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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
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Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode is about Meet Me in the Middle: Parenting, Entrepreneurship, and Finding Balance. And I’m here with Gary Vee, who I’ve known in person for a while. I met him years ago at our friend Jim Kwik’s house. And online, he’s known as Gary Vee, Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s a serial entrepreneur, the Chairman of VaynerX, the CEO of VeeFriends, and a five-time New York Times bestselling author. He’s considered the leading global mind on what’s next in culture, relevance, and the internet. And he has an uncanny ability to recognize trends and patterns early and help others understand how these shifts impact consumer behavior. He’s considered one of the most forward thinkers in business, and his approach sits at the intersection of business and culture. And I really enjoyed this conversation because we got to go into topics I hadn’t even gotten to talk with him about in the past, especially parenting. And he makes the bold statement that he feels like he was perfectly parented. And we talk about some of the things he views as strengths in his mom, especially his approach with him and his siblings. And how this actually led into him now trying to reach into the childhood and young adult space because he got so many messages from people in their 15, like age 15 to 25, and understood what they were struggling with and how it started in childhood. He talks about his definition of success, which is actually peace of mind, ways we can create and integrate balance and accountability for our kids, surprising things he found from the messages he got from 15- to 25-year-olds, and so much more. We also end with, I think, a very important message around judgment and how to avoid it. So as always, I enjoyed this conversation with Gary, and I know you will as well. So let’s jump in. Gary, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.
Gary: Thanks for having me.
Katie: I’m so excited to chat about, I feel like a new topic for you somewhat. You’re so well-known in the online world, and this is a little bit of a new road for you. So I’m really excited to get to delve in, especially because in the prep for this interview, you mentioned that you felt like you were perfectly parented. And we’re talking to a lot of moms, and I know this is something we think a lot about as moms, is obviously wanting to do the best with our kids and kind of not getting to know until they’re grown what worked and what didn’t. So I would love to hear a little bit more on that from your perspective growing up in that environment. Maybe what things stood out, or what do you feel like were the strengths that your mom especially had that really made a lasting difference for you?
Gary: It’s a great question. So, you know, obviously thinking about the audience that’s listening. You know, it’s funny, if you look at the 20 years of my content in the business and entrepreneurial world, there’s always, and it starts to rev up in 2008 and over the last five to seven years, I talk about it more directly, but I’ve always been very connected to emotional intelligence and really understanding how big of an impact my childhood had on my career. And then to the point that you’re asking specifically, just an incredible understanding that the way my mom specifically parented me the first 14 years of my life. And then the reason I use that number is that I spent a lot of time with my dad working in the family liquor store business because he was always there. The impact was pretty enormous.
And the reason I have been working on a book for a long time called Perfectly Parented is, of course, I’m not perfectly parented. But I’m incapable of being upset or angry at any of the moves that my parents made that were shortcomings because I’m too grateful and thankful for all the things they did well. To answer you directly, ironically, it’s why the book is titled Meet Me in the Middle. I think what my mom did, which was very unusual for the 80s and incredibly unusual today, was she found balance. I think that a lot of parenting shortcomings in modern times is that we’ve overcorrected from the parenting styles of the 50s, 60s, 70s. And we’ve now gone, let’s just use political terms, if the OG days were too red, well, today’s last 30 years have been too blue, right? Overcoddling, eighth place trophies, no accountability. Forget about spanking your kid. We don’t even ground kids. No ramifications. Unbelievable disrespect in the way kids speak to their parents by comparison.
And so I think my mom made me feel like I was remarkable and capable, but she didn’t create delusion and entitlement. And I’m going to say that again. She made me feel like I could do it. And I was the greatest and I was special. But there was no delusion or entitlement that came along with it, meaning I had the ability to do many things, but I was going to have to work for it. And, you know, everything had a price and civility mattered and kindness mattered. Oh, and most of all, if you disrespected me, this is her talking to me or any other grown-up, that was unacceptable. It was just this incredible concoction of many different ingredients that were really foundational. She grounded me for every report card because I was a poor student, but I never felt that I was dumb or wasn’t gonna succeed because of a bad report card. That is a tight rope that she walked that I admire to this day. And it’s impacted me so much that when I wrote my first kid’s book, Meet Me in the Middle even the whole VeeFriends thing, this Pokémon meets Sesame Street world I have created this intellectual property, it’s about kindness and good, but competition and merit. And that is a level of purple that America and parenting around the world need because we’ve gone to blue and red.
