Episode 586: Raising Resilient Kids in the Age of Smartphones and Overprotective Parenting

Habits and Hustle

Tony Robbins discusses the growing trend of overprotective parenting and its impact on children's mental resilience, arguing that excessive

Key takeaways

• Resilience is built through struggle, failure, and discomfort—not by eliminating challenges.
• Overprotection, including helicopter parenting and participation trophies, undermines self-efficacy and contributes to rising anxiety, depression, and suicide rates in youth.

Main topics

• Overprotective parenting
• Mental resilience in children

Notable quotes

"If we coddle our children, which is what a lot of people are doing now in this time, it's actually, you're doing a disservice in a real way."

"Boredom is where creativity lives. It's where kids think for themselves and figure shit out."

Conclusion

Tony Robbins concludes that raising mentally strong children requires pare

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits & Hustle. Crush it! Speaker 1 (0:07) Welcome to Habits and Hustle, where we talk about the habits, strategies, and mindset shifts that actually make a difference in your health, happiness, and success. And in this episode, I'm sharing a segment from my recent conversation on the Mind Pump podcast. We're talking about what it actually takes to raise mentally strong kids, including overprotective parenting, boredom, failure, smartphones, sports, independence, and why confidence comes from giving kids the chance to struggle. Speaker 1 (0:35) problem solve, and build evidence that they can handle hard things. Before diving in, if you're listening right now and you've gotten something out of this show, do me a favor. Hit subscribe if you haven't already and leave a review on your own. I would love to hear what you think and if there's anything we can be adding to the show to even make it better for you because I read every single review. Now let's dive in. Speaker 1 (1:07) I'm not a psychologist. I'm a parent. So I think anybody who is a parent, that makes them an expert, right? Because they're dealing with parenting day in, day out. And I really thought it was an important topic, which is I wanted to, it was called The Secret to Raising Mentally Strong Kids in a Fragile World. And the reason why I did it was I have two small kids, one's going to be 10 next week, another one's 12. You guys all have kids as well. And what I've been noticing as throughout the years is over time, kids are becoming more and more fragile, more and more frail. And it's really the onus is on the parent. And I think this whole culture of gentle parenting has really made our kids weaker. And so I wanted to have a platform or create some type of platform where we can kind of come together, unite and create. Speaker 1 (2:04) mental resilience in the younger generation. And so to me also, if you want to be a mentally strong person, why not start when you are a child? These are habits and tools that are important throughout your life. So why would you're like, what, 21, 25, then you start to learn how to be mentally resilient? Start when you're a kid. get the foundation, prime your brain, prime yourself for failure, for resilience, because life's not easy. Life isn't easy. And if we coddle our children, which is what a lot of people are doing now in this time, it's actually, you're doing a disservice in a real way. Gentle parenting, in my opinion, is snow plowing. Speaker 1 (2:57) all difficulty away from your children. And snow plowing challenges. We've created a culture of coddle culture versus challenge culture. And challenge is what makes you stronger and makes you more resilient. So let's start with that. I would also say part of this stuff is helicopter parenting, participation trophies, creating a space where there's safe spaces and triggers. All of this lingo and language. in my opinion, is creating a soft child, which then creates a soft teenager, a soft adult, which, by the way, I will tell you, some of this is causing suicidal rates to increase. Anxiety is through the roof. Depression is through the roof. When you don't feel competent and capable of like taking care of yourself and having any form of self-efficacy, what happens to you as a, as a human being is, is beyond detrimental. Right. Yeah. And we've seen it. I mean, the reason why, like what. Speaker 1 (4:03) The reason why we were all raised in a very different time where independence was very much a thing. We took risk. We were kind of like thrown into