Two Rules Are Enough

A Parenting Standard Built to Survive the Dinner Table

The Framework: Be Respectful + Do Your Best

Purpose: To give a kid — and a parent — a standard simple enough to actually use. Not a philosophy. A filter you can apply in the moment, at the dinner table, in the car, mid-argument.

Summary: Two rules, no more. Respect covers how you treat yourself, other people, and everything around you. Do your best turns every outcome — win, lose, or somewhere in between — into a conversation about effort instead of a verdict on the kid. Together, they're the only corrective question a parent ever needs to ask: was that respectful, and did you do your best?

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Twenty years ago, right before I became a parent, I did what a lot of new parents do. I started reading. Every book on raising kids who win. I spent months on what was, honestly, a strategic plan for parenthood — how do you set these kids up to actually succeed.

What I learned almost immediately: you can't run the dinner table like you run a boardroom. All that strategy had to get simpler, fast, or it was never going to survive contact with an actual six-year-old.

So I went back to the purpose first. A parent's purpose is to facilitate their kids standing on their shoulders. That's it. I just need enough credibility — earned through my successes, and more importantly, my failures — that they can learn from both and do better than I did. Whatever “better” ends up meaning to them, not to me.

Once the purpose was that simple, the rules could be too. We landed on the only two a kid actually needs.

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Be Respectful

This one sounds simple. It isn't small — it gives you a wide berth as a parent, because almost everything worth correcting fits inside it somewhere.

Respect yourself: staying up too late, not eating right, not taking care of the body you've got.

Respect others: empathy, kindness — and knowing respect for yourself means not tolerating it when someone mistreats you.

Respect your family.

Respect your environment.

Respect your things.

The list is long. The rule isn't.

Do Your Best

I like this one because win, lose, or draw, it starts a conversation instead of ending one. If your kid is genuinely capable and bringing home C's, the question isn't “why did you fail” — it's “what do we adjust.” If they left everything on the field and still came up short, that's a different conversation entirely, about what improvement actually looks like from here.

It gives you a foundation to determine what “best” means for this kid, in this moment, without turning every result into a verdict on who they are.

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Try this: The next time your kid messes up, skip the lecture. Ask two questions instead — was that respectful, and did you do your best? Notice how much shorter the conversation gets, and how much more of it they actually hear.

In October 2024, my daughter Olivia sat down to write her college application essay and reached for exactly these two rules — not because I told her to, but because they were what she had to explain who she'd become. She wrote: “On the surface, these may sound simple, but how these values were instilled in me has shaped my identity.” She got into UC Santa Barbara.

That was never the outcome I was chasing when we simplified this down twenty years ago. The outcome was a kid who could tell you, in her own words, exactly what she stands on. Two rules did that. A parenting manual never could have.