Katie: Well, congrats to your mom. That sounds like she walked an incredible line very, very well. And for you as an adult to still have remembered those lessons and have so much gratitude for them, I think that’s the goal for a lot of moms. And..
Gary: For a lot of moms listening, I was the oldest of three. I was the only one born in the old country. I was born in the Soviet Union. We immigrated here when I was three. My sister was born right when we got here. And then my brother was born 11 years later. And all three of us have an incredible relationship with my mom. She parented all three of us differently. So that’s another thing. She contextualized every kid and reverse engineered them. And so it was not a one-size-fits-all approach, which I think is also incredibly nuanced and important for people to hear. Again, all three of, all two of my siblings, all three of us have plenty of things we can speak to mom went too far here or dad did this, but it’s an we’re incredibly fortunate to be parented by her. And it’s motivated me as a public figure, I think, so much of what I put out as Gary Vee on my content. It’s like, look, you can be a winner, but don’t compromise humanity. And definitely the mission I have with VeeFriends in this new book. I want kids to learn that many traits can be good, but not when they’re out of balance.
Katie: I think that message of balance is so important in today’s world. And I love that you are bringing this to the children’s space, because as you explained your childhood, I could obviously see the connections of how that I’m sure has translated into the work you do and into entrepreneurship. And this is a big core value in my family as well. I actually have an agreement with all of my kids that they have to have a profitable business for a year before they can have a phone or a car, because I think so many tangible life lessons are learned through entrepreneurship and through trying something and failing, through having to work hard, through having to pay attention to details. And I could see those things your mom did. I was taking notes of ways I could integrate that even more so. But I’m really curious, because you are known in the online world for all of your advice around entrepreneurship and business and so much. And you have such a long history of that. You’re probably one of the longest-standing in that world. What inspired you to bring that into the world for children and with this children’s book?
Gary: So, I started putting out content in 2006. It was around wine. In 2009, it started to segue way into business and mindset. By 15 and 16, 2015 and 16, I started to realize, like, I started having these moments of like, why are people not doing the things that I’m saying? It’s free advice and it’s so black and white. And I realized a lot of it had to do with people being insecure. And that took me down a very interesting path for several years. And then I really started to get more known. And I started to get into, forget about hundreds of thousands of followers, forget about a million followers, but tens of millions of followers.
And that started giving me a real blessing, which was I was getting an outrageous amount of DMs from 15- to 25-year-olds. And what I still to this day do pretty well, and I really recommend a lot of the people that are listening, especially if they’re entrepreneurs, I think one of the biggest shortcomings we have as parents, is we don’t do enough listening. We don’t really listen. Like we let them talk, but we don’t internalize their opinions because they’re seven, because they’re 11, because they’re 14. And so I understand. I mean, I have a 15- and an 11-year-old, soon to be 12-year-old. I’m very empathetic to all the delusion and ridiculousness that comes out of kids’ mouths. But if you listen and you really pay attention, there’s things, there’s things being communicated.
And so, one of the things that I think that happened to me was I started reading so much of the comments because I still do this to this day. I mean, I read hundreds of comments a week. And in parts of my year, parts of my career, I’ve read thousands of messages a week. And so what started happening was I started to get themes. I started to understand themes and I could see things were really changing as the world became, you know, we blame so much on social media. We blame so much on politicians. But I think one of the great misses in parenting currently, and of course, this is generalization, there’s so many parents that are great at what I’m about to say. But there is a massive amount of lack of accountability in society right now. So we’ll blame, you know, I’m sure you’ll laugh at this. I get stopped in airports and people are like, Gary, I love your work, but I got to tell you, I don’t believe in this TikTok thing. I think it’s bad. And my kids are getting like affected by it. And I look them in the face and I’m like, so then take it off their phone. Like, you know, like be a parent.
