 All right. We're bringing you Adam Lane Smith. Again, attachment expert. He's an expert on relationships. Today's episode. He talks about how to become a great parent and raise successful kids. If you've loved his other episodes, uh, this one's one of the best ones. Today's program giveaway is the original maps, anabolic. If you want to win it, do this, leave a comment below this video. The first 24 is that we drop it subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications. If you win, we'll let you know in the comment section. We also have a sale going on maps, old time strength, half off maps, obstacle, course racing, also half off. If you're interested, just click on the link at the top of the description below. All right. Back to the show. Welcome back in today. We're going to be talking about parenting and why it is so hard and so complicated in this modern world. I'm also going to show you how to make it uncomplicated and how to build the best families, the best connections and the best family relations so that your children can have secure attachment for their whole lives and build incredible relationships in the future. Whatever the future is going to hold, whatever marriage looks like and dating looks like by the time they're grown up or if your kids are teens and they're already launching into the dating world or even if you have adult children, we're going to talk about building incredible relationships with them here today and how to build a great family system. Let's get into it. So specifically the things I'd like to cover today are why modern parenting is especially hard. Things that we're facing that our ancestors didn't face, that your parents didn't even face. How modern people view parenting because it's not a pretty picture how people view parenthood anymore. How attachment issues will poison your parenting structure or your co-parents parenting structure. Why many kids today get wrecked. If you watch the marriage episode just prior to this one, you probably have a pretty good idea, but we'll dive deeper so that you can safeguard your child's attachment. We're also going to talk about how secure attachment is going to help your child grow throughout the course of their life and get stronger and healthier. We're going to talk about building what I call a self-correcting family system. Yes, it's not about being a perfect parent because you never will be a perfect parent. It's about building a self-correcting family system so that your family gets stronger over time instead of weakening and falling apart. We're going to talk about co-parenting successfully in this world. How to co-parent as long as the other co-parent is even halfway willing to work with you. If it's not an extreme hostile relationship, there are ways to make it work. And frankly, because there are extreme hostile circumstances, I will talk you through a little bit about what to do if that happens. And then we're going to talk about how to raise kids to succeed in this world. How to raise kids so that they can go out and conquer and build a great life for themselves and achieve their goals. By the end of this episode, you're going to understand how to give your kids the best love possible. How to raise them so that they are strong and confident. And how to create a healthy family system for generations to come. So let's jump in. First, let's talk about why modern parenting is just so darn hard. A big piece of this is that most of us just did not have family, family structures that functioned at all early on. Most of us don't know what a structured family system actually looks like. What a healthy one looks like. A lot of kids in town today are being born into families where there is no double relationships happening. There's no couple anymore. The family is already split up by the child at the time the child was born. The family was never together. The child doesn't even know who their dad is. That's pretty damaging, by the way. Or family structures where everyone is fighting and hating and screaming at each other all the time. A lot of us also don't have parenting skills that work. So a lot of our parenting skills that we talk about are actually retained traumas from childhood. So here in the West, especially United States, we had massive industrialization that launched people into cities into 100 hour work weeks about 100 years ago. People went from family farms to working in the cities and working 100 hours a week. People don't realize this, that when Henry Ford came along and announced the 40 hour work week, it was a miracle for many industrial workers because they'd been so destroyed prior to that working 100 hours a week in factories and dying in factories, by the way, there's a lot of that. But then the Dust Bowl came, then the Great Depression came, then World War I, before that World War II, after that, all these wars, all this destruction, all this chaos, a lot of us are still catching up and we still have retained family traumas that we think are going to make us strong. Raise your child to believe that nobody in the world will ever care about them. Well, that's really great and helpful during the Great Depression. It's really great and helpful during collapses of society, not so much helpful for raising successful loving kids of their own, though. So raising your children with a hardcore survival edge doesn't really build into great family systems long term, it just keeps your kids alive. A lot of parenting skills that are still surviving today that many of us use are trauma pieces. So we're going to have to overcome that. Don't worry, I'm going to teach you some better parenting skills here in this episode later on. Most parents, though, don't even get married anymore. Most of the we have unmarried parents, people are not even connected. And it's not that marriage magically makes everything great. It's when your child has a structure, and they say, my family will always be together so I can relax and feel safe, huge benefits. If the couple is committed to cooperating together as a team, huge benefits, they see people cooperating, huge benefits. If they're all split up, the messages nobody can cooperate, my family falls apart, I have nothing to rely on, I have to build a structure to keep myself safe. This is why marriage is not a magical fix, but marriages tend to give the best satisfying connection and health and security for children long term, so that kids feel safe. A good marriage makes kids feel safe, and sets them up to look for a good marriage and build a great marriage later on. Just point blank. Most of us though, if you're my generation, you grew up with parents who split apart, and they explain this to you as a child by saying, sometimes love just doesn't last. Sometimes people just fall out of love. Sometimes love isn't enough. Well, no, it's that you are a complete selfish prick, and you didn't know how to actually give love or receive love, or be honest with people, or talk about problems, or share solutions, or build a relationship together. You are incapable of cooperating with other human beings. You never had love in the first place. But as kids, we don't understand that we just say, wow, love isn't enough. People can just fall out of love. People won't love me. Well, then love is worthless. We don't even know what love is. Also, a lot of parents, co-parents going back and forth. There's Disneyland dads. There's super fun moms, checked out moms. Moms who are in their late 40s trying to