There are many valuable strategies that parents can learn from business owners when building a strong family culture. Dr. Tim Jordan explores these CEO-inspired approaches with parenting coach Avital Levy. Together, they examine the current trends in family building and parenting, as well as how to establish a clear vision within a home, much like a business would. Avital warns about the consequences of gentle parenting, particularly its tendency to raise less resilient children. She also discusses the need to return to a play-based childhood and allow young ones to develop their skills and talents in the most enjoyable way.
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Building A Strong Family Culture With Avital Levy
Dr. Tim Jordan here, back with a brand new episode of Raising Daughters. As always, I am very grateful that you stop by here every week and tune in to learn some things about girls, raising daughters, and supporting daughters. As you know, sometimes I just blab about a topic, but other times, I will have a guest on.
I’ve been worried. I have four grandkids now, three grandsons and one granddaughter. I have listened to my kids as they’re raising their little kids and also their friends. They have a lot of friends who we hang out with, and all that. I know every generation has its anxiety. I worry that this generation is getting a lot of information about how to parent, and a lot of it is conflicting. It’s so much easier for them to grab lots of information through their computers and all the social media and things. I’m a little bit worried that they’re losing the sense of being able to trust their intuition because there’s so much knowledge bombarding their brains.
I thought what I would do today is have an expert on, somebody who’s a parent coach. She’s been doing it for ten years. She has helped over 100,000 parents in over 100 countries through her coaching programs and also through her YouTube channel. Her name is Avital Levy. She is in Israel. That’s where she lives. This is an international flavor. I asked her to come on so she could give us her experience about what she sees with parents today. Avital, you also travel a lot and talk to people from all over the place. At some point, you can tell us what it’s like for parents in other places besides the US and Canada. This show reaches a lot of places as well, but it’s mostly the US. First of all, welcome to the show. I appreciate you being on.
Thanks so much for having me, Tim. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Parenting Coach Avital Levy
She has a British accent because she was originally born there. She spent some time staying with her husband. She has five kids, ranging from ages 4 to 14. I want you to tell us quickly about your path to where you are, and then briefly, what you do.
Thank you so much. My background is in design. I come from the world of design, problem-solving, strategy, and branding, and that thing. When I decided to become a parent, I was very nervous about the experience. As a designer, I wanted to research it and think up ways of making this experience pleasant, elegant, and solutions-oriented. All of that design thinking kicked into action because the truth is, as much as I didn’t want to miss out on this human experience, it didn’t seem all that rewarding. It seemed difficult, draining, exhausting, stressful, and high-risk. It’s a high-risk, long life endeavor to become apparent.
I became a bit obsessed with parenting. I read dozens of books, and that is how I started on this path of parenting. Eventually, it went from being a hobby and my own personal endeavor to being my life’s work. Along the way, one of the things I realized was I’m very lucky to have grown up in a very family-oriented, pro-natal, and pro-children society that supports the community, that village that we all want to raise a child, a screen-free time, family meals, and all sorts of things that I took for granted in my household growing up.
As I traveled the world and saw particularly the crises in parenting in the US, my years there with my very young children, it highlighted for me how high the level of isolation, anxiety, and distress for parents is there. It quadrupled my passion and my interest in the area. It went from being a personal need to be in something that I felt more mission-oriented. I’ll say right off the bat, I do believe that parenting can be the most meaningful project of our lifetime, and that it should be, but we’re having a very hard time getting there as individuals and as a society because of many different aspects. That’s the short story of how I came to this work.
[bctt tweet=”Parenting can be the most meaningful project of our lifetime, and it should be.” via=”no”]
You’ve been counseling and coaching parents in what kind of vehicle?
Primarily, I do group coaching. I do some one-on-one coaching, but primarily, I run a membership. In my membership, I teach parents not how to do the nitty-gritty of parenting, not how to handle tantrums, or how to talk to a child when they’ve lied to you, or that kind of thing, although we talk about all of that stuff too. To me, that’s the endpoint. What I try to teach parents is what I think is the foundation, which is family culture. How to build a culture in the home that helps us enjoy parenting, helps us relax more, helps us imbibe our children with our values, with our vision for the world.
