When is it time to let your kids quit.... #70

In this episode, Jon sits with one of the most charged moments in parenting—the car door open, practice about to start, and a child saying, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” Through personal story and real parent questions, he explores why quitting is rarely about laziness or lack of grit, but about how kids experience overwhelm, unfairness, and frustration in their bodies.

Parents will walk away with a steadier way to tell the difference between healthy discomfort and too much, language for guiding kids through hard beginnings, and permission to think in smaller units—finishing the chapter, not the whole book—as they help their children learn perseverance without sacrificing trust or connection. 

Chapters

• 0:00 The Parking Lot Dilemma
• 2:59 A Personal Story Of Quitting
• 12:05 What Went Wrong And Lasting Mindsets
• 18:26 Youth Sports Overload And Sunk Costs
• 27:12 Question 1: Seven-Year-Old Soccer Struggles
• 35:17 New Things Are Hard: Coaching Lens
• 38:21 Break And Reset
• 39:13 Question 2: The “Serial Quitter” Nine-Year-Old
• 46:54 Shrinking Habits And Building Tolerance

Transcript

Jon @WholeParent: 0:00

The car door is open, but no one is getting out. One hand is gripping the door handle, the other is wiping tears off of a sleeve. You can hear a whistle blowing somewhere in the distance, a coach calling names. Time is moving forward without you, and your kid says from the backseat, I don't want to do this anymore. Most parents don't struggle with the idea of quitting in the abstract. We struggle with it right here in the parking lot, in the stairs to class, halfway through a season that we already paid for. We're trying to decide in real time whether this is the moment to support our kid by letting them step away, or the moment to support them by holding the line. This episode is about that decision, how children learn perseverance, and how parents can shape the learning in ways that feel supportive, steady, and sustainable. We're gonna break down what's happening when kids suddenly want to quit and how parents can tell the difference between healthy discomfort and overwhelm. Let's get into it. It's like so quiet out here tonight after the pouring rain of last night. I felt like I was in a storm, in the middle of a storm. And tonight it's like silence throughout my whole house, throughout the whole of the outside. It's just pitch black. It's kind of a weird, almost like too quiet feeling. And I was thinking about this episode as I was preparing for it. And I was like, man, should I tell a story from my childhood? Should I tell a story from my kids' childhood? And I opted to tell a story about my childhood. And then maybe I'll cover some scenarios with my kids as I go through. I have had my kids in it's specifically soccer, is like the one thing that we've done with my nine-year-old. And we'll get into a little bit like the overwhelm that is youth sports today. But I have he he has gone through different soccer seasons. And in one case, he was in like a soccer class where he quit and we felt actually kind of good about that. In another one, uh, he wanted to, and we we kind of said no. And so I have examples of both, but I wanted to point to a moment in my own journey, and I actually, it's when I quit baseball for the last time, and it's a moment that I think that my parents didn't do a great job. And I just want to say here on the record on the podcast, I don't say this a lot, but I had really, really good great parents. Uh, somebody messaged me the other day totally out of the blue and said, Well, you know, it's just based on your content, I would imagine you were like spanked and you were hit and you came from an abusive household. And I was like, Man, I don't know what I have to do to say that that is not accurate at all. I try and embody that experience as I've counseled people through that. That's it, that's a common thing. And if that was you, and that was the case for my parents, but but uh if that was you, I don't want you to feel alone in that. But but that was not my experience of parenting. My parents did not always make the right choice. This is one of those examples where I think that they didn't, although I think they were doing their best. And uh, but but oftentimes they did a really, really great job. And this is a time when they were weighing this decision. I remember it when it happened. I was probably in fourth grade or fifth grade, and what was happening was I was on a baseball team, and I had just been we signed up for kind of the just the general youth baseball in in whatever Evanston, Illinois. I think it was called like I don't I don't even remember, team Team E or something like that. And uh EBA, Evanston Baseball Association, I think that's right. But anyway, uh we I had signed up and what we didn't know, what we weren't aware of, was that a lot of the other parents had gotten together, a lot of the travel team parents got together and kind of all worked to get their kids to be on the same team. So if they were gonna be on a travel team together, the parents got along and uh they carpooled and stuff like that to practice, and so they all worked together to get each other, you know, get their kids on each other's teams, and they kind of coordinated, they coordinated this web of like, I want my kid to be on a team with this kid, and I want also on this kid, and then another kid requested them and somebody else. And so it kind of created this situation where I was really the only kid, or maybe one of two kids on the team who was not on the in crowd with this group of uh other players and and parents. My my parents were my dad particularly was always really involved with the sports that I played, but he was not the coach of the team. Uh, one of the other dads was the coach of the team. And my um ability to actually get into the games and play on that team was pretty limited. And I was not a terrible athlete or anything like that. Uh, I went on to play college volleyball, and and the, you know, I was a high achieving athlete in other arenas, but on that team, there was no space for me because all of the other kids had been playing travel for years with each other. And the coach of the travel team was also the coach of the rec team, of the community center team. And they were just doing this as kind of a pre-season warm-up before they went off and played travel ball. And I, this for me, it was my only season. And my dad saw this and saw the dynamics and saw that I was getting the least amount of playing time of any of the players, and I had