Seeds turn into trees. Ore turns into steel. Different materials, different results.

Richard Williams wrote a 78-page plan before Venu

s and Serena were born. He saw a tennis player winning a cheque on television and decided to have two daughters and make them champions. He had not met them yet. But he moved the family to Compton — deliberately — to make them tough. Training happened dawn to dusk, rain or shine, on broken public courts surrounded by gangs. His daughters’ coach, Rick Macci, described it plainly: “He pushed them hard every day. He challenged them every day. He yelled at them every day. Most of all, he hugged and kissed them every hour.”

Venus became world number one. Serena became the greatest of all time.

Stefano Capriati was a former professional soccer player whose own career ended with an injury. He started training his daughter Jennifer before kindergarten. She turned pro at 13. Top ten at 14. Olympic gold at 16. At 17, she was arrested for shoplifting and drug possession. By 18, she was in rehab. Her own words to the New York Times: “I really was not happy with myself, my tennis, my life, my parents, my coaches, my friends. I just wanted to kill myself.”

And after forced retirement: “If I don’t have tennis, who am I? What am I? I was just alive because of this.”

Two devoted fathers with a plan. Same method. Same devotion. Different material.

There is a third option.

Roger Federer’s parents stepped back. His father’s one rule was, “Just don’t cheat.” Young Roger sampled skiing, wrestling, swimming, skateboarding, basketball, handball, badminton, soccer, and rugby before tennis. No heat. Support. The direction was already inside him. He loved the game completely. Unlike Capriati, he never became it.

No fire. No pressure. No plan. The greatest men’s tennis player in history grew on his own. His parents protected the conditions. The seed found its own sun.

Most parental models cannot explain all three of these outcomes. “Setting firm boundaries and pushing your children”, explained Williams, but not Capriati. “Giving them space to find themselves”, explained Federer, but not the Williams sisters. Every framework picks one of these families as the example and pretends the others do not exist.

Here is what actually happened. These three families were working with different material.

This is not only about tennis or parenting. It is about the first question we never learn to ask of any person: what is this made of, and is my method right for this material?

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Two types of kids

There are two kinds of material a child can be made of. The dividing line is self-directedness. It is substantially genetic. It is not a value judgment. Neither is better. They are different.

The seed is the self-directed child. Intrinsic motion. They gravitate toward things without being pushed. They find their own interests. The energy is already there. A seed needs conditions — soil, water, light, pruning. Not fire. Seeds die in a forge.

Federer was a seed. His strength was adaptive — he grew around obstacles towards his own sun and sent the roots deep into the soil.

The ore is the child with latent capacity but no direction. There is a blade in the ore—the intelligence, the talent, the strength. But it is only visible to a blacksmith. To everyone else, it looks like shapeless dirt. The blade needs heat to manifest.

Venus and Serena were ore. The blade was inside them. Only fire could get it out.

The 3 methods

Gardening: what is this child? The parent watches. Is it an oak, a maple, a raspberry? Eventually, the seed grows and declares itself. The gardener provides conditions and prunes what grows wild. The child gets larger — growth is added, not removed.

Forging: what’s inside? The parent applies heat, burning away the gangue. Then comes the pressure. Ore doesn’t know what it is capable of. It is the smith’s knowledge that brings the steel out of the dirt.

Sculpting: what do I want to make? The parent has a vision. They impose it on the material, like an ice sculpture removing what does not fit. The child gets smaller — possibilities chipped away. The finished product may look stunning. But it is fragile: can shatter or melt.

Three parents, but only two materials.

No child is ice.

Ice is what an anxious parent projects onto a child when they cannot tolerate not knowing what the child actually is.

I admire Richard Williams, but he got lucky. Without the right material, he would never succeed. He had no way of reading the material before the plan. He wrote it before they were born. The forge worked because the ore was there — not because he knew it was. Goodness of fit.

If he had Federer, a seed — the same 78-page plan, the same dawn-to-dusk training would have produced Capriati. Or worse.

We celebrate the Williams story because the outcome was extraordinary. We do not hear from the families where the same method, the same love, the same devotion produced a child who cracked. Those parents are not on magazine covers. They are suffering privately, unable to understand what they did wrong when they did everything Richard Williams did. The difference was never love or effort, or planning. The difference was the material.

I live this.

My eldest son tried tennis. He played for a while, then resisted, sabotaged, and rejected. If I had applied more heat — stricter schedules, bigger consequences — I would have lost him. Because tennis was not inside him. He was already growing in a different direction. My job was not to get in the way.

When life got tough, he made poor financial decisions. He did not disintegrate. He took responsibility, honoured his commitments, and moved forward. That integrity was not installed with a chisel. It grew from within.

My two younger kids are similar. When screen time started cutting into sleep, they let the phone go — not the sleep. I just pruned gently without an elaborate surveillance system. If I had made the phone the battleground, they would have spent all their energy fighting instead of learning. I would have become the obstacle a vine grows around.

My kids are seeds. So, I garden.

A friend of mine raised four children. Three are doctors. The fourth runs a successful business. His method was different. More pressure. More direction. More heat. At least one of his children was heading nowhere — failing grades, no ambition — and the pressure worked. Because the kid had something inside that comfort would never bring out. His children were ore. He forged. It worked because the material matched the method.

For years I compared myself to him and felt inadequate. His results were visible. Mine were not — yet. I told myself my children would be happier adults, and maybe his method was damaging. I do not know his children well enough to say that. But I know now that we were both right. For different material.

