Navigating Parenting Boundaries: Finding Balance in Discipline and Empathy

In the first episode of 2025, I reflect on a challenging yet transformative year for my family and the evolution of TUF.  This week, I dive deep into the nuanced topic of setting boundaries and parenting standards for my kids while navigating differing approaches from other families.

We explores the tension between being a strict, authoritative parent versus embracing a more empathetic, “gentle parenting” style. I shares personal challenges, holiday anecdotes, and the mantra I'm instilling in my family: “We lead the way.”

If you’ve ever wondered how to find the middle ground between discipline and autonomy or struggled with balancing your parenting values against societal pressures, this episode is packed with relatable insights and thought-provoking reflections.

Join the conversation and share your thoughts on navigating this complex parenting journey.

Chapters

• 0:00 New Year Reflections and Podcast Evolution
• 11:41 Finding Balance in Parenting Approaches
• 16:39 Community and Parenting Perspectives

Transcript

Robbie (00:00)
All right everyone, welcome back into the Unhinged Father podcast. I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday season. Welcome into the new year, it's 2025. Hopefully if you're like me, you're looking forward to starting the year off on the right foot, getting into a rhythm and just making this the best year that we could possibly make it. I know that last year was, for me and my family, definitely one of the harder years that we've had on file as of late. We've gone through quite a bit of...

transition and some hardships that came around. luckily, towards the end of the year, we got some good news. We're still going through some of those transitions, but all positive things. then in terms of just this podcast and what it's become, I remember last year going back and listening to some of the early episodes and just seeing the evolution of what it was like when I first started doing this about a year and a half ago, listening to myself talk and the way that I would interact with, you know,

the microphone, the camera, all that stuff, and to where I'm at now, which is just slightly better, still pretty shitty, but I've progressed quite a bit and I'm really happy with ending the year off with being consistent, putting out essentially one episode per week, and staying consistent, having these come out and seeing the growth of new people listening, joining in, and hopefully eventually

contributing to this show as well with whether that's their recommendations or popping on as a guest or any of the other things that we could potentially do. So anyways, I just wanted to acknowledge that reflect a little bit and, you know, project moving forward. want to continue to have some of the consistency that I've been able to build over the past couple of months still continue to get at least one episode out per week. And I'm really hoping to build a little bit more structure within the podcast. I think it's time to

I've gone from sounding like an absolute dipshit to sounding like a little bit less of a dipshit to hopefully this year really taking the podcast in a different direction, not like completely, but just having more structure surrounding what I'm talking about and

having a little bit more of like a defined goal in terms of like what each episode is going for. So having a subject matter and not necessarily just sitting there and bouncing ideas off all of them in my head, trying to kind of work some of it out on paper prior to getting on here and talking to you guys. This episode is not going to be like that because as I mentioned, we're going through a lot of different transitions and really just trying to start off 2025 and

So I didn't have a ton of that time to prepare for this episode. But like I said, that's just one of the goals for me is to make this more of a structured, informative, and digestible product for everyone. And hopefully you get something from it. Hopefully you're able to either just pick up on small ideas and incorporate them in your life, or you hear a story and can really relate to it, or you get...

you know, little bit of empathy from me, someone who sees what you're going through and says like, hey, that's all right. and on the other side of that is sometimes I'm not going to be that empathetic voice. Sometimes you need someone to be like, Hey, I understand that you're going through a lot of shit, but at the end of the day, you got to kick it in gear because the buck stops with you. So time to get it done. I think you can do it anyways. Those are just some of the reflections that I've had, on the podcast and where, where I started.

where we're at and hopefully where I'd like to see it go. I'm not aiming for Joe Rogan or crime junkies or even New Heights or Kylie Kelsey or any of those people. Just kind of aiming to be a little bit, a little bit better than what I was last year. that being said, let's go ahead and jump into what I wanted to talk about today and

It's something that came up a little bit during the holidays for me and something that I've been reflecting on is my boys are getting to the age where discipline and rules and boundaries are really important. mean, they're they're important all the time, but it's at a point now where they're interacting with other cousins or friends or things like that. And it's intertwining between parenting styles.

and the kids personalities and just everything that goes along with building a community. And when you're doing it with these little kids that don't have

fully developed and regulated emotional and cognitive functionality, you're going to run into some conflict. And this is something that I'm trying to balance out with because I definitely have a tendency to lean towards more of a dictator type role, someone who's more authoritarian. I can be, if you've met me outside of the internet realm and

more in like a personal setting. I've been told by some that I can be abrasive and very intense and somewhat aggressive. Not necessarily like I'm going out and beating the crap out of people, but just my my personality can be somewhat overbearing at some points, especially if I'm not mindful about it. And I've been observing this with my kids because I have a high standard and

And don't get me wrong, my kids are not perfect. I'm not a perfect parent. I do a lot of things wrong and my kids are spoiled rotten in a lot of different ways. My wife and I have worked hard to try and provide as much as we possibly can to our kids. And they've got plenty of toys and Christmas decorations and they got a ton of shit for Christmas.