gone from being like kind of a person who was allowed to pitch and play first base and kind of play these central positions to a person who really uh, you know, I maybe played right field for half the game, you know, sometimes it was not uh the same experience at all. And my dad, I remember him saying, Yeah, you know what, this is unfair. And you don't have to do this if you don't want to. And I in the moment, you know, I picked up on that and I was not having a good time on that team. I wasn't feeling successful. And I said, Yeah, you know what, I don't want to do this anymore. I want to quit. And my parents supported me in that decision, and they let me quit, which is something that really, if you knew my parents, seems completely out of their normal way of doing things. But they let me opt out of this one. And the result was when the next year came around, and I could have been put on a different team with a different circumstance. And by the way, I had actually had the same thing happen like the year before or two years before, and the the all of those players had kind of left for other travel teams, and I had been put on a different team where I was allowed to kind of shine and thrive, and the coach was much more egalitarian in his approach, where he kind of gave everybody equal playing time at whatever position they were interested in. It was really for the love of the game and not like highly competitive or anything like that. And by the way, that team that I was on that uh at the that I quit close to the end of the year, I didn't quit, didn't make it to the end of the year, they went on to win the championship, of course, because they were by far the best team. Uh, it was rigged, it was stacked, full of kids who wound wound up playing high school baseball, my local high school. But um, that year, the where I had not quit and I had gotten pushed over to another team, I had wound up having a great time. But because my last experience with baseball was negative, I just thought I'm never gonna want to do this again. Well, fast forward a couple years later, I was in middle school, I think I was in eighth grade, and my friend played baseball, rec league baseball, and we would, you know, play catch in the backyard and stuff. And and I was pretty sad that I was not playing anymore, and that I was not doing that anymore. And when uh high school came along and I would turn 15 and I could join the church rec league softball team, slow pitch softball in Chicago is this crazy game that we play where you use this gigantic, you know, it looks like a small watermelon or like a cantaloupe, and you uh play baseball with this thing with no gloves. Uh, when that came along, I played and I loved it. And in fact, I became like the coach of that team at like 18 years old. I was the coach of my church's rec league team and and I loved baseball, and I still love baseball to this day. I don't I follow sports generally. I'm not like a super heavy sports sports guy. I'm not super into it or anything like that. I'll, you know, look at some scores on my phone occasionally, but the one sport that I do watch a lot is baseball because it's a sport that I really care about. My parents let me quit that time, and and it the result of that quitting was that it tainted my relationship with that sport forever. And I want to point out specifically that it was the way in which they allowed me to quit. It was not quitting from this uh a place of health, it was quitting from a place of bitterness. And my parents really allowed me to uh express that victim narrative that I was somehow being unfairly treated. And rather than hold that tension, and I I think there was probably a lot more going on in this as well. Around this time, my family was going through a lot of change. My older brothers are a lot older than I am, and they had a lot of stuff going on. My parents probably didn't need to be driving to baseball games every single Saturday that they didn't want to go to and that I didn't want to go to. Uh, and so I, you know, I was like missing, I remember the the last practice I missed because uh before I quit, because I had an orthodontist appointment that was the only time that I could go. And so it's kind of like a a series of a lot of different things. I don't think it was all that single experience, but because they were even willing to entertain that, um, because of of the unfairness that that they felt. I I'll be completely honest, I took that with me in all aspects of athletics going forward into college, where I still was constantly complaining about it being unfair or being the coach didn't like me, and that's why I wasn't getting my due just desserts. And I was putting in all this work, and it wasn't about my talent, and it wasn't about my production on the court or on the field. It was always about somebody who didn't like me. And so I don't want to point to that and say that that was all it was, but I want to say that that was that was one of the times when that mindset was verified, and so this is a really important thing. Now, I don't think that that means that we just never ever let our kids quit under any circumstances. And there are times when allowing your kid to take a step back can actually be really healthy and adaptive, and you don't want to overwhelm them to the point where it's not not healthy, and so that's what we're getting into today. It's how do we divide this up? There are times to let kids quit, absolutely, and um they're not gonna most most kids are not gonna go on to be professional athletes. In fact, I think a big piece of this is we burn kids out on sports and and extracurriculars, and we don't need to do that, and so there's a lot of things going into this, but anyway, this was maybe one of my longest intros ever. But I gotta stop talking and just get to my questions. My first question is from Samantha. It's my cousin's name, Samantha. And it's not my cousin who who messaged me this though. That would be funny though, that would be great if I was answering questions from my own family. Total transparency. My family, uh not not many of them watch anything related to whole parent. Uh, if they listen or watch anything, please, if you hear this and you are related to me, I would love to hear from you that you actually are listening in. But I think the overwhelming majority of people who are in my family don't even listen to this, much less ask me questions. Uh, but Samantha says, My daughter, who's seven, began begged to do soccer this year. Like, begged. We bought cleats and chin guards and a pink water bottle that she picked out for