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Raising Independent Creative Children (Unconventional Entrepreneurial Parenting Tips)

Chris Do shares his unconventional parenting philosophy for raising independent, creative children who thrive on their own terms.

Chris Do

Founder, The Futur™ · March 18, 2025

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An Unforeseen Outcome

Chris Do’s oldest son is studying philosophy at Columbia University. His youngest son made six figures before he turned 18. These are not the results of a meticulously planned, Ivy-League-or-bust parenting strategy. They are the product of a radical, counterintuitive philosophy built on two simple rules and a vast expanse of freedom.

The success of his children seems, on the surface, contradictory. One pursues the life of the mind, the other the fast-paced world of digital assets. Yet both paths were forged from the same environment, one that actively rejected the norms of modern, over-involved parenting.

This is not a story about how to micromanage a child into success. It is a story about how to get out of their way. As Do reveals, “I have very firm rules for the things that matter to me and almost no rules in between.”

The foundation of his approach comes from an observation by the yogi and mystic Sadhguru, who suggests that children are born perfect. It is the intervention of adults, primarily parents, that corrupts this state. Reflecting on his own childhood as a latchkey kid of working-class immigrants in the 1970s, Do realized the lack of parental hovering was not a deficit. It was an advantage.

The long hours of unsupervised time, the absence of a curated schedule, and the freedom to be bored allowed his imagination to flourish. “This laissez-faire style of management in terms of raising me allowed me to dream, to daydream,” Do explains. “It allowed my creative child to survive into adulthood.”

As a parent and successful entrepreneur, Do faced a new challenge: how to recreate that environment of benign neglect for his own children, who were growing up with far more privilege and resources. The answer was not to replicate the poverty, but to replicate the principles.

The Two-Rule System

While many modern parents operate with a complex and ever-expanding list of rules, Do’s entire system rests on just two non-negotiables. There are, he says, only two things that truly matter.

The rules are simple, clear, and absolute:

Rule 1: Always give people respect first. This is the cornerstone. Respect is not earned; it is the default setting. Disrespect towards anyone, from a parent to a teacher to a stranger, is a critical failure.
Rule 2: Zero tolerance for physical violence. There are no exceptions and no justifications.

That’s it. Between these two firm guardrails lies a vast territory for exploration, mistakes, and self-discovery. This approach stands in stark contrast to what has become known as helicopter parenting, a style defined by constant hovering and micromanagement.

Do paints a vivid picture: a parent at a playground, obsessively wiping hands, checking for splinters, and literally catching their child at the bottom of the slide. While the intent is to protect, the outcome is damaging. “Our desire to protect our children actually prevents them from making good decisions later on,” he argues. By shielding them from every small bump and bruise, we rob them of the chance to learn that life involves setbacks. We prevent them from normalizing failure as a part of growth.

A psychologist at a seminar once described parenting as downloading your operating system onto your child. The real test is not how they behave when you are watching. “The real question is what will they do when you’re not around?” Do asks. Over-parenting creates compliance, not character. It teaches children to follow external commands rather than developing an internal compass.

This leads to another critical insight from that seminar about the strong-willed child. Society often encourages parents to break a child's will, to tame them like a wild animal. This is a profound mistake. That strong will, that internal conviction, is precisely what they will need later in life to resist peer pressure, to stand up for what is right, and to navigate a world that doesn't always have their best interests at heart.

“If you break that as a parent,” Do warns, “you’ll also break it when they need to use it when you’re not around.” The goal is not to shatter their will, but to guide it with a few unbreakable principles.

The Poison of Permissiveness

Living in an affluent community provided Do with a front-row seat to the consequences of a different parenting failure: the complete lack of boundaries. He observed a disturbing pattern among the children of his wealthy neighbors.

These children, he noticed, were often “poorly behaved.” They operated without boundaries, spoke in commands instead of requests, and displayed a profound lack of gratitude and respect. They treated their parents like subordinates, driving the relationship dynamic entirely.

A simple title could reveal everything. “I’m Mr. Do, I’m not Chris,” he would tell his children’s friends. “You don’t earn that right until I give you that permission.” This old-school formality was a world away from the homes where kids called their parents by their first names, blurring the lines of authority.

Do recounts a trip with another affluent family. At mealtime, the child would eat one small part of their food, discard the rest, and demand another. The parent, without hesitation, would summon the flight attendant and order a replacement meal, which would also be picked at and wasted. The entitlement, the waste, and the lack of appreciation were maddening to witness.

This behavior is a symptom of a deeper problem: an inability to delay gratification and a complete absence of meaningful limits. When these children do not get what they want, they shift into “turbo temper mode.” When faced with a simple choice, like vanilla or chocolate, they melt down, unable to decide. The parental solution is often to just buy both, compensating for indecisiveness with money and wastefulness.

The long-term consequences are severe. These children grow into adults who are self-absorbed, egotistical, and unable to function in a world that is not designed to appease them. Their social skills are stunted because they have never had to consider anyone but themselves.

“You can’t blame them for that,” Do admits. “Because if I grew up in an environment for 18 years of my life where everyone just gave me whatever I wanted...why wouldn’t I expect the entire world to do that?”

When this pattern of behavior appears in public figures, people who cannot handle their fame or wealth, Do conjectures a lack of boundaries in their upbringing. Someone, at some point, should have sat them down and told them to chill out. But no one ever did.

Winning the War, Not the Battle

At times, Do found himself forced to be that person. During a group outing, watching a child run roughshod over their parents, his internal thermometer reached its boiling point. He couldn't take it anymore.

