How to Prepare Children for the Real World

Note: this blog post is adapted from the podcast episode, How to prepare your kids for the real world.

Parents often ask me: “How can I prepare my child for the real world?” This question emerges in three distinct contexts:

• Navigating external influences like junk food and media;
• Dealing with broader social systems that don’t align with our values;
• Concerns about using traditional disciplinary methods, combined with worries that children won’t learn to function in a world where rewards and punishments are part of life.

In this post, I’ll explore practical approaches to addressing these challenges while honoring our children’s authentic selves.

Food Battles and Body Image

Let’s start with a familiar scenario: You’ve prepared a nutritious meal, but your child is munching on bread while ignoring everything else. You remind them about the protein and vegetables. They take a tiny nibble of chicken but refuse to touch the “green stuff.” As frustration builds, you wonder: “How will my child get the nutrients they need if all they eat is carbs?!”

Behind this concern lies a web of social pressures, including:

• Judgment from other parents
• Comments from relatives about your child’s body size
• Medical professionals evaluating growth curves
• A culture that’s unkind to children with diverse body types.

This creates tremendous stress around mealtimes. It goes far beyond your relationship with your child.

In my conversation with Dr. Lindo Bacon, we discussed how Body Mass Index (BMI) was never designed to measure individual health. It was created to assess population trends, not determine if a specific person is healthy. Now it’s used everywhere from schools to doctor’s offices to public health campaigns.

Even more surprising, research shows that the group with the longest lifespan isn’t those in the “normal” weight category – it’s those classified as “overweight.” And most people in the “obese” category live as long as those in the “normal” category.

So why are we so focused on controlling children’s eating habits? It can seem like the least bad option. The food industry has spent billions perfecting irresistible foods. Frito-Lay employs 500 chemists, psychologists, and technicians to find the “bliss point” in snack foods. Scientists engineered Cheetos with what one food scientist called “uncanny ability to melt in the mouth.” This creates “vanishing caloric density” that tricks your brain into thinking “you can just keep eating forever.”

Marketers bombard children with advertisements for these products. At the same time, you face immense pressure to ensure your kids eat “properly.” If your child refuses vegetables, society tells you it’s your fault and your responsibility to fix it.

One approach many parents find helpful is Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility model:

• Parents decide what, when, and where food is offered.
• Kids decide how much they eat—or whether they eat at all.

(In the episode we addressed a lot of the questions parents ask about reading books on DoR as they struggle to apply it in their own lives.)

Making foods forbidden tends to increase our desire for them. Instead, we can include them in our daily consumption, and treat them like any other food.  Serve dessert with dinner, and allow your child to decide which to eat first.  If you’re going to allow them to eat a square of chocolate today, does it matter when they eat it?  If they decide they want to eat it for breakfast, they get to meet their need for autonomy as well as for indulgent food.

We can learn what is a serving size of lots of different foods. When our child has eaten a serving of one food and they ask for another, we can say something like: “You’ve already had a serving of apples today.  Our bodies do best when we eat lots of different kinds of foods.  What else would you like?”

The key is that we treat apples the same as chips apples, so no food is ‘better’ than any other.  (The main exception to this would be with neurodivergent children, where you’ve decided that their emotional regulation is more important right now than what they eat.  A feeding therapist may be able to offer support if you and your child would like to make progress on their ability to tolerate and accept a wider variety of foods.)

Screen Time and Digital Media

Just as with food, parents often struggle with technology. Game designers, like food scientists, have engineered digital experiences to be extraordinarily compelling. They offer immediate feedback, achievable challenges, and social connection. They’re designed to meet children’s psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relationships.

Contrary to common belief, research doesn’t show a compelling link between video games and violence. In fact, as video game usage has increased globally, violent crime rates have generally decreased. Countries with higher percentages of young gamers than the US often have lower violence rates.

What’s more important are the cultural messages embedded within games and media. Many popular games reinforce limiting gender roles and social hierarchies. It can be tempting to shield children from these ideas. These ideas are out in the world, so we can’t shield our kids forever. Games can give us a way to discuss the topics and support our kids’ developing critical thinking skills.

Many parents’ most immediate concern is how to stop the battles at the end of screen time.  Seeing this as a gradual journey can help both us and our children. Expecting a child to go from having all screen time managed by you to managing it independently isn’t realistic. Break it down into stages:

• First you manage the timer;
• Then they manage it with your backup;
• Then they manage their time independently, with ongoing conversations about balance.

Social Expectations and Human Development

The cultural messages in video games aren’t isolated phenomenon. They’re reflections of broader social expectations that divide human qualities into rigid categories. For instance, games often portray male characters as warriors and female characters as healers. They reinforce the same limiting patterns that show up in children’s books, movies, and everyday interactions.

Our society often elevates certain qualities over others based on these divisions. Research by Dr. Carol Gilligan shows that boys as young as four demonstrate remarkable emotional intelligence. Between the ages of 5 and 7, they begin to shield these qualities, afraid of being seen as “soft.” Many girls learn between ages 9 and 13 that their authentic voice is “too much,” replacing it with a version that says what others want to hear.

Children naturally resist these divisions. They arrive in the world with both voice and desire for connection. They play freely across gender lines until social conditioning teaches them otherwise. When we force them to choose between these fundamental human capacities, they lose an important part of themselves.

You can help your child to see these influences when you read books or watch movies with your kids. I recently read the New York Times bestselling Fablehaven series to my daughter. In the second book, there’s a scene where the main character, Kendra, warns her friend Alyssa about walking home alone with a new boy (who Kendra knows is actually a disguised goblin). Kendra takes Alyssa aside and says: “Think about it. We hardly know anything about him. You just met him today. He’s not a little guy. Are you sure you want to go walking alone in the dark with him? Girls can get in a lot of trouble that way.”