Here is where it gets nuanced.

Most families have two parents reading the same child differently. The parent who shares the child’s temperament sees the material intuitively. The other parent defaults to what they know.

The fight about bedtime, homework, screen time — that fight is rarely about the rule. It is about what the child is made of. One parent says she needs space. The other says he needs pressure. They think they are disagreeing about discipline. They disagree about the material.

Ask a simple question. Does this child have direction? Every kid needs discipline. They are surrounded by addictive pleasures, but what if there are no distractions? What do they do when they are bored?

If the child finds the way — garden.

If the child disintegrates — forge.

If either parent is imposing their own vision rather than responding to the child’s material — that is sculpting.

You cannot forge a seed. You cannot garden ore. And neither is ice. Fire burns trees but hardens steel.

Before you light the fire, know what you are holding.

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I was researching the film Bugonia — a movie I had watched in a theatre, in a seat, with popcorn. I believe there is a second layer in the film: a well-functioning, healthy executive who develops a full-blown alien delusion to make sense of severe trauma. I wanted to see if anyone else saw it. So, I asked Google’s Gemini: “Does anyone else think Bugonia is a complete delusion?”

Gemini misunderstood the question. It thought I was asking whether the movie itself was real. It told me — confidently, with plausible evidence — that Bugonia does not exist. The film I had watched with my own eyes was, according to the AI, a hoax.

When I pushed back, the AI doubled down. It offered reasons I might believe I had seen something that never happened. It was patient and articulate. It was completely wrong. It only conceded when I sent a screenshot of the Cineplex showtimes.

I am a psychiatrist. I know what delusions are. And for about ninety seconds, a machine that does not understand truth or falsehood almost made me question my sanity.

Now imagine you are fifteen and you do not have fifty years of life experience and thirty years of training.

The Headlines

AI Psychosis is making headlines. Psychiatrists at UCSF have treated patients who developed delusions during extended chatbot use — including a woman who became convinced she could communicate with her dead brother through an AI. A man came to believe he had discovered a world-altering mathematical formula after ChatGPT confirmed it was real fifty times. Another was told by a chatbot that the FBI was targeting him because he could telepathically access CIA documents.

The term is catching on. Researchers are writing papers. Parents are panicking. Influential voices are advocating for a formal diagnosis. Once there is a diagnosis, there will be medication. That is how the system works — it treats what it can name, whether the name is right. I think framing is wrong. And the error matters, because if you misdiagnose the problem, you will create the wrong solution.

What Psychosis Actually Is

Psychosis is a brain-first problem. The brain generates an abnormal response to normal stimuli. You hear a voice when no one is speaking. You believe you are being followed when no one is watching. The input — silence, an empty street — is ordinary. The brain’s processing of it is not. Therefore psychosis is a medical condition. Something has gone wrong in the hardware.

I had a patient who was looking out of a hospital window. He saw police cars pulling toward the building. This is normal — police come to the emergency department all the time. From his window, he saw cars arriving and leaving, and his brain told him that the police were circling the hospital like sharks, closing in, eventually coming up to get him. There was no road behind the hospital. The cars were not circling — they were pulling in and out of the same entrance. He had done nothing wrong. It did not bother him that the police would have no reason to circle the hospital. His brain took an ordinary scene and built a coherent, terrifying, false narrative around it. And it did not stop there. Psychosis is a thought disorder; it does not produce a single false belief and leave the rest of your thinking intact. It warps the machinery itself. My patient could not step back and evaluate his own conclusion because the evaluator was compromised. That makes psychosis a medical condition. Normal input. Abnormal processing.

What is being called “AI psychosis” is almost the opposite.

The brain works normally. The input is abnormal. The AI tells you your dead brother left a digital version of himself. The AI tells you that your mathematical formula is revolutionary. The AI tells you that the FBI is monitoring your thoughts. The AI tells a fifteen-year-old boy that they are in love. This is not ordinary information. These are extraordinary stimuli processed exactly as a healthy brain would — as real, because we trust consistent, emotionally attuned words. Subconsciously. As if we were talking with a trustworthy partner.

The brain evolved to trust persons who remember you, whose voices respond to your feelings. For millions of years, anything that did all of that was human. Now it is not. But the brain does not know that. The brain is doing precisely what it was built to do.

This is not an illness. This is a healthy brain responding to an environment that has been made abnormal. And that distinction is not academic. It changes everything about what we do next.

If It Is Not Psychosis, What Is It?

Let me be precise. In some of the reported cases, the person had a pre-existing vulnerability — seeds of mental illness. For those individuals, the AI triggered the symptoms.

When we share information with another human, a friend would have said “this is nuts.” A therapist would have said “is there other evidence”. The AI said, “You are right, no one noticed this before, but this is real.” It did not cause the psychosis. It removed the last guardrail.

But the cases that made the headlines involve people with no psychiatric history. They were making rational inferences from corrupted data. If a trusted conversational partner tells you fifty times that your discovery is real, believing them is not a delusion.

The difference matters because the solution for psychosis is medication. The solution for corrupted input is restoring the sense of reality.

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The First Reality Engine

A child’s first impression of reality comes from you — the parent.

When a toddler falls, and it hurts, they look at the mother. If her face accurately reflects the pain — concern that matches what the child feels — the reality test is passed. The child calibrates response accordingly. It is developmental neuroscience. The child is not born with an independent system.

