Last night, I had a conversation with my daughter that’s been sitting in my chest like a stone. She’s sixteen, an artist with a philosopher’s mind, and we were talking about a friend of hers whose parents, in her words, “just let her do whatever she wants.” No curfew, no rules about grades, no pushback on questionable decisions. “They’re so cool,” she said, not with envy, but with a kind of clinical observation. “They never make her feel bad.”
I put down my coffee. “Do you think that’s good parenting?”
She thought for a long moment. “It feels good. For everyone, I guess. No fights. No tears.”
“But is it right?” I asked.
The silence that followed was more profound than any answer. It led us down a path we’ve walked before, but never with such clear footprints. It’s the central, aching paradox of raising another human: Being a good parent means doing the right thing for them, not doing what feels good to you.
And let me be clear—the “you” in that sentence is me. The parent. The one who has to live with the immediate consequence of my child’s hurt, anger, or disappointment. The one who has to swallow my own instinct to soothe, to fix, to make the bad feeling go away—for both our sakes.
This isn’t a theory for me. It’s the scar tissue over a lifetime of learning what love really demands.
The Seduction of the Easy Path
Let’s be honest. Avoidance feels amazing.
Your kid is melting down because you said they can’t sleep over at a friend’s house where you don’t know the parents. The easiest thing in the world is to say, “Fine, go.” The storm clears. Peace is restored. You get a hug instead of a scowl. You feel like the “good guy.” That’s the hit of dopamine, the immediate reward for choosing the path of least resistance. It’s the parenting equivalent of eating the whole pizza instead of making a salad. It feels great in the moment.
I know this because I have made a lot of bad decisions in the early days of parenting. My aim was for my daughter to avoid trauma, by being an understanding parent, but I gave in a lot, and I am paying for some of that damage (in the form that I still find myself picking up after my daughter) In my early days of fatherhood, coming from a background of zero healthy parental modeling, my compass was broken. My only guide was “don’t be like my parents now that I know the damage that bad parenting does to a child”. For a long time, I misinterpreted that as “don’t cause any pain.” I confused permissiveness with love. I wanted so desperately to be the opposite of everything I’d known that I built a house with no walls, thinking it was a sanctuary. But a house with no walls isn’t safe; it’s just exposed.
I was doing what felt good to me—avoiding the confrontation, basking in the gratitude, soothing my own deep-seated fear of being the “bad guy.” I was treating my anxiety, not raising my child.
The Anatomy of a “Right Thing”
So, what is the “right thing”? It’s not a universal checklist. It’s context-heavy, kid-specific, and often terrifyingly unclear in the moment. But in my experience, it usually has these fingerprints:
- It Prioritizes Their Long-Term Safety Over Their Short-Term Happiness. This is the big one. No, you can’t ride your bike without a helmet. No, you can’t get in that car with a driver who’s been drinking. I don’t care if you’re mad. I’ll be the villain in this scene if it means you get to be in the next act.
- It Builds Character, Not Comfort. Doing their project for them feels good. You save them stress, you get a perfect result. But you’ve stolen their chance to learn diligence, problem-solving, and resilience. Letting them face the natural consequence of their procrastination—a bad grade, a disappointed teacher—feels awful. But it builds something that lasts.
- It Honors Their Future Self. The 16-year-old wants the tattoo, the skipped class, the reckless freedom. The 30-year-old will need a clean professional image, a work ethic, and the ability to commit. Good parenting is often a conversation you’re having with the adult your child will become, while the teenager in the room is glaring at you.
- It Requires You to Hold Their Emotional Weight. This is the brutal part. When you enforce a boundary, you have to stand there and hold their sadness, their rage, their “I hate you.” You cannot hand it back. You cannot collapse under it. You have to absorb it and say, with your actions, “This feeling is big, but it won’t break me, and it won’t break us. My love for you is sturdier than your anger at me.”
The Ghost in My Nursery: Breaking the Cycle
I have no blueprint for this. My first memory is violence. My childhood textbook was fear. Love was a foreign currency. The easiest path for me would have been to repeat the cycle, to parent from my unhealed wounds, or to swing so far the other way into permissiveness that I created a different kind of dysfunction.
