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172. Are Parents Stealing Their Kids' Self-Esteem? | Character Is Built Through Struggle
55 Plays9 days ago
A brain surgeon recently shared a powerful observation:
"If you do too much for your kids, you build your self-esteem by stealing theirs."
That one sentence sparked one of our favorite parenting conversations.
Why do parents feel compelled to rescue their children from every disappointment? What happens when we remove every obstacle from our athlete's path? And how do we help our children become resilient without abandoning them?
In this episode, Shad Martin and Dustin Smith discuss why struggle isn't the enemy—it may be one of life's greatest teachers.
If you're raising athletes (or future adults), this episode is for you.
Eyes Up. Do the Work.
00:32:17 - Introduction
00:32:47 - The Brain Surgeon's Quote
00:34:32 - Why Parents Naturally Want to Protect Their Kids
00:37:37 - Helicopter Parenting vs. Bulldozer Parenting
00:40:27 - Are We Protecting, or Preventing Growth?
00:44:02 - The Difference Between Harmful Pain and Productive Struggle
00:47:32 - Helping Instead of Rescuing
00:50:37 - Sports as a Laboratory for Resilience
00:53:17 - The Frozen Peach Tree Story
00:56:37 - When Protection Becomes the Problem
00:59:12 - Practical Advice for Parents
01:01:32 - Final Thoughts: Eyes Up. Do the Work.
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Credits: Hosted by Dustin Smith
Produced by E4A and IMAGINATE STUDIO
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Transcript
Introduction to Empowerment through Sports
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Especially for Athletes podcast, where we explore essential principles that empower athletes to learn life's most valuable lessons through sports.
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome everybody to the Especially for Athletes podcast.
Insights from a Brain Surgeon on Parenting
00:00:19
Speaker
I'm Dustin Smith here with Shad Martin and excited to do what's going to be a a quick, short, very yeah to the point podcast today. We're going to do this in about 15 minutes. So please hang in there to the end. It's it's an important podcast. The video that we're going to share right now is from ah a brain surgeon. I don't know that we've used a lot of videos from brain surgeons, but it's ah it's an interesting one. you You played it for me, Shad, and I immediately said, we need to talk about that. So we're going to play it right now. Listen to what this brain surgeon has to say, then break it down a little bit.
00:00:56
Speaker
Today, parents do way too much for their children. And they steal their self-esteem. I often say, if you do too much for your kids, you build your self-esteem by stealing theirs.
00:01:12
Speaker
yeah And you're going to be tempted
00:01:19
Speaker
because you're going to have such love for them. You don't want them to hurt. And that's a mistake. Because character is built through struggle.
00:01:36
Speaker
All right, Shad, here's my initial thoughts
Balancing Protection and Learning in Parenting
00:01:38
Speaker
on that. I've said this hundreds of times in auditoriums, speaking with especially for athletes. And I and i i put myself, everybody that's a parent is guilty of this. And I don't know that it's a necessarily a bad thing.
00:01:54
Speaker
it's It's not intentionally meant by us to be a bad thing, but I think it is a bad thing for our kids that we have to be aware of. And that is this. our One of our jobs as parents, we're supposed to raise our children, protect them, nurture them, feed them, put a house over, you know, a roof over their head. All these things that were're supposed to do as parents.
00:02:14
Speaker
If you sum that up, it's to keep them safe, right? it's to and And to teach them, love them. but keep them safe, protect them. So when they're in a situation where we can't necessarily be there to protect them, they're on a basketball court,
00:02:29
Speaker
And they're they're missing shots or they're they're in a baseball game and they're they're pitching and they're having a hard time throwing a strike or they're in a football game and they're dropping passes. And we can't go catch it for them or we can't go pitch for them or call the strikes or the ball. The ref's doing something that may or may not be what we agree with. We can't control
The Role of Sports in Building Resilience
00:02:48
Speaker
that.
00:02:48
Speaker
We see our kids struggling. As parents, we recognize that better than anybody, and we immediately are gonna feel a sense of pain. And and then we're gonna have that switch go off in us is that is, I have to protect my child and stop this.
