Parenting Expert Kasey Edwards: Stop Making Your Kids Happy – Make Them Confident!

In this Episode

• [03:33]Kasey Edwards shares her background and discusses co-authoring parenting books with her husband, Dr. Christopher Scanlon.
• [06:52]The conversation turns to parental guilt, as Kasey unpacks the unrealistic expectations placed on today’s moms and dads.
• [11:35]With the idea of “flipping praise,” Kasey encourages helping children internalize the belief that their own opinions matter more than external approval.
• [14:49]Highlighting the dangers of appearance-focused compliments, Kasey explains how an overemphasis on beauty can erode a child’s self-worth.
• [19:48]Kasey advocates for praising children based on effort, kindness, and other controllable actions to help build lasting self-belief.
• [23:06]Drawing a distinction between “strong boys” and “tough boys,” Kasey introduces the concept of “emotional bravery” as essential to raising emotionally resilient sons.
• [29:46]Kasey pushes back against the normalization of physical violence, pointing to its potential consequences, like incarceration and addiction.
• [37:52]Emphasizing autonomy, Kasey explains why supporting kids in pursuing their own goals is more effective than forcing them into unwanted activities.
• [40:19]Kasey underscores the importance of teaching children how to lose gracefully and avoid measuring themselves against others.
• [45:27]To close, Kasey offers her top takeaways for living a stellar life.

Jump to Links and Resources

About Today’s Show

Hey, Kasey. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. 

Orion, it is such a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much for having me on your show.

Yeah, I’m very excited. Before we begin, I would like to know your core story and how you started on the journey that led you to become the expert you are today.

I am the author of two parenting books that I co-wrote with my husband, Dr. Christopher Scanlon, focusing on raising girls who like themselves and bringing up boys who like themselves. When we first had our daughter, who is now almost 16, we felt so ill-equipped to be the parents she needed us to be. As we’re both researchers and writers, we decided to research how to be the best parents we could be. For me, Orion, I was really motivated by this really deep sense of growing up, never feeling like I was enough, and I carried that throughout my whole life, and I knew other women around me didn’t like themselves very much either. 

My goal was to figure out how to help my daughter develop a positive self-image.

My goal was to work out how I could raise my daughter to like herself. Because I knew that if I just raised her the way I was raised, in the way other girls were being raised, then we were going to get the same outcome, and I was also going to raise a girl who had a deep sense of inadequacy. Chris and I spent 10 years researching that project, and we created our own framework to raise our own daughter that way. Everything is evidence-based, and everything is achievable in a complex, busy life. We put it in the book, Raising Girls Who Like Themselves. 

Then, on the very day it came out, people started saying, “Well, what about boys?” Yes, of course, it was just that we’d focused on girls because we were the parents of girls. Then we turned our attention to researching Bringing Up Boys Who Like Themselves. We’ve got those two books, and I’ve just released a book this year called Goodbye Good Girl, Hello Me.

That’s actually my own journey of reparenting myself. As I did the research for Raising Girls Who Like Themselves, I could identify all the reasons that I didn’t like myself, and it was like being a fish swimming in water. I didn’t see what it was that I believed about myself that stopped me from feeling enough. But because I was looking at it as a researcher and looking at raising my daughter rather than looking at myself, it all became so clear. I’ve also written a memoir about how I’ve unpicked all those good girl beliefs and created new ones.

Nothing makes us more insecure than being a parent, and the reason it makes us so insecure is that we love and care so much, and we want to do the very best job that we can.

That’s amazing. Wow. I want to learn everything about everything you just mentioned. Let’s start with the girls, move on to the boys, and then ask the parents. You know, as a mom, I always have this guilt that I’m not doing enough, or other moms might be doing this better, or if something happened to my son, I’m like, “Oh, it’s my fault. It’s my fault he’s like that.” Actually, let’s start with parent guilt. How can we get over the guilt and into just being proactive or just giving ourselves some grace?

I think nothing makes us more insecure than being a parent, and the reason it makes us so insecure is that we love and care so much, and we want to do the very best job that we can. If we didn’t care so much, we wouldn’t be so worried about the job that we’re doing, right? 

