Episode 586: Raising Resilient Kids in the Age of Smartphones and Overprotective Parenting

**Jen Cohen** (0:01)
Hi, guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it!
Welcome to Habits and Hustle, where we talk about the habits, strategies and mindset shifts that actually make a difference in your health, happiness and success. And in this episode, I'm sharing a segment from my recent conversation on the Mind Pump podcast. We're talking about what it actually takes to raise mentally strong kids, including overprotective parenting, boredom, failure, smartphones, sports, independence and why competence comes from giving kids the chance to struggle, problem solve and build evidence that they can handle hard things. Before diving in, if you're listening right now and you've gotten something out of this show, do me a favor, hit subscribe if you haven't already and leave a review on your own. I would love to hear what you think and if there's anything we can be adding to the show to even make it better for you because I read every single review. Now let's dive in.
I'm not a psychologist, I'm a parent, so I think anybody who is a parent then that makes them an expert, right? Because they're dealing with parenting day in and day out.
I really thought it was an important topic which is I wanted to, it was called The Secret to Raising Mentally Strong Kids in a Fragile World. Yeah. And the reason why I did it was I have two small kids, one's going to be 10 next week, another one's 12 You guys all have kids as well. And what I've been noticing as, you know, throughout the years is over time, kids are becoming more and more fragile, more and more frail, and it's really the onus is on the parent. And I think this whole culture of gentle parenting has really made our kids weaker. And so I wanted to have a platform or create some type of platform where we can kind of come together, unite, and create mental resilience in our little, in the younger generation. And so to me also, if you want to be a mentally strong person, why not start when you are a child? Like these are habits and tools that are important throughout your life. So why would you're like what 21, 25, then you start to learn how to be mentally resilient? Start when you're a kid and get the foundation, prime your brain, prime yourself for failure, for resilience, because life's not easy. Life isn't easy. And if we coddle our children, which is what a lot of people are doing now in this time, it's actually you're doing a disservice in a real way. Gentle parenting, in my opinion, is snow plowing all difficulty away from your children and snow plowing challenges. We've created a culture of coddle culture versus challenge culture. And challenge is what makes you stronger and makes you more resilient. So let's start with that. I would also say part of this stuff is helicopter parenting, participation trophies, creating a space where there's safe spaces and triggers. All of this lingo and language, in my opinion, is creating a soft child, which then creates a soft teenager, a soft adult, which, by the way, I will tell you, some of this is causing suicidal rates to increase. Anxiety is through the roof, depression is through the roof. When you don't feel competent and capable of taking care of yourself and having any form of self-efficacy, what happens to you as a human being is beyond detrimental, right? Yeah. We've seen it. I mean, the reason why we were all raised in a very different time, where independence was very much a thing. We took, we took risk. We were kind of like thrown into independence because our parents weren't watching our every single move. And another big one is boredom. We've eliminated boredom from our children's lives, where we are over-scheduling everything because we're so nervous of our kids missing out on anything. When the reality is boredom is where creativity lives. It's where kids think for themselves and figure shit out. And if we're eliminating all of these things, what is our child left to do? They're not thinking for themselves. They're not acting on their own. Their parents are getting them out of every, you know, uncomfortable, challenging situation. And we're left with like basically a blob of a human being. That's what we're left with. Because over time, we've evolved to a place where parents rather be their child's friend than being their parent. They're so scared of being disliked by their child that they're just like not parenting anymore. They're not disciplining anymore.
They're so scared of that particular thing. When the reality is our job as a parent isn't to be liked all the time, isn't to make our kids happy all the time. It's actually the opposite. Our job as a parent is to make our kid resilient, make them competent, make them capable.