herself. The first practice was fine. The second one, she cried in the car and said that she hated it. The third one, she wouldn't get out of the car and said that everyone is better than her and she doesn't like running anyway. My instinct is like, no, you don't just quit something because it's hard, but I don't want to be that parent who forces there things, who forces things and that she hates sports forever. My husband says that we should make her finish the season since we already paid, which, yeah, fair. But I don't know if that's teaching follow-through or teaching her that we just don't listen to her. She's been super emotional lately in general, so maybe this isn't even about soccer. I don't know what should I do. Uh, you know, the first and most important thing that I would point out, Samantha, is that when we have conversations about any big decision in life, and this is conversations about quitting, it's conversations about grades, it's conversations about death. I want to do an episode about death soon and how to talk to kids about death. Like literally any large, big, huge conversation about something heavy that has long-term consequences, we don't want to make those decisions or even have those conversations, entertain those conversations while we're in highly emotional states. So if you say she's been emotional lately in general, okay, but she's not constantly in an emotional state of dysregulation. If she is, then let's let's talk about that and let's talk about maybe we maybe we do need to quit. Maybe we do need to pull back because if we see our kid in a constant state of dysregulation, it might be that there's just there's just too much going on. Uh, but I think the important piece, the the brain hack here is we can make this decision not in the moment of dysregulation. I can't tell you the number of times that my son said, I don't want to go to soccer practice, and he would scream and don't make me go, and I hate it, I hate it, I don't want to go and kick and scream and all of this stuff. And then go and absolutely love soccer practice. But the reason that he did that was because he didn't want to leave playing with his friends. And that's a fair thing, right? I think there is a conversation to be had here about there are too many, there is too much commitment in youth sports. And I see this especially in not in just like a soccer league that our kids are in and they're seven, but in the high competitive travel sports. Uh, I think that it's it's actually disgraceful that that there are organizations out there that essentially sell you the lie that your kid is, it's all going to be worth it. This is an investment in their future because they're going to get a scholarship to college playing baseball or they're going to get a scholarship to college playing football or soccer or whatever, when in reality, they have no idea whether that is the case. And I'll tell you, as a person who coached a highly in a highly competitive volleyball league, where uh I was I was the coach of a team where none of the girls were likely to get a scholarship to college. But there was maybe one to five girls in the whole program, in the whole club out of maybe 50 girls or 60 girls that would have gotten a scholarship. None of these girls were one of those girls. And yet my club director told me, yeah, you know what? These are all of these girls are the ones that pay the bills because uh we don't have to give them a lot of you know specialized training. We can kind of push them to the back burner. But, you know, of course, when they sit, when their parents sit down at the beginning of the season in her office, it's you know, I see some great potential in your daughter, and you know, she's gonna be a real asset to this team. And I think someday she's gonna play varsity for her high school, even though she's on the 15C team now. One day she's gonna play varsity for her high school, and then she's gonna be picked up by Northwestern or Michigan or somebody, and you're gonna go to, you know, not have to pay for college because she's gonna go there on an athletic scholarship. Uh, that was not true of any single kid in that club that they were gonna get a full ride scholarship to college. Uh, some of them might have gotten a partial scholarship, like I did, where you know, I pay got paid a little bit of money to play volleyball, but in reality, I was really there on academics and other things. Uh, they might get that. They're not gonna get a full ride, most likely. And none of the girls, I would imagine, that I coached went on to that. They just weren't the right size. They weren't tall enough, they weren't big enough at that point at 15 where they already can identify because how girls grow, they tend to be bigger earlier. Uh, boys, you can have a 15-year-old boy who gross eight inches, 10 inches still, but that's not usually the case with girls. They already knew that these girls were probably not going to wind up getting scholarships, and yet they sell them this line because they want to get the three to five to ten thousand dollar club fee from their parents. They want, they want that income. And so I think that there's a separate conversation to have be had here, and this is kind of a diversion, about youth sports. And I think youth sports are far overcommitted. They're the the these clubs are taking up way too much time. And in the case of my son, you know, this was a once-a-week practice, he probably could miss some time playing with his friends to go out and do that, especially when it's in the summer and they're playing every day. But if our kids have no time to have play dates and free play and time to just be bored, uh, time to just be, have nothing to do, downtime, down to time to read, you know, time to do anything other than athletics and homework and sleep. Uh, if they don't have that time, then we probably should be pulling them out of uh sports, not just because they hate it, but because it's not good for them at that point. There is there is such a thing as too much organized sports. And when we were growing up, it was a far lower commitment. And if it's if the case for your daughter is that this is a once-a-week, you know, hour, two-hour commitment or something like that to play soccer at seven years old, I don't think that you necessarily have to pull her out for that reason. But if it's truly that, hey, look, she's emotional about everything because life is just too chaotic right now, then not in the high emotions of the moment, not in the high emotions of getting back from soccer practice or about to go to soccer practice, but on a