pretend that they are in their early 20s again, banging every dude they can get access to, so they feel good and validated, and their teenage kids hate them, and feel completely neglected and wish that mom actually loved them. Plenty of dads doing this too. Plenty of Disneyland dads. I only show up once in a while, take my kids to Disneyland. And otherwise, their mom has to be the one who lays down all the rules and is a jerk to them, and they hate her. They love me. Plenty of times this is happening. So co-parenting unsuccessfully from separate households creates all kind of tension. There's no shared rules. The kids go back and forth. It's endless chaos. I've even known people that the kids go back and forth every other day. Every single other day. Kids go back and forth. It's not like three days here, three days there. Every single day they are in a different house. Can you imagine? Like being four years old? Imagine what that does to your brain. Imagine what that teaches you. Especially if mom and dad are fighting in between those two days. They can't even meet up to successfully just hand you off, patiently and calmly. They can't even do that. What's that going to teach you at two, three, four years old? Not good. The high cost of living also means today that even if you do stay together, even if you do succeed, your kids are probably going to be raised by daycare, raised by school, or raised by their ever present guardian, the tablet. The magical tablet which just cycles their dopamine by the way endlessly. So all they do is binge dopamine over and over and over and over, learn everything. Yeah, they're getting good at tech. They're also getting really great at navigating around like pornography around all kinds of other things. They learn all kinds of stuff they shouldn't be learning early on. If you thought it was bad for kids learning about porn at 12, wait until you hear about how early they're learning about porn now. Kids are being raised by screens. They're being raised by technology and they're being raised by daycare and school and strangers. They don't even have access to their parents hardly anymore. I've done so, so much work over the years with families that should on paper have been successful, but each kid is in three different sports. And there's three kids in the family, nine different sports. Parents are both working jobs, kids were raised in daycare, then they go into school, then they are endlessly in sports. Family dinners are a quick granola bar in the car as they're dumping kids off, picking kids up, doing all kinds of stuff in the evenings. Kids don't even know how their parents are and the parents don't understand why their kids are suicidal by age 12. That's what we're dealing with today. There's barely any bonding time where you're not utterly exhausted. If you're too exhausted to bond with your kids, you're too exhausted to be able to balance that. We'll talk about that and how to structure that in. I've had to navigate that myself, totally understand. And everybody feels all alone, alienated, cold, distant. There's no parenting skills, like we mentioned, no, and there's attachment issues. Parents don't know how to bond. They want to, but they don't know how to connect to their kids. They don't know what emotional intimacy looks like. We're living in a post-catastrophic experience with trauma, trauma, trauma through the generations, saying where are the parenting skills that would have passed down all these pieces? How do I bond to my kids? Well, I don't know. Just do it. I don't know how. I'll just buy them toys. I'll give them a tablet. Here, kid, can play on your tablet for three hours. That's my way of showing you love. Cool. And communication problems. We don't even know how to talk to each other. How do we talk to our kids? We weren't talked to as kids, not with love, not with connection. Most of us, our parents didn't invest time in us. So we don't know how to talk to a child in a loving intimate way that builds them up instead of talking down to them like we were talked down to. All of this is a recipe for horrible experiences for everybody involved, parents and kids. So fast forward to today. How do people view parenting nowadays? They think it's horrible, right? They think that it'll be, many people think I'm going to be unsuitable. I had no good parenting. I was so messed up. I would mess up my kids. I should never have children because I will ruin my kid's life. Those are actually the people that probably should have kids, most likely because they take it that seriously. But they're now too terrified to have kids. Fix your challenges, learn the skills. It's a skill. And then build a great family because you take it seriously. Other people think that kids are going to ruin your life, right? They call them crotch goblins is a good one. Parasites, little parasite growing in my belly, things like that. Kids are going to ruin my life. I won't have fun. I can't have sex all the time. I don't get to just travel. They treat them like an inconvenient pet that you now have to take care of. Many are used to being told by the way that they were a huge burden in childhood. Some people say my parents only told stories about how much fun they didn't get to have anymore. So you grow up and that's all you hear. Or they now have other friends and their friends have kids and their friends say, oh man, it's terrible. It's hard. I'm exhausted all the time. My kids threw up on my head the other day and they hear, wow, that's terrible. I don't want that. That's awful. Why would I want that? And if you've never experienced love and intimacy in a family setting, you have no framework for why somebody would take on a huge burden like this and get thrown up on. I have four kids. I got number five on the way. Let me tell you, there's a lot of bodily fluids. There's times that you're praying it's just pee running down your back. There's all kinds of times with parenthood and it's hard. And it's also one of the most fulfilling things that a person can do for most people. So many of us only saw broken families growing up. We only understand the bad. We think all of that's normal. We think the dysfunction is normal. We think misery is normal. We think it's normal to be broken and that there's nothing good or redeeming at all in a family. Take what you can get, leave as fast as you possibly can. Who would want to have a kid in that? Who would want to raise a child in that kind of a structure? This is why a lot of people fall into the zero population growth. Don't have kids. It's the worst thing you can do. You're a monster for having kids. Don't bring them into this world. We're over populated enough as it is. No. So if you want better for your kids, if you're like me and you want to have kids, I want even more kids. If you want to have kids or if you already have them, but it feels hopeless. It's not hopeless. I'm going to show you how to have a good parent and good family structure here. Very simply. But here's some complications that we need to acknowledge. The world right now that we live in is even more terrifying than ever. The rate of pedophile seems to be increasing. Have you noticed that? It's in the news all the time. Hey, missing children found on an island. Hi politicians. All of the pedophilia. All of the problems going on. All of those struggles. All of the what is it? Pedosexuality happening everywhere, right? They're the move to normalize it. But also everything today is sex. Freud