Jocko Underground: You Might Be Worrying Too Much About Your Kids.

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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is the Jocko Underground Podcast, number 157, sitting here with Echo Charles EC.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:06Jocko Willink?

  We got some questions from the troopers of the world. What's happening in the world? Let's find out. Let's give some recommendations, some courses of action to take.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  People are wondering how to do certain things under certain circumstances.

• 0:17Jocko Willink?

  And we can provide courses of action.

• 0:21Jocko Willink?

  Courses of action like try this, check your feedback. If that's going well, continue. If it's not going well, adjust. But it's good to have some courses of action.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, fully.

• 0:30Jocko Willink?

  So let's get to it.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 0:31Jocko Willink?

  What do we got?

• 0:31Speaker 01

  First question, hey Jocko, hey Charles, I'm a 40 year old male from Germany. I have a family and two children and a great job as a teacher in higher learning. Since having children, I have been afraid that I might lose them. For example, through illness or accident. The worry is at a low level, but is always there and it affects me in my daily life. Several years ago, I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, which I manage well through psychotherapy, exercise and discipline daily routine, including playing saxophone and lots of reading. However, I still struggle to let go. For example, when the children walk to school alone in the future, in the future, play outside unsupervised or be out on their own. How can I handle that fear? Thanks from Germany.

• 1:18Jocko Willink?

  Well, clearly you care about your kids, which is awesome. That's great. And that's a very common feeling for people to have. We care about our kids. We hope, we, we hope people care about their kids. And look, I'm glad you're getting some professional help and I'm sure your therapist can give you a course of action. That's probably better than my course of action, my recommendation. But you know, if I had to think about this or just give you some thoughts about it. Again, I think you should check with your professional and see what they say. One thing I, I noticed you say that there's a low level worry that's always there. I think that's pretty common for parents to have like a low level concern that about your kids.

• 2:03Jocko Willink?

  I don't think that's abnormal. I think that's in fact, I think it's healthy that you have, hey, a little voice in your head that's going, you know, at a low level going, I hope my kids are okay. I hope, I hope everything's all right. I hope there's not, uh, you know, a school shooting. I hope there's not a bus crash or whatever, like things can happen, terrible things happen. So I think that's totally normal. But you do say that it affects you in your daily life, which I would wonder how it affects you in your daily life if it makes you check the news more often or something. Yeah, okay, you know, it's like a little bit of a, but if it makes you not want to work or something like that, then I could see where it could be a problem. But I would keep, I would keep these things in mind a little bit.

• 2:47Jocko Willink?

  You know, you want your children to be safe, of course. But you also want them to be functional. You want them to have enjoyable lives, right?

• 2:58Jocko Willink?

  But what if I told you you could actually hurt them by being overprotective?

• 3:03Jocko Willink?

  Right? That you can, you can shelter your kids to a point where they don't develop. Or you can pass on your own irrational fears to them and you can give them anxiety. Or other end of the spectrum, you could make them rebel against you in a disastrous way where they're emotionally detached from you and they don't want to talk to you and just leave me alone. And so you see what I'm saying? So if you have extreme behavior, which again, right now, it doesn't sound like you're, it doesn't sound like worrying about your kids is not extreme behavior, but you have to, you have to kind of cap it there, right? You have to kind of cap it there. So

• 3:43Jocko Willink?

  you don't want them to overcompensate for your overprotectiveness by becoming either risk addicts or, you know, acting out in ways to get back at you because you interfered with them. Like those things happen. So we don't want those things to happen. There's a long list we could make of things that could go on there. And it's important to note that children are very difficult to predict. I have known amazing parents, amazing parents, you know, I wouldn't go so far as to use the word perfect. But I've known parents that were really good parents and have had two, you know, three kids, two of which are wonderful children and have carried out excellent, productive.

• 4:31Jocko Willink?

  Achievements in their lives and one kid has just been a total disaster. Drug addict. Uh, yeah, mo- mostly it's drugs that gets them. But drug addict or nonproductive or quitting, you know, not doing anything, not working, being lazy, like all those things. Same exact parents. Now, look, your birth order and where you are and what's going on at the time, all that stuff plays a role. But what I'm saying is you can, you can provide the same household to children. And you can have it work for some and not work for others, right? And there's some kids that become more resilient because of certain types of behavior. Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know, you heard about Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was on our podcast and

• 5:13Jocko Willink?

  just him talking about his dad, very cold, you know, alcoholic, borderline abusive. And that breaks some people and turns them into abusers, but no, it like Arnold Schwarzenegger turned out to be a nice guy and very successful. So

• 5:31Jocko Willink?

  there's, there's, there's things that are, there's things that are happening when you're raising kids. And I think it's best to try and be as balanced as you can. Because if you start going extreme in one direction, you might get extreme, you might create extreme reactions, right? What is the physics saying? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So this is why you don't want to have a bunch of extreme actions because it might create an extreme reaction and we don't want to do that. We don't, we don't have enough control over the experiment to, to, to test with extreme behaviors. You want as a parent to be kind of middle of the road. You want to be kind of middle of the road.