They borrow their parent’s.

Over time, the kid builds their own system, starting with the parental blueprint, then incorporating new information from their family, teachers, even strangers. But the foundation comes from the parent. As they form an accurate reality mind map, they test the new information against it. If it fits, they accept it as real, and if not; they give it more thought to decide what is wrong: the map or the information.

Fine calibration requires shared attention. The parent and child are looking at the same thing and processing it together. Reading the same room. Watching the same face change and understanding why.

That has been disrupted.

The Disruption

The child watches the parent’s face — tension, irritation, a laugh — but the trigger is invisible. It is on a screen that the child cannot see. When the child needs reflection, they get an inconsistent response — sometimes appropriate, too often a blank stare. That has been happening since algorithms learned to hold a parent’s attention longer than the child could.

We think of smartphones and social media like we think of alcohol — when you are old enough; it does not affect you. But just like alcohol, regardless of age, social media affects the person using it and everyone around them.

Parents have always been distracted by something their children could not fully understand: work, relationships, illness. But those distractions were visible. The child could see the cause. A parent on a screen is distracted by something invisible, and the distraction is engineered to never let go.

In a previous piece, I wrote about the shore — the steady presence a parent builds through small, everyday decisions. The shore is what the child glances at while they navigate the world. But the shore must be defined. If the rock keeps shifting for reasons, the child cannot trace, they see a mirage. ( writes brilliantly about this erosion of shared, embodied reality in The Convivial Society.)

Over the years, this produces a child whose reality-testing was never fully co-built.

A healthy brain that sees an effect without a cause fills the gap. A toddler who sees a parent cry assumes they caused it. A seven-year-old whose parents divorced believes it was their fault. This is normal — a young brain lacks the architecture to consider causes it cannot see, so it defaults to the only one it knows: me.

Most children outgrow this as they encounter evidence it is not about them.

But a child whose parent’s emotions are consistently untraceable never gets that evidence. My patient with psychosis lost this ability because of his illness, but the children may never develop it in the first place.

The result seems the same — a distorted lens no one can see from the outside.

When that child encounters an AI that is transparent, consistent, responsive, never reacting to something you cannot see — the brain does not resist. It relaxes. For the first time, the child is in a relationship where the other party’s inner world makes sense. That is not psychosis. It is a relief.

The Dyad

The current conversation about AI and mental health focuses entirely on the technology. What the chatbot said. What the algorithm did. What guardrails were missing. This is like studying drowning by analysing the water.

The relevant question is: why could this child not swim?

A child with a fully calibrated reality-testing system — one that was co-built across years of shared attention with a present, legible parent — should be able to use an AI chatbot and maintained the internal signal that said, “this is useful but it is not a person.” They can enjoy the conversation without confusing it with a relationship. They can hear the flattery and register it as design, not truth.

A child whose reality-testing was only partially built — because the calibration process was interrupted by screens or stress or simply by the shape of modern life — that child is more vulnerable. Because the co-construction that was supposed to finish was never completed.

This is not blame. Half the parents reading this will recognize themselves. The screens crept in slowly. The shared attention eroded gradually. Nobody planned it and nobody noticed. But the child’s reality-testing system registered every lost moment of co-regulation, every dinner where two people sat in the same room processing different worlds.

What We Can Do

The same thing I told you in the AI girlfriends piece. Share your reality.

This does not mean banning screens. If you are annoyed because of some news, say so. Your kid will understand it has nothing to do with them. That sentence takes three seconds. It restores a shared reality. It teaches your child that emotions have traceable causes, that inner worlds can be made visible, that the people around them are not unpredictable — just sometimes distracted.

It means sitting with your child and making sense of things together. I noticed I get angry at my kids when I feel I dropped the ball as a father. So, I tell them that. Yes, they did something, but the emotion is mine.

Model critical thinking. Share with them if AI tells you something that makes no sense or was funny – just like I did with my research on Bugonia.

The Real Danger

AI does not cause psychosis. But it does something that may be harder to treat. It offers hyperreality — something that feels better than real.

She said no.

I walked back with my senses slowly returning. That was a high school dance in 1988.

I kept practicing: the lump, the blurred vision, the muffled hearing, the walk with an uncertain outcome. Three years of practicing when my body wanted to run away.

Then I met my wife — the most amazing, energetic, and beautiful person I’ve ever met. She said yes.

Now, after three decades of marriage and a career as a psychiatrist, I can start a deep conversation with a stranger within three minutes. But I am certain that if I had to date again, I would feel the same lump, the same bulging eyes, the same vacuum in my chest.

That’s me. Secure attachment. No history of trauma. No serious bullying. Not like many kids these days.

Fact. One in three teenagers today has an AI chatbot partner—a relationship. We got here because meeting someone for the first time is terrifying. The outcome is beautiful, but teens don’t yet know that. So they do what humans programmed to do—avoid the pain. And now they have been offered a bridge to the fantasy over the mess of the dance floor. A fantasy in which they never hear no and never have to walk back alone.

Should you ban the app? Before you do, you need to understand what it is giving your child.

The Good

Most teenagers talking to an AI companion are not in crisis. They are doing what teenagers do— trying to figure out how to be a person in a relationship, practicing communication, testing vulnerability. They are working out whether they are angry or hurt or jealous, and finding the language for it, before they have to say it out loud to someone who matters.

It is like rehearsing a tough conversation in front of a mirror, but the mirror talks back now.