He knelt down to the child’s level. “I don’t know if you know this, but I’m going to say this in behalf of your mom and dad,” he began. “They’ve worked really hard to provide you what you have...and the level of disrespect that I’m seeing is really hard for me to witness.”

The child, never having been spoken to like that, froze. The parent’s reaction was even more telling. “See, Johnny? That’s how Uncle Chris raises his kids,” they would say, completely abdicating their own responsibility.

Initially, Do’s own children resented these interventions. “Dad, I can’t believe you said that to them,” they’d complain. “Now no one wants to come over and play at our house.”

Do’s response was unwavering. “That’s good. Until they learn respect and boundaries and to be grateful, I don’t really want them here.”

He was willing to endure his children's temporary anger and social isolation to uphold a core value. This is the essence of his philosophy: playing the long game. So many parents, desperate to be liked by their children, make decisions to appease them in the moment. They are constantly trying to win the battle for affection. Do’s focus was always on the war: raising a functional, respectful, and self-sufficient adult.

“I will forgo the temporary loss of a battle to win the entire war,” he states. “And the war is I want to make sure that my children when they’re adults have a good set of rules and beliefs and values and know how to govern themselves.”

Years later, his children, now older and more aware, would observe similar behavior in their peers and turn to him. “Oh my God, that’s a mess,” they would say. “Dad, I’m just glad you raised us the right way.” It was an implicit apology, a validation of the entire strategy. The long game had paid off. The resentment had transformed into understanding and appreciation, a journey he explores in the context of personal branding in Ditch Networking. Build An Authentic Personal Brand Instead.

The Parent as Facilitator, Not Dictator

The alternative to hovering or appeasing is not apathy. It is facilitation. The parent’s job is not to shape the child into a preconceived mold, but to see what they gravitate towards and clear a path for them to explore it.

This means resisting the urge to live vicariously through them or have them fix your own life's regrets. “You had your shot,” Do says directly to parents. “Why inflict the same wound to your own children?”

Too often, parents push their children toward paths they themselves wish they had taken: the uneducated parent demanding a PhD, the aspiring politician pushing their child into government, the failed artist insisting on art school. This is inherited trauma, passing down a set of rigid, outdated rules, or what Do calls “dogma.” In a world changing as rapidly as ours, with AI and social media rewriting the rules of career and life, this dogma is more dangerous than ever.

Instead, the parent’s role is to be a provider of resources. When Do’s sons showed interest in things, the family supported them.

For his son interested in drawing, they provided art supplies and helped him set up a camera to make YouTube time-lapse videos.
For his son who loved music, they ensured he had a piano and access to tutors, encouraging him to write his own songs.

Crucially, when their interest waned, they were allowed to stop. It was never about what the parent wanted for the child; it was about what the child wanted for themselves. It’s a mindset similar to finding your own purpose, a topic Do covers in his Ikigai Workshop on turning passion into profit.

This freedom from expectation is why Do never once checked his children’s homework or looked at their report cards. He bribed them to drop out of school, not to get straight A’s. “We want them to love school for their own reasons, not because we told them to,” he explains. If they did poorly, his assumption wasn't that the child was failing, but that the school was a bad fit.

This approach baffled his cousin, who asked in amazement how he got his kids to do their homework. The answer, “I’ve never checked,” was so foreign it was almost incomprehensible. But it was the truth.

The Operator's Manual for Independence

Creating independent children requires a tactical approach. It’s not just a feeling; it’s a set of deliberate actions. Do credits his family therapist, Dr. Joan Lightfoot, with providing some of his most effective tools.

One of the most powerful concepts was that children feel safe when they know someone’s in charge. This insight rocked his world. When parents try to be friends with their children, blurring the lines of authority, it creates anxiety. The child worries, “If we are equals, who’s in charge?” This lack of a clear leader creates dysregulation and insecurity.

This is why Do embraces an authoritarian stance on things that truly matter, especially physical safety. Dr. Lightfoot gave him a specific technique for this. In a dangerous situation like a parking lot, he uses a firm “dad voice” to call his children to him. But he doesn’t stop there.

Following her advice, he would pick them up and show them the danger from his vantage point. “You see that person over there?” he would say, pointing to a car about to back up. “I bet you couldn’t have seen that down there.” He demonstrated *why* they needed to listen, proving his authority was based on superior knowledge and a desire to protect them. The result? When he used his dad voice, they listened. Immediately.

This consistency is key. He notes his wife struggled to get the same response because she gave too many instructions, diluting the importance of any single one. “I rarely give instruction,” Do says. “So when I give one, they know it’s got to be important.”

Another crucial tool was giving children the illusion of choice. Instead of open-ended, paralyzing questions like, “Where do you want to eat?” he would offer two pre-approved options: “Do you guys want Chinese or pizza?” This strategy achieves several things at once: it empowers the child to make a decision, it builds their decision-making muscle, and it ensures the outcome is acceptable to the parent. Over time, these small, low-stakes decisions build the confidence to tackle bigger ones.

This confidence was put to the test on a dangerous hike at Angel's Landing in Utah, a trail so treacherous people die on it every year. At a narrow section where they had to hold onto a chain bolted to a rock face with a sheer drop below, his older son panicked. But his younger son, Matias, kept going. Why? “Because he was borrowing on my confidence,” Do explains. “And he knows who’s in charge and he feels safe.” They made it to the top together, a core memory built on trust and clear leadership.

