Raise Resilient Kids

7 critical tips from the world's foremost expert.

Post summary

• Kids and teens are facing a mental health crisis.

• Due to my work, I receive many questions about how to raise resilient kids—but I don’t have kids!

• So I called one of the world’s foremost experts on what parents can do to raise resilient kids.

• Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg walks us through the seven tenets of building stable, competent, totally awesome humans. You’ll learn why you should:

  • Act how you want your kids to act

  • Be receptive, not judgmental

  • Be a mountain guide—not a helicopter

  • Not try to be your kid’s friend

  • Think 30 years ahead

  • Let kids be independent (but not stupid-independent)

  • Balance social media instead of banning it

Housekeeping

• This post, like all Monday posts, is free to all subscribers of Two Percent. But if you want full access to all three of our practical and useful weekly posts, join our tribe and become a Member:

• ICYMI:

  • On Wednesday, we covered five nutrition strategies for exercising in the heat this summer. They’ll help you feel more energized and get better results—whether you’re 88 or 18.

  • On Friday, we ran a live Q&A and covered whether Omega-3 supplementation is worth is, the problem with “surrogate markers,” home gym tips, three people I’d like to hang out with, and more.

• Check out GOREWEAR, the best endurance gear company on Earth:

  • GOREWEAR. I’m wearing GOREWEAR’s Concurve 2in1 shorts on the trail all summer. They’re comfortable in the heat and hold all my essentials (I was able to ditch my hip pack thanks to these shorts). Speed is security. EASTER gets you 30% off your first GOREWEAR purchase.

Audio version

The post

In The Comfort Crisis and Scarcity Brain, I show how character and capability emerge not from constant ease and comfort, but through facing and learning from life’s challenges.

With kids’ and teens’ mental health in crisis¹, I get many questions from parents about how they can raise resilient and capable children.

Parents want their kids to be safe and happy. But since the early 1990s, some researchers argue this well-meaning instinct is implicated in the youth mental health crisis. Think: Helicopter parenting.

One review² found:

Time-intensive parenting has now become a cultural norm and is pervasive, even across different social classes. It has also been argued that such intensive parenting is prevalent on a global scale and has harmful effects such as an increase in depression and anxiety. Thus, helicopter parenting is an important modifiable risk factor with regard to mental health.

The parents I speak to walk a fine line. They want to protect their kids but not overparent—creating anxious, under-equipped adults.

Of course, I can cite all sorts of resilience studies and offer reasonable suggestions.

But here’s the thing: I don’t have kids.

I don’t know what it’s like trying to apply my findings to a tiny human that holds my DNA, that I care deeply about, that I want to protect at all costs, and that may or may not want to listen to me.

So while I can look at the data without emotion, I also have no clue what parenting is actually like. No clue.

To get wiser answers for those of you who want to raise resilient children, I called someone who does have a clue. A big one.

Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg is a parent, pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He founded and directs The Center for Parent and Teen Communication and has spent decades helping parents raise strong, resilient kids.

He calls his approach Lighthouse Parenting. It has six decades of research and a whole lot of common sense backing it. He wrote a book on his ideas, called Lighthouse Parenting, which any parent should consider reading.

Here’s what he told me:

1. Act how you want your kids to act

Kids don’t learn by what we say. They learn from what we do.

“If kids see you as fragile, constantly flustered, or losing your footing every time you face a challenge, they’ll learn the wrong things and won’t come to you,” said Ginsburg.

Your move: Remain calm under pressure, have the bandwidth to support others, and demonstrate that you have strategies in place to take care of yourself.

This idea hinges on a concept called co-regulation, which has decades of data supporting it:

• One study³ found that kids who experienced co-regulation were more likely to have stronger emotional regulation skills, better attention, and fewer behavioral issues.

• Other research⁴ shows that it helps kids build stronger bonds with their parent. Those bonds then helped kids regulate stress, manage anxiety, and have higher social skills.

Ginsburg said, “When adults share their calm with kids, their kids learn how to find their own calm.”

Demonstrate tactics that help you: “Work out, pray, talk to a friend, journal, dance, whatever. If they see that you have strategies, then kids can come to you without feeling like they're going to be a burden,” said Ginsburg.

2. Be receptive, not judgmental

The question Ginsburg gets most often is, “How can I make sure my kid will come to me when they’re struggling?”

Ginsburg says there are two key tactics.

First, don’t judge. “Kids don’t come to parents if they think they’re going to lose them through judgment,” said Ginsburg.

But it’s not only that you don’t judge your kid. You have to demonstrate that you don’t judge others more broadly.

“Children observe how parents interact with other people,” said Ginsburg. “If parents overly judge others and engage in cruelty or divisive rhetoric, kids learn that disagreeing with someone leads to negative feelings or awful behavior. And they won’t come to you for fear you’ll do the same with them.”