completely different day during the week, maybe on a Sunday afternoon or something, we sit down and we have the conversation about priorities and we have the conversation about whether this is a fruitful thing, whether it's a good thing. And I want to just point out here, yeah, you paid for it, but if there's there's this principle in economics, occasionally I pull out economics principles on the podcast. There's a principle in economics called sunk cost. Basically, what that sunk cost is, is once you've paid for something, it doesn't mean that you have to quote get the most out of it. Um, you've paid for an experience. And if that experience is not rewarding or benefiting you, it's actually you're you're actually increasing the cost of that experience by now also giving time over to it. So if you ever pay for a terrible, terrible movie and you know in the first 15 minutes this movie is awful and I don't want to sit through this, leave because you don't, you already paid 10 bucks or 15 bucks or whatever for the ticket. You don't also need to give it an hour of your time or two hours or three hours of your time with movies these days, right? So you don't have to give something your time just because you've given your money to it. And I, and that might be the lesson that we're learning here. The might, the lesson may be sometimes we make commitments, and you can talk about the cost, the trade-off of, you know, we did choose to do soccer, so we're probably not gonna do, you know, basketball six weeks from now because we didn't do soccer. That was a big cost, not because we don't trust you that you won't actually want to do it, but because we already have spent you know our money for sports this year. And that didn't work out. Next year we can make a different decision. That's a not a terrible decision to be made. And again, that's non emotional. It comes from the place of practical decision making. And so if your daughter is overwhelmed by everything in life and she's just like, I just need one less thing, which I hope that's not the case at seven, but My goodness, when I look around, th that is the case for some kids. Um, with how much we put on them and they're on swim lessons and soccer and piano lessons and extra help with homework and my goodness, the amount of schoolwork that seven-year-olds get these days is absolutely ridiculous. If I had it my way, seven-year-olds would not be given homework at all, ever. And under any circumstances, it's bad for them. And I could make an entire podcast episode about why I think nobody should be given homework until 14 years old. But uh nevertheless, we live in the real world and not the ideal world where John gets to make all of the rules about what's good for child development, or the researchers make all the rules and John just supports them and choruses it from the rooftops. And so, in the real world, it may be that we might want to quit. And I will say, this is pretty early in the season to be having these types of reservations. And so it may be that we just need to push through a little bit of that starting. Uh it's hard to start things. There's a there's a the trickiness, the you know, objects at rest. This is not now. I'm pulling out physics principles. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Getting started is the hardest thing. There are neural pathways that have to be built. When I coach soccer for seven-year-olds, which by the way, I do. So I'm that coach. I hope that your daughter doesn't hate me. Hope that this is not actually secretly one of the girls on my team. Did I have a Samantha on my team? I don't know. Maybe I did actually. I think I actually did have a Samantha on my team. I surely hope it was not me. But one of the things I say in the first practice every single year that I coach anything is my first rule is not have fun. My first rule is new things are hard. And so, because new things are hard, there's many times this year I'm gonna ask you to do something that's hard and you're gonna make mistakes, and that's okay. I'm fine with you making mistakes because new things are hard. And I make them repeat it. It becomes our mantra as a team. New things are hard. And then my son from the back goes, easy, because he knows exactly where I'm going with this. And I go, Matt, shut your trap or run a lap. Just kidding. I think I've said that once or times, but anyway, I go into coach dad mode. A little different, still emotionally supportive, but uh a little bit more broy, I think. So that's how I would say about that. And let me take a break because I've already delved into so many different things here. We've already been going for 20 plus minutes. So I'm gonna take a break, take a sip of my drink, and then we will be back to answer question number two. Question number two comes from Thomas in the membership. Thomas says, I'm gonna be honest, I think I'm more mad than I should be, and I don't totally know why. My son is nine and he wants to quit piano. Again, this is the third thing that he's quit in two years. Karate, swimming, and now piano. Every time he's all excited at first, and then suddenly it's I hate it, I'm bad at it, I don't do I have to go. I don't want to raise a quitter. Let's let's just let's put a pin in that one before I read on to the question. If you've heard that in the past, tap your phone or raise your hand in your car, whatever. Because that's that's a trigger for me. I don't want to raise a quitter neither, Thomas. But I also don't want to be yelling about piano at 7:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. Agree. I don't know what lesson I'm supposed to be teaching here anymore. Thomas, I think that one of the things that we talked we've talked about is that new because new things are hard, the starting phase for any of these activities is really, really challenging. And often we lump together the whole activity when actually what we're overwhelmed by is the starting phase, when the effort is high and the reward is low. I'm looking at these and I'm going swimming, piano, and karate. These are three activities where the early rewards are very, very low. The early payoff in these things, I would add like learning to speak a second language is also this way. The learning curve is just very steep in musical instruments and karate. And I guess I don't really know that much about swimming. I've never had kids who are like intensely involved in competitive swimming. Uh, but but for sure, that is that is a piece of this. And and I think that that's we we want to kind of pull back and go, all right, the brain is working hard, there's really no