• 6:14Jocko Willink?

  You know, you, you want your kids to, you know, you want your kids to do stuff, but you don't want to go crazy. You want to get good grades in school, but you don't want them to cheat to get there. You see what I'm saying? Like there's all these things. You want to be a good, stable, middle of the road person.

• 6:29Jocko Willink?

  Now, the, the, there's things in life that, that you cannot mitigate.

• 6:38Jocko Willink?

  You see what I'm saying? Like there's, you, you can't protect your children from every possible risk. If you do try to protect them from every possible risk. In other words, if you over protect your children, you will do more harm than good.

• 6:55Jocko Willink?

  And what's hard about that explanation is that if you have that, that very rare catastrophic incident, like for instance, um, if you're, your kid can break their neck wrestling. Happens, happens once every 10 years. Like of all the kids in the world that are wrestling, once every 10 years, or football, right? Playing, playing tackle football, once every five years? How often would you say someone breaks their neck and gets paralyzed in football?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 7:25Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's not a huge number. Once every five years, once every five years of all the individual football plays that take place across the country. Now you're in Germany, I don't know what the equivalent, but American football, talking about American football, once every five years, a kid gets paralyzed.

• 7:45Jocko Willink?

  And if, if I'm telling you that, hey, overprotecting them will do more harm than good, and then you're, end up with that kid out of the millions, the one in 300 million football plays and your kid gets paralyzed, obviously, these words that I'm saying have, are, are, have no bearing whatsoever.

• 8:04Jocko Willink?

  But

• 8:07Jocko Willink?

  in the event that your kid is not one of the one in 300 million, that, that now gets all the benefits and the friendships and the athletic skills and the leadership skills and the, the mental toughness from playing football, you take all that stuff away that there's a remote chance that this something bad could happen. Well, your kid's gonna get sick when traveling. Okay, so no traveling. Your kid dies on a plane. Your kid can die on a plane crash, right? So we're not gonna put our kids on planes. And so now our kid's not gonna travel, not gonna see the world, not gonna feel comfortable, gonna be paranoid. What about kids drowning in pools? Kids drown. So what are we gonna do? No pools. Not teach them how to swim. Like if your kid never gets wet, they're never gonna drown.

• 8:50Jocko Willink?

  But they're also not gonna go on a swim. And by the way, there's gonna be certain situations that you can't control.

• 8:55Jocko Willink?

  So there's risk with everything that we do and there's a certain amount of risk that you cannot mitigate as a parent. And what you have to do is you kind of have to do a risk assessment of saying, okay, yes, there's a one in 300 million chance that if my kid, what sport would they be playing in Germany where you could get injured? Obviously soccer's real big. Okay, judo, we'll go judo. Occasionally judo, you get thrown in your neck, you break your neck. But man, take that away. Okay, so now we're not doing judo. And by the way, you can blow out your knees doing soccer. And by the way, you can, you see, just hockey.

• 9:36Jocko Willink?

  Well, you get checked in hockey, you get head trauma, you get TBI. You see what I'm saying? It's like everything has risks. Traveling has risks. Interacting with other human beings have risk. Going to school has risks. You know, you're in Germany right now, they're having these vehicular attacks where people are plowing down. Terrorists are plowing down groups of people. So let's not go to any other, let's not go to any events anymore. No fair, no circus, no movie theater. Like, you see what I'm saying? So you have to recognize that there's some risk. There's some things that you cannot mitigate. You cannot mitigate that risk other than putting your kid into a bubble. And if you do that, it will negatively impact, not just negative

• 10:21Jocko Willink?

  impact, there's a decent chance it kind of wrecks their life. So being, that's the hardest thing about being a parent. It's kind of like I wrote about in the dichotomy of leadership, like you love your, you love your guys, but you still gotta send them out on missions. That's the ultimate dichotomy. Well, guess what you're doing with your kids? You love your kids. You don't want anything bad to happen. But in order for them to grow up, in order for them to become productive humans and resilient humans, they've got to go out and live. And in living, there is risk. There's a bunch of risk that you cannot control. And this goes back to combat. Like, there's some things in combat you can't control. You cannot

• 11:05Jocko Willink?

  control some things in combat. And if you focus on those things, you're missing on the things that you can control.

