The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
What to do when your kid gives up before they even TRY? #49
In this episode, Jon answers three real parent questions about kids who shut down, melt down, or avoid trying altogether — the moments when, as one child put it, “I’d rather not try than be bad at it.” Through stories, neuroscience, and relatable examples, Jon offers a grounded way to understand the gap between a child’s stress limit and their skill limit, and why “new things are hard” becomes a life-changing mantra for both parent and child. Listeners walk away with clarity, compassion, and a more connected path forward for supporting kids in those tender I-can’t moments.
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In this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast, we're going to break down why some kids hit their frustration threshold long before they hit what's called their skill threshold. What's happening in the brain of a child who shuts down early, and how we as parents can slowly stretch that capacity without pushing them into overwhelm. You'll start to see these moments differently. And by the end of this episode, you're going to have a clearer sense of exactly how to support your child in those I can't moments. How to respond in a way that calms the panic and builds their tolerance for frustration. Let's get into it. Excited to be here. I'm recording it in the evening live again over on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. I wish I could do TikTok too, but they don't let me do that these days. I've not like banned or anything, but I haven't gotten the approval yet. I want to start start this morning or this evening. Automatically say this morning, even though it's clearly nighttime while I'm recording for those watching on my freezing cold porch. I want to start by just kind of telling you something that happened in my life before I jump into the questions about frustration tolerance. It's not actually about frustration tolerance, uh, but I just give you guys like a window into what's going on with us. So this morning was really challenging for me and my family, not actually because of what took place, but because of the anxiety around what was going to take place. My my daughter, who is 13 months old, had to get a blood test. And so we had to get her in the car, and my kids didn't have school, like they were off of school because the the weather is too cold, and they go to an outdoor school. So because of like the crazy below sub zero temperatures, we had to get her in the car, bundle her up. And uh this is my job. So so my wife does all the doctor's appointments with my my kids. Not all, like sometimes I I I'll come along, especially if if you know, multiple kids are going to the doctor. I do all the dentists, she does all the doctors, but when it happens to be a blood draw, we had to do one for my other son. He's now almost four. We had to do one when he was uh about this age, maybe two, what one and a half, two. And that was my job back then, and that's my job now. And so we had to take her for this blood test. And we were kind of freaking out about it, my wife especially, uh, just kind of not feeling good about it for all of the days leading up. And and I like didn't really bring it up because I didn't want to keep thinking about it. But then last night I said, okay, you know, tomorrow we got this blood test. And she's like, No, I can't believe this is happening. I hate this. And I was like, Yeah, yeah, I know it's gonna be fine. It's gonna be fine. And I kept saying it's gonna be fine because when my son went in, it was so crazy. Like, we went to this, it's just like a local um drug testing type place. They aren't getting drug tested, guys. My kids do not need to get drug tested, but uh they do they perform lots of tests, blood draw tests, and they're they're just when I brought my son there, it was crazy. Like he's gotten all these shots and all these vaccinations and things like that, and he would cry. Like all of my kids cry when they get shots, like every kid, I think. But when he got the blood draw, there was like no crying whatsoever. He didn't even like seem to notice it. And so I said, I really don't think it's gonna be this big of a big of a deal, Jess. Like, if you had been there with him, you would know like it was really not painful. And she was just like, our kids are not the same. And I was like, you know what? You're right, our kids are not the same. And I shouldn't, I shouldn't assume that it's going to be as easy or as painless for for her as it was for him. And so I was kind of freaking out about it too. Like I was starting to get in my own head about it. And then we got there, and the the doctor hadn't put the orders in right, so then we had to wait for the doctor's office to open so that they could get send the orders over. I got my air and my tires filled up with my daughter. We like drove over and got the air and the tires filled up, and it was just like this terrible morning of anxiety and panic. And finally, when we get back to waiting room two or to to blood draw room two, I saw that it was the exact same, like, I don't know how old she is, maybe in her 50s or 40, late 40s, early 50s, uh Filipino nurse who, or I don't even know if she's a nurse, maybe she's a phlebotomist, maybe she's just a PCT or not just a PC BCT, maybe she's a PCT or patient care technician. I don't know what her job is, but it was the same person who did the blood draw on my son. And I said, You know, you did this for my son, and it was