Name: How to Raise Kids Who Can Handle Hard Things | Kathryn Hecht | TED
Uploaded: 2026-02-24T21:31:45.000Z
Duration: 16 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

These soles have ground into the pavement of downtown Minneapolis.

The rubber mats of my car, the linoleum of a gas station bathroom and the play doh crusted carpet of a daycare.

Embedded in the tread smear, a toddler booger.

Little fleck of dog poop makes you sick just thinking about it, right?

And while you may not have tasted what I just tasted, you felt what I felt.

Your sympathetic nervous system activated, increasing your heart rate and tensing your muscles.

Your anterior insula flared, creating a feeling of disgust, little nausea, slight gag reflex.

Because that discomfort, that is the first essential step to creating confident kids.

This week I had an 8 year old stab me with a needle 20 twice, took a kid into a basement on a spider safari and played Uno on the bathroom floor with an understandably reluctant teen.

I'm not doing this stuff because I'm an evil psychologist.

I'm doing this because as a pediatric anxiety and OCD expert, I'm a professional bravery coach.

I'd like to tell you about a kid that I worked with years ago named Sammy.

Sammy was this sweet little third grade string bean who lived for adventure.

Bright, curious, optimistic, could tell you everything you honestly never needed to know about airport design.

His brain appreciated bees, vital pollinators.

His body, however, reacted like they were flying yellow needles with some anger issues.

As soon as those leaves turned green, Sammy would initiate his own personal bee safety protocol.

No sweets outside, social distancing from the flowers, even staying inside during his family's cabin trips.

When Sammy got to meet, he and his parents had tried everything to get rid of this anxiety.

They had also debated the fear endlessly.

Sammy reminded his parents they were not fortune telling wizards in four.

How do you know this phobia was stealing Sammy's childhood?

One sunny summer day, at a time when I sing Happy Birthday with a cringing 12 year old as loudly as possible in the grocery store produce section, when I rank order photos of vomit by chunk level or yes, when I lick my own dirty shoes, I don't just do it for fun.

Although, believe it or not, Sometimes it's very fun.

I do it for kids like Sammy because there is a method to this madness.

And after a decade of clinical practice helping kids be brave, it's become clear to me that the method, exposure therapy, isn't just the gold standard treatment for child anxiety and ocd.

It is a secret parenting playbook for raising kids that thrive.

I want to share that secret playbook with you today.

But before we talk about what to do, we need to talk about what we are up against.

It's a wild, worried world out there, folks.

According to the National Survey of Children's Health, pediatric anxiety diagnoses rose by nearly 30% from 2016 to 2019.

And that was before COVID But you don't need stats or lists.

You have felt this because thanks to evolutionary biology, when kids get anxious, adults get anxious too.

Now I have two girls and home is the hardest clinic that I have to work in.

When one of my little gals looks up at me with the big teary eyes, AKA the mommy bat signal, my nervous system does the same thing that yours does.

It responds as though I have discovered that the kitchen is on fire.

The amygdala, the watchdog in our brain, starts barking and the fight or flight system kicks in and adrenaline surges and there is this instant magical transfer of distress.

Now I am proof that professional degrees do not make you immune to this.

In my eldest daughter's four short years of life, I have become a one woman emotional SWAT team more times than I can count.

I've answered questions for my daughter when she clams up with a new adult.

I've sacrificed my sleep and allowed our little human space heater into the big bed for the night.

I have forfeited all privacy while peeing because even that closed bathroom door feels too far away.

Now all of this is what I call parenting for comfort.

And it is the single most natural and well meaning and deeply flawed thing that we do in the anxiety treatment world.

Parenting for comfort has another name, accommodation.

In my office, it looks like the parents who removed everything green from the house because green meant vomit.

In Sammy's case, it looked like kind, loving parents who altered family plans from outdoor fun to indoor fun.

No picnics at the park, no meals on the deck at the cabin.

Parenting for comfort is not limited to the parents of anxious kids.

It's also the common thread in the last 30 years of parenting trends.

From the helicopter parenting of yore to the gentle parenting of today.

All of it is rooted in this idea that healthy is a synonym for happy.

But I have watched this approach play out hundreds of times in my office, and

I can tell you there are three big problems with parenting for comfort.

First, it places an incredible burden on parents.

It turns us into this stressed out member of the feeling secret service tasked with controlling something we just can't another person's emotional experience.

Second, it teaches kids that hard feelings are an emergency.

When we cancel that picnic in July or open the bathroom door midstream, we may not say it, but

our actions shout, this feeling is a problem.

We can't eliminate the pain or mistakes of childhood.

They're a part of the process of growing up.

We cannot guarantee emotional comfort when discomfort is a side effect of being alive.

If life won't promise comfort, our parenting can't either.

Instead of parenting for comfort, we need to be parenting for confidence.

When you parent for confidence, you flip the script.

Our goal is not to get rid of anxiety, uncertainty, or distress.

Our goal is to build coping efficacy, what I call handlebility.

This deep in your bones belief, I can handle it.

That is the heart of exposure therapy and the key to raising kids that thrive.

Not avoiding hard feelings, but experiencing them and still saying, I can do this.

Our kids don't require a comfortable life.

When Sammy got to me, all that he and his parents had tried hadn't really worked.

And he was waiting to see if I would waste his time too.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How to Raise Kids Who Can Handle Hard Things | Kathryn Hecht | TED

stuff

anxiety

struggle

distraction