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I watch my husband tell our 7-year-old "I'm proud of you" for putting on his shoes. For eating breakfast. For walking to the car. My son doesn't even look up anymore. Last week I counted: he said it seventeen times before noon. He wasn't always like this. When we first had kids, he was normal about praise. Celebrated the big stuff. Let the small stuff be small. Now he says "I'm so proud of you" when our daughter hands him the remote. When our son finishes his cereal. When they brush their teeth without being asked twice. I see our kids' faces. The eye rolls. The way they've stopped lighting up when he says it. It doesn't mean anything anymore because he says it about everything. He doesn't see what I see. How desperate he sounds. How he leans in too far when he says it, like he's trying to push the words all the way through them. I asked him about it once, gently. He got quiet for a long time. Then he said his dad never said it. Not once. Even when he made varsity. Even when he got into college. Even at his wedding. So now he says it constantly. Like if he floods our house with enough approval, it'll somehow travel backward and fill the silence he grew up in. But I watch our kids getting tired of hearing it. And I watch him not understanding why his desperate love feels heavy instead of light. I thought the problem was that he didn't get enough praise as a kid. It wasn't. His nervous system learned that approval was so scarce it had to be hoarded, performed for, earned over and over again. A body that learned love was conditional treats every ordinary Tuesday like an audition. I found a quiz at 2 AM while he was asleep next to me. Something about understanding your nervous system. I almost didn't send it to him. Seemed too simple. He took the Liven quiz on a Sunday morning. Three minutes. It showed him what I'd been watching for months — how his body was still scanning for approval that never came. How he was trying to heal his own childhood by over-correcting with ours. He still tells the kids he's proud of them. But now it's when they actually do something worth celebrating. They look up when he says it now. They believe him again. If you're the parent who says it too much because you never heard it enough... If you're trying to heal backward through your kids... If your love feels heavy when you meant it to feel light... Your nervous system built something around that absence. Something that's still running. Liven has a quiz. Three minutes. It shows you what's actually happening in your body and why it keeps reaching for what it never got. Link is below. 💙