Something that became clear to me in our research is that one of the reasons we feel so guilty about our parenting and worry about every little decision we make, as well as the teenage years. It’s because we have been sold the lie that it’s our job to create a perfect childhood. By that, I mean that our children are never upset and they never struggle, and that they’ll give us a gold star when they turn 18 and look back on our parenting and say, “Yes, I was happy the whole time, you did a good job.” 

It’s like we’re expecting some performance review, but that is not our job as parents. Our job is to raise functioning adults who don’t need us, and part of being a functional adult in the world is learning to deal with struggles and learning to cope with things that don’t go your way.

We need to shift our focus from never having a child upset to focusing on raising a child who is independent and resilient. But the other thing is, and this is one of the pillars we talk about seven foundational pillars that a child needs to like themselves, and this is the same for both boys and girls. It is the last pillar, and it is authenticity. 

A child who likes themselves must be allowed to be themselves, to grow up into the very best version of the person that they choose to be, not the one that we choose for them. We talk about stone parenting and seed parenting. There’s so much pressure in today’s society for us to be stone parents, and that is the idea that we have a vision of what the perfect child is like. We think it’s our job as parents to chip away at them and create this perfect child, and then we’ll get all this external validation. Society will approve. We’ll feel like we’ve done a good job. 

But the problem is that’s our vision of them and not their own vision. What we need to be is seed parents, and this is the idea that our children are this beautiful, precious, unique seed. We don’t know how they’re going to bloom, and we don’t know when they’re going to bloom, but that’s not our job. That’s their job. Our job is to create the right environment, including love, nurture, boundaries, and support, and then to stand back in wonder and love the child we have, not the one we thought we needed to create.

I get that as a mom. It’s about losing the need to control. We validate ourselves through our kids. If my kid is good, then other people think I’m good. It’s not even about the kid, it’s about us. It’s about our own childhood wound, I guess, inflicting upon our children. We need to heal our own need for validation so we can model it for our kids, and then we won’t have to put them in the same trap, the next generation.

It’s such a difficult thing to do, particularly for mothers, right? Because we are judged so harshly by society based on our children. It’s very normal for us to feel that way, but it’s about working out what our child’s job is, and what our job is.

Just one other thing, if I can add, there, Orion, that the thing that can really help us release the guilt is that it’s really very simple—what our children need from us most, and it’s the same thing that we all need most.

We need to shift our focus from never having a child upset to focusing on raising a child who is independent and resilient.

Our children need to be seen, accepted, and loved for who they are in this moment. They don’t want to have to win the race, pass the test, lose weight, or hang out with the popular kids. They want to be enough right now, and their self-worth is reflected to them through us. When we look at them and we see the beautiful, unique person that they are, and see that they’re enough right now, then they will feel that.

What does it mean for a child to really like themselves? How do you know if they do?

First of all, you have to be able to be yourself without constantly deferring to external measures. What is particularly true for girls and women as we grow up is that many of the rules we are taught are those intended to make us good girls. Girls and good women rely on external measures. “You’ll be good enough if everybody else likes you.” That’s an external measure. “You’ll be good enough if you’re beautiful.” Beauty is an external measure. It’s something that someone else decides. “You’ll be good enough if you get a mark. You’ll be good enough if you lose weight. You’ll be good enough if a man chooses you.” All of these things rely on someone else or an external measure. 

If you are relying on external things to like yourself, you will, by definition, be insecure. A fundamental part of learning to like yourself is what we call, in our book, a power perspective. This is the idea of learning how to think in a way that works for you, rather than against you. That you can’t always control the events in your life, but you can control the way you think about them, the stories you tell about them, and the next action that you take. 

A really simple tweak that every parent can use to teach their child that their opinion about themselves matters more than anyone else’s is what we call flipping praise. Now, our children will come to us about 6,000 times in their childhood, asking for praise. “Do you like my summer sculpture? Do you like my drawing? Do you like my dress?” 