won. Everything is sex. Oh, I'm going to eat hot dog. Oh, sex. Right? Oh, I'm going to hold her hand. Oh, sex. Everything is sex, sex, sex. Porn everywhere. The hand your kid a tablet and they get into pornography immediately, right? All kinds of crazy stuff happening in this world. Everything is sex, but the economy right now is 23, 2023 as we record this. Everything is crashing, but at the same time prices are going up. I saw a stout the other day that we are making financially less than people made during the Great Depression, but costs are financially worse than they were during the Great Depression. So we are actually financially worse off right now than people were during the Great Depression financially numbers wise. We are worse off with our income than we ever have been ever. It's horrible. We also have no time for family. Dads come home utterly exhausted. Moms too. Trashed from their daily work. All the extra things they have to do. All the stress and the struggle and the pain. And then you have to come home and try to focus in on your kids. It's exhausting. Necessary, but exhausting. And frankly, when you're that stressed and that exhausted, kids start cutting into your coping time. Because we need time to decompress. We need time to relax. Sometimes time to cope. If you can't manage the trauma, then you need to cope with the trauma and handle it. Or the pain or the stress of what you're dealing with. And kids cut into that. They just they just do. It's hard. The fear is that they're going to be miserable and depressed anyway. Right? The flow from childhood and anxiety into depression, teenage depression, into adult depression. They're going to be stressed out and miserable. That's the belief that they're going to leave you forever. I saw a stat the other day that said once your child is 18, they have spent 90% of the time in their lifetime that they will ever spend with you. And you will only have a tiny sliver of time with them throughout the rest of their life because you will never see your children. That's horrifying. I don't believe that in most circumstances, but there are definitely circumstances where that can be true, especially if your family system is so broken, that they have no reason to connect with you. And you have no reason to connect with them because you've never properly bonded or they move far away because they don't want to value family. They value safety. And that just comes from a high paying salary at a job. So they move away, take a job, hardly ever see you again. Yes, you're going to see less of them probably in adulthood, most likely, but not only a sliver. That's horrible. That's horrible. If that is involuntary, that's tragic. But we believe it. We also think that parenting is a horrible and thankless job that we're just going to be exhausted. We're going to be drained. We're going to be miserable. Then they're going to walk away from us, spit on us and leave. And we will just be left broken and alone. This is what people think. But we still want it. The research shows that millennials are the one generation that has wanted children more than any generation on record prior ever, ever. Millennials want kids more than any other generation ever has, and they are the least likely to have kids. Gen Z, they haven't really begun recording this yet because Gen Z isn't really old enough to even start thinking about kids, many of them. Some of the oldest ones a little bit, but millennials are the most likely to crave having children. Even in all of this, and the least likely to have them, which is crushingly depressing, out of all the women that they're childless, they say about 10% of them shows that way and are happy. Which means about 90% of women are what they call involuntarily childless, right? You've heard about incels for men, 90% of women who don't have children say it just never worked out for me, and I wish it had. 90% of childless women. The research is pretty ugly, guys. Now, we can fix this. This is not the end of the picture, but this is an acknowledgement of the bad. Let's talk about attachment. Let's talk about attachment before we dive into fixing it. Here's what you need to know if your attachment has been broken, if you've been handed broken attachment from your family. If you can't believe in real love, how are you going to raise kids? Anxious parents, especially, are going to have a really hard time because here's what tends to happen is they either hyper fixate on protecting their kids, obsessive helicopter parenting that smothers them, or they demand that child soothe them. I finally have someone who can't abandon me. Now, I'm going to demand things from them by doing things for them and then requiring soothing in return. They might become really controlling or resentful of their kids or just overwhelmingly nervous around them, and they start setting their kids up to be obsessively terrified and nervous about the world as well, or they smother them with their own needs like we talked about. Avoidant parents might completely neglect and avoid the kids, hardly spend time with them at all, or they might try to love them by criticizing them. I'm going to make you tough to survive in this world. You don't need love. You need this. I heard a very famous content creator say, if you ever tell your kids you love them, you have ruined them for life. Interesting. That was a red pill creator. If you tell your kids you love them, you have ruined them for life because no one else will love them. So you've destroyed their reality already by giving them too much love. Cool. No. Most people in this structure have never had oxytocin. Oxytocin is the hormone release when you feel calm, at peace, relaxed, and safe in some of these presence. If you've never experienced that, you don't know what family love is and how good it can feel and how amazing it is for your nervous system, for your organs, for your functioning, for your immune system. Oxytocin suppresses pain. It calms us down. It allows the release of GABA, gamma-aminobioric acid, an inhibitory neurotransmitter that functions as a natural antidepressant and anti-anxiety medication in your brain, basically. When you have those things in place, you feel safe and you function better. A strong, healthy, loving family makes you function better in this world. But so many of us have never experienced that oxytocin bonding. We don't even know what a good family can do for us. So these kids grow up without oxytocin and all they have is fear. The family breaks apart and it makes it so much worse in the future. This is why broken attachment has led through the generations to be worse and worse and worse and worse. And that's why we're fixing it. Now, this is exactly why kids get wrecked. Let's talk about how. So you grow up with fear, anxiety, stress. Your parents are always stressed. When it's criticizing you because they're avoidant, when it's smothering you because they're anxious, you grow up in a constant terminal if you even have both parents. If they even live together or you're bouncing back and forth between them or your childhood family home is ripped apart through divorce. You start developing chronically high anxiety, right? Anxiety issues start playing out with perfectionism. A constant seeking of approval, acting out, maybe becoming the class clown, the joker, deflecting all the time, running away from issues. You become really avoidant. You push back on other people. You just people, please. You manage other