Pushing Back Against the Pace
Raising kids with strong values has never been easy, but today’s pace and pressures make it especially challenging. The cultural current is fast — always moving toward more: more achievement, more content, more activities, more stuff. But what if real family success means less? Less hustle, less clutter, fewer outside demands — and more time, more connection, more clarity.
We didn’t start with a radical plan. We just started asking better questions: What do we want our kids to remember about growing up? What values do we want them to embody? What pace of life supports those things?
This is how we found our way to values-based parenting — a quiet but revolutionary act in a world that often prioritizes performance over presence.
In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt outlines how anxiety and disconnection in children are on the rise, often tied to screen overuse, academic pressure, and over-scheduling. He describes a generation that is “digitally connected, but emotionally untethered.” As parents, we’re not powerless in this — we have to be brave enough to swim upstream, to question what is normalized around us and to make clear and reasonable decisions about what we allow in our families and what we root out.
When we got clear about the values we wanted to embrace in our family we started saying no — to weekend commitments we didn’t love, to apps that promised “educational content” but delivered dopamine hits, to the idea that a packed calendar is a badge of good parenting. What emerged in the space we reclaimed was time to be with our kids — to let them be bored, curious, creative, and grounded in something deeper than what the algorithm is pushing… to be deeply connected to friends and family and to develop resilience, confidence and community.
Slowing Down to Connect
Mel Robbins talks about “The Let Them Theory” — a concept she shared that went viral for a reason. The idea is simple but powerful: let them be who they are. Let them try and fail. Let them wear the weird outfit, climb the tree, quit the sport they don’t love. Let them explore their own edges without micromanaging them into someone else’s idea of success.
This applies to us too. Let us — as parents — slow down. Let us release the hustle that’s not aligned with our values. Let us build a life where our family isn’t just surviving the schedule, but thriving within rhythms that nourish us.
In our home, we’ve worked to build slow family living routines. That looks like family dinners, yes — but also weekday walks, leaving white space on weekends, and creating technology boundaries that prioritize eye contact and play over passive consumption.
Raising Kids Who Know What Matters
Ron Lieber’s The Opposite of Spoiled is one of the most practical books out there for raising financially literate, values-centered kids. Lieber says kids aren’t spoiled because they have too much — they’re spoiled when they don’t know what things cost, how money works, or what their family believes is worth spending on.
We took this to heart. We started having money conversations early — not in a scarcity-based way, but in a values-based way. We explain why we prioritize travel over toys, or why we saved up for bikes instead of upgrading tablets. We talk about generosity, sufficiency, and choice — and we invite our kids to have a voice in those conversations.
This kind of intentionality helps them connect dots. It teaches them that our lifestyle choices — from meals to housing to vacations — aren’t random. They’re a reflection of our family priorities.
What We’ve Learned Along the Way
Choosing an anti-hustle family life isn’t always glamorous. It means sometimes the whole living room is covered in shredded packing materials and discarded bits of string. It means saying no to things that look shiny on Instagram. It means sitting with discomfort when our kids feel left out because we skipped the extravagant birthday party or didn’t upgrade to the latest trend. It means trusting that what we’re building — slowly, deliberately — is worth it.
And it is.
We see it in our kids’ capacity to play creatively. We see it in the conversations they initiate about fairness, kindness, and purpose. We feel it in our own relationships — less reactive, more rooted.
We’re not perfect. Our house still gets loud, the calendar still fills up sometimes, and we occasionally lose sight of our “why.” But we come back to it. We ask: Does the way we spend our time and money reflect who we are and what we care about?
That’s the heartbeat of values-based parenting.
Closing Thought
You don’t need to overhaul your whole life overnight. You just need to get curious. Ask yourself: What pace of life supports the kind of relationships we want in our family? What does enough look like? Where can we simplify, so our values can take center stage?
Parenting from your values isn’t always easy — but it’s always worth it.
