How to Raise Kids Who Can Handle Life

**Brian Buffini** (0:00)
Hey, you got a minute? I wanna talk to you about how parenting is a long game. Now, I got a minute with you right now, and it takes more than a minute to be a great parent. Well, I have three major points on today's broadcast, as I always do, because parenting is not a short-term thing. It's a long game, at least. Can you get that in the map for me? First thing we're gonna talk about is how to teach your children to become great decision makers. Because when you make all the decisions for your kids, you disempower them. The second thing we're gonna talk about adversity, how to overcome adversity, and how, as a parent, you don't want them to have the giant adversity that destroys their life. In a safe environment, let them experience setbacks and challenges that they overcome, so they become strong and independent. And then the third thing, hey Al, how's it going? You got a cup of tea for the old man? Appreciate it, bud. You gotta understand that you start out with your kids, and when they're young, you're the controller, right? You can't have bad things happen to them. Then you become the coach. And then later on, the goal is to be their confidant. And if you do that right, and invest the time right, you'll have that stage in life, and it's the best time. Sláinte.
Come join me today.
Today's Blueprint is about Parenting the Long Game. You know, I probably never wanted to ever teach on parenting. You never feel like you're doing it good enough. Nobody's perfect, and your kids don't turn out perfect. But, my bride and I raised six kids, we now have five grandkids, and it turns out none of them are ax murderers. They all have gotten along pretty well. They're all pretty productive members of society, love each other, love their families, love God. And I thought, well, if you guys want to hear it, I'll share a few tips on it.
The number one thing I would say today from a big picture starting out, is the number one thought that I think the typical parent has today, especially the typical mom, is I don't want to screw up my kids.
They come from a position technically of fear. I don't want to make this mistake in case I screw up my kids. I'm concerned to what the effect are. So we tend to parent from concern, which concern is a nice way of saying fear. And when we do something from fear, you're chasing the symptom.
So we want to do it out of love. You do it out of love. In fact, you love your kids so much, you don't want to make a mistake. The fear is out of love. Now, if you ask somebody what the opposite of fear is, sometimes they'll say it's faith. But the truth of the matter is the ancient scriptures say this, perfect love casts out fear. Perfect love casts out fear. So the opposite of fear is really love. So here's my encouragement to everyone. My bride and I have counseled hundreds of parents over the years. We've done conferences, not specifically maybe around, because we home schooled our kids. And people would ask, how can you be an entrepreneur? How come your kids are all athletes, and you guys home schooled? And we home schooled 35 years ago when people thought we'd lost our mind. Today, home schooling is a science. The most tools are amazing. There's connections. There's all kinds of, like, you can have your kids take Spanish from a Guatemala teacher live. So today, it's a very sophisticated process for a lot of people, especially post-COVID. So the first thing I would say is don't parent from fear, parent from love. The second thing I would say is this.
Every human being I know, I'm in the adult coaching business. So we've coached well over 100,000 people. I've spoken or trained 4 million adults. And I would say every single adult I've ever had a private conversation with will say that the adversity they faced and overcame in their life was the making of them.
And yet, when it comes to our kids, we go to every length possible for a kid to avoid any kind of adversity at all.
And I'll share some examples of that today. Now we don't want our kids, and some parents do this, okay, you know, jump in the lake and see if you can swim type mentality. And that's not the case. We don't want our kids to learn the drastic decisions. We don't want them to, the severe mistakes that will take decades to recover. We don't want our kids to have to go through that adversity. We need to come alongside them. But if we try to engineer a world where, A, I'm afraid to screw up my kid, and B, I'm afraid for my kid to go through anything, cause it'll break them, it'll ultimately set in motion a very, very weak, soft, non-persevering human being. Basically doing weights without any weight on the bar. And we do the pushups for them. And so that's really not great parenting. So I want to talk about this today. Maybe you'll get something from it. Maybe you'll disagree with it on how you raise your family. Or maybe, maybe there's one or two things in here for you today. Number one thing I always want to do with our kids, and Beverly and I, was to build decision makers. We wanted to teach them how to think well. So help them become decision makers. Next, you want the consequences they experience to be the safe ones. So you can turn their mistakes into reflection.