What Every Parent Should Fix While They Still Can

Dr. Amen starts with a principle that surprises a lot of parents: raising a mentally strong child begins with the parent’s own clarity, not a technique for the child. He traces it to his own upbringing, one of seven children in a Lebanese family where the oldest son was golden and he, the third, felt irrelevant; his mother was present, fun, and strict, but his father was mostly gone. Deciding what kind of parent he wanted to be, present, above all, became his first principle. The first question isn’t what should my child do, it’s what kind of mom or dad do I want to be, and what kind of child do I want to raise.

The second principle is bonding, attachment, and it’s tied directly to compliance. Dr. Amen says that children he considers healthy typically comply with a parent’s first request, without arguing, about seven times out of ten, while the struggling kids he treats in his clinic are often closer to zero or three. When he asks these children why they don’t listen, they genuinely don’t know, because, as he puts it, it’s not will driven, it’s brain driven. Ignoring a child’s non-compliance, or simply repeating the request, actually teaches the brain, which is lazy by nature, that it can keep ignoring you.

Doesn’t training obedience work against raising an independent thinker? Dr. Amen’s answer is Love and Logic, a method he co-wrote a book on with Charles Fay: the way you build a child’s agency is by refusing to solve their solvable problems. He tells the story of his daughter Chloe, an oppositional, argumentative child who fought her mother over homework for hours, until his wife finally told her, I’ve done second grade, this is on you, and calmly laid out the real consequences, an upset teacher, missed recess, possibly repeating the grade. Chloe stormed off upset, came back twenty minutes later, and no one ever had to ask her to do homework again. She’s now an independent, hardworking college graduate. The same logic applies to forgotten sweaters, lunches, and homework: Dr. Amen argues that repeatedly rescuing children from ordinary, affordable consequences can teach them to rely on the parent to solve those problems. He recommends starting this as early as age four to six, always with appropriate protection, what he calls bumper guards, in place.

This connects to a striking finding Dr. Amen cites from a 70-year Harvard study that followed 454 inner-city Boston school kids: the only thing that correlated with adult self-esteem was whether or not a child had real responsibility growing up, a job, a paper route, chores at home. Affluent kids who had everything done for them were, by this measure, set up for struggle, not confidence. Solving a child’s problems for them, he says plainly, robs them of their self-esteem.

Bonding itself takes a specific, small, repeatable form: special time, twenty minutes a day of a reasonable activity the child picks, phone away, with no commands, no questions, no directions, just presence. Dr. Amen describes coaching a friend whose two-year-old daughter seemed to want nothing to do with him; three weeks of daily special time later, the same father called back complaining that now she wouldn’t leave him alone, exactly the problem he wanted. Alongside special time sits active listening: when a child says something hard to hear, blue hair, I don’t fit in, the instinct to correct or lecture immediately shuts the conversation down. Repeating back what you heard, and giving space for the real feeling underneath, keeps it open, and often the child solves their own problem once they’ve been heard.

Dr. Amen distinguishes mentally strong kids from vulnerable ones by one core trait: strong kids don’t believe everything they think. Both have automatic negative thoughts, what he calls ants, but a resilient child learns to question them instead of attaching to them; blame, turning yourself into a powerless victim, is described as the worst of these thoughts. He also warns against two common but backfiring habits: telling a child they’re smart, which makes self-esteem fragile the moment something is hard, instead of praising effort, which makes kids work harder when challenged; and phrases like it’ll be okay or I’ll take care of it, which quietly steal a child’s agency. Better, in anything short of real danger, bullying, or abuse, is asking, how do you think you can handle that?

On discipline, Dr. Amen insists love and structure are not opposites, they’re both required. Families need real rules, tell the truth, do what mom and dad say the first time, and he notes that repeating a request over and over before it’s enforced is exactly the pattern that raises a parent’s risk of losing their temper and reacting in anger. The fix is a clear choice stated calmly once, followed by a real, already-explained consequence, without threats repeated five times and no follow-through. Family routines and chores, like the rotating dish duty he did with his sister growing up, build both skill and belonging, they make a child part of the family rather than entitled to it. And the investment has a clock on it: Dr. Amen warns that if parents have not invested time in the relationship, friends who don’t have the same wisdom or judgment may become far more influential by adolescence, leaving that child more exposed to whatever shows up on their phone. He closes by redefining love itself: love isn’t over-solving, over-fixing, or forcing achievement, and it isn’t giving in to a child’s manipulation, even a fear-based one like a demand for a phone. Love is presence with the phone away, boundaries held kindly and consistently, and the discipline to let a child struggle enough to become someone genuinely capable of caring for themselves.