The Unforeseen Payoff

For a long time, Matias, the younger son, was the quiet one. He seemed less confident than his older brother. He was the one who, as a small boy, was too afraid to ask for a drink refill at a restaurant. Do worried about his indecisiveness.

But while his parents thought he was just playing video games, Matias was doing something else entirely. He was immersing himself in digital culture. He started creating digital paintings and was commissioned for NFT projects. He learned about cryptocurrency, created his own digital wallet, and became a savvy trader, even advising his high school friends on their investments.

The discovery was a shock. One day, his older brother asked, “Dad, do you know how much money Matias has? He has over $100,000.”

This was the ultimate validation of the hands-off philosophy. Had Do been a helicopter parent, he would have intervened. He would have questioned the screen time, warned against crypto “scammers,” and tried to negotiate the contracts. By staying out of it, he allowed Matias to make his own decisions and his own mistakes.

And the mistakes were as important as the successes. When the crypto market crashed, Matias’s friends lost money based on his advice. He felt a deep sense of personal responsibility. He didn't walk away. He spent months painstakingly guiding them until they were all back in the black. Once they were safe, he told them to sell. The lesson was learned. “Dad, I finally got them out of the red,” he said with a sigh of relief. “I will never do that again.”

The boy who was once afraid to ask for a refill had learned a graduate-level lesson in risk, responsibility, and ethics, not in a classroom, but in the real world. That is the power of allowing children the freedom to operate. This entrepreneurial spirit is a mindset that applies far beyond business, as explored in You're Stronger Than You Think w/ Ryan Blair.

This hands-off approach also applies to the fear of failure. After a talk with his son about a homeless person, the boy declared, “I guess I’m glad I’ll never be homeless.” Do immediately challenged him. Why not? The boy assumed he could just take over his father's business. “That’s a big assumption,” Do replied. “That’s an option for you too, if you want to.”

He isn’t sure if he would actually let his children become homeless, but he says, “they need to believe that.” The absence of a safety net forces them to own their decisions, to understand that choices have real and lasting consequences.

Stop the Generational Trauma

The ultimate job of a parent is not to create a perfect child or a flawless life. It is to stop the cycle of inherited trauma. Most parents repeat the patterns of their own upbringing, often unconsciously, even the parts they disliked.

You must become self-aware about these inherited behaviors and beliefs. The rules that governed your parents’ world likely do not apply today. The fear they operated with is not the reality your children face.

The parent who is soft when they need to be hard and hard when they need to be soft is a parent without a clear internal framework. They get upset over spilled milk but let disrespect slide. This happens when you haven't defined your non-negotiables.

Make a short list of what truly matters. Communicate it clearly. And enforce it with consistency. For everything else, let go. Your need to control robs your children of their ability to develop their own decision-making power.

Your job is to create an autonomous, independent, creative human being who is not afraid of the world because they understand how it works. They understand that every decision has a benefit and a consequence, and they are prepared to own both.

You had your shot. Let them have theirs.