people. Maybe you even manipulate or you have raw anger at the world because you never feel taken seriously. So you're going to make them take you seriously. All this boils over into that overwhelming anxiety and this turns into depression as demands grow as you move forward into middle school into high school into bonding, losing your friend groups, trying to date all your hormones surge. Now you have depression. So you go from broken attachment, broken family structure, broken family lineage and the generational attachment issues into anxiety, then into depression and hopelessness as hopelessness and helplessness sets in. Now we have teenage depression. Now it's normal. We just think teenage depression is a normal thing. Yeah. Teenagers, biologically, humans just get crushingly suicidally depressed for years and it's just part of puberty. They try to kill themselves and if we survive through the meat grinder, yeah, that's cool. That's just a normal part. No. What other species gets crushingly suicidally depressed for years of their biological growth during their puberty time? None. That's not how it works. That is the flow of broken attachment. You've got to fix it. But unfortunately, these teens, they cope in any way they possibly can. Drugs, sex, video games, cutting, right? Self-harm. It's not about trying to die. It's about activating the parts of the brain that start suppressing emotional pain so that you can start coping with the physical aspect of what's happening. Coping, it's a coping mechanism similar to progressive muscle relaxation. Runners hide all kinds of physical pieces. Cutting is about just managing that emotional agitation but they don't realize that. Then the parents scream at them for cutting and they just yell at them and make it worse. But this leads to that nihilism of everything is bleak, everything is miserable. Why don't I just kill myself? I'm 14. I've seen everything I need to see. This is actually why suicide rates among 11-year-olds are spiking out of control and pediatricians are sounding the alarm and it's being suppressed because no one wants to talk about it. It's very uncomfortable. Yeah, let's talk about it and fix it. Attachment issues are getting worse. 65% of adults now have attachment issues. I'm willing to bet money that it's going to go up to 75% when Gen Z is all here and all become adults. When the boomers die off and when Gen Z becomes a big portion of the adult population, it's probably going to go up to 75%. It's getting worse. You guys, we can fix it and a lot of people are waking up and fixing it. I started sounding the alarm about attachment years ago and all of a sudden the internet is flooding with attachment theory discussions. I get that. I love it. It's fantastic. Let's have more of those conversations. We have to stop this because it doesn't have to be this way and it shouldn't be this way. It can't be this way. Bad news. Let's turn in the good news. Here's what you need to know. Secure attachment is going to help. So fixing your attachment right now is going to help. We've talked about that through this whole process, fixing attachment with yourself, with your friends, with your family, building great dating profiles that lead and great dating processes that lead to great marriages, building a great marriage, experiencing great connections. You have resources. I have resources. Let me know if you need that. Fixing your attachment, it's going to help. You also need to learn the parenting skills that have been lost over the last 100 years. Don't panic. It's okay. The skills are still here. We have them. We're bringing them back, right? We're bringing all that old knowledge back. I'm going to give you some skills here in this that are going to work and then you can learn and refine with specific skills. These are going to be general skills that will guide you through most of the bulk of the work of building a healthy loving family. Then you can patch in all kinds of skills as you need them. We're going to build you a family that cooperates and communicates. Absolutely crucial. This is going to build the self-correcting family system that I talked about in medical. We're going to build a self-correcting family system that over time gets healthier and healthier that stops this constant bleed that you've experienced. The reason you guys are watching this learning to be better parents is because that bleed has happened. You're going to stop that and you're going to build better from here. Your family's gone down. Now they're going to go up from now on for the next few generations. We're going to teach you heirloom skills you're going to hand down from now on. All of these things that you've learned about your friends, your family, everything, romance, we're going to teach here too. It turns out that relationships are relationships are relationships. So the same things that work that make great friendships, you're not going to become friends with your kids, but the same skills are going to apply here too. Parenting relationships are just as important. So I'm going to introduce this concept. Your children are not a magical childhood. Magical childhood is something we've invented, by the way, very recently. Magical childhood. Let them be innocent. Let them have fun. Okay. But let's use this model of apprentice adults. My children are apprentice adults who are at various stages of capability. And it is my job as an adult to raise them into a successful, healthy, thriving adult. They are an apprentice adult that you are supposed to be careful of their phases and guide them at the right times in the right ways. Apprenticeship mindset. Remember this. Self-correcting family system. What does this mean? I've said it a couple of times now. It means you are not the only actor, the active person fixing the family. Everybody else is bringing problems to solve and solving them together. If you mess up now, five years from now, your kids can say, I have this weird memory. Can you walk me through it and give me context? You solve it. They don't just have an awful memory of you that doesn't make sense for 50 years and on your deathbed they ask you about it. They ask you about it now. They say, hey dad, this doesn't make sense to me now. What do you mean? And you talk about it and you build context and you share. It's not just do what I say because I'm your dad. Okay, hey, you know what? I'm not raising you to obey mindlessly. Let's talk this through and let me teach you apprentice adults. Self-correcting family system of them being dynamic creatures that are surviving in the system with you working together. You can stop mistakes in their tracks and fix them. They can heal you too. It's not about using them for your needs. They might heal you over time and step in and say, dad, you got to fix this thing that you're doing. Okay, man, you're right. Let me share this with you and you bond with them and you heal through the experience. It's not about them parenting you. They're not your therapist but you can heal through the experience of having a good family. Relationships will heal you. Then they can build a bigger, better family system as they go and you can step back and watch them thrive. It's not pressuring them to have grandkids. I'm not saying that but the ones who choose to grow and build bigger family systems, you get to watch that and be a part of it and engage in it. That's part of your legacy right there. But it all comes down to being a team together. That's what we're