Second, be receptive. Make sure your kids know you’re there for them whenever they need a sounding board.

Don’t force the conversations. Rather, give them reminders that you have their back no matter what and are always available.

3. Be a mountain guide, not a helicopter

Imagine two ways to summit a mountain: You can take a helicopter to the top or climb to it yourself with a guide.

The helicopter does all the work for you.

But the guide “shows you the ropes,” literally and metaphorically. She points out the safest path, ensures you’re not heading into imminent danger, and demonstrates the skills you need to climb the mountain yourself (so you can eventually go on to climb other mountains alone). With a guide, you still have to handle the hardship of climbing yourself, but you grow and learn along the way.

And so it should be with parenting.

When your kid faces hardship, “Don’t say ‘let me do this for you,’ because that implies that the child can’t do it themselves,” said Ginsburg.

Do the following:

1. Listen to your kid describe the problem they’re facing.

2. Reflect on what you’ve heard.

3. Ask them questions that will help them find their own solutions.

“If your child asks you for advice, you absolutely can share your wisdom and your experience, but you always need to recognize that your kid is the expert in their own life, and you need to remind them of that,” said Ginsburg.

He added, “I’m not saying your kid knows more than you or that you’re giving up your authority. I am saying that if you don’t understand the details of your child’s life, you’ll give advice that probably won’t be followed.”

4. Don’t try to be your kid’s friend

This one surprised me, so I prodded Ginsburg about it.

“If you ask a teenager what they want from their parents, they'll say, ‘I want them to be more like my friends,’” said Ginsburg.

But there’s a catch: “Kids live in absolute fear of losing their friends. Fitting in drives so much of adolescent behavior,” said Ginsburg. When you try to be a friend, it puts pressure on the child to please you.

“We need to let kids know their job isn’t to please us and that we’re better than their friends because they can never lose us—we’re going to be present during our kid’s hardest times and never reject them. And that is so much better than friendship.”

5. Think 30 years ahead

Too many parents are obsessed with one question: Is my kid happy and smiling right now?

And they act accordingly. If their kid gets sad, many parents immediately intervene to sate the sadness. If their kid gets bullied, they call up the school, the bully’s parent, and probably the United States military to stop the bullying.

Ginsburg says reactive approaches do more harm than good.⁵

“We need to stop asking if our kids are smiling right now and start asking, ‘Are our kids developing the strength of will, character, and skills that are going to make them awesome 35-year-olds?”

He pointed out that mental health isn’t about experiencing joy in the moment. “Mental health is about how you respond when life is not joyful.” When we solve problems for our kids, they don’t learn to respond productively and that hurts them later on.

“We want children who can manage life’s complexities, experience joy, find goodness in people, and respond to life’s inevitable stressors in a way that is healthy,” he said.

The takeaway: Help your kids learn from their feelings and use them as a tool for growth.

6. Let them be independent (but not stupid-independent)

The rise of helicopter parenting led to a backlash movement: Free-range parenting, which promotes as much freedom as possible.

“The truth is always in the middle,” said Ginsburg. “Of course your child needs to learn independence. Of course your child needs to make some mistakes and learn how to get back up. Of course your child needs to learn how to navigate the world—but this all needs to happen in a way that’s guided and safe.”

When I asked Ginsburg how a parent can find the balance, he said to use common sense. For example, if you live next to a busy road or in a dangerous neighborhood, you’ll need to find other methods beyond free time outside to teach skills. If you live in the country in safety, the outdoors can be a great teacher.

Be objective. Look at safety data. Wade in.

7. Offset social media use

Social media is like a hammer—it can be used to build things or bash things.

Ginsburg says banning it altogether can put up barriers. Instead, try to balance it.

“If a child is sleeping well, having family time, spending time outdoors, and engaging in lots of eye-to-eye conversation, their social media use is likely to be balanced with the real world, protecting against its dangers,” said Ginsburg.

He added that parents also need to teach kids that what gets posted online stays online—forever. Teach them that less posting is probably best.

Have fun, don’t die, raise awesome 35-year-olds,

-Michael

P.S. For more insights, check out Ginsburg’s book, Lighthouse Parenting.

1. See this WHO data: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-mental-health

2. Vigdal JS, Brønnick KK. A Systematic Review of "Helicopter Parenting" and Its Relationship With Anxiety and Depression. Front Psychol. 2022 May 25;13:872981. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.872981. PMID: 35693486; PMCID: PMC9176408.

3. Eisenberg, N., Spinrad, T. L., & Eggum, N. D. (2010). Emotion-related self-regulation and its relation to children’s maladjustment. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 6, 495–525.

4. Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books.

5. He also added that this question is creating a “an anxious generation of adults.”