And so, I just think that it just started to become clear to me that there were certain themes that were populating. And I started to realize, oh crap, getting people at 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and starting to talk to them about accountability, about optimism, about patience, about tenacity, about kindness, about nice guys finish first, not last, about true empathy. Like, you know, if you can’t feel another person and it’s all about you, well, then you’re just selfish and you want the whole world to see the world the way you see it. And just all these deep things that are manifesting in our society, I started to realize, wait a minute, if I want to leave a huge impact on the world, which is definitely in me. I’m not a nonprofit. I’m not altruistic. I just feel like you can both build stuff for yourself and leave a good impact on the world. Selfish and selfless activities don’t have to be in conflict. I think you can do them both at the same time.
And I just started to realize, wait a minute, I want to get my messages younger. And if I can start putting out cartoons and kid books and trading cards and if I can start replacing some of the content that I’ve seen kids consume that I’m not sure is really delivering any true message, it’s just commercially interesting for the people that are putting it out there. Well, I can have a selfish and selfless framework here. Let me get to kids at four, five, six, seven, and start impacting their thinking and being a supplement to the good things their parents are putting in, kind of like Sesame Street.
I got very, very, very infatuated with Jim Henson during these last five years. I think he had real good intent. And I have really good intent with VeeFriends. And so, yeah, I just felt like I had to get to ages three, four, five, six, seven to really foundationally change perspective and be a positive contributor and a teammate to good parenting. If I want, because what was happening was, I was seeing the effects of my words on 20-year-olds, but that was more similar to therapy. Like you have to really put in a lot of work to unwind a lot of things that were foundational. And for me, all the shit that kids are consuming, even at a young age on YouTube Kids and things of that nature, I thought that I could contribute something positive that would set them up for more success. And success for me is not money. Success is peace of mind, lack of anxiety, smiling when you wake up versus frowning, being optimistic versus being cynical. And I’m focused on that.
Katie: I love that. I think those early ages, we often, I’m sure you’ve seen it as a parent too, but we often underestimate how incredibly capable kids are of understanding. And I mean, even more so in learning at that age. And I think bringing those lessons at a really early age and trusting their capability and understanding them is amazing. I also really love and want to highlight what you said about the difference between listening and letting them talk. I think that one step alone can completely change a parenting relationship when they feel heard. I know so many of us go to therapy as adults because we didn’t feel heard as children. So I absolutely love that you said that. Do you have any tangible tips for the parents listening on ways to bring in that balance and accountability with our kids, even at these young ages? Of course, the book helps with that, and I’ll link to that in the show notes. But any practical tips from the parenting side that we can integrate?
Gary: I have some real thoughts on this. So I’m going to give you a left-field answer that I think is going to hit a lot of parents on the treadmill right now, driving right in the chest. I think it starts with not parenting based on validation from the outside. So I’m going for dramatic pause for a reason. You want to find balance? How about starting with the humility required for what I’m asking right now, which is looking at yourself in the mirror and realizing that a lot of things you push your kids to are based on positive affirmation and justification from your own mother, from your sister, from fellow parents in the neighborhood, from the teachers and principals in school.
There’s too many parents who overvalue external authority and who overvalue the opinions of how well their kids are doing, from family members, acquaintances, and other circles, including their social life. And I feel like that is probably the thing that my mom did best. If I really think the core of what got me to where I am and what she really did was she did not value principals and teachers, her friends or any relatives opinions on her parenting or on our good grades, bad grades or clothes, what our activities were, really anything. And I think today’s parent, and again, these are generalizations. There’s many that are doing this well, but so many, I mean, by the way, let me give you an insight to a lot of parents that are listening. So many of the 15- to 25-year-olds DMs to me is my parents don’t care about me. They just want me to go Harvard to show me off to their friends. You know, the second you start putting honor roll student bumper stickers on your car is the second you’re starting to indicate to your kid that they care more about outside validation of you being good at school than their own parent being proud of it. And it’s like a real thing. And I really do think a lot of people are listening to me right now and are either at the moment where they’re ready to accept this truth that they’re parenting for outside forces or they’re viscerally reacting to what I’m saying right now, either saying that’s not me or glossing over, or even maybe being like, nah man, that’s not real. And I think it’s a big one.
