Stop Telling Kids “Don’t Be Bossy”; Do This Instead #73

In this episode, Jon explores what we often call “bossy” behavior and reframes it as leadership energy colliding with an underdeveloped social brain. Through vivid playdate moments and real parent questions, he unpacks why telling kids to stop being bossy misses the point—and how correction can quietly turn into shame, especially for strong-willed kids. Parents will walk away with a clearer way to distinguish control from influence, language that builds social awareness without dulling confidence, and a grounded reminder that the goal isn’t to soften a child’s intensity, but to help them learn how to lead in ways others want to follow.

Chapters

• 0:00 The “Bossy” Playdate Problem
• 0:33 Bossiness Versus Leadership Energy
• 1:36 Housekeeping, Vibes, And Settle In
• 2:34 Why Kids Lead Before They Read The Room
• 4:36 Question 1: The Six-Year-Old “Director”
• 9:17 Prepping Kids To Check In First
• 12:39 Gender Bias And The Word “Bossy”
• 19:56 Question 2: The Oldest Steamrolls Siblings
• 25:56 Train Social Perception, Not Compliance
• 29:45 When One Kid Leads And Others Thrive
• 33:25 Reading Bodies: Behavior, Response, Outcome
• 38:29 Question 3: “She Runs The Playground”
• 41:55 Expanding Range: From Control To Attunement
• 46:00 Teaching Ethical Persuasion To Kids

Transcript

Jon @WholeParent: 0:00

It's a playdate that was supposed to be easy. Snacks on the table, shoes kicked off by the door. But from the other room you hear No, you have to do it this way. That's not how the game goes. It continues for several minutes, a steady stream of instructions. When you peek in, you see your daughter methodically rearranging the toys, resetting the game for a third time while her friend is sitting back, hands in her lap, already asking, Is it time to go yet? This episode is for parents who keep hearing the word bossy and don't know whether to correct it, worry about it, or maybe even defend it. Because here's the thing what looks like bossiness is often leadership energy colliding with an underdeveloped social brain. And the usual advice just tell them to stop or tell them to be nicer, tell them to share control doesn't actually fix the real issue. In this episode, you'll learn what to say to set your child up for collaboration instead of conflict and how to coach leadership without dulling your child's confidence or intensity. Because there's a difference between correcting behavior and building missing social skills. So I want to share with you the one simple shift that helps kids move from control to influence in real time. Let's get into it. Welcome back out to the porch. If you are watching this, you might notice that my light is a little bit different. I chose a warmer-toned light today, hoping to warm myself up because it got real cold again. And so I'm cold out here. You can see the steam. If you could see the camera, I know I don't post these anywhere yet, but you can see the steam pouring off of my mug. At the suggestion of somebody in my life, I've switched over at night from coffee. I wasn't having trouble sleeping or anything like that, but just a lot of caffeine. Too much coffee. Too much coffee in my life. And so I've switched over. And tonight I'm not even drinking tea. I'm drinking water with lemon and honey. So this episode is sponsored by water with lemon and honey. Warm it up and see what happens. Primarily because one of my kids struggles with this a little bit. And uh one of the questions, I think it's the second question in this, uh, it talks about how this can happen in sibling relationships. And that's usually where it comes off with my kids, not so much in friendship relationships, but in sibling relationships. But, you know, this is one of those things where it's hard to say this is all bad or all good or all this or all that, or play the binary game because bossiness really, as I kind of said in the intro, it's leadership, and it leadership looks different in different places. And I'll also just say that kids struggling with not knowing how to enact that leadership and coming off kind of totalitarian or tyranty or bossy or however you want to put it, you know, acting like a dictator, this is a problem that many adults struggle with too. And so here, I just want to start from a place of deep empathy for kids who struggle with this because adults struggle with this too. I was just researching like what are the best-selling self-help slash nonfiction books. I made a claim in a chat uh the chapter that I was writing today, and uh in the in the claim I said something to the effect of like Atomic Habits is one of the best or what one of the best-selling books of all time, which is true, and the best-selling self-help book in the last five decades, or something like that. And I went, eh, you know what, I've heard something to that effect, but I, you know, with as with anything, you just kind of it comes out as a stream, and then I go, I gotta fact check that. So I looked back and I was like, you know what? Actually, Atomic Habits is not the best-selling uh nonfiction self-help book of all time, or even of the last 50 years. There are others, and one of them that stuck out that is like number two on the list of the top five, Atomic Habits is like number five, I think, on the list. Uh, it's like the best-selling book of the last couple of years, but or last decade, but not, but not of the last 50 years. One of them that's older is how to make friends and influence people. And the if you've ever read that book or or even just skimmed that book or read a summary or heard people talk about it, you know that that book is essentially about what we're talking about today. How do we lead well? How do we uh influence people without kind of becoming a person who they don't want to be around