I think that we are leaders. We are like CEOs. We’ve established this new thing called our family, and we need the same level of training, inspiration, consistency, good habits, support systems, and systems, in general, that CEOs need in order to run a smooth ship and hit certain goals. It’s this very mission-oriented parenting. Inside my membership, I teach parents all of these family habits, as I call them. None of them are new novel ideas that I’ve come up with. They’re all things that we all know if we think about it for more than a moment. Sitting around the family dinner table as a family without phones, getting out in nature, prioritizing sleep, and all sorts of things that you might think are basic, but are challenging to implement in today’s day and age.
Building A Strong Family Culture
You said, “If everybody would take a moment.” I think that’s one of the problems. Families do, but it seems like they don’t have those moments to do. My wife and I give talks to groups. We talk about beginning with the end in mind, one of Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. As you’re talking about, CEOs know that. Companies do it, corporations do it, and businesses do it. A lot of places take this step back and say, “What do we want? What’s their value?” We don’t do it with our family. How do you get families to do that?
That’s a fantastic question. I take from the model of the CEO the business trainings, stand-up meetings, breaking down smart goals, and getting clear on our values, what the top three values are, and our vision for the future. Also, having parents take a beat, for example, inside my membership. Every year, we start with vision. We start with crafting the vision for the upcoming year, but also where we’d like to be in 5 or 10 years. It’s hard to motivate a mother who has a toddler, for example, to workout. It’s hard to get up and move your body when you’re so tired, and you’re depleted.
When you start to tap into your long-term goals, “I’d like to be able to lift my grandchildren up. I’d like to be able to be healthy and independent for my kids,” that starts to motivate you on a much deeper level, or thinking raising children is a marathon, it’s not a sprint. Think about how the habits that I start establishing with my young children are going to affect them in their teen years, their adulthood, and well into their lives. It’s easier now to stick my toddler in front of a screen for several hours a day. What will that do in setting him up for delayed gratification, patience, proper cognitive development, social skills, verbal development, and all of that stuff? Taking that long-term view is something that we borrow from the CEO’s life.
There are many other things. CEOs have famously had this trend of self-care, their morning routines, their meticulous diet and nutrition plans, biohacking, longevity, and those types of things that top CEOs are very obsessed with. Parents deserve that same level of support. CEOs get the coaches, the support, and the troubleshooting when things aren’t going right. CEOs have metrics that they can measure. Are we being successful? Are we hitting our goals? What’s lagging? What isn’t working? Who’s not pulling their weight?
The metaphor runs out at some point. We’re not running a business, and we’re not measuring profit margins or revenue cycles, but there’s quite a lot to be gained in terms of becoming the best leaders we can be and running an organization that is staying on mission, that is fulfilling a meaning for us to run. That’s going to hopefully result in the type of dream family life that we had. You have some kind of song in your heart when you have a child, when you start a family. It takes tremendous effort and energy to find a partner and to have a baby. You do it for a reason, you do it for some kind of vision.
There are those moments that you’re hoping for, whether it’s watching siblings help each other, sitting around the table and laughing together, having a meaningful conversation with your child about their future, or just the closeness, the warmth, and the love. Those are all things we wanted, and then maybe life gets in the way. We find ourselves caught up in the day-to-day humdrum chaos of it all.
I interviewed an author a few weeks ago. He wrote a book called 30-Phobia. It was interesting because she was talking about how 30th-year birthdays are like a milestone. There are a lot of people in their 20s who, as they approach that birthday, are like, “I don’t have my life partner, I don’t have my dream job, I don’t have any kids.” They start looking around at other people who, in their minds, are further along, and then they get anxious. They end up in that stage of their lives, bringing a lot of anxiety into all that.
I’m wondering too. Our generation of parents, or the past generation or so, conditioned our kids to look outside themselves for “Am I okay,” or “What should I do,” or “What’s right,” and all that. I think sometimes that’s where parents get caught. You’re saying they need to huddle up together as a family unit and create their own family culture, and use that as their vision. Too often, they’re looking outside for “My kids are getting behind,” and that kind of thing.