reward here yet, the dopamine hasn't kicked in and the frustration is spiking. Um, instead of arguing about quitting, let's just let's just name that reality and let's shrink the the beginning of the habit. I've been reading rereading Atomic Habits lately just because I think it's a great book. And I heard James Clear, the author, on a podcast recently, and I went, oh, I should listen to this book again. And I've been uh re-listening to it actually, because I have it on an audiobook, and it's easy for me to listen to because I've already read it once. And uh one of the things he talks about is shrinking the initial stage of a new challenging habit forming activity. And actually, you know who else talks about this is uh Katie Milkman in her book How to Change, where she talks about how you should shrink the beginning of an activity to just make it so palatable to do the thing the first time. And clear, James Clear talks about, and I don't even know if it was in the book or if it was in the podcast episode, he talks about how there was this guy who was trying to go to the gym. And instead of trying like going like setting a I'm gonna work out for an hour every day, and I'm gonna go to the gym and go for an hour every day, he said, I'm just going to make sure that I go to the gym every day and I I will not miss a day. I will check into the gym every single day. I will not miss a day. And so some days that looked like him literally driving to the gym, if he didn't have time, driving to the gym, getting out, checking in, walking straight back out the door, getting in his car and driving home. But he was just like, I need to make sure that I actually show up for this thing. Now, how is that related to what we're what we're doing here? Well, in in this case, this isn't exactly the same thing, but they there is an aspect of like getting the momentum moving forward with any new activity. And with these new activities, it may be that you need to shrink that beginning down to instead of you need to practice for 30 minutes a day, which by the way, my parents said that about upright bass, and it made it so intolerable for me. Instead, it might just be, hey, you're gonna sit down at the piano bench every single day. And even if you just play one song, or even if you just play one scale, at least you practice today. And maybe it should be multiple times a day, breaking it up to be less monotonous. Another really thing key thing here, and I'm not I'm not diagnosing in any way just based on this question, but kids who have ADHD, like they love starting new things, but then as soon as it's challenging and they they need frustration tolerance and they're not getting the reward, dopamine reward from those things, they want to quit them. So, like this is a common ADHD thing. Also, and this is this I can kind of go back to Samantha. This can also be a thing for highly sensitive kids who are starting in sports and they're just not sure about it yet. Like I heard in your question, Samantha, and I probably should have said this. You might everybody's better than me. Well, that's like a common, highly sensitive kind of assessment. And one of the things that you can do is just have her watch. Hey, you can go to practice, you don't have to practice, but you have to be there, right? So this is again shrinking the actual thing. I don't like running. Okay, you don't have to run today, but you have to go and you have to sit there, and you know what? It's gonna be way more fun to get out there and actually play. Same thing. Like you got to sit on the piano bench for five minutes a day. I don't care what you do when you're there, but you got to sit there for five minutes a day. Well, maybe in the early stages, it'll be this kid noodling around on the piano, but probably over time it's going to grow into okay, I'm gonna try playing this song or I'm gonna try playing this scale, and you can kind of build on that, those early uh habit-forming behaviors. Ultimately, you're just trying to get to that point where the thing becomes rewarding. And learning frustration tolerance for kids of doing non-rewarding things is positive. But kids increasingly don't have frustration tolerance. And I think a big part of this is just one, an overscheduled modern world where they're just being rushed from one activity to the next, activities more often than not that are led by adults, where they just kind of have to comply and they're experiencing this restraint of just I gotta listen to the adult, I gotta do what's asked of me. And they're being rushed from one thing to the next, and they don't even have time to breathe or eat, much less actually get bored. And so whenever they have to sit down and do something boring or monotonous, which by the way is already harder for those of us who are ADHD, I can't imagine sitting down and practicing piano every day. But I can imagine sitting down and playing piano now that I've learned it. Um, but I can't, I hated learning it. Let me just tell you, I got a D, a D with as in dog. Uh, was it a D? It might have been a B. It might have been, I mean a C minus. But I think I got like a C minus or a D in piano in college. I took piano keyboarding, you had to take a music class, and I took keyboarding, and it was like God bless liberal arts colleges that make you take music classes, even when you're I was in jazz band. I mean, you would think that that would have count, but I don't think I took it for credit or something and I got in trouble. Anyway, I did keyboarding and I got like a D or a C minus, even though I'm a perfectly fine musician, but I hated practicing. And I didn't want to learn how to read treble clef and do all these like monotonous low reward, early low reward things. And so I'm with your son in how challenging that is. And I can't even imagine being nine where you already lack frustration tolerance. And so they're being ushered from one thing to the next, and they're not building boredom and frustration tolerance in that way, tolerance for monotony. And then, and then when they're not in those things, oftentimes kids who are nine, eight, seven, uh, they're just handed a screen. Something I've started to say to my nine-year-old all the time when he asks, can I use my iPad? Or can I use iPad? Can I play Switch? And and the it always comes as soon as he gets bored. Something I've been starting to say to him is, no, you're just getting bored. We've been working to get you bored all day. Now that you're bored, you'll come up with something fun and creative to do. And I like just reframe the whole thing. No, we're we're trying to get you bored