Katie: I bet that did hit home for a lot of us. I know even in small ways, like when our toddlers have a temper tantrum in public and there’s that immediate feeling of what are other people going to think? It starts so young. And I know I can resonate with this looking back to my own childhood. I internalized early that good grades equaled love or academic achievement equaled love. And that was a whole big thing that I got to learn to let go of in adulthood. But I know the goal for many parents is how do we avoid these same pitfalls in raising our own kids?
Gary: Let’s talk about the one that you just brought up. What you cheer for, is what they strive for. So my mother, for example, gave me most positive reinforcement when I was nice. So when I open the door for elderly women, when I go to McDonald’s, this is like a big story in my life. This shaped my life. I once opened the door to an elderly woman when we went to McDonald’s when I was eight. And you would have thought that I won the Nobel Peace Prize. My mom made such a to-do about it that it ingrained in my mind.
And so I tell a lot of parents that like, if you tell your kid, if you cheer, if you are positive reinforcing and cheering for straight A’s, they’re going to overvalue conforming to systems. If you over-cheer for them being attractive, like, you know, I grew up with a kid who was a good-looking dude. And his mom, like, that’s all they talked about. Like how good look, and by the way, like he’s now a 48-year-old man who’s had like 40 plastic surgeries, tons of Botox, like, and I get it now. I’m like, wow, right. He thinks, to your point, that’s the love language. That’s the thing. That’s what he brings to society.
And so you have to be very thoughtful of what you cheer for. And I think one thing that I’m very passionate about is cheering for good behavior, civility, kindness, who you are as a human being. And I think that’s a big insight for parents, like what you make a to-do is going to really implant in their brain. And I think if you can get into accountability and work ethic, I can tell you for me, work ethic is very clearly, and again, sometimes it goes too far. No question am I a workaholic because how many hours I worked or how hard I worked was positively re-informed in my immigrant household. And so, you know, even though that’s a good trait, and by the way, that’s the book. It’s a book of Patient Panda, excuse me, Patient Pig and an Eager Eagle. Eagerness is amazing. But if you’re overly sloppy, and not strategic and thoughtful around your eagerness, well, then you’re going to lose if you overdo it, if you overextend yourself. Patience is one of my favorite things to talk about as an entrepreneur. But if you overdo it and it becomes complacency, well, it’s a disease. So this goes back to that middle. And I think that’s what parents need to be thinking about.
Katie: I love that. And so praising the things like the kindness, the moments they go out of their way to help someone else, the work ethic that when they work hard and put in effort at something. I think that’s a huge key. And you touched on work ethic. I know as an entrepreneur who’s hired people of various age groups, and I hear this from other entrepreneurs a lot, it seems like there’s a lot of struggle with that work ethic and accountability piece, especially in certain segments of the younger population. Do you feel like this parenting shift is going to be helpful in sort of reversing that tide or what other things do you think could make a change there?
Gary: Well, now you’re going into, I appreciate you going to a hot topic in business land. Look, I know unlimited Gen Z kids that work for me and companies I’m an investor in that are working very hard, we need to, especially if you’re listening right now and you’re in a first world country like America, especially America. We’re going to have to accept a very important truth that’s happening in America. We are a mature empire that has had a long run of prosperity and it has created enormous entitlement.
