From the Wall Street Journal: A Former Navy SEAL on How to Raise Confident, Risk-Taking Kids

Bestselling author Brandon Webb on the perils of overprotectiveness, why some parents need a splash of water in the face and whether he’d

I wanted to share my recent Wall Street Journal Interview with Pamela Paul (also a great mom)…I’ll share some other great podcasts and interviews in the coming weeks.

Thank you all for buying or gifting my new book, Puddle Jumpers, and please share this with someone you think it would help.

Full Interview from the Wall Street Journal

By Pamela Paul

Brandon Webb is talking the way parents do when their kids aren’t around—tallying their strengths and foibles, failures and wins, and the extent to which his own shortcomings as a father may have contributed.

Much of this self-appraisal is detailed in his tenth book, “Puddle Jumpers: Powerful Mental Techniques from a Navy SEAL Performance Coach and Father of Three,” which comes out next week.

About halfway into the conversation, over Zoom from an Airbnb in the French Alps, it becomes clear that two of those kids, Jackson, 24, and Madison, 21 (both pseudonyms used in the book), have been flitting in and out of the room the whole time. They occasionally pop on screen to fact-check or elaborate on their father’s responses to questions.

“This was the most fun and fastest book I’ve ever written,” Webb, 51, says. The author of the memoir “The Red Circle” and “The Killing School: Inside the World’s Deadliest Sniper Program,” never imagined he’d write a parenting book. “I cried three or four times while writing.”

What made him cry? “Just these vulnerable moments with my kids,” he says. Madison failing to pass her purple belt test in Taekwondo. His son Tyler (also a pseudonym), now 19, getting kicked off the basketball team. The letter Jackson wrote to his parents explaining why he was going to the prom despite being grounded over an incident the family dubbed “Operation Weed.”

“They were like, ‘Oh no, my friends’ parents are going to read this! But they’ve been really good sports about it,” Webb says.

What is a puddle jumper?

One of my early memories as a father was when Tyler was five or six and wanted to jump in this nasty, dirty mud puddle just as we were coming off a day on the slopes in Tahoe. I was like, ‘Don’t you dare!’ But then I realized, What do I care? So I have to do an extra load of laundry? I realized I want to raise kids who are going to jump in mud puddles. That’s a joyful confident kid who wants to jump into life.

You were an elite sniper with The Navy SEALs. Can you explain how those principles align with child rearing?

A lot of it is about mental management and self-talk. When I was teaching snipers, I realized you can’t point out mistakes, especially in front of other people, because they spread like a virus. A common one is flinching on a high-power rifle. If I say to a trainee, “You’re flinching,” that puts it in his head. When we introduced changes to training to focus on positive psychology, our 30% failure rate went down to 1%. When I left the Navy, I said, why can’t this apply to parenting?

(Photo: Brandon Webb, second from left, and his children, in Lisbon, Portugal.)

What would you think of one of your kids going through Hell Week?

Hell Week is just a personal journey of suffering. You can’t fake it. You have to go through it and earn it. But there are times I wish they had experienced more hardship because I think it builds character. When Tyler got kicked off the basketball team, for example. There are a lot of parents who would go to the coach and say, ‘How dare you?’ but we took the feedback seriously and it was brutal. It’s tough to watch your kids suffer. But the world is tough. It’s not always fair. They’ve got to learn to deal with this stuff.

What’s the biggest misconception people have about what a military parent might be like?

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That we’re overstrict. Harsh. I remember when I coached Little League, the other parents were scared. Someone said to me, “Maybe send an email out to the parents and let them know I’m not going to be putting them through boot camp, and making them do push-ups and screaming at them.” If anything, combat veterans are more empathetic. They’ve seen the worst of human nature, and that actually makes them caring parents.

(Photo: Brandon Webb in 1999 at a warfare training center in Niland, Calif. Brandon Webb)

How do you differentiate between discipline and punishment?

Punishment is when a parent acts out of a fear response whereas discipline is more thoughtful. You want to take your own emotion out of it and get to the “why” behind the kid’s behavior and respond to that. But I’m a big believer in consequences too. Kids know if you’re bluffing, so do not make a threat that you’re not willing to carry through. Once I was taking the kids to SeaWorld and they were misbehaving in the car. I said, “If you keep that up, we’re not going to SeaWorld.” When they kept going, I took the next turn off the highway. When we finally went back two weeks later, they were all quietly reading in the back seat. They need to know you’re not messing around.

Who is the reader you had in mind while writing this book?

I keep seeing these successful parents who obviously love their kids but give in too much. You can’t focus solely on your career and outsource being a parent—and then wonder why your kids are going in a really dark direction. Some high performing parents need a splash of water in the face.

Explain what the phrase “Do it for Dad” means in your family.

It’s my fatherly nudge to do something that they’re a little nervous or apprehensive about, like the double black diamond or even trying a new food.

What does it mean to you to be a good father?

I want to be the kind of dad that my kids look back on and think I was present and loving and the kind of person they’d look up to. It’s such a rewarding thing as a parent to have this kind of friendship with your grown kids.