The Parenting Trap: Are You Raising Kids Who Can’t Make Decisions?

In this episode, we explore the unintended consequences of modern parenting—are we making life too easy for our kids and accidentally robbing them of critical decision-making skills? We discuss strategies for fostering independence, overcoming decision fatigue, and developing soft skills that help children grow into confident, capable adults. Whether you're a parent, a leader, or someone looking to optimize decision-making in your own life, this conversation is packed with insights.

📌 Key Topics:
✅ The hidden ways parents make decisions for their kids
✅ The impact of decision fatigue and how to structure daily life
✅ Why giving kids controlled choices builds confidence and independence
✅ How parenting styles shape soft skills and future success
✅ The power of planning ahead to eliminate daily stress
✅ Practical strategies for fostering better decision-making skills in kids
Tired of overthinking every decision? This episode unpacks why we struggle to choose and how to break free from decision fatigue! 🎙️💡

🎬 Chapters:
00:00 Navigating Decision-Making in Parenting
06:49 The Importance of Planning and Structure
12:19 The Impact of Decision Fatigue
18:17 Soft Skills and Parenting Strategies

Transcript

They said that when you set yourself up for tomorrow, you are ensuring that it's success. Cause you take all the decision making out of the next day. And if the night before you're mapping out where your day is going to go, then the next day, when you're looking at the calendar, you don't have to think about it at all. It's just execute.

So Tanner, do you want to record a podcast today? No, I'm good. We'll start it off different.

Do you think that making decisions is hard for a lot of people? I do. I mean, I think that there's definitely strong willed people who make every decision and there's people who like all the decisions made for them and how those people develop on their own is, you know, their own backstory. But I think having seven kids, we see it so differently in all the kids and even, you know, having a son who's a teenager now that I think of as a determined strong-willed person. But what I've been learning lately is that he is incapable of making decisions for himself. And I've been going with him. He's all involved in sports. He does wrestling, does baseball, he does football, he does bowling. He'll try anything just to get out there and do it. But I haven't, until I got more involved with him and started going with him to these things, I didn't realize how indecisive he is.

And what I gathered from that, and this is trying to take extreme ownership whenever I can, is that we never put him in situations where he needs to make decisions. We tell him when to go to bed. We tell him when dinner's ready. We tell him what time, you know. So when he's asked, do you want to do something, his answers are shrug. And so just recognizing that pattern, I've been trying to break it more and give him more options and things.

And there's a book, I think it's How to Talk So Kids Will Listen or something like that, or it's a raising.

Raising lions. think that's the one raising lions is a really good one. It's a parenting book and they talk about, um, primarily difficult children, you know, ones that have, uh, what a lot of people call ADHD or attention issues or whatever hyper activities. And sounds like you're, uh, on the opposite side of that. Uh, yes. You don't believe, don't believe in it. Well, I, do to a point, but I think that.

I think more along Einstein's quote of if you judge an elephant by its ability to climb a tree, it'll grow up its whole life thinking that it's stupid. And one thing that my wife is phenomenal at is not suppressing our kids' abilities. Like our five-year-old son is hyper, he's energetic, and he's a problem solver. But how I see that through my lens is he's disobedient, he's reckless, and he doesn't listen.

So I can look at it through that lens and say, you know, when he says, hey, can I have some popcorn? And I say, not right now, I'm working. He'll climb up on the stove, grab the popcorn up on the top cover, you know, throw a pan on and pour the kernels in. Because what he heard is, dad's busy, so I'm gonna have to figure this out on my own. And all I'm seeing is disobedience. My wife tries to remind me constantly that he's determined and he's a problem solver.

And he's making decisions. And he's making decisions. Right. We'll go back to your 13 year old whenever I interrupt you. No, no, that's, I mean, just seeing how we as parents are constantly developing, you know, we're changing our outlook on the world and how we then translate that to them. They, each kid was got a completely different childhood experience. And you look at how our 18 year old is now.