Are You a Lawnmower Parent? (To Yourself.)
Full disclosure: I am not a perfect parent.
Last week I told Quinn that if she didn't brush her teeth, I'd get arrested. As in, there are actual laws about parents who don't make their kids brush their teeth, and the police would come for me personally. She believed me. We brushed our teeth.
And Quinn is not an iPad kid. She thinks our iPad is a travel iPad. It only works outside Austin city limits. On a road trip to Memphis last year, she spent the first 30 minutes asking "is it working yet?" until we crossed far enough out of the city. She was thrilled when it finally "turned on".
I'm telling you this because what I'm about to share is going to sound very intentional and wise. And I want you to know it's coming from someone who is out here inventing fake dental hygiene laws and geo-fencing an iPad.
Some of my parenting tactics are pure survival. And some of them are actually systems.
The travel iPad isn't really a lie. It's a design. I don't want her reaching for a screen every time she's bored in the car around Austin. So I engineered the conditions where screens feel special, not default. She's not fighting the rule because she doesn't know there is one.
That realization led me somewhere I didn't expect.
The Yes Day
Last weekend, Quinn got a Yes Day. The whole concept is simple: for one day, the answer to basically everything is yes. Yes to the "wrong" breakfast. Yes to the chaotic activity she'd been asking about for weeks. Yes to whatever order the day happened in. We handed her the wheel.
Part of me wondered if we'd create a tiny monster. If saying yes to everything for one day would make the no's harder afterward.
The opposite happened. She was calmer. More settled. Fewer meltdowns, less pushing back on the normal stuff. It was like she'd been filled up with something she needed.
And I haven't been able to stop thinking about why.
The Lawnmower Parent
We all know what a helicopter parent is. Hovering, anxious, always swooping in.
But have you heard of a lawnmower parent? That's when you mow down every challenge before your kid ever hits it. Smooth the path so completely that they never figure out how to navigate bumps on their own. It sounds loving. It IS loving. And it can quietly rob them of the one thing they need most: the experience of handling something hard and coming out the other side.
Here's the thing: this isn't just a parenting concept.
How many of us are our own lawnmower? Clearing discomfort before we ever have to feel it. Avoiding the hard conversation, buffering every challenge, keeping life so smooth that we never build the muscle to walk on rough ground. Then wondering why we feel stuck, or fragile, or somehow less capable than we know we should be.
The research backs this up. Studies consistently show that giving people genuine autonomy, real choices, real control over something, is linked to better self-regulation, stronger resilience, and higher well-being. Not despite friction. Because of it.
The Yes Day worked not because Quinn got everything she wanted. It worked because for one whole day, she got to be in charge of herself. That filled something up in her.
You need that too. We all do.
Challenge is a gift. Not cruelty. Not failure. A gift, wrapped in friction, delivered without a bow.
Growing up, every Mother's Day and Father's Day I'd ask the same question: "When is Children's Day?" My mom had the same answer every time: "Every day is Children's Day." I rolled my eyes so hard. Now I'm a parent and I think about that line constantly. She was right. And also, I think she was only half right. Every day doesn't need to be your day. But you do need one. A moment where you hand yourself the wheel and trust that you can handle where you end up.
That's what the Yes Day really is. Not indulgence. Permission.
1. Pick one thing you've been lawnmowing for yourself. A conversation you've been avoiding. A task you keep making easier than it needs to be. A discomfort you keep buffering away.
2. Don't fix it today. Just name it. Write it down. That's the whole challenge. Naming it is the first step to stopping the mow.
3. Make it easier: open your notes app and finish this sentence: "The challenge I keep clearing out of my way is ___."
If naming one thing opens something up and you want to go deeper, our Self Discovery Deck is built exactly for this kind of honest self-excavation. Sometimes the right question is the whole unlock.
Where in your life are you protecting yourself from exactly the friction that would make you stronger?
📚 Reading Corner
The 5 Principles of Parenting by Dr. Aliza Pressman. Don't let the title fool you. This is really a book about human development. Her core argument: resilience isn't a personality trait you either have or don't. It's a skill, built through autonomy and, yes, letting things be hard sometimes.
🎧 Cool find
Raising Good Humans podcast, specifically the episode “How to Raise Self-Driven Children” with Dr. William Stixrud. The big idea: think of yourself as a consultant, not a controller. Relevant whether you have kids or not.