TRANSCRIPT

I've been very fortunate to raise two well-rounded children my oldest son is currently studying in Colombia and my youngest he made an astounding six figures before he even turned 18 I know that sounds crazy trust me we had to file his taxes so in this video I want to share with you some of my parenting philosophies and Reflections to help you raise independent and successful children now whether you're a parent a soon Tobe parent or maybe someone who needed a little bit more from their parents I'm excited to have this heart tohe heart just between you and me and feel free to just listen if you're doing something else right now as this is going to be a laid-back conversation together I came across a yogi his name is huru and he said something to the effect and I'm paraphrasing here that children are born into the world completely perfect it's all the intervention and actions of adults mostly parents that that ruin their child so I'm not that I'm not that different than how many first generation immigrants are raised by parents uh especially in the time in which we came to the United States in the' 70s where we had two parents that were both working so this is the Dual income household they were at their job from sunrise to sunset basically and when we would come home we were latch key kids we' take care of ourselves until our parents got home now reflecting back on my formative years I just thought this thing that I so long for more entertainment choices more present parents actually really helped me to develop as a human being my parents just kind of let us do whatever we want they had certain ideas and rules but they didn't come come down on it with a like a like an Iron Fist and say you must do this they wanted us to do well in school but it wasn't like you're disappointing the whole family I'm so ashamed of you it wasn't any of that kind of stuff so this laai Fair style of management in terms of raising this allowed me to dream to daydream and it allowed my creative child to survive into adulthood so I was never told you can't do that you shouldn't do that or this isn't correct you should be doing something else they might have felt it but they didn't explicitly say it so I was thinking man now that I'm an adult and an entrepreneur and very comfortable with taking risk I'm wondering how I can create an environment for my own children though not having the same needs and wants that I had growing up relatively poor and lower income how do I create that same idea and so my parenting style is really around having really healthy guard rails but a wide birth for them to explore in between so I have very firm rules for the things that matter to me and almost no rules in between and you might be sitting there thinking well what are the rules and how many there are how many are there there's exactly two rules that I can think of right now number one is always give people respect first respect is a very important thing for me so when you disrespect me or disrespect friends or teachers or parents that is not a good sign of a person who understands their place in the world so give give people respect until they they give you reason not to respect them and rule number two zero tolerance for physical violence towards each other we we maintain those two rules and and that seemed to work really well now this is a direct contrast to how most parents raise their children there's a term it's called helicopter parenting where you kind of I think the way it sounds is like you hover over your kids you're kind of micromanaging every little thing that they do and the class classic example of this is you go to a playground and you see uh a parent looking after your children like every little thing like make sure you don't get a splinter wipe your hands and and and literally taking them up to the top of the slide and then letting them slide down but running down as fast as possible to catch them on the way down I don't have that kind of energy but I also think what do we want to do when we're doing this helicopter style parenting I think we're trying to safeguard our kids from getting hurt that's generally a good thing but what we're also doing is were preventing them from experiencing small mistakes and learning that mistakes little bumps and bruises both metaphorically and literally are what life is about and I didn't want my children to experience setbacks and mistakes and failures those bumps and bruises into their adulthood they should be experiencing this and normalizing this as part of how we grow so our desire to protect our children actually prevent them from making good decisions later on I was at a a workshop or seminar uh uh from a from a doctor who was like psychologist he was talking about this thing it's like what is parenting about parenting is when you download your operating system to the little human and when you're not around the little human operates with the same set of instructions without you there so this overparenting this this need to control means they will do what you want when you're around the real question is what will they do when you're not around that's the true test and they said there's something that we need to recognize the strong willed child the one who is not easy to mold and tell what to do and they said please protect that strong will of that child because what parents want to do is they want to break the will of the child like they're a wild animal To Be Tamed and he said they will need that strong will that conviction that North Star that they have internally when people are telling them to do things that they know are not right so we we we've heard of like negative influence like say they want them to commit a crime cheat on a test or to be mean to other kids or to steal to do drugs whatever it is it's very hard to stand up to a group of your peers that strong will that exists inside of them if you break that as a parent you'll also break it when they need to use it when you're not around so for me it's about being able to share points of view ways of thinking but allowing the children to play to explore like how the world works and allow them to make their own mistakes because your desire to prevent those mistakes are going to create much bigger problems later on I've been very fortunate in my life and to be privileged enough to be in communities where all my neighbors are affluent they're upper class upper middle class or really just stupid rich and I get to see how they parent their own children and when my kids have a play date or they're they're around their other friends and I get to see how they operate quite a few of them a disproportion of them are really in my opinion poorly behaved they seem to have no boundaries and they'll do whatever they want and it seems like they're the parent and the the parent is the child so they're really driving the relationship they don't seem to be very grateful uh they they they speak in commanding language versus asking for permission to do things and I see just like a like a super unhealthy level of or lack of respect like I'm Mr doe I'm not Chris don't call me Chris okay you don't earn that right until I give you that permission I know it might be like that way at your house where you can call Dad Bob and Mom Sarah uh maybe that's the way it works but I'm I'm old school like that and the other thing that I see is that their uh ability to delay gratification is very finite so when they don't get what they want they start to go into turbo temper mode and they seem to ask for things as if the world owes them something here's a classic example we we we sometimes travel with other parents and obviously if we're traveling vacationing together and they're pretty affluent and and I remember one time we're all being served our food it's good food everything and they just eat the part that they want and they're like I want another one and I was like oh my God how are they going to handle the situation and then the the parent raises their hand motions to the flight attendant says um can we have another one and they're like of course so they get another one and they rip it right open they basically just eat one component of the entire meal and now they're like I want another one I was like there's got to be some boundaries around this I understand the need to feed your children but to say like the tone the attitude and the way you're doing this and your lack of being grateful and appreciative of what you're having it's just driving me crazy I see in many other