or being bossy? And so if that's one of the best-selling books of all time, I think it's that it sold 40 million copies, which is just a mind-bending number of copies of anything. Um if if I ever got 40 million of anything, that's just feels like a so far outside the realm of comprehension. But it said 40 million copies, I think is what it said on on Google. And 40 when you think about 40 million copies of people who are trying to figure out what these kids are struggling to do. And so I don't think it's like that bad that kids struggle with this. And also, as I kind of alluded to, this is this is a generally positive trait. Bossiness is a manifestation of something that's ultimately something good. And so rather than keep telling stories and stuff like that, I just want to jump into it because I'm sure I'll tell, I'll talk about my son, and that'll kind of be my my midpoint story. And I also want to try and keep these episodes shorter because I've been I've been going a little long. Sometimes I wonder if I should maybe just do one question per episode or something like that and make them shorter so that they're more digestible. You guys can let me know. Send me a text in the show notes or send me an email, podcast at wholeparentacademy.com, uh, and or send me a DM on Instagram or something and say, John, I listen to the podcast and I like it being 45 minutes long. Or John, I listen to the podcast and it's a whole lot to listen to every week. Can you make it 10 minutes? That would be great. I was just talking to somebody today, a very awesome parenting influencer who said that she's making her episodes 10 minutes, and I thought to myself, hmm, interesting. Okay, first question comes from Amy who says, My daughter is six, and everyone says that she's bossy. She tells kids what game they're playing and what role they are, and then she gets shocked when they don't want to play. I keep telling her that's that's not how you make friends, but she just doubles down and cries that nobody listens to her. I don't know if I should be worried or if this is just her. Also, she's actually really smart and organized, so I don't want to squash that, but I'm also trying of the side eyes from other parents. And then there's an emoji at the end of this one that's that like eee face, like the the not like a smile, it's just kind of like the teeth are showing, it's like, oh yikes. You know, what I hear here is something that you didn't actually say, which is when you say she's also really smart and organized, it's probably that the other kids really like playing the game. It's just that the way that she's presenting it is is the way that she's packaging it is not going well. And that's a really cool thing and a really cool trait that your daughter has. It's her brain can see this plan, but she can't feel yet the kind of social development to know how that's gonna land. And as I talk a lot about in the podcast, there are, you know, every kid is different. Like obviously, I I talk about parenting in these kind of broad strokes ways with advice or you know, insights that are applied applicable to deaf many different kids in many different scenarios. But, you know, there is some kind of uniformity within kids where brains do develop, like underdeveloped brains are underdeveloped brains, and more developed brains are more developed brains, and and and so there's things that we can say, like basically all kids struggle with executive functioning because it comes later, or you know, people kids are not born at at one month old being able to talk, right? Like there are things that we can say that are kind of broad stroke things, but then there's there's kind of infinite variability within that because every kid has a different circumstance of their genetics and their biology, and that's not even the most of it. It's it's they have different nurture structures and they have different experiences and and they have different ways of being you know, how all those things mismatch. And when you think about a deck of cards, I know that this is like kind of a weird analogy to start with, but when you think of a deck of cards, but a lot of people don't know this. This is I I probably should put this in a book because it's a great, great thought experiment. If you shuffle a deck of cards, what do you think the likelihood is that you have held a deck of cards like that with in that exact order before? Right? It's just 52 different variables, right? Because it's 52 traits or 52 cards in a standard deck. Most people think, like, yeah, maybe once or twice before in my life have I felt held that exact deck of cards. Uh the answer is you haven't. And in fact, no one in history has ever likely statistically held that deck of cards if it was a good shuffle. And if you wanted to get two consecutive or two shuffles that were the same, you would have to shuffle decks of cards for literally like as long as the earth has been around. You would have had like if you shuffled every once a second for billions of years, that's how long it would take. That's how many different variables there are in just a standard deck of cards. So now just think about all of the different like your kid is not 52 variables variables, they're hundreds of thousands, millions of different variables of interactions and uh different like genetic makeups, and and like they're so different. And so every kid really truly is a unique snowflake, and they're none of them are the same. And the reason I say this is because what happens is though different things develop and different things mature at different times, right? And so one kid who might be very cognitively advanced with executive functioning to plan a really cool game and uh to hold all of the roles and pieces in their head, and it's gonna be a really fun game, and everybody