From Manager to Mentor: Raising Kind, Grounded Kids

Dr. Leigh Weisz is the Founder of Coping Partners, a mental health clinic. As a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice, she was on staff and affiliated with The Family Institute at Northwestern University for several years. She has experience working with children, adolescents, families, and individual adults in areas such as child and adolescent family therapy, grief and loss, and relationship issues.

Dr. Weisz earned her graduate degree in clinical psychology from the Illinois School of Professional Psychology with a specialty in children and families. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology and Spanish from the University of Michigan, having graduated with honors. Dr. Weisz has practiced in community mental health, hospitals, and outpatient family medicine practice settings.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[03:40] Learning to close the gap between your values and your actions
[06:55] The daily behaviors that build deeper family connections
[10:25] Practical ways to nurture kindness and gratitude at home
[16:55] How letting kids contribute creates confidence and purpose
[25:00] Tips for fostering independence through household responsibilities
[30:45] Why real-world experiences are more important than digital connections
[40:58] The growth that comes from letting kids face discomfort

In this episode…

It’s easy for parenting to become a calendar-management job: practices, homework, carpools, reminders, meals, screens, and one more thing that needs to get done. Underneath all of that busyness is a quieter question many parents carry: how do we raise kids who are not just successful, but kind, grounded, and capable?

According to Dr. Leigh Weisz, a child psychologist and parent of two, the answer starts with aligning what parents say they value with what children experience day to day. She explains that kindness, resilience, and independence are built through ordinary moments: asking targeted questions at dinner, inviting kids to help with household work, letting them feel disappointment, and resisting the urge to rescue them too quickly. When parents model their values, let kids contribute, and step back enough for them to grow, children begin to see themselves as helpful, capable people who can handle life’s ups and downs.

In this episode of The Coping Podcast, Dr. Leigh Weisz discusses how parents can raise kind, grounded, and capable kids. She explains why values need matching daily behaviors, how modeling kindness shapes what children absorb, and why chores and family contribution build confidence. Dr. Weisz also shares advice on stepping back so kids can face discomfort, practice independence, and grow.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments:

“We are raising kids in a time that is incredibly intense.”
“What we do consistently becomes what they value.”
“Relationships we know are the number one predictor of long-term well-being and happiness.”
“We also want to notice the questions we’re asking. And again, what value is it getting at?”
“We now have generations that are less equipped to handle not just true adversity, but even basic life skills.”

Action Steps:

Align your values with daily behaviors: Choosing one value and pairing it with a regular action helps children experience what truly matters at home.
Model the character you want to build: Children learn from what parents consistently do, so everyday kindness, gratitude, and patience become powerful lessons.
Invite kids to contribute at home: Giving children real responsibilities builds confidence, helpfulness, and a sense that they matter within the family.
Step back before rescuing them: Allowing kids to face disappointment and solve problems helps them develop resilience, independence, and emotional regulation.
Create more real-world experiences: Reducing screen-centered habits and encouraging face-to-face connection gives children more opportunities to grow, connect, and cope.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Coping Partners.

Coping Partners is a mental health practice dedicated to helping children, adolescents, and adults manage various challenges including anxiety, divorce, behavioral issues, relationship problems and much more in the Chicago suburbs.

Our practitioners are devoted to building on our clients’ strengths and bolstering weaknesses.

To gain insight and tools for getting unstuck check out our website at CopingPartners.com, email us at support@copingpartnersgroup.com.

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Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:01

Welcome to The Coping Podcast, where we share strategies for coping with the stressors of life, especially the difficulties of parenting. And here is your host, Dr. Leigh Weisz.

Dr. Leigh Weisz: 00:15

This is Dr. Leigh Weisz. I am the host of The Coping Podcast, where I feature top experts on topics like raising healthy children, parenting, and so much more. This episode is brought to you by Coping Partners. Coping Partners is a mental health practice in the Chicago suburbs dedicated to helping children, adolescents, and adults. We help manage various challenges including anxiety, divorce, behavioral issues, relationship problems, and much more. Check out more episodes of our podcast and our website at copingpartners.com, and you can contact us with any questions you have.