That’s 6,000 times we can very subtly teach them that what they think matters most, instead of just giving our opinion freely. What we do when we praise them straight out is implicitly teach them that our opinion matters more than theirs, that we are the judge of their drawing and their somersault. Instead of doing that, just take a moment and say, “Well, it’s your work. I’m really interested in what you think. You tell me what you think.” That’s called flipping praise, and it doesn’t take any more time, right? Because we’re all busy, you just flip it, and 6,000 times in their life, they will learn that they’re the person whose opinion about them matters the most.

I know that. I learned that trick, and I find myself saying when he shows me something, I’m like, “Oh, it’s so pretty. What do you think about it?”

Also, everything that our kids do, we think is amazing. All out of our mouths. But it’s all about flipping the praise. They get to understand that. They get to be the judge, and if they like it, then you reinforce that and say, “Well, that’s fantastic, because it’s your work, you get to decide.” If they don’t like it, well, then you can say, “Well, let’s talk about what you’d like to do next time.”

What do parents do that can unintentionally destroy or demolish a child’s self-esteem?

All of this is unintentional, right? Because we are all doing the very best jobs we can. I think there are a lot of myths out there on how to build children’s self-worth, and one, particularly for girls, is about beauty. We think that a girl, in order to like herself, needs to believe that she is beautiful. The advice that parents get is that we should tell our children over and over again that they’re beautiful, and then one day, they’ll believe it, and then they’ll have high self-esteem, and then they’ll like themselves. Now, that was done to us, Orion, wasn’t it? People in our lives have told us that we’re beautiful. Advertising campaigns tell us we’re beautiful. 

On social media, there are memes all the time saying that we should love the skin we’re in, right? But most women’s body image is not great, and the reason is that if you tell a girl over and over again that she’s beautiful, she will naturally believe it is the most important thing about her. A girl will receive more compliments about her appearance than about everything else combined. She will believe that her beauty defines her worth in the world, and then she will go out into a world where she will never be beautiful enough. It is simply not possible to be beautiful enough in today’s world. 

We interviewed two supermodels who had terrible bodies, and I remember thinking, “Well, if you’re not beautiful enough, what hope do the rest of us have?” But as I said, beauty is an external measure, right? People will take it away. We’re setting our children up to fail when they build their identity on beauty that other people control.

We need to build our children’s identity on things that they can control, things that cannot be taken away from them, such as their creativity, character, kindness, persistence, and humor. One thing we can do to reverse the damage of building a girl’s, and increasingly, boys’ identity around their appearance is to dial down the beauty comments and talk more about what your child does, thinks, and who they are. 

If you are relying on external things to like yourself, you will, by definition, be insecure.

When we were researching Raising Girls Who Like Themselves, we found women—there weren’t many of them; we called them our ‘unicorns’—who had really positive body images, who didn’t worry about how they looked or whether they were being judged for it. They didn’t think about their weight. They just lived their lives. I remember feeling so envious of these women to have all this headspace free, that they weren’t constantly critiquing how they looked. All of those women had one thing in common: they all grew up in families that did not care about beauty.

But I care about beauty. I keep telling my son, “Oh, you’re so handsome.” I shower him with compliments. I know I’ve been told that this is wrong, not specifically by me, but by parenting experts, who say, “Don’t compliment them on their beauty. Don’t compliment them on their appearance.” But how do you even do it? It does not feel genuine. If I see that he’s dressed up and he’s so cute, I’m like, “Oh, you’re so cute.” How can I not? I just have to stop myself. What’s the balance here?

In our family, we made a rule that we would not talk about how bodies looked at all, good or bad. That was our rule. The reason for that is that my body image was terrible. I grew up in a family that was so focused on beauty, and I was overweight when I was a child and told I wouldn’t get a husband if I put on weight. 

Body image was such a big deal for me, and I didn’t want my girls to think that they owed the world beauty. I didn’t want them to think that I cared, so my girls know that I think they’re beautiful. They just know I don’t care about it. Of all the things that I love and value about them, beauty is not even on the list. Now, I know my approach is really extreme, but as I said in the interviews I did, one of the ‘unicorns’ said to me, “I can’t recall a single time when my parents told me that I was beautiful, they didn’t care about how I looked. They cared about whether or not I tried.” 

