Tough Love & Consequences: Raising Resilient Children

We sit with the messy truth of tough love and why letting natural consequences happen can be the most loving path to resilience. We also face parenting guilt head-on and separate what we can influence from what is shaped by DNA, boundaries, and our kids’ own choices. 
• defining tough love as guidance with limits 
• why natural consequences teach faster than nagging 
• how smoothing the path blocks grit and confidence 
• helicopter parenting and the struggle to navigate adulthood 
• boundaries, rules, and honest conversations that stay compassionate 
• nature versus nurture and why perfect parenting is impossible 
• radical acceptance when a child keeps struggling 
• supporting adult children without enabling 
• a personal story about addiction, guilt, and consequences 

If you have thoughts about this, I would love to hear your input. Use the link in the show notes to send a typed or voice text.

Transcript

Why Tough Love Matters

Mary 0:00

Hi, and welcome to a mini episode of No Shrinking Violets. So, what has been on my mind lately has been the idea of tough love. And we don't use that term much, at least I don't think we use it that much. When I was a counselor for high school students, we would use that term when we talk to parents because there would be issues of students not studying, failing classes, or starting to develop problematic behaviors. And we would suggest things like taking the car keys away or stop nagging to study and allow the natural consequence to happen of failing a class, those types of things. And it was really, really hard for some parents, which I totally get. But here's the thing about this, and I want to also bring in the idea of nature and nurture, and I'm going to do that in a minute. You might be thinking, how are these connected? But when we allow a natural consequence, the behavior is going to extinguish sooner. And I sound like a behaviorist saying that. But when we allow

Natural Consequences Build Resilience

Mary 1:15

a consequence, the lesson happens. If we are trying to smooth the road in front of someone so that there's never bumps, there are never stumbles, we don't develop resilience. Our kids cannot develop resilience unless they have challenges that they need to overcome. And I am not suggesting that we abandon our children, not at all. It's very, very hard to watch a consequence happen. I totally understand that. Let me give a really extreme example. So you have a baby. Obviously, when there's an infant, you have to carry the infant around. But one of the milestones, we want to see them crawl, we want to see them walk. Well, imagine if you didn't want them to fall or didn't want them to ever fail in their attempts to crawl because you see them get frustrated and you decide, I'm going to carry my kid everywhere. Well, they would never develop strength. They would never be able to walk. Now, yes, that's an extreme example. But we are so afraid of failure that we try to keep it from happening. I have had parents do crazy things for their kids when they were in high school. First of all, fill out college applications to colleges they picked for their kid. That's a very mild example. I've had parents that I know wrote papers for their kids so they would pass a class. These are kids that are gone to college. So by allowing a consequence, like if there's a really poor choice that a kid, let's say, gets caught underage drinking, allow the consequence. Now, I know, again, that's very hard. But if there's not a consequence, we don't learn to navigate difficulty. We don't learn that we can navigate difficulty. I can't tell you how many students I had as college students who had helicopter parents, who had parents that were always smoothing the path in front of them. They got to college and they had no idea how to navigate simple things. So by allowing these things, by addressing concerning behaviors early, we allow our children the ability to be stronger. And we can do this. We can walk beside them, have honest conversations, talk about how hard it is, but explaining that there needs to be boundaries. There are boundaries in the world. There are laws for speed limit, when you have to file taxes.

When Parents Bail Kids Out

Mary 4:05

The world has laws. So a kid's life should have guidelines and rules. So one of the hardest things, I think, and I've I realized this my whole career working with the parents of my students, but when I started to work with women in midlife in the last several years, I started to get the front row view of this because the parent was now my client. And what I heard was so much guilt. They saw their child struggling. And this could be people that even did allow consequences. But when a child is struggling, it's totally natural for a parent to think back over their life, what did I do? Where did I fail my child? How might things be different if I had made different choices? So, first of all, there is no perfect parent. Honest communication is one of the most important things. If we realized that we maybe made a misstep or maybe weren't there when we felt we should have been, talk about that. That's so important to do. But there are going to be things that happen with some children that that's a DNA thing. So here, let me talk about nature and nurture. If you have more than one child, you totally know how much they are unique beings. Two kids come out of you if you're a woman, and they can be totally different. You can make all the same choices when you're pregnant, even, and they're gonna be different. So just like I'm the only kid out of five in my family with blue eyes, everybody else has brown. My parents couldn't have created five blue-eyed children through an act of will if they had wanted to, because blue is a recessive gene. So, of course, there are more kids in my family with brown eyes. That is the dominant gene. Same with behaviors and traits, and grit is one of the parts of resilience. Some of those things, some people are just born with a different worldview, a different way of looking at things, more optimism. Parenting is really, really, really important. But I think sometimes when we see a child struggling, the guilt overwhelms this knowledge that they are also a product of their DNA, that what we have done, and I'm not talking about egregious behavior like abuse, but simply parenting decisions along the way, we can always question them. But knowing that there is a huge part of each person that is a little bit predetermined. So again, we take for granted the physical traits, the blue the eye color, the hair color, the height, all of that stuff. But in the same way, there are emotional and cognitive traits that are part of DNA. We certainly want to optimize everything for our kids. And that's why we want to have a consequence. Because they need to have failure. Failure develops resilience. Guiding them

