Lighthouse Parenting: Raising Resilient Kids | Dr. Ken Ginsburg

We're Out of Time

Dr. Ken Ginsburg, pediatrician and founder of the Center for Parent and Teen Communication, discusses 'lighthouse parenting'—a balanced approach to raising

Key takeaways

• Overprotective parenting often undermines long-term resilience; children need space to fail and recover.
• Resilience is not about constant happiness but the ability to bounce back from adversity.

Main topics

• Lighthouse parenting framework
• Building resilience in teens

Notable quotes

"Preparation is protection."

"When we do for our children and they do not learn to do for themselves, they will not be able to function when they are not with us."

Conclusion

True parenting strength lies not in control or perfection, but in consistent emotional

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) When we do for our children and they do not learn to do for themselves, they will not be able to function when they are not with us. And the line that I use more than any other is preparation is protection. Speaker 1 (0:34) If someone has a problem with substance use disorder, please call One Call Placement. That's 888-831-1581. And if we can't help you, we'll make a referral to someone who can. Please, we're out of time. One Call Placement is affiliated with Carrera Treatment Wellness and Spa and One Method Treatment Centers. Speaker 2 (0:54) Before we start the conversation today, I want to deliver a personal message. Every day, families across America lose someone they love to an overdose. Many of those deaths are preventable when communities have the right education, resources, and support. That's why I've partnered with the CDC Foundation through their COPE, Community Overdose Prevention Efforts campaign, and committed to matching every donation dollar for dollar up to $25,000. I've spent my life helping people recover from addiction, but if we can get to the place of prevention first, this would help save so many more lives. I hope you'll join me in supporting the CDC Foundation's overdose prevention work. at cdcfoundation.org slash cope. You can also visit the link below in the show notes to donate. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Every parent thinks they're protecting their kid until one day they realize they're not. They sit across from families all the time asking the same question. How did we get here? the anxiety, the isolation, the substance use. So where does it actually break? And more importantly, how do you build a child who can handle real life without falling apart? Our guest today, Dr. Ken Ginsberg, has spent his career answering that question. He's a pediatrician and one of the leading voices on teen mental health and resilience, working with families across the country and developing a framework for building real strength, not just avoiding problems. Speaker 2 (2:45) His concept of lighthouse parenting challenges everything most parents think they're supposed to do. And if you can get it right, it can change the trajectory of your child's life. Welcome to the show, Ken. Doctor, you work on building resilient kids. I deal with the ones where that didn't happen. Where does it break? Speaker 3 (3:08) That's a really powerful question. I prefer not to think of any human being as broken. And even though they might be living through profoundly difficult challenges, and even though their behaviors may be completely undermining to them and self-destructive, I think that we begin... always by trying to look at a human being and think about all that is good and right about them. And if there, I had to answer your question about where it breaks. It would be that not everybody feels seen, heard, or worthy of being loved. And when they don't feel that way, they're going to seek approval somewhere, someplace, in some way that is not always healthy to them. So when I think about my career as a guy who thinks about resilience, Speaker 3 (4:11) I don't have a lot of really fancy things to say except for that people are deserving of love and people are deserving of unconditional attention. And when we can get adults to be the kind of people that young people need and deserve in their lives, we're going to see a lot of problems go away. He's the blame the parent guy. I'm the support the family guy, not the blame the parent guy. Those are very, very different perspectives. Nobody responds to being told what they're doing wrong. Nobody. People need to be uplifted. They need to be empowered. And blaming a parent is you're already behind the game. You're supporting the parent and you're leveraging what they have, which is love. Speaker 2 (4:56) And Speaker 3 (4:56) you're letting them know that that's the foundation that begins. Look, Speaker 2 (5:01) I'm all about support. Okay. That's in blocking and tackling for your kid. That's, I wrote that book. Okay. Are kids actually struggling more than in past generations or are we just more aware of it now? Speaker 3 (5:17) I think that's a really complicated question. It's a question that people always want. People always want me to give answers in terms of the numbers. So there's no question that there are some kids who are suffering. No question. But what is also true is that in past generations, when people were suffering, they were silent. I was one of those kids, right? So when I was suffering for a very short period of my life, which was at this point, 48 years ago, right? I was silent. So point number one, for sure, some kids are suffering. Point number two. Let's be thankful that they are speaking about the fact that they are suffering. And point number three, let's level set about what mental health is. One of the greatest mistakes that we've made, I believe emphatically, is in equating mental health with being happy. And when we have engaged a generation or a generation of parents. who believe that they are good parents or not, that their children are healthy or not, or individuals believe that they're healthy or not, based on what they're experiencing happiness, we're setting a generation up to fail. You're not supposed to be happy all the time. You're supposed to be able to be resilient, to bounce back, and to make wise choices when life is awful. And we have to help people understand, you know, if they're... Parent gets mad at them, be sad. If your boyfriend breaks Speaker 2 (6:50) up with you, be sad. Doctor, how do we deal with this when every feeling is pathologized? How do we do that? And just to elaborate even in more than that, the DSM. Speaker 2 (7:06) creates new disorders every edition, right? And they do it for a multitude of reasons, but one of the most important reasons they do it is so that you can bill for it. If it's not in there, you can't bill for it. What do we do around this? Speaker 3 (7:28) So I think that I'm going to get back to kind of my territory, not refuting the DSM, but really supporting that human beings have a wide range of emotions and that they can be normal. And that what makes them not normal is when they respond in self-defeating or undermining ways. And it begins with, I agree with you, not pathologizing. the fact that you're supposed to have a range of emotions. Anger is okay sometimes. If something has created anger in you, it's okay to express it. Sadness is okay. Confusion, my God, if you're not confused right now, then you're not paying