• 11:13Jocko Willink?

  So let's focus on the things we can control with our kids, making them situationally aware, making them healthy, making them make, helping them learn how to make good decisions. Those kind of things will mitigate way more risk than you keeping them from doing anything. So that's my kind of, that's my two cents. I'm sure your therapist is gonna give you some, some protocols to go through, which I'm sure will be very helpful.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, uh, one that I like that you, I guess, in a way taught me, whatever, explain to me where, uh, let your.

• 11:50Jocko Willink?

  Brush up against the guardrails of failure.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Yes, but, but with that.

• 11:55Jocko Willink?

  Let them go off the cliff.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. No, but even before that, um, uh, let them do this, the stuff like, you know, how like, um, you know, we wanna, and I think you were talking about making lunches or something like that. I forget, but you're like, hey, let them do it or tell them they gotta do it. Even so, so it's basically in a nutshell, teach them to do stuff and try to make that a routine and a habit, like teach them to do stuff so they know how to do certain things. And so when you do that, let them brush up against the guardrails of failure. So they know how it feels. So they know how to correct themselves, you know? So you're gonna have to worry way less about a kid who knows how to do stuff. And then on top of it knows how to, if they don't, if they're not successful, they know how to bounce back and be normal rather than just this fragile person who doesn't know how to do nothing. And that's

• 12:40Speaker 01

  really what we're worried about. They're gonna go outside in the real world, whether it be out, just out to play on their own, or when they're gonna grow up and go into normal society, we worry that, okay, they're not gonna be okay. That's, that's essentially it. In whatever, whatever way, however far our imagination can go, that's what we're worried about. But you reduce that chance of something, them not being okay, if they know how to do more stuff, including recover.

• 13:03Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  From bad stuff, because that kind of stuff can happen, you know?

• 13:07Jocko Willink?

  When I was a little kid, so at my house, we had a, like a steep hill in our front yard and.

• 13:15Jocko Willink?

  Uh, my dad was like, need them, the lawn needed to be mowed and I was pretty little, you know? And I was like, okay, so I'm out there mowing the lawn and it's a very steep hill. And I like fell and the, the lawnmower fell too. So me and the lawnmower were like tumbling down the hill. And it was, you ever seen, you ever seen somebody on a BMX bicycle and they're, they fall? And they like get all tangled up in their bike? Yeah, I've been that guy before. Okay. A hundred percent. It kind of, it kind of was close to being that. It was close to being that, but it was a lawnmower with those blades spinning. Yeah. But I remember thinking to myself, this probably was not a good idea.

• 14:01Jocko Willink?

  Like in motion, I'm like, I might lose an arm right now. But that's probably one of those things where you, you can do a risk assessment. Yeah. And say to yourself like, oh, what's the worst case? Well, the worst case would be my kid falls and the lawnmower hits him in the head. Yeah. Like, and gets his head chopped. Yeah. So use good judgment. Yeah. Or even if they, you know, like there's other jobs I could have done besides that one. You know, pulling weeds or weed whacker, you're not going to lose a limb from your weed whacker. So those would have been smart, but just the straight lawnmower? Yeah. That little freaking point five horsepower rolling.

• 14:36Jocko Willink?

  So that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground Podcast. So if you want to continue to listen,

• 14:46Jocko Willink?

  go to jockounderground.com and subscribe and we're doing this, we're doing this to mitigate our reliance on external platforms. So we are not subject to their control and we are doing this so that we can support the Jocko Podcast, which will remain as is free for all, as long as we can keep it that way. But we, but we are doing this so we don't have to be under the control of sponsors. And we're doing it so we can give you.

• 15:18Jocko Willink?

  More control, more interaction, more direct connections, better communications with us. And to do that, we are, we're building a website right now where we'll be able to utilize to strengthen this legion of troopers that are in the game with us. So, thank you. It's jocko underground.com. It costs $8.18 a month. And if you can't afford to support us,

• 15:44Jocko Willink?

  we can still support you. Just email [email protected] and we'll get you taken care of. Until then, we will see you mobilized underground.