Jet Li parenting daughter Jada through a period of mental health struggles became the turning point that led him to abandon what he called the ‘general’ approach to fatherhood, one in which a parent issues directives and expects compliance. Speaking on the Daily Stoic podcast, hosted by Ryan Holiday, Li described a gradual, deliberate shift from authority figure to friend.
From provider to listener: how Jet Li rethought fatherhood
Li’s starting point, he explained, was shaped by circumstance as much as culture. His own father died when he was 2, leaving him with no paternal model to draw on. Growing up in a traditional household, he came to believe that a parent’s core obligation was practical: ‘You work hard, make a lot of money, then give them a good education,’ he said. ‘That’s good enough.’
That understanding held until it didn’t. When his daughter Jada began struggling with her mental health, Li said he did not know ‘how to help.’ Despite having spent years studying Buddhism and mental training, he found himself unable to reach her once she withdrew. The tools he had built up over a lifetime simply did not apply.
Li has four daughters in total: two from his first marriage and two from his second. It was the crisis with Jada that exposed the limits of the model he had been operating under.
Jet Li parenting daughter on equal terms, not from above
‘You’re the general. They’re the soldiers,’ Li said, describing the default dynamic he recognised in himself and in parents more broadly. The problem, he came to see, was that soldiers do not confide in generals. They comply, or they withdraw.
So Li said he turned down work and committed to something different: ‘Through this journey, I try to do everything I can with my daughter. Become a listener, become their friend.’ The shift required him to retrain instincts that had served him in other areas of life but were actively working against him as a father. ‘Become their buddy, become their roommate, become their friend. Then talk to them,’ he said.
The hardest part, he said, was learning to hear without immediately responding with advice. ‘Sometimes I need to learn to hear. Don’t give an opinion. Just hear.’ For someone accustomed to directing, that restraint did not come naturally.
In a December 2023 interview on a Taiwanese talk show, Li described asking his daughter to identify his shortcomings directly, so that they could build a genuine friendship rather than a managed one. She told him he was self-centred and arrogant. Her bluntness initially upset him, he said, but he came to be grateful for it. The willingness to receive that kind of honesty, rather than deflect or dismiss it, was itself part of the change he was trying to make.
The candour Li sought from his daughter mirrors a broader pattern that Business Insider has tracked among public figures reassessing how they parent. In March 2025, Kate Hudson said that accountability for her own mistakes had become central to her approach: ‘Sometimes in conflict, you go too far, and you need to say you’re sorry, instead of teaching them that you doubled down.’ In August, Matthew McConaughey said he had adjusted his tone as his children grew, becoming ‘less judgmental when they’re saying something’ in order to keep the lines of communication open.
Li’s framing on the Ryan Holiday-hosted podcast is distinct from those accounts in one respect: he is describing not just a change in behaviour but a recognition that the entire structure he had imposed on family life was the obstacle. Money, he concluded, could solve some problems but not all of them, and the ones it could not solve were precisely the ones that mattered most to his daughter.