Ep 251: Why Your Kids Don't Listen to You (It's Not Their Fault) | Dr. Tom Cowan

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If your child is not listening to you, they’re sending you an important message that you keep ignoring.

Dr. Tom Cowan, alternative medicine doctor and author of Common Sense Child Rearing, joins me to unpack what he learned from decades in family medicine, raising his own children, and years of watching families up close.

Food fights aren't about food. Defiance isn't a phase. Childhood illness sometimes says more about the parents than the child. We talk about the exact cases that changed his thinking, including one autistic boy who stopped tearing the office apart the moment Dr. Cowan named what was really going on in the family.

We also get into the trap of "gentle parenting", the MAHA movement's role in keeping people dependent on authority, and why the health freedom crowd keeps recreating the same top-down dynamic at the dinner table.

If your kids have started mirroring things back to you that feel uncomfortably accurate, this one will land.

You'll Learn:

[0:00] Introduction

[7:20] Modern parenting has become government at home

[8:51] Food fights are never about food, and how coercion backfires

[15:38] How to set boundaries around screens and sugar without becoming authoritarian

[29:44] Explaining “the why” beats saying no “because I said so”

[37:57] Is childhood defiance natural, or a symptom of authoritarian parenting?

[46:33] Reprimanding kids often reflects on us, not what they did

[55:41] The health freedom movement's integrity problem, and how MAHA keeps you in the system

[1:03:50] Steph Curry would never have discipline problems teaching kids basketball

[1:14:25] Real education happens once you stop feeling guilty about school

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