We’ve been lied to about what it means to be a “good parent.”

We were told a good parent always shows up, always fixes, always rescues, always smooths the path. If the child is cold, you rush a jacket to school. If they forget their homework, you drive it over. If they’re sad, you eliminate the sadness as fast as possible.

It feels like love.

But what if that instinct—beautiful and well-intentioned as it is—is quietly stealing the very thing we most want for our children: mental strength?

In his conversation with Jay Shetty, psychiatrist and author Dr. Daniel Amen lays out a radically simple, profoundly uncomfortable idea:

You do not solve all of your children’s problems.
That’s not neglect. That’s love and logic.

This editorial is about that tension: our urge to protect versus our responsibility to prepare. It’s about why mentally strong kids start with mentally strong parents—and why the hardest part of parenting may just be learning to sit on our hands.

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The Myth of the “Always-There” Parent

If you grew up with any kind of lack—emotional, financial, or physical—you probably made yourself a quiet promise:

“When I have kids, I will give them everything I never had.”

That promise often turns into:

• I will always be reachable.
• I will always show up.
• I will always fix it.

Dr. Amen shares that his own father was largely absent while his mother was present, playful, and strict. That absence created deep bitterness in him, so when he thought about the parent he wanted to be, his first non-negotiable was: I want to be present.

Presence matters. Neuroscience is clear that early attachment plays a massive role in protecting kids against mental illness later in life. Kids need to feel seen, safe, and connected.

But presence is not the same as constant rescue.

A parent who is physically there but emotionally frantic—fixing, controlling, and over-solving—can unintentionally send a devastating message:

“You can’t handle this. I have to handle life for you.”

That’s how love turns into quiet sabotage.

Mentally strong kids don’t grow from being carried through every difficulty. They grow from learning, again and again:

“Life is hard, but I can handle it.”

And that learning begins with a brutally honest question for every parent:

What kind of parent do I want to be?
And what kind of person am I trying to raise?

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Mentally Strong Kids Begin with Mentally Strong Parents

We want kids who are:

• Confident, but not entitled
• Independent, but not disconnected
• Kind, but not people-pleasing
• Resilient, but not hardened

That’s a tall order. And according to Dr. Amen, there’s no shortcut:

“You have to model the message.”

If we want mentally strong kids, we have to do the harder work of becoming mentally strong ourselves.

That starts with clarity.

Most parenting is reactive: we respond to homework, meltdowns, phones, bad grades, social media drama, and sibling fights in the moment. We’re exhausted, stressed, and often improvising from our own childhood wounds.

Clarity flips that script.

A mentally strong parent asks:

• What do I want my child to say about me at 25?
• What do I want them to know how to do without me?
• What kind of inner voice am I building inside them?

Without that clarity, we default to the easiest short-term strategy: fix the problem, stop the tears, keep the peace.

It works today.
It backfires tomorrow.

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The Chloe Story: When Love Stops Fixing

One of the most powerful examples from the conversation is the story of Chloe, Dr. Amen’s adopted daughter—bright, oppositional, argumentative, and completely locked in a nightly homework war with her mother, Tana.

Every evening became a battle:

• Nagging
• Fighting
• Dragging her through assignments that weren’t their responsibility but hers

Then everything changed in one moment of clarity.

Tana, after diving into the Love and Logic approach, looked at her second-grader and said:

“I’ve already done second grade.
I’m never going to ask you to do your homework again.
If you’re okay with the consequences—your teacher being upset, missing recess, maybe even repeating second grade—that’s your choice.”

No yelling.
No threats.
No drama.

Just agency.

Chloe stormed off. Twenty minutes later, she came back, sat down, and did her homework.
No one ever had to ask her again.

Fast-forward: she went on to become an independent, hard-working college student—not because someone constantly pushed her, but because no one was willing to carry her responsibilities for her.

And here’s the crucial part:

• If she forgot her homework, no one brought it.
• If she forgot her sweater, no one rescued her from the cold.
• If she forgot her lunch, no one drove over with food.

Not because her parents didn’t care.
Because they cared about something bigger than temporary comfort:

“I am responsible for my life.
My choices have consequences.
And I can survive those consequences and adjust.”

That is mental strength in action.

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The Most Important Skill: Agency

We talk a lot about self-esteem, confidence, and success. But Dr. Amen points to a deeper, quieter skill that often gets ignored:

Agency – the belief that “What I do matters. I am not just a victim of circumstances; I can act.”

Kids don’t develop agency by being told they are special.

They develop it by:

• Having real responsibilities
• Seeing real cause-and-effect
• Working, contributing, and being trusted to handle things

He references a famous long-term study of kids from inner-city Boston followed over 70 years. One of the strongest predictors of self-esteem later in life wasn’t money, grades, or even family structure.

It was this:
Did you work as a child?

