Matthew McConaughey says overprotecting children can take away the 'beauty of ignorance'

Matthew McConaughey, 56, says parents should authorize children to obtain small, manageable risks.

On Tuesday's event of the "Build or Break" podcast, McConaughey talked concerning the value of letting kids obtain specified low-stakes risks — a instruction shaped by his own cognition expanding up.

"Look, kids aren't fearful of heights until they fall," McConaughey told podcast presenter Daniel Lubetzky. "Every genitor knows this."

McConaughey compared it to observing a kid ascend up a tree.

"You let your kid go out on a limb, right? Maybe it's six feet off the ground, but there's beautiful St. Augustine grass below, and you're like, well, if they fall, they're not going to have to go to the hospital," he said.

Putting the "proverbial safety mat" under them at that phase could create children additional wary of risks they power alternatively handle, and obtain distant the confidence that comes from getting rear up following a insignificant fall, he said.

"You've already taken distant a attractiveness of ignorance, which is item that I cognize has gotten me through a lot of pickles in my life, since I was uninformed at the period to cognize how dire the genuine circumstance was," McConaughey said.

"I pulled it off since I didn't provision the emergency the credit it equal deserved at the time. And that's part of youth," he said.

However, formerly a kid is elevated adequate that a autumn could be fatal, McConaughey stated that is whenever a genitor should quietly guide them rear down.

McConaughey stated he learned several of that outlook from his mother, Kay McConaughey, whom he called "the queen of denial."

He stated she had a habit of refusing to provision setbacks too much "credit," alternatively treating them as things to move former fairly than crises to live on.

"Denial in that way is, kind of, part of the resilience that it takes to get to the period in your existence anywhere you do acknowledge that, oh, that nonaccomplishment — which it was — was really a gift," he said.

This isn't the archetypal period McConaughey has shared insights on raising his three children. He earlier shared a conversation starter he uses to get his teenagers to open up, which involves asking broad questions fairly than pressing for particulars concerning their idiosyncratic lives.

"Now they're talking in the third person, but they're talking concerning themselves and their own experience," McConaughey said.

His mother, Kay McConaughey, has additionally talked concerning the old-school parenting approach she says helped her lift her three sons: environment apparent boundaries and sticking to them.

"They had until 18 in my house, and we had a regulation — you hear to me and you do what I say," his mother said. "After you rotate 18, you are out of current and can do what you please."