The Daily Stoic - Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson on Building Resilience and Communicating Effectively | It's About What You Make of It

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

Ryan reads today’s meditation and has another conversation with Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson about their new book What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home, experiencing adversity and developing resilience, why we should look at the last year as a gift that can improve our lives rather than a burden, how to teach kids to find purpose and control in their own lives, and more. Ned Johnson is the president and founder of PrepMatters. A 1993 graduate of Williams College, Mr. Johnson has a BA in Economics and Political Science. Originally from Connecticut, Mr. Johnson now resides with his wife and children in Washington, DC.William R. Stixrud, Ph.D., is a clinical neuropsychologist and founder of The Stixrud Group. He is a member of the teaching faculty at Children’s National Medical Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine.GiveWell is the best site for figuring out how and where to donate your money to have the greatest impact. If you’ve never donated to GiveWell’s recommended charities before, you can have your donation matched up to $1,000 before the end of June or as long as matching funds last. Just go to GiveWell.org/STOIC and pick podcast and The Daily Stoic at checkout. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show.KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 30% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson: Homepage, Twitter, Facebook See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first we've got

a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hi I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. It's about what you make of it. Lots of interesting things happen to people. They don't all become writers. Lots of interesting things happen to people who are writers and it doesn't always translate into great writing.

And that's because it's rarely about the raw material. It's about what the person turns the raw material into. As Vivian Gornick explains, what happened to the writer is not what matters. What matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. And so it is, with life generally, events happen, some people ignore them, some muddle through them, some turn them into transformative moments. Stockdale took those experiences, and the Hanoi Hilton made them into something that, in his own words, he would not have traded away. Marcus Aurelius made himself into the kind of blazing fire that could turn whatever life through it into fuel. He took being made emperor a job that made so many of his predecessors into monsters, and he used this to become better. And as a writer, he made something great out of what happened as well. And this is what we must do. What happens is what happens.

And this is what we must do. What happens is what happens. What matters is what we're able to make of what happens. And we have the ability to transform the raw materials of our experience into opportunities, into art, into growth. And this is how we become great. And this is how we live, a more faulty. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. You know, stoicism is a philosophy that's supposed to be there for actual life. And yes,

the stoics were emperors or generals or artists. They had sort of real jobs. And I think part of what when we say stoicism is a philosophy for real life, that's what we're talking about. Does it stand up to the stresses of an elite or life or death situation? But also, and I talked about this a little bit in lives of the Stoics. The Stoics were real people in the sense that they were not like monks, or they made no disavowal

of earthly life, earthly pleasures, earthly obligations and responsibilities. Some of the Middle Stoics talked about the importance of marriage, talked about the importance of children, and indeed most of the Stoics had kids. They looked to how philosophy stood up to the stresses of family life. There's a joke about Socrates that part of the reason he was such a great impatient philosopher was that he had a difficult marriage. His wife was a difficult lady. Putting the sexism of that aside, the point is that it's not just philosophy for the classroom

and it's not just philosophy for the public sphere or occupation, but it's a philosophy for your private, and it's not just a philosophy for the public sphere or occupation, but it's a philosophy for your private life as well. And I got to say, nothing has challenged me philosophically, quite like having kids being married, trying to consider success, not just how my books do or how my business does or how my brand does, but success as in, do I have a happy family? Are my kids being prepared for life? Are they going to be good people? Am I setting them up for success? Am I being present and dedicated and loving to them? So, I had something I think a lot about.

And in fact, I try to see my sort of civic, professional, and personal responsibility as being in kind of a balance with each other. And with one is out of whack, at the expense of the other two, I don't consider that success. It's how do you keep them all working and functioning well together? So part of this is we have our daily dad email and podcasts, which hopefully you check out. That's at dailydad.com.

But I'm also just always interested in sort of experts on parenting, family life, marriage, self improvement, etc. family life marriage, self-improvement, et cetera. And today's guests are two people who have helped me quite a bit. Some of the only people to come on the podcast twice. I'm talking about Dr. William Sticksrud and Ned Johnson, the author of The Self-Driven Child, one of my favorite parenting books. We sell it at the Painted Ports. It's always very popular. One of the books I recommend to parents all the time, something that's informed my parenting

philosophy. And then you have a new book called What Do You Say, How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home. I think it's very much related to the self-driven child, but it's about communicating effectively with teenagers, with kids of all types. But I also think it's just about communication period, just intelligent, effective communication, which is of course the key of leadership, the key of philosophy, the key to life, I think. So I bring you Dr. Sticksrad and Ned Johnson once again in a wonderful conversation.

Obviously, I think it's particularly relevant to people who have kids or are thinking about having kids, but I think I hope this conversation is relevant to just about everyone. I tried to make it not just be about parenting, but about effective communication and dealing with stressful emotions and all the things that get in the way of effective communication. So check out the new book, what do you say, how to talk with kids

to build motivation, stress tolerance, and a happy home, and of course, pick up the self-driven child, hopefully at the pain and porch or anywhere books are sold. Hope you like it, and I the self-driven child. Hopefully at the painting porch or anywhere books are sold. Hope you like it and I'll talk to you soon. I had such a great time talking with you guys last time. I had some more questions about the first book

and then we'll transition to the new book which I'm also very excited about. I wondered what you thought of this idea. I've seen people write about it. I've heard people talk about it, but this idea that they're sort of referring to like a lost year, right, like for kids. This is a lost year.

Now it's going on year number two. Certainly there's obviously been immense consequences to the pandemic and it's tragic that it's happened. That kids had to be affected in any way by the irresponsible decisions of adults and leaders. But I don't know, my initial reaction to hearing it, and I guess we always have to think about where we're privileged and what other people are going through.

But it struck me as a very fragile view of our kids, right? Like when I talk to a grandmother or my grandfather who lived through the depression, you know, they don't they don't talk about it as just like lost year. It's sort of a source of wisdom and experience for them. So I'm just curious how you think, having written so much about kind of the forced and unnecessary fragility and of sort of a generation of parenting, how do you think about the adversity that you've just seen all these kids go through? Well, I think that Ned and I see that quite differently than this idea that it's a lost year.