here. I can't give you your give you a tablet. I can't give you a switch right now. We'll do switch later. I'm not saying we can't do it, but but come on, you're just about to get bored. And then of course, as soon as he reframes that and he goes, Oh yeah, that's right. Boredom is like this like positive thing that always creates creativity. Now he's, you know, decorating this little car that he got for Christmas now 13 months ago for uh, you know, turning it into a dragon that he can ride around, which is something that he's doing in his game, and he's like excited to do that. And so he does it now with his car. It sounds like a long diversion from what I'm supposed to be saying here, but I think that really what we're saying is that what I'm trying to say is that new things are frustrating and hard, and the the place where your son is is in that boredom phase where things are frustrating and tedious and monotonous, and he has to get through that stage. And so this is a place where I probably, you know, your point of I don't want to raise a quitter. I'm not seeing this as really quitting, I'm seeing this as just not following through. And I think maybe like I would push through that a little bit. You know, maybe this is a little bit different where where with Samantha, I'm I'm more likely to be like, ah yeah, you know what, there maybe there's something going on here. It just sounds like there's a lot of high emotions. Let's not make the mo the decision in the moment, but let's not like whatever, let's let's just try and sit in there, right? But I would I would maybe push through this a little bit if for no other reason that every time you push through this a little bit, he he learns that message, that he gets that message that it's important that you that you do push through and that you persevere a little bit. And a little bit of frustration tolerance is the only way to to build frustration tolerance. Right. I think about when when I think about the concept of tolerance, I think about Inigo Montoya, or not inigomantoya. Uh I think about Wesley in in uh The Princess Bride and you know rest in peace, Rob Reiner, amazing director who who tragically died recently. Um But Wesley is the is the protagonist, one of the protagonists in The Princess Bride. And I'm gonna spoil the movie, but it came out 40, 50 years ago or something, so like get over it. I'm sorry that I spoiled it. But um he at one point he builds up a tolerance to a poison and he uses this uh iocaine powder, he uses this tolerance in order to like outsmart this guy who's seemingly impossible to outsmart. And the way he outsmarts him is by poisoning himself. The guy would never think that he would poison both cups, and he does. So the guy dies and he lives. And I asked my dad, I remember asking him when we first watched the movie, or maybe when I first understood the scene, oh, what does he mean build up a tolerance? And he says, Well, he just took he had to take a speck of the powder first and have it, and he had to learn for his body to get accustomed to the spec, and then he could take two specks, and then he could take three specs, and eventually he could take a pinch, and then eventually he could take, and he could build up a tolerance in this way to this poison because his body adjusted over a long period of time to that thing. I think sometimes that's what it feels like to be a kid. It's like you have to build up the tolerance to frustration, but it starts by just a pinch, a tiny little bit of frustration. Like it doesn't start by just making them super frustrated and overwhelmed, it starts by allowing them to be frustrated for an extra second before you intervene, allowing them to persevere for an extra minute before you jump in and save them. And it's that those small wins. And Dr. Becky Kennedy talks about this. I'm not always the biggest fan uh of the way that she talks about things, but when she talks in long form, I like her a lot more. And she had a bit about this on one of her recent podcast episodes where she talked about this building frustration tolerance as this like little by little thing. So, anyway, that's my answer to that question, and let's get into the third one before I run out of time in this episode. All right, I'm back. Question three came in as an email. I didn't think I said the last one was from the membership. It's one of my buddies in the membership. But anyway, uh Abby came in through email. She said my five-year-old does dance lessons, and every single, every single week it's a thing. She cries before class and clings to my leg. She says her tummy hurts or she doesn't want to go in there alone. And it's a weird, and it's weird because once she's actually in the room, she's mostly fine. Sometimes she's even happy, but getting there is always awful. Part of me thinks that it's maybe just her personality. She needs me to push her a little bit. Another part of me is like, am I ignoring anxiety here? I don't know how to tell the difference between this is good for her, discomfort, and this is too much for her, discomfort. And I feel like I'm guessing every week. You know, this is a really great question, and it is a really challenging kind of middle thing to know whether or not we're pushing kids too deep. And I will say it is very dependent on the kid and on their personality. Uh, as I've kind of alluded to in this episode, a lot of these trying new things and wanting to quit things rear up with highly sensitive kids. And if you don't know if you have a highly sensitive kid yet, you should definitely find out. Uh, I have a quiz, it's somewhere. I think if you go on to my instant, if you really want to know if your kid's highly sensitive from my perspective, this is all a very roundabout way of saying it. Maybe I'll add the link to the show notes here. But if I forget to add the link to the show notes, if you go down the show notes and the link isn't there to find out if your kid's highly sensitive, uh, because I may forget, you can just hop over to my Instagram and comment on any of my videos the words highly sensitive, and then I'll send you a quiz and that quiz can take you through it. But anyway, uh one of the big things with highly sensitive kids is this slow to start thing where they have to observe and they don't like being pushed into things. And what I'll say with highly sensitive kids is that pushing them into stuff actually backfires. And it does not backfire if your kid is not highly sensitive all the time. Sometimes it can, but but it doesn't all the time. Because if your kid's not highly sensitive and you kind of give them a little push