I've been telling my kids to do hard things. Make your bed. Earn it. Be patient. Then I catch myself ordering from Amazon because I don't want to drive to the store, or pulling up Walmart+ to get something delivered in an hour because I'd rather not wait. I'm preaching one thing and living another.
The truth is I've built a comfortable trap. Every convenience I've added — next-day delivery, grocery apps, same-hour anything — felt like a smart use of time and money. But stack them all up and what you actually have is a person who has quietly stopped tolerating friction. I'm not saving time. I'm avoiding discomfort. And I'm spending money carelessly to do it.
Richard Bromfield spent thirty years as a clinical psychologist at Harvard Medical School studying exactly this. His finding is uncomfortable: kids do what they see, not what they're told. Tell them a hundred times to be patient, to earn things, to sit with discomfort — it doesn't stick if what they're watching every day is a parent who reaches for his phone the moment something gets inconvenient.
Nearly 95% of parents feel like they are overindulging their children, but feel powerless to stop themselves.
— Richard Bromfield, PhD · How to Unspoil Your Child FastThat's the message I've actually been sending. Not the one at the dinner table. The one they see when the groceries appear at the door without anyone having to plan, shop, or wait. The one they absorb when something I need shows up the next morning because I didn't want to make a trip. I've been addicted to convenience and calling it efficiency. My kids aren't blind to that. They're taking notes.
Bromfield dedicates an entire chapter in his book to parents unspoiling themselves first — because the work starts there. You can't model what you don't practice.
My cousin Jaisen gave me the simplest fix I've heard in a while. He restricts himself to one Amazon order per week. That's it. No complicated system, no budgeting app. Just one day, one order.
What that one rule actually does is force a pause. Instead of pulling up the app the moment you think of something, you add it to a list and wait. By the time your order day comes around, half the things you would have bought next-day feel less urgent — or unnecessary altogether. The friction isn't punishment. It's clarity.
That's the thing about removing convenience — you don't always realize how mindless the behavior was until you slow it down. The one-order rule doesn't make Amazon harder to use. It just makes you think before you do. And that small gap between impulse and action is where better decisions live.
Jaisen's rule is just the start. I'm going to keep finding places where I've let convenience replace intention — and start adding the right friction back in. Not to make life harder. To make it more deliberate.
That's what I want my kids to see. Not a parent who suffers through inconvenience, but one who chooses it sometimes. Because the right amount of friction slows you down just enough to be present. To think before you spend. To notice what you actually need versus what you reflexively reach for. To show up to your own life instead of outsourcing the small parts of it.
Bromfield's whole argument is that kids are watching. Mine are too. And I'd rather they see someone who is working on this than someone who has quietly made peace with the easy version of everything.