situations kids can't make decisions basic things like do you want vanilla or chocolate and they start to like have a total meltdown cuz it's either or or the parent says well you have it all and then they do this where they they they just compensate the inability to make a decision with just spending more money and being super wasteful so the the the feelings of anxiety indecisiveness overthinking seems very apparent to me and the lack of clear boundaries both from the parent and the child is going to manifest itself later on what happens to these kids is um a couple different things that I've seen manifest number one is they they wind up being self-absorbed egotistical self-important people but you would think okay well that's not so bad I mean but what happens is when you go into the real world and everyone else isn't trained to accommodate you and appease you you become isolated you become the Pariah of a community and so they wind up not having great friends and people alienating them people making fun of them and so they have a lot of social interaction social key like they they don't know how to read what's going on because everywhere they've been thus far from the parents or the grandparents who lack boundaries and parenting skills have given them exactly what they've wanted they've always been the most important person in the room and you can't blame them for that because if I grew up in an environment for 20 years of my life or 18 years of my life where everyone just gave me whatever I wanted and I got more of what I wanted without any restrictions or any penalties why wouldn't I expect the entire world to do that that's that's a pattern in life that was established for them so I think when we look at adults now people who are in the public light who don't know how to handle their Fame their power their influence their wealth we see that kind of bad behavior and I can't help but to conjecture that I think there was a lack of boundaries somewhere along the way that someone didn't sit them down and say hey chill out let me give you all an example okay I have a my hot button issue is is around respect so if I'm traveling with someone or going to a museum or some science fair or something I get to spend quite a bit of time with with children and their parents and I see the parent the child running rough shots over their parents saying I want this I don't want to do this anymore and at some point my thermometer my inner thermometer just reaches boiling point I'm like I can't take this anymore and I shouldn't have to be the the parent but I'll go over to the child I'll get down at the level and like you know I don't know if you know this but I'm going to say this in behalf of your mom and dad but they've worked really hard to provide you what you have the things that you get to enjoy and the level of disrespect that I'm seeing is really hard for me to witness I just wanted to let you know that this is my observation and I I would encourage you to try to be a little bit more grateful and to to mind your manners and I'm thinking okay I had to do this I feel really not angry at them but I feel really angry at the parent and the typical response that I've gotten is see Johnny see Mary that's how Uncle Chris raises his kids and I'm like well where are you in this are you neutered in this operation don't you have authority and power to do something about this so you're going to abdicate your responsibilities and Export that to someone else some somebody like myself and then you can see the kids their reaction to this they tighten up they become really quiet they've never been spoken to like this before and we get in the car and then all of a sudden it's like they're scared of me and it's quite interesting because I have no power over them I can't punish them nor do I want to but no one has ever spoken to them like that before and it's a shock to their system now what what happened with my own children is they would say Dad I can't believe you said that to them and now no one wants to come over and play at our house I'm like that's good until they learn respect and boundaries and to be grateful I don't really want them here they're not that welcome I'm sorry and then my kids get upset at me he like oh now we have no friends and everything and for a little while my own kids had some resentment and anger towards me for being the disciplinarian that I am like I told you before I have two hot buttons right one is run respect and the other one is run physical violence towards each other so this is them Crossing that boundary and I'm going to lay it like I don't do it the first infraction I do it when I'm like I can't handle this anymore there's too much of this happening and I have to just put a stop to this I can't be around them and I don't want to explode in anger so fast forward a couple of years when my kids are older and understand what's going on and they're around people like this they turn to me like oh oh my God that's a mess and I can't I I I I can't stand them either and then without directly apologizing to me they say Dad I'm just glad you you rais us the right way and so here's one lesson for all you parents like I'm not trying to win the the battle I'm trying to win the war so a lot of parents manage their own kids because they want to appease them and make them happy and feel like the kids love them and and like them and respect them I will forgo the temporary loss of a battle to win the entire War and the war is I want to make sure that my children when they're adults have a good set of rules and beliefs and values and know how to govern themselves and know how to make decisions and to know that their decisions have consequences and if it means that they don't like me for most of their life until they get into an age where they're more aware of who they are and they have their own identity that then they can warm up to me so I guess it was a couple years ago when my wife would notice with my oldest son his attitude towards me started to change because I think for a long period of time he was not so happy with me and she goes it's kind of crazy now I think your son is falling in love with you cuz now it's always like dad is so good at this dad is so great and I know this and I'm good because of dad that's what I mean in terms of like playing the long game and making sure you're doing the right thing so you don't appease them in the moment and the classic example if your kid wants candy and they have a mouthful of cavities the easy thing is to give them the candies it's like I just want them to be happy I want to be a good parent I want them to be happy this is their child that I want to and after a while they have no teeth left so I'm the kind of person who's like we don't really want to eat candy and you can have it if you want but try it and see how you feel about it and so to this day my kids don't really look forward to Halloween because they don't have a sweet tooth they prefer not to eat candy at all and so those habits those ways of looking at the world have been set a long time ago so if they're going to have a soda with sugar in it it's an occasion it's not slamming it down three times a day with every meal I don't think I'm saying anything particularly unique or different but I'm saying in a sequence that maybe if this resonates with you you'll want to dig in deeper number one is I think our job as parents is to reverse engineer who our children are supposed to be to allow them space to try lots of different things and not to be too hard on them when they fail or when they want to change their mind so if my children want to play music music I'm like let's support that let's get lessons let's rent the the instruments and if you want to go deeper and deeper we'll continue on that Journey with you and if you want to stop we'll we'll let you stop so it's not something that I want for you it's like what do you want for yourself so as parents I think instead of trying to hover over them and shape them into the person we should have been or we could have been living vicariously through them what we should do instead is like see what they gravitate towards and allow them to play so so my both of my children are very creative but they express their creativity in very different ways and so I want to make sure throughout the house we have the resources tools and means to support whatever the interests are so they can explore it to whatever degree they want to take it so my son we saw that he had great talent and interest