Episode 168 - Parenting Change Yourself First

Are we raising a generation of entitled, lazy kids without even realizing it?

Drop a 🔥 if this hit home for you — because it’s time to reflect on how we’re shaping the future 🧠✨

Most of us don't realized how much our parenting choices echo in our children’s behavior. From social skills to discipline, everything starts inside the home.

It’s not about blaming anyone — it’s about recognizing that we are the roots. When we improve ourselves, we lay the foundation for well-rounded kids.

If you want to break the cycle and raise responsible, respectful children, start with self-improvement. Your character is the blueprint they build on.

Think about it — are your roots grounded and strong? Or are they shaky and overgrown with bad habits? 🌱

Remember: changing ourselves isn’t easy, but it’s the most powerful gift we can give our kids.

What’s the one thing you’d like to improve in yourself today? Comment below!

#parentingtips #selfdevelopment #ChildRearing #RaisingResponsibility  #innergrowth

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

God gives you those children with those challenges because He wants you to be able to recognize your faults in their behavior. They're behaving that way because they come from you. If you want them to change, then you need to change first. Now it's not so easy, right? Now you understand why so many people fail at parenting. Because in order for me to discipline my child properly, in order for me to raise them healthily, I need to change myself. That's the hard part. It's easy to scream at my child. It's easy to make demands of my child. It's easy to have all these expectations of them. But if I'm not willing to do it, they're not gonna win. They're not gonna change. The trust factor is a ticket to a better life. The trust factor shows you how to get through the life. Welcome back, my friends. We're back at it. It was a week, eight days off. Felt like a long time for me. I know it certainly did for a lot of the listeners. I did get a lot of messages. I tried doing the podcast from there, and try as I may, I went from place to place to place, and it was just very difficult to get a good quiet spot to be able to record. And I didn't want to just record for the sake of recording. So we're back at it, and we're talking about child rearing, raising children, well-functioning, well-adjusted individuals. That seems like a thing of the past. If you're my age or older, then you know that this generation is suffering in ways that they don't even realize. We're so not used to it because it's literally the exact opposite of the values and the ethics that we were taught growing up. The value of a handshake, how to interact with people, social skills, how to make eye contact, how to say please and thank you. These things are going the way of the dinosaur for so many reasons, not the least of which is technology, people who are stuck on their iPhones and their iPads and their computers from such a young age today. And I'm not blaming anybody because we're all guilty of it to a certain degree. But it's become the standard. Add to that the fact that we had COVID, a global pandemic that shut down schools that affected so many kids in the years where they're supposed to have a social life and interact with people and be out there in the workforce. They couldn't do it. And so we're feeling the net effect of that right now. And I don't see it getting any better anytime soon, but the primary source of education and determining factor of how your child is going to turn out is not what's outside the house, it's what's inside the house. It's what you have done to be able to work on yourself to become the best version of you so that you can impart your character traits on your children in a healthy way. It's gonna happen. Your children are sponges. We know this. We know that they're gonna end up being a miniature version of you, a little bit different here, a little bit different over there, but by and large, you're their example. You're who they're learning from. And they are going to turn into little miniature versions of you, not just in the way that they look and the way that they sound when they speak, but in the choices that they make. So if you're making good choices, then the odds are greatly improved that your children are gonna follow in your footstep. It's not a coincidence, it's not rocket science that you see wonderfully behaved children, you see kids that are so well put together. Where does it come from? They're parents. If you look at the parents, you'll see parents who are well put together. And at the same token, if you see children who are short-fused, who are always flying off the handle, who are non-committal, all the difficult character traits, it comes from somewhere. It's modeled by the parents. Most of the time, that's the case. So what does the book tell us? It tells us that if you want to fix this, if you want to make sure that your children have the best chance at success, then you have to do what they call a root treatment. Fix me. I am the root of my child. My child came from me. I'm the tree and they are the fruit. So I need to make sure that my roots are solid. I need to make sure that I'm positioned in a place that, for sake of the analogy, I'm getting sunlight and I'm getting oxygen, and my roots are grounded and that they're thick and that they're supporting me and that they're feeding my offspring the right information. That's the analogy. But in real life, that's exactly what it is. If we are falling apart at the seams, we can barely hold our lives together, then I have news for you. Your children, unfortunately, are going to experience very much the same. Let's get into it and see what the book says. It says, educating your children entails many tests of imuna. A child that doesn't listen to his parents, a child who is cruel to his siblings. We said this, I think, we put before we went away on vacation. A rowdy child, a child who refuses to eat or to wear the clothes that you've laid out for them, a child who does anything that the parent considers improper behavior, and other such situations are a test of a parent's amuna. Why? Why? Okay, they're acting like children. Yeah, but not all children behave the same. Some children are very rowdy, are wild. A lot of children have ADD and