Book #55: How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success by Julie Lythcott-Haims

This book is both breaking my brain and making me scribble a bunch of notes of things to do at the same time. On the one hand, I CANNOT BELIEVE SOME OF THESE STORIES ARE REAL. Lythcott-Haims has a lot of anecdotes and stories from her time as a freshman dean at Stanford to perfectly exemplify the twenty-first century "helicopter parent"--parents who show up to college with their kids, who show up to GRAD SCHOOL with their kids, who go with their kids to their first job interviews and try to negotiate their salaries for them, who try to handhold their kids through life and never know how or when to stop and let their kids finally grow up. These parents have one goal in life--to help their kids get into the best college they can so that they can get a good job and make good money and become successful. And they will do everything they can to make sure their kids get there, from waking their kids up every day for school, doing their homework, and yelling at their coaches to get them on the varsity team, to paying thousands of dollars for SAT coaching and helping them to get into Stanford. These stories are so crazy and yet totally believable--because we all know people like that.

But Lythcott-Haims is trying to fight against the pressure and the craziness and to get parents to CALM DOWN. She argues that we cannot prevent every bump and bruise and scrape our kids get into. That is life--they need to learn how to fail, how to get hurt, and how to get back up again. This is called resilience and it's an important life skill they will not survive without once they get into the real world. Kids need to learn how to work and how to do things for themselves, life skills, other than just doing homework and doing well in school. They need to be able to make themselves breakfast, to get themselves up in the morning, to manage their time, and to call and make their own doctor's appointments. And you can start very young to make sure that they are able to do things on their own that they are capable of. She says that you should make sure you're NOT doing things for them that they are capable of doing by themselves. I was thinking about that, and today I asked Dane to try and buckle his bottom buckles on his carseat by himself. He's been trying to do it for ages, but today I pushed him a little bit and he DID it! Without my helping or coaching him at all! He was so proud of himself, AND it makes my life a lot easier because now he can get in the car and buckle himself in all by himself. Hallelujah! I knew he was capable of it and he could try to do it.

I've always thought that raising independent kids is one of my main goals as a parent. There are other important traits that are high up there too, but if you think about it, the whole POINT of being a parent is to give your kids the life preparation they will need to eventually grow up and be on their own. So it has been really interesting reading this book and getting specific ideas about how to help your kids be independent and self-motivated and hard-working. I don't really think we were in much danger of overparenting like some of the parents in her book--when you come from a big family, and plan to have a big(ish) family, I don't think that's usually the mindset you have--but this gives me even more motivation to consciously work on helping my kids to develop individually and to give them the chances to do things on their own, whatever age they are.

In the final chapter, Lythcott-Haims summarizes her point into these four principles, that I wanted to write down just for me to remember:

1. The world is much safer than we've been led to believe, and our child needs to learn how to thrive in it rather than be protected by it.
2. A checklisted childhood designed to lead to a narrow definition of success robs children of the proper developmental opportunities of childhood and can lead to psychological harm.
3. A child learns, grows, and ultimately succeeds by diving into what interests them, doing and thinking for themselves, trying and failing and trying again, and developing mastery through effort.
4. Family life is richer and more rewarding for all when parents aren't hovering over and facilitating every moment of a kid's life.