Duncan Gill  •  November 5, 2026

Putting the Leadership Principles Together

Going through each of the Leadership Principles one at a time has been useful for me. It has made me think more carefully about each principle individually, but it has also helped me see more clearly how they fit together. And when you look at them as a whole, I think they reveal something important about why parenting is so difficult.

First, it is worth remembering what we are trying to accomplish. I have argued that the goal of parenting is ultimately to help your child grow up to a point where they no longer need you—to become a functional, independent adult who can survive and thrive in the world. In that sense, successful parenting eventually makes the parent obsolete. Everything else we do as parents should ultimately be in service of that goal. 

I am also a pragmatist about how you get there. These principles are not commandments, and I don’t think there is one correct way to raise a child. If you have a completely different approach and it produces a healthy, independent adult, I’m all for it. I’ve put these principles together because I believe they give parents a useful framework that works well across a wide range of children and situations—not because every family needs to look the same. 

But when you put the principles next to one another, something interesting happens. They sometimes seem to contradict each other.

Show up, but don’t take over.

Support your child, but allow them to fail.

Give up control, but intervene when you need to.

Consider the needs of the individual child, but also protect the larger group.

Don’t fight with your child, but don’t enable unhealthy behavior.

Give your child increasing responsibility, but remain the parent. 

This is not a flaw in the principles. I think it reflects the reality of parenting.

Parents frequently come to us wanting to know what they should do. Should I make my teenager get out of bed, or let him miss the bus? Should I take away the phone, or let her figure out how to manage it? Should I intervene when my child is struggling, or let him fail? Should I insist on something because I’m the parent, or am I trying to control something that isn’t really mine to control?

There usually isn’t a rule that answers these questions every time. Parenting is largely a process of figuring out when to do something and when to leave something alone. It’s a continual balance between doing too much and doing too little. The key is learning to discriminate between the situations in which your child needs you to step in and those in which your child needs you to get out of the way. 

That is one reason parenting is hard. Following a simple rule would be much easier. Never interfere. Always enforce the rule. Never let your child fail. Always let natural consequences teach the lesson. But children, families and circumstances are too complicated for that. Good parenting requires judgment.

The Leadership Principles give us a common language for making those judgments. Instead of asking only, “How do I get my child to do what I want?” we can ask different questions. Am I supporting or interfering? Am I trying to exercise control when what I really need is authority? Is this a situation in which failure might be useful, or is this a train-track moment in which I need to intervene? Am I helping my child develop responsibility, or am I unintentionally enabling dependence? What effect is this having on everyone else in the family?

The principles don’t automatically provide the answer. They help us think about the question.

Finally, if I had to reduce everything I’ve said in this series to just a couple of ideas, I would start with Show Up. Be there for your child. Be available. Have a relationship with them. Do your best. I have called this the most important Leadership Principle from the beginning.

But if you’re reading this article, you’ve probably already shown up. You’re interested enough in your child and in parenting to spend time thinking about how to do it better.

So the next principle I would choose is Practice What You Preach.

Be the kind of person you hope your child will become.

Children learn from what we do far more than we sometimes realize. If we want them to take responsibility, we need to take responsibility. If we want them to admit mistakes, we need to admit ours. If we want them to handle frustration without exploding, we need to show them what that looks like. If we want them eventually to become thoughtful, capable, independent adults, we should try to model those qualities ourselves.

If you show up for your child and provide them with a good model to follow, I think you’ve already done two-thirds of the work of being a good parent. The rest of these principles matter. They can make an enormous difference. But to some degree, they are the details.

Parenting is hard precisely because there is no formula. You have to keep deciding when to help and when to back away, when to hold firm and when to let go. The goal isn’t to apply every Leadership Principle perfectly. It’s to use them to make better judgments while gradually transferring responsibility for your child’s life from you to them.

And, if everything goes well, eventually they won’t need you to do that anymore.