In fact, Ned wrote a piece in the New York Times pretty early on in the pandemic suggesting that this could be an opportunity to build stress tolerance and resilience and wisdom in kids. In our first book, The Self-Divine Child, we talk about the way that people become able to do what we call develop high stress tolerance, that kind of ability to function well and handle the challenges of life. It's by doing so. It's by being in a challenging situation, your prefrontal cortex has to activate

to figure out what to do. And then as long as you have time to recover, once you go into coping mode, then you recover, that's what builds that confidence that I can handle hard things. We see many kids who are really thriving, gaining confidence, they can handle hard things, they can handle loss, they can handle uncertainty that they weren't sure they could handle before. I'd love to hear Ned's ankle on this. I agree with all that. I think there's also a question of when do you assess, right?

During the middle of the pandemic, right when it ends a month later, a year later, because it's exactly right, that it's the experience of adversity with support that develops resilience. And I forget if we shared, when last time I spoke, I had a family that had a lot of headwinds.

My father's an alcoholic who eventually drank himself to death, my mother's struggle with her mental health. I spent three months of seventh grade in the pediatric hospital, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. But at this point in my life, I'm really convinced that on anyone. But at this point in my life, I'm really convinced, I can handle almost anything.

Because when I think about what I've gone through, it gives me the confidence that I can get through other hard stuff. If you're going to be an epic hero in every movie, you don't just get someone sort on your shoulder and hey, you're the hero now, you gotta go out and do stuff and you get you earn it you get you know Yeah, and because it's really it's that you know

It's resilience if we remind ourselves that it want the kind of metallurgical definition of resilience is the ability to turn to a previous shape And we and then I think that same thing applies to us, you know Emotionally that the only way you develop that is if you get a little bent out shape and then come back. And before the pandemic, we had hundreds of articles, oh, the case they got no resilience, they can't, they're cream pops, they can't handle nothing. Well, now we've got our opportunity. And I wouldn't wish to challenge your difficulty or hurt or all the terrible things. I wouldn't wish that in anyone.

But it really is how do we deal with that? You know, how do we come together? How do we try to find solutions? How do we convey courage to our kids, even though things are scary as opposed to let everyone go hide in a bunker and just wait for the solitude to be over? Because in the meantime, life goes on. No, and it's not everything you're saying also applies to adults too. There's a great line from Sena Kowri's talking about is like, I actually pity the person who's never gone through adversity. He says, because they don't know what they're capable of. They have never been bloodied.

They've never gotten up. So they don't know if they can get up. And so it's sort of strange that are, as you said, we sort of criticize people for not being resilient, we wonder, what would I ever do if I had to live through a moment like this, or we think like, what I've learned from a near death experience, and then we have it and we spend all our time resenting it and pretending that it's insurmountable.

It seems strange. Well, you're right, I'll tell you this you this, four, five, six weeks ago, whatever it was now, I was in the middle of recording the audio for this book, what do you say? And I came out from the auto, I got my wife on the phone, my son had been having all these migrants, these weird aura things, and there's some family history of that, and we get them on the phone, and the three of us,

and his language, and he drops a word, and then he drops another word And then his language starts to fall apart and I'm like what is going on? Ask my wife to call me the other line I thought he's having his stroke fast forward my son's diagnosed with a brain tumor Now fortunately well-mannered kid that he is he chose the one that seems to be most amenable to chemo therapy And so he's going through the middle of this But I swear a week ago he said to the two of us, he said, you know, I have had such an

easy life, you know, you know, I, you guys are great parents, you know, you know, we were financially stable, I live friends, I'm in school, you know, I'm, you know, white, I mean everything that you could make, make life easier to get through life, he has, he's had so many, so many advantages. And he said, I always wondered, when was something happened to me that would challenge me? And I thought, fascinating. Now, I don't wish a brain tumor on anyone,

certainly not on my kid. But I thought, holy smokes, what an interesting way that that's where his brain went. And his, I mean, he's a glass, have full kind of guy anyway. But I mean, he's sort of taken a line from the Mark Matt Dame and the Martian, right? Let's work the problem.

OK. What are we going to do? And because what else can you do? And he's thinking, I'm going to be stronger for having gone through this. And what kind of message is it sending your kids that you sort of write them off as being irrevocably harmed by, you know, missing most of fifth grade or having to do sixth grade or eleventh grade remotely, it does strike me that in the scheme of adversity, you

know, that's nothing compared to a brain tumor or nothing compared to when. And sestually, we are all descended from people who endured far worse things. Well, yeah, and we talk about this great, there's research named Sonny Lupin who used that acronym of NOTS of what stresses people out. And she said that one of the single best ways to come back stress is to have a plan B. And so, you know, and so what we always want to do when we find ourselves stuck, right, or in a hard position that we think, well, what else can I do?

What else can I do? What else can I do? Because, you know, whether you're a family or whether a corporation, you're constantly saying that didn't work out as planned, how can we pivot? What's another solution? And so, again, this is a hard time

and I know I've had it easier than other families have, but I think one of the more helpful things we can do is to keep saying, well, that's a lousy that you zoom on school, that's pretty terrible. And what are you going to do about it? What's your response? What else can we make out of this? We also, in both books, we mentioned the work of Byron Katie, who is thinking, I think, is very similar to a lot of the stoic thinking about the idea

that for all we know, what's happening right now, whatever it is, is what's supposed to be happening because there's no evidence that something different is supposed to be happening. And one of the people I've learned the most from is meditation teacher, Mairish Meshogi, who used to say that the world is as it should be. And people ask him, well, why are you working so hard to change it? He'd say, that's also as it should be. And I think that we emphasize that the wisdom of teaching kids

to not to immediately judge the word that this is bad or this is good, but what they said, this is the way it is, make peace with it, and then decide, do I want to try to change this? Could this be better? Well, that's the stoic idea of a more faulty that comes from Nietzsche, not just to bear what has happened, but to love it, to go, this was chosen for me. And again, this is easy to say about Zoom fifth grade. It's harder to say about a brain tumor or losing a job or what have you, or even the worst trauma's out there. But the idea is it happened.

So having negative thoughts towards it doesn't make it unhappened and it does make it a part of you to focus on what you do next. Have you guys seen the Jocco-Willink video good? It's like the Superviral video, but it struck me as similar to the self-driven child philosophy, which is basically he's a Navy SEAL commander and he's relating this conversation where they're preparing for this mission or they're on this mission and one of the men keeps coming to him and going, hey, we're not going to have enough time and he says, good, and he says, hey, we just lost all the supplies and he says, good.

And he says, and one of the guys is sick and he says, good. You know, sort of over and over again, this idea of good, because, again, saying that it's bad doesn't do anything, but saying that it's good does inform the attitude to which you are going to orient your response around. And that's also what the idea of the obstacle is the way. Yeah, it's, I mean, I'm not sure people were doing this during the Depression. They were probably spending a lot of time talking about how bad it was and how these, you know, fat cats in Washington were all to blame or whatever, but at the same time, they, you do, you do have the choice about whether it's going to be a formative experience for you.

