Ep #100: 3 Ways to Raise Antifragile Children

Today is a super special episode because it is our 100th episode of the Raising Healthy Kid Brains podcast. And I have something special for you today because, if you’re a parent in this decade, you’ve probably struggled with this balance between the idea of gentle parenting and raising resilient children. How do we meet our kids with empathy and validation and emotional awareness and yet also continue to help them grow and become strong and resilient? I think I have some ideas for you. I’m excited to share this idea of how we prepare the child for the road and not the road for the child. It’s coming up right after this.

Welcome to the Raising Healthy Kid Brains podcast, where moms and teachers come to learn all about kids’ brains, how they work, how they learn, how they grow, and simple tips and tricks for raising the most resilient, kind, smart, compassionate kids we can. All while having lots of grace and compassion for ourselves, because, you know what? We all really need and deserve that, too. I am your host, Amy Nielson, let’s get ready to start the show.

Welcome to this amazing 100th episode of the Raising Healthy Kid Brains podcast. I am so honored and grateful that you’re here and that we’ve had this journey together and that we’ve had these amazing guests on and learned so much. I hope you’re learning. I certainly have. And this has just been such an honor to be a part of this.

One of the things I wanted to do today was talk about this topic that’s been coming up in my life over the last year to two years. And I think it’s something that’s so relevant to you and every other parent out there. I think any parent that’s alive right now is experiencing this question to some degree. And it’s been interesting because as some of you know, I was married about a year ago. And so we have these two different families coming together with somewhat different parenting styles. It’s been pretty smooth, honestly. It’s been really pretty good. But there’s definitely been things we’ve talked about and been trying to figure out together and discuss. And so, as a result, we’ve been listening to books and having conversations. And I want to share some of that with you because I bet you’re also having some of these conversations.

So, before we get all the way into it today, I just want to give you a scenario and I want you to be thinking about your response, okay? And then we’ll talk through what we’re going to talk about today and see if it changes anything and how that struggle feels.

So, imagine you have a child that doesn’t get invited to the birthday party that all the other kids in the class or all the other kids in the neighborhood got invited to. And this child is devastated. They are so hurt. They feel so poorly used, abandoned, all these hurt, sad feelings. What do you do? Now, probably everything inside of you is either feeling angry or wanting to fix it or whatever. And I just want you to sit with that discomfort for a second and imagine what you would do, and we’ll come back to the story in a little bit.

So, while we’re thinking through that and feeling that, I want to share a story with you that I came across in the book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. And he talks about scientists doing this really interesting experiment. They were trying to figure out what life could be like on Mars in a very controlled biosphere atmosphere. And so they have this completely controlled atmosphere, and they’re trying to grow plants, trees, all of these different things.

So they plant these trees, and in this completely protected, ideal, controlled environment, these trees are thriving. They are growing so fast. They are doing so well. And then all of a sudden, a couple years in, they start to fall down. They haven’t even reached adulthood yet, and these trees are falling down. And scientists are wondering what in the world is going on? Why are the trees falling down? What happened?

And as they dig deeper into the cause, what they discover is that trees out in the wild have something called stress wood formed into their bark. They have something a little bit different because those trees out in the wild are used to having to face storms and strong winds. And in order to compensate for this constant barrage attacking of the elements, they literally develop thicker skin or bark, right, thicker wood, this stress wood, which makes them stronger and able to stand up in storms. The root systems are also more deeply developed when they’re trying to stand up to pressure. And so what they discovered is that they had protected the trees in this biosphere from every storm. And in so doing, the trees never developed the strength to stand.

Isn’t that interesting? Now, Jonathan Haidt relates this to our children. And if we’re so anxious to protect them, which is our parental urge to do, right? We love these kids. We want to save them from pain. But if we’re protecting them from every storm, are we doing the same thing that the scientists did to these trees? So, we’re going to talk a little bit about antifragile and what that means, antifragile children. And then we’re going to talk about why it’s so hard to let kids struggle. And then I’m going to make a suggestion of three things that we can do to raise mentally strong, antifragile kids.