00:03:06
Speaker
And that's tough because we can't stop it, unless we go to extreme measures to try to um cover up by either and by either doing something at a game or at a practice,
00:03:21
Speaker
to fix the situation, screaming and yelling or or you know grabbing a coach and doing yelling at an umpire, trying to manipulate or or fix the issue to protect our kid. And in doing so,
00:03:34
Speaker
embarrass our kid, embarrass ourselves, maybe even, maybe even complete our objective of making it easier for our kid, but at the cost of our kid, not learning how to get through that struggle and learn the resiliency or after the fact being with our kid and making an excuse or covering up for them by blaming somebody, you know, and, and, and and and what I say to parents is that our job is to love and, and, What we do sometimes is we love them so much that we we don't just protect them a little bit. We completely shield them from everything that's difficult and hard.
00:04:16
Speaker
And in an effort and then say, well, that's what i'm I'm a good parent. Like my kid isn't hurting anymore. They're not crying anymore. They're not sad in the back of the car because I fixed this and it's the coach's fault that they lost. It's the umpire's fault. it's it's It's Johnny's fault. He made an error at shortstop. And that's why you, you, it's not you. And in doing so, our kid doesn't hurt as much. And then we maybe feel this sense of, okay, i did a good job as a parent.
00:04:41
Speaker
I stopped the hurt from my child. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah, we did, i guess. But in doing so, I think where we're loving our kids so much and doing such a good job of protecting them and loving them.
Bulldozer Parenting and Its Consequences
00:04:57
Speaker
Every one of our kids grows up in a house right now and drives in a car right now that is nicer than the house we grew up in. They have luxuries and comforts that we as kids dreamed of that's just a regular thing for them.
00:05:09
Speaker
and And now they have this one thing that can be hard and difficult and struggle that they've got to crawl and scratch and figure out how to get through. And we swoop in and it's it's like you the quote you've heard before. It's not heerop hellerop helicopter parenting anymore.
00:05:25
Speaker
It's bulldozing parenting. We're just bulldozing everything out of their way so it's easy for them to follow. We're not helicoptering over the top and watching and occasionally hopping in. We're just bulldozing it out of the way and let the kid. We want to be as easy as possible.
00:05:40
Speaker
And so in in in doing so, were cutting their legs out from under them and actually making them weak, taking the Teflon that they needed to learn how to put on, the shield that they needed to learn how to develop to withstand these arrows of life. We're doing such a good job of taking them on ourselves that then when this experiment of sports is over,
00:06:04
Speaker
or high school or whatever is over, kids are going out in the real world and they don't have any shield on them at all. And so when those arrows start coming and mom and dad can't protect them, we have kids that are being just struck down by them and they don't know how to handle it. And that's it that's happening. like there's We all know that. Less resilient young adults.
00:06:22
Speaker
And why? i think this is part of it because we're doing such a good job of protecting that we're actually hurting our kids in the long run. And that's what he was, I think, talking about, right? And in doing so, building our own self-esteem while i'm a good parent.
00:06:38
Speaker
okay, but they're not learning how to get through things and then they're therefore not prepared to deal with them later. And what's the result of that going to be? Is they're going to struggle later because we can't fix all their problems forever. They're going have to at some point. Would you rather them learn how to do it in a baseball game or a write a ah ah softball game or volleyball match or in a job, right? Or as a parent, is ah in real life stuff, right? And so anyway, that I went on
Understanding Pain and the Value of Struggle
00:07:05
Speaker
quite a bit there. But what what are your thoughts, Chad?
00:07:07
Speaker
No, I totally agree. I mean, when he said that, if you do too much for your kids, you build your self-esteem by stealing theirs. That hits, man. that That's like, yeah, i I want to be validated as a good parent.
00:07:22
Speaker
And sometimes it's hard to view good parenting as taking a step back and letting kids figure it out. We feel like, man, I'm a good parent because I bulldozed for them and I cleared the way and I made things easier.
00:07:36
Speaker
And it made me think about, well, there's another part of the quote, Dustin, where he said, um you're going to be tempted because you love them. And I think that's important too, that this doesn't come from this bad desire.
00:07:53
Speaker
It doesn't come because parents, are purposely doing it, they're filled with a lot of love and they want to remove pain from their kid's life. But I almost feel like there's two types of pain. i was thinking about this quote and as you were sharing that, you know, you and I have experienced both kinds, right? Where one pain comes from like injury, where maybe as a little kid, you're
00:08:24
Speaker
you know, you're running ah on on wet ah pavement at the pool and your parents are like, hey, stop it. Stop running.
00:08:36
Speaker
i don't want you s slipping and breaking an arm. yeah I think there's that kind where that that's fine is to be that kind of a parent. The other kind of pain is the pain that both you and I have experienced throughout our life is, for example, you start lifting really hard for football, right?