When I was growing up, I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood, and I didn’t know a single kid that starting in high school didn’t work. Everyone in my high school worked. McDonald’s, the car wash, landscaping, the liquor store like me, you know. What do you think is going to happen if kids don’t grow up their whole life working? What do you think is going to happen when kids don’t grow up working and then are getting money from their parents to buy everything? What do you think is happening when a lot of these kids, I feel bad for these kids. A lot of these kids started during COVID where they were told to stay home and the government’s going to send them a check. They got tricked. They grew up in a soft world. And then they got paid to stay home at first.
And so, yeah, I mean, I think, yes, I think parenting that finds the middle, a high-net-worth family, right? You know, this is a cliche. Husband and wife grow up poor or middle or lower middle class. They work their asses off and they make it. Then they have children and they’re buying them stuff because, and they’re making it easier for them because they have, we overcorrected for what was hard for us. The problem is finding the middle isn’t overcorrecting to the other side of where you grew up. It’s just finding the middle.
And so, I’m very empathetic. I get it. I see it in so many. I have tendencies of it. I get excited when I can buy something that I could have never bought when I was a kid and a lot of us are still kids inside. Like when I buy baseball cards for my son, I’m really buying them for myself. You know what I mean? So there’s all that kind of stuff going on. And so I’m very empathetic that it’s hard, but yeah, I mean, I don’t think parenting alone can solve in a mature empire. There’s a reason the Roman Empire fell. America has had a lot of prosperity and there’s a lot of entitlement. Plus there’s been a lot of communication of demonizing work ethic and hard work, right?
And people have weaponized not only youth culture of many humans have weaponized mental health to reinforce their own laziness or lack of accountability, which is devastating because so many people actually have mental health issues. But now, if like you don’t want to go to work, a lot of people are weaponizing that. And it’s a very confusing time and a time of transition for companies and people. And I remind a lot of business owners, the best kids are doing it for themselves. You don’t need to work at Kmart or Walmart or McDonald’s anymore. Like if you’re a whiz kid at 16 and 17 and hungry and ambitious, you’re building an online business for yourself. You don’t need to go and work at a department store or a landscaping company or painting houses to make a couple bucks. So it’s a different era as well.
Katie: I’d love to circle back to the competition and balance side there in a world where it is about the eighth place trophies or the participation trophies, helping our kids develop and find a healthy relationship with competitiveness, with self-esteem. I coach high school track, and it’s interesting to see those dynamics play out often of like the parents seem like their egos are on the line even more than the kids when the kids are competing. And often a lot of the stress comes from the parent side, not even from the athletes who are doing the work. So I’m curious any ways that you think as parents, especially we can nurture a healthy relationship with competitiveness and with self-esteem, but also a balance there in a world that gives out participation trophies for everything.
Gary: I mean, this one’s super simple. Eighth place trophies are hurting us. This one’s not even like. I really don’t see the path of what we’re accomplishing here because at its most basic form, when we’re starting to tell kids at five years old that it doesn’t matter and everybody wins, you’re telling them that losing is bad. And then they fear losing, and then they’re risk-averse. They lose courage. They overvalue other people’s opinions on their losses. We’ve destroyed so many children’s competitive advantages and all those, like, this is why youth sports was so good for so long. It was one place where merit dominated the truth. Like it was what it was. This is where you really learned merit. Even school’s not merit. You know, like you get grades. They ebb and flow a little bit based on the teacher. You know, like it’s not like every, like there’s participation in the classroom and that’s 40% or 30% or 25% of your grade. That’s completely subjective at some level. You know, obviously if you raise your hand or things of that nature, but nonetheless, sports was the most merit-based thing to kids. And once we eliminated that because we didn’t want to have our kids hurt.