And it seems like parents have spent a lot of time blaming, resenting, venting instead of going, here's how our family was improved by what we went through. Here's what we taught our kids, you know, using the world events that were occurring around us as they happened. I think that's actually right. There's a success coach from the 80s and 90s, Brian Tracy, who's worked with Bill and I both. We like to lot. And he has this tells the story about some industrialist in the 1910 or whatever, who's

summoned from his sleep to come down to only define the factoring gulfed in flames. And as this thing is burning to the ground, he sits there and watches for about 10 minutes and then declares to his secretaries, whoever are ministers who are nearby, I said, well, this is fantastic news. I just have to figure out why. Sure. Well, I tell a story in the obstacle is the way about Thomas Edison. Exact scene, factory is on fire, his son is standing there shell-shocked and Edison grabs him and he says, go get your mother, they'll never see a fire like this again. Is it go get your mother and all her friends?

They'll never see a fire like this again. I think about the parenting lesson of that, you're essentially witnessing your dad at his worst, the worst career moment of your dad. You're watching your inheritance go up in flames. But your dad finds some, some ones of good in it and he rallies the family around and Edison does, you know, he says to a reporter the next day, you know, I've been through things like this before.

It's going to prevent me from getting bored. And he rebuilds and he gets to work and you think about what a lesson that would be to your children. And then you go, oh, yeah, but that's, you know, that's Edison. I have an experience, things like that. And it strikes me. It's like, you did. That's what the last 18 months have been. And yet we've been sort of looking at gift horse in the mouth because the gift horse never

looks like a gift. You know, in a self driven child, we talk about, we have a strong emphasis on parents thinking about themselves. As kids get older, it's more as a consultant to their kid, whose role is to help their kid figure out what kind of life they want and how they want to live it. And part of the reason that we support this kind of idea and want kids to practice making their own decisions

is that I don't know whether a kid makes a decision, whether it's gonna be a good decision or not. There's notice saying, when do you judge? Is it a year later or five years later? But when I first had time, I went to graduate school. I was in a doctoral program in English at the University of California, Berkeley. And I went 20 weeks without California, Berkeley, and I

went 20 weeks without turning an assignment, so I flunked out. And it felt like my whole life was going up in smoke, and it took about two months for me to realize is the best possible thing that could have happened to me. Because I just felt like an imposter as an English student. And when I became a psychologist, these are more of my people. But who knows? Who knows when something happens? If it's bad or good. I'm a famous psychologist. These are more of my people. I get this. But who knows? Who knows when something happens?

If it's bad or good, and the idea of this is a wasted year, it just doesn't make any logical sense. Maybe because you're making what we call the fortune telling error that I can predict that this is going to have a terrible effect on a kid's life, as opposed to maybe a next bag or maybe actually advantageous. Definitely nickname me, Kiki, Kiba Bag Palmer. And trust me, I keep a bag, love. But if you ask me, I'm just getting started.

And there's so much I still want to do. So I decided I want to be a podcast host. I'm proud to introduce you to the baby Mrs. Kiki Palmer podcast. I'm putting my friends, family, and some of the dopest experts in the hot seat to ask them the questions that have been burning in my mind. What will a former child star be if they weren't actors? What happened to sitcoms? It's only fans, only bad. I want to know. So I asked my mom about it. These

are the questions that keep me up at night, but I'm taking these questions out of my head and I'm bringing them to you. Because on Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, no topic is off limits. Follow Baby This Is Kiki Palmer, whatever you get your podcast. Hey, prime members, you can listen early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. No, I think there's that Zen proverb about the man who discovers a horse than his son breaks his leg on the horse and then he doesn't fight in a war because his leg is broken.

It goes on and on, but but the father replies each time everyone says, Oh, you're so lucky or they say, Oh, you're so unlucky. He just says, we'll see. And I do think what you're saying, I think it's really helpful, I'm glad you said it, I'm gonna try to apply it myself, it's just like a elongate the horizon with which you're looking at this event with your children,

and try to get them to do the same thing. It feels terrible that they just got dumb, to feels terrible that they just got cut, to feel terrible that they just got cut from the basketball team. It seems like it's a huge disadvantage that they're doing remote ninth grade, but we'll see, because we don't know, and to think that we know,

is to be both arrogant and naive. Right. And this Byron Katie, I mentioned, who wrote a book called Loving What Is, which is the basic idea. And it simply says, when something happens, ask, is it true? Is it true that this is a terrible thing? Is it true?

And can I really be sure that this is a way, going to be a wasted year? And for honest with ourselves, we can almost never really be sure. And then the question is, if I'm not sure about it, why torture myself like this? Is this going to help me think about this is making more flexible and adaptable? And usually, usually, usually not so much. Well, yeah, that's the essence of Stoicism. A vencer objective, our opinions about them are not, and it's our opinions that upset us. So that's the other thing is like, you don't have to call it a good year, you don't have to go as far as Jocco, you also don't need to go as far as it's a bad year.

It just is, right? Like you don't need to have any judgment about it, whatsoever, because it's simply a fact. And, and you know, if your kid was born with class, you know, born with, eyesight, they have to get classes, you don't have to have an opinion about this. That's just what their eyesight is, right? Like you would obviously try to address it.

You know, you have a kid who's good at sports and you have another kid who's not good at sports. It's not good or bad. It's just who they are. And your opinion is actually what's gonna cause the distress because it's gonna make one of them feel superior and the other one feel inferior. When in reality, we're all dealt different strengths

and weaknesses and we simply are. Right, nobody gets everything. Yeah, and just going back to Danette's point about, you know, in both folks, we want to communicate courage to kids rather than fear. And the last thing we want to do is feel sorry for kids. We don't want to pity kids, because we don't to do is feel sorry for kids. We don't want to pity kids because we don't want them to feel sorry for themselves. I mean,

self-pity is never very attractive. It's not a lot of agency. And so the idea that somehow, oh, this is such a waste of year, the poor babies, it's just not a helpful attitude. And it's certainly understandable. And God knows so many people that we work with it's been have a really tough time and I'm not taking that I'm not taking it right away but I am saying I don't want kids to feel sorry for themselves so I choose not to feel sorry for them. So that was how I was going to transition to talking about the new book because, you know, so we have our troops as parents, as a society, you know, we say, you know, that we talk about our duty, we talk about our responsibility to other people, we talk about the American ideals, you know,

