Matt Walsh Gives Relationship and Parenting Advice
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Matt Walsh reads letters from his fans and gives them marriage and parenting advice.
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This was a comment that somebody left on YouTube on one of the shows this week that I thought was interesting.
And it's not looking for advice.
It's actually giving advice.
I just think it's good.
PBD Park Biz says, You just have to join in and most parents won't.
I don't think my parenting is better or my child is well behaved with a screen.
They're upset for a minute and then they forget for a few.
It takes a week to break the habit that most kids have.
Just take it away and don't give it back.
The screen's referring to.
Be strong.
Here's the part that's most important.
Spend time with them.
Let them be in the room while you work.
Let them ask 1,450 questions, even if it's annoying.
Stop being a child yourself and parent.
I think that's extraordinary advice.
It's also very basic and it should be obvious, but the best advice often is, and this is exactly right.
The first thing when it comes to modern parenting anyway, this is like one of the number one challenges, is the screen.
It's the siren.
...song of all these screens that are constantly beckoning to your children and to us, and threatening to totally take over and absorb every minute of our lives.
And so you've got... if you want to have a happy and fulfilled family and marriage, and you want happy, fulfilled children, and you want to have some chance also of actually raising your own children, of you being the one who raises them, and that their moral formation and their spiritual formation and all of that in their education, Is largely up to you.
If you want some hope of that, then you've got to be able to sever their ties and their dependency on the screen.
And you just got to be able to do it.
Do it!
And in some ways, I don't have a lot of sympathy for parents that don't know how to do this, or they don't want to, or they feel bad about it.
No, yeah, if you take the screen away from your kid, maybe you've already given them a phone, big mistake, take it away, say, never mind, you can't have this phone.
It's okay to admit when you made a mistake as a parent.
You can say, we made a mistake, you should not have this, we're gonna take it away.
You take away that, you know, you severely cut down on TV time, on time with video games.
If you do that, yeah, the kid's gonna be upset, they'll be in a huff, whatever.
Who cares?
You know, you cannot allow yourself to be emotionally manipulated by your children.
You just can't allow it.
And what you should know as a parent is that there are basically, like, two kinds of hurt that your child might experience.
There's the discomfort that he might feel because he's not getting something that he wants, and yet shouldn't have, and you're taking that thing away, or you're limiting his time with that thing, and that makes him uncomfortable, that makes him bored, and he's upset about that.
There's like that kind of hurt, okay?
And then there's the real hurt.
There's a, you know, either emotional or physical, where there's something deeper going on.
The first kind of hurt really shouldn't bother you.
I can say for me as a parent, it just doesn't.
If my kids are whining because they want something and I don't give it to them, they want to watch TV and they can't, they want a junk food snack, and I say, no, you can't have that, they want some soda, and I say, I'm not going to give you soda, and they get in a snit about it, that has no impact on me at all.
Those kinds of emotions from my kid, you've got to get over that.
I'm Teflon with that.
That bounces right off me, I don't care.
Now again, there's the deeper kind of emotional hurt that your child might feel, and that you should take seriously.
I mean, there are many examples of that.
A recent example for me, when I was most recently going on a trip to speak at another college, and my son was very upset that I was leaving again, because I've been traveling a lot, and he was really upset about it, and he was in tears, and he was...
Now, of course, that's something deeper.
That's like, I want to spend time with dad, you're not here, you know.
So then I'm going to sit down and we're going to have a real conversation about that.
Okay?
And that does, you know, that's the kind of thing that, that's a gut punch.
That you actually feel as a parent.
But there's other stuff where they're just whining because they want something.
You got to be able to, you know, be unfazed by that entirely.
And then, yes, as the comment points out, you take the screens away, you take these things away, and especially when the children are younger, you can quite easily replace that in a way that they will find more than satisfying and sufficient if you spend time with them yourself.
But the dirty little secret, which is not much of a secret, is that most parents, this is exactly why they put their kids in front of the screens, because they don't want to spend time with their kids.
Because they consider it taxing or annoying.
Right.
Kid asks so many questions or whatever.
But you're a parent.