was in drawing so we'd always make sure he has all the art supplies and we would encourage him and he wanted to make YouTube videos so we showed him how we would set up things for him to make YouTube videos of him drawing those time-lapse videos and uh mom would bribe him a little bit every video you post I I I'll do something for you right and just encourage him to help him set up those kinds of patterns and it was great and then he went out of that face and he stopped Otto on the other hand loves music and he would play piano non-stop day and night and we would just make sure that he has the piano he needs and he has the tutors and the mentorship that he needs and encourage him to make music and so he started to write songs and I was like this is wonderful you could do this for for for your life if you want to but he's like Dad I don't want to be a musician it's not important work and you know he would have all these Reasons I'm okay all right just want to encourage you and so they get to explore lots of different things and I think that's our primary role is to not try to make up for the mistakes and the Mis opportunities that we've had and get our children to do that you'll notice a lot of times parents who don't have a lot of Education want their children to be super educated uh parents who didn't go into government who have always wanted to do that encourage children to do that who weren't doctors lawyers or attorneys now want their children to do that because they're trying to fix their own life's mistakes the message I have for parents here is You Had Your Shot for whatever reason let's say your parents weren't as gracious as giving and as supportive and nurturing as you'd like them to be and no parent really is but you had your shot why inflict the same wound to your own children so that they have this repetition of inherited trauma or or set of rules and we we'll refer to these rules as Dogma this is the way it's always been done this is the way it always will be and we what we realize is the times have changed so much even in my own Lifetime with the Advent of the internet social media and now with AI that a lot of the rules that we had just 30 40 50 years ago do not even apply anymore the jobs that that that people used to do were were high paying or we thought were Irreplaceable or not easily replaced or no longer even exist what we have to realize is within every generation the way that technology and opportunities Advance is you kind of have to throw out most of the rules especially when it comes to career let's not put all the blame on parents because you were also raised a certain way and you were raised to be fearful of the unknown we would rather lose in a world that we know than to venture forth and have a big win in a world that we don't know it's a reason why a lot of us stay within a 50- m radius of where we were raised it's why many of us haven't ever been on a plane have never left the state have never left the country it's because we want to play it safe we don't realize that's what's happening but that's what we're doing so we want to protect our own children from suffering from pain so we like well in my world this is what works so let me try to create a new world for you that looks just like my world so that you can navigate it and and not have those kind of failures I'm going to give you one example here I mentioned before a certain kind of helicopter parenting style and I'm not often like Mr Mr Mom with my kids and every once in a while my wife has to do something when they're much younger I think my oldest son at that point was like probably not even one yet and she go can you look after him for a little bit I need to do something I'm like cool but I'm in my work environment so I put my boy on the couch he seems pretty stable he's just sitting there drooling doing what what babies do being adorable I kind of look at him I look away I look at him I look away I go to get a book or something I get out and so he's out of my eyesight for like 5 seconds and then all a sudden I hear this loud thump I'm like oh my God the boy tumbled off the couch onto concrete floor probably head first so he starts wailing at the top of his lungs and at this point we're living in a three-story house and my wife's like what's that I'm like oh snap I failed my one duty as a parent to watch after my kids my wife comes down and she's like shoeing him kind of like comforting him and everything he's crying and he's adorable but he fell on his head and she gives me just like this scornful look like I'll deal with you later kind of thing and you know what I was negligent but I'll tell you say something he never fell off another couch after that he just didn't and he would always butt scoot his way down things and and somebody was always there to catch him I didn't want him to get hurt I don't want him to lose an eye or break a limb but you know what sometimes we got to get a little hurt so we know every time I tell you don't touch the fire sometimes you got to get a little burn on you before you realize parents today are so fearful of their kids making the wrong decisions they wind up making all the decisions for them and this leads to an inability to decide the classic example where do you want to eat it's like I don't know I don't know I don't know you decide you decide where do you guys want to go today I don't know I don't know you decide you decide to me that's just like it boils my blood does anybody here have an opinion as inconsequential as that is so when I was seeing my family therapist um Dr Joan Lightfoot she would say to me give your children the illusion that they're making decisions all the time I'm like what do you mean she goes don't give them open-ended questions like where do you want to eat say things like would you prefer to go to the salad bar or the all you all you can eat pasta place or whatever it is just give them two options you guys want Chinese or pizza and so you've already made the decision it's going to be one of these two things and neither of them are bad so when the kids say I want pizza I'm like great are we in agreement is everybody happy with that and if we're not we're going to say this thing that we can't always be happy that sometimes we have to compromise to make the whole group happy so this time you get to pick next time you get to pick so we're sharing the responsibility we're making sure no one feels like their voice is invalidated but we're not also trying to appease everyone at the exact same time so we give them the illusion of choice they make these little decisions and then what you do is you start to escalate things and here's something else that my therapist told me about my family therapist she said that children feel safe when they know someone's in charge that rocked my world cuz I was like they feel safe when they know someone who's in charge and then she will go on to explain kids who are raised by single parents often times the parent wants to be their friend and so when you start calling Mom or Dad by their first name that's because we want to be friends and then the kids start to worry like who's in charge right now if we are equals who's in charge and so this starts to create a lot of disregulation in them they don't know what's going on and they do not feel safe and so I'm That Kind of parent around certain things I'm very authoritarian things where they can get hurt real bad so here's what she told me how to handle situations like this so when we're out and and about and we're in a part parking lot or a parking structure I always tell the kids kids come here and they know when dad uses the dad voice they just come and I reach out my hand I hold both their hands and we walk together because you've seen these videos where the kid runs away and gets smacked gets run over bad things happen right and so my my therapist said just add this one thing the next time you're out and you pull them to you and you see danger what you do is bend down pick both of them up hold them in your arms and show them your Vantage Point so from their level they cannot see that someone was getting in their car and about to start it up from my level as I'm scanning around the the lot I can see many more things than them I said and I picked them up I did exactly as I was told cuz I'm a good student I say you see that person over there I bet you couldn't have seen that down there and so when you walk over there because you're below what they can see unless they have a backup camera they're