This Is What You're Getting Wrong in Parenting

This Is What You're Getting Wrong in Parenting

How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety when parenting still has to happen every single day? This episode from The Brain Warrior's Way Podcast speaks straight to mums and dads who love their kids so much they’re accidentally doing everything for them. Drawing on their own family story, Dr Daniel Amen and Tana Amen talk about the common trap of “helping” children by rescuing them from every bump in the road.

As they put it, many parents are “doing way too much for them, thinking that is love, but it is not.” You’ll hear how homework battles with their daughter Chloe completely shifted once Tana took a Parenting with Love and Logic course and stopped making Chloe’s homework her own responsibility.

Instead of nagging, Tana calmly told seven-year-old Chloe, “If she was okay with the consequences of not doing her homework… that was her choice.” Chloe stormed off, then came back twenty minutes later and did the work on her own – and that was the end of the nightly homework war. The same principle applied to forgotten lunches, jumpers, and school books: Chloe experienced “affordable consequences” while the risks were still small.

The episode lays out the Love and Logic four-step process for helping kids solve their own problems: start with empathy, hand the problem back, offer options only if they ask, and then step aside so they can choose within clear boundaries.

The message is simple but challenging: self-esteem comes from self-efficacy, “a sense of personal agency or feeling competent and in control of their own destiny.” If you’ve ever found yourself doing your child’s life for them, this conversation might nudge you to pause, breathe, and ask a new question: “What do you think you’re going to do?”