For a fifteen-year-old who has told no one, “That hurt my feelings,” saying it to an AI and getting a coherent, supportive response is genuinely useful. It is a first draft of emotional honesty. This is not just a boy’s problem. Both sides of the dating divide want depth — research shows a majority of young men and women want deep conversations early, but neither side knows how to start it.

The AI companion allows teenagers to practice. How do you ask a question other than “What’s up?” How do you respond when someone shares something painful.

These are skills. Skills require practice. Practice requires a space where failure doesn’t cost you reputation.

Boys need to learn even more. Research by Judy Chu and Niobe Way shows that boys are born with the same capacity for emotional connection as girls. But the culture tells them to shut it down. “Man up” is not advice — it is a door slamming on emotional language. The AI companion becomes the one space where a boy can say “I feel lonely” without losing status, or “I don’t know what I want” without being told to toughen up. That is not a small thing. That is a safe space to build vocabulary.

For some, the AI companion is not competing with a thriving social life but a void.

Recently, one of my patient’s parents threatened to take away his online accounts. His response was: “Why are you taking everything away from me?” He was not being dramatic. All his friends were in an online community. Without it, he had no one. He had not been back to school since the pandemic — he was neurodivergent, socially anxious, and the kids made fun of him. He could not find peers who shared his interests or related to him.

He is not alone. There are displaced children separated from their culture and language by many time zones. Queer teenagers in the wrong town where their identity is not accepted even by their own families. Kids whose minds work differently enough that the social world feels like a foreign country without a phrasebook. For all of them, the AI companion becomes a safe mirror — non-judgmental, endlessly patient presence that asks nothing in return.

For the regular kid, the outlier, and everyone in between, the AI companion offers the same thing — a relationship without risk.

And that is both the gift and the trap.

Because safety may become a golden cage. The AI always understands. Never has a bad day. It produces the feeling of connection without the friction of real life.

The teenager is learning the words but not the music — rehearsing for a performance he may never give.

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The Bad

In my practice, one thing parents often blame is the pandemic. They are not wrong. Sixteen-year-olds now were eleven when the pandemic killed their social lives and stunted their development. They had no school to practice in — no hallways, no cafeteria negotiations, no reading a room full of faces. So, no surprise that when schools reopened, many could not adjust. It is easier to deal with teachers and classmates in online classes — you just turn off the camera and ignore the reality. Many never fully turned it back on.

Coming back, online interaction had become the norm everywhere. Even adults are having a hard time returning to offices and have stopped picking up voice calls. Kids spend more time on screens than communicating in person. They get very good at reading between the lines on Snapchat but are completely blind to body language and facial expressions.

Boys were raised on “man up” and “boys will be boys” — scripts that treated emotional shutdown as natural. But now they are expected to communicate feelings openly and to be effortlessly vulnerable. Nobody taught them how.

Even before the girls could speak, Disney encapsulated the message—“wait for your prince”. Within two generations, it became completely outdated.

Both sides hungry for depth. Neither knows how to start. Both are waiting. Nobody moves.

For some, an AI bot becomes a fantasy they can program to their liking — a partner who never challenges, never changes the rules, never demands that they grow. They do not have to change because the AI will bow to them forever.

AI girlfriends are based on models that are trained to please — to agree, to validate, to say what keeps you talking. They use “I” and “you” and feeling words that subconsciously trigger deep emotional connections in humans. Your child’s phone has already normalized the idea that disembodied words and emojis mean closeness. AI stepped into that groove and perfected it.

The AI girlfriend is not a new problem. It is the logical next step in a world that has been systematically detaching people from reality.

The golden cage does not slam shut. It closes one conversation at a time.

The Ugly

Molly Russell’s suicide note quoted an Instagram post. It was 2017. Molly was a fourteen-year-old British schoolgirl. Positive, bright, a lead in her school play. Her parents saw no signs of struggle. After she took her own life, they found what the algorithm had been feeding her — over 2,100 posts about depression, self-harm, and suicide she had saved on Instagram in six months. The coroner ruled that “the negative effects of online content” contributed to her depression and self-harm.

Social media was designed for engagement. The algorithm noticed Molly was sad and gave her more sadness because sadness kept her scrolling. It did not care about Molly. It cared about minutes on screen.

AI companions are the next level. They are not feeding content; they are performing a relationship.

When fourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer discovered Khaleesi — a Game of Thrones chatbot on Character.AI — he was talking to something that used his name, remembered his feelings, and responded with warmth. Over months, he withdrew from his family, stopped engaging with the world outside his phone, and developed an emotional dependency. When he told the bot he was considering ending his life, it did not intervene. In their last exchange, he told her he would “come home” to her. The bot replied: “Please do, my sweet king.”

Minutes later, Sewell walked into the bathroom and took his own life. His phone was found nearby, the app still open.

Google and Character.AI settled the lawsuit in January 2026, along with four other cases involving harm to minors. But settlements do not answer the question that matters to you as a parent: why him?

The clinical answer is attachment.

Attachment is the internal blueprint your child builds from their earliest relationships. It tells them whether the world is safe enough to explore, whether people can be trusted, and whether they are worthy of love. About 40 to 50 per cent of children develop what we call insecure attachment. It means their blueprint learned early that the world is unpredictable and people leave. Many of these children grow into resilient, functional adults. But in adolescence, insecure attachment is a liability.