• Did you have chores?
• Did you help at home?
• Did you have a paper route?
• Did you contribute?

In affluent families, where everything is done for the child, we unintentionally create adults who have never tasted the satisfaction of making a real difference.

We give them everything—except the experience of earning anything.

And then we’re surprised when they crumble under pressure or feel hollow despite their privileges.

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The Art of Loving Boundaries

We love to split parenting into two camps:

• Strict vs. gentle
• Authoritarian vs. permissive
• Tough vs. soft

But the research paints a more nuanced picture.

Dr. Amen cites a University of Oregon study that looked at 10,000 families along two axes:

1. Firm vs. Permissive
2. Loving vs. Hostile

That creates four parenting styles:

1. Firm + Loving
2. Firm + Hostile
3. Permissive + Loving
4. Permissive + Hostile

You might assume hostile + permissive is the worst. And it is bad.

But here’s the surprise:

The second worst outcome—worse than firm + hostile—was loving + permissive.

Let that sink in.

Parents who were warm but lacked boundaries had kids with more mental health challenges than those with tough, firm parents who were sometimes harsh.

Why?

Because children need boundaries to feel safe, to learn how the world works, and to understand that behavior has limits and consequences.

“Loving and firm” turns out to be the sweet spot:

• You are emotionally available.
• You are consistent with rules.
• You are kind in your tone.
• You are clear in your boundaries.

It’s not “anything goes.”
It’s not “my way or the highway.”

It’s:

“I adore you.
And because I adore you, I will not abandon you to your impulses, your screens, or your short-term moods.”

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Special Time: The 20 Minutes That Change Everything

If boundaries and consequences are the bones of mental strength, connection is the heartbeat.

Dr. Amen describes a deceptively simple practice he calls special time:

• 20 minutes a day
• One child at a time
• Doing something they choose (as long as it’s reasonable and doable at home)
• With no commands, no questions, no directions

No lectures.
No multitasking.
No half-scrolling on your phone.

Just being there.

He tells the story of his literary agent, a father who complained his two-year-old daughter wanted nothing to do with him. “It’s just a mother-daughter thing,” he shrugged.

Dr. Amen’s diagnosis was blunt: “You’re ignoring her.”

The prescription? Special time.

Three weeks later, the same father was “complaining” that his daughter now grabbed his leg the second he walked in the door:

“All she wants is time with me.”

Exactly.
Because that’s what connection does.

Special time is “money in the relational bank.” It doesn’t solve every behavior issue, but without it, you have no leverage for influence. You’re just another voice shouting into the noise.

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Shut Up and Listen: Active Listening as a Superpower

Most parents believe they’re talking to their child.

In reality, we often talk over them.

We:

• Interrupt their sentences
• Explain their feelings to them
• Jump in with solutions
• Compare them to ourselves

Dr. Amen brings in a classic therapy tool: active listening.

Instead of reacting, advising, or shutting down a conversation, you simply reflect back what you hear and listen for the feeling behind it.

Kid: “I want blue hair.”
Old-school parent: “Absolutely not. As long as you live in this house…”
Conversation over. Battle begins.

Active-listening parent:

“So, you want blue hair.”

Full stop.
No sarcasm. No lecture. Just space.

The child might then say: “Everyone else has it.”
You reflect again: “Sounds like you really want to fit in.”

Now you’re having a real conversation—about belonging, identity, and self-image—instead of a screaming match about pigment.

You might still say no at the end. Boundaries don’t disappear just because you listen.

But now your “no” lands on top of a relationship, not a power struggle.

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The Guilt Cycle: How Parents Quietly Burn Out

Every parent knows this loop:

1. You overreact.
2. You feel guilty.
3. You back off too much.
4. Behavior gets worse.
5. You explode again.
6. More guilt. Repeat.

Dr. Amen calls this the “guilt cycle,” and it’s one of the most destructive patterns in modern parenting.

The way out?

Not perfection.
Not never raising your voice again.

Instead, it’s a win-or-learn mindset:

“Every day, I either win or I learn.”

You treat your own parenting mistakes the way an Olympic athlete treats a bad performance: not as proof you’re a failure, but as data.

• Did you yell because you were exhausted?
• Did you snap because you skipped lunch and your blood sugar crashed?
• Did the time change, stress, or work spillover make you short-fused?

Curiosity instead of self-hatred.

That same mindset is what we want to install in our kids:

“You are not bad.
You made a choice.
You can learn from it.”

But we can’t authentically teach that if we refuse to extend it to ourselves.

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The Inner Critic We Hand Down

There’s a haunting idea in this conversation:

The way we talk to our kids is often a direct reflection of the way we talk to ourselves.

If we operate with a vicious inner critic—“You’re not enough, you messed up, you’re behind”—we inevitably externalize it:

• We catastrophize their grades.
• We overreact to their mistakes.
• We push them toward prestige instead of purpose.