The “right thing” meant doing the excruciating work on myself first. It meant going to therapy not to be a better person for me, but to be a safer harbor for her. It meant learning emotional regulation so I could model it, because you can’t teach what you don’t possess. Every time I choose a calm conversation over a yell, I’m doing the right thing for her. It doesn’t always feel good. Sometimes, in the moment, yelling feels powerful. But calmness builds trust.
I remember once, years ago, she did something dishonest. A small thing, kid stuff. My father’s ghost in my head screamed for a punishment that would “teach a lesson.” The easy thing for me would have been to unleash that anger, to offload my own hurt and disappointment onto her. It would have felt cathartic. Justified.
Instead, I sat with her. I said, “I’m not mad. I’m sad, because this isn’t who you are. Let’s talk about why you felt you needed to do that.” We cried together. It was harder. It took more time. It required me to manage my own trauma response in real-time. But it preserved her dignity. It taught her that mistakes don’t define you; your repair of them does. That was the right thing for her.
The Modern Minefield: “Feel-Good” Parenting in a Digital Age
This principle is getting harder, not easier. Our world is engineered for parental avoidance.
Your kid is being a jerk at the restaurant? Hand them a tablet. Instant peace. Feel good. Your teen is socially anxious? Let them retreat to their room and live online. No conflict. Feel good. They’re begging for a social media account at 11 because “everyone has one”? Saying yes makes you the hero. Saying no makes you the enemy.
We’re outsourcing the hard, right things to screens and algorithms because the immediate payoff of harmony is so seductive. But we’re letting Tik Tok teach them about relationships, let YouTube raise their attention spans, and let anonymous forums shape their self-worth. We’re avoiding the small hurts and setting them up for systemic fractures.
Doing the right thing now might mean being the only parent who says “no smartphone until high school.” It will feel terrible. You’ll be the subject of eye-rolls and “you’re ruining my life.” But you’re protecting their childhood, their neurology, their capacity for boredom and creativity. You’re choosing their long-term development over your short-term desire for quiet.
The Beautiful, Heartbreaking Payoff
Here’s the secret they don’t tell you: doing the right thing, consistently, even when it feels awful, builds a different kind of “feel good.”
It’s not the sugar rush of permissiveness. It’s the deep, steady warmth of trust.
My daughter and I have that trust now. It wasn’t built on me always saying yes. It was forged in the fires of me sometimes saying no, and then staying present in the aftermath. It was built when I apologized for my own mistakes, modeling that adults aren’t perfect. It was cemented when she saw that my “no” was never arbitrary, but was a guardrail on a cliff she couldn’t yet see.
That conversation last night ended with her leaning her head on my shoulder. “So, her parents… they’re avoiding their own hurt. By not making rules, they never have to feel like the bad guy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And what does that cost their daughter?”
“A guide,” she said simply. “Someone to run into when they’re going the wrong way. Even if it bruises.”
There it was. She gets it. Not because I lectured her into it, but because she’s lived inside the structure of a love that is brave enough to say the hard thing.
My Honest Takeaways (Not a Conclusion)
This isn’t a manifesto for harshness. Love is still the foundation. Warmth is non-negotiable. But love is the why, not the how. The how is sometimes firm, often uncomfortable, and always looking down the road.
- Check Your Motives. In the heat of a decision, ask yourself: “Am I doing this to make my life easier right now, or to make their life better in the long run?” The answer is your compass.
- You Will Feel Like the Villain. Accept it. If you’re doing it right, you will have moments where your child genuinely dislikes you. Your job is not to be liked. Your job is to be trustworthy.
- The Repair is Everything. You will get it wrong. You will lose your temper, enforce a dumb rule, or misjudge a situation. The “right thing” then is the humble, authentic repair. That teaches more about humanity than any perfect performance ever could.
- Look for the Trust, Not the Thanks. Gratitude for good parenting often comes decades later. What you can look for now is the evidence of trust: do they come to you with problems? Do they test boundaries but generally stay within them? That’s your report card.
Being a good parent hurts. It just does. It hurts to see them struggle. It hurts to be the source of their frustration. It hurts to carry the weight of their well-being. But that hurt is the price of admission for the greatest privilege there is: guiding a soul you love more than your own comfort toward a future where they can stand, resilient and whole, on their own two feet.
And maybe, just maybe, they’ll look back and understand that every hard “no” was a silent, stubborn “I love you too much to take the easy way out.”