we talk about so much stuff. And then it strikes me that, you know, then our kids hear all this. They hear our indoctrination and they hear our myths and they hear what we say is important. And then they look at how people actually behave and then they get a sense of the difference between, you know, action, practice and principle. And I think one of the things that makes me the most sad about the last year is just kind of, there's no nice way to say this, but we really showed a generation of young people that is particularly older people showed to younger people that they're basically foolish yet, that they don't care about anyone but themselves, that this idea of sacrifice, this idea of being resilient,

this idea of putting other people first, that the right thing is what matters. All this, how generationally can we possibly communicate as a society, I guess I'm specifically referring to America, but no country seems to have done extremely well. But like, how can we communicate louder than our actions have communicated over the last year? It's, I mean, it's just been sort of abysmal. I think that's sort of the tragedy of the boomer generation as they've aged has been sort of those high-minded ideals versus the

sure, but I don't want to have to give up my vacation house or, you know, I don't want, like, you know what I'm saying? It seems like we're really struggling between what we claim to believe and then how we act when situations are stressful or difficult or would come at the slightest personal cost to us talking about whether it's mask wearing and vaccines or nimbyism or climate change. It strikes me that we're having, we're in a crisis where we've communicated so loudly the disparity between our actions and our ideals. And would you frame that up? I mean, part of what I hear in there is, is, is, is, when we talk

about high-minded ideals, a lot of that is about the common good, right? And, and shared values and shared goals and, and shared sacrifice. And then you see a lot of people acting far from that, you know, really selfishly. Exactly. And it's pretty, it's pretty distressing. And I'm not sure I have a full solution to that. I mean, if I did, we could probably solve political political gridlock. You know, I also, I also like in this may be polyannish, but you know,

the William, great psychologist William James is, you know, our experience consists of that, which we choose to attend to, because we can also look around to people who have advanced you know heroic ideals and have lived you know lived their lives with tremendous grace and and and done more than their fair share. I mean my twin brother is a paramedic and so he's he's about as frontline as frontline people get. Sure. And it's been it's And it's been a year and he gets pretty upset with folks. But I also said that they're watching with him and people like him do and go, yeah, I mean, there are, it's not everyone, sadly. You know, many hands make light work. But I also,

I also tried, well, what's it, Fred Rogers says, look for the helpers, right? Yeah. So I think there can be, while we nascent teeth about goings on, I think it's also helpful to look to our, when we're talking to our kids to help them look to or add people who are living those, those ideals, even if it's even like those people are few and far between. Well, that's something I've tried to think about too,

it's easy to go, look at the lack of courage in these politicians or look at the selfishness in so and so. But ultimately, what we control is what's up to us. I was thinking about, I was actually just talking at a friend over where we were talking outside. He's a pretty liberal guy and he was just talking about this birthday party that Obama threw. What a missed opportunity it was for leadership to sort of, instead of criticizing what other

people are doing, instead of criticizing the choices or the selfishness of other leaders or other groups, which may have the vast majority of impact, maybe disproportionately causing the majority of the harm or the hypocrisy, but you don't control that. What you do control is the choices that your family makes, right? And so, I guess what I'm saying is we'll decry the lack of courage in some politician or something. And then meanwhile, we're sitting at the dinner table talking about how we refuse to stand up to our boss.

Or again, we'll talk about this group not doing this or that, and then we throw a big birthday party. We're violating the COVID protocols ourselves in our own small way, saying essentially, we want other people to be sticklers, but when it's my call, then I always have an excuse or a reason. I guess at the end of the day, what you communicate to your kids by example in the things you control is what really matters the most.

That seems absolutely right. And I mean, especially what you have teenagers are so perceptive about inconsistencies and hypocrisy. And there's a chapter in our new book. It's called Talking with Kids About the Pursuit of Happiness. And what we focus on is that young people are growing up with all these nutty ideas about what makes people happy. And we focus on some of the research,

the focus on the importance, for example, of meaning, of relationships. So the research suggests that you're actually happier if you give stuff away, then accumulate it for yourself. You're happier if you do something for somebody else than if you do something for yourself. And I think that what we're hoping is that we're also just also mentioned that we're in various places we talk about the

importance of asking kids to really think about their highest ideals. With the family goal of all of us, you know, trying to live lives there on a quarter of their highest ideals because it's just suggesting, you know, we often don't, but it's a practice. It's a practice with the goal of aligning our life with the highest ideals. And we talk on our book about helping kids do that because in part, because it helps, it's one of the keys to being happy,

but also it's just good for everybody. Yeah, we tell our kids, like education is important. And then it was like, when was the last time they saw you read a book, right? Or, you know, we tell them that like, money's not the most important thing. And then we complain about the job we hate that we do for money.

Or, you know, we tell ourselves honesty is important. And then they see us, you know, lying to get out of a ticket. And I think that's really been the difficulty with COVID. And I'm not saying that parents have been letting their kids down, but certainly, uh, generally, and a lot of these issues, whether it's COVID or climate change or just sort of kicking the, the political can down the road, we say we love our kids. We say that, you know, they're more important to us than anything, and then sort of generationally, we're not making the difficult short-term decisions that would have important long-term consequences.

You know what I mean? We're not actually putting them first in the decisions we think about. I think that's exactly right. Back know, and back to the idea about values that the more consistently we can write about, you know, and journaling that you can talk about, what are our core values, the easier it is to have short-term behaviors that align with longer-term goals. And that's true, I mean, that's true whether,'re trying to be an Olympic athlete or you're a business person or whether you're a political leader. And if our focus is always on the short term, the next dollar, the next election cycle, whatever, then we're not going to put, we're putting our energy into that short term thing at the expense of the future. And so, for us as leaders in whatever, whether it's business or faith or our families,

that to spend time really talking about those highest values makes it much easier for our short-term actions to fall in line with what we espouse to be our highest values. Yeah, what are you modeling to your kids and to the future generations in the decisions you're making and the actions that you're taking right now? I just wonder, you know, so much of what we think about and write about and talk with kids about and talk with parents about is this crazy idea of kids growing up thinking to the most important outcome of their childhood and adolescence is where they go to college. And you just wonder what are people who think that? What do they

think the purpose of life is? Is the purpose of life to accumulate the most stuff or is it to have the most prestige or the most power over people? And I think that if we really think about, what, why are we here? Well, what kind of life do we want to create? Well, in the book we talk about, talking to kids about, if there's a reason you're here, what is the reason is that you're here? What do you have to offer this world?