would love to. Like they're gonna be a great dungeon master someday for the DD players out there. I've never played DD, but I desperately want to. Um, they're gonna be a great dungeon master who can kind of come up with this whole story, and maybe they'll be a great fiction writer, or you know, maybe this will be not no part of their professional or personal life, but but they're just cognitively uh advanced in that way, and they love exercising that part of their brain. At the same time, that same child can have more growing to do, or or maybe be not as advanced in their social emotional awareness of of how people are receiving them. And that's actually very typical, right? Uh lots of people fall on the standard deviation for these things, but that doesn't mean that one child might be, you know, an early walker, but not an early talker. One grade school age kid might be really good at emotional regulation, but not good at picking up on what other people are feeling. They might be they like highly sensitive kids, for example, really good at picking up on what other people are experiencing, usually tend to be pretty explosive and unable to regulate their own emotions as easily as non-highly sensitive kids. Again, painting with broad brush here. But you can see how just because she's really smart doesn't mean that she's going to be able to be aware of the social here. That's why I say it sounds like she has a really great plan. Now, can she feel how it lands? Like, how can how can we help that skill grow? And I think the the way to do that is not in the moment when this is all happening. I I just say it all the time, right? Like timing is everything. It's it's I'm gonna teach a workshop in a couple days, and I'm sure I'm gonna say it on the workshop. Um, maybe actually I taught it a couple days ago. And if you're listening to when you're when this comes out, I've already taught the workshop. I'm a time traveler in that way. Um when you're listening to this, I would have just taught a workshop. This is my favorite workshop to teach. And one of the big pieces of that workshop is when I talk about how important timing is. The discipline, when the the when of discipline is as important as the what. And in this case, I would do this actually before going to the park. I would preempt a play date, I would preempt the social interaction, knowing that my daughter's probably gonna come out swinging and want to, you know, kind of direct traffic and be that leader. I would say, hey, you're really good at having these awesome ideas. Leaders don't start by telling, they start by checking in with everybody. Good leaders do. So instead of saying something like, This is what we're doing, ask, do you guys want to play my idea, or should we pick something to play together? I think that's a great place to start, is just lead in and say, look, great leaders check in before they immediately start directing. And you know who needs to hear that most of all today? Probably me. When I am uh in roles where, like as an adult, where I'm excited about a project, I will often not even be aware of how other people are receiving that in the moment because I'm just so excited to tell everybody about this new project that I'm doing. But what I know is that people really, and this is an adult principle, but I think it applies to kids too. People don't care what you know until they know that you care, right? And similarly, people don't want to play with you until they know that you want to actually play with them, that they're not just a prop in your game. And so start with that check-in and asking, hey, do you guys want, are you guys consenting to do this? You want to do this? And just that little choice for her friends is going to make it feel much less bossy because now they've said, Yeah, I'm I'm into this, I want to do this. And if they wind up picking to play something else, now at least your your daughter it can make an informed choice of like, do I still want to play with them, do I not? Whatever. But you know, at least they've agreed to this. A lot is gonna go with that, especially when when she's sounds like she's really good at at leading and planning the games and organizing everything, that it's gonna go much better. And I think you know this, if if they if the kids already want to play that game and they they already are kind of checked into that. I'll get to what happens in the next question, probably with my son, when you say, Do you want to do you want to play the game? And they go, No, and I don't want to play anything with you because you're always bossy, right? That's something entirely different. But I think this is a good check-in. And then on the back end, right? I would in the car process, hey, how'd you think that that went? Oh, whose game were you playing? And you know, how did it go to play somebody else's game? Or how did it go to have some, you know, did you maybe maybe set some achievements that she can together, like some goals. Hey, I I want to you like integrate somebody else's idea today. Let's try and integrate somebody else's idea, and then check in afterwards. Hey, how how did you how are you able to do that? And and it's again, it's not that we're taking the leadership away, it's that we are that we are teaching in the moment how to steward that leadership in ways that people appreciate. People don't want to be ordered around, people want to be led. And it sounds like you have a leader on your hands, and that's a good thing, right? Because ultimately, and that's that's kind of where I'm gonna end the answer to this question. Ultimately, I think a lot of times we demonize bossiness and don't even get me started on the social implications of calling girls bossy, but men we just call them assertive, right? Like there's there's so many gender biases here, and