going to talk about here today. Building a self-correcting family system. So number one, start cooperating during conflicts. So here's what this means, right? I have a son. He's seven years old at a time of filming. He's seven years old here. He does not like, surprise, surprise to go to bed at on time. He doesn't like his bedtime. He likes to delay it. He likes to, he likes to push it off. He likes to get out of bed. He likes to play around. He likes to sneak out. He'll do all the kinds of stuff. He doesn't like bedtime. Okay, that's fair. I wouldn't like a forced bedtime right now, I'm 38 years old. I wouldn't like to be forced to go to bed either. So I don't scream at him. I don't threaten him. I'll beat him with a stick, right? I don't do all the things parents would do. I don't negotiate. Say, okay, I'll give you ice cream. No, here's what I do. I explain to him, look, buddy, are you tired right now? Where are you at? What do you need from me? Do you need an extra five minutes? Do you need another 20 minutes to wind up because you're super up? What do you need? Did you not get enough attention today? Are you just too tired and you're pushing off going to sleep? Are you being stubborn? What is it? Okay, what do you need? All right. Listen, here's where I'm at. Here's why I need you to go to bed. Here's why it's important for you to get good sleep. Here's why it's important for you to explain these things in seven-year-old language, right? You need to get rest so you don't get sick. You need to get rest for tomorrow so you have a great time. You need to get rest so that tomorrow you have all your energy and we can do this and this and this tomorrow, but it's really reliant on you going to bed. Okay, what do you need from me to really go to bed? I need you to sleep. What do you need from me to make for that to happen? It's not bribery. It's okay, I'll buy you a toy. It's what do you need from me? Dad, I need another 10 minutes. Dad, I want to spend time with you tomorrow. Dad, I want, you know, okay, buddy, look, I'll watch an episode of your cartoon with you tomorrow morning. If we have some time, I'll give you something to look forward to, but cool. Why don't you do that? We'll have an experience tomorrow. Don't just reward them with toys or sugar. We'll have an experience tomorrow. Okay, cool. Let's look forward to that. I need you to go to bed. You need that. Can we shake hands, make a deal? Cool. You show them and guide them with patience, not just completely abandoning it. They're like, okay, kid, you're the boss, but you guide them with patience to do what you need them to do because they understand it's important. Harder to do when they're little, I know, but you guide them through this. You have to be a little more firm and say, this is what's happening, but here's the trade, but you don't just scream at them. You're going to bed because I said you're going to bed. Cooperate during conflict. Right? I also, I have plenty of kids. I got four kids. Sometimes things could get broken in the house. Shock. I don't scream at them because something broke. I sit down, I get down on their level and say, right, explain to me how this happened. Okay. That's what happened. How are you feeling with this? Are you feeling embarrassed? Are you feeling upset? All right. I'm pretty frustrated this happened because I feel like you didn't pay attention and you didn't care. Can you talk to me about that? Okay. You didn't understand. Okay. I understand, buddy. I don't scream at them and take out my feelings on my kids. I cooperate with them. I apologize for making mistakes. If I do have a bad day and I'm grumpy at my kids, I say, yeah, I'm sorry. You didn't deserve that. I'm really sorry. That was me. Don't make excuses, but explain why and explain it in context. Really important. I'm grumpy once in a while. As you could tell. I get tired. We all get tired. Hey, I'm sorry, buddy. I shouldn't have been grumpy at you. I shouldn't have made a passive aggressive comment. I shouldn't have ignored you, right? I shouldn't have just said no. I should have explained this as why, right? Express apology and humility for your own mistakes. Again, you don't pass over to everybody, but you're the boss. I'm sorry. I'm a mess. No, you explain, but the way that you want them, an authority leader in their life to explain so that they hold authority figures to account. You asked more questions. I asked my kids questions all the time. All right, explain how you feel. Explain what you were thinking here. Explain what you need from me. Talk to me about why this was important to you. All right, buddy, you want that toy. Talk to me about why. What does that mean for you? I am curious about my kids. I learn about them. I want to learn more about them. Very, very important leadership skill. I also show more interest in my kids, right? Talk to me about you. You love that cartoon. Why do you love that cartoon? I guide them through it. Why do you love that cartoon? Who's your favorite character? Why? Is that somebody you want to be like? What makes you want to be like them? Cool. All right. Is that a good thing? It's a bad thing, you know? My oldest son, he thinks the villains are the coolest. He's in that phase right now, right? The villains are the coolest. All right. Why? What do they do? Okay. Why do you think they act that way? Do you think that they might be harming other people with those actions? Okay, so maybe he's not the coolest character in the block. Okay. But you think that he is cool because he has confidence and he takes control. Okay. So you like those aspects. Are there pieces of him you want to kind of be like, but also maybe pieces you don't want to be like? I invest in my kids and show interest and talk them through this. Again, apprenticeship. I take some time to do this with my kids. We watch a cartoon. A cartoon turns into a learning experience. We watch a movie. Turns into a learning experience. We take a walk. We read a story. Learning experiences. You just spend a little bit more time asking questions. I also have what I call the 10-minute daily approach. If you have no time to spend with your kids, if you are working 18 hours a day, you're dog tired, you're stressed out, your heart's about to explode, all you really need is 10 minutes a day with each child you have. 10 minutes. You sit down. You do this. You set a timer. You are my priority. I want to get to know you. I love you. I care about you. I have such little time. You give context. And I want to learn everything about you. So for the next 10 minutes, we are going to play a game. You might play a game. You might color. You might do a puzzle. Something physical with your hands, right? This works with young kids, teenagers. I'd have 13-year-old very rebellious, angry teens come in with their parents. Kids don't want anything to do with their parents. And we'd set up the 10-minute system. And little kids get into this in the first week. Teens take about two to three weeks to get into it. Consistent every single day. You are my priority. I will set the timer. And I do nothing but ask you branching questions about you. No lectures. No talking at you. No being like your boss. No coming down on you. I will investigate and learn about you through branching questions. Hey, what did you do today? What was important today? Hey, what was cool? What do you like doing? What's your favorite, you know, whatever character and whatever you're learning about. What's your favorite color? Why