We're not the type of parents that just are like our kids have one toy each and they go outside and play with their chickens and then milk their goats and do all of their chores. We're not anywhere close to that. And I don't know if anyone's kids are really at that level. I'm sure you see a lot of it on social media, but now we've just got a couple of regular kids that like to play, like to have fun, respectful when we go to other people's houses, which is something that's good. And

they interact well with other kids. But during the holidays, not everyone's got the same rules, regulations, boundaries, all of the things that we have for our kids. Not everyone's got the same expectation for their kids. And I'm starting to notice that when I have these rules or these boundaries that I put in place with my kids, I'm not necessarily implementing these boundaries on other people's kids, on cousins or friends or anything like that.

And it's definitely getting to the point where my my two year old doesn't necessarily understand or or give a shit at this point. He's just kind of bopping around and will, you know, just do pretty much what I ask him to do unless he thinks he's being funny. But my five year old, five and a half year old, can definitely notice that there's different set of standards that are put on him as an older kid and then also as my son and my wife's son.

We hold him to a little bit of a different standard and we're not afraid to set those boundaries and say no or let him know like you shouldn't be doing that. But it's very difficult for him sometimes when we're like hey you can't do that. That's not for children to do. And then all of a sudden his cousin comes running by and is doing the same shit that we told him not to do and trying to explain to him

that his cousin or his friend or that these other children are not my kids and I'm not responsible for the way that they act or for responsible completely for keeping them safe, right? To a certain extent, if someone's doing something just totally stupid or super dangerous, I'm not afraid to let other kids know, hey, don't do that, don't do this, but I'm not as nitpicky as I would be with my kids. Like I said, I hold my kids.

to a higher standard, just like I hold myself to a higher standard than I do most other people. And the reason I talk about this is because I'm trying to find a middle ground or an area that I think is gonna be best suited for my children to where I'm not creating these little rule following minion robots that just do whatever the hell people tell them to. But I also don't wanna create some little fucking monster that doesn't have

any boundaries whatsoever or doesn't listen to anyone just as whatever the fuck they want. And I think that a lot of people, especially people in my generation, millennial dad, we grew up, a lot of us grew up in more of like a dictatorship, an authoritarian parenting style where it was just my way or the highway do what we say because I say it. And a lot of times there's like this pushback to, I don't want to be like that.

I would rather let my kids do what they want to treat them like a person, let them have respect, autonomy, all of these different things that go along with the quote unquote gentle parenting style. And you'll see a lot of psychologists or experts, quote unquote experts that will give their, their thoughts, opinions and quote studies and shit like that on it. For me personally, I think that it's probably somewhere in the middle where you do set boundaries.

kids do here know they're not able to do whatever the fuck they want. It's your job to kind of keep them safe and guide them along life. But at the same time, treat them like they're human beings. Explain to them why they can't do stuff. I think that's a big thing. There's certain things you can't really explain to them. But if I'm telling my kid not to jump over the back of the couch, I can let them know it's like, hey, don't jump over the back of that because you can fall and crack your head. And that's why I'm telling you not to do it, because it's dangerous, because you could hurt yourself.

Same reason why I tell you not to open the front door and go out into the street because it's dangerous. You can hurt yourself. So just doing these like little things, I think help out and I gotta mention, I'm just trying to find that middle ground and this is like new to me as a parent. I have ideas on it, but we're in the trenches now. There's a big difference between the...

the ideological and the theoretical and the book learning and all that stuff and the being in the trenches actually doing shit and seeing what works right. It's like that in pretty much all facets of I don't know science social science everything. Book smart is very different from street smart and I think what I'm trying to do right now is to blend both of them and come up with a new system to where we're using some of the.

some of the theoretical, some of the psychological aspects that maybe older generations didn't really have available to them. But at the same time, combining that with the shit that really works, there's a reason why a lot of us are alive, still here, work hard, have resilience. It's because the older generation kind of instilled that in us, even if it was caused other issues within our lives. We got that because they told us no, because they made us do hard things, because they yelled at us, all of these things.

There's kind of a push and pull

I don't have the answer to any of this stuff right now. I'm just, as I, as I mentioned earlier, you know, trying to have more of a structure and having answers and providing information to you. But I think on this episode, I just, I don't have the answer to this right now. It's something that I'm still trying to work through and something that I'm, I'm interested in something that I'm trying to figure out for my kids. And, you know, hopefully for

any other kids that we interact with, because as my kids get older, we're just going to have more and more interaction with different type of parents, different type of kids. They're going to get friends from school, friends from sports. Those kids are going to come over. We're going to interact with different parents who have much different parenting styles from us. They have different value systems than we do, and we're going to have to navigate that. And for me personally, I can I can be empathetic and try to look at things from certain people's perspectives. But at the end of the day,