Hurting from losing is one of the great foundational blocks of human development. I would say that a parent’s job is to eliminate indifference. Indifference is what leads to very dark places in people’s minds. And I think when you tell them it doesn’t matter, it breeds indifference. And so, yeah, I really struggle with eighth place trophies. I really think that they’ve done real damage. And I think parents have to acknowledge that the last 30, 40 years, we’ve created a bunch of zoo animals. These kids are over-coddled and then they go into the real world. And I don’t know if you know what happens with zoo animals. Back in the day, zoo animals used to be let out into the wild. They stopped doing that. Because within a week, within a day, sometimes within hours, that animal was killed because it was over-coddled in the zoo. And then it goes into the jungle and it gets killed. You have a 22-year-old that you as a parent paid for everything their whole lives, eighth place trophies, you fighting teachers to give them better grades, you manipulating things behind the scenes, you creating nepotism and entitlement. What do you think happens when they go into the workforce? They’re not prepared.
Katie: Yeah, and I can see that being a little bit of an uphill battle in a society where that’s reinforced from so many angles. But thankfully, it seems like there is a lot that parents have the ability to affect change within that realm. Any suggestions for within our home culture and within our interactions with our kids? Obviously not coddling them, but anything that can help sort of undo that societal pressure from all sides.
Gary: Stay unmuted because I want to go back and forth on this and it’s okay if any of the kids yell in the background. I think it’s good ambient noise.
Katie: Okay.
Gary: I mean, you know this. Of course, we’re in control. This goes back to me getting yelled at at the airport for TikTok. You know, like, what do you want from me, John? You’re Ricky’s father. You don’t believe in TikTok? Delete it. Oh, you can’t deal with your kid pushing back a little bit and crying because he’s the only one without TikTok in the school? Tough shit, you’re his fucking dad. What is my advice? Like you’re in control of your kids and their four walls.
My mom had no interest in being popular with other parents or other kids in my school, and most of all with me. You can be kind and warm and loving to your child. You don’t need to be their pushover friend. Grounding, consequences, ramifications. And I know it’s hard. We live in a different era. It’s not 1965 anymore, where you like spank your kid at the store when they cry. And that’s great. Like I said, I’m not advocating for extreme red. But this blue shit we’ve been on has also not been working. The answer is purple, Meet Me in the Middle.
But yeah, I think parents need to, but again, here’s where people fuck up. If they think the world is blue, they go fully red in their household. The way to find the middle is to be purple in your household. Got it? That’s the nuance that everyone’s struggling with. The number one way to find the middle is to be middle. Ah, let me give you one that’s really going to hit. This hit me. For all the moms that are listening right now, if you’re the blue or the red or the left and the right or the hard or the soft and your husband’s the reverse, what we tend to do is if the husband, let’s say he’s the soft one and you’re the disciplinarian. If the husband’s being overly soft too far, what a lot of times happens is the mom in this scenario that’s listening on the treadmill right now will go too far the other way thinking that finds the middle. The insight I’m parenting is you as the mom in that scenario, go to the middle. A little bit of what dad’s saying and a little bit of what you and find that middle. That’s how you get kids to the balance point. A lot of our kids are byproducts today of the extremes.
Katie: That’s a great point. It’s like that pendulum analogy, and we often swing way too far in the other direction before we come back to center.
Gary: I’ll tell you, I’ve done it for a long period of my life in every genre, work, parenting, being parented. And I’ve really come to learn the value over the last five years and see the ramifications in every aspect of my life, relationships, parenting, and definitely business.
Katie: I also think it’s really important to point out that you said your mom had zero interest in a popularity contest of being liked by you when you were little. That wasn’t her main goal. But you seem to have a great deal of respect and a great relationship with her as an adult as a result. And I know that I’ve seen some statistics of the parents who go out of their way to be their kid’s friend and to only be the soft one are actually the ones that most often get cut off by their adult children when the kid starts unpatterning things. So I think that’s just a really important thing to highlight.
Gary: There’s a reason why there’s two different words for the word love and like. My mom loved the shit out of me. But she was okay if I didn’t like her in moments where she had to create consequences for behavior that she didn’t deem good. My mom thought I was going to be wildly successful and yet grounded me to my senior year of high school for every bad report card, even though I knew she knew that I knew that she knew that it didn’t mean shit in the future of my life. Think about how amazing that is. What level of discipline that took. We were incredibly close. And I would be so devastated and cry, but it’s like anything else she drew lines in the sand.