is that your favorite color? What are you hoping for? What do you learn about your kids? You just ask them questions for 10 minutes, but you're doing things with your hands. So it's not staring at each other in the eyes and awkward and horrible. Kids do so much better verbally when they're playing a game or doing a task or a craft. You do that for 10 minutes with each child. I have seen miracles happen with the 10 minute approach. If you can help with that, shoot me an email. I have a PDF that I can share with you. Support at adamlainsmith.com is my email. Shoot me an email. I will help you out. And we'll talk about it. But do the 10 minutes a day if you have nothing else. Do the 10 minutes a day even if you do have other things, but 10 minutes a day with kids can make miracles happen after a couple of weeks. If angry teens, honestly, after a month, I've even seen that turn around really hard. When you show kids that they're a priority and that you're interested in them and you want to learn about them and you play a game with them and you do something cool with them for 10 minutes a day, it changes everything. Even 10 minutes can make a big difference. So if you are a father or a mother who is pressed for time and exhausted and running your head off and not sure what to do, this is a big change you can make is a 10 minute change. Email me. I'll be happy to share that PDF with you and you can make that change happen today. The biggest thing I want to tell you is to raise adults that you could be friends with in adulthood. Raise adults that you can work together with in a family system. Raise adults who would want to live near you when they have kids. Raise adults who will want to call you. You have about 18 years to get your kids to want to be around you. Otherwise, you will be chasing them for the rest of their life. Make them easy to catch. Make them want you to catch them. Make them glad when they're 35 and you call them on the phone and they see your face and they don't say, oh, no, dad's calling. I don't have time for this guy. They are pumped to talk to dad and share their interests. Dad, let me tell you what I was doing this week. Let me share my win at business. Let me share this. Hey, I hit this record in the gym. Hey, dad, let me tell you about this girl I met. Hey, dad, tell me. And you talk to them and they just flood you with the information because they're so happy to share their wins and share because they know you're interested because you have trained them all these years to believe that they are interesting enough in their own. This is how you start building secure attachment and kids who don't go out and try to be interesting and stimulate other people because they know that they are good enough and interesting enough being who they are. This is how you raise more secure attachment. Raise them to believe specifically these things. Number one, that people will take them seriously and care about their hurts, care about their needs, care about their feelings. Not that you're slave to their feelings or that they are either, but you'll take their needs and care seriously. Number two, that people will cooperate with them during a conflict, that they won't scream at them, blame them, walk away from them, shove them aside, that they will work with them during a conflict. Raise kids who believe that people should be honest with each other. So when they date, they don't have time for people who can't be honest. They don't have time for people who lie to them. They don't have time for people who won't tell them straight out what things are. Raise kids who believe that they believe they can and should share their needs openly. Hey, I need this. Hey, I need this. Hey, I want this. Can we do this? How can we build this? Calm, not demanding, but calm and clear. Raise kids who believe that they can relax in relationships and feel safe. So they don't have to feel like they have to constantly guard against other people and betrayal endlessly forever. Not mind-numbingly stupid naive kids, but people who know when you can trust and when you can't. Raise kids who believe that they can pursue their goals in life and be safe because dad's got them. I'm not saying they have to live in your basement forever. I'm saying you've got them. They have a safety net. Dad, this bad thing happened. Can you help me out? Yeah, buddy, I got you. Okay, you made a bad choice in business. You need me to cover you for the next month or two and rent. Buddy, I got you. I know that you're better than this and I know you're going to rise. I got you for a month or two. Dad, my boyfriend just dumped me. I am so broken, so crushed. I got you. Come here. Come be with us. We will take care of you and manage through the grief and we'll help you make sense of what happened. Give them that safety net. They can pursue goals that way and be opportunity focused instead of risk obsessed, right? And Twitter parlance, old Twitter parlance, ex parlance. Now they will be abundance mindset instead of scarcity mindset. And the last one is make sure that your kids understand that life is about those opportunities. It's not just about risk. This is easier if both parents are aligned on this. Parents, if you're together, I hope that you're watching all of this together and building this in together. But co-parenting makes this tougher. Let's talk co-parenting. Let's talk tactics. If you're in the same house, get on board with the same mission. What is your mission? To raise healthy great-grandkids. I mean that with my wife and I, we are on the mission is to raise healthy great-grandchildren. So to do that, kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, it's not just about giving our kids a happy childhood. It's about raising them into healthy, loving, fulfilling, opportunity-minded adults who will thrive and cooperate and then have good kids and then have good grandkids, right? Building that structure for them. We look beyond just the kids, just their childhood. We're not here for Disneyland parenting. We're here for lifelong parenting and guidance. Number two, talk about what sort of family you were trying to create together. What's the ideal family? For me, multi-generational home, taking care of each other, building businesses together, building houses across the street from each other. It's my ideal. Will my kids follow suit? I don't know. We'll find out as they grow up. I'm not going to crush them into it, but that's my ideal and that's my wife's ideal as well. And we're raising our children to understand that the benefits of that but also to have their own choices, right? You don't smother them. That's the family estate model, the family finances model, the family connection model. It's helpful, especially as the economy is collapsing for you guys to work together and have that trust with each other and build a connection that they can thrive in. But what is your mission? What's your mission in life? What sort of family model would support that mission? Talk about this. Actually talk about this and the shared values that will come back to that. So shared values you want to pass on. Share these with the kids too, right? Game of Thrones was not that long ago and I know it dropped off the map with the awful last season but every family had a saying, right? And my family, the motto is this. I'm Adam Lane Smith, the Smith. A Smith's word is iron. I know it's cheesy but it works. A Smith's word is iron. So I tell my kids, if they ever lie when