Because a trial is something that children can control, beauty is not. Actually, it disempowers our children, because they’re dependent on you to decide whether or not they are. You will decide that your boy is beautiful because you love him and you have his best interests at heart. But when he goes out into the world, he’s going to face people who will not think that he is beautiful, and particularly for girls, every single woman is going to have beauty taken away from them. If they think that their identity is based on being beautiful, they will not be able to like themselves.

What do you praise your daughters for?

For repeatable behaviors, for trying things that are hard, for displaying kindness, and for being funny. When we praise our children for things that they can control and do again, we are empowering them, because then they can decide to do that anytime they want. It also builds positive behavior. Whereas if you tell—so ‘beautiful’ we’ve covered, but same as if you praise your child for being smart. Well, being smart isn’t something a child can control either. If you praise your child for getting good marks at school, I mean, working hard can help, but they don’t actually always control those marks. If you praise them for trying hard, for making a mistake, learning from it and doing it again, then those are the attributes that build real self-esteem and self-belief.

If you praise your child for trying hard, for making a mistake, learning from it, and doing it again, then those are the attributes that build real self-esteem and self-belief.

I feel like the damage is done already. Where am I going from here?

I re-parented myself when I was 40. We can change these things if we decide to, I think, particularly for body image, because it’s such a difficult issue for women to deal with. Most of us have been scarred very badly by society and from our own families. But if we decide today that our girls are not going to learn body insecurity or our boys from our mouths, if we make that decision today, then our children will have so many more opportunities to build a positive body image than we ever did, so tomorrow can be a new page in your child’s life.

Yeah, I’ll do my best. I always do my best, and then I think that I don’t do my best. At the end of the day, we do what we can, right? We learn all this information. But sometimes I am pretty sure that a lot of “you’re so cute, you’re handsome, you’re smart” is going to come out of my mouth. But what about you know, is there a benefit to telling them that, or is it all negative?

If your child grows up in a family that really values beauty, and you don’t tell them that they’re beautiful, then that’s going to be a problem, right? But if you grow up in a family that doesn’t value beauty, then it doesn’t matter. For example, when I was a child, if they said, “You really suck at chess. You’re really bad at chess.” It wouldn’t affect my identity or my self-worth because I haven’t based myself and my value on whether or not I play chess. My family doesn’t value whether I play chess, so they will judge themselves on the things that we teach them to value, and it can be damaging if we teach them to value themselves on things they can’t control.

I totally get it. You wrote the book about girls, and you wrote the book about boys. What’s the difference in research between boys and girls?

Chris and I have girls. We’ve got two girls. We don’t have boys. We asked 15,000 parents what their biggest concern was in raising. 

Wow.

Yes. It was so amazing, Orion, the similarities in responses and what came back were that the number one concern was that parents did not want to raise their boy to be tough. They worried about raising their boy to be tough, but they worried even more about raising their boy to be weak. 

They worried that if they didn’t make him tough, he would be weak, and nobody wants their boy to be the one who gets slammed up against the locker or kicked in the stomach at lunchtime. So, we spent a lot of time researching that problem, and I have some really good news for boy parents, you don’t have to choose between tough and weak, because weak is actually a consequence of tough, and I’ll tell you what I mean. 

What we need to do instead is to raise strong boys. Strong boys are very different from tough boys. Strong boys have strength of character. For example, we teach tough boys to never show vulnerability. We teach them never to show weakness, never to back away from a fight. Well, if you can’t back away from a fight, then you are not very strong, are you? Because someone else is controlling your behavior. 

We all need to own the impact of our mistakes if we want to reconcile and have meaningful and intimate relationships.

The person who starts the fight has controlled you, so that’s actually weak. If you can’t admit that you’d made a mistake, then you cannot have a meaningful relationship with someone, because everybody in life makes mistakes. We all need to own the impact of our mistakes if we want to reconcile and have meaningful and intimate relationships. If we raise boys to never admit that they must make mistakes, never apologize, we are denying them the opportunity to have meaningful relationships, which is also making them brittle. 

What it also does is that we see with boys and men who have been raised to be tough is that they cannot handle difficult feelings, and their frustration. They can’t handle embarrassment. What they do is they offload their emotions with aggression or violence. They avoid their emotions by just not trying. We hear this a lot. People say, “My boy’s lazy.” 