And it's just a very different way of thinking than you need to get A, so you can get to the top college and make a lot of money. Yeah, there's an essay from Plutarch where he's talking about educating children and he's talking about how a wealthy parent, they know they're gonna pass on like an inheritance to their kids. So they spend a lot of time and a lot of money

setting up a trust fund or writing their will. So the kids don't fight with each other and the money is managed responsibly in blah, blah, blah. And he goes, wouldn't it be better? And obviously, estate planning is important, but he goes, wouldn't it be better just to raise some children who wouldn't fall out with their family over money? Or, would be able to manage, you know, in inheritance properly, you know, like, so it is interesting, yeah, we sometimes forget that like just raising an adaptable, hard working, decent human being, those people are very rarely unsuccessful in life. Meanwhile, a lot of people go to great schools or get grades are doing amazing on the SAT, and they completely fail at life because they don't have those other skills

that we're just talking about. You know, I was lecturing in Houston. I can't remember I mentioned this last time, but I was lecturing in Houston a couple of years ago about the self-driven child. And I mentioned one of the most elite schools in DC, and I don't remember the context, but I did. And I mentioned one of the most elite schools in DC. And I don't remember the context, but I did. And somebody came up to me afterward and said, I'm a therapist here at the manager clinic in Houston, which is one of the very prestigious mental health plays. So we know the school in DC really well because so many of the graduates, they get into these top colleges, but they can't handle them emotionally. They've never had the deal with adversity,

they've had their kind of life program for them. So they take a medical leave and they come here for treatment. And I think that that, you know, Ned's in my angle is that our goal for kids is for them to be able to run their own life before they go off to college or go off to do whatever they're going to do. And so that's our goal, for his parents, is helping kids learn to run their own life and run it in a way that's meaningful to them. One that ties into the new book, which is like one of the most essential skills in running

one's own life, in adapting, in dealing with adversity, whatever, is the ability to communicate, to effectively about what you want, to effectively about what you need, what you like, what you dislike. And so I guess it shouldn't surprise us that parents who can't communicate effectively struggle to raise children who then struggle to effectively communicate. We are, and it's very well said, and really the reason we wrote this book, in part because in the self-driven child, we have great concerns about the increasing levels

of stress, anxiety, depression, and young people. And a close connection between parents and children. Is as close to you get, as close as one gets, just silver bullet against the effects of stress. We're back to that adversity plus support. We'll develop resilience. And part of that close connection is how effective are we in communicating with kids, in having them know that we understand them, that we see their point of view, and listening to them and having them be able to listen to us.

And so, as a parent, you have ideas that you want to share, but you're just not effective in how you communicate it. Then everybody's upset, because your kid feels being nagged or yelled or harassed, you feel like your kid isn't listening. And so often, it's the how-not the what. And then no one feels, listen to, no one feels connected.

And again, the message is the values that you're trying to share, just, well, those go, those fall on the cut in room floor. And so we really took seriously the value of learning to communicate effectively, rather than sort of shoving things down, kids' throats. And part because these are also the models of communicating

effectively, communicating respectfully are the very same tools of communication that our kids will then take out into the world and the college and their relationships and their workplace. And goodness knows, for me at least when I watch, so what seems to me like misbehavior in the political realm, it feels a little bit like whoever can hardest the most outrage, whoever can be the most angry

is the person who sort of wins the battle. And I have a colleague at work who she and our very different ends of the political spectrum. We have both very different ideas, but somehow, and it's probably more her graciousness than mine, we can disagree. We can disagree agreeably. I can hear her perspective. I can say, okay, and tell me why you think that, right?

And we work together beautifully. We don't agree all the time, but we work together beautifully because we communicate in ways that confer respect even when we disagree. Yeah, and I think, you know, showing your kids, I think one, one of the things that I, I sort of remember growing up listening to a lot of talk radio, watching a lot of Fox News sort of this stuff. And you realize only, only when I, you know, sort of got out of that bubble a little bit and, and, uh, let's, let's get a proper liberal arts education,

nothing to do with liberal or conservative, but just like, actually learned how to think and how to communicate. Did I come to recognize how profoundly manipulative and dishonest and inaccurate the community, you sort of, you realize what's happening, right? And so I think a lot of parents struggle with, with not just what they're communicating, but even teaching kids how to recognize, like what bullshit is or what biases are.

Do you know what I mean? Like communication isn't just like, how do you say what you wanna say, but also making them aware of, like, clearly, generationally, we see people who are just much very susceptible to conspiracy theories, very susceptible to demagoguery, et cetera,

like also teaching our kids, by effectively communicating, teaching them how to communicate, you're also doing them the service of teaching them how to recognize bad or insufficient or manipulative communication so they're they're inoculated against that That's a wonderful point you know, and I think anybody who's raised teenagers and it's had the experience of teenagers And they're in their effort to kind of separate and find their own identity

We'll push back on with the parents believe or challenge things. And if we can listen respectfully, and we can listen in a way and let them know, they were really trying to understand. They're much more likely than to, to two subcases to realize that actually, I kind of like the way my parents think, or I disagree

with this but that if we just lecture them, we try to indoctrinate them, it just doesn't work very well. And I just were talking last week about this article that David Brooks wrote last week in the New York Times about the shocking percentage of adults who are estranged from at least one of their parents. Yeah. It's like 27 percent are estranged from a parent. It's just so painful to think about that people that you love the most, they don't

want anything to do with you. That's hopefully what we're talking about in our book, this way of staying connected with your kids, staying, treating them in a respectful way, communicating a way that you're assertive when you have to be, and you're challenging when you have to be, but also that you respect them as people, and that people you want to have a relationship

is net pointed out. Good. You cut last few weeks. We're going to have a longer time, hopefully, with our kids as adults, then we are with them as kids. No, I relate to that very much. And I've written about it a bit where, and this goes to what we're talking about earlier, I think I think generationally, you're seeing a lot of young people, especially people my age, struggling with this idea of like, here are the values my parents raised me with.