I'm not saying that's necessarily at work with your daughter, but hey, it totally could be because we put little girls into boxes really early in ways that we tend to not put little boys into boxes. There are other ways in which little boys, especially uh non-white kids, often get put into certain little non-white boys get put into certain boxes, and uh especially with disciplinary stuff, and they kind of aren't given the benefit of the doubt. That's a whole separate episode. But for the context of bossiness, even when I was writing the title of the episode, I'm going, oh, we're talking about bossiness today, right? Like, oh, that just that word has so many kind of uh misogynistic connotations as it relates to to little girls, where you know, and so she's gotta learn. I I guess uh what I'm I'm saying this to say is like she we live in the real world, not the ideal world. In the ideal world, I think we call this out and we go, hey, she's just leading, and that's actually good, right? In the real world, we also have to teach and prepare that like yeah, we have to this this is the way in which it's gonna be easier to be received, and and that sucks. I maybe I'd it's do I say sucks on this podcast? I guess I do. Like that is like really a I'm not looking forward to having to look like learn more about I guess I'm looking forward to having to learn more about that, but not having to experience that now that I have a daughter. I like I really don't want people to treat her differently, but like I know from the women in my life telling me and being honest with me that like that it happens. So I also you know, I don't want to go too far into that, but just feel this as the good thing that it is. This is assertiveness and this is leadership. This is not um some sort of negative, don't don't receive the negative stigma of like oh bossiness, demandingness, right? Like, that's not what I read in this in this question. I read a person who is is still catching up, and that and again, so many people are still catching up. What did I just say about 40 million copies, right? Like everybody's trying to figure out how to influence people well. That book is probably more relevant today even than it was back then because like look at my job. I'm an influencer and I'm not very good at influencing people. It's hard, it's hard work, and and it's it's hard to know what to say and what to do and how to lead well. And oftentimes I don't lead well. And so all of us are learning this. It's not surprising that your daughter is still learning this at sex. But it sounds like she's gonna be a great leader, so I don't want you to stamp that out in the process.

SPEAKER_00: 18:54

Okay, let me uh take a quick break and then go to Jamie.

Jon @WholeParent: 19:02

Just took a long sip of my lemon honey water. I feel like it needs less lemon next time and more honey. Maybe that's just me. But it's finally a temperature where it's not burning the inside of my mouth. But it is making me cough a little bit. Apologize for that. The question comes from Jamie. She is a member. Hey Jamie. And she has three kids. Eight, six, and five. She says, My kids are eight, six, and five, and my oldest kind of steamrolls his little brothers. He's not mean exactly, just intense. Like, no, we're doing it this way, energy. Then, when they don't want to play his games, he gets confused or mad or hurt. And I usually say something like, Well, if you weren't so bossy, then they'd play with you, which I know is not helpful, but also it's kind of true. So, what should I do? Great question, Jamie. Uh, this is the point in the episode where I'm gonna tell the My story because I have three kids who are of playing each other with each other age and then also uh a one plus year old on the back end. And my oldest is nine, his little brothers are five and four. And they run into this all the time, where the nine-year-old has great ideas that are going to be more fun than anything that the five-year-old comes up with. I just experienced this this morning. They we didn't have this problem this morning, which is like so fantastic, partially because of the advice that I'm going to give you. I think we've actually kind of cracked the case on this, uh, at least in our family, and I hope it works for you too. But this whole morning, they played all these games. They played Sweet Shop, which I don't know if it was just like a manipulation tool to get me to let them eat sweets, but they like literally set up like a sweets shop where they took all of the candy in our house. We rarely have any like high sugar stuff. Well, not rarely. We we will have like maybe one thing in the house at a time. But just so happens right now, because of the holidays, there's still like leftover cookies and stuff, and they like set it all up and they're drizzling chocolate sauce over like a slice of toast and putting MMs on top of it and powdered sugar. And and he was just trying to, and then and then they played another game where they like Lego shop where they like took out their Lego sets and they tried to sell them to each other. And and it was not like no money was actually exchanging hands, there was no stakes to this, but they just like played so nicely for hours together this morning. And when you see it go well, you're like, oh my gosh, this is like everything that I wanted as a parent. My kids playing like this. It made me feel really good because then the rest of the day I wrote about siblings, and I was like, I feel like I'm not a terrible sibling parent because they're they they really gave me what I needed as far as confidence this morning. They don't always. Um, but probably two, three weeks ago, that was not how play time was going. Basically, on a daily basis, my nine-year-old would come to my five-year-old and go, Hey Ollie, we're we're