Stop Telling Your Kids to Stop. Then Let Them Teach You

The thing you keep telling your kid to stop doing might be exactly what they're built for. (Want a taste of what Front Row Dads is actually like? Come sit in on a live Brotherhood Experience. It's 60 minutes on Zoom with Jon and a few other dads, free, and it's the easiest way to find out whether a room like this is for you. You don't have to share, and you don't have to prepare. Dates and sign-up at frontrowdads.com/experience) Giovanni Marsico has spent his career helping people find and use their gifts, and in this Quick Cut from 2024, he turns that lens on parenting. He starts somewhere uncomfortable: under stress, parents fall back on how they were raised, and the fastest word to come out is stop. Stop with the questions. Stop being so loud. Stop being so much. He knows it from the other side. At sixteen, he was producing events, a thousand people at his first party, and what he heard at home was don't do that party thing. The trait underneath the annoyance was the career. Then he catches himself in the same trap in real time, mid-story, with his own endlessly questioning kid. It closes with his eleven-year-old's soccer lesson becoming the family's mantra for the year, get open, which is proof that the learning in a family runs both directions.   IN THIS EPISODE Why stressed parents default to how they were raised The thousand-person party, and being told to stop doing it "Stop with the questions," and the moment Gio caught himself The reframe: the annoying trait is usually the gift, undeveloped How "get open" went from a soccer field to the family's phrase for the year Kids co-creating the family culture, and why it makes them feel powerful   FULL EPISODE Manufacturing Serendipity, Sharing Your Superhero Powers: https://frontrowdads.com/423