Duncan Gill  •  November 12, 2026

Avoid Enabling Unhealthy Behaviors

The word enabling is probably most familiar in the context of addiction. Giving alcohol to someone with an alcohol problem would be an obvious example. But I use the word more broadly. Enabling is anything we do—or sometimes fail to do—that reinforces an unhealthy habit.

Habits matter enormously, particularly for children. Some habits improve our functioning and make our lives easier. Exercise is an obvious example. Other habits make our lives harder. And one of the most important things about habits is that they tend to become easier to repeat and harder to change over time.

There’s an old saying that practice makes perfect. When it comes to habits, I think a better way of putting it is: practice makes permanent.

The more often we do something one way, the harder it becomes to do it another way. This is why we encourage children to develop healthy habits when they’re young. It’s much easier to establish a pattern than to spend years trying to undo one. 

Parents can enable unhealthy habits in two seemingly opposite ways.

The first is doing too much.

This overlaps with several of the other Leadership Principles I’ve discussed, particularly Maximum Support, Minimum Interference and encouraging children to take increasing responsibility for themselves as they grow older.

Suppose you’ve decided your child is old enough to be responsible for certain household chores. Your child doesn’t do them, so eventually you do them yourself. Or your teenager misses an appointment and needs to make an uncomfortable phone call to the doctor’s office, but you make the call for them. Your child behaves badly toward someone and owes that person an apology, but rather than expecting your child to handle it, you apologize on their behalf.

Exactly which responsibilities a child should have at a particular age is something every family has to decide for itself. But once you’ve decided that something reasonably belongs to your child, repeatedly taking that responsibility back sends an important message: Apparently, I don’t actually have to do this. Someone else will.

That’s enabling.

It may feel helpful in the moment. It may even be considerably easier. You can probably make the phone call more efficiently than your teenager can. You can finish the chore rather than spending the next three days wondering whether it’s ever going to happen. But the short-term solution can reinforce exactly the pattern you’re hoping your child will eventually outgrow. 

The confusing thing is that parents can also enable by doing too little.

This is one of the frustrating things about parenting. Sometimes I’m telling parents to back off and let their children manage things themselves. Other times I’m telling them they need to intervene. There isn’t a simple rule that parents should always do more or always do less. Much of parenting is figuring out when to do which.

Suppose you’ve decided that brushing teeth regularly is important. A child skipping it once isn’t a catastrophe. It certainly isn’t what I call a Train Track Moment—an immediate safety issue requiring decisive action. But allowing a child to go day after day without brushing is different. Over time, you’re allowing an unhealthy pattern to become established.

The same might apply to a child spending virtually every waking hour watching television or using a phone. One Saturday spent watching television isn’t a crisis. But if that becomes the child’s normal way of spending every free moment, you have to ask a different question: What happens if this pattern continues for the next several years?

That’s an important distinction between a Train Track Moment and enabling. Train Track Moments require us to think about immediate danger. Enabling often requires us to think about trajectory. What is this behavior likely to become if we keep practicing it? 

Consider something as ordinary as phones at the dinner table. Maybe your family doesn’t care about this. That’s fine. Families don’t need to have identical values.

But suppose you’ve decided that dinner is one of the times your family puts phones away and interacts with one another. If your child is on the phone throughout dinner every night and you continually allow it, you’re helping establish the opposite habit.

Of course, this also illustrates another Leadership Principle: Practice What You Preach. If you’re scrolling through your own phone throughout dinner, it’s difficult to make a compelling case that your child shouldn’t do exactly the same thing.

The point is that you get to decide which habits are acceptable in your family.  The important thing is to identify the habits you believe will help your child function well in the future and then pay attention to whether your own behavior is supporting or undermining them. 

This is much easier to address early.

In my work, I frequently see teenagers with patterns that have been established over many years. By that point, changing them can be extraordinarily difficult. If a child has spent years being allowed to watch television all day and at 15 you suddenly announce that this is no longer acceptable, the child is understandably going to be unhappy. From their perspective, you’ve changed the rules.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t change them. Sometimes you absolutely should. But you should expect it to be much harder than if the expectation had existed when the child was eight.

And there’s another complication: enabling itself can become a habit.

Your child becomes accustomed to you doing certain things for them, but you also become accustomed to doing those things. Your child learns to avoid an uncomfortable phone call, and you learn to make it. Your child learns that you will eventually finish the chore, and you learn that finishing it yourself is easier than tolerating the uncertainty. Over time, both people settle into their parts.

Then one day we look at an older teenager and wonder why they aren’t taking more responsibility.

Often, the answer isn’t that anyone made one terrible parenting decision. Parent and child simply practiced the same relationship over and over again. And practice makes permanent.

Avoiding enabling doesn’t mean always pushing your child harder. It doesn’t mean refusing to help. And it certainly doesn’t mean that parents should never intervene.

Sometimes avoiding enabling means doing less—allowing your child to make the phone call, complete the chore, offer the apology, solve the problem, or experience the consequences.

Sometimes it means doing more—stepping in when a pattern you’re allowing is gradually becoming unhealthy.

Knowing which is which is one of the hard parts of parenting.

The useful question isn’t simply, Should I step in or should I stay out of it?

It’s: What are we practicing?

Because whatever you and your child practice together today has a pretty good chance of becoming what both of you do tomorrow.