gonna play this game, we're gonna play this way, and this way, it's gonna be so fun. And he was right, it would have been really fun. And Ollie would respond with, No, I don't want to play with you, just full stop, I don't want to play with you. And we were almost like, that's kind of mean. Like the the five-year-old's being kind of mean, right? Like, he's just being like, I don't want to play with you, blah, blah, blah. And part of that is that he's like way more introverted. Like, sometimes he's just overwhelmed by social scenarios, and he's just like, I'm just done playing right now, like it's after school or something, and Matt's like on an emotional social high after school, where he's like just spent the whole morning with a bunch of people, and now he's like, Let me spend some more time with people because it makes me feel energized. And Ollie just spent the whole morning with a bunch of people, and he's like, Let me let me go sit in my room and be alone for the next hour, right? And so some of it is that, but then other times it was just like he would just literally, for no reason, he would just be like, nope, I don't want to play with you, and we're like, that's kind of mean. So instead of doing kind of going towards him, I sometimes I felt like going to the five-year-old and being like, You've got to play. But then I'm like, Oh, that's not a good precedent to set either. You don't want to do something with someone, now you're being made to do it, and you need to play with this person. It's just like it creates a weird paradigm, right? So I'm like, ah, that's not that's not the place to start, probably. Instead, what I did, and what I'm gonna encourage you to do, is to I started not narrating the problem, but rather narrating the impact of how the question was being asked. And there was just no blame, right? And that was the real key. So your kid, your oldest, needs to understand the cause and effect without it being a character judgment. That was the thing that my son was really internalizing, my nine-year-old was really internalizing the oldest. He was like, if he doesn't want to play with me, it's because he doesn't like me. He never wants to play with me, he doesn't like me. And when we say, you know, if you weren't so bossy, they would want to play with you, essentially we're actually feeding into that narrative. We're saying, like, yeah, you're right, they don't want to play with you because there's a problem with you, you're bossy. Instead, in the aftermath of this, try saying something to the tune of like, I noticed that you were deciding everything, and when you did that, the other kids, like your your siblings, kind of changed, their bodies changed. Like they got quiet and they backed up and they backed away, or their shoulders slumped, or they put their head down. And that's usually a sign that they want to turn to choose what to play to. And that is a very different thing than saying you're bossy and that's your problem, you need to fix it. It's saying, look, there's competing things here. You want to play a game and you want to lead the game and that's good. And they feel walked, they want a turn to lead, and that's also good. And sometimes two good things can lead to hurt feelings or or you know, not no not fun playtime. It's not that w anybody did anything wrong, it's that there's competing going on here, and competing for kind of that autonomy and that authority and that agency. And in that moment, it uh creates this situation where there are feelings hurt even though like nobody intentionally did that and nobody's trying to do that. And I think that the the key with this is that you you're training social perception, you're helping the brain link the behavior to the nervous system response of others and the outcome. And by the way, Amy, the question for the first one with you know, everybody says my daughter's bossy, um probably all of that's what what I'm asking you to do too. It's training social perception. How does my behavior impact the room? How can I lead more effectively? And I think that just in that simple reframe, sometimes it's somebody else's turn to lead. And if we don't give them that turn, then then they're not gonna want to play. Not because we're bossy, but because they wanted that turn. Because here's the flip side of it. Other times, it's very clear that everybody's having fun. And if you halted the game to be like, now it's your turn to lead, you you need to be the leader, and you need to come up with what we're doing next. Like this morning, for example, my nine-year-old led every part of what happened this morning. He was the he was the champion of it all. Now, he gave them agency within the game, and that's part of how he's learned this, right? He's learned, hey, I if I if I demand or and and and dictate everything, even within the boundaries of the game that I myself set up and that I want to play, then they shut down. So he was giving them little choices within the games, but he was leading all the games. If he had been like, oh, well, I don't want to be bossy, so I'm not gonna lead, and I'm just gonna go off and be on my own, that actually would have cut off the play. And so this is one of those places where we really want to teach our kids because ultimately we don't want to be the one like policing their play, where we're constantly being like, okay, now it's this person's turn to lead, now it's this person's turn to lead, now it's just like that is an unsustainable solution for for uh uh several reasons. The first one being that we're not always going to be there, the second one, and equally important, um they're they're not actually learning the point, which is that they need to assess as they're leading and they need to assess as they're playing if everybody's having a good time. And then third, and