Rebel

I noticed as I was teaching my daughter how to drive, she ignores me. 

She tunes me out. 

It's really frustrating. 

I think she would rather get into a car accident than listen to me.

Then it hit me. 

Fighting with my daughter, I finally learned, I was just fighting with myself. 

I wouldn’t listen to my dad when he gave me directions. 

I got lost and had to find my way home. 

When I was in my career funk in Houston, trying to figure out my next path, my dad told me to stop putting so much pressure on myself. 

He said just because you went to HBS doesn’t mean you have to be successful. 

When I told my kid’s doctor, a mom, in the peak of my despair, she told me to just stay home with the kids. Here I was in the middle of a midlife crisis, and I was being told to just stay home and raise my kids. 

But this inner child rebel was always in me, just like my daughter, who wouldn’t listen to me. 

I didn’t want to listen to my dad, nor did my daughter want to me.

Empathy means challenging your preconceived ideas and setting aside your sense of what you think is true in order to learn what actually is true. 

- from book Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley, David Kelley

As kids, we want to do things ourselves. 

We probably do the opposite of what we are told. 

Then I read Shane Parrish weekly email , he mentioned a quote from his podcast, “If you could just change one thing in your child’s life, it would be to give them autonomy. Humans spent 200,000 years as hunter-gatherers. That’s where our brains evolved. That’s where we evolved in this context. If you look on lots of different continents, children have enormous amounts of autonomy in these communities, which implies that that’s how the child evolved, right? The child’s brain evolved. ... It wasn’t that long ago in Western society that we had autonomy. The evolutionary perspective says that we need it. Then there’s this data that shows that kids that don’t have it are more anxious, more prone to depression. There’s tons of data showing that we need autonomy. Children need autonomy, but I think parents don’t know what it looks like."

The more people told me no, the more I wanted yes and to figure things out. 

When I shared this realization with my daughter, she finally listened to me. 

I understand now she wants independence, and I have to stop telling her what to do. 

Thanks for reading!

Happy Independence Day!!

Tiffany Kent

Your Friendly Wealth Engagement Guide,

Tiffany@wealthengagement.com

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