totally painless. Can you do that again? And she kind of laughed and she said, Well, yeah, for some kids they don't cry, some kids they cry, like it just kind of depends. And then, guys, she did it, and my daughter didn't even react. And the whole time I was just building up all this anxiety about, like, oh my gosh, is my kid gonna be screaming? Are they gonna be like, Am I gonna be having to hold this child down while she has this like medical procedure? Like without my wife there, is this gonna be like so, so horrible? And then it just wasn't like it was just really not nearly as bad as I thought it was gonna be. And just kind of goes to show you with a lot of the questions that I'm gonna be answering tonight, and I said it's not related, it's kind of related. With a lot of the questions I'm gonna be answering tonight, one of the main things that we're dealing with, and this is just a parenting thing in general, is our expectations of something versus and the anxiety that comes from us worrying about something versus actually that thing occurring. And so as I jump into the questions, I want to just talk about the fact that number one, our kids experience that anxiety too. They experience that anxiety when it comes to trying new things and doing things that they haven't done before, which is what this episode's about. But also we experience that anxiety because we are parents for the first time. And we don't know that, you know, if our oldest kid doesn't try this thing or if they quit easily, or if they uh are really failure averse and they won't try hard things, if that's just gonna be forever. And I want to tell you, as somebody who's now been doing this and working with parents for a long time, but who also has been a parent for nine years, going on 10 years, things change. And the kid in my family who is the most averse to trying new things, who is the most failure averse, who who struggled the most early on with frustration tolerance of all of my kids so far, has been my oldest. And the amount of change that I've seen him go through and the amount of frustration tolerance that he's been able to build in the last few years, especially, has been outstanding. It's been overwhelming to experience this and witness this. And so as I jump into the questions, I just kind of want to start with that and just set the tone there. Okay, so that's what's been going on in my life. Um, maybe I'll do this section again, maybe I won't, but I'm also gonna try and answer the questions a little bit more quickly than I have been answering them in the past because sometimes I just talk forever. Okay, first question is uh an Instagram direct message, DM, and it comes from Ashley. And I think we might have had an Ashley last night as well. Maybe it's a different Ashley. Maybe just everybody who was born in the 90s was named Ashley. Ashley says, John, can you talk about kids who just like won't even try at things that are even a tiny bit hard? My daughter, parentheses seven, took look one look at her math homework and literally laid on the floor and said, I'm done before she even tried. I got frustrated and I told her that she has to push through sometimes, that life is gonna be hard. I don't know. Did I mess that up? She keeps saying, I'm not good at it. I don't know how to fix it. Ashley, I don't think that you messed that interaction up. I think that we can tweak some things in that interaction because I think what your daughter is experiencing is a lot of overwhelm that comes from not just something being new or something being challenging, but something that specifically, like with math homework especially, is hitting on a thing that for kids can be really challenging and and unique. And so one of the things that I all always talk about with young kids, and seven still young, is that kids, all kids, not just neurodivergent kids, but we see this a lot with neurodivergent adults, of which I am one. And I was just talking to another parenting influencer, and I'm gonna be on her podcast in a couple of weeks. Uh, she is also neurodivergent. And one of the things that neurodivergent people struggle with, and so I have a lot of empathy for this, is executive functioning. And one of the executive functioning tasks that we have to learn over time is breaking things down into smaller steps. And kids almost universally have a hard time with breaking big challenges down into their composite steps. So the first thing that I would say to your daughter when she says, I don't know, I'm just not good at this, or I'm done, instead of saying you have to do hard things, I would flip that. I would say, new things are hard. And I would, this is going to be for all of our questions, all three of our questions today. This is my mantra to my kids. This is also the mantra that I used when I was a soccer coach. This is the mantra for for like little kids, six, seven, six, seven, eight-year-olds, nine-year-olds. This was the mantra that I used when I was a high school and college volleyball coach. This is the mantra that I use when I uh work with people who are now adults in therapeutic environments, who parents. This is the mantra that I use with literally everybody in my life. And that mantra is new things are hard. And I'm gonna keep having for all of the questions today. The first thing out of our mouth should be that mantra. When our kids are struggling with something that's new or something that's challenging, or an even if it's something that we think one of the things that gets so frustrating for me and my wife is when my nine-year-old