Guilt And The Nature Versus Nurture Split

Mary 7:45

through those failures is the best thing you can do, but you don't need to be perfect. And when the things happen where you've done everything in your power that you knew at the time to do, and you still have a child that's struggling, being able to step away from that guilt, and it's very, very difficult. I know that. But the radical acceptance of this is who my child is, figuring out how do you support them in a way that you also have a boundary, that you also empower them, that is the really tough work. But bailing them out or trying to make it easier, that doesn't serve them. Now, again, I'm not talking about if there are things that a child can't do for themselves. For instance, a physical disability or a physical concern, or even, you know, mental capacity, emotional capacity. Those are things we can coach them through. But when they make a decision that we can see is dangerous, again, if they're a child, we step in. When they're an adult, then that becomes your role is to support and to help them in whatever way they are willing to accept help. But at the same time, you you can't undo what you've done, right, as a parent. But the other thing is to sometimes set hard boundaries because there are times when someone needs to have a consequence, even as an adult, to then reap the benefits of that. I actually worked with a client who upended her entire life after her partner died to be there for her children. She was not happy. She was happy in her other life, but she felt as though she needed to be there in the way that her adult children needed her to be there. So she basically abdicated her choice in life, her friendships that she had, and she moved in to support the needs that her adult children had. And she could totally tell me, I this it doesn't make me happy. But yet she continued to do it. She didn't have the conversation she needed to have. And if there are things that you have done that you know have been difficult, maybe the way you handled a divorce or the way that you encouraged one of your kids in a way that you see now wasn't positive, you can talk about that. It's okay to apologize. Sometimes the hardest thing is to see a child struggle and fail. Be there when the failure happens to help them through, but to do it for them or to not allow the consequence to happen. It's really hard to see it sometimes if you're a parent. But you raise them the best you knew at the time. Now it's

Boundaries With Adult Children

Mary 11:55

time for them to test, test their legs, to walk on their own, to make it through their life to gain that strength, to have those, those failures, those stumbles to develop that strength. And the last thing I'm gonna say is that child may not always see at first that you need to do that to let them have the stumbles, to let them have the failures so they can learn who they are, so they can become stronger. I watched my mom support my brother, who was an addict, abusive addict. He abused me when I was a kid. I watched her do all the things for him, at the expense often of the other four children in the family. I watched her do that for him. She carried him for his whole life. He never learned to take responsibility for the choices he made. He even ended up in jail at one point. And his whole takeaway from that was that he was a victim and that everybody ganged up on him when he was in jail. So I won't go into all the details. Obviously, there were a lot of details from his whole life and having grown up in that household. He terrorized me. But water under the bridge, my point being that had my mom allowed him to have consequences for his actions when he was in his early 20s, I'm guessing that he would have not left that trail of destruction in his wake, because basically he did. So it's really hard when we're carrying the guilt. And my mom carried the guilt because her dad was an addict, also. And I think she felt responsible that she brought that genetic material into this, depending what you believe about addiction, she brought that into the gene pool. She was responsible. We can't change DNA. But remember that while parenting is crucial, perfect

Addiction, Enabling, And A Listener Prompt

Mary 14:20

parenting is impossible. You can discuss the things that you wish had gone differently. But when our adult children, or even I mean, our non-adult children, that's the time to start allowing the consequences to happen with that safety net. When our adult children start to make choices that are having impacts, and we continue to smooth out the consequence, not let it happen. You know, talk about a consequence and not stick to it. That's not helping. That's we're carrying them. That's my thought for this week. I've just had a lot of clients that we've sort of processed these same issues. Um you've heard me talk before about responsible versus response able. We always have the ability to respond as a parent in many ways, but we're not responsible for the choices our adult children make when we've done the best job of parenting we can. This topic of parenting is very emotional. So if you have thoughts about this, I would love to hear your input. You can text me at the link in the show notes. You can actually text a written text or a verbal text. You can leave me a voice text. I would love that. So that's my thought for the week. Until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.