Dr. Amen admits he went to a community college, not an elite private university, and still built a deeply meaningful, impactful life. Yet many parents still panic about preschool choices as if Harvard Nursery is a prerequisite for happiness.

Prestige has become a proxy for our own self-worth.
And kids can feel that.

We say we want them to be happy.
But we treat them as walking redemption arcs for our unfulfilled dreams.

Mentally strong parenting requires a brutal form of honesty:

“Where does my ego end and my child begin?”

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Social Media, Screens, and the Numbing of the Brain

No discussion of modern parenting is complete without the glowing rectangles.

Dr. Amen doesn’t sugarcoat it: social media and addictive tech press on the pleasure centers of the brain—the nucleus accumbens—over and over, flooding it with dopamine.

Over time, the system numbs.
You need more drama, more novelty, more stimulation just to feel okay.

That’s not just theory. He talks about scanning kids’ brains before and after gaming sessions and seeing their frontal lobes—the area responsible for judgment, impulse control, and planning—deactivate while playing certain hyper-stimulating games.

The takeaway is not “ban all tech forever.”

It’s this:

• Delay devices as long as possible.
• Model your own restraint.
• Make tech use conditional on it not damaging the family: if it breaks connection, it’s a problem.
• Protect their brains because you love them.

And again, this loops back to boundaries.

You cannot be on your phone all dinner and expect your kid to obey a “no phones at the table” rule. They will model what you do, not what you say.

Mentally strong kids need mentally strong modeling.

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When Families Break: Divorce, Attachment, and Emotional Fallout

Divorce is another uncomfortable but necessary topic.

Staying in a chronically unhappy, high-conflict relationship is not better than splitting up peacefully. Constant tension, criticism, and hostility are corrosive to a child’s stress system.

But divorce isn’t neutral either.

The key, Dr. Amen argues, is how you handle it:

• Don’t weaponize children as emotional hostages.
• Don’t badmouth the other parent (your child is half of them, after all).
• Don’t force them to pick sides.

The deeper danger is when early attachment breaks—death, abandonment, extreme conflict, and emotional neglect. Many people walk around with:

• Unresolved rage toward a parent
• Guilt about feeling that rage
• A chronic pattern of self-attack and negative inner dialogue

That’s not just “personality.” It’s a wound.

Raising mentally strong kids requires us not only to parent them differently but to heal the broken attachments inside ourselves.

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So What Does Love Look Like, Really?

Most parents would say their deepest wish is simple:

“I just want to love my child well.”

But love gets distorted into:

• Over-solving
• Over-praising
• Over-scheduling
• Over-protecting

We confuse loving feelings with loving actions.

From this conversation, a different definition emerges:

Love is not removing every discomfort.
Love is preparing your child to face discomfort with strength.

Love looks like:

• Not bringing the forgotten homework so they learn responsibility.
• Not rescuing them from every social conflict, but coaching them to navigate it.
• Turning off your phone and giving them 20 minutes of undiluted presence.
• Letting them work, take on chores, and feel the satisfaction of contribution.
• Asking what they think instead of constantly telling them what to do.
• Saying no to early smartphones or social media, even when “everybody else has one.”
• Holding boundaries kindly but firmly, even when they are furious and you feel guilty.

And maybe the hardest form of love:

• Doing your own inner work so you don’t use your child to fix your unlived life.

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Raising Mentally Strong Kids in a Fragile World

We live in a time of:

• Endless information
• Infinite screens
• Rising anxiety
• Sky-high expectations

It’s tempting to believe our kids need more advantages, more comfort, more help.

What they actually need is more capacity.

The capacity to:

• Sit with discomfort without falling apart
• Make decisions and own the outcomes
• Question their automatic negative thoughts
• Fail without collapsing into shame
• Ask for help without feeling weak
• Respect boundaries and set their own

And they will not learn any of that if we constantly stand between them and every consequence, every challenge, and every messy, real-world emotion.

The paradox of parenting is this:

The more we rush to fix their problems,
the less equipped they are to live without us.

If we truly want to raise confident, kind, responsible, resilient humans, we have to accept a role that is far less glamorous than hero and far more demanding than fixer.

We have to become:

• Calm witnesses to their struggle
• Steady holders of boundaries
• Curious students of our own triggers
• Soft places to land—but not soft places to hide from reality

We have to trade:

• Short-term peace for long-term strength
• Ego validation for genuine connection
• Control for collaboration
• Rescue for responsibility

In other words:

We have to grow up, too.

Because mentally strong kids are not an accident.
They are the byproduct of adults who are willing to do the slow, humble, uncomfortable work of becoming mentally strong themselves.

And maybe the most hopeful part?

You don’t have to get it perfect.

You just have to be willing, every day, to say:

“I either win or I learn.
And I’m prepared to do both—
for myself and for my child.”

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