Katie: And there’s like a safety in the structure of knowing those boundaries versus them being sort of unclear and hard to find. And so then you’re testing them to try to find out what they are to find that sense of security.
Gary: I think everyone’s, every mother’s going to agree with me because they all remember being kids. There’s a level of knowing that your parent gives a shit that comes along with consequences. That’s powerful.
Katie: Yeah, you don’t like it, but you can appreciate it on some level.
Gary: Correct. You also respect it. Like I love that I get to walk around earth respecting my parents. Like too many kids by four, when you’re 11, when you’re 15, when you’re 12 and you’re shitting on your parent and they’re not doing anything about it, you lose respect for them. And that screws with you as a kid if you don’t respect your parents. Parents are way too focused on what other parents are doing.
Katie: Yeah, key takeaway, if we can all let go of something is let go of the opinions of other people related to our relationship with our children.
Gary: Especially to remind everybody, most of the parents that you know that are your friends with your kids or in your circles, very few of them are going to be your friends after your kids leave high school. So you’re basically forming the rest of your life’s relationship with your children based on the opinions of people that you’re not even going to know for the majority of your life. That’s insane.
Katie: Yeah.
Gary: I don’t give a shit that alpha mom, Sarah, like judged you because you took Instagram off that you didn’t give your kid a phone and that you’re, here’s what the scene is. Alpha mom, Sarah, and you are in some sort of function or dropping off at school. It gets brought up like what she says with a fourth grader, I’m giving little Sally a phone this year. When are you giving a phone? And if you say ninth grade, oh my God. If you can deal with that, oh my God, you have a much better chance of having a healthy relationship with your children in perpetuity.
Katie: Such good advice.
Gary: If you think that ninth grade is the right year, you may think it’s seventh. You may think it’s college. You may think it’s first grade. I’ll be honest with you. I have zero opinions or judgment of other parents. How about that? Let me say it nice and close. You may decide that you don’t give a phone to your child until they leave your house at 18, or you may decide that you give it to them at six-years-old. And I’m telling you right now, at least one man’s point of view, good for you as long as it’s your decision. If you’re being peer pressured into giving a phone in fourth grade, because that’s when everybody else is getting a phone, that’s when it starts getting ugly.
If you in your heart believe that your kid’s not ready and then needs it in seventh grade. It’s when you compromise your own values and your own beliefs because of the subjective opinion of random people and those, and or not random opinions. If you do something your mom, if your mom tells you, fourth grade is the right year for Sally. She’s my granddaughter, I know. But you want sixth grade? Well, then you’ve already failed. You’re going to resent your mom if it doesn’t work out. Or if you have siblings, I have a sister with kids the same age range. If we parented based on what the other one’s doing, like every kid’s different. I think about the four kids between my sister and I, all four of them are different. This goes back to earlier in the podcast where I said my mom parented us all different.
By the way, that’s a cool scenario. Let’s play out this scenario. Oldest son gets a phone in fifth grade, youngest daughter’s coming up. She’s going into fifth grade. She’s like, all right, mom, I’m ready. And do you have the strength to say, no, darling, you’re getting your phone in seventh grade. But wait a minute, my brother, Tom got it in fifth grade. Tom and you are different. Do you like Tom more? No, baby. I just think that another year or two for you to keep your innocence or to keep you like, these are the convos parents are not having.
Everything’s a conformed system. They listen to, by the way, my greatest hope is that not a single parent listens to anything that I’m saying right now and agrees with it for the sake of agreeing. They may agree because it’s how they see the world as well. There might be an insight that they heard that starts them down a path of changing their mind. I love changing my mind. There may be some things they hear. And they’re like, fuck you, Gary. And I’m like, respect. You know your parents. We’re talking macro. This is why I answered your Gen Z question of like, I have tons of workaholic Gen Z kids. I just have way more that are not.