Just a quick disclaimer. The information provided is for educational and informational purposes only. This is not intended to provide mental health treatment and does not constitute a client therapist relationship. The information provided is not a replacement for being assessed and evaluated by a licensed professional, and is not intended to replace mental health or medical advice. Hello everyone, and thank you so much for being here.

As Rachel shared, my name is Dr. Leigh Weisz. I am a child psychologist and I run a group practice here in Northbrook called Coping Partners. I’m also the parent of two kids ages 12 and 14, so I’m very much in this with you. So I spend my days working with kids and families. And what I see over and over again is that parents today are trying really hard.

So in terms of our agenda, sometimes I know I leave presentations feeling overwhelmed by all the things that I’m not doing right. All the ways I must be getting it wrong. And my goal today is for you to leave here feeling empowered with 1 or 2 specific goals in mind of how you might shift some of your parenting practices. We are raising kids in a time that is incredibly intense. There is just more information, more comparison, more activities, more expectations, more pressure on parents in general to get it right.

So if you are ever feeling stressed or overwhelmed, you’re not alone. In fact, in 2024, the US Surgeon General issued an advisory on the mental wellbeing of parents. They described this like an epidemic. Right. And the majority of parents really do feel burned out and exhausted.

Some of the many reasons why parents might feel more stress. We don’t get much of a break. We’re always connected to our kids with technology. Even during the school day. We know parents experience a lot of stress around how to navigate technology, especially as we learn more about the real harms, for example, of social media.

And yet we also know its prevalence in our kids’ lives. Parents feel more isolated. And also just the way in which affluent communities offer so much in the way of these structured extracurricular activities. I think most of us are pretty overscheduled, and so parents are just more stressed with logistics, carpools, dinner at different times, not to mention their own work stress and work schedules. So today I really want to step back and ask a really important question, which is what really matters?

What actually matters in the long run. All parents, I believe, share an innate desire for their kids to be kind, empathetic, and caring. But we live in a world today where parents also feel an immense amount of pressure to provide their children with every competitive advantage in academics, in sports, even in their social lives. And so what’s happening more and more is that fundamental values are being lost as parents lose sight of what’s really important. And I want you to leave here today with three take home messages in ways to implement them, with the goal of teaching your child how to be kind, resilient, and autonomous.

And just by being here, you’ve taken the first step and should feel really good about wanting to instill these values in your children. Because when researchers ask parents what they most want for their kids, we say things like kindness, happiness, resilience, being a good person, being a good human, you know, raising a good human being, right? But when you ask kids what they think parents value most, they’ll say things like achievement, performance, success. So there’s clearly a gap between what we say matters and what most of our kids are actually experiencing. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today is like, how do we close that gap?

How do we raise kids who are not just successful, but like, more importantly, kind, grounded, capable? So I want you to look and see, are these aligned? Most parents say it’s important to them to raise a child who is kind, connected to others, resilient and capable. That’s not to say that parents don’t also want their kids to have a good education or academic success. It’s just typically not ranked by parents above these other core values.

But if you look at the day to day reality and the things we value most, they don’t look so aligned. I want you to take a minute and think about all the activities that fill your child’s week. I’m sure for many, these activities could be basketball, dance class, soccer, art, academics. And while these are all wonderful, enriching activities, and my own kids are right there in those activities with yours, it does raise the question like, where do we fit teaching kindness in our busy schedules? This is a chart from the book Dopamine Kids, written by Michaeleen Doucleff.

And by the end of today’s lunch and learn, I want you to choose one top value or goal that you have for your kids and a corresponding behavior or two that supports that goal. I’m going to give you a few examples now, but if you can get a piece of paper, a pen, or a pencil and just jot down throughout this presentation some ideas for you of the values and the behaviors that you know you’d like to implement. I’m going to go back to this at the end. So here’s an example. Most parents want their children to be happy.