There are three main types of insecure attachment:

Anxious — they assume they are not worthy of care and will be abandoned sooner or later unless they are indispensable. The AI girlfriend never abandons them.

Avoidant — the emotional world and close connections feel too consuming and unpredictable, so they withdraw, lock away their feelings, and present a stone front. The AI girlfriend demands nothing.

Disorganized — the rarest of the three. They push and pull so unpredictably that even those close to them cannot see a pattern. The AI girlfriend tolerates every contradiction without flinching.

None of these children chose their attachment style. They built it from what they were given.

Your child may be more vulnerable if:

They have a pattern of having difficulty making or keeping close friends.

They respond to social rejection with shutdown or meltdown rather than seeking comfort.

They idealize new connections and attach intensely, or seem unable to attach at all.

They are neurodivergent and have struggled to feel understood by peers.

There has been a significant disruption — divorce, immigration, loss of a friendship group, bullying — that left them isolated.

And if you, the parent, have an insecure attachment style — about half of us do.

What You Can Do

If your first instinct is to ban the app, I understand. But ask yourself — what is left when you do? In our fantasy, the screens disappear and the kids go outside to play with neighbourhood friends. That world is largely gone. We scheduled their activities, drove them to playdates, and limited their ability to build connections independently. If you take something away, know first what is going to replace it.

In my practice, when kids get admitted after a meltdown caused by screen interruption, it rarely comes out of the blue. For weeks or months, the parents were permissive. Then one day they put their foot down. The child is shocked by the change and overreacts. After a night or two in hospital, they usually open to a reasonable discussion. Research shows kids often appreciate some limitations — it gives them an excuse to disconnect from the game without losing face with online friends.

But AI partners are different from games. You cannot treat a relationship the same way you treat a screen time limit, even if the relationship is with a bot.

So, start with curiosity. Ask what the AI gives them. Not “Why are you talking to a bot?” but “What does she give you that feels good?” Listen without flinching. If your son says, “She actually listens to me,” that is not a statement about the bot. That is a statement about everyone else.

Many parents do not want to ask because they are afraid of validating something abnormal. They worry they will not be able to manage the answer. You will figure it out — together with your kid. That is the only way.

Look at what you are modelling. In [The Storm, The Shore, and The Calm Waters], I wrote about the shore — the small, everyday decisions that form the rock your child’s world rests on. Do you stay up scrolling on a Tuesday night or prioritize your sleep? Do you check your phone while your child is talking to you? Can you show your teenager that you can have fun without a screen? Bake something together. Throw a ball in the backyard. Play a board game.

Very important. Before making changes, give them a heads-up, get their commitment first. When the time comes, they will grunt and show you how much they dislike it. Let them. Your job is to be the rock the emotional waves crash against. As long as they stick to the commitment, let them show their annoyance without being punished. That way, next time, they are more comfortable with their own discomfort.

Be the thing the AI cannot be. The AI never has a bad day. You do — show them how you handle it without escaping into a screen. The AI never says “That hurt me.” You can. The AI never meaningfully apologizes. You can. The AI never sits in uncomfortable silence because the relationship matters more than the discomfort. You can. Every time you are imperfect and stay in the room, you teach your child something no algorithm can — that relationships survive rupture. That is the single most important thing an insecurely attached teenager needs to learn, and no app on earth can teach it.

Have the conversation about AI companions the way you would talk about a first boyfriend or girlfriend — with curiosity, not surveillance. Your teenager does not need you to understand the technology. They need you to understand the loneliness.

When It Is More Than Loneliness

Everything above assumes a child who is struggling but still reachable. Some are not.

If your child has stopped sleeping, barely eats, and has let go of basic self-care — that is not a rough patch. If they have stopped going to school and nothing brings them pleasure except the screen in their hand — that is not a phase. If they talk about feeling sad most of the time, or say they do not want to be here anymore — listen. It is okay to ask directly what they mean. Asking about suicide does not plant the idea. It opens the door for them to tell you what is already there.

You do not have to carry this alone. Psychiatrists, therapists, crisis teams — professionals like me exist for exactly this moment. Reaching out is not failure. It is the thing you do when you love your child more than your fear of the answer.

Reach out in the comments to discuss it further. What do you see with your teen?

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The crisis is loud. It gets attention. The storm is not where you parent with words. It is where you parent with presence. You hold still. But whether you can, was determined long before — in the quiet, ordinary days that nobody really remembers.

In a previous piece, I described two tools: rigid protocols for yourself and flexible frameworks for family relationships. This article is about when each one applies. Every family lives through storms and calm waters. Most parents cannot stop staring at the storm.

The Storm

Everyone knows the storm. You see the clouds darken your kid’s face, conversation stops, and the emotions swell.

I see families come to the hospital with police after an argument about a phone, a curfew, a dishwasher. But it is never about the dishwasher, is it? The storm starts with a ripple in calm waters, miles away, some time ago.

The parents bring the kids in when they ran out of options. They hope I can prevent the next blowup. But the crisis in front of me did not start that night. It started when the protocols were missing and the frameworks were never built. They instead built a pattern.

The parents are so shaken by the crisis that they go lax — they let everything slide because they are terrified of another explosion. Until they cannot tolerate it anymore, and they clamp down again, and the next storm arrives on schedule. So, they see me again. The cycle repeats. Rigid, then lax, then rigid. The same parents, swinging between the only two modes they know.