00:08:56
Speaker
That's going to bring with it pain, but that pain leads to growth. And so I think you could be too aloof as a parent where you're letting your little kids run on wet concrete and not saying anything like, well, they'll learn as soon as they get a concussion. And I don't think that's what this doctor is saying.
00:09:16
Speaker
I think it's more the... realizing that some of the pain they go through, having to stay up late and work out, doing an assignment, maybe not even doing it well, not getting a good grade on it, is better than a parent swooping in and saying, well, do you want me just to write you an excuse note for tomorrow and you can stay home and you could do this and turn it in and then you don't get docked points? Like when we take away the struggle and we bulldoze, that's when I think,
00:09:48
Speaker
that we're taking away their self-esteem to build our own. and And the temptation that every parent the temptation of every parent is to make life easier for their child, but the responsibility of every parent, I think, is to help their child become stronger than life's difficulties, to build them for the future, not just to keep them comfortable now. And so that quote really resonated with me Because we love our kids, but we can't save them from the type of pain that is going to make them stronger.
00:10:25
Speaker
We can't pull up the bar every time they're struggling with that last rep because it's a struggle. That's when it burns the most, but that's when it's doing the most good. And I just think that temptation is ah is always there.
00:10:39
Speaker
to take away pain from our kids and we need to make sure we're not building our own self-esteem at the expense of theirs. I thought that was a great, great thought from that brain surgeon there. I've never thought of it that way, the way he said it, the self-esteem part, building, you know, building ours. It, it you know, but that kind of goes back to other podcasts. In fact, one that we just recently did where, you know, a coach, um,
00:11:04
Speaker
yeah won a game for his team by appealing ah a technicality.
The Peach Tree Parable: Lessons in Overprotection
00:11:08
Speaker
um His self-esteem is probably built up because he's the winning coach. Right. And, but he did it in a way that at the expense of the kids and I guess in the, I guess in the definition of, of coaching, if, if one of the requirements is winning and being known in the rule book and you know, so you you could, you could win on a technicality like yeah a past podcast we did where a nine-year-old coach,
00:11:33
Speaker
you know, got an umpire to reverse a call and and on a super stupid technicality. um But, you know, that what good did that do in the long run? i I think it's super important to just, you know, to understand that as parents, it's okay to help our kids get through the problem by You know, I don't think it's a bad thing to nudge them and, you know, pull them up a little bit here and there and point them in the right direction.
00:11:56
Speaker
Right. Like you're not playing a lot. You want to play more. Okay. How do we help them go talk to the coach themselves and get the information they need so they can then hopefully go and work on those things and get more playing time, helping our kid muster up the courage to go have that conversation.
00:12:14
Speaker
What questions to maybe ask. um how to then respond to what the coach is going to tell them. And, and that's, and then, okay, but then you got to have to push them off the ledge and teach them how to fly. Right. You go swooping into the coach's office and doing it for them.
00:12:31
Speaker
The kid will never learn how to fly. Does that make sense? Like you gotta, so that it's, it's, it's nudging and helping, right. The kid's struggling with, with a ah topic at school. Well, going to chat GPT or online, getting all the answers so they can get the A. Okay, yeah get the A and maybe that helps them get into a college or whatever, but they didn't learn. And they they learned that there's an easy solution out there that shortcuts the answer to things. And later in life, that shortcut they're going to take is going to cost them.
00:13:00
Speaker
And so we have to have a 30,000 foot view of things, not the 10 foot view of right now and see, right? See the kids as they could be in the future, learning from this lesson, not right now, the the the instant,
00:13:19
Speaker
joy and happiness and and lack of pain and fear that I want my kid to to experience right now because that comes with no growth. No growth happens when you're comfortable and and life's easy. And kids have to learn that life's not. Sports is a great way to teach that until we swoop in and take away those learning lessons by only thinking sports is about fun Sports is only about happiness and sports is only about winning. It's not. It's not always about fun. It's not fun all the time. That's okay.
00:13:50
Speaker
It's not about happiness all the time. It makes you sad sometimes. That's okay. It makes you sad a lot of times. That's good. I love seeing little kid crying after a loss. I love seeing high school kids crying and upset after losing. so They care about It's good. now what are going to do about it? And life's hard and it's okay to cry and be upset for a minute. But then you got to move on. Today,
00:14:09
Speaker
It's going to hurt tomorrow. You got to get back up and get back to work and live your life. That's good. So parents got to stop protecting so much that we don't let our kids experience that.