I think again, equally important to the other two, is that when an adult intervenes in play in that way, it ceases to have the same benefits, uh, long-term social, uh, cognitive, relational benefits, because the adult's presence is there mitigating. And so I think that the better alternative here is to train that social perception and get them to do that that process of looking, okay, behavior and response and outcome. Behavior, response, outcome. Behavior, other people's nervous system, outcome. And I want to say some kids are gonna be again, all kids are different. The 52 decads thing that I said earlier. Some kids are just gonna have a much harder time reading that body language, and we're gonna need to be explicit and really do that review afterwards. It's like, okay, so so did you see their shoulders drop? Did you see this happen? Did you see that happen? Okay, what do you feel like like what does your body do when you're kind of defeated? That will give them more of those steps. So it's not gonna be an automatic thing. I was grateful that for my son, um it there was some back and forth of like how we can do this. And there was another piece of this that I'll get into in a second, but with a third question, but a huge piece, at least for us, was just that noticing. And I did have to do some training of like, okay, well, what does that look like? But once he got it, he got it, and he started to look out for it other places, and ultimately that made the play one of the most advantageous things ever. In fact, I think you could argue, right? Teaching this is is as important or more important than basically anything else your kid's gonna learn in in the world. Like learning how to read is obviously massively important, learning how to write is important, learning math is somewhat important, I suppose, probably for some people. Learning science and history, important. None of them are they all pale in comparison to your ability to relationally track how other people are receiving you. Like that is going to have long-term benefits, not only in one's career cognitively, but in all aspects of one's life. And so I think that is really, really important. Okay, let me take another sip of this and then go to the last question.

SPEAKER_00: 32:23

Question number three comes from Emma.

Jon @WholeParent: 32:25

It was an email. Emma the emailer. She says, Is it bad that my kid kind of takes charge? She's five and she runs the playground. Teachers say that she's strong-willed, which feels like code for something worse. Other parents joke and tell me that she's the boss and laugh, but I can tell that they don't love it. Yeah, there's that bossiness thing coming out again. Let me keep reading. But I kind of love that she's gonna grow up, not going to grow up to be a people pleaser like me. She knows exactly what she wants, exactly who she is, and she goes for it. I wish I had more of that energy. So anyway, my question is is it okay to just let her be a little bossy and dominating if that's her personality, or should I rein it back in? Emma, I love this. I love this question. I love that I started to before I kept reading to go off on the uh that's we're calling little girls bossy again, and I don't like it. And you're like, no, I love it. Emma, the short 30-second answer is absolutely it's okay for her to be bossy, if if that you're or dominating or or the leader of the playground, and who cares what other people think? Like, if that's a if that's the the thing that you're looking for me to say, I just said it. Who cares? She'll figure everything that we're talking about of this like social training, it's so massively important. I I stand by it. They don't have to learn it in this exact moment and in this venue every time, right? That said, if you want what I would do in this scenario, I would take that energy that you experience of being like, I I hear you saying like I look up to her, which is something that I wish more parents could say. So many parents are caught up in this like hierarchical, and and I understand parenting relationships are hierarchical, and we don't want to get into um like this transference thing where all of a sudden we're expecting our child to be the parent to us. That's super problematic, it's a narcissistic thing that people do. But I think that we need more of like, hey, I'm not only proud of you, I also look up to you in this. Like, I wish I had more of that type of energy in my life. So the fact that you're even identifying that, like, I man, I'm so glad that your daughter has you as a mom to to say that and feel that because we need more people, we need more kids who who hear that. And so if you haven't said that today to her, do please say that because I think it's I think it's important. Um if you want to know what I would do beyond just saying, yeah, go go run the playground and and be on your own, I would shift the goal a little bit. Instead of trying to soften her personality or soften her and make her into like a meek and mild and and not leader, I would teach her to expand her range. So I would say, hey, if this is gonna be a really advantageous skill, which I think it is, and this is gonna be a really positive thing for her, which I think it is, then how can we start the leadership development training again to say, okay, how can you lead effectively more than why you should let other people lead in your stead? Right? Leadership does not seem like it's the issue here. If anything, it's rigidity in that, like I'm gonna do it my way and I'm not gonna care what anybody else thinks. That's not a great trait for anybody to have. I think there is confidence in that, but there's also actually um a lack of confidence. People, people who are so rigid in their leadership that they have to do it their way, it's because they feel