And this is what your child wants.
It wants to be around you.
It wants to spend time with you.
Especially for younger kids.
I think it's one of the biggest mistakes that we make as parents of younger kids is that we don't Give children that time that they need and that attention that they need.
You can't give them attention all the time, right?
When they think the world revolves around them.
They do want your attention.
They do just want it.
They want to just be around you.
They want to do the things that you're doing.
You don't always have to do childlike things.
You can incorporate them into the things that you're doing.
They really like that.
They want to do that.
But you have a lot of parents where they're annoyed by it.
They don't want to deal with it.
And so they push the kids away.
They say, ah, just go watch TV.
And then the time inevitably comes when they become teenagers, or maybe even before that, where suddenly it's like a switch is flipped.
And now they don't even want to be around you anymore.
They don't want your attention anymore.
And when that happens, we hear this story a million times from parents, that's when they look back and they think of all those times when the kids were younger and begging for their attention and that's all they want.
Like when you're a parent of a young child, this is your biggest problem.
It's just that your kids like you too much and they want to be around you too much.
It's like one of the biggest, it's one of the biggest issues that parents complain about is when they have young kids.
Which is not really a problem at all.
And once the kid gets older and doesn't want to be around you anymore, because they're going through their teenage phase, you look back on it and realize, oh, that was never a problem.
That was a beautiful thing.
I wish I had...
I wish I'd spent time with them when they wanted it.
Maybe they would still want my attention now if I had given it to them back then.
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All right, Carter says, Mr. Walsh, I listen to and enjoy your show very much.
I would hazard to say that I agree wholeheartedly with your views on marriage and the family.
Being a traditionally raised Catholic myself, I've come to understand the beauty and joy that marriage and the family can bring into one's life.
However, I find it impossible to find anyone that I'm interested in dating, much less marrying, who resides anywhere near me.
I was wondering if you would have any advice or words different from the typical be patient or you need to get out more.
I'll admit that I have reclusive tendencies and that I mostly just go to work and then go home.
With that said, most of the young adult groups in my area would consist of women in professions which would not allow for a traditional marriage and family, which is how I'd want to raise children.
I also don't like bars.
They're typically loud, dark, and crowded, which usually causes me to shut down.
Not to mention, I likely wouldn't find the kind of woman I'm interested in at a bar.
Combine this all with the fact that most of my dreams that have had any true value have all ended in failure.
I find it hard to maintain hope that there is someone out there for me.
Perhaps you have the golden nugget of wisdom that will help me hold on to hope.
I guess my first golden nugget of wisdom, Carter, is to stop expecting anyone to have a golden nugget of wisdom that's going to solve your problem.
Woo!
It's a nugget!
The path forward and the solutions, the potential solutions, I think are obvious to you.
In fact, you dismiss some of them outright.
You say, well, don't tell me this.
Those are some of the answers.
You dismiss, for example, the young adult groups in your area.
Because you assume, you say, well, they would consist of the kind of people that I don't want to be around.
And I would go here, but I'm not going to find people there.
And I would go there, but there's going to be the wrong people there.
Sounds like you're just sort of assuming all of that.
He's right, General.
And you're not actually trying.
You're not actually putting yourself out there.
And as much as you don't want to hear it, that is part of the solution for you, potentially, is you've got to put yourself out there more.
I mean, you said that you go to work, you come home, you don't really socialize with anyone, you don't go anywhere else.
Well, how would you meet anybody in that case?
Even if it's uncomfortable, and I totally get that.
As an introverted person myself, I'm not into forced group activities.
I'm not into any of that, but I did some of that when I was single.
Because I realized, I've got to put myself out there.
I've got to get outside of my comfort zone a little bit.
Focus on improving yourself.
To whatever extent you can.
And then the other practical piece of advice that you didn't rule out, at least from the start, is that, and this is a big one, expand your search area.
So you're telling me to begin with that there's no one in your area who you find worthy.
And I'm willing to bet that there are women even in your area.
There aren't many great things about the modern dating scene, but maybe the only one is that you're not relegated just to where you physically live.
You can expand your search area by using dating sites and that sort of thing.