The next day, Alyssa reveals he kissed her: “I was having so much fun. We talked in front of my house for a while after you drove away. He was being really cute and funny, and then he moved in close. I was terrified. I mean, I hardly know him, but it was also sort of exciting until we actually kissed.”

This seemingly innocent middle-grade fantasy novel was teaching troubling lessons:

• That it’s girls’ responsibility to protect themselves from boys (not boys’ responsibility to respect boundaries);
• That feeling “terrified” during a romantic encounter is normal and should be pushed through;
• That boys should pursue while girls should be pursued.

I paused after I read this passage and we discussed how this narrative reinforces harmful expectations for both genders. It teaches girls to ignore their instincts and boys to adopt an aggressive role they might not be comfortable with. These discussions help children develop critical awareness of messaging they might otherwise absorb without questioning.

Rethinking Discipline

Behind questions about managing challenging behavior often lies the concern:

“How do I discipline my child so they’ll be ready for the real world (and also do what I say)?”

Researchers developed tools like Time-outs after they saw that pigeons and chimps would change their behavior to get rewards and avoid punishments. When you give a Time-out, you’re removing the child from the opportunity to get positive reinforcement (your attention) to discourage unwanted behavior.

This approach may reduce immediate problematic behaviors. But we have to wonder: What is time-out teaching our children about relationships? Many children interpret temporary withdrawal of attention as withdrawal of love, even when we don’t intend it that way.

This misses the crucial understanding that behavior is communication. When we look deeper at “misbehavior,” we typically find unmet needs:

• The child hitting a sibling might be desperately seeking connection
• The child throwing toys might be experiencing sensory overload
• The child refusing directions might be trying to meet their need for autonomy

Consider one parent I worked with whose 11-year-old had been diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. When she shifted from demanding compliance to asking, “What’s going on? Do you need help?” her son responded with connection rather than resistance. Later, he wrote: “Mom, I’m so sorry I didn’t get us to school on time. I really needed your help. Thank you for giving me grace this morning.”

As she reflected, “My son wasn’t being defiant. His needs weren’t being met.”

The Need for Acceptance

Dr. Marsha Linehan’s memoir Building a Life Worth Living illustrates how parents’ attempts to shape children can create profound harm, even with good intentions.

Dr. Linehan’s mother continually berated her about her weight, her looks, her clothing, and her lack of social graces.  Dr. Linehan was intellectually curious, but her questions were not welcomed by her parents.  She felt completely alone in a family of eight, with nobody who could understand her experience.

This created what Linehan calls “traumatic invalidation.” This is a pervasive misreading of emotions that led her to feel like an outsider in her own family.  What Dr. Linehan needed—what all children need—was acceptance of who she really was.  The irony was that Linehan’s parents tried to shape her behavior because they loved her, and they wanted her to be successful in life.  They wanted to make her acceptable in a world where her only job was to get married to a man who made enough money to maintain a middle class lifestyle.  They appear to have succeeded with Dr. Linehan’s siblings; Linehan’s mental health was the price that the family paid.

Most parents aren’t trying to harm their children; they’re trying to prepare them for what they believe is necessary for success. But in doing this, they communicate: “I’ll give you love and acceptance only when your behavior fits my expectations.” The child learns to cover up their real feelings and needs, and eventually forgets who they really are.

When we think about changing our child’s behavior, we must be clear on why we’re doing it. We might think it’s for their own benefit, just as Dr. Linehan’s mother thought as well. We, too, want our kids to to fit in social systems that dictate appropriate body size, emotional expression, and behavior. But this creates disconnection between us, instead of the validation and acceptance that we all crave. We might have done well in school and work ourselves, and now explode at our kids when they ask us to really ‘see’ them.  Our ‘success’ in life has come at the expense of our mental health, and the same thing may happen with our kids if we don’t make a conscious decision to do things differently.

Bringing It All Together

Whether we’re navigating food choices, screen time, social expectations, or discipline, the underlying question remains:

How do we prepare our children for the real world while honoring their authentic selves?

The thread connecting these areas is the tension between external pressures (from marketers, media, social systems) and children’s innate wisdom about their own needs. Our role isn’t to shield them completely, nor force them to conform, but to help them learn how to to navigate these influences with awareness.

These insights play out in everyday moments. When your child resists getting ready in the morning, instead of assuming defiance, try asking with genuine curiosity: “Why is this hard today?”

Maybe they’re seeking connection or avoiding a problem at school. Understanding the underlying need allows you to address it while teaching valuable life skills.

This approach doesn’t coddle children; it validates them. It teaches them they’re lovable exactly as they are—the foundation they need to navigate our complex world.

To prepare children for the real world, our most powerful tool isn’t protection or control, but connection. We’re working to create relationships where children feel seen, understood, and valued, while developing skills to engage critically with the world around them.

If some of these ideas challenge your current parenting approaches, please be gentle with yourself. We parent from our own histories and with the tools we’ve been given. Your children benefit not from perfect parenting, but from your willingness to learn and grow alongside them.

 

References

Linehan, M.M. (2021). Building a life worth living. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks.

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Moss, M. (2013, February 20). The extraordinary science of addictive junk food. The New York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html

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National Center for Education Statistics (1996). Do rich and poor districts spend alike? Author. Retrieved from:

https://nces.ed.gov/pubs/web/97916.asp#:~:text=Districts%20with%20high%2Dincome%20households,to%20spend%20for%20public%20education.&text=districts%20with%20moderate%2Dto%2Dhigh,student%20(%245%2C411%2D%20%244%2C774).