There is no such thing as a laziness gene. It’s a boy who is afraid of the feeling of doing something hard and of failing. We know that boys who are raised to be tough, who do not have the strength of character to deal with their emotions properly, will not be able to reach their potential. To reach your potential in life, you must receive negative feedback, which doesn’t feel good. 

However, we need to teach our kids to handle those negative feelings and emotions so they can learn from their mistakes and achieve excellence or succeed in life. But the really good news is that the key to strength of character is what we call emotional bravery. The way that you build emotional bravery is the first step is simply naming it. The research shows that if you accurately name the emotion that you’re feeling, and it has to be accurate, you go most of the way to resolving it. 

Women know this instinctively when we catch up with friends after we’ve had a difficult day or a fight with our partner, or whatever, and we tell them about our problems. We call a friend. What we’re doing is accurately naming what we’re feeling to a safe person, and then we walk away feeling better, right? But very often, boys are not encouraged to name their emotions, and they can only name three: happy, sad, and angry. That’s not enough. 

You have to accurately name them. What we have in our book, and I’ll give you a handout, if you like, for your listeners. It’s called an emotion wheel. Print it out and put it on your refrigerator. When your boy comes home and he’s angry, is he angry, or is he jealous, or is he lonely? You encourage him to name that emotion, and in many cases, people’s parents fear that boys get angry. They’re worried about their boy’s anger. If he can name his emotion to a safe person, that will cut the anger off in many cases, before it escalates. However, the most important part is that it has to be a safe person, which means we, as parents, have to be okay with whatever emotions our children are expressing and whatever they’re telling us. If we shut them down, if we laugh at them, if we minimize them, or gaslight them, we’re not going to be the safe person that they need us to be.

That’s amazing. I love that. Naming the emotions, also. How do you go about even explaining the emotions? Like explaining jealousy, explaining some more complex emotions.

One thing to do is model it, particularly for boys. We need to model apologizing. We need to model failure. Many boys do not have a role model in their life who apologizes. Because in previous generations, men were taught that men don’t apologize, so they’ve never actually seen a man own the impact of his actions. They’ve never seen Dad fail. Talking about failure and how they’ve struggled, overcome, and succeeded is a really good story to have in the home. 

As parents, we must be open to the emotions our children express and the messages they convey to us. If we shut them down, laugh at them, minimize their concerns, or gaslight them, we won’t be the safe person they need us to be.

But you can also just catch your child in the moment, if they don’t get invited to the birthday party, instead of trying to fix it by calling the other parent, that’s an opportunity to say, “Gosh, you must be feeling really left out right now.” Or when friends are away on holidays and they’re at home by themselves, “Are you feeling lonely right now?” We can just, in everyday language, increase our boys’ vocabulary and our girls ‘ vocabulary. But this happens naturally with girls anyway, because the research shows we do speak more about emotions to girls, and girls have more role models of people who express their emotions, so particularly with boys, that is absolutely the key to raising a strong boy.

How do you teach your child to stand for themselves?

I’m going to share a really good technique with you. The other thing I want to say is that what we got back from the boy’s parents was that they didn’t know whether or not they should teach their boy to punch, to stand up for himself by using violence. Now, they didn’t think it was a good idea to use violence, but they also, as I said before, didn’t want their boy to be weak. They saw that he was getting bullied at school, and they didn’t know what to do. Now, the first thing I want to say is we should not be teaching our boys to do something as a child that could end up landing them in jail as an adult, because we will be creating patterns of behavior that could ruin their lives. 

Anyone who is encouraging their boys to punch is using an extremely risky strategy, because if he does that when he is twenty, he could end up in jail, or he could ruin someone else’s life and his own. The research also shows that physical violence, such as punching, does not have the outcome that parents think it does. It’s the kids who have been punched. They’re at a greater risk of being bullied again and more severely. We also know that boys who use physical violence are more likely to end up later in life with addictions, more likely to be in car accidents, and more likely to have broken relationships.

My goodness.