is struggling playing video games, because we don't really like love him playing video games in the first place, and he's like having a hard time playing video games, even when it's that new things are hard, gives permission to struggle. I think this is a really challenging thing in the modern world where lots of things come easy. And I think this is a really challenging thing when we think we put to project forward into the use of Chat GPT or AI tools or whatever to make life easier. The use of an air fryer to make life easier, the use of a microwave, the use of DoorDash, the use of, you know, Amazon, whatever to make life easier. Life is getting increasingly, we we are increasingly getting permission in our world to just not try challenging new hard things. And so I think giving kids permission to try hard things and say new things are hard. If it's new, it's going to be hard, guaranteed. It's just a good way to frame that whole thing, right? It's a good way to begin. Just assume that it's going to be hard if it's new. Math homework, kind of by definition, is going to be hard because it's new. You wouldn't, I guess some math homework is probably a review, but you know, they wouldn't be giving it to you if it wasn't supposed to challenge you. But oftentimes we don't expressly state that to kids and they don't understand. They don't understand that like it's supposed to be hard. The reason that we're doing it is because it's hard. And so just to say, to begin from the place instead of you're going to have to do hard things, that is true. Ashley, to everybody else listening, from Melbourne to Thailand to wherever, South America, North America, Oceania, Europe, everywhere in between, Africa, maybe there's somebody from Africa listening. Wherever you are in the world, new things are still hard. And that reality has to be something that we instill in our kids because they don't automatically understand that. That's something that they have not automatically experienced. And to us, it might just be like, well, why do you even have to say that? It's just so obvious. It's new, it's hard. No, say it explicitly. And then we're going to do the second part of this, which is that executive functioning piece for you, Ashley. And that's to break down the hard thing into its composite steps. So shrink the problem. Instead of saying, Yeah, you look at the math homework, and this can be an experience for kids. They look at the challenge. And if the math homework is three pages of problems, they go, Oh my gosh, I'm never going to be able to do all these. So why am I even going to start? When I wrote my book, Punishment Free Parenting, and I knew I had, you know, hundreds of pages to write, and then going to cut those pages down to fewer hundred pages so that you can actually read it. I knew that that mountain to climb began with a single step. But that was not automatic. And that is not automatic for our kids. They do not automatically know that you can break things down into their composite steps. And even if they did, they would struggle with it. And so I would say, okay, let's start by just doing one problem together. Let's just handle the first problem. Okay, no, the first problem is so hard. The first I can't even do it. Okay, let's let's go through the whole thing. Let's find one problem that you can do. Let's solve one problem. And then that's one less problem to solve. And then we can take a break. And when we break things down into manageable bite-sized things, our kids can do it so much better. I was talking to a friend of mine, his name is uh Dr. Josh. This is many months ago. We were talking about working with kids who really struggle with homework. They get really, really behind. And one of his things is never let make your kid do homework for more than like 30 minutes at a time. So, Ashley, what we're gonna do, we're gonna say new things are hard. These problems are hard because they're new. We're gonna work on this for 30 minutes and then we're gonna take a break. We're breaking the problem down into the its composites. All we got to do is just make it through 30 more seconds or 30 more minutes of this. And now it's 29 and now it's 28. And we're just gonna shrink the problem. And when the problem gets shrunk, our kids who are smaller feel like it's achievable. And then over time, they actually build the resilience and confidence from tackling the they tackle all the small problems, they tackle all the 30-minute increments and they tackle the problems one by one, and then they look at everything that they've accomplished and they say, wow, I did all of this and I'm proud of myself. Instead of looking at all of that and saying, that was so overwhelming, I can't ever do that. And that's the power that comes from shrinking the problems. So I'm gonna move on to the next question. But Ashley, if you're out there listening, thank you for sending me this DM asking me about this, and keep listening because everything else we're gonna say is also gonna contribute to that. Okay. Question number two comes from Jordan. This is a TikTok DM. I very rarely respond to my TikTok DMs, but occasionally I see one come across that's a question. And I'm I'm not gonna lie, uh occasionally when I see a dude DM me, a guy DM me, over 25% of my followers, or only 25% of my followers are men. And so whenever I see a guy asking questions about parenting, I admit I'm a little bit more likely to it's scroll stopping for me, let's say. I just get I'm getting all of these things from mostly on TikTok. The reason I don't respond to the DMs