How to Apply How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success
Discover why the most loving parenting habits might be the ones quietly holding your kid back
About This Book
A mother was arrested for letting her nine-year-old play in a park while she worked her shift at McDonald's. A Stanford dean discovered that some of her most capable students couldn't ask a stranger for help carrying a box to their dorm room. Julie Lythcott-Haims spent ten years as Stanford's freshman dean, watching thousands of impressive eighteen-year-olds arrive on campus quietly unable to function without a parent nearby. Drawing on more than a hundred interviews, hard data on abduction rates, college rankings, and campus mental health, plus her own overparenting of her two children, she traces exactly how safety, opportunity, and love curdled into control, and what raising a genuinely independent adult actually requires.About the Author
Julie Lythcott-Haims served as Stanford University's freshman dean for a decade, working closely with tens of thousands of incoming students and their families and later sitting on Stanford's mental health task force. A graduate of Stanford and Harvard Law School, she raises two teenagers with her husband in Palo Alto, at the heart of Silicon Valley's overparenting culture. She writes candidly throughout the book about having been, by her own account, one of the overinvolved parents she describes, drawing on research, more than a hundred interviews, and her own family's experience.
Biggest Takeaway
You'll recognize which of your daily habits, the reminder text, the rewritten essay, the ride you didn't need to give, are quietly training your child to need you rather than cope without you. You'll get a concrete, staged method for handing any task over for good, a clearer read on how much weight to give safety fears and college rankings, and language for catching yourself before you finish a project or make a call that isn't yours to make. Expect calmer conversations about grades and activities, fewer moments of doing your child's work for them, and a child who calls to share news rather than to be rescued.
Key Insights from This Book
Explore the most important ideas and learn how to apply them in your life.
A mother went to jail for letting her daughter play unsupervised
What haunted a Stanford dean after one student's blunt question
One phone call from a trainee's mother cost him his Wall Street job
The midnight glue gun session that wasn't the fourth grader's work
Three ordinary habits a psychologist says quietly damage children's minds
A straight A student who never learned to make her own bed
Why a magazine's swimsuit issue business model decides where teenagers apply
Two very different kinds of parents in one airport line
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