Here are the things they said were important. I didn't agree with all, and then here were their political beliefs. Here's what they said was important, why they voted the way they did. And then what do you do when you watch them throw all of that out the window because, you know, this is what their party is endorsing now or worse, you know, because they read some thing on Facebook or watch them

random, you know, video about it. I think people are struggling with the like, wait these people who I admired and respected and always thought were operating at a certain sort of mental level are now, you know, making medical decisions based on an email they were forwarded and that they're forwarding me, I think generationally a lot of people are struggling with, again, that divergence from, you know, sort of the ideal and the reality. And I think that's been really hard. Yeah, I think it has been really hard. Yeah, I think it has been really hard. I think it, you know, and part of it is, you know, if you go back to that,

that the seeking to understand perspective, we know that the more that we sort of, you know, try to convince someone that they're wrong, the more that they, the more that they, they sort of, they get more entrenched in their beliefs. We take a note from some of the lessons from what's called motivational interviewing, which is first done with alcoholics.

And where these people who are trying to get people to stop their substances, abusive use of alcohol. And they tell me, like, if you don't, if you don't, it's quick, you're gonna lose your health, your job, your family blah, blah, blah blah and they would just dig in even deeper where is it they well so tell me about your relationship you know with that with alcohol I mean we have a story in a book about a school counselor who was working with a young woman who was smoking a ton of pot and she first came when she said look I'm not gonna try to tell you I'm not gonna be the umpteenth adult that tells you

why all the problems with pot and to be completely curable, we're not advocating drug use particularly for young people. But she took this perfect and she said, so I'm not going to try to talk you out of it. But I'm curious, tell me about, tell me about what does it, what does it do for you? And the girl sort of, you know, waxed, waxed, wrapped, sawdic about how it made her feel more relaxed. She felt cool around these kids that she wanted to be friend with, you know, on and on and on. But then at some point she said, but it does cost a lot. And so in this motivational interview and you listen, you don't judge and you don't

try to tell them why, but you look for change talk. And so the counselor said, well, tell me more about that. She's well, you know, I buy twice a week and it's pretty expensive. She's, okay, well, if you, if you, if you, if you, if only about once week, if you have more money, what would you do instead? I don't know, I, you know, I bet this pair of shoes my friends had to really like those and maybe get my hair done.

Okay, and she didn't lean in. So look, look at all the great things you're gonna have if you stop smoking so much. She didn't do that. And she just listened and reflected back. And a week or two later, the girl she saw walked down the hallway and she had her hair cut. And she said, oh, that looks really cute. Well, tell me about that.

Well, you know, I realize I could probably buy, by once a week and smoke a little less. And yeah, I do like the way my hair looks. And I sit there when I think about, you know, things like political disagreements where I don't want to yell and fight and try to use force of large, even though I'm convinced that I'm right most of the time. Because what I do is I build a bigger wall, and I make it that much harder for a person who maybe the person does realize it the wrong. And they have to climb all over the wall to come on to my side. As opposed to, if we keep the wall really low and we don't pitch a fit, it makes it easy and say, maybe I'll tip to over to that side for a while. This friend of mine who I've mentioned at work

who we have very different political beliefs changed her political party to independent. I won't say which side she started, changed to independent. And I thought, well, okay, we're halfway there. There it is. Yeah. Well, you know, this motivational intervening that Ned mentioned,

at its core, is this active or reflective listening, which was developed in some way, by Carl Rogers, was one of the really influential psychotherapists in the 1960s and 70s. And Rogers thing was to let people to try to communicate to your clients that you really understand them. And you do that, is there talking by kind of summarizing

or paraphrasing what they're saying, am I getting this right? And I think that I've often wondered, I personally find debates boring because nobody's listening to each other. Just thinking, I've been thinking when you're talking, I'm thinking, how can I refute what you're saying? And I've always wished that we'd have some kind of Sunday talk shows where people had to,

when a conservative, listen to a liberal argument, had to summarize the liberal's argument in a respectful way. And then before he responded. Which is a really big technique and marriage therapy as well. And if our leaders practice this kind of respectful listening to each other, it could actually be open to learn from each other. We wouldn't see this kind of tremendous kind of good luck, at least. Yeah, I would say part of what I would consider a central set of lessons for kids would be,

you know, an understanding of cognitive biases and understanding of sort of traps or mistakes, logical fallacies. And then one thing that I learned relatively late, but it's something I love is the idea of like, can you steal man? Can you argue against a steal man instead of a strong man? So, you know, most of what you watch, as we're talking about with like a Fox News or a conservative radio or something, is a lot of dunking on strong man arguments, right? Disagreting with things that no one essentially believes in and making it sound like you're some sort of fearless warrior for the truth,

steelmaning is, well, why does someone believe this? Why do they think, what is the argument for this thing that we disagree with? Or what logic is the other side operating under? And then how can you then use that to strengthen your own arguments or your own beliefs or, you know, in some instances, change your mind as you're talking about

because you realize, oh, I may have been on the wrong side of this. So I guess this goes back to modeling. It's like, how often have your kids seen you change your mind? You know, how often have you ever been convinced by their arguments for something? And then conversely, you expect them to just be convinced to do what you say because you said so. I think how do we show our kids what good thinking, good clear communication,

mental resiliency looks like. That's probably the best way to pass it along to them. mental resiliency looks like that's probably the best way to pass it along to them. That's such a great point. I think that when I'm just thinking back a couple of conversations, I'm going back, you know, it's 50 years now, but my own, more than 50 is my own father. And where we talked about stuff and he said, you know, that's a really interesting point. And I never really thought about it that way. And in terms of making me feel confident and courage, having my father basically say,

I'm willing to see it differently. It was a very empowering thing. Yeah, I listened to a podcast with Malcolm Gladwell and he was talking about what he learned from his father was that his father was that his father would never pretend that he knew something in the course of a conversation. If someone's like reference something, he would never have pretended to have heard of that or to have watched that movie.

He would go, I don't know about that. What is that? And you can see in someone like Malcolm Gladwell, perhaps where his curiosity and sort of, you know, what makes him Malcolm Gladwell, you can see where that came from. Right. Right. Yeah. And certainly we talked to in this new book about just how simple how powerful it is to

apologize. Sure. To our kids, when we act badly, to simply say, I was wrong, I was tired, I was really stressed, I'm sorry, I took it out on you, you're the most precious thing in the universe to me. And I think that I mold enough that I don't remember a specific incident. But I remember when I was 40, that I could still remember times when my father got mad at me and came to my bed room that night. And really, I'm really sorry. I can't say how much I love you.

And I was really stressed or whatever it was. And it just, it made me feel so respected. And I think that that changing, being able to change our minds, being able to say that we were wrong, being able to say that I'm learning, I learned from this, is a really powerful message for kids.