going to run right over you and my kid's like oh oh I do that because I need to demonstrate to them why you need to listen to Dad so often times if it's an open lot they run around and all I have to do is say boys I do that and they just come right to me and we're good and so my wife who struggles with this too because she's she's not applying the same rules and so they they kind of run around she like boys boys and no one seems to understand that she's in control and this manifest itself in in some ways it's a it's a point of frustration as two parents are like why do they listen to you why don't they listen to me and I'll tell you why because you you're giving too many instructions all the time so when there's one that's important they think it's all the same that it's not important whereas I rarely give instruction so when I give one they know it's got to be important and I've proven it to them using the parenting coaching that I have received and applying it consistently so give you an example we're out in Utah I think it's called Angels Landing or Angel's Crest it's actually quite dangerous to get out there there's a part here where you kind of shimmy along a very shallow ledge and you hold on to a chain that's been bolted to a giant rock so essentially if you lose your footing you have to hold on to that chain cuz you're going to slide down hundreds of feet and they're not going to find you and every year some people die my kids are fairly young at this point but we love h and backpacking so my wife and my oldest go together and my youngest he must have been like eight we go together and some point they're they're shimming their way across and they get really scared and so they now need to turn around cuz my oldest is panicking right I think he's panicking for good reason and probably my wife is also a little scared like what do we do here so they're trying to go backwards now there's more people going forward and it's a one lane kind of freeway here and so they have to shimmy above and below above and below and Matias and I we make it across and we look at Mom and and my oldest and it's like okay we're going to go to the top and I'll tell you why my youngest who's much more scared than my oldest the reason why he was able to make it was because he was borrowing on my confidence and he knows who's in charge and he feels safe and so we wind up going all the way up the Ridge and to the top and we would dangle our feet over and take pictures and I I would say to him son here's a deal there there's real danger here if you are not paying attention but I got you the whole time if you're not paying attention you can slip and you fall there's nothing I can do the chances of you surviving this fall are very low and I I cannot go home to Mom and say I've lost my child so it's very important for me right now that you follow everything I tell you to do without question do you understand he goes yes Dad and he said are you scared he's like no I'm not and so we have this core memory together being able to do this and then coming back like an hour and a half later when it's nearly dark my wife's like you guys went to the top like yeah we did are you okay like we are totally okay and and to this day whenever there's danger both those boys unspoken just start to hover closer to me cuz they know someone's in charge so if you want your children to pay attention to what you're saying just be more diligent about when you want them to pay attention cuz otherwise it's overwhelming for them what we need to do is parents is to make a list of things that are non-negotiable and they should not be that many things it should be less than what you have in one hand like less than five things that are non-negotiable and then I say everything else just let it go your need to control and dictate how things work Rob your children of their own decision-making Powers Rob them the ability to make mistakes when it's fairly inconsequential when they screw up as opposed to like later on in life when they're like investing in some swamp plan somewhere and they lose all of their money and I've seen this happen a lot of different ways uh I've been around people who have young children and I kind of see the children running around like wild animals I'm sorry to describe it like that I know it's very offensive for some parents to to hear that but like I have friends that when they're talking on the phone their kids run over like what are you doing what's going on and trying to grab the phone out of their hand I'm like in what world is this okay but I'm not going to say anything it's not my it's not my job to raise your children right or when one of these children spills milk or does something very typical of what children do the parents rain down freaking Hellfire on them I'm like over that so we're getting really upset over things that don't matter and then we're not getting upset over things that really do matter so the the expression I use is we're being hard when we need to be soft and we're soft when we need to be hard it's because we don't have our own internal rules we've never sat down to say what are my non-negotiables and this is not just about the the parent child relationship but this is the partner to partner relationship the employee to employer or vice versa we don't know what the non-negotiables are and so we live in a world of gray and it's hard to navigate because we don't know how to decide and that creates a lot of anxiety for us so if you make that list and you communicate that to them and say there's a lot of things you can do and you're going to make mistakes and it's okay to make mistakes I make mistakes all the time too but here are the two or three things I really care about and I need you to listen to me and when you break those rules there are consequences and if you set this up and they do break those rules there have to be consequences cuz children are tricky they're tricky people they will say like if you draw the line and you say you you cross this line bad things will happen they'll inch their foot closer close to that line and then you move the line no inch it and then eventually like there is no line so you do have to follow through so another warning is don't make empty threats you have to be able to follow through therefore don't make a lot of threats cuz you're not going to follow through you're just not going to follow through with them and they're going to learn sometimes mom and dad is serious but most of the times they're full of BS but you know maybe that's okay within this environment but when they get into the real world they're going to assume everybody operates under the same thing right and this gets into a lot of problems for example people who cross the line in dating environments were like no I I I didn't think you were serious then we can see this like where did they learn this pattern from when you are not being serious they were like well my teacher's not being serious my boss is not that serious I know they're just joking because there are no consequences to anything my whole thing is I will feel if I failed as a human being if my children go on and start to behave in ways that I that violate our core values I've completely failed I've also made sure that they understand this this idea that whatever decisions they make in life are Theirs to own and to reap the rewards and suffer the consequences tell you a little story here one time my my children and I we we with my wife too we love to go to the art store Blick's art store we love going there because it's a world of possibilities every little thing that you can buy there can be something can be turned into something a work of art something and we go outside and there's a homeless lady kind of laying on the street quite laying on the floor face up but laying on the floor and her hand was peeking past her blanket open my assumption was this was her form of asking for money without harassing anybody so I reach in my pocket I find some money and I reach over and place in her hand and she's like shocked she's what are you doing I'm like oh I'm so sorry she's kind of yelling at me now she's probably having some kind of like mental illness and I interrupted what she was doing and she just was shocked so we walk away my children are so scared and they kind of run towards the wall using us as a shield which they you been trained to do and they're kind of panicking my youngest is like Dad why didn't she take the money why' she behave like that and I had to say to him son