they're little, they try lying. No, we don't do that in this family. We don't do that in this family because lying breaks us up. It makes it hard to trust and it makes it so we are not a team. It's you against everybody. Tell the truth and let's deal with the truth together as a family. We don't lie in this family because a Smith's word is iron. Easy to remember, huh? What's your family? What's your motto? What's your value? The values should help you reach the mission. The values stop you from sabotaging the mission. Think of it that way. So parents, if you can, whether you live in the same house or not, talk about the mission, raising healthy kids mostly, talk about the values that will get you there and unify around those together as a family. Parents in one household at least should be unified as a team. Now this is called presenting a unified front. It's not parents versus kids. It is parents united as co-founders in a business with the employees under them. You don't trash the employees but you also don't divide and say, well, they're a stupid leader. I'm the right leader. No one can get in between you to cause drama because kids will try to get in between you. They'll try to take control. Kids constantly try to take control to see if they can. The goal is to not let them take total control and especially by dividing you. You give them control carefully as they earn it and build responsibility with them so they understand what responsibility is. So do you have one main decider? A lot of couples fall into the typical gender roles. Most couples do. It's not a bad thing, but a variation of them usually. Have one main decider. Cool. If you're equals, have a rule to discuss things before handing down decisions. If you have one decider, point people at that one decider. I don't say, I'm not saying have a good parent and disciplinary. It's not good cop, bad cop, but have a decision process. Make that clear who makes decisions. If it's both of you together, tell your kids, we will discuss this together and we will get back to you. That's how you handle a business. That's how you handle a family. Get the kids used to the two of you going into another room to talk and discuss. But not only away from them, by the way. Kids should see you talking and discussing together, not arguing, screaming, yelling. Teach them how to be in a partnership. Maybe even debate a little bit with respect. Debating each other with respect, bouncing ideas off of each other, advising, talking, working together. Get your kids used to you as a couple doing that so they learn to expect that in a marriage someday. Teach them how to act with their partner and how their partner should act with them. Now, for parenting in separate houses, same basic idea if you guys can get on board, shared that unified mission, the unified values. I've helped couples do this before, presenting a mission, talking about it, and saying, can we at least navigate around this? When we make decisions, can we do it for this purpose? When we have, can we talk about shared values with our kids and also embody them together? I will commit to embodying this value with you, my ex, if you can commit to it and we will always work together to do this because it's best for the children. Can we unify around this? At least agree on those things so you can work as a team. Even if you aren't fans of each other, you have a shared goal, you can work toward it. Start making choices toward that mission over time. So start thinking, okay, if our mission is healthy, successful, thriving kids who've grown to great adults, who also thrive and have good kids of their own if they choose to, what is best for our kids 20 years from now? That's how you should be making decisions as a couple. What's best for our kids 20 years from now? Now, if the other parent refuses to do this, you still provide guidance for your kids. You can get a meteor involved if necessary, but build that structure, build the mission, build the values, even if it's just in your own home. Okay, I know your other parent doesn't do this. I'm not talking about good or bad about them. Here is what we do here in this household and here's why. Here's what this should teach you. Here's what this will operate and offer you later in life. Here's the opportunities that will grow, nothing bad against them, but here's what we do here and here's why. Let's talk about it and work on it together. And again, get a mediator involved if absolutely necessary. Start working that out. Sometimes you just don't have the skills to make it happen. That's totally okay. Now, how to raise kids who succeed in this world, right? This is how not to screw up your kids. How do you raise kids who succeed? First, make sure you have secure attachment. You as a parent need to have secure attachment so that you can guide them into that. If you have insecure attachment, you are probably going to cause problems and that's going to look ugly down the line. Fix your attachment first, right? When you're on an airplane, they always say, the mass drops down, secure yours first and then help other people. Because if you help somebody else, you're going to pass out in the middle of it and then you both die. Fix your attachment, then help them build secure attachment. Absolutely crucial. You must fix your attachment. Now, if one parent won't fix their attachment, fix yours and then help the kids fix theirs because they're going to need that over time from a parent who has broken attachment. Fix yours, help them. Biggest hack for life, secure attachment. Here's why. The dating pool, the friendship pool, the human pool divides out. Who operates with healthy, secure attachment, openness, confidence, honesty, integrity, all of those good values and beliefs that those things are important and who operates from constant risk, safety, protocols, obsession with being safe, obsession with taking care of themselves and being away from other people, avoidance, anxiety, being interesting and stimulating two different pools of friends and dating and opportunity and business partners completely separated out. Get your kids in the secure attachment pool so that they thrive there. Otherwise, they end up in this pool and they will endlessly cycle in here being betrayed and miserable for their whole life until they hopefully they have a rock bottom moment and then try to become secure to shift here. Get them over here in this pool from the beginning of their life. It's the biggest thing you can do for your kids. This is a huge bonus for their life, for all the opportunities they'll ever have. Give them this. Now, next, once you do that, create an environment that they can come back to and get answers or help. This doesn't mean you're enabling them or infantilizing them. It doesn't mean again that they play Xbox in your basement until they're 40 years old smoking pot in their underpants, no job, you financed it. No, no, no. They can come back and get help. They have kids. They need help. You can help them. They have a financial explosion blindsided by something. You help them out. They need advice on something. You help them. They need context for something. You help them. Something painful happens to them. You shelter them and nurture them and then launch them again. Maybe they live with you for life, but they contribute, right? Multi-generational household. I'm trying to build this myself. We'll see if it works, but this is something they don't just live with you for nothing. They