And you have to be willing to travel, you know?
My wife, when I met her, she lived two and a half hours away, so it wasn't like she was halfway around the country, across the country, but she was two and a half hours away.
And so that meant that, like, to see each other took effort and time.
That's not a bad thing, though.
You know, when you have to put in, to begin with, you have to put the effort in and the time in just to see each other and be around each other.
I think that can be a great advantage.
Ashley says, My question is, how often should a couple say I love you?
My husband is not outwardly emotional, hardly at all, unless he's upset.
We next to never say I love you.
Should I initiate this more?
What are your thoughts?
Yeah, you should initiate it more.
Just tell him you love him.
Also, you could talk to him about this.
Maybe you have, but I'm always surprised by how often it seems that people have these kinds of issues in their marriage, which are, like, relatively minor, and then you talk to them, you find out, well, they've actually never talked about it.
Let me say, we don't really need to be here.
So this is something you could bring up to him, not in a nagging way, not in a scolding way, nothing like that, not in an accusatory way.
Once again, things that could have been brought to my attention yesterday!
You find a time when you're both in a good mood, and you're sitting on the couch or something, and you just tell him, you know, I know you love me, but it makes me feel good to hear the words from you, and so I'd like for us to start saying it more to each other.
I think he would respond to that, if you said that to him.
And it is important to say the words.
You know, it's not like you have to be on a schedule where it's like, well, you got to say I love you, uh, 14 times a week, you know?
And if it's been a few days, you haven't said it, then you got to catch up.
It's not that, but you should, the words do matter to spouses and also matters to your kids.
I think we should also be telling your kids that you love them.
All right.
This will be the last one.
This is from Jacob says, Matt, I recently did the impossible.
I matched with a fellow sweet baby on Tinder.
That, that does seem to be the, on Tinder is where you found the fellow sweet baby.
Wow.
I didn't know we had a presence on Tinder.
I don't know if I'm happy about that or not.
As you can imagine, I was extremely excited and we quickly began discussing our views and learning about each other.
We exchanged numbers and socials and began talking.
I asked her if she wanted kids and I also joked that maybe we should move to Tennessee together so we can rub elbows with the fine people of The Daily Wire.
After a couple of days, I tell her that we should go out after the holidays, to which she seems surprised and told me that she thought I was just her political buddy because I didn't... Oh, man.
Sorry, man.
Because I didn't flirt enough in the beginning and that she found someone else.
This genuinely hurt.
I find it hard to believe she didn't know I wanted to date her when we were on a dating app.
Do you think this was her way of trying to let me down easy, or is she just evil and in need of being canceled?
She's not evil.
She's a member of the Sweet Baby Gang, so we know she's not evil to begin with.
I think this was, yeah, her trying to let you down easy.
Now, on her part, she should be more honest with you, but people don't feel always comfortable being that honest with especially someone they don't know.
And yeah, I think we can assume that she realized that you're not on Tinder looking for a, quote, political buddy.
You're such a good friend, right?
The bestest!
One of the worst kind of like friend of all the ways to friend zone someone.
I think maybe that's one of the worst ways you can do it.
Did you do anything wrong that made it so that she lost interest that quickly?
It's impossible for me to say based on this short description of the exchange that I have here.
If I were you, I wouldn't have made the comment about moving to Tennessee together.
And I know you phrased it as a joke.
Sorry, I'm making a go of it in a new city.
It probably wasn't entirely a joke, was it?
You were kind of like feeling things out.
Not that you were going to move with her that moment, but when you just met someone on Tinder, you haven't even met them in person, and you're already even jokingly bringing up moving somewhere together, that might have freaked her out a little bit.
Other than that, you know, based on this, it doesn't sound like you did anything.
Wrong, and you didn't let it linger too long.
I think oftentimes the mistake a guy will make is that you, I guess what they call the talking phase, and you do the talking phase for weeks and weeks and months, and then finally you work up the courage to say, hey, maybe we should actually like physically go out together, and at that point she's already lost interest.
My density has bought me to you.
What?
But you talked to her for a few days and asked her on a date.