We do have a culture of absolute comparisons. Just to steal on it for a moment. There’s something healthy about the pro-social tendency of looking around us and measuring ourselves against our peers. There is something to the idea of someone being where you envision yourself being at that age or at that stage of your life, and for that to be somewhere along the norm of the curve. No one wants to feel left behind, and that makes sense.
The trouble is that we’re not measuring ourselves against our local intimate connected communities that have similar values to us, similar lifestyles, and similar resources. We’re comparing ourselves to everybody’s highlight reel. The billions of people in the world have the best edited, most curated, and most filtered highlight reels on Instagram, where you’re seeing them in their Christmas card mode, and measuring yourself against them.
That is where our brains break. We feel so confused about why we don’t have the big family or the Lamborghini or whatever it is that people are comparing themselves to. What would behoove us is to bring back the localized community, where I talk to my friend who has a similar lifestyle than me, lives in a similar climate, with similar resources, and similar religious and political culture that helps me make sense of my life choices and of where I’m going with all of this, and not to celebrities or to people in entirely different realities in our own.
Current Trends In Family Building
What do you think, globally? You work with parents from all over the place, you travel, and all that. What are you seeing globally? Is it similar to what’s going on in the States and the UK, or are they a lot different?
It is a lot different because the world is a big place, but it tends to be that where the US and then the UK go, the rest of the Western World follows. I can only talk about liberal democracies that are somewhat similar in their structure because it’s going to be wildly different in other types of communities. In those countries, the trends that we’ve seen over the last few decades are that parenthood is being further and further delayed. People are getting married less and later. They’re having fewer children and having them later in life. That creates a very different type of parenting dynamic because it’s a model of higher investment in fewer children than we saw maybe 50 to 100 years ago, where people would have more children younger, and would have much less time spent and resources per child.
It has become a very high investment endeavor. All these parents often feel this intense pressure to get it right. They often have to go through very taxing cycles of fertility treatments, long decades of dating to find their partners. It’s a much different game to build your family than it used to be. That amplifies fears about development, about milestones, about making every moment count, and about having financial resources. Parents and previous generations didn’t expect to have that for their children. It wasn’t the same level of pressure.
That’s one thing, and then we have the social media echo chamber, which we already mentioned, but the endless online advice, which is often conflicting, as you said in your intro, that comparison culture fuels a lot of second-guessing, a lot of overwhelm, a lot of hesitancy. It’s good that there are podcasts, like yours and mine. There’s good information out there, but there is information overload for a lot of parents. They get stuck in analysis paralysis. Parents feel less and less confident in their choices, in their parenting, and their skills. Being a little bit older also makes you a lot more risk-aware, a lot more self-analytical. That’s another big trend that we’re seeing now.
There’s also the medicalization of childhood. As a doctor, I’m sure you could talk much better than I, but the increasingly pathologizing of what is often normal developmental phases that kids go to. Now, every quirk is becoming a diagnosis, and that’s putting parents on edge, thinking that they need to seek therapies and medicalization for every challenge, which all children have temperaments and personalities, and sometimes that becomes very overwhelming for parents nowadays.
Focusing On Mindset Setting
One of the things that you do is you have parents develop their own family culture, which may look different than next door or anywhere else, but what’s important to them, what do they value, and all those kinds of things. What else do you do with parents besides that? How do you coach them along?
One of the key things that I like to focus on is mindset. My background is that my grandparents were all Holocaust survivors. One of the most famous Holocaust survivors is Viktor Frankl. He wrote about the idea that someone can take everything from a man except for their choice of how to respond to any given situation. One of the things that has happened in parenting, and I didn’t mention this trend, but isolation has become a big one, because not only that we’ll be having kids later, but we’ll also be having fewer children, fewer cousins, and fewer siblings around, and then further and further away from our family of origin.
Neighbors and friends are less likely to interact. We’ve lost that village in the US. There’s a lot of anxiety about that, isolation, that sense of being judged or fear of being judged, even fear of being criminalized for letting your kids go to the playground or that kind of thing. It has become a very high-stakes and scary thing to have a child. Back to Viktor Frankl and mindset, a lot of what empowers parents now is to reclaim their sense of control and their sense of mindset. That is similar to what I was talking about with the CEO mindset, with the idea of being a leader, “How can I step into my leadership role, craft something intentionally and deliberately the way I want it to look?”