So, let’s start by talking about what is antifragility. So I get this term antifragile from a book by Nassim Taleb. The book is called Antifragile. And he talks about being antifragile is not just bouncing back. So, he talks about fragile, right? And fragile is something that just breaks under pressure, right? If we’re talking about you’re putting fragile over package you’re sending in the mail, and it’s saying if you drop this, it’s going to be very bad for it. It will break, right?

And then there’s a word that we hear a lot called resilient. We want resilient kids. Now, this was an interesting idea to me because I thought that was the goal. Resilient is great, right? We want resilience, right? I was actually on a field trip today with about, we had – the class that our daughter is in had 30 kids in it, and then there was another fourth grade class. Anyway, so we had probably 60 kids on this bus, and the bus broke down on the way to the field trip.

And so they pulled off to the side of the highway, and we’re sitting there stranded on the side of the highway, right, with all these kids that are missing their field trip, right, and don’t know what’s going on. And it was a little bit stressful. They’re wondering what’s happening and why are we stuck and when do we get to go and we’re hungry and we need snacks, whatever, right? And it was so interesting. We were stuck there for a while waiting for another bus to come rescue us. And then of course we had to get all the kids out on the side of the highway and get them into the other bus.

And anyway, the teachers did something so beautiful at the end and they said, “Okay, we’re going to shoot a video of ourselves and we’re all going to say, We are resilient.” And so all the kids yelled, “We are resilient.” And I love it, right? It’s so healthy. It’s so good.

But Nassim Taleb says there’s another level. Resilient withstands pressure, right? So fragile breaks under pressure. Resilient withstands pressure, which I thought was really good. But he says there’s actually a different level, and that is antifragile. Antifragile grows from pressure. Okay, so going back to the glass thing, if you have glass in a box and you’re shipping it, fragile, don’t do this. Resilient would be, okay, you could do some stuff to this box and it’s going to be it’s going to stand. It’s not going to break. It’s probably going to be fine.

The idea of antifragile is you should do some stuff to this box. Rough it up a little bit. It will actually whatever’s inside is going to become actually stronger from the movement, from a little jostling, from whatever. So I’m thinking butter, right? You put butter in some cream and some thing, right? The more you work that butter and do things to it, right? It churns it and it turns into butter, right? So that idea doing things to it actually makes it what it’s supposed to become, right? So that’s the idea in my head that I had around this.

But isn’t that interesting? He talks about from Greek mythology, the Hydra, right? The Hydra where you chop off one head and it grows multiple heads in its place, right? So literally damaging it makes it stronger, right? This idea. Now, how cool would it be if we could help our kids to take on that mentality? Not just that they’re good at bouncing back and that they’re resilient, which is good, right? I think that is a good thing.

But what if they could actually feel that when hard things come, because they will. It is the most consistent thing in any of our lives. We will face hard things. What if they knew going into that hard thing that it was going to be hard? And that they were going to be okay. But not only that, but there was a way that they could find some way to make that work for them. And that they could grow from it and be stronger.

Wouldn’t that be something really valuable for our children? And of course, it doesn’t apply in every situation. There are some horrible things that are really impossible or so long lasting that maybe this doesn’t apply in every single situation. But I think it pretty widely applies to so much of what happens in our lives.

So, if we’re talking about our kids and imagining them as these trees that need resistance to properly grow so they can stand on their own in adulthood. Why is it so hard to let kids struggle? Why is it so hard? Let’s talk about a couple of things. Here’s one that is a new idea that I heard from Dr. Amen. And I heard this quote and oh, it struck home, guys. Listen to this.

If you do too much for your children, you’re increasing your self-esteem by stealing theirs. Oh. Does that hit? Let me repeat it. If you do too much for your children, you’re increasing your self-esteem by stealing theirs. Don’t you ever want to help a kid if they’re struggling to tie their shoe, if they’re trying to cook something and they’re not sure exactly what they’re doing or they’re measuring it wrong or they’re whatever it is, right? They’re having a hard time, they’re not quite doing it right, they’re struggling.

You can tell and you know how to do it and you want to do it for them and be that awesome parent that can fix things. You’re such a fixing parent. You’re so good at that. And you can fix it for them. And yet, by doing so, you’re keeping them from building the confidence, the self-worth, the self-esteem of being able to do it on their own. And ultimately, do we want our kids dependent on us for everything? We don’t. We want them to know that they’re capable, that they can figure it out. That it might be messy and they can still figure it out and it might not be the first time and that’s okay and they can figure it out.