So, none of this is blanket, but do we have the strength to make our own decisions based on our own kids’ realities? That’s, I think, what we’re struggling with. How about like the reverse? Here’s one that’s impossible. My dad was always scared about giving anything because he always said, if you give something, you can’t take it back. How about giving your kid a phone in fifth grade because everyone else is getting one that year? You can see that they’re not handling it well and taking it away. Talk about tough, right? Do you have the strength as a parent to be okay with that. All that crying and moaning and judgment from parents crying and moaning inside your own house. You give a fifth grader a phone for three months and then you take it away. It’s like detox. Those first weeks are going to be hard. Parenting is hard, like, because anything that’s special is hard. And this all goes to like, you know, there’s a character I haven’t done a kid’s book on yet called Accountable Ant inside of VeeFriends. And I really want to make Accountable Ant powerful and famous and sought after and collectible and cool like CocoMelon and Spider-Man. Because if God forbid I pull that off and kids love accountability, it would change the world.
Katie: Absolutely. Yeah, I think it’s so important that like developing a comfort with being temporarily disliked by our children to do what’s in their best interest out of love. And also the two sides of what you said is not being affected by the opinions and judgment of other parents and releasing our own judgment of other parents. I think those two steps would shift so much.
Gary: Well, you’re a very smart lady. That little last part you said. It’s so funny that you said that. I’m going to pull it up on my phone right now. I’m going to show it. I know this is probably audio, but I’m going to show you. Or if there’s a video clip, here you go. Literally, I posted today, I’ll read it. Want less negativity in your life? Step one, stop deploying it in retaliation to it, two wrongs don’t make a right. And number two, stop looking for it. And that comes from this whole thing of judgment that I think a lot about, which is you want to be less susceptible to judgment? Stop deploying it.
Katie: Yeah.
Gary: One of the reasons that I think I’m able to be a public figure and deal with judgment is because I don’t tend to judge. It’s not a framework. So when you are a judger and you’ve got opinions on how Carol dresses her daughter, Susan, or what Rick and Nancy are doing this summer, the more you deploy judgment, the more you’re susceptible to judgment.
Katie: I love that. Well, I know we got to weave in a little bit of talk about the book through some really amazing conversations around parenting. But before we wrap up, I want to make sure we get to talk a little in more detail about the book, where people can find it and what’s coming next for the whole Vee universe.
Gary: So VeeFriends, veefriends.com, go check that out. I think a lot of you are going to associate with it. The book comes out in July. Meet Me in the Middle. It’s a story of Eager Eagle and Patient Pig. And it’s a really fun book. It reads from both sides. So you read the story from Patient Pig’s perspective, and then you flip the book over and you read the book from Eager Eagle’s perspective, and they meet in the middle of the stories. And it really does talk about this balance, which is something I think all of us as parents are trying to figure out.
As far as what else is going on with VeeFriends, Moonbug, the makers of Cocomelon, and I have teamed up, and the VeeFriends cartoons hit this fall on YouTube Kids. So I’m very excited about that. And then for all the collectors, all the parents that have Pokémon collectors in their house, if you go to eBay and type in VeeFriends, I think you’ll get a really good look at what’s going on with the collectability of this world.
So, yeah, it’s been a lot of fun. I grew up loving Transformers, and I’ve always been into 80s pop culture, My Little Ponies, and Strawberry Shortcake, and Jem, and Josie and the Pussycats, and Saved by the Bell. All this stuff, like pop culture, 80s life. And I always wanted to get into that world and now creating my own little universe, which I really do see as a Sesame Street meets Pokémon. Sesame Street and instilling good values and Pokémon competition and collectability. And we’re taking a stab at it. And this kid’s book is a big, big, big step in the right direction.
Katie: I love it. I will put links in the show notes for all of you guys listening on the go. Gary, I hope it’s wildly successful and that it resonates with many families. It was such a great joy to get to catch up with you today and have this conversation. And I know how busy you are. So I’m deeply grateful for your time today. Thank you so much.
Gary: Thanks for having me.
Katie: And thank you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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