At the end of the day, technically, parents are shaping the future. You’re raising the future generation. How do you raise a future that you believe in, that you’re excited about, that you’re passionate about, and that you’re happy to contribute to? A lot of the fear around climate change or the world wars has led parents to feel like, “I can’t even bring a child into this world. What kind of future are we leaving them? Is it even responsible?”
[bctt tweet=”Parents are shaping the future by raising the next generation.” via=”no”]
That also feeds into the underlying, sometimes subconscious anxiety about raising kids in the future in general. I think it’s very beneficial. One of the things I coach people to do is to develop realistic optimism. We’re not talking about being unrealistic or seeing unicorns, stars, and rainbows where there aren’t any, but optimism, competence, my ability to withstand things, and my ability to handle what life throws at me. One of the repetitive thoughts that many of the parents that I coach have in the back of their mind, without even noticing it, is “I can’t handle this. It’s too much for me. I’ve messed up.”
Every parent I’ve ever coached has a story that they’re telling themselves about how they messed up. “I didn’t breastfeed for long enough, I yelled at my child when they were three, I went to work too early.” Some story that they say, “That’s why my child is acting out. That’s why my child isn’t making friends.” A lot of this is normalizing the regular day-to-day struggles of raising kids. When you live in a culture like mine, where there are lots of kids around, you see that’s how it is always, not just because of something you did or didn’t do, but also quieting those noises and stepping into the role creatively, energetically, and excitedly with passion.
Returning To A Play-Based Childhood
You wrote a book a couple of years ago called Reclaim Play. You believe strongly that we’re not giving our kids enough opportunities to play. Talk about that for a moment.
Play has declined rapidly over the last decade, two decades, and further back. We used to see childhood. Even when I was growing up, children spent most of their time playing. It’s how Mother Nature intended it because when children play, they learn everything they need to learn naturally and enjoyably. It’s pleasurable for them. They want to do it, but they don’t just play to pass the time. It’s not idle. It’s where they learn all these very critical skills from cognitive development, social development, physical development, etc. This is so well researched, and the evidence is there from over 30 years of research.
Children playing with blocks improve their math scores in high school. It’s an incredible correlation. Unfortunately, that has been replaced with scheduled activities, with supervised activities, and with screen time, which, beyond any issues that it might have to their sedentary lifestyle, to their eyesight, and their cognitive development, is simply taking away time that they need in order to develop well. When I say play, I don’t mean a parent sitting on the floor and playing with them, although that has its value. I mean independent, self-directed play.
The cool thing about reclaiming play and the reason I wrote the book was because I was alone in a country where I knew no one, I had no support, my husband was doing a medical residency, so he was away all the time, night shifts and weekends, and I had tiny kids. I had a baby, a toddler, a four-year-old, and I ran a business. I didn’t have any household help. I did not know what to do. I did not know how to manage my life. I was exactly in that mindset where moms are thinking, “I can’t handle this. It’s too much for me. I’m messing up.”
What I noticed was that the one thing that gave me this relief and I didn’t need any budget for it and I didn’t need any extra pair of hands for it was when my kids were playing independently, when they suddenly got themselves into a game, and it wasn’t with a screen, they are playing with trains or with dolls or tag, whatever they’re playing. I saw how happy, healthy, and better-behaved they were, how much more relaxed I was. I was able to get some self-care done, my work done, and my housework done.
It just lit a fire in me to say, “This is what it’s supposed to look like. It’s supposed to look like kids playing and adults shuffling around the house doing what they need to do. Not constant conflict, stress, butting heads, chasing them down, and entertainment. I didn’t need to be exhausted with one more task on my to-do list, and now I need to entertain them.” Bonding with our children, yes. Attaching with our children, yes. Quality time with our children, yes. Teaching our children, yes, but then also yes to independent play, which offers us a reprieve and offers them the opportunity to develop the way that they need to develop optimally.
People ask me all the time, “Are kids different today?” They read about the levels of anxiety and depression in girls, all that stuff. What I told them is that when they come to a week of my summer camp, there’s no electronics, no phones, none of that stuff. They are away from their families, which doesn’t mean they have bad families, but they’re just away so they can be more independent.