00:14:21
Speaker
yeah In fact, it reminds me of this. I'll show you this picture, Dustin. yeah We've talked about this yeah before, right? Where it was one of the first podcasts we did actually, where we're experiencing it right now, actually in Utah, where there was a late freeze, right?
00:14:38
Speaker
And for those who can't see this picture, i'll I'll just explain it, but there's a lesson in it. There was a late freeze here in Utah. It was going to kill all the buds on the peach trees.
00:14:49
Speaker
And I had a ah neighbor that I really looked up to, farmer. And he said, you know what, sometimes if you mist your trees with ice, if you go out when it's going to freeze, then it it forms the ice around the bud and gives this protective seal to the bud and keeps it at a at a constant temperature. And maybe it won't it won't die because of the the frost.
00:15:15
Speaker
And so we decided that we were going to do that. And I woke up at three zero in the morning and went out and misted my peach tree. It didn't work very well. But my neighbor, who was elderly, decided he was just going to put a hose at the base of his 30-year-old peach tree. And he was going to spray up the water over the tree and just form this protective layer of ice around the tree and try to save the bud so he could get peaches that year.
00:15:41
Speaker
And what ended up happening and those who are watching it on YouTube, um you could see here that the weight of the ice became so heavy that it broke every limb off of the tree and destroyed the tree.
00:15:58
Speaker
And so by trying to protect the tree, the ice that was there to protect it became way more damaging than that frost would have been one more year. This tree's now dead.
Guidance over Protection in Parenting
00:16:10
Speaker
It's still in our neighborhood here. And I It's not there anymore because it was overprotected by ice and the weight of the ice became more weighty than the frost would have been damaging. And so I just feel like to that brain surgeon's point here and to what you've said, Dustin, it's just sometimes we try, we feel this instinct to...
00:16:34
Speaker
to like protect that that's our job when sometimes taking a step back and guiding them through a difficult situation, helping them figure out the solution that becomes way more valuable to them in the future than the one little battle that we fight for them.
00:16:53
Speaker
yeah Any thoughts to close Dustin? No, I think that sums it up, right? We can overprotect and in doing so actually harm our kids and we have to pick and choose which ones we want to really engage in and which ones we don't. I think we should be cautious that you know, that that a little bit of struggle, a little bit of pain, isn't the worst thing. They're going to get through it.
00:17:14
Speaker
Doesn't mean that we just leave them out there to dry, you know, to or to to, to just suffer all the time and hang them out to dry. We have to, you know, nudge and help them. And, but it's got to be a teaching lesson for them. And, and if not, we may find that we love them actually to death. Like we, we love them too much. We protect them too much. and And then later in life,
00:17:36
Speaker
causes them more harm than then we want. So we just have to be cognizant of that. Eyes up. you know That's what we say. Eyes up, be aware, and do the work. It's work to let your kid kind of struggle through things and to not get involved in everything.
00:17:50
Speaker
That's more work than getting involved. It's easy as a parent to say, forget this. I'm going to fix this and jump in. It takes work to back off and control those emotions and say, nope, My son or my daughter is going to figure this out.
00:18:03
Speaker
Honey, this is what I would recommend or I might advise you to do. Be careful of. Do this. It's your choice. This is going to either way. going to figure it out, though. But it's not the ref's fault. It's not the umpire's fault. It's not your coach's fault.
00:18:18
Speaker
You know, you guys have to do A, B and C better, in my opinion, if you're going to win. And you guys, you and your teammates have got to figure that out. And. You better set your alarm earlier and work harder. And guess what? You could do all of that and still lose.
00:18:32
Speaker
That's life. It's not fair. And the sooner you learn that, easier life's going to be for you. But how you react to it is what matters, right? How you react to it. And they're not going to react the right way if every time something hard happens to them, we do the reacting, we do the protecting. And then later in life, wonder why they're struggling and then blaming the government, blaming adults and blaming the school system and blaming their you know religion and blaming social media and blaming big business and blaming right all the stuff that we find reasons to blame rather than, you know, in our own circle, doing the work with our eyes up. So that's that's
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:19:14
Speaker
my final words. I think that was a great comment by that guy and something that needed to be addressed. So i appreciate you finding that, Shad, and us being able to talk about it for 20 minutes.
00:19:25
Speaker
Awesome. Thanks, everybody. Eyes up. Do the work. Thank you for joining the Especially for Athletes podcast. To learn more about Especially for Athletes organization, get a copy of our book, The Sportlight, or to bring our program to your team, school, business, or organization, visit us at especiallyforathletes.org.