is because they're all spam. So I'm getting all these spams, and then I see one from Jordan, and he was like, Hey, my five-year-old loses it the second something's not easy. Like we're talking full meltdown over a zipper. I try and hype him up, and then I'm like, bro, you didn't even try. Am I supposed to help him or am I supposed to let him figure out? Because I swear it feels like if I step back, he just freaks out. But if I step in, he freaks out. So honestly, I'm just confused. What do I do? Jordan, I understand why you're confused. New things are hard. And I'm gonna guess this is your first five-year-old. And being a parent to a five-year-old is a new thing, and new things are hard. The key term that I want to talk about here, and it's a term that is gonna permeate through the rest of the episode, is frustration tolerance. I talked about it in the intro. The idea of frustration tolerance, the well, let's just break it down to its two pieces, right? Frustration, we know what that is. Frustration is when we're trying to do something and it's not going the way that we want it to go. It's being challenging, right? Like pulling up a zipper. Tolerance is what is is what we build with as we learn to uh adapt to that thing that we're becoming tolerant of, right? So tolerance is not something like you learn to love it, it's you learn to tolerate it. And when we think about tolerance in terms of medical tolerances, medical tolerances, like in the ED, or the ER, rather, for those who don't have a partner who works in the emergency department who calls it the ED, the ER, the emergency room. When a person comes in who is an alcoholic or who has a long history of drugs, or just has red hair, that's kind of a random genetic feature of red-haired people, is that they have a high tolerance to certain narcotics, um, or sedation methods, I think it is. Um when somebody has a high tolerance to something, it means that they've usually, not in all cases, but often, they've consumed a lot of that substance and their body has essentially grown somewhat immune to it. And so a high tolerance for alcohol is a person who can drink alcohol without feeling the effects of that alcohol because they have had repeated and you know continuous exposure to it. Give you an example from my life. I spent more than 10 years off of all ADHD medication. And then I started taking it again about a year and a half ago. And I didn't take it for that long. I took it for a pretty short period of time, but I took it every day as you're kind of supposed to. Or I took it five days a week. And very quickly, because of the type of medication, I built up a tolerance to it. And I either needed to up my dosage or uh stop using it or find another alternative. What I opted to do is only use it in very sparing circumstances rather than using it every day. I just use it when I have to do something that's really painfully difficult for me as an ADHD person, like doing my taxes, for example, or cleaning the whole house is another way that I might use that medication. But it's not, I'm not using it inappropriately. I'm doing so under the guise of a or under the supervision of a doctor, but it's understanding that I don't want to build up that tolerance because I want the medication to be effective for me at low dosages. But if I take a lot of it, it's going to build up tolerance. Well, those are kind of negative uh understandings of tolerance. Frustration tolerance is how we build up a tolerance to frustration. And what we do lack what we don't understand with kids is that they are not born with any frustration tolerance whatsoever. And frustration tolerance is like a muscle. It has to be built. You can't just, you're not born with it. You're not just gonna have it. And the modern world that we live in, oftentimes kids don't have any frustration tolerance because as soon as they start to display the symptoms of frustration, they start to melt down or they start to get aggressive or they start to, you know, feel big feelings. Their parents intervene and hand them a device or just fix the problem for them. And Jordan, that's what you're feeling. You're like, I don't, I just gotta bail my kid out here. My what I would give you the advice. So that the advice that I would give you is look at that frustration tolerance that that you're trying to build with your child, because that's what you're trying to do, right? You're trying to build frustration tolerance. And I would try my absolute best to just wait as long as possible as they struggle and then intervene before it becomes overwhelming. Does that make sense? So wait as long as possible and then intervene before it becomes too overwhelming. And just so you guys know, for those listening and watching live, I just turned off my heater because my heater heats up my camera, and then my camera overheats, and then I lose the video feed, which is no fun at all. So that's the first piece of this, Jordan. I would let the frustration build a little bit because only by going through that frustration do they build the tolerance for it. It's different than sync or swim, right? Which is sync or swim parenting, often called 80s, 90s parenting, is this parenting approach where you just say, figure it out on your own. You'll figure it out. If I don't help you, they'll figure it out. It's literally like you, it's I call it sink or swim because it's those parents who would push their kid in the pool and they go, they'll learn how to swim when they get nobody to save them. What we know is that actually that sends kids into their