What I tell them is the summer of COVID, we decided to have a camp. Most of the people we know who owned camps did not have camps. We decided we’ll make it smaller and we’ll make our own little cocoon. I never forget how happy they were running around. The same thing happens every summer camp, which is coming up. When you get them in an environment where there are no phones and they’re paying attention to each other, and they have free time to hang out. We have lots of downtime because we feel like they need that. They’re no different than we were 20, 30, 40, or 50 years ago. They’re the same. They just need the opportunity to have that time.
That’s so true. No one needs to buy my book because the main thing is to get out of the way. That’s the most important thing. It’s to give them the opportunity, which they don’t have. We’re obsessed with safetyism and constant supervision. They need to be able to try things like building a raft or building their own fort, or things that involve some heavy things or some tools and machinery, and privacy. Not complete privacy.
I’m not saying go crazy, but giving them that space in nature on the beach or whatever to play, to build the sand castle, and the time away from the screen, which involves a lot of boundaries, which parents today are a little bit phobic of. No one is comfortable setting boundaries anymore, which might be another big difference between previous generations and today. The boundary around the screen is a crucial 21st-century parenting skill that we have to learn in order to allow our kids the opportunity to have a childhood.
The Consequences Of Gentle Parenting
We’re talking with Avital Levy. She is from Israel, and she’s a parenting expert and a parenting coach. She’s the author of a book called Reclaim Play. If you would, for a moment, talk about gentle parenting, because I hear that a lot. My judgment is that parents end up doing too much talking and not enough setting boundaries. My wife and I had been teaching parents for 35 years or something. We don’t like spanking. We don’t like yelling and any of those things, but I think the pendulum is swinging one way over here. Sometimes you just need to say, “We need to go.”
The original writers of the gentle parenting world meant to teach us to be authoritative parents with high expectations and high support. That’s very well evidenced, and it’s a good path. Unfortunately, I don’t know if it’s because of content creators or the way trends go, but it has slipped, slid, and suffered from concept creep, where a concept means something at the beginning, and then it slowly morphs into a more extreme version of itself. Now, gentle parenting has somewhat become synonymous with permissive parenting. Permissive parenting is not good for kids. I’m thoroughly against spanking, and I do my best not to yell or to punish. I don’t think those things are very effective.
Do you yell at your kids?
I yell at my kids, and I apologize when I do. I don’t think raising your voice is very dignified or very effective. I think there is a time and a place for a sharp tone and a very clear, firm directive. The research is pretty clear that permissive parenting is even worse than authoritarian parenting. The results are not good for kids. It’s a huge part, in my opinion, of why we see the spike in anxiety and depression amongst young adults today. It’s a huge part of it. It’s very difficult to transition from a home like that into the real world and not feel complete whiplash.
Gentle parenting today has suffered from many of the side effects that you’ve mentioned. Over-talking is a big one, even over-talking to toddlers. Forget teenagers, but even toddlers. Over-talking is a big one, negotiating, but also simply being uncomfortable with your leadership role, and setting any boundaries, to begin with, having any expectations. There’s this underlying message that kids are gurus, that kids are infinitely wise, that kids are born into the world complete and whole, and it’s our job to let them guide themselves and make their own decisions, whether it’s about their education or about what they want for their birthdays and christmas, and the rest of their lives, or about even medicalization.
These are decisions that are left up to children. It’s deeply unfair to the children. It’s an abdication of our parenting role. The proof is in the pudding. It’s simply not working, and so, gentle parenting is a great idea in theory when you stick to the original idea, but when you lean into the permissive parenting side of it, where parents are saying up front on camera, “I don’t like setting any rules for my children. I don’t like telling my children what to do. I don’t think it’s up to me to tell them that it’s enough sugar, or enough screens, or bedtime. They should listen to their bodies and make those decisions for themselves.” You’re laughing, Dr. Jordan, because you’ve raised children. I think it’s something easy to slip into when you have a very young child. Unfortunately, you get mugged by reality as time goes on, and you realize that’s not going to work.
My kids tell us, because they’ve been watching their friends’ parents, some of them are parenting the way you described, the gentle parenting thing. They’re saying those kids are a mess and they’re out of control. The parents are a mess because they’re making it harder on themselves than they probably need to.