in, they they oftentimes adjust and kind of as you're describing with your daughter, they have a great time. But if you push a highly sensitive kid, they learn to distrust you. And then they put their boundaries and their borders up and their walls up earlier. So, like a great example with my son, who's highly sensitive, is like when he was learning to go down the slide, I used to say, let's just walk up to the top of the slide and just like look at it from up there and see if it's too scary, and then we'll come back. If you don't have to go down, but you can come back down if you don't want to walk all the way up there. And he was like, No, I think we're gonna get up there and you're gonna make me do it. So I'm not even gonna walk up there. And I was like, You have a problem walking up a bunch of stairs. You've never had a problem walking upstairs before. And he goes, Yeah, because I don't believe it's just the stairs. I think you're gonna push me into doing it when I'm up there. So I don't even want to go up there where you have the opportunity to push me into doing it. So, like, this is and and by the way, the way that we got over that fear for him, that anxiety for him, was that he had to sit at the bottom of the slide, not at the top, and watch his friend, who he knew to be pretty sensitive as well, but who had already conquered the slide, go down the water slide. And once he saw his friend do it, he was like, I want to try too. That's just a highly sensitive thing. Like he was totally willing to do it once he had observed somebody else doing it first. But if I had just pushed him into that, he would have never even like if I had pushed him into, okay, no, you have to go up to the top of the slide so you can see it, then he would have said, Well, I don't even want to go to the back half of the water park anymore, because then you're gonna make me go up to the slide. And now I don't even want to go to the water park anymore because I have trauma over you forcing me to push this. And so by not pushing him, paradoxically, by letting him stand at the bottom of the slide where he felt safe, he actually got to see somebody do it who he knew, and then all of a sudden, now this kid's whizzing down the slide over all summer long. He's just going down this slide over and over. And he told me when he was probably, you know, a week before he went down the slide the first time, Dad, I am never going down the slide until I'm 21 years old. I'm still not gonna go down it. And I don't know why my kids think 21 is like the age where, like, that's like you're the as old as you could possibly be at 21. But he's like, even if 21, I'm never going down the slide. And so it could be, as you mentioned, part of me thinks it's just her personality. She needs me to push her a little bit. It could be that your kid needs a little push. It could also be that your kid is having anxiety about this because you're pushing too much. And so that's a delicate dance, but I don't think it's impossible to figure out as a parent. You just have to be willing to be wrong. So if you push a little bit and you see that that does not go well, then don't be the type of parent who goes, well, that just means I need to push a little harder next time. Be the type of parent who assesses and has the humility. This is a huge piece in parenting, the humility to get curious rather than just doubling down on the ineffective parenting technique that you're using. So just get curious and go, okay, so what's going on here? And that is where I would begin this. I would begin this with curiosity, kind of going back to what I said at the very beginning, not in the moment of dysfunction. Although with a five year old, you know, it's good, it might you might be harder to pull that out of her. But I would begin with curiosity and I would just go, okay, what's going on here? What is it about dance? Because I'm I'm and just observe. I'm watching you in the class. It seems like you have a great time. And before you go to the class, you really don't want to go. So like help me understand where where's the gap? What am I missing? And she may just come out and tell you, Oh, I really don't like the way that we start the class in this way or this way. Or I may I really don't like this. Or she may say, I don't know. And then you may have to describe a little bit more. Okay, well, you know, I just what what was it that you were saying to me before we went in? I don't want to go, I don't want to go, I d you can't make me, you know, all this stuff. And I heard you saying that and it was I was like, oh man, she really doesn't like this. And then you went in there and I saw you laughing and playing. So did you not like it or did you like it? I'm just, I just want to know, and I'm not gonna make you do anything that you don't want to do, but let's let's just talk about it. She may come out at that point and say, Yeah, you know what, it's my uh my tummy gets this weird feeling, and it may be something there, it may be nothing there. Maybe my teacher, I think my teacher doesn't like me. Oh, you know, your teacher was just saying this really positive things about you yesterday. I don't think she doesn't like you. Um, shall we talk to her about it? You know, whatever. Like you can work with that. But when it comes to actually deciding, I like the the context and the again. This is like an old school parenting thing, which is we are not necessarily going to commit to this in the long term, but we are going to commit to this in the short term. And I've been waiting for a place to insert this. A dance class seems like a good one. You know, you're not deciding to do dance for the rest of your life at five years old. If you are, you're probably like one of those dance moms and I we have lots of lots of things to talk about beyond just this. Uh, there's lots of interesting parenting that happens on those reality shows. But uh we're not talking about dance forever here. We're talking about finishing this class. Then we'll reassess. I think that that, and that that's true, by the way, for uh for Thomas and for Samantha as well, if you're still listening. I hope you are. And anyone else who has struggled with quitting, that is always a place to compromise with your kid and saying, We're gonna finish the chapter, we're not necessarily gonna finish the book. Right? Instead of we're deciding what we're gonna do forever, let's decide we're gonna do right now. And and I'm gonna be honest, I wish that that had been the exact language that my parents had used with me. Because I didn't really know at the time that I was quitting