It’s a really bad strategy to encourage your boy at seven to punch back because he’s being picked on at lunchtime. But the good news is, it’s much better to use the right words rather than a right hook, and the research is quite compelling on this. It’s a comeback statement. When your child is being picked on, bullied at school, they need one statement, and they need to practice it with you at home, because delivery is really important, and it needs to be a statement that lets the other child know that they have seen what the child has done and they are not okay with it. Now the statement has to be a statement, not a question, and it also has to avoid getting them in trouble. 

We need to teach our children that they are capable of standing up for themselves, and we believe that they can do it right.

If a teacher hears them say it, they have to not get in trouble, so it can’t be rude or aggressive or a swear word, and the research shows that that is the most effective way to stop bullying. For example, a quick comeback could be, my daughter’s was, “Seriously?” Or “That’s not cool,” or “Good on you.” But it has to be something that your child picks so that they can say it with confidence. When they are picked on, they deliver their quick comeback and walk away, letting the other child know, “I saw what you did. I’m not okay with it.” This is also important for girls, because we often tell them to just ignore it. 

Do you really want to make such a big deal out of this that it corrodes your self-worth? Because if you don’t stand up for yourself, it’s really hard to believe that you’re worth it. Girls, just as much as boys, should be using this quick comeback statement. I heard from a mother just the other day that her boy was getting elbowed in the stomach three times a day to stand up in line, to go into class. He didn’t want to go to school because there was a kid in front of him who was elbowing him in the stomach. We taught him the quick comeback line. He did it once, and the kid in front of him was really surprised. The next time, he elbowed him again, this time at lunchtime, and the child gave a quick comeback, and that was it. The child said, “Wow, it didn’t happen again.” The last thing I heard from the mother was that the child was now being really nice to her son.

That’s amazing.

There are times when parents absolutely have to get involved with bullying, but wherever possible, we need to be teaching our children so that they are capable of standing up for themselves, and that we believe that they can do it right, and that is a really effective technique to use, not just in childhood, but also in adulthood, particularly women can really struggle with standing up for ourselves.

I like that. Next time somebody annoys me, I’ll be like, “Seriously.”

You must practice it with your child, because it needs to. They need to deliver it in the heat of the moment, and they need to deliver it with authority.

That’s amazing. So, when you talk to parents, what do you feel like parents struggle with the most when raising confident kids?

You do not build self-esteem from word presence. We cannot give our children self-esteem. Self-esteem grows from within, emerging from the fertile soil of independence and mastery.

I think one of the things is that body image is a problem. Another thing that we often get wrong is our generation. When I grew up, the research, common belief, and advice for parents was that we build our children’s self-esteem by telling them words that they’re wonderful, awesome, smart, clever, and the best, and then that will give them self-esteem. However, often, what that does is just give children impostor syndrome. You do not build self-esteem from word presence. In fact, we cannot give our children self-esteem. We can’t buy it, we can’t say it. We can’t give it. 

Self-esteem grows from within, emerging from the fertile soil of independence and mastery. The children who really believe in themselves, who have high self-esteem, are the children who can do life. Now, that doesn’t mean they win every race and have a cabinet full of trophies. It means that in day-to-day interactions, they know that they can handle themselves and that they can do things for themselves, and this is something that Chris and I got really wrong as first-time parents, because we don’t like to see our children struggle. It’s actually really hard to watch our children struggle. 

But what if our children don’t struggle? They don’t learn mastery, and they don’t learn self-esteem. For example, when our first daughter was in the playground and the equipment was too hard for her, she would struggle and get frustrated. We would come over and lift her, because we didn’t want to see our little girl unhappy. We actually taught her to be helpless. We got to the point where, when she was in front of something hard in the playground, she’d turn around to us and put her arms up, and so that’s what we did. We taught her not to even try for herself and not to believe that she could accomplish things herself. 

By the time our second daughter came along, five years later, we had been researching for five years. We knew that children had to build self-worth through mastery and independence, so we left Ivy to navigate the playground on her own, and when she was frustrated, we would talk to her and validate her feelings. “Yes, it is frustrating.” We problem-solved with her. “Maybe you could climb up the climbing frame another way. Why don’t you try the other side?” 