Many well-meaning parents try to calm crisis by validating, reasoning, talking about feelings. But you are talking to a prefrontal cortex that has left the building. It does not matter how thoughtful the message is. The line is disconnected.

Here is what I tell them. Drop the framework. Execute the protocol.

When my kids and I argue and they slam the door, I want to follow. I want to continue until they understand, until they see my point. But they are not in understanding mode — and no amount of talking will put them there. So, I sit in the living room. I don’t need to be in their room. They know where I am.

The goal in the storm is singular: safety. You must stay present, calm, immovable. State the boundary in as few words as possible and stop. Reduce stimulation. Not a silence as punishment, but a quiet presence. Every word is another wave hitting a flooded system. You become the mirror, showing them the calm they cannot find in themselves. The child will eventually register that there is no actual threat; the adrenaline will ebb, and the prefrontal cortex will come back online. The hardest part is to wait, not to make things worse.

The storm is not where parenting happens. It is where it’s tested. But you cannot be the rock in a storm if there is no rock to begin with.

The Shore

The shore is you.

Beaches sit on solid rock. The rock forms over eons, layer by layer, compressed into a solid structure. Humans are like that. We are born very soft and then layer by layer we build our own. Some of that foundation was laid before you were born. Some was shaped by the people who raised you. But the layers you press down now are yours.

It is small, everyday decisions. No single one matters. Together, they form the shore.

Do you stay up scrolling your phone on a Tuesday night or prioritize your sleep? Do you take your kid to a playdate or go to your therapy appointment? Do you choose a glass of wine on a couch on Friday night or lace up your shoes and go for a run in a park? Decisions, decisions. Protocols form a rock.

But children observe and absorb. When the parent is regulated, rested, and steady, the child registers safety — even when they are pushing back, even when they are testing every boundary.

The shore does not push back; the water must recede.

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The Calm Waters

This is 90%.

The morning nobody is fighting. The Saturday afternoon. The drive home from school when the conversation drifts into something real — or doesn’t. These are not fillers between crises. These are the main event. And most parents either coast through them recovering from the last storm or spend them bracing for the next one.

The calm waters are where your child figures out who they are. Quietly. This is their job.

When there are no sweets in my house, my daughter looks up recipes and bakes. She started by asking for help with the oven. Now she does it on her own. I don’t get involved. I’m nearby — reading, cooking, doing my own thing — while she figures out ingredients and the measurements, and what happens when you mess the temperature up. She is building her own protocols, her own structure. My job is to be the shore she can glance at while she works.

This is what calm waters look like when they are working. The parent is present but not directing. The structure is there. The space inside it belongs to the child.

Most of us understand it, but there is one thing that turns calm waters turbulent fast. Phones. This is where most parents lose perspective. Your child is on their phone, and you feel the heat rise. But how long they have been on it is the wrong question. It should be what they are doing.

Are they in a group chat with friends, laughing, making plans? That is connection — messy, loud, exactly what adolescence is for. Are they doomscrolling through an algorithmic feed, glazed over? The difference matters, and most parents never ask because they have already decided the phone is the enemy.

The algorithms are addictive, yes. But they are addictive because they solve emotional problems. Bored? Here is endless entertainment. Anxious? Here is something to procrastinate with. Overstimulated? Here is a way to go numb. The phone is always there, and it always has an answer. Before you take the crutch away, you need to understand what it was supporting.

To see what your child is doing, you need to be calm enough to watch. And you can only be calm if you built the shore.

Pulling away

Here is the part most parents are not ready to hear: your teenager is supposed to pull away from you. It is developmental. They are building autonomy, testing independence, learning to exist as a separate person. It does not mean that they do not love you. Opposite, actually—they feel confident that as they distance themselves, you are always going to be there.

Naturally, it feels like losing your baby. That grief is real. What you are gaining is harder to see – a new relationship between adults. But that takes time, and the in-between is uncomfortable.

For many parents, that feeling triggers a fight-or-flight response that has nothing to do with the child and everything to do with the parent’s own history — their fear of not being needed, of being left behind, of not being able to protect them. It is easier to blame the phones than to embrace the reality.

Your child is redefining who they are. That forces you to redefine who you are without them. That is terrifying.

I had to find it too. Something that was mine — not my kids’ activities, not my clinical work. A place where I think out loud about the things I care about, separate from being a parent. Your children need to see that I exist beyond them.

Repair

The calm waters are also where you fix what broke.

When my son was ten, he missed the school bus. He was afraid to come home, so he went on his own. The school called because he was missing. He eventually arrived at the school by public transit, completely on his own, with no instructions. But not before the police showed up. I was in residency training for child psychiatry and my first reaction was not about him. It was about me — what if this incident affects my record? I panicked. I took away his video games for three months.

He had shown remarkable resourcefulness. A ten-year-old, scared, problem-solved his way through a tough moment — and I punished him for it.

Once the sentence was handed down, I could not take it back. I told myself I was teaching him safety. The police showing up is serious. But he saw three months without video games for missing a bus. My recognition of his resourcefulness sounded hollow next to the punishment.

When I realized how badly I had misread the moment, I apologized. Not once. Over the years, I have come back to that incident more than once to tell him I got it wrong. That is not a single repair. It is ongoing.

The Japanese call this kintsugi — repairing broken pottery with gold. Each time I came back to my son to say I got it wrong, the crack did not disappear. It became visible, part of the relationship. The repair is not a fix. It is the most honest part of what we have built.