like if they don't do it their way, it's there's a threat to their leadership. And I think that that like like you see that in politics, to be honest. People who are like, it's my way or the highway. Like that just shows me that you think that the second that you lose any, you you give any ground, you have any compromise, you have any collaboration, that you're gonna lose all ability to be a leader. Like great leaders can be like, no, I'm gonna equip and empower the leaders underneath me, knowing that I can still lead them, even if they feel equipped and empowered. I don't have to belittle people and and and drag them down and and um dehumanize them in order to make them into my pawns to be manipulated. Like bad toxic leaders are ones who say, like, it's my way or the highway or or or it's gonna be my way, and you have to do it my way. That said, kids are still in a kind of profoundly self-centered stage of life at five, uh, not in a bad way, just in a developmental way. Of she may not even know that there are other ways to lead, right? Like she's just like, it's my way because my way is the only way, because that's how I think. I'm not really doing the perspective taking things so much yet. So I would look at this and I would go, okay, how can we build some cognitive flexibility here? How can we help her for her brain switch over from control as the means of leadership to attunement and to leading without losing that sense of that awesome power that she seems to exude? That, you know, I don't care, I'm gonna not gonna be a people pleaser, right? Something where you can say, hey, you're being a leader, that's great. Leaders do X, Y, and Z. And so this is where I'm gonna pivot back and say that I only give half the answer to what my son effectively did in transforming our own home into a place where he is, again, leading his siblings in a really positive way. The second thing that he did was that he and I talked about effective forms of persuasion. And he was like, What's persuasion? And I said, Persuasion is the art of getting somebody to do something that you want them to do. And ultimately, ethical persuasion is getting somebody to do something that you sincerely believe that they want to do, but they're having a hard time doing it. There's an impediment in some way. And so he said, Tell me how that goes. And we had this long, hour-long conversation about like sales. I know it sounds kind of silly, but I literally talked to him about like how how I get people to want to buy my book because I think it's actually gonna genuinely help them. And I said, you know, it starts that I make a video on Instagram where I talk about uh some principle for my book. And then I tell them in the video, you know, hey, if you want this free resource, or you know, if you like this, you should follow along. And when they follow, I say, okay, I'm gonna give them this free resource that again is related to some principle in the book. And then they download the free resource and I give it to them and I show them how it's gonna work, and then they practice it with their kids. It's you know, some emotional regulation games or something, they practice it with their kids, they see that it works, and then they come back to me and they go, John, I can't believe that that worked. And I say, Yeah, I know it worked. Actually, I talk about this and so much more in my book. I think that you'd really like it. And then they go, I want this book. And I said, I said, now, Matt, if I began from the point of saying, I just got up on my phone, I pull up my phone, I just said, You should buy my book. And I had no followers, I never made any good content before, I've never talked about parenting. I just said, I wrote a book about parenting and you should buy it. I think, do you think I'm gonna sell a lot of books? Do you think a lot of people are gonna want my book? And he said, No, I I don't think I don't think a lot of people would want your book, Dad. I said, Yeah, I don't think so either. I had to show them that I understood what I was talking about, show them that what I was offering them was actually going to work and that was actually gonna make their life better, and then and then they were willing to take a chance of buying the book and transforming their life. And I said, the the amazing thing, Matt, is that I have thousands of people who have bought the book and who have written me emails and messages or reviewed it somewhere. And of those thousand people, I've never gotten one person who said I didn't like your book. He was like, Really? I said, Yeah. There are people who got my book for free who thought it was like okay, because you know, they're maybe like a professional book reviewer and they they didn't really care about me, they didn't know me, and they just found it. But I said, the overwhelming majority of people who bought my book, I had already taught them something about parenting before they ever did. And so they already knew they were gonna like it, and then they bought it and they loved it. I said, and then I switched it to them and I said, When you're playing with your friends or when you're playing with your siblings, you actually know what's gonna be fun for them most of the time. You know that they're gonna enjoy the game. The problem is sometimes they don't know that they're going to enjoy the game because they don't have your brain, they don't know how the game's gonna go. It's in your mind. And so you need to get you need to persuade them to play because you know that they're actually gonna benefit from it. I said, Well, how do I do that? I said, Well, what do I do? I said, Step one, show, don't tell. Instead of saying, This is gonna be a great game, you should be there, you should do it, you should play it with me. Instead, say something like, I'm playing this