And so, consider that one. Is part of it this thing where we validate ourselves as parents and feel better parents because we have the ability to fix things and do things our kids can’t do? And if we do them for them, somehow that makes us feel we’re a better parent somehow. And is that really true or is it, does it mean that maybe we’re preventing our child from growing by doing something that’s keeping them from building their own self-esteem?

Let’s talk about another one. What if a kid is completely failing at something that’s actually important or having a meltdown, right? Meltdown at a grocery store. Let’s go for that one. Right? If your kid’s having a meltdown, they’re so upset. They are not emotionally regulated. You can’t logic with them right now. They’re out, right? What are your instincts? And we talked about this earlier, this idea of that the birth, your child’s not invited to a birthday party.

Let’s talk about three parental instincts that we have. There’s three. We want to rescue. We want to rescue this kid that’s struggling or that’s feeling, they weren’t invited to the party or they’re upset or whatever. They’re having a hard time completing their project or building their tower and they can’t get it to work right. We want to rescue, okay?

Second one, we want to distract. Oh, this one hit home. I’ve totally done this before. If you ever kid get really upset about something and you’re like, “Ooh, what if we go home and we do this,” right? And they’re so upset because they don’t want to leave the park, right? And you’re like, “What if we go home and we get to go have a popsicle or something like that?” And we’re trying to distract them from the feeling they’re having, the upset, the emotion that they’re having in wherever they’re at, right?

And then a third one, fixing things. We want to fix it. We want to fix all the things that are hurting our kids or that are causing them distress or pain or anything like that. Now, part of this is our own fear, right? Maybe we’re afraid of being judged if our kid is having an emotional outburst at the store. Maybe it’s our own emotional discomfort, this big emotion that they’re having makes me so uncomfortable. How do I fix the discomfort that I’m having? And the way that I fix that is by fixing the discomfort that my child is having and then I can feel better because it’s so uncomfortable to watch your kid hurt.

I have kids from elementary school all the way into adulthood now. And watching your kids hurt is so painful. It’s so hard to watch your kid hurt. And you want to fix it. You want to rescue them. Sometimes you know you can’t necessarily rescue or fix it, so you want to distract them from it, right? Let’s go out for ice cream. Your boyfriend and you broke up. Let’s go out for ice cream. And to some degree, right, it’s not necessarily that going out for ice cream is bad because maybe we go and we talk and we sit in the pain that they’re having and discuss and support and love.

And I think that’s different than trying to pretend it didn’t happen or make it go away by shiny object other syndrome, right? But think about the next time this happens, if you’re feeling you’re going into rescue, distract, or fix, what’s happening inside your own brain? And is this something that’s truly helping your child grow that bark, right, that extra strength? Or is it something that you’re trying to Band-Aid fix to help your own feelings feel better because it’s hard to watch your kid suffer?

Now, I love Brené Brown. We’ve talked about her before, but she has this thing that I’ve brought into my life the last few years that is so amazing. And she talks about not trying to fix and make all their feelings go away, right? And not trying to avoid them because they’re so big and hard and sad. But to sit in the dark with them. And I love this concept so much.

I actually felt people did this for me when I was going through a very difficult divorce. And they couldn’t necessarily fix anything. There was no fixing that they could do. There was very little they could do at all except for come and sit in the dark with me. And because I’d learned this concept, I’m now able to do it for other people.

I have a dear friend whose mother passed away and she was best friends with her mother, and it’s been so painful. And I know that I can’t fix it. I don’t have words to make that better. I can’t take her out to lunch and it’s all better, right? There are things I can do to be a supportive good friend, but the reality is that is going to be painful for a long time. While she’s working her way through it, whatever her grief journey looks like. But what can I do? I can sit in the dark with her. Not afraid of the emotion, not hiding from it, sit with them.

When I have a teenage daughter who’s trying to figure out hard things, right? Auditioned for a choir. Was really working so hard for months to get into this particular choir that she really wanted. Knew it was a stretch but really wanted to be in this one. And didn’t quite make it into that one. Made it into a different one and it was so hard. And I don’t have a quick fix for that.

