The Daily Dad

If They Don’t Get It From You, Where Will They?

Mar 24, 2020

02:25

Snipd AI

The podcast discusses the importance of parents providing their children with a sense of safety, love, and support. It highlights the potential negative consequences if these needs are not met.

AI Summary

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Parents need to prioritize emotional support and ensure their children feel safe, loved, and proud of themselves.

If parents fail to meet their children's emotional needs, they may seek validation and love from unhealthy sources, leading to negative outcomes.

Deep dives

The Importance of Providing Emotional Support

As parents, we have a critical role to play in providing emotional support and fulfilling our children's innate need to feel safe, loved, and proud of themselves. Despite our own worries and pressures, it is crucial that we prioritize their emotional well-being. If we fail to provide them with these essential feelings, they may seek them in unhealthy ways, such as turning to negative influences, engaging in reckless behavior, or developing false beliefs about acceptance and appreciation.

If They Don’t Get It From You, Where Will They?

2min

We know that our kids want to feel good, feel safe, feel loved. We know they want to feel that someone is proud of them, that they’re talented, that they’re worth something. We also know that they’ll want to have fun, take risks, mess up, be crazy, and feel the pleasures of the world.

As the person in charge, as the person who wants them to be successful in life, it may come to pass that you are at odds with those feelings more often than you’d like. Because you see their potential, you are critical of their choices. Because you are worried about them, you’re strict. Because you know how hard and competitive the world is, you push them...and then maybe you push them some more. And because you have so much on your plate, you don’t always say the nice thing, the obvious, supportive, reassuring thing.

The problem is: If our kids aren’t feeling safe or loved or supported by us, where will they get it from? Because they will go out and try to find it. If Dad is blocked off because Dad is busy, Daughter will go find love in the wrong places. If Dad is a hard ass, because Dad regrets his choices in his own youth, and he pushes too hard, Son might rebel or learn to value the wrong things. The gender of the child doesn’t matter. Neither does their natural personality. If Dad doesn’t give his kids what they need, they’ll get it somewhere else and it will almost certainly not be from the right or best place.

It might be from drugs or a gang or bad influences or reckless behavior or from a false belief that you can earn acceptance and appreciation. All of that is wrong. Your kids deserved those things at birth. And they deserve them from you.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.