contribute. They take care. They take ownership of the home. They are part of the family system, not just a child forever and ever and ever, right? Raise them to work in your business and someday take over your business. This was the model for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. My dad was a blacksmith. He was a blacksmith. His dad was a blacksmith. He was a blacksmith. Everyone is a blacksmith. I took this business over. It's an eighth generation blacksmith. Cool. They weren't infantilized. They were raised to work in the family structure and build that together. We've lost that. We can bring that back. Now, maybe, maybe this could work for you. Maybe you build a multi-generational home. Maybe you buy a big plot of land and build multiple houses. Maybe they move out into the house next door that they have built. Maybe they move away for five, 10 years and then they're ready to have kids. They move back. A lot of women move away from their parents, but then move very, very close to their parents once they have kids. Maybe they move away and come back and have kids with you and you raise their kids together and you have a giant, wonderful family. I don't know what your family will look like. I don't know what you want it to look like. I don't know what your kids want it to look like. Build that together with them, talking with them, collaborating with them. Don't pressure them, but build it. By the way, that system right there, even in a bad economy where both parents have to work, grandparents can raise the kids during the day. They stay with family while parents go out and hunt and then come home. Much better context than being raised in a daycare by strangers. Even grandparents can create healthier attachment and bypass some of that daycare problem, right? From childhood and broken attachment. Grown kids can pursue opportunities, by the way, without riding that edge of financial disaster if you're taking care of each other. Whether they live with you or not, you can launch them. You can say, hey kid, you know what? You want to pursue that, but it's going to have a heart. You're going to build your business, but you're going to have six months of no income. I got you. Here's six months of operating revenue. I will take care of you for six months, launch your business. How many of you watching this would have had a game changer if your parents had said, I've got you covered for six months, launch your business? Would you have launched a business? Would you have launched your business 10 years earlier? Maybe. That's a game changer. This only works, though, in secure and trusting families. If it's a bad, broken family, they will smother you. They will destroy you. A lot of you watching this are saying, Adam, you're smoking crack. That would never work. I would hate that. My family is awful. They would have smothered me. I would kill myself. Cool. Yeah, that doesn't work in insecurely attached families. This model won't work unless you have full secure attachment and everybody is accounted for. The goal is not to smother the individuals for the sake of the family or for the sake of the people at the top. The goal is to functionally take care of every individual in a way that also causes the system to flourish. Only operates with secure attachment. Will not work without secure attachment. So again, build that out. Now, raise your kids, number one, to seek out healthy people. That's what you're trying to do here, to seek out healthy people outside of the family system so they don't launch from you, launch out into the world completely naive and stupid and get blindsided. But they also don't wander out in the world, petrify that everyone out there is a monster. Raise your kids to apply healthy, strong boundaries that are based on their goals and their mission. Nope, sorry, I can't do that. I won't lie to people. Nope, sorry, I'm not going to sleep with you on the first date. I'm trying to build a loving family system and that's stupid. That's going to make me do something stupid. No judgment on people who do that, but I'm just saying, that's not my goal. Raise kids who pursue their mission, who have a mission and pursue it and believe they can actually accomplish it. Raise kids who see opportunities and not just risks, right? They're not afraid all the time. They chase their dreams, good dreams, not stupid like unicorn dreams, real dreams. Raise kids who believe that you, their parent, will help them when it's truly needed. They're not completely being guided by the hand through life, but they're not being kicked out of an airplane without a parachute either. Be their guidance, be their support, be their parachute, be their safety net. They walk the tightrope, but you're the safety net if they fall. Raise kids who find a partner, who actually shares their values. They don't run out of the world desperately hoping somebody somewhere will take pity on them and keep them or run out of the world thinking they have to get what they need from other people, but can never open up and be vulnerable. Raise kids who know that they don't have to be interesting and stimulating to get other people to like them. Raise kids who know they are interesting and stimulating already because of who they are, so they bond over better things. And finally, raise kids who recognize when others are manipulating them through broken attachment issues. Raise kids who recognize manipulation and can push back on it effortlessly. You do that by giving them secure attachment. They'll simply say, no thanks. Now to do this, you need to get yourself under control. You need to fix your attachment. I've said it 500 times. I will keep saying it until the day I die. Parents fix your attachment. Is the best possible thing you could possibly do for your kids? Fix your attachment 100%. If you can fix it together as a couple, even better, you'll bond through the experience. Apply your boundaries. Apply great boundaries. Live your principles. Go back to episode one and listen to it all over again. Apply your principles and values and build great attachment with yourself and respect yourself and chase your mission. I will warn you about this. Do as I say, not as I do, will never, ever work. So you have to model for your kids the way they should be living or they will have no idea how to live in a way that's better. You have to show them. So how are you doing with this? Hard question, but how are you doing right now? Stop. Take an assessment. How are you doing with this in you and then transposing this into a relationship into parenting? How's your relationship now? How's your marriage doing if you are in one? What are you modeling and teaching? If you need some help, stop and get some help. I'm here to help. I'm here on Mind Pump. They're incredible guys. They will help. There's lots of people out in this world that will help. Watch out for grifters. Yes, but get some help. Now, proper parenting is going to drive a huge part of your legacy and your mission and your meaning in life and your purpose. Proper parenting can be one of the biggest parts of your legacy. It doesn't have to be, but it definitely can be. Final episode. We've covered all five here. I thank you for being with me. Number one through five. Go back. Start with one again. Check out my website, adamlangsmith.com. Grab the video course from the bottom, the attachment boot camp course fix your attachment. Get better. I am here to help. Contact me. Let me know if you need help and I am here.