When Love and Empathy Turn into Disabling

Today's episode is a re-release of episode 23. I wanted to bring this episode back because it gets to the core of what Mike and I are always trying to teach: helping kids with ADHD move from dependence to independence. This conversation started with a powerful listener comment about how “doing everything out of love” can actually leave kids feeling helpless and incapable. That story stuck with me—it perfectly illustrates what happens when empathy turns into over-accommodation.

In this episode, Mike and I talk about why confidence comes from experience, not protection, and how kids only build real executive functioning skills when they’re trusted to try, fail, and try again. We also dig into why too much therapy, too much prompting, and too much hovering can actually hold kids back.

We decided to re-release it now because this message matters more than ever. If you’ve ever wondered how to balance empathy with accountability—or how to stop “lovingly disabling” your child—this is the episode to revisit.

The over all theory

I liked the over all theory of allowing kids the independence to learn through experience, however, it stops there. Their is no information of how far are to let this go as a parent, if they are not doing their homework this pod cast states let this happen and they will independently learn that this has a consequence. In real life it proves that a child may not see this as a learning experience. Are parents to let their child fail in school until they learn to do assignments in class, do homework, study for tests? Good intentions, but no real follow up details, sounds more like opinion then a true strategy