They are not using the range of tools that are at their disposal, but also the kids feel deeply unsafe. I think of kids sometimes as a little bit like tourists in a completely new destination. They don’t know the language, they don’t know the rules, they don’t know how things work, they don’t understand the currency or the public transport, and with their tour guides. We’ve been around a while, and we have a fully developed prefrontal cortex. We have life skills and language skills, and all these things that kids simply don’t have.
[bctt tweet=”Kids are like tourists in a completely new destination, and their parents are the tour guides.” via=”no”]
Unfortunately, parents who fall into this trap of gentle parenting have to be reminded that children are just children. They’re gorgeous, they’re wonderful, they are whole human beings, they are valuable as they are in terms of how lovable they are and how worthy their life is, but they are not fully developed. They don’t understand risk assessment or delayed gratification, or the way the world works. They can’t be left to their own devices to decide whether to wear a seat belt, when to go to bed or not, or whether to say please or thank you or not.
It’s not fair to them because, like a tourist in a new destination, if their guide were to say, “I trust you with whatever you want to do. You think what’s appropriate. You decide how to abide by these laws and use the bus system.” It would be very unfair. That would be an abdication of the guide’s role. You’re there to tell them how it works. Help them, for crying out loud. It’s unfair to leave them to their own devices. They’re going to make some pretty detrimental mistakes. That’s where the gentle parenting world has gone at this point.
We’re talking with Avital Levy. She is a parent coach and an author. I did a podcast about a year ago. I interviewed some high school seniors. I do a support group every two weeks for high school girls, and they were talking in the group about how freaked out they were about growing up. They didn’t want to grow up. They’re scared to grow up. I know these girls. They’ve been in my camps. They were very animated about it. I had them on the podcast. I interviewed them, and they talked about all the uncertainty and the anxiety about growing up and all that.
What they came to by the end of the podcast was that they felt that probably the main reasons why they were where they were was because their parents had done too much for them. They hadn’t allowed them to solve problems, think through things, overcome challenges, and all those kinds of things. They felt like, “I’m going to go off to college or somewhere in the world, and I’m not equipped.” There’s some anxiety and a little bit of uncertainty when you go off to another level of your life, but they bring a whole lot more because they haven’t developed the optimism. They have the tools and the skills, and the confidence to say, “I can handle it.”
That’s exactly right, and there isn’t an emphasis in the gentle parenting world on resilience whatsoever. There’s this belief that what doesn’t kill me makes me weaker, and that every experience is a damaging experience, that every insult is a trauma, that every time I don’t get my preferences met, I’m somehow scarred for life. That’s a problematic perspective for children because, unfortunately, we know how our systems work and our bodies. If you don’t expose children to some germs when they’re kids, it doesn’t make them stronger. It makes them weaker. They do need to be exposed to germs in order to learn how to handle them. That’s what builds a strong immune system, because it’s anti-fragile.
I like to remind parents of Nassim Taleb’s idea, where you have fragile substances, like glass, that break under pressure. You have non-fragile substances, like steel, that don’t break so easily under pressure, then you have anti-fragile substances, like muscle mass that gets stronger under pressure. It needs the pressure or else they atrophy. Kids are like that. Kids need some stress. They need pressure. Every time you think, “My child was rejected. My child was frustrated. My child has to wait for something. My child is disappointed. My child’s feelings were hurt,” that’s not a time to fret. That’s a time to secretly celebrate and say, “Yes, I built my child’s immune system up and built a stronger child. They’re going to be able to handle life’s ups and downs.”
It’s all about that old phrase of not clearing the path for the child, but rather preparing the child for the path. You know, I live in a war zone. It’s something that we deal with on a day-to-day level in a very intense way. One of the things parents around me say a lot is, “This whole generation is traumatized.” I won’t stand for it. I don’t think that at all. Just because you lived through a traumatic event, even if it’s objectively traumatic, capital T, by definition, only about 10% of people will have any symptoms of trauma further down the line. I say this as someone who had clinical PTSD from from Tehran war in my teen years. It has only made me stronger. It has only built my resilience.