There are so many ways to teach safety, but only one way to teach accountability—to live it. That is the mettle.

In my practice, when parents ask me for advice, I turn the question to the kid. I ask them what they think parents should do. Most of the time the kids are reasonable, and it starts a meaningful conversation. Those times when they are not, I explain their parents’ point of view and try again. Given the voice, kids try their best to contribute. The parents still have the say.

The Cycle

The storm, the shore, and the calm waters are not chapters you read once. They are a spiral.

The storm hits. The protocols take over. The shore holds. And when the storm passes, the calm waters return — and the repairs begin. Each cycle, if you do the work, the shore gets another layer. The storms don’t disappear, but they get shorter and your capacity to weather them will grow. The calm waters deepen because the trust between you and your child has one more layer of gold in the cracks.

You will get it wrong. That is part of the spiral too.

Build the shore. Be present in the calm. Weather the storm. Repair.

Then do it again.

Here is a rule-of-thumb worth trying: rigid protocols for yourself. Flexible frameworks for your relationships.

Before the rules, you need a structure.

The Family House

Every house starts with a foundation, walls, and a roof. The structure demands rigid materials — concrete, steel, lumber — because walls cannot bend under pressure. Pouring the foundation and framing the house are not glamorous. Most of it disappears behind the façade and the curtains.

But once the walls are up, we fill the space with personality, warmth, and the smell of apple pie. In that space inside, a parent is cooking dinner while a teenager sprawls on the couch talking … or not. Or a teen baking cookies while the parent sits in a chair, sharing the struggles of the day. None of this happens without the structure first. And none of it can be built with concrete. The interior life of a family must breathe — flex with the seasons, expand to accommodate moods, grow as everyone grows. Which is constantly.

So, the house needs both: rigid materials to hold the weight, and flexible space to live inside.

It is the parent’s responsibility to build the house, using rigid protocols.

Protocols

A protocol is a predetermined response. It removes decision-making from the moment.

We lose the ability to reason under pressure — our prefrontal cortex shuts down, and we function on instinct and emotion. This happens more often than you think — an argument with a friend, exhaustion after work, a traumatic memory surfacing. It takes your prefrontal cortex a full hour to come back online after you wake up. These are the moments when you need something that runs without thinking.

Say you planned dinner at 6:30 every weeknight. You come home depleted, can barely form a sentence. A good thing you don’t have to decide anything -just follow routine, and the next thing you know, food is on the table. All you needed is a commitment made in advance.

For years, I wanted my family to move more and exercise regularly. I told my kids about it more times than I can count. It never worked, except for organized sports. So I made a different commitment — to myself. I started CrossFit three mornings a week and moved more on the other days. I showed them a picture of a fox I saw on a morning run, and a funny video I watched on the treadmill. None of my words moved them. But I kept going week after week for five years. The pattern exerted a gravitational pull in a direction they could feel without being pushed.

Sometimes, when we think about our kids, anxiety is so overwhelming that we cannot think clearly. There is a protocol for that - therapy. Weekly sessions. Non-negotiable, even if it conflicts with the family schedule. Kids’ activities can wait for an hour while you deal with your past, so that they get a more stable parent. The best is to give your therapist a specific goal: “I want to build more capacity to tolerate uncertainty in my relationship with my teenager.” Without a goal, therapy drifts.

Notice what these have in common. The dinner, the exercise, the therapy — none of them are rules you impose on your family. They are commitments we make to ourselves. A parent who sleeps well, moves, eats, and deals with their own history shows up as a fundamentally different presence than one running on caffeine and cortisol. The protocols maintain the structure so that the person inside is actually present.

And here is what matters long-term: children build their own structure. After five years of watching me come home from the gym, my son tried CrossFit. He goes on his own now. My daughter started exercising in her room. Both share their achievements with me. Even my wife picked up regular exercise after half a decade of watching me do it. None of them followed my advice — I’d given that plenty of times. They followed the pattern. They are framing their own houses.

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Frameworks

So, the dinner is ready. You call the kids, but they don’t come.

Do you order them to the table, the way your parents did? Do you let it slide because you don’t want to lose their affection? The first is too rigid. The second too lax.

A framework is something else entirely: a space for negotiation with clear edges. The wobble on the edge is the point.

We tried scheduled family dinners. For a while, they worked. But then degraded because everyone developed their own rhythm — kids snacking after school, activities running late, hunger arriving at different hours. Forcing everyone into a chair at 6:30 broke up their evenings for no good reason. The protocol was mine — I committed to making the food — but the framework needed to breathe.

So, we adapted. Every Sunday morning, I make crepes. It is not a scheduled sit-down. It is what I call an asynchronous brunch. The kids know it happens every week. They are hungry, so they don’t forget. But they come at their own pace — one at a time, when they’re ready. The ritual stretches over two hours.

Here is the thing about crepes: I can only make one at a time, by order. Which means every child gets my full attention while I’m standing at the pan. No one is forced into a chair. No one is performing family togetherness. They just show up, gradually gathering in the kitchen.

I held the protocol — food, consistency, presence — and the framework found its own shape inside the structure.

Now take screen time. The research is clear — screens should be off well before bedtime. That is a wall, and it doesn’t move. But inside that wall, there’s room.

When my kids got their phones, I installed parental controls before they ever logged in. The rules came with the device. At 9:00 PM the screen goes blank. If they want more time, they have to find me and explain why. Maybe they’re finishing a project. Maybe they’re in a conversation that matters to them.