I remember one day when she climbed up on that climbing frame all by herself, the look of pride on her face, her self-worth and self-esteem, taking my breath away. I realized that every time I had rushed in to rescue my older daughter so she didn’t have to struggle, I was denying her the life-affirming feeling of self-worth and mastery. The rule we recommend for parents is to only do for your child what they cannot do for themselves; everything else, whether they want to or not, is about us saying to them, “I believe you can do it.”

Is it possible to create situations for kids that will help them master something or feel like they have mastery of something?

Yeah, so first of all, just everyday life. Let them tie their own shoelaces. Let them feed themselves. Let them speak for themselves. That is a really important one. We interviewed a school principal who did the intake interviews of four-year-olds. He could tell it for which kids were going to thrive socially and academically at school based on whether or not the parents allowed the child to speak for themselves and the parent, the child didn’t have to say anything even a full sentence, but just the fact that the parent allowed the child to speak for themselves was an indication of their mastery to come. 

But in terms of helping our child achieve goals and work towards things, it is a myth that we build grit by forcing our children to do things that they don’t want to do. Now I’m not talking about carrying your own school bag, cleaning your bedroom, eating, or whatever. I’m talking about forcing your child to play the violin if they hate it. We think that if we make our kids do something that they hate, we’re going to teach them grit and perseverance and how to succeed in life. That is not what the research shows. That teaches them to hate what they’re doing, to give it up as soon as they can, and not to get any intrinsic motivation or joy. 

We build grit in our children by supporting them in tackling difficult tasks to achieve their chosen goals.

The way that we build grit and achievement-focused children is to support them in pursuing a goal that they choose and encourage them to do the hard bits of that goal. For example, if your child wants to be a horse rider, they have to shovel the manure. In order to do the good bit that they really want to do, they have to do the hard, yucky bits they don’t want to do. The way we build grit in our children is by supporting them to do the difficult tasks in pursuit of the goal that they choose.

In my case, it’s picking up Legos. The whole place is full of Legos. But he’s like a little Lego master. The things he creates are amazing. When I think personally about my son, I know that he struggles with losing, and he struggles with thinking that he’s not the best. How can I get him out of that?

Learning to lose is actually a skill. We actually had our daughter struggling with losing, so we actually played poker with her, not with money, just with chips, because we knew she would lose, and we let her feel the emotion of losing. It’s okay to be upset, it’s okay to be disappointed. I see this in children’s sports. A lot of our kids will be disappointed that they lost, and we’ll go, “Oh, the other team cheated,” or “The referee was unfair.” What we’re doing is denying our children the opportunity to learn that they can cope with the difficult feeling of loss. The most successful people in life are not the ones who never lose. They’re not the ones who never fail. They’re the ones who fail and can endure the discomfort of failure and get up and try again.

I like it. What about not feeling like he’s the number one? Sometimes, if another child receives compliments, he thinks he’s less than because he didn’t get that compliment.

Holistically, change your focus of praise from trying to achieve. Then he’s not measuring his self-worth by a fixed standard if he doesn’t win, or if he doesn’t get something that another child has. The thing that you value is that he tried, that he did something hard, and that he was creative. Put all your focus on the thing that he can control, and then he will always be a success. The other thing I love is that these are also skills, right? You can teach your child over time to think in this way.

Awesome. 

Encourage children to congratulate and be happy for other children’s success.

Also, encourage children to congratulate and be happy for other children’s success. Model that. What we want our children to know is that they don’t need to take from someone else’s bucket in order to fill their own. When someone in my daughter’s school wins an award or a role she wanted, I will talk to her about it: “I know it’s disappointing and it really hurts, but let’s also be happy for your friend, and let’s go and congratulate them.”

We started playing games where I had the same conversation with him, and then he kind of forced himself to come and give me a hug when he lost. But now it’s much easier for him. I noticed. You know, I had this child after so much struggle, and I’m like, “Oh, my God. My gift from God. The thing that I cherish the most in the world. How can I put him in a bubble wrap and protect him from everything?” had to learn the hard way that, “Hey, I can’t protect him from everything.”