What can I do? I can sit with you. And I can say, “I know that you have whatever you need inside you to figure this out.” And I don’t know exactly what that’s going to look like. But what I can do is be here with you while you figure it out. And you can and you will. I know you will. I don’t know exactly what it’ll look like, but you will. And I’m going to be here with you through the hard part, and I’ll be here with you to celebrate at the end. And so we can sit in the dark with them.

Now, what does that say to a kid? That says, “This isn’t too big for you, and it’s not too big for me.” Right? This is a hard thing, but you can do this. You have everything inside of you to do this. I have confidence in you. I believe in you. Which then gives them the confidence to have belief in themselves instead of us trying to fix it. Oh, that’s so unfair. I’m going to go talk to the choir director. I can’t believe he would choose other people to do this and whatever. And it’s we’re taking away their power to figure this out. So instead, we sit in the dark with them. And we be there for that entire process while they figure out that emotion.

I love the idea from Brooke Castillo. She talks about – she’s a life coach and has an amazing podcast. And she talks about this idea of a 50/50 rule, that life is pretty neutral, right? And it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor or if you feel fat or skinny or all these different whatever, wherever you’re at, young or old, life is about 50/50. You’re going to have about 50% positive emotions and 50% uncomfortable ones. And that’s how it’s going to be. And the kind of uncomfortable feelings change depending on where you’re at, right? But it’s about 50/50.

And so discomfort is truly unavoidable. It’s going to happen no matter where you are, what you’re doing with your life. And so she says, “If I know that I’m going to have about the same amount of discomfort, no matter what I’m doing. The only real choice I have is I can maybe have some impact on the types of discomfort that I feel.” And she says, “I would rather have discomfort that comes from growth than the discomfort that comes from avoiding growth.” From hiding from it, from being afraid to try, the discomfort that comes from growth.

Now, as I’ve worked and shared this with my kids, it’s really powerful because, right? I think I almost grew up with a mindset around you’re supposed to be happy. If you’re not happy, you’re doing something wrong. Well, what does that tell our kids when they’re not happy all the time? Right? That either it’s impossible to be happy or that there’s something wrong with them because they’re not happy all the time.

What if instead we said, “You’re not going to be happy all the time no matter what you do.” That’s not the goal. The goal is being willing to face any emotion, right? Being able to be okay in whatever emotion is coming, to feel it, let it happen, and let it go. And so you’re cycling through different emotions. And what we want to have are these waves, right? We’re not trying to be happy all the time. If you can imagine a bar, right? We’re going up and down and up and down. And that’s actually good.

And we think that sounds really bad, but that’s because there are outside of the boundaries up and down that are not healthy, right? You can go way high, like a manic type of thing that’s really not healthy. And then you can go extremely low, depressed, which is also not good. But being somewhere in the middle, it’s almost a heartbeat. If you watch heartbeats, right, on the monitors in the hospital, right? And you’re going, there’s these things that go up and down, up and down, up and down within a range. That’s exactly what we’re supposed to be doing.

That means you’re feeling a full range of emotion, of healthy emotion within a healthy range. That’s what we’re going for. We want kids to not be afraid of that, to feel confident in that. That they can experience discomfort and it’s okay. In fact, that probably means that they’re alive and that they’re living life and a part of it, and it’s really normal. And, oh my goodness, what if we could be antifragile and grow from it?

I feel it’s almost sticking it to life sometimes. Whatever you throw at me, I’m going to find a way to make it not just happen to me and have it work for me, right? And so it’s almost a challenge. How am I going to make this work for me, right? Bring it. Not really, because don’t send me any more crappy stuff. But also, when you do, I’m going to be ready and I’m going to find a way to make it work for me.

So, let’s talk about three things. Let’s talk about this antifragile growth path, okay? What are three things that you can do, right, to really help your kids develop this strong, antifragile ability? So, let’s start with number one. Connection before correction. Okay, connection is so valuable because it’s really hard to have influence when you don’t have a relationship. When you have a strong relationship, you have much more impact, right? Relationship gives you proximity, right, which is going to be super impactful, and trust, which is also massive for being able to share something and teach something. So connection, super, super important. Nothing works without relationship.

