Jason Wasser, LMFT 🎗️Founder, Shevet Collective · Therapy & Coaching for Entrepreneurs, Family Businesses 🖥 Certified Neuro Emotional Technique Practitioner Founder Shevet Collective 🎧Host:You Winning Life Podcast 🎤

Tough Love Is Required: Joe DeSena, Founder of Spartan Games #joedesena

19 Mar 2023 · 1 min

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1:06

In this conversational excerpt, two speakers discuss the concept of "tough love" in parenting. Speaker A admits feeling inadequate in teaching practical life skills—like pumping gas or changing a carburetor—to his children, acknowledging that despite his good intentions he often falls short and even jokes about moving to a slum in New Delhi to make his kids tougher. Speaker B reflects on his own upbringing, contrasting his experience moving from public to private school in South Florida. He notes that the public‑school environment forced him to develop resilience and learn tasks the hard way, whereas private‑school peers received more hand‑holding. Together, they explore how socioeconomic and educational contexts shape a child's self‑reliance, and they both express a desire to raise children who can handle challenges independently rather than being overly protected.

Chapters

Listen, anybody listening to me right now is saying, "Oh, this guy, he's too tough on his kids," or whatever. And I just want you to know that I'm not tough enough. That I am just like every other dad and every other mom, um, and I could be doing a lot more. They should know how to pump their own gas. They should know how to change a carburetor. They should know how to— but I've been so focused on some other things that make me feel good and get me to spend more time with my kids that even I'm failing. At it. So if I'm failing at it, I can't even imagine everybody else that's trying to make their kid their best friend. Um, I could definitely do more. I mean, I laughed at my wife years ago. I said, we got to move to New Delhi, India. We gotta, we gotta live in a slum. We gotta make them tougher.
And then, and what, and then what? All right. And then, and I mean, what's— because I'm in South Florida and I see this, and I went from public school to private school, and I went into that environment where I was around the kids who had while I was a kid who hadn't. And, and that allowed me to like build up some resilience, have to do it on my own, learn how to do things the hard way versus kids who were just handed things. And I think that in the, you know, there was some resentments for sure along the way of that, but now looking back, that I can say that I built something on my own