My mom, Mirta Glyck, a retired New York City public school teacher with two master's degrees and 29 years in the classroom, opens this conversation by compressing her life into less than a minute: the war started when she was eight or nine years old, her mother counted more than 20 cousins, aunts, and uncles killed by the Nazis, and when she couldn't leave a difficult marriage, she gave herself a 10-year program.

This is what 94 years looks like when you had to build grit you weren't born with, and she has been watching parents and children across four generations ever since. Here's what Mirta knows that most parents today don't: that where there is more, children often feel less secure, and that every time we do too much for our kids, we take something away from their ability to believe in themselves.

What she has observed across a lifetime confirms what Dr. Daniel Amen shared with me in a recent episode, that the most effective parents are involved, firm, and kind, and she has seen firsthand what happens when that balance tips. You'll walk away from this conversation knowing that grit isn't born, it's forged, and that doing the next right thing, one day at a time, is exactly the philosophy that kept this woman standing through things most of us will never face.