Now, here’s something that I learned from Dr. Becky that I love, love so much. She talks about the importance of having empathy and being able to validate feelings that children are having while maintaining boundaries, right? Being the sturdy parent, she calls it, right? So we’re able to see their emotions, talk about their emotions, name their emotions, have empathy for how they’re feeling, right? Validate that this is something that they’re feeling right now, and then also have very strong boundaries. Kids actually value that so much. It makes them less afraid because they know someone is in control.

For example, I was telling you the story about on the bus today. If the teachers on the bus are panicking and freaking out and, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know what’s happening, right, blah, blah, blah.” And it would quickly turn to chaos on this bus, right? At the same time, ignoring the fact that we’re parked on the side of the road is not going to work. The kids know we’re stopped. They know this isn’t normal. They don’t know why we’re sitting here staring at sagebrush and not driving on the bus.

And so when we can validate, right, this fact that yes, we are, it’s weird that we’re over here on the side of the road and that we’re stuck. And that’s probably a little uncomfortable and it’s scary and it’s a little sad because we’re missing part of our field trip and that’s so uncomfortable. And that’s just real. Yet, we’re not going to scream and we’re not going to get off the bus and we’re going to have a calm response to this, right? We’re going to wait for the new bus to come. And then give them an activity to do that was within boundaries, right? So it provides such a safety net for these kids while also recognizing and acknowledging how they feel. It’s very powerful. And of course, that messaging, “You’re right. This is hard.” And guess what? You can do hard things, right? And that’s so empowering to children. Okay, so number one, connection before correction.

Number two, let them feel it. Okay? Emotional strength doesn’t come from feeling good all the time, right? Just trees don’t get strong from not having any pressure on them ever, right? They fall over, right? Emotional strength doesn’t come from feeling good. It comes from knowing that you can handle feeling bad or uncomfortable and still be okay and still move forward. There’s a quote that I love from Brooke Castillo. And she says, “Confidence is being willing to face any emotion.” Isn’t that powerful?

What if your kids weren’t afraid of rejection? They’re willing to face it. It’s not comfortable. They don’t want to be rejected, right? If they’re going to go try out for the play, they don’t want to be turned down. They want to get the part, but they have confidence to go in and do it because they’re willing to face that feeling of rejection, that sadness that comes if they didn’t get what they wanted, right? That disappointment, they’re willing to face that emotion. Right?

Confidence is being willing to face any emotion. If we can help our kids be willing to face that instead of trying to protect them from it, right, to fix it, to rescue, right? And instead we sit in that discomfort with them and we acknowledge it and we’re willing to feel it as parents. And help them experience it and help them learn how to experience it well, and then be able to move forward.

Now, coming along with this, feelings are okay, right? We’re teaching kids feelings are okay, right? And they are welcome. But not all behaviors are okay, right? And this is where we come back to that having empathy and validation with boundaries, right? You can have those feelings, we can talk about them, experience them, but also we’re still going to behave in a way that’s acceptable, right?

And here’s the boundaries for that. Okay? So I love that. Normalizing feelings that are really uncomfortable, right? Anger, sadness, fear. And teaching them that our goal is to navigate these, not avoid them, right? Avoiding does not work. They are coming. They will be there. They are in your future. If you try to teach them how to avoid them, you’re setting them up for this pattern of avoiding for the rest of their life, which will not serve them. So instead, we teach them to navigate them, not avoid.

Okay, so we’ve been through one, connection before correction. Two, let them feel. And number three, allow affordable mistakes. I really like this. From Dr. Amen, he says, “Hey, we got to let kids experience failures when the stakes are low, right?” What if they could start experiencing failures when they’re small and manageable and low? When they’re young, we let them do things that we know that they are not really going to be super good at yet.

Sometimes my kids just want to do something, I’m like, “Oh, that is such a bad idea,” right? Maybe they’re trying a recipe and they want to completely change it up and put things in there that are not going to work. And I can try to give a little bit of advice around it. But I also try to hold back and not be, “This is never going to work. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. I’m not letting you do this.” Because when I let them do it, guess what? It doesn’t work. And then they’re frustrated. And then we have a conversation about why it didn’t work. And guess what? That learning right there, super valuable.