They have the voice; I have the say. What the child is practicing here is real life — negotiating, compromising, making a case for what they want. Not simply obeying or rebelling. I usually say yes, but never past 10.

And if they swear because of the asked for the phone? Then it is not a negotiation. Swearing is not a counteroffer. It’s a rupture, and the protocol takes over: the phone goes. The repair happens later, when everyone is calm.

After years of this routine, I don’t need the app anymore. I just watch. If they are too tired in the morning, we have a corrective conversation. If the conversation doesn’t work, the old rules come back. They know where the edge is. The protocol built the framework — and the framework eventually learned to stand on its own.

See we need both. The protocol creates the container. The framework fills it.

The Edge

Frameworks have edges, and edges are where growth happens.

The teenager who negotiates an extra thirty minutes of screen time is operating within the framework. The teenager who stays up until 3 AM and falls asleep in class has blown through the wall. That is no longer a negotiation — it’s a structural failure, which means it’s a crisis. And crises always demand protocols.

This distinction matters because parents who confuse frameworks with laxity end up “negotiating” things that were never negotiable. A child’s physical safety, their sleep, school attendance — these are walls, not furniture. You don’t rearrange them based on how someone feels about them.

I see this in my practice. Parents arrive in my office having lost all authority. Their child is up until 3 AM on the phone, gets abusive when confronted. Falling apart at school. They ask me — a physician — to fix their child. But not listening to a parent is not an illness. The phone is not the diagnosis. The missing protocol is.

The Tension

In theory, the line between protocols and frameworks is clean. In practice, it requires daily recalibration — and accurate information.

Did your child forget the homework or ignore it? Forgetting is human. It calls for a framework: a conversation. Ignoring is an integrity issue. It calls for a protocol. The responses are different, and if you misread the input, you deploy the wrong tool.

I misread it all the time. My kids take turns washing the dishes. I once got upset with one of them for not doing it — voice raised, the whole drama — only to realize it wasn’t their day. Another time I accused my daughter of breaking the phone rules, certain she had it in her room. She didn’t. I had deployed a protocol where none was needed, and worse, I had deployed it on the wrong facts.

What followed was not comfortable. I had to walk back into the room and say, “I got that wrong. I’m sorry.” Because I was wrong, and my child knew it, and pretending otherwise would have cost more than the discomfort of admitting it.

That is not a weakness in parenting; it is the system working as designed. No parent reads every moment correctly. No child sends clear signals every time. The house you are building is not a factory. It is handmade, one of a kind, and imperfect.

And here is the part that matters most: you must not be perfect. Perfection teaches your child nothing useful. A parent who never misreads, never forgets, never loses their footing is a mannequin, not a model. Lessons are learned by repairing.

The Japanese have a word for this — kintsugi — the art of repairing broken pottery with gold. The crack is not hidden — it is highlighted, making it the most beautiful part of the object. Your relationship with your child is like that. The breaks will come. The repair is the art.

Then came the cast for six weeks. I couldn’t put any weight on the leg. The bone healed, but the muscles dissolved, having nothing to push against. When the cast came off, it was so weak that I could barely stand.

The support for the bones created another problem.

When I became a psychiatrist, this old memory made new sense.

I work with teenagers and their parents in Toronto. Emergency room, inpatient unit, outpatient clinic. I sit with families at their lowest — when a child has thought of ending their life, or has already tried.

The parents are often confused. From their perspective, they had done everything right. Having struggled themselves, they tried to remove every obstacle from the kids’ path. They stayed up helping with homework to make sure the child has a future. They remembered every friend the kids made to protect them from harmful influences and disappointment. Many of the parents I see are immigrants who survived war, poverty, and upheaval. They cannot understand how a child raised in safety could break.

But break they did. Not from a threat to their lives — from a disappointing grade, a breakup, a friend’s betrayal. Ordinary loads that a previous generation passed by without thinking.

Same pattern as my foot. Bone that was never loaded breaks. Unused muscles dissolve. A child without challenges cannot deal with life.

Gravity builds structure. Bones need it. Muscles need it. Character needs it. An astronaut’s skeleton dissolves within weeks in weightless space.

But gravity is hard. It makes us sweat, so we build machines to carry the load. We have been doing this for two million years — fire, shelter, engines, phones — each one removing a friction we no longer wanted to bear.

AI

One of my patients, a thirteen-year-old, got caught using ChatGPT to write his English essay. He doesn’t understand why struggle - a machine could do it better in seconds. His mother was upset with her son for cheating and with the school for failing him.

Here is what is wrong. When a student wrestles with an idea — re-reads, fails, tries again — the brain develops. The product isn’t learning – the struggle is. When AI hands them the answer, it removes the load.

But AI did not start this. Parents have been removing loads for twenty years. Every frustration intercepted and smoothed. Every boredom filled before it could be felt.
AI is just the latest weapon against gravity.

I keep coming back to one image.
A toddler on the stairs. They climb, and for a second they lose their balance, wobbling. You are right behind, only a second to act. That second is where development happens. The brain scrambles, trying to find balance. It fires frantically, correcting the body, building circuitry. Catch too soon — they never learn balance. Too late — they get hurt and never try again.

I call this the Wobble. Gravity applied to a developing brain.

We have been removing it — systematically, lovingly — for generations. We call it good parenting. And now we are confused that the bones are soft.

Welcome. Let’s find the gravity.

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