Relationships we know are the number one predictor of long term well-being and happiness. We know that kids with strong social connections show all kinds of positive things like higher life satisfaction, lower anxiety, and lower depression. We know that warm, supportive relationships predict long term happiness and health. So in a behavior that we might implement as parents on the daily right to promote our value of connection and happiness would be doing something that connects us with our kids, makes them feel connected. So reading books at bedtime while snuggling up nightly for sure would do the trick, right?

Which is different than, you know, saying to your kid, here’s the iPad, have your wind down time. You know, before bed. By the way, I should say, I do not ever intend to iPad shame. Everyone I know, myself included, has a time and a place where we do need to have something like the iPad. We cannot be there every second of every day.

And every family is going to do it differently. But in terms of the behavior that promotes the value, this is an example. So you see of like what would promote connection and what wouldn’t. And so how you implement this in your family is entirely up to you. What times of the day you can really foster connection.

But the goal is to do it and to figure out a regular time that it’s happening. If you have older kids who might not want to snuggle with you at bedtime anymore, this might be listening to music in the car together and bonding in this kind of more age appropriate way, rather than if your teen normally sits and checks their phone during the car ride. You might say like, we’re going to make a new rule phone off in the car, and over time they just get used to that. But then they’re bonding because they’re actually listening to music or talking. Connecting.

This slide shows another example of an aligned value and parental behavior. So again, a value might be kindness. And the related behavior would be involving your child in a helping behavior daily, like setting the table, helping to make a meal or regularly volunteering somewhere. If it’s important, there should be a behavior or an activity we see showing up daily, weekly, regularly. Now, I’m going to give you an example from my own life as a psychologist, I know all about the importance of cultivating gratitude and how wonderful that is for mental health.

So it was always important to me to gravitate to, to gravitate, to cultivate, excuse me, gratitude in my kids. And that they give back to others. So I decided I should put the goal of volunteering with the kids in my calendar monthly on repeat, just to keep it top of mind. The reality was that because of busy schedules, both ours and the kids, we didn’t actually act on it for maybe six months, but because it stayed on my calendar, it remained visible and important. And eventually we did follow through and we found different ways to volunteer as a family once a month.

So a practical takeaway is if something matters to you, schedule it. Even if you’re not ready to act on it immediately or write it down somewhere, keeping it visible increases the likelihood that it’ll eventually become reality. And I’m very proud. My older daughter is on a leadership service board and really does this because she loves it. She loves the feeling of giving back to others.

So we’ve talked about, you know, what gets in the way of promoting these wonderful core values and what actually matters. Here’s another value I forgot to mention. If another value, same value is kindness. Another easy behavior you can implement is like involving your child with pet care. So even a little kid can notice if, like the water bowl is empty and you can be like, hey, and give the water bowl.

Why don’t you fill this for, you know, the dog’s name? Or if the dog’s bringing the ball to the child, like, hey, why don’t you throw it and get some exercise? So the idea that there’s little ways to implement this. You just want to kind of like notice it. And instead of just doing it yourself, ask them to help.

Okay. So everything we’re going to talk about today really comes down to three things. What we model, how we involve them and how much space we give them to grow. So number one is model what matters. Kids are constantly watching us even when we don’t realize it.

If they see us, for example, regularly on our cell phones, they begin to view that behavior as normal and important, and they’re going to imitate what they observe. So even at a really young age, they start engaging in the ways they see their parents behaving. I have a friend who has a mouth that you can imagine. She’s a doctor. She’s super poised and professional at work, but at home she swears left and right, and her daughter, at the age of three, repeated some of her choice words at a family barbecue.

And we were all just hysterically laughing. And while my friend wanted to hide under the table, we knew and she knew that her daughter had mimicked her and she was caught. Needless to say, she worked on that habit of hers. So again, we have to model what matters. What we do consistently becomes what they value.

So for example, if you’re taking time with a friend on the phone listening and trying to help her explain later to your child, like, why were you taking the time out of your busy night to help a friend or a lot of families do. Highs and lows. Best part of your day? Worst part of your day, which is great. But you might add in questions that incorporate teaching, empathy, and kindness.

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