It also is, “It’s okay to fail.” It’s okay because you learn something. This one was an affordable mistake, right? We can make this one. And then they’re learning how to make mistakes, how to navigate the feelings of failure and frustration and all of those things on a manageable scale, right, while also learning, “Okay, that didn’t go well. This is really uncomfortable. Now, what can I get from this? What can I gain and take away that’s going to be better?”

So let’s give an example, right? What if your child forgets their homework? This has happened to me before. Raise your hand if this has happened to you. Oh my goodness. Your child was working on a project, doing their homework, and they forgot it at home. Now, in this scenario of affordable mistakes they might call you. This has happened to me. Is this ever happened to you? They call you and they say, “I need you to bring me my homework,” at school. And if you don’t, then I might not get the treat that everybody gets at the end of the week, or I might not get this or that or whatever. And they want you to come rescue them.

And we’re like, “Rescue, rescue. I can be an amazing super mom. I come rescue. Or I can fix this.” Right? They’re going to be so sad if everyone else gets that treat or that surprise and they didn’t. And we want to fix it. And I’m not going to tell you what the answer is here, but I want you to think about all the things we’ve talked about today and what might be the right option for you here if you’re trying to help build resilience, if you’re helping them build cause and effect, that there are consequences to choices. Is this an affordable mistake that they can make that is it uncomfortable enough that they’re going to learn to not do this anymore? They’re going to remember stronger because learning is really much more powerful when it comes with a really uncomfortable emotion afterwards.

So talking about these three ideas, what gets in the way? Right? I think there is so much modern parenting pressure, perfection. Our kids have to have perfect grades. Oh my goodness, if I don’t take their homework, they’re not going to have a perfect grade. And then that’s going to make me look bad. That makes them look bad. This is going to affect them forever. Even if it’s we’re still in first or second grade. I don’t know. We’re stressed, perfection. Maybe safety obsession.

Oh my goodness, my kid can never, ever get hurt. Do we keep our kids from being able to have normal experience, like learning how to use their body, how to maybe fall correctly, how to be able to climb and be able to do things, navigate and use their bodies correctly? If we’re always trying to protect them from anything that might possibly someday be able to hurt them. Now, again, going back to affordable, there’s some things we want to protect our kids from, right? There’s some things that are too dangerous to let our kids have some freedom around.

But we’ve talked about this in an episode with one of my guests that maybe we’ve gone too far on safety obsession and protecting them so much that they’re actually not even learning how to use their bodies correctly and that they’re not being able to experience the world in ways that would be very, very healthy for them.

And then there’s this idea of control. Somehow we feel we’re going to feel better if we’re in control, and our brains haven’t figured out yet that we’re really not in control. And so we’re always trying to get control. And so if we feel we can have control, then we’ll feel better even though that’s not really how it works. So, those are some of those things that get in the way.

I think another set of things that can get in the way, right, is burnout, overstimulation, all these things where we’re tired and we’re overwhelmed, we’re overstimulated, all these things that might make us more reactive. So either we’re getting upset too easily and taking over, right? We don’t feel we have the time to play this out and work through this and help them build these skills. We want to get in and fix it and be done. This has totally happened to me. Oh my gosh, it is so much easier for me to go do it correctly than to try to help you do it four times or let you make your mistakes and then try to come back and fix it, whatever. And so, noticing that. And again, not around perfection, but working towards helping them become what we’re trying to help them be.

I want to wrap this up with this idea that hopefully this is permission for you to stop chasing perfect parenting. We’re not having to be perfect. It doesn’t all have to be perfect. We don’t have to be in control all the time. That’s not even real, right? And instead, what if we focused on raising resilient or even antifragile, responsible, real humans with real emotions that have all the emotions and are able and willing to navigate them instead of trying to avoid them.

If you could take one thing away from this episode, I would have it probably be this: Discomfort does not necessarily mean danger. Sitting with our children in their darkest feelings teaches them that they’re never alone and that they are stronger than they might know. Have the most amazing rest of your week. Thank you for coming and supporting this podcast.

Share this if you want to with someone that you care about that also has kids and that’s maybe having some of these same questions around that balance between emotionally supportive parenting and boundaries and structure and resilience, because it’s a tricky one. And it’s really relevant, I think, to us right now. Thank you for joining me, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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