One thing that I picked up in the book you were talking about, how painful it is for a kid to have something they want to communicate or have a feeling and not be able to, because they don't have the words, they don't have the concepts. And I was just thinking about this with my oldest, who's five or turning five shortly, you know, you'll do something wrong, you know, knock over his brother or, you know, you'll do something wrong, knock over his brother, or throw something, or you know, he'll do something, and you know, when you sort of get up close to him and you say,

like, hey, you can't do that. That's not a good idea, or we talked about this. Not like sort of, even in the way that I remember, as a kid, sort of being aggressively kind of, you know, man-handled or told what not to do. Even the most sort of polite or, you know, gentle reproach, you can tell that this is, that he's overwhelmed with emotion and sometimes he'll spit or he'll pull away or he'll say something mean when he's feeling this. And thinking about your book and trying to practice a melody, my wife and I were going,

well, what's happening is he's being overwhelmed by the emotion of shame for the behavior that he just committed for being communicated now in even a gentle reproach. But he lacks the ability to say, like, I wish I hadn't done that, he lacks the ability to say, well, I wish I hadn't done that. He lacks the ability to say, well, here's what I was thinking. You've misunderstood me.

Or even though, like, I don't like this. Or like, hey, I'm not a bad person. Why are you making me feel like a bad person? He's being overwhelmed with an emotion that he can't communicate about. And so he's communicating instead via behavior, not good behavior, but as they say behavior is the sort of natural language of children, it strikes me that

community, providing your child the tools to communicate effectively and also understanding when they can't communicate and not being too hard on them is in immense sort of release for them or or sort it's an immense relief of discomfort for them that they didn't even necessarily understand they were experiencing. I think that's right and one of the things we talk about is you're not going as a parent, you're not going to deliver an effective message when a kid's emotions are that high. We do, of course, want to address the behavior and help kids figure out a better way, you know, than spitting or throwing something or brother

or giving them the elbow to, you know, to communicate your frustration, your needs, your wants, whatever. But we can start with some like, wow, you look like you're pretty upset about what happened there. No, I didn't approve of his behavior. I didn't say it's okay to get through an elbow at your brother or to throw a toy. But I'm acknowledging you look like you're pretty upset there. And we start with this empathy and this acknowledgement, this validation, is a way to calm the heart of emotions and bring the, you can have the prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of your brain back online.

And so we use this acronym of Sure, where, you know, first thing you, you, you stay calm, you don't get, you know, don't get upset yourself as the parent because they need to come hard to the problem. You seek to understand, you look like you're pretty upset there. Can you tell me what's going on there and not looking for evidence to pounce on them? You then reframe it, you know, you're pretty upset there. Can you tell me what's going on there? And not looking for evidence to pounce on them. You then reframe it. You know, you reflect and listen. So what you're telling me is your brother took something

early in the day and you're still mad about that. Do it. Is that about right? And then you explore options. So let's think about, let's talk about how we can do this better because you probably don't feel really good but like you're such a great older brother for throwing something at him.

And as your dad, that's just not gonna pass muster with me. But I understand why you're frustrated, but this is not behavior. How you're handled, this is not the way I've been watching to handle this in the future. And we do this in a gentle, respectful way by sort of being a non-anxious presence ourselves in that, because that will calm the heart

emotions and help our kids be able to then think about more effective ways to handle the disagreements, more effective ways to handle their own heart emotions. Rather than just coming down on, like that's not acceptable behavior, because arguably, if they already had more effective ways to express and handle the situations, they would have used them. You know, kids, kids do well when they can.

And if they can't, we want to figure out how to help them do it better next time. Yeah. That's a beautiful expression. Kids do well when they can. Tell me about that. Who's that from Bill? But, um, I didn't know. Who's that from Bill? I think Nelson. You know, that's Ross Green, Ross Green, who really popularized the idea of collaborative problem solving with kids, and as opposed to other forms of discipline.

And there's a chapter at the very end of our new book. It's called What what about consequences? And because at our first book, we talked so much about the power of a sense of autonomy or control or agency in kids. People would ask us, when we'd lecture about it, well, what about consequences? Don't kid these consequences.

And what we point out is the root of the word discipline is to teach. Yes, we want kids to learn from their experience. But we love this line from Jane Nelson, who wrote a classic book called Positive Discipline, which is, where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to help kids do better, we have to first make them feel worse

by coming down on them or shaming them, like that. And I think that I just love that idea. And I think you said it very well, Ned, that there's many ways that we can help kids learn from their experience that they don't involve getting mad at them or coming up with some negative consequence for them or shaming them. And there's a sensitive kids any time they're corrected. They tend to go towards that shame or kind of resentment. And you got really sensitive kids that it takes even more of kind of sensitive handling.

But the idea is simply that what we want is for for kids to learn from their experience. So they become skilled at paying attention to their own experience and learning from. Yeah, I mean, I'm an adult. I don't like being reproached. They're like, when somebody does that to me, I, there's a part of me that wants to pull away

or deny or lash out. You know, it's sort of like, why would you expect a child to be magically better at something that you haven't even mastered and you've been on the planet for decades. It's a great point. In part because these executive functions of putting things in perspective and controlling our emotions, these are skills that develop ideally.

I develop over time. You're absolutely right. It's not a it's not, it's not, it's not reason when you're gonna be disappointed. If you think that a four or five or 12 year old is gonna be able to have the same self-control that we would expect of a 25 or a 35 or 45 year old. In addition to that, there's also the observation that the kids who get the most punishment

tend to learn the least from it. And we just want, is bills? Have we want kids to learn from their experience and learn from their mistakes? But how we do it is so darn important. One of the things when we were writing this book, we talked with dozens and dozens of teenagers and asked them, who do you feel closest to?

