The Self-Driven Child by William Stixrud and Ned Johnson

I am surprised by how much I loved this book. I really, really loved it. This is definitely a parenting book I want to buy, and to revisit again and again. It was all about children's need for autonomy, and our need (as parents) to allow them their autonomy and the ability to make informed choices about their lives. The authors work with a lot of kids who are super stressed out and struggling with their mental health because they feel like they have one shot to get into their college of choice and if they make one mistake or miss out on one type of extracurricular, they will have ruined their whole future. But the whole message of the book was that this is a FALSE assumption, there are plenty of paths to success, and everyone succeeds in different ways and at different times, and is it really worth it if you're giving up your happiness and mental health forever just to get into college? They said, "Agency may be the one most important factor in human happiness and well-being." This seemed like it went along really well with the message of Parenting with Love and Logic, about giving your children choices and allowing them to decide what they want to do. 

Two quotes I really liked (there were plenty more, but I didn't take great notes): "How do you capitalize on positive or tolerable stress while avoiding the bad kind? It is simple in theory, but tricky in execution: kids need a supportive adult around they need time to recover from a stressful event, and they need to have a sense of control over their lives." And: "When your home is a calm space, free of excessive fighting, anxiety, and pressure, it becomes the place to regenerate that your kids need."

It seems like one thing I can really work on as a parent--not that I think I'm doing a bad job at it yet, but I think I could always improve--is by making sure I don't TELL my kids what to do, but explain things to them and help them to come to the decision by themselves. I need to ask them to help instead of yelling at them to do it. I feel like this book gave a lot of great examples of how to talk to our kids (not explicitly, but in just the way they described things) that I think will/would be very helpful when we have teenagers.