When I protect him from everything, I rob him of his lessons, and in Kabbalah, it’s called bread of shame. When you give somebody something without them even trying to get it, it’s way more damaging. It’s like giving a 15-year-old a Porsche without them even earning it. It’s a very spiritual path to be a parent and learn all these things. Additionally, everything that’s happening with our kids is a beautiful mirror into our own internal world and internal struggles. I feel like I’ve grown up as a person and as a woman, just because I had this beautiful child of mine. That taught me so many things. It’s seriously one of my greatest teachers. It’s unbelievable.

That’s beautiful to see as opportunities for us to grow, because then we can give ourselves grace when we make mistakes, right?

Our kids are within our aura until the age of 13, and they are connected to us. When we heal something within ourselves, we heal our lineage, not only our parents, but also our children. When I was struggling, I went to a healer, and she’s like, “Okay, you want to heal this in him, but we have to heal this in you, because when you’re healed, it’s gonna affect him. When you liberate yourself, it’s gonna liberate him.” It’s been such an amazing journey of growing up, actually having this child.

It’s wonderful for you to have the humility to do that, because it can be quite painful to look within and see what you need to heal in order to be the mother your child needs.

That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much. This was amazing. I can speak with you for another four hours, if you have that time. If you want to come back on the show and discuss this further, it would be amazing. Before we say goodbye for now, what are your three top tips to live a stellar life? And number two is, where can people find you?

My top tip—I talk about this in all of my books, and it’s particularly the case, I think, for mothers—prioritize friendship. We often think that friendship changes as we get older. First of all, for children, friendship is a skill. The children who have the best friendships are those with the best friendship skills. Therefore, if children are struggling with friendships, they need help developing their skills. 

It’s not that there’s something wrong with them or that there hasn’t been enough magic or serendipity; we can support our kids, but as adults, what we need is to prioritize friendship. Friendship is incredibly important to our physical and emotional health, and often, for women, we prioritize everything else first, leaving friendship to fall through the cracks. We need to flip that friendship. One of the most important things. That is one of my top tips: prioritize friendship. Call that friend you’ve been meaning to call for one month or six months, and you just haven’t gotten around to it.

I’ll do it today.

Motherhood can be incredibly hard and exhausting at times, and nobody can wound us like our own children can.

My other tip, which came from all of my research and applying it to myself, is that nobody is going to tell you the right words that you’re enough. Nobody’s going to give you permission to follow your dreams, do the things that you have always wanted to do, speak up or say what you want. We have to do that ourselves. It’s in the little decisions that we make every single day to be a little bit more courageous and a little bit more authentic than we were yesterday.

Amazing.

And you wanted three?

I would want number three, yes. The first one was to prioritize friendships and give yourself permission. And the third one is?

You know what it is. It’s sleep.

That’s a good one.

This is also for kids. If your child is struggling academically, struggling with regulating their emotions, struggling with eating, struggling with attention, focus on sleep. Everything becomes easier if your child is getting enough sleep. Many children are chronically tired because we don’t prioritize sleep, and this is also true for us as adults. The research is becoming more and more compelling that sleep is absolutely fundamental to every aspect of our lives. We deserve that—prioritize it for our children and ourselves.

I’m going to text my friends and go to sleep at 10 PM instead of 2 AM. That’s good. Thank you for that reminder. What you said just makes sense. It’s awesome, especially about friendships, because, as moms, you said, we try to put everyone first, and we don’t live in isolation. We don’t raise kids in isolation. It’s really healthy to have someone like you to validate our emotions and call out our emotions, too. It’s very, very healthy.

Motherhood can be so hard and so exhausting at times, and nobody can wound us like our children can. Every time that has happened to me when I’ve really felt like I’ve been on the edge, it has been a friend who has taken my hand and gently guided me back to safety. That is something that I try to do for the women in my life, and if we all did that to each other, I think life and the motherhood journey would be more enjoyable for all of us.

Where can people find you? 

You can find me at kaseyedwards.com. My books are available in bookstores and on Amazon, including Raising Girls Who Like Themselves, Bringing Up Boys Who Like Themselves, and Goodbye Good Girl, Hello Me.

Thank you so much for being here, and thank you for sharing all the wisdom with us. It was wonderful.

Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much for the opportunity to talk to you.

Yes, amazing.