Because we know this close connection is so important and effective communication and there's also probably this close thing to Silver Bullet in sort of decrease in the risk of anxiety and depression. And we asked this, who do you feel closest to? And sometimes it was my mom and dad, sometimes it was brother, sister, what a brother, sister, and aunt, who my grandma, you know, my coach, my teacher, whatever. And then the following question was, well, what makes you feel close to them? And the two things were, they listened to me

without judging me. And they don't tell me what to do. Now, some parents are gonna hear this, like, well, of course I have to tell my kid what to do. You know, that's my job as his parent, which again is true, but there's a how. There's sharing, you know, teaching in ways that maintain the relationship, in ways that don't undermine their autonomy, where we're giving them the benefit of our experience, and giving them better tools to be effective in their lives and their communication

without being, with really being authoritative, with our news in our natural authority, without being authoritative, kind of because I said so type approach. When I think about why I was closer with one of my grandfathers, then sort of both my parents,

it's almost as if grandparents have freed themselves from this sort of self-inflicted and probably not particularly productive pressure, like you were saying, as soon as a parent hears, well, I have to tell you what to do. Do you really, like, you know, grand parents are just it's not like grandparents will let you get away with anything, the grandparents have just slightly reduced the pressure, right? Because they've been through this before. They kind of probably understand that it's not as, whatever it is, it's not as important as it feels to the parent. And just by being slightly more

relaxed, they could be saying the exact same thing, even enforcing potentially stricter rules, but it's like the volume's been turned down slightly, and so it gets heard, and it's heard in a different way because the receiver is more open to receiving it. Right. I think, you know, as a grand period, I mean, I certainly, I think that many things that my kids do, that my grandkids do, seem like a big deal to me, but they do more to the parents. And, right, and certainly, you have a couple of kids, you grow up, you realize, that's just

not a big deal to grow out of it or whatever. And I think being able to convey that kind of attitude to kids is really beneficial. And that's why we talk about this goal for parents of kind of working in this direction of being a non-anxious presence, where we kind of, we can take a long view as we talked about before assuming that and we can be respectful of kids, kids have to go through some hard stuff in order to develop the confidence they can handle their lives. That we really, if we take more of that grandfather perspective, we start one of the chapters with a story from Fred,

what's Fred's last name to the... Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers. Fred Rogers, where he's saying that he was walking on this wall, this kind of stone wall, and his mother and his grandmother said, honey, could you get a get down, you're gonna fall. And the grandfather says, let it stay up there, he can do it. Yes.

And he said, eventually I was running on the wall. And he said, I was like seven years, I still remember that to this day, my grandfather had confidence in me. And that's what we want. We want to communicate to kids that we have confidence that they can handle things, that they can figure out

their life ultimately. Well, I think one of the things I would say there's a great book I've recommended to people called adult children of emotionally immature parents. Is there another type? Sorry. No, no, but the premise being like at the root of, you know, sort of raising a more self-driven child, communicating effectively the story with Fred Rogers, which I love, which is like dealing with your own shit. Like how often is it that you're, you know, having struggle, you're struggling to communicate with your kids because you're communicating from a place of anxiety or from a place of insecurity or a place of emotion that if you dealt with

in your own life, whether it's going to therapy or reading or taking better care of yourself or sleeping better, whatever it is, you would more effectively communicate because certain barriers or headwinds would have been removed. And it strikes me to sort of a through line of what we're talking about,

whether it's the sort of extreme political views that have led to a strange men, or it's the pressures of these parents trying to force their kids to go into some college. It's they're coming at it from a place of being very immature themselves, not dealing with their own issues. And then so you have a ten-year-old talking to a person who's emotionally only like 15 or 16. Of course, it's going to be explosive and non-productive. You've got two children arguing with

each other instead of fully formed adult talking to empathetically to a young child. Well, I think it's a great point. And we have a chapter in the book about the language of of non-actious presence. And simply a dear that when we, it helps if in any given situation, there's like there's one adult, right? Right. And so when we as parents, if we can be more non-axis, if we can be less reactive, if we can take the long view, our energy changes their energy and makes them much more able to think, you know, with, with, with their more developed faculties, with their executive functions and, and, and just make better decisions. But when we as a parents, if we are alarmist and if we

yelling and screaming and, and everything is a crisis, then both our higher faculties and our kids higher faculties are nowhere to be seen. We were acting like children, we were looking like people who were just terrified and no good thinking comes out of fear-based thinking. So it's a whole chapter on how we can simply be more effective and helping our kids, including giving them really important messages of values and how to live life well. When we work on ourselves to be more non-anxious, to have more of an extolic philosophy,

the calm emits the storm. I mean, the fascinating thing for me, in this whole time with my son, is people just over and over and over sent to me and to my wife, how are you guys so calm about this? And for me at least I'll say, I prioritize being well rested and exercising every day and practicing,

I practice transcendent meditation as does my wife now. And I mean, in many ways, can there be anything more alarming than Dean on the phone with your kid when he's falling apart and you turn out his brain tumor and I'm 600 miles away. But still, what I knew in that moment is the best way that I can help my kid is not to panic because I can always panic later. And because my wife was the one who was, you know,

20 miles away, not 600, if when I was able to help, when I could stay calm, it would help her stay calm. And when she could stay calm, it would help him stay calm. And then we just trusted that we're getting the best medical health that we can. And this whole COVID thing has been challenging, challenging, challenging. But so much of the way kids are the lessons they're going to take out of this past year and a half is their own experience, but also as they look to us as parents and caregivers saying how do we, however we look into this? This is a challenge and we're going to get through it together or oh my gosh

This is the end of the world which is kind of a hard message to get out of bed pull the head Get out from underneath the cover and say I'm ready to take on the world. Yeah, and the idea that you can't, like, we seem to be able to respond well in crises, like truly dangerous situations. Like, I'm always amazed, like, you know, my kid will be doing something and it's actually not safe and they need to get inside right now or something, right? You know, in that instance, you can communicate effectively. We seem to know what to do in true emergencies when our adrenaline, our body, when something

takes over, then we know what to do. The problem is in this middle ground. I guess what I'd say is like, if you've ever responded well in emergency, you should take from that is, oh, I do know how to do this. It's really about how to do this more consistently in slightly less severe situations. Like, you know you're capable of it, so now it's just a matter of figuring out how to do it in everyday situations. I can't tell you how many kids have told me

over the years that their parents screened at them for yelling at their brother. Some irony there about it. Of course, yeah, it's not what you say, it's what you do, don't talk about it, be about it. Well, amazing guys, I love this book. I love the first one. It was an honor to talk again. And you've been very helpful to me and my parenting journey. So, so please, please don't stop. Thanks so much. We love how you think. You, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, for all of you. Well, thank you. Yeah, it's a blast talking to me.

You can hear that that is my actual Amor Fati challenge coin, which I keep in my pocket. It says Amor Fati in the front, it's got flame, the idea that everything you throw in front of a fire is fuel for the fire. And then on the back, it has the quote from Nietzsche, who coins this phrase, he'll put it in Tendet, a Morphati, not merely to bear what is necessary,

but love it, to see what it is, to see what it can become, and to make it into that. That's what the idea of a Morphati is. And you can check this out at store.dailysteo.com. You have a pendant too, but it's one of the things I try to think about on a daily basis. How do I love what life is chosen for me and how do I turn it into something that in retrospect I wouldn't have traded for.

So a more faulty be well. Hey prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.