I can't completely ignore the feelings that I have on ways to raise our kids. I don't want to shit on other people who are trying to raise their kids in the best way that they can or the way that they think is fit. But it's difficult when it has an impact on my kids. And I'm not trying to be judgmental here or come down on other people. But at the end of the day,

it's in my kid's best interests for me to help in, I'm losing track here, because I'm not saying it's my job to raise other people's kids, but I wish that we were in this spot where it was more of like a community effort and where people actually talked about this type of shit. I feel like we've gotten so far or so defensive. And actually in one of my conversations I had with

Meyer Kraw with Here for the Dads a couple of weeks back. Now it's a couple months back. But he talked about how he really enjoys getting advice from older dads or from the older generation and like incorporating that in where a lot of people, myself included, get really defensive when we hear other people either critique the way that we parent or give us advice on things that we should be doing. in all honesty, I'm a I'm a big culprit of this. I

Definitely can get upset when people try to tell me I'm not raising my kids the right way or there's things that I could be doing better But in all reality there are things that can be doing better and I should be getting a diverse perspective from other people that are in the trenches raising kids and so raining this all back in you feel like I just went all over the place this all really stems from the point that as my kids get older And I have these certain standards and boundaries for them

and they see that there are other kids that don't have it. Example, when they get older, I don't want my kids to have cell phones and I'm sure there are going to be kids that have cell phones, play video games and do all this other shit. They're going to see that and they're going to be like, how come I don't get to do that? And, I guess maybe one of the ideas I've had on this is just trying to differentiate us from other families and not in like a negative way. Like other people are shitty or stuff like that, but

one of the things that I've kind of fallen back to or that has been coming up kind of organically, but you know, I'm a big, I like to be in leadership roles. I like to try and help other people along the way. I like to share my opinions. Obviously it's why I'm doing this podcast, but one of the terms that I let my boys know is that when they say, how come other people are doing that or how come we can't do that? I use, you know, our last name.

And I just say like, lead the way. We lead the way. crowd girls lead the way. That's like a mantra that I've been, been using with them and they're still too young to really understand, but I hope that it's something that sinks in with them and something that they take pride in is the fact that other people may be doing other things and have, different boundaries, different rules. They might be able to do whatever the hell that they want to, but within our lives, like

Kratigers lead the way. We have a sense of morality. Our family has a sense of right and wrong and what we should be doing, what we shouldn't be doing. And we're going to lead by example. And so I continue to say that with them. Like I said, I don't think it truly has set in yet, but I'm hoping as they get older and older that this is something that becomes kind of a family mantra, something that we can say or something that we embody is just

We're leading the way. We're gonna be the ones who do what we think is right, what we think is appropriate, and set the example for other people. So yeah, that was just something that I've been thinking about.

I'm hoping that I don't come down too hard on my kids. Like I said, I don't think I really come down too hard on my kids. They spoiled kids, just like I was a spoiled kid when I was younger. I didn't want for anything. I had lots of toys and my parents bought me stuff. If I needed stuff for sports, we went and got it. Our kids, similar. They've got a house, food, snacks, toys. Definitely not wanting.

for anything physically right now. But that being said, we do try to hold them to certain standards when it comes to setting boundaries, setting rules, chores, and all the other things that go along with being a kid. And as they get older and older, it will be interesting to see how we've been doing and if we need to change direction anywhere. But these are just some of the things that I've been thinking about, especially here in the new year.

especially with just spending a bunch of time with friends and family over the holidays and interacting with different family styles, different parenting styles, different kids. It's just been a, it's been something that I've been observing and something I've been reflecting on and something I'd like to talk about, something that I think is important to talk about, not just with me and my wife, but with other parents having this conversation, getting at different people's perspectives and then trying to implement that. So that way we can raise not only our kids, but all of the kids to be

the happiest, healthiest, best versions of themselves that they possibly can be. So that's where I'm at right now. If you've got any thoughts or you think I'm completely off my rocker or don't think that what I'm saying is correct or you're like either so far to the right, the old school, like nah, just smack those kids. Or if you're leaning more towards the theoretical and psychological, like don't tell your kids no and.

They've got to figure stuff out on their own. Kids can do what they want. They're little human beings, which they are, but they need to be guided. If I let my kids do whatever the hell they want, they'd have nothing but fucking cake and fruit and chocolate for every single meal of the day, chocolate milk every single night. They wouldn't have a bedtime. They'd go to bed whenever the hell they wanted to. They'd watch a bunch of movies or play a bunch of video games and want to go to school.

There's a lot of things that I have to do as a parent to help my child along, to help guide them. And this is just one of the areas where I think there's some new nuances that I have to consider while raising them. And let me know your thoughts on that. But yeah, that's going to do it for this week's episode. Like I said, I'm going to try and get these to be a little bit more structured where it's not just me.

talking about whatever the hell's at the top of my mind. I didn't really get a chance to prep for this week's episode, but I wanted to make sure that I started off consistency in the beginning of the year, getting an episode out on Wednesday and making sure that you guys had access to it. But yeah, that's gonna do it for this week's episode. I hope that everyone has a great start to 2025 and I'll see y'all next week.