Stop Telling Your Kids to Stop. Then Let Them Teach You

Most parents parent from stress, and stress makes people fall back on how they themselves were raised. That is the uncomfortable starting point Giovanni Marsico brings to this Quick Cut: the word that comes out fastest under pressure is stop, and the trait you are telling your kid to stop is usually the trait they are built around. He learned it the hard way, as the kid who got told to stop, and now he catches himself doing the same thing to his own son.

The kid who got told to stop

Marsico was entrepreneurial at sixteen, producing events and pulling a thousand people to his first party, scaling up to five thousand people a week. At home, the message was simple: stop doing the party thing. He never touched drugs and never drank, but the nightlife read as risk to his family, and the conflict over his path followed him into a confusion he later understood as depression and anxiety.

“Most parents, in times of stress, fall back into what they know, meaning if you were raised a certain way, then that comes out when you’re stressed.”

The trap he is still catching himself in

Marsico’s own son, nine years old, asks a thousand questions. Marsico wants to nurture the curiosity, and still catches the word forming: stop with the questions. He connects it instantly to his own childhood, and to a memory he is still unpacking in therapy at thirty-five: being told to stop asking questions at the dinner table, and quietly deciding to stop.

“I’m constantly reminding myself, don’t tell them to stop. Encourage the things that are frustrating to the adults, because that’s part of the mystery of what the gift is.”

What “get open” taught the whole family

The clearest example came from soccer. His eleven-year-old was dominating a pickup game full of grown adults, then started hiding from the ball in his next real game, afraid of making a mistake in front of his coach. Marsico and his wife gave him one instruction: get open, meaning stand where a teammate can find you, mistakes and all. Then they turned the lesson on themselves.

“My wife and I were thinking, wait a minute, what’s the lesson for us? How do we get more open in our work that we’re doing? How do we be more bold? So our family phrase now is get open, for the year.”

Kids are teaching you too

Marsico’s larger point is that parenting is not a one-way transmission. His son invented the family’s mantra for the year. That is not a consolation prize, it is the actual argument: children co-create the culture of a home, and pretending otherwise costs a family the chance to grow together.

“We are their teachers as much as they are our teachers… we’re co-learning.”

Listen to the full conversation on the podcast: Manufacturing Serendipity, Sharing Your Superhero Powers and Creating Divine Moments & EPIC Experiences with Giovanni Marsico.