game over here. Do you want to see how I'm playing? Or just play it in front of them. Start playing the game. Oh, this is what I'm doing. And then all of a sudden, they'll say, Hmm, that looks kind of fun. Maybe can I try? Oh, yeah, yeah, you can try. Actually, you can you can be this player. I'll I'll I'll go over here. Do this other thing. I said, play their role for them. Show them what it's going to be like. Then once they start to see do it and play it, then when they have ideas, then you offer them, oh yeah, that's a great idea. Okay, let's integrate that and let's find a way to do that. And so we went through this whole thing, and he goes, All right, I'm gonna try it. And the next day he goes, Ali, you want to play a game with me? And this was in that phase again, when Ali's just like, Nope, don't want to play with you. And he goes, Okay. And he you see it, he literally like looks up at the ceiling and he like thinks about how he goes, and he goes, he goes, Do you want to play this really fun game with me? And Ollie goes, No, I said I don't want to play with you. Why do you keep asking me? And he kind of looks over at me like, Dad, it didn't work. And I looked at him and I said, Show, don't tell. And he said, Okay, okay. So then he went and just started playing the game on his own. And he goes, Ollie, can you help come help me move this uh board over here? I'm playing this thing over here. And Ollie, Ollie's very helpful. He went and helped him move it and he goes, Oh, what are you doing? I'm just doing this game. You don't have to play. If you if you want to, you can, but I'm just doing this game. This is what I'm doing. Oh yeah, I love doing this. Blah blah blah. And he's like really selling it, you know. And then Ali's like, wait, I don't want to play this game. Wait, can I play this game? And Matt's like, I don't know if you want to. Right? Then he like hits him with the hardcore sales move, and I'm like, I'm like, where did this kid get this? I didn't tell him anything about this. Like, I can't do that. And he goes, I don't know if you really want to. And he goes, No, no, no, I do. Now Ali's like, Liam, you gotta come over here. We're playing this game. You gotta get in this. All of a sudden, he went from dictator to leader, just in the way that he presented the information. Now, Emma, am I telling you that you need to do exactly what I just did? No, not in any way. But I want you to talk to your kids in that way, meaning in the same tone of saying, hey, this is gonna serve you for the rest of your life and it's gonna enhance your skills as a leader. Instead of saying, oh, you need to learn when not to be a leader, which is, I think, what you're worried about people saying, and you know, you need to learn how to take a set back seat, you need to learn how to, you know, uh soften yourself or soften your whatever. Instead, you say, no, no, no. Look, you know, if you're having trouble persuading people to play the game, learn a better persuasive method. Don't stop leading. Right? If she's a leader, she's a leader and she should keep leading. But she might need some tools in how to do that effectively. And so that's the type of like social emotional training that I think is so, so powerful for kids. And I know that I just would talk kind of in circles for a long time about like this story that I was telling about, this great experience that I had with my son, but but I really I'm trying to highlight here if if I can lay in the plane that you want to be the type of parent who instead of saying, hey, you're you're dominating at the park and you're running the park and you're that's just like too much and other kids don't like it, say, hey, you're you're being a leader. And here's a great leadership quality. Leaders notice when the group needs things to be different. Leaders know how to influence and they know how to persuade. What do you think these your friends need right now? What do you think the kids at the park need right now? What kind of game do you think they want to play? You can still lead it. But what what like instead of just what do I want to do? What does everybody want to do? Because that is a true leader. True leader takes a group and moves them going in a direction that's good for everybody, not just that person, right? That's the difference between a dictator and a leader. A dictator does what's good for them and they order people to get in line. A leader does what's good for everybody. And sometimes a leader will often, in fact, often a leader will not do what's best for themselves, they'll do what's best for the group. And so take that leadership quality that your daughter has and stoke it and feed it like a fire, give it more fuel, and give it more oxygen, and give it more shape and form, and give it more uh ability to be adaptive and move effectively to get her leadership skills and honed and in line. And it's a lot of what we're talking about in this whole episode, but do that rather than just put the fire on. I think that would be a huge loss, not only for you, not only for your daughter, but for the world, because it sounds like she's gonna do amazing things. Okay, that's what I have for you in this episode. Sorry if it's too long again, but I'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for your time listening to the whole apparent 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. The first one is to jump over on whatever podcast platform that you are listening to right now and rate this show five stars. You'll notice there are a lot of five-star ratings on this show, whether that's on Spotify or Apple Music or Apple Podcasts. We have a ton of five-star ratings and it helps our podcast get out to more people than almost any other parenting podcast out there. 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