auto, their uh sympathetic nervous cycle. It's part of their autonomic nervous cycle. And when they get too overwhelmed, they no longer are experienced frustring frustration tolerance. They're just experiencing overwhelm and stress. And their stress limit is hit before their skill limit. And so that barrier, that gap between the skill limit and the stress limit, that becomes a barrier to building frustration tolerance for kids. Now, of course, confidence comes from a kid pushing through and achieving something small win and not having their parent do that for them. But the only way that they get there is by building a little bit of frustration tolerance and having the reps to then attempt to do that thing. Now, I did lose my camera no matter what, unfortunately. So what I'm gonna do here is try and turn it off and turn it back on and see if it comes back. Oh no. I know that you guys can probably still hear me. I apologize in advance. Give it a second, it'll come back on. Okay, I got it. Give me thirty seconds, I promise. Alright. Let me know when you guys can see me again. I bet you you guys can see me right about now. Hang on, hang on, I promise. I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. Okay. We can hear you, we can see you. I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it. Okay. So back to where we were. Talking about building frustration tolerance. I'm gonna have to cut all that out of the uh thing. Whenever I have to edit more, it always makes my job a little bit trickier on the post. But you know what? That's okay. So yeah, Jordan, that's that's what I'm focusing on. Trying to build that gap between the frust between the the place where their skill limit is, doing a zipper as a five-year-old is challenging, where their stress limit is, which is where they go to that overwhelm place, and you know where this is, you can experience this in real time when they are no longer experiencing a frustration tolerance growth. They're not just frustrated, they're actually overwhelmed, they're melting down. And even if that break in between those times, so finding that sweet spot before they melt down, while they're still struggling to let them build some of that resilience and that frustration tolerance. And I just heard somebody say this the other day, and it's really profound. It was another parenting voice. I'm forgetting who it was in the moment. But they said, even if you let your kid just sit in that frustration tolerance or in that frustration for 10 seconds, it's still 10 seconds of frustration tolerance that they built. So oftentimes we think of this in terms of long-term, right? Like, oh, well, they gotta be frustrated for five minutes straight to build any frustration tolerance, right? Not true. If a kid has zero frustration tolerance, any amount of frustration that they experience before we save them or do it for them, or they hit total overwhelm if but just by you know being there and saying, yeah, that is tricky. I am here, you know, new things are hard. Any amount of that does build that resilience. So that's where I would frame all of that. I think you're doing a good job of trying to hype him up, but you have to find that that middle ground. And it is hard. And it's hard because new things are hard, and parenting a five-year-old is hard because it's new. So don't feel like there's anything wrong with you, Jordan. I my guess is if you're asking, hopping in the DMs on TikTok of a parenting educator, you're probably doing a really good job. And everybody who's watching this now or listening to this after the fact now, listening to the podcast right now, they're doing a really good job too. And so you don't have to feel like you're just screwing up just because your kids are having a hard time. And that's the key here. We we we we have to not want to save our kids from every single bad emotion. And that's that's actually where I'm going next with Megan. So the last question came from Megan. It was sent in via email. Although, Megan, I will say you replied to one of my uh weekly newsletters with this. You did not send this to podcast at wholeparentacademy.com. But I'm gonna forgive you for that. For those who don't know, I have a weekly newsletter that goes out where I talk about kind of in in these terms. I'll often reference episodes of the podcast or or other things that I'm doing at things like uh I have a workshop coming up, free workshop that I'm doing. Um, I have a children's book coming out in not too long. I have obviously my book that I I sell, but it's actually majority, not sales. The overwhelming majority of the things my newsletter is just my parenting takes stories about my life as a parent. And so if you're interested in parenting, from Megan's perspective, you know, be like Megan, join the newsletter. And uh it's a great place to just kind of hang out with like-minded parents. There's 40,000 people on the on the newsletter who love all of this. And I have like a 70% email open rate because um I just I just give I just give value in that. I don't I don't like sell constantly or anything like that. I do sell occasionally, but not constantly. So Megan said, okay, random question, but does it mean anything if my kid always quits before they even start? This is a little different than the other two questions, at least as I'm interpreting it. My husband says she's being dramatic and that she needs to toughen up, but my gut says that it's not that simple. She's nine, she's super smart, but the second that she thinks that something is going to go wrong, she literally shuts