Parenting & Family Quote by Denis Waitley

Parenting advice often fails by choosing a side: either indulge every whim or clamp down for the sake of “discipline.” Denis Waitley’s line tries to dissolve that false choice. The sentence is built like a relay race: listen, encourage, then let go. Each verb shifts power a little further away from the parent, until the final handoff lands where Waitley believes it ultimately belongs - with the child.

The intent is pragmatic, not dreamy. “Listen to the desires” doesn’t mean treat every want as wise; it means take a child’s inner life seriously enough to hear it clearly. That first step is quietly radical in cultures where kids are expected to be managed more than understood. “Encourage them” signals the adult’s role as a stabilizer: you’re not absent, you’re providing confidence, resources, and guardrails. Then Waitley drops the real thesis: autonomy. The subtext is that overcontrol produces compliant children, not competent adults. Autonomy is framed as something you “give,” which also reveals the power imbalance: parents are gatekeepers of independence, sometimes withholding it long past the point when it helps.

Context matters here. Waitley emerged as a prominent voice in the late-20th-century self-help and performance-psychology ecosystem, where “personal responsibility” and “self-determination” were treated as learnable skills. Read that way, the quote isn’t just about family harmony; it’s a training philosophy. Kids who practice making decisions early become adults who can handle consequences without outsourcing their agency to authority, peers, or panic.