this is my fault she didn't ask for money I made the assumption that she wanted money and I wanted to help her but what I was doing was not helpful to her at all and she and he says to me so people want to be homeless I say some do but many people have some mental illness and they're not they're not quite sure what's going on right now I wanted to teach him that lesson like we we made the Assumption it is my fault her reaction pretty normal cuz I said people also have self resect they weren't asking for money and you you you treated them like they're a charity case and some people have some problems with that and I say that that could be an explanation lots of different things maybe she was in a deep sleep and I interrupted her and she felt unsafe and she was respon lots of different reasons all I know is I shouldn't have done that cuz she didn't ask me we get in the car he feels safe and the the the kind of stress level is going down he goes I guess I'm glad I'll never be homeless and I turn to him I say why wouldn't you be he goes what do you mean I'll just run your business I said that's a big assumption that you can run my business and that I've offered it to you which I've not a lot of people make poor decisions in their life that could lead them to homelessness and that's an option for you too if you want to and sometimes my wife looks at me like would you really let them be homeless they need to believe that I'm not sure if I would but they need to believe that because I don't want them to use us as some kind of backup plan when they make really bad decisions I'm going to lay on the plane but I'm going to tell two stories I'm 53 years old I have a cousin of similar age to me and he came by the house with his he started his family much later with his young child and he's watching how my kids operate and he's admiring them for like their their initiative how thoughtful they are and how how well they're doing in in both respects like my oldest is going to Colombia studying philosophy and writing my youngest is starting art center and in studying entertainment design and he asked me this fairly kind of casual question he's he says H how'd you get them to do their homework I since he's struggling through that himself right now with his own child right and I said to him I've never checked on their homework I've never even looked at the report card I could care less if they even go to school in fact I've tried to bribe them to drop out of school and he looked at me like what kind of hippie dippy radical Anarchist style parenting is this and I said to him the children have done well we've been very for forunate we don't ask to see their homework we don't even know what they're doing and we want them to love school for their own reasons not because we told them to and if they didn't do well in school we'd find another school for them we don't think our children are bad if they don't do well in school we just think the teachers are not good and the school is not a good fit for them and so I think he walked away probably more confused than than he had Clarity but it's very true both my kids do what they want to do in the way that they want because they've been trained or given the freedom to do that exact thing so every decision like my son really wanted to get into an Ivy League school he worked really hard he didn't get one into one initially and he kept working at it working on his sa and transferred over to Colombia and then he felt like he checked off a box never in my life did I say it would be great if you went an IV League school I could care less and Matias to my surprise who's the younger of the two who was for a good portion of their time growing up felt like he wasn't learning as fast not as confident self assured but he's a sleeper one day we're out about and OT asked Matias some questions like wait what what is going on here he goes dad do you know how much Matias how much money he has I'm like he has money he goes yeah he has over $100,000 like what I thought he was playing video games yelling at like give me a gun all the time and what he was doing in between the video game sessions is he was being immersed in the digital age and the digital culture he started to do digital paintings and he was commissioned by people who were building different nft projects and they they would hire him and pay him and so at some point he became a Savvy Trader himself created his own digital wallet and traded in different kinds of um cryptocurrency and invested and was actually advising his high school friends what they should be doing I remember one time we were traveling together and he was like Dad I need to finish this call and the way he was talking like you it's like a scene out of the Wolf of Wall Street so when he hits this point I need you to sell and you need to get out of that whatever XYZ he was talking about options and trading I'm like who's this kid think he is and you know when the market got cold his friends were in trouble cuz it goes in Cycles it's hot and it's cold right and then months later he's like I'm like what's what's going on like what has a child got to wo about like what is so heavy off your chest today my boy goes dad I finally got them out of the the red they're all okay I told them all to sell they sold I will never do that again so there's a lot of things to pull away from this number one is if you don't rein your children in so much and you let them learn at the pace in which they can learn and let them get involved in the things they want to get involved in wonderful things can happen but I love that he had to learn a very important lesson there's this expression that the road to hell is paved with good intentions so you're giving your friends advice on how to invest and the market takes a dump so now you feel responsible personally responsible which I love that you now have to help your friends get out of this hole so he stayed on it with them so that they can get back into the break even or into the black then he said sell and now I'm no longer going to do that now imagine to tie this together with our conversation if I was a helicoptering parent I'm like what are you doing with crypto why are you getting involved in nfts and all this kind of stuff that's a full a world full of scammers and I want to read the contracts and let's negotiate a better deal what are they paying you he could make his own mistakes this was the little guy that I was worried about who was afraid of making decisions and Afraid of the world who could not ask at a Tender Greens for refill for Dad that's the same boy so I think the hypothesis thus far has proven to be pretty good I can't say this universally true for everybody I just want to share my experience with all of you and hope that you get a different perspective and encourage you to let go of the reins because everything that you think is so important that needs to be controlled that has dire consequences actually doesn't certain kinds of damage is like irreversible but it's very few and far between what those are and to remember that what you want to do is to create an autonomous independent creative human being who's not afraid of making decisions because they understand that every decision they make has a benefit and a consequence allow them that freedom don't try to live vicariously through them and have them fix all of your mistakes You Had Your Shot might not have been a good shot but you had your shot let them have their shot and especially whatever you do become much more self-aware about the patterns of behavior that you've inherited that you hold to be true even if you didn't like them you're still repeating them to this day you are kind of unconsciously giving to your children this horrible inheritance of unresolved childhood trauma I think your job as a parent I'm sorry to be so preachy on this part your job as a parent is to stop the generation trauma let them live their lives if this episode resonated with you in any deep way whether you're the parent or the child who needed a better parent I have another video I'm going to recommend that is a much deeper dive it's called what you believe becomes your reality it's 35 minutes it was released in 2019 but I think you're going to love it

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“I'm not trying to win the battle, I'm trying to win the war.”

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Length: 42m
Views: 8,344
Topic: ENTREPRENEURSHIP

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