down. She literally said to me, I'd rather not try to be, I'd rather not try than be bad at it. I don't even know what to say because same. Megan, great self-awareness. And I love that you said same because uh I'm gonna do something that I almost never do, and I I'm gonna ask kind of a clarifying question. And if you can feel free to respond to this email or respond to this me via email. If you have not yet taken my quiz on whether or not you you're you have a highly sensitive child, I would I would start there. I would ask the question of whether you have a highly sensitive child. And the reason why I would start there and ask that question is because what you're describing to me is actually kind of a perfect analogy for what it is like to have or perfect example of what it's like to have a highly sensitive kid. And highly sensitive kids really, really, really do not like failure and they do not like to be wrong. And I do not have time in this episode, I'll have to go into another whole episode on just that um to talk about why that is. But because of that, oftentimes highly sensitive kids shut down before they even try something new. And I'm gonna give you three really quick tips. So if you have a highly sensitive kid, I would give you three tips that would, I think, game change for you. The first one is that you have to let your kid watch before they engage. And so I don't know what exactly you're talking about here. Uh, you didn't give me an example of a time when your kid kind of quits before they are even trying or before they're afraid of being bad at it. But kids often who are highly sensitive, they have to watch somebody else do something before they themselves engage in it or want to do it or have any kind of ability to try. They're watchers. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. That's a normal thing developmentally for kids. It's a normal thing for adults. Not all adults want to just like dive right in and do things right off the bat. And so, yeah, I think that that's a beautiful feature, not a failure. And if you can find opportunities for her to watch, it's it can be a little abnormal for us as parents because maybe we don't feel that way, although you've said you kind of do. I would just look for those opportunities for her to go and be a witness first. The second thing I would say is I would reframe failure as look, being bad at something is not as bad as you think it is. And I would do that by showing all of the things and being willing to be a little bit vulnerable in front of your daughter by showing her that you will do things that you're bad at too, and just name them outright. So, one of the main principles in the book is that in my book, Punishment Free Parenting, is that whatever is modeled, whatever is modeled is mirrored by our kids. And so if we want our kids to take failure lightly, and I don't mean like big failure, but being bad at something, new things are hard, as we've been saying all episode. If we want our kids to be able to see that and and engage in that and be able to push through that, we have to show them how to do that by doing it ourselves. We have to actually kind of be there in it with them to show them. And then the last thing I would do is I would always, always, always greet the second that she does try something, I would greet that with connection. We have to greet every struggle that our kids have, we have to greet it immediately with connection. And so if the failure comes, it's very natural for those of us who grew up as like 90s kids to pull away. Because that's what our parents said when we didn't do things well all the time. And I don't know your story, but that's often the story. But actually, we want to lean in in those moments when when we fail and when we see them fail and be the soft landing place for them. That's ultimately our goal is to be that soft landing place, to be this home base. And so to reframe failure as like this time when connection occurs. Not that it's not this like horrible thing that is gonna lead to everybody abandoning you, which is often what kids feel, but instead that no, it's it is a thing where I'm gonna draw near to you, I'm gonna go close to you when you feel like you're failing. And I think that this is good advice for all of the questions that we've gone through thus far. I don't think that these are that's just for only highly sensitive kids. I think that that can be true for all kids. But I think that really reframing things in these terms can help. So just to review kind of all of this, what we've where we've gone. Number one, to start with a mantra that new things are hard, that in all cases, when we try something new, it's going to be challenging, even for grownups. Two, we can start to shrink the problem, try to make them bite-sized for kids so that they can actually do the things that they need to do. Three, we can allow them to engage in a degree of frustration tolerance to build up those muscles, knowing that we can't save them from this feeling of frustration. It's going to happen throughout their life because, and especially because with kids, their stress limit is going to come before their skill limit. For adults, we get stressed when we have to do things repetitively, repetitively, and repetitively, and we keep failing over and over. And then we get stressed. For kids, they might feel stressed the first time they do something because their skills are so underdeveloped in those ways. And then last, we need to let our kids watch before they jump in. That's a helpful tool. We have to model