attention to the universe, right? And we have to stop telling kids that you're supposed to feel good all the time. And as someone who's a child and adolescent advocate and who loves kids with all my heart and soul, We have to stop making them think that every adult around them is destroyed or overjoyed by every move they make. They have to become comfortable again, falling down, learning how to get back up, and knowing that the adults are not going to come in as rescuers, but they're going to be coaches. Speaker 2 (8:47) When I was having my first child, My ex and I would go to early childhood development talks all the time. I remember the last one I think we saw right before the child was born was Danny Siegel's talk. Okay. So we would go see all these, you know, people that really knew and thank God, cause I had horrible modeling. Okay. But you know, it was 43 years old having my first kid and I want, I thought that passed me by. Right. And I was so grateful to have a child because as you know, okay, as a father, okay. You know, people think they know what love is, but until you have a child, you don't know, you think you do, but you don't. Right. And so when I'm sitting there. with my child and the first time I had my phone in my hand, God bless my ex. She comes over, takes the phone. She goes, hey, you want to start treating your, you want to end up treating your kid? I said, no. She goes, then get down on his level. Okay. Speaker 2 (10:08) Pay attention like he's the most important thing in the world. Okay? And when he goes, he knows what he's talking about. He just can't get it out. So you just look at him and go, wow. Speaker 3 (10:24) Well, I got to tell you, that's some brilliant advice you received. You know, I walk down the street, you know, as you know, I write a lot of parenting books. People think I'm a parenting expert, which I somewhat am. But when people come and they, you know, their sentences often begin with, what should I say? And then blank, blank, blank. What should I say? This situation, that situation. And we need to help parents understand that it is their presence. that matters. It is them showing up that matters. It is literally getting down on their knees and understanding that the child is the expert in their own Speaker 2 (11:02) life. And, and check this out because you're going to miss this part and you're going to go, wow, you're the best. When the kid looks at you, when the kid's just independent play, right? And then they get scared because you weren't present and they turn around. And if they see you, that does what? Speaker 3 (11:21) that helps them feel secure and know that they're safe. You know, the example, when I work with people who have, you know, chronic pain or whatnot, and I help them to understand how a human being reacts to an experience, I bring them back to watching an 18-month-old fall. When an 18-month-old falls, they fall down on their knees, and it hurts. Because hurting your new niece hurts. But they haven't made the decision about how much it hurts until they turn around and they look at their parent. If the kid is crying and acting like the kid is broken, the kid is screaming. And if the parent goes, get up, little man, you're okay, the kid goes, and gets up. So true. Speaker 2 (12:13) So true. Speaker 3 (12:14) Same pain. Richard, I have to go back a few minutes. Can I do that? You said something really powerful and I want to respond to it. Speaker 2 (12:25) Okay. Speaker 3 (12:26) You made two statements. One is that you don't know what love is going to be like until you have a child. And having a child is in truth like having your heart on the outside of your body. Speaker 2 (12:36) For sure. Speaker 3 (12:36) And you feel like you need to protect that child at all times. And I'm all about protection, but let's remember that protection is not Overprotection, hovering, or fixing, it is preparing and letting them know that you believe they can get back up and you're not going anywhere. Speaker 2 (12:54) You're a thousand percent right. The benefit of a skinned knee. Right? I get that. Who wrote that? Speaker 3 (13:01) Wendy Mogul. The point is that our children will fall down. That's what is called life. And what makes us resilient is to learn how to get back up. To get back up, we have to have a certain degree of confidence. Where does confidence come from? It doesn't come from us showering praise on the children, nor does it come from us saying to them, I'm going to do this for you. Let me help you with that because the implication is I don't believe you can do it on your own. They have the confidence to get back up because you don't see them as having been broken in the first place. You don't see this mistake as a disaster. You see it as a learning opportunity. And you will trust that they will get up in a path that they choose because they're the experts in their own life. And you will support them but not do for them. But you will support them and be fully present and loving. That is what gives them what's called co-regulation. It's your brain, the bottom parts of your brain, saying to the bottom parts of their brain, you're chill, dude. You got this, right? And so that is key to helping our children know. that they can recover and not just recover, grow. Speaker 2 (14:25) Good. Now I want to go back a couple minutes because I set you back. Okay. You were like, what? You were close to walking out of here almost. Okay. When I said he's the blame, the parent guy, right? You're offended by it as you should have been because you didn't know what I meant by it. So let me elaborate. The reason I'm the blame the parent guy, and we're going to get to the family systems part because what you do around family systems, that's where the magic happens. Okay. That's everything. Why am I the blame the parent guy? Because as a father, okay, we only have one job, whether we know it or not, only one. And that is to make certain that our children are okay in the world when we're gone. That's it. Whether these people can articulate it or not is irrelevant. We know that's true. Okay? And, man. If you didn't get down on their level, if you didn't make them feel important, if you didn't meet their basic needs as a child, if you weren't present and not always preaching so that you weren't a bad time, then... It is your damn fault when your kid goes sideways because you could have prevented it. Now, I'm not going to speak for the mothers, but I'm a man and I have responsibility. I take responsibility. If I have 1 % responsibility for an outcome, it's my fault because. I could have done better. I could have dived into that 1%. So for me, okay, and especially, you know, you're in the prevention game. By the time they get to me, they're wrecked. So let's give you an example. I tell the parents, well, listen, you got to cut this kid off. He's not working. He didn't finish school. He's got gas cards. He's got a black card. He's got a Benz. He's got all these things. He's spending $40,000, $50,000 a month. Okay, why should he get sober? And they won't do it. Right. So this and more. OK, the the fathers. Right. Who, you know, these kids can't measure up and then they beat the out of them instead of, you know, cultivate what they're good at and and support that. Right. It's just I'm the blame the parent guy. Now it's your turn. So Speaker 3 (17:13) let's. There's a bunch of