Even if you do have PT, even if you do have lingering symptoms after trauma, it can still be a gift in your life. There are silver linings to struggle. We don’t want struggles that are going to crush our children. There is such a thing as too much pressure and too much drama, and trauma is real, and PTSD is real. The idea that somehow what doesn’t kill us makes us weaker is simply not borne out by evidence.
The strongest people that you’ve ever met in your life, or that I’ve ever met in my life, went through things. They overcame things. That’s what made them strong. If you have a cushion protected life with no responsibilities, not even chores to do around the house, if you never even wash the dishes, you’re going to find it abrasive and much more difficult to handle. We’re not doing our children any favors by treading so gently. It would be much more beneficial to them to focus on their mental strengths.
How Children Can Achieve Emotional Mastery
We’re talking with Avital Levy. I love your passion. I’m taking up too much time. Can I ask you one more question?
Yeah.
With all your experience coaching parents, traveling, speaking, training, and all that, plus your own kids as well, I’m wondering, if you could go back in time before you started, is there anything that you know now, or what’s the most important thing that you know now about parenting that you wish you had known years ago when you started your parenting life?
I think it might be this point that we’ve discussed, which is that children are antifragile and that you’d want to speak to that strength. Anyone tuning in to this show is likely blessed in the sense that they live in a place that has relative peace and prosperity. It’s very important to keep that in mind and keep that perspective in mind and stay grateful for that. There are ailments of prosperity that we don’t notice.
Anxiety and depression are illnesses of the prosperous. They are illnesses of the peaceful. When people have a cushy, good, protected life, that’s when those illnesses wear their heads. We sometimes look for challenges to toughen us up when those challenges aren’t presenting themselves in our regular day-to-day life. I will say that even in peaceful and prosperous societies, there’s disease and there’s financial downturn and the school shootings and this hurricane, divorce. There are many different things that you could be struggling with.
[bctt tweet=”Anxiety and depression are illnesses of the prosperous and the peaceful.” via=”no”]
It’s important in our generation to keep in mind that those struggles, whilst they are real, are also useful. They can be used to our benefit. They can be used to strengthen our mindset, just like how Viktor Frankl, from the depths of Auschwitz, said, “I’m going to rise above you. You can’t take away that freedom from me.” I’m not sure why, but in today’s day and age, we’ve given over that power over our mood, over our mind.
With your permission, Dr. Jordan, I’ll phrase this specifically around girls. As a girl myself and growing up, I was conceived of and labeled myself as hypersensitive and emotionally volatile, and on this emotional roller coaster. You can excuse it through hormones, or that’s how girls are, or that’s what women are. As someone raising a girl, one of the things that I focus on is emotional mastery. I think emotional expression is good. It’s good to be able to name your feelings and to express your feelings, but I think we are encouraging a whole generation to be driven by emotion and to make decisions based on emotion, and to be at the whim of their emotions.
I think that’s weakening our girls very much. It weakened me. I said this as someone who has overcome PTSD and pretty crippling anxiety, and a lot of sensitivity and insecurities. All of those things are overcomeable. That’s not a life sentence. That doesn’t need to define you. You can become strong and stable. We need to put a little bit less focus, like the gentle parenting puts on emotional expression, and a little bit more focus on emotional stability and mastery.
Just because I feel it doesn’t make it true. My feeling is past. I can overcome. I can drive this ship we spoke about, being a CEO. Our children need to learn to be CEOs of their own bodies and minds, especially our girls need to learn that they are not at the whim of what everybody thinks about them, or even of what they think about themselves. They can overcome that, move forward, take the next right step, feel empowered, and build that mental strength and mental toughness, which we’re all going to need at some point or another in our lives. Going back, I would talk about that. I would talk about mental strength and emotional stability.
[bctt tweet=”Children need to be CEOs of their own bodies and minds. They are not at the whim of what everybody thinks of them or what they think about themselves.” via=”no”]
That’s beautiful. Many years ago, we started our weekend retreats and summer camps. One of the reasons was that my wife and I had been teaching some weekend retreats for adults on personal growth. One of the things that we found was that they were struggling with something in their life now as a 30, 40, or 50-year-old in their marriage and their life, whatever. Once they could get away on a weekend retreat and look at it, most of them sowed the seeds for those issues as adults. The seeds were starting in their childhoods.