baseball forever. I think I did know. Like, you really want to quit baseball? I really wanted to say, like, no, I want to quit this team. Okay, well, we're not quitting this team, but at the end of the season, you can decide whether you want to play baseball next year or not. And we'll trust you and we'll go with that decision. I think that would have been the right uh choice. Now, is there do you always do that? Does it always have to be that? No. If it's truly not fruitful for your kid, you don't think that it's a positive thing. You don't have to make them finish it. But if you feel like she's really enjoying it when she's there, maybe this is not so bad, then you can shrink the commitment. The example I kind of alluded to in the in the first story that I told, of us deciding to quit a soccer-related thing with my son, was that he uh had uh a soccer league and a soccer camp that he was a part of. These are different things. And the soccer camp that he was a part of uh was super disorganized. And it was led by these two like high school kids from the Rec League Rec Center, they didn't want to be there. The kids, it was just chaos, they never could get the kids together. There was no official coach, it was just like supposed to be like playing games and doing drills and stuff. My son was simultaneously like older than most of the kids, but also way younger than a handful of kids. So he was going between like, I'm just absolutely running away from all these kids. I'm way better than them, way better at soccer than them, and then also just maybe I might just get taken out by like a 12-year-old who just runs over me because they're here with their older, their younger sibling or something. And it was so bad that there was like parents on the sidelines being like, I don't know if I want to bring my kid back to this. And I've never really been in those situations before, but it was very clear that it was really disorganized and it was just not going well. He was not enjoying it, and we were every single week, it was just a time when his friends could play, and we were pulling him away from his friends every week so that we could take him to this like random field where they half the time didn't even set up goals and they didn't even like nobody knew what they were doing, and the kids just kind of ran around chasing a ball. And there's nothing wrong with kids just running around chasing a ball, but he could have done that with his friends at our house. We didn't have to be driving him over every single week to do that. And so we decided, we said, are you enjoying not at the moment, not after a terrible practice or a terrible camp or a great camp? But we just decided about halfway through have a conversation with him on like a Saturday morning, and the camp was on like a Tuesday night, and we said, Hey, do you like doing that camp? Or do you really like being on the team? Like the team part is just gonna start back up soon. Um Do you just want to take a break from soccer until the team part starts back up in a month? And he was like, Yeah, I do. Yeah, I'd rather just play soccer in the backyard with my friends. And it's not, I don't really like the camp, it's just not like it's not my thing. I don't really like playing. And we're like, okay, well, you know that if we if we pull you out, like we're we're not gonna probably go back. We'll plan things for the for nights and that'll be it. And he was like, No, I'm cool with that. I have never regretted that decision. Not for a second. It was a decision not made in the moment. There was no real commitment being made here. Uh the kids were so different week to week, it was not like a big deal. Um, yes, we had paid for it, we didn't get any of our money back, but it was not a huge amount of money. It was, you know, rec leak, not travel or something like that. We didn't get our money back, but it was the sunk cost of saying, you know, hey, look, just because we paid for this does not mean that we have to force or forced in some way to kind of pull our life apart every week, every week to go out and do this. It was not great. And so that was a place where we just said, we're we're gonna call this right now. We're not even gonna finish the chapter, much less finish the book. But then a month later, he started back in his soccer team and he absolutely had a blast. He didn't quit soccer forever. And so, just in the same way that your commitment is not being made forever, you know, if you choose to do the finish the chapter, we're not gonna necessarily finish the book. The commitment doesn't have to be made in the extreme in either direction. The commitment can be made on a case-by-case basis in a non-emotional way. And that is really where I want to land this ship about quitting. And if you have let your kids quit in the past, I wanted you to know, I'm with you. I don't think you're a quitter, I don't think you're raising a quitter. There, there is definitely more space in our world, and I've kind of alluded to this in the first answer, but there's more space in our world to give kids more freedom and autonomy and not put them in all of these highly scheduled, overly dramatically, you know, intense athletics and stuff like that. And so if you're like, but John, really my commitment is about like whether I want to do travel five days a week, you know, for the next three years and it's gonna be fifteen thousand dollars a year or something plus gear, um, you have my permission to quit. Like, because it's probably not your kids probably not gonna play in the major leagues, and if they were gonna play in the major leagues, travel is not gonna make a difference. Uh, a lot of those guys grew up playing like with rocks and sticks, and and they still can hit a ball a mile, country mile. So, like it's not you're you're not gonna change we're not gonna train kids out of, and somebody should write a book about this if they haven't already, but we're not gonna train kids out of their genetics in most cases. And so uh I I think that it's okay. It's okay to step away. And so if you need to just hear that today, it's okay to step away. It is, it's also okay to push and build some frustration tolerance, and whatever you do, don't make those decisions in the heat of the moment. All right, I went way too long today. You can tell I'm passionate about this topic. So, yeah, I'll stop here and see you tomorrow. Thank you for your time listening to the whole parent podcast today. I hope you got something out of it. I have a couple quick favors to ask of you as we end the episode. 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