Trace Gallagher has spent three decades as a Fox News anchor, paid to talk for a living. But raising two daughters, now 25 and 22, taught him the opposite skill matters more at home: staying quiet.
“These are different people,” Gallagher said of his daughters. “When they have a problem, they don’t really want you to talk to them about their problem. They just want you to hear them about the problem. You need to sit, you need to shut up and you need to listen.”
Gallagher writes about the shift in his new book, “Turns Out They Were Right All Along.” He admits it ran against his instincts.
“I’m a talkative guy. My career is talking,” Gallagher said. “When I was younger with them, I would try to explain what I think.”
Over time he realized his daughters weren’t asking for his analysis. They wanted to be heard.
“So then you learn through the years, you just listen, and you nod, and you only jump in when they ask you to jump in,” he said. “They want to be heard, they want to get it off their chest. Instead of screaming and yelling, these girls just want to talk it out. And when requested, they want your advice — but only when requested.”
Gallagher once pictured himself raising an “all-American quarterback” son. He now calls having daughters “the greatest thing in the world.”
A hard fall, a quiet response
Gallagher pointed to a moment during his youngest daughter’s youth soccer match, when she took a hard fall.
“I’m looking at her, and she’s looking at me, and I said, ‘Hey, it’s all good. You know, it’ll be fine,'” Gallagher recalled. “She scores a goal five minutes later, and she looks over at me…. It is soothing for them to know that somebody is really paying close attention.”
Fight your own battles
That approach stands apart from how his own mother, nicknamed “Big Red,” raised him. When an eight-year-old Gallagher tried to quit football, she didn’t intervene — she made him tell the coach himself.
“I’m sitting in my full pads in my mom’s avocado-green recliner … and I said, ‘I don’t want to play football anymore. I want to quit.’ And she said, ‘Fine, go quit,'” Gallagher said. “I walk on to the practice field and the coach looks at me, and he blows the whistle three times, and then he screams at me, ‘Gallagher! You’re late! Give me five laps.'”
He did as the coach ordered, and by the end of the day he was hooked. He went on to play football through college.
“[Coach] saw me coming from a mile away and was not about to let me quit — and my mom knew,” Gallagher said. “I think that today, kids need to be put in that very same position. If you want to do something, if you want to quit something, you need to do it. You need to fight your own battles.”
Gallagher says that discipline, more than raw talent, is what carries people forward. “You build your career, you build your character and you build your esteem. You build your confidence,” he said. “Career, confidence, character.”
He closes with a simple instruction for parents and everyone else: “Listen to people. Hear them out. Sometimes it hits you like a sledgehammer, and sometimes it seeps in, and you don’t really understand it for years. So listen.”