They had a lot of unresolved issues and unresolved emotions that they hadn’t had the chance to, or the ability to work through. Now they are carrying it with them into adulthood and their parenting. We thought, “Why are we waiting until people are 50 to look at this stuff?” Part of what we do in our camps is we have a circle time in the morning. It’ll be 25 girls sitting in a circle. We’ll talk about life, things, emotions, understanding your emotions, expressing your emotions, handling adversities, or talking about friendship. Whatever is on their minds, we’d talk about them.
I think some parents have the sense of “This is a camp for troubled girls or girls in trouble.” I would tell them, “If I walked into any one of your kids’ schools and I just grabbed the first 25 girls I saw, that’s who you are seeing in that circle. They all have stuff that they experience in life. Some of them have more intense things than others, but they still can relate on that level. I think kids need a safe place where they can talk about those things, so they can make better sense of it, so it doesn’t end up following them in a negative way into their teen years and adulthood.
It’s amazing that you’re providing that. I think parents can also provide that in their homes. You build the right relationship with your child, and you hopefully become the shoulder to cry on, and they are listening in. Also, that coach who tells them they can handle it.
The Unbreakable Family Kit
Tell parents how they can find you and find all the resources that you offer.
Thank you so much. If anyone is tuning in to this and they feel like, “You know what? I’m drowning in a sense of chaos or overwhelm, and ready to stop that survival mode, and feel like I’m thriving,” then I do have something for your audience, specifically, Dr. Jordan, which is the Unbreakable Family Kit. It’s a quick start guide, a simple and actionable roadmap to create a calm and connected family dynamic. I’d also invite them onto a breakthrough coaching call with me.
If anyone wants to grab that for free, DM me the words Raising Daughters on Instagram. My handle is @HiFamLife, and that will be yours. I can help you get out of survival mode and into a family life that you love. If you want to watch my videos, I’m at @HiFamLife over on YouTube, and my book that Dr. Jordan kindly plugged is called Reclaim Play. You can grab that on Amazon or Audible. The website is HiFam.com, and everything will be there. If anyone wants that Unbreakable Family Kit, they do have to DM me on Instagram for me to be able to send that to them.
I will put those links on the website at DrTimJordan.com. Check out the show and it’ll be there. Thank you so much for all that you’re doing. Your parents are lucky to have you. Wherever it is you’re coaching, you have great passion, you have good experience, and you have a healthy perspective. I’m glad that there’s some healthy parenting and coaching advice out there.
Thank you so much. That means so much coming from you.
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That was interesting. I’m glad she came on. I was interested in her perspective, having traveled all over. My wife and I have traveled and given talks. I think it was fourteen countries, but she’s done more. She coaches parents at a lot more places than I have. It’s nice to get a sense of that. Also, another way of looking at our parenting where we can start trusting ourselves more and not be so overwhelmed with information. It’s great to get information. I’ve written seven books. I do this show. Information is good, as long as it doesn’t overwhelm people.
It’s good to take bits and pieces from lots of different places. That’s what I did with my parenting years ago, and I still take bits and pieces from all kinds of places. It’s a good example. Grab pieces that fit you. As Dr. Spock used to say, “Relax, you’re probably doing a better job than you think you are.” That’s true for most parents. I’ll be back here in a week with a brand new episode. Check out the website at DrTimJordan.com to get the links to Avital’s website and get the free gift and all that. See you back here in a week. Thanks so much for stopping by.
Important Links
- Hi, Fam!
- @HiFamLife on Instagram
- @HiFamLife on YouTube
- Reclaim Play
- Avital Levy on LinkedIn
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
- 30-Phobia
- Dr. Tim Jordan
- Keeping Your Family Grounded When You’re Flying By the Seat of Your Pants (Revised and Updated – 2025)
- Keeping Your Family Grounded: When You’re Flying By the Seat of Your Pants (Revised and Updated – 2025) – on Amazon
About Avital Levy
A designer, parenting coach and mother of five. Married for 16 years, parenting for over a decade and designing for 20. Avital is here to offer you the blueprints, checklists and roadmaps that will allow you to cut corners, skip years of painful trial and error – and design a family life you love.