ADHD. It's not coincidence that they have that, that they're suffering from these things, that they behave in certain ways. Why? Because your children are mirrors of you. God gives you those children with those challenges because He wants you to be able to recognize your faults in their behavior. They're behaving that way because they come from you. If you want them to change, then you need to change first. Now it's not so easy, right? Now you understand why so many people fail at parenting. Because in order for me to discipline my child properly, in order for me to raise them healthily, I need to change myself. That's the hard part. It's easy to scream at my child. It's easy to make demands of my child. It's easy to have all these expectations of them. But if I'm not willing to do it, they're not going to win. They're not going to change. But to do it for me, for myself to change, is so much more difficult. I would rather just scream and yell at them and hope that they're able to be bigger than I am. It's not going to work, my friends. There's always exceptions, but by and large, this is the steadfast rule. It says that God uses the children to show parents what they need to correct. For example, suppose a son doesn't listen to his father. It's probably because that father didn't listen to his father. And now it's coming around full circle. You know, the parents often said that to you when you were growing up. Wait till you have children. They're going to do the exact same thing to you. Why? Because it's a vicious cycle. Nobody's been able to break that cycle. Or even more, if he's not listening to you as his father, it's because you're not listening to the big father, the father in Abbott. If a child is cruel to others, then the parent probably is as well, and so on and so forth. There's no coincidence. I was on the airplane coming back from our trip, and I had two young kids behind me, probably a 10-year-old and a five-year-old, and the parents were opposite aisle, same rope. It was pretty uninventful. But a couple of times, the young one got really loud and really rowdy, smacking the back of the seat and screaming at the top of his lungs to the point where everybody was turning around. I was doing my best to ignore it, but I couldn't at one point. And I noticed that the parents weren't doing anything, completely allowing them to do it. And I thought, what's going on over here? Until the father tried to interject because he was nervous. He saw that other people were being interrupted and inconvenienced. And the father tried to intervene to tell the boy to stay quiet, and the mother stopped the father. The mother shot a look to the father as to say, leave them alone, knocked down his hand and said, Don't get involved. What message is that sent? What kind of disciplining is that? I understand it's difficult, but you're on a plane. This is not your opportunity to allow your children to work out their problems. And they weren't even the problem between the children. It was just one kid behaving badly. But the mother would not allow her husband, and she certainly wasn't ready to discipline this child. Why? Why not? Why are people so afraid of doing the right thing? She probably thought that she was doing her child a favor by not telling him not to do the things that he was doing. Or she didn't want to upset him even more. Whatever the reason may be, you see clearly that there is failed parenting happening everywhere in the world. People, for one reason or another, are not willing to do the required disciplining of their children. And as a result of that, we have a generation of entitled, lazy people who want to get what they want and they don't want to work. And that's why this whole generation is busy trying to make money while they sleep on the internet. It's not working because that's the carrot that they're dangling, right? There are a very small few that are making untold fortunes online, but by and large, it's the minority, but they dangle the carrot anyways. Everybody runs after that holy grail of making money while we sleep because we're lazy and entitled. And it doesn't work. So what ends up happening? They live in the parents' basement until they're 40 years old. But they tried. I tried this, I tried that, I've got this business going on over here, I've got that business going on over there, I've got all these different things going on, but nothing's materializing. Nothing real is happening. Why? Because in order to work and earn a real living and support yourself in today's day and age, where everything is so expensive and challenging, it doesn't help to work an hour a day or two hours a day, or to pull into Starbucks and flip up a laptop and pretend to be typing away, doing really absolutely nothing, not achieving much. But they feel like they're doing something because they're outside of the house, they're sitting in Starbucks plugged in, and all they're doing is occupying space. Do you know how many people do that? It's the norm today. That's why go into any Starbucks, you're hard pressed to find a chair. Why? Because everybody's selling themselves. That's work. It really isn't. That is this generation. So, in order for a parent to influence his children, his self-improvement must be a root treatment. Remember, we're the root, and not some superficial cosmetic clone. A parent's sincere effort at improving himself are the core solution to rectifying a faulty characteristic in the child, especially one that torments the parent. Nothing else, especially force, will solve the problem, which will only grow as the child grows. If you don't nip it in the bud when they're young, then that character trait will grow with them exponentially. It will continue to get worse while the parent hopes that the child's going to outgrow it. They ultimately do not, and it becomes one of the child's negative character traits. So you want to fix the child, fix yourself first. If you don't have patience, find the patience, work on yourself. If you're constantly flying off the handle and screaming and yelling, do the utmost best to stop flying off the handle. It's possible. You can do it. Screaming and fighting does not work. A child will outmatch you all day long. They've got more stamina than you do. They don't have to work for a living. They don't come home exhausted. They've got all the power in