what it looks like to try new things and not be great at them all the time and show them that and tell the story of times when we've done things that we were not great at and we kept trying and it was never great. And I do that with my kids all the time. And last and not least, we need to find a way to connect with our kids when they do struggle and try and fail. And I think if we do all of that stuff, and I know that's a lot of different things, just pick one or two of these for anybody listening who is a kid who struggles with failure or struggles to even try or struggles with frustration tolerance, just pick one or two of these. And I promise you, if you start to focus on those and break your problem into bite-sized pieces, parenting a kid who struggles with failure is new to you. This is your first time doing this. And so all of the same things apply. Everything that I just said, and lead with connection. When you screw up, lead with connection. I didn't do well with my kids today. Find a friend who can say, yeah, it's okay. Somebody who listens to the whole parent podcast. So, anyway, that's what I have for you in this episode about failure. I hope that it helps you, all the adults who struggle with failure, like me, as much as it helps the parents. And just remember, in all of these things, it's like the shark music from the beginning of the episode. The anxiety that you have around parenting and like the hard things that your kids are gonna go through, those are not necessarily going to define their reality. And so just try and hold it a little bit more lightly and a little bit more loosely and know that you're gonna be there no matter what. That's what I have for you. I hope you enjoyed this episode. This has been the Whole Parent Podcast. Thank you again for listening to this episode of the Whole Parent Podcast. If you are listening to this right now, yes, you in your car driving somewhere on a walk with your kids, perhaps your kids are melting down and you're listening to this on your headphones with the noise cancellation turned on. Whatever you're doing while you're listening, doing the dishes at night after your kids go to bed, I don't know. That would just be me if I was listening. Stop right now. I have three quick favors to ask you. I promise they're not going to take you very long. The first one, very, very easy. Go in to wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate it five stars. That's one, two, three, four, five stars. The more five star reviews that our podcast gets as we accumulate episodes, the more likely it is to be pushed out to more parents who are searching for parenting podcasts to solve their problems. Whatever you got out of this episode, whether it was something that to try with your kids, whether it was a new way to think about parenting, maybe this episode was not specifically about a problem that you're having, but you're somebody in your life who's having this problem. Go in and rate it five stars. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, that first one only takes you 10 seconds. If you have an additional 30 seconds, just type a few words for me to read. I'd love to read, I'd love to read the reviews. If there's something specific that's helped you, write it out. It helps me to know what we should keep doing here on the podcast, week in and week out. The second question that I have for you, or request that I have for you, favor, let's call it, is to share this episode with somebody in your life who you think could use it. Uh, it might be a parent, another parent in your kid's class. It might be a sibling who has young kids, maybe it's your kid's teacher or a faith leader in your life, whomever it is that you think should have this episode of the podcast or any episode of the podcast, send it directly to them. I know it's vulnerable to share podcasts with people who you might not have that close of a relationship with, or even more vulnerable if you do have a close relationship with them. But I promise you, so many of the people who listen to this podcast listened not because they followed me on social media, but because they got a personal recommendation from somebody in their life who said, Hey, this guy has a way of talking about parenting that just works for me. You don't know if they listen to it or not, they might never reply, but maybe, just maybe, they'll love the episode so much that they become your new parenting partner out there in the world, doing things the same way that you are, and you might have just made your new parenting bestie. The last thing that you can do is definitely the biggest ask for me, but it is to go over to Substack. That link is down below in the bio, and to subscribe so that these episodes can keep coming to you. Paid subscriptions on Substack is the only way currently that I am being funded here on the Whole Parent Podcast. That is the only money that I receive. It is$5 a month. I think that this podcast is worth the price of a coffee for you. If it's not worth the price of a coffee for you, obviously don't do it. But if you're extra cheap like me, you can just subscribe annually. I know that you're gonna listen for the rest of the year. If you know that you're gonna listen for the rest of the year, just give me$50 up front, and then you don't have to think about it coming out of your credit card every single month. Those are the ways that you can support me. And as always, I think that you're a great parent already. But I do hope this episode gave you something to make you a little bit better. Take care.
