In my years as a family therapist, 1 approach worked consistently to get angry and defiant little kids to be loving and obedient:
10-minute sessions EVERY DAY with each child where the parent just asked questions, paid attention, and showed them love.
Stopped so many behaviors.
Some played Go-Fish, some colored pictures, just just sat together. No screens. 10, literally timed on a countdown clock they could both see. Questions and questions with no advice or directions or scolding. Just interviewing with interest as if the parent cared about their child
10 minutes a day with each child turned things around even for families with older kids who were starting to use physical violence against adults to express their anger.
Being treated like they were loved changed their entire behavior pattern. Imagine that.
If you want your kids to listen to you, they have to feel loved and they need to know you’re interested in them. That gives them something to lose if they act badly. Kids naturally want to please their parents but many feel like it’s impossible so they go the opposite way.
Give your kids love and be interested in them and suddenly they’ve got something to lose if they act badly. You don’t have to ground them or scream at them or spank them. Defiant kids will use those punishments as fuel.
But your disappointment is way more powerful, if attached.
It all comes back to attachment. If your kids feel unworthy of your love and believe you don’t even like them, they won’t listen. They have a vested interest in forcing you to give them attention instead. And they’ll convince themselves they don’t need your love.
Give your kids clear love and focused attention. Develop their attachment to you. Natural processes will kick in and they will fear losing their connection to you. So they’ll fear displeasing you. That becomes enough.
Then you love them unconditionally, but attention is earned.
Attention becomes their currency. And if they can get that attention for good behavior, they’ll do it.
But you have to make yourself pay attention to good behavior.
You get out of your relationship with your kids what you invest in it. So invest smarter. Pay more attention.
Paying attention to your kids improves their mental health.
If you want to give them a healthy future:
✅Put your phone down
✅Make eye contact
✅Ask questions
✅And listen with interest
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Got a depressing email from a 25yo guy saying he wanted to off himself because he wasn’t 6-feet and couldn’t reach 6 figs in time to get a wife and have kids, so what’s the point in living?
He wouldn’t believe there are scrawny 5’8” dudes making $80k and dating amazing women.
The whole rhetoric around 6–6–6 is really insane. It’s a bunch of highly damaged women laying out arbitrary measurements for hypothetical men they’ve never met, rules which they throw aside for real connection. And a bunch of angry dudes claiming that’s the reason they’re alone.
The truth is that only a tiny sliver of women are going to demand arbitrary measurements like this from a real person. Sure, if you stop a drunk girl on the street and ask what she wants hypothetically, she’ll say this, but most of them are more happy with an emotional connection
Your wife is unhappy. She’s complaining, distant, and uninterested in sex. You’re trying EVERYTHING—helping around the house, giving her space—but nothing is working.
Here’s the hard truth: the problem isn’t effort. It’s connection. Let’s talk about what that means for you. 🧵👇
Most men think if they just do more—more chores, more compliments, more dates—it’ll fix the marriage. But if your wife doesn’t feel emotionally connected to you, none of that will land.
The root issue? You never built SECURE ATTACHMENT. Here’s why that matters. 👇
Marriage is supposed to be a partnership—a place where both of you feel seen, supported, and valued. But without secure attachment, even the best-intentioned efforts can feel hollow.
She doesn’t want things done for her. She wants to feel understood. 🛑
Here’s the truth: it’s not about what you’re doing wrong. It’s about what you never built right (because you didn't know how).
Let’s talk about attachment. 🧵👇
Marriages don’t fail because of arguments or mismatched sex drives. They fail because of unresolved attachment issues.If you and your wife didn’t bond securely at the start, cracks will show under stress—and right now, they’re showing.
Here’s why. 👇
Most men think marriage problems are about surface-level issues: money fights, house chores, or mismatched libidos.
Nope. These are symptoms of a deeper problem: disconnection. Without secure attachment, even small stresses feel like relationship-ending disasters. 🛑
The wife is getting worse. She's been unreasonable for years, but now she's plain mean.
Her husband wants to make things better. But he can't get past her spiky armor. And he gets blamed for everything.
What can he do to turn this around?
Here's what works: 🧵
This awful dynamic is confusing for most men. They just want a loving relationship, and they try every tactic they can think of, but nothing works. She just gets WORSE.
I've seen this problem thousands of times in my 15 years of experience working with couples.
The cause is...
Huge incompatibility that was never detected (but CAN be corrected, sometimes).
When they got together, he was usually insecure. Anxious, nice guy, people pleasing. He wanted to make her happy.
She was anxious but controlling. Not too bad, just a bit.
Why are an estimated 40% of men neurochemically incapable of feeling loved?
Modern life is activating a specific survival adaptation that turns off men's ability to experience the neurochemical markers for feeling loved by others.
Here's what's happening...🧵
Men have the ability to shift their brain chemistry to respond to hard times and bad environments. This shift happens in childhood based on experiences that shape how you perceive the world to function.
Hard and lonely childhood can lead to a different brain.
Here's how...
If no one gave you the bonding hormone OXYTOCIN in childhood, or if your stress and cortisol levels were too high and they BLOCKED the receptor sites for oxytocin, and if others seemed either inconsistent, unreliable, controlling, or negligent, your brain entered a new pathway...
The wife feels lonely and sad, but the husband has no idea why. They love each other but don't like each other anymore.
This is by far the most common married couple who comes to me for help. And there's a specific reason this is happening.
Here's the reason:🧵
There's a hidden relationship dynamic playing out in about 50% of adults:
Growing up in families that didn't teach the vital skills needed to maintain a functioning romance has led to generations of adults who can't maintain a marriage and make it thrive.
Here's why:
You learn skills by seeing someone else using them or by having someone transmit them to you through experience.
In other words, if your parents didn't have a thriving marriage or raise you to form intentional bonds, how will you know what to do?