the world, especially when they're younger, to outlast you in a screaming match. They can throw tantrums and lie in the floor in the supermarket. You're not going to do the same thing and you're not going to beat them at that game. It doesn't work. The example is given of a religious mother who takes her children shopping. She goes to the grocery store and they're walking around through all the aisles. And what do the kids do? What kids normally do. Mom, can we have this? Mom, can we have that? Now the mother doesn't want the kids buying junk food, and that's the only thing the kid wants to buy is the junk food. So the child will grab a package of candies off the wall and bring it to the mother. And the mother will look at it and say, No, you can't have any more candies. I told you. No more candies. You eat too much junk. And that child is going to let loose tantrums flying off the handles, lying on the floor, kicking and screaming, making a whole spectacle of the situation until what happens? Until you break. Which the child knows just how much it takes for you to break. And so that child is going to do it until he gets what he wants. And eventually they get it. But if they don't, they learn very quickly that it's not even up for negotiation. What's the example? That religious mother looks at the package of candies and says, sorry, there's no kosher symbol on there. You can't have it. And the child takes that pack of candies and puts it back on the shelf. No tantrum, no screaming, no spectacle. Why not? Because it was non-negotiable. The child knows perfectly well that the mother is not going to relent, not even once. And it doesn't matter how much you scream and cry, you're not going to get a non-kosher pack of candy. The other reason, because you've had too much, because we've got it home, because what doesn't matter what it is. If you're willing to bend on that like you've bent in the past, then that child is going to take full advantage of that. But when the child knows my mom's not going to bend on this, it's just not an option, they don't even try. They're praying that that package is kosher because they know that's the only reason that they will never get that pack of candies, and nothing that they can do will ever change that. If you take that approach to everything in life, you stand by your word when you say something, you follow through, you will never have to raise your voice. That's how I raised my children, and I'm very, very proud of it. I've never raised my voice at my children, and I've never raised, God forbid, a hand on my children. I've never needed to. Not because they were role model children from birth, no child ever is, but because I stuck to whatever it was that I said, to the commitment that I made. When I punished them, I held firm on that punishment. If I said you're punished for three days, it was three full days. And it didn't matter what they did in those three days to try and get out of it. It's very nice. They might get rewarded somewhere else because they were a model child for those three days, but it's not going to lessen that punishment. When I take the phone away, when I take the technology away as a punishment and I tell them it's gone for the day, there isn't a chance in the world that they're going to get it back before the day is done. It doesn't matter to me. I don't care what you say or do. It doesn't matter the argument that you put up. Even if you're right, it doesn't matter. When the words exit my mouth, it's too late. It's done. Solid as steel, unbending. Later on, if they were right, we'll have a conversation about it. If I need to apologize, I'm happy to apologize. But they now know without a doubt that if the words exit my mouth and if they've taken me to that brink where I now have to say something and commit to something that is going to negatively impact them, then they are stuck with that response until it's over. They will never test you. The screaming batch, who can scream louder? Useless. The hitting, absolutely useless. They become numb to it. And on top of that, they start to reset the parents for using violence against them. And as a result, we see children in their later on years when they come from a house that's full of violence, they can't wait to leave. As soon as the opportunity presents itself, they can't get far enough away from that house that they grew up in because they were assaulted either verbally or physically. Why would you need to verbally or physically assault a child? It's simply not a solution. It should never be employed. Use your own commitments. Use your own abilities. At the same time, you work on yourself. You build yourself up to make yourself that person who stands by your work, who commits to it. It's not easy. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It's not easy, but it is the trick. Fix yourself. Make sure you are a person of your work, that you stand by your commitments. Demonstrate that with your children. You will gain from it and they will become better as a result of it. We're back on track, my friends. We're continuing with the series. We're still talking about children because not all children grow up with the same potential. Some children have got forbid problems, emotional, physical problems, things that hold them back. Sometimes we deal with children who become delinquent later on. Those are real world issues, and the Torah addresses them. There's a right way and there's a wrong way. We're going to talk about it more tomorrow. But in the meantime, enjoy the rest of your day. Share the podcast. Remember, so many people need to hear this, especially if they're dealing with marriage, they're dealing with divorce, they're dealing with children. Share the podcast. My friend sharing is Carrie. Thank you for spending time with us on the Trust Factor Podcast. If you've heard something today that moved you, save this episode and share it with someone who might need to hear it. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss upcoming conversations that challenge, empower, and uplift. And if you're on social media, connect with us. Leave your thoughts. Drop a quote that resonated with you. Hashtag the TrustFactor Podcast. Until next time, keep growing in your trust and keep living with purpose. I'm Jesse Revivo, and this has been the Trust Factor Podcast. Thanks for listening.