How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success
Julie Lythcott-Haims
Top 10 Best Quotes
“If you’re overfocused on your kid, you’re quite likely underfocusing on your own passion. Despite what you may think, your kid is not your passion. If you treat them as if they are, you’re placing them in the very untenable and unhealthy role of trying to bring fulfillment to your life. Support your kid’s interests, yes. Be proud—very proud—of them. But find your own passion and purpose. For your kid’s sake and your own, you must.”
“Why did parenting change from preparing our kids for life to protecting them from life, which means they’re not prepared to live life on their own?”
“When children aren’t given the space to struggle through things on their own, they don’t learn to problem solve very well. They don’t learn to be confident in their own abilities, and it can affect their self-esteem. The other problem with never having to struggle is that you never experience failure and can develop an overwhelming fear of failure and of disappointing others. Both the low self-confidence and the fear of failure can lead to depression or anxiety,” Able said.”
“Not only does overparenting hurt our children; it harms us, too. Parents today are scared, not to mention exhausted, anxious, and depressed.”
“A DIFFERENT KIND OF CHECKLIST If we want our kids to have a shot at making it in the world as eighteen-year-olds, without the umbilical cord of the cell phone being their go-to solution in all manner of things, they’re going to need a set of basic life skills. Based upon my observations as dean, and the advice of parents and educators around the country, here are some examples of practical things they’ll need to know how to do before they go to college—and here are the crutches that are currently hindering them from standing up on their own two feet: 1. An eighteen-year-old must be able to talk to strangers—faculty, deans, advisers, landlords, store clerks, human resource managers, coworkers, bank tellers, health care providers, bus drivers, mechanics—in the real world.”
“Resilience is built from real hardship and cannot be bought or manufactured.”
“There’s a popular, potent story right now that says success is a straight line from the right school to the right college to the right internship to the right grad school to your chosen profession.” “Raise your hand if this is the path that you took.” About 5 percent of the hands went up. “That’s right,” she said. “In any group of people only 1–10 percent have taken a straight trajectory. The much more common route is circuitous.”
“Yes we dream of our selves, of what we will become,” Chi Ling told me, “but it’s the environment that tells us what is possible. I don’t think our dreams are limitless; they are bounded by the society we live in and its conception of what is respectable and good.”
“We’re depriving our kids of the chance to do the work of life for themselves.”
“Taking the long view, we need to teach our kids street smarts, like the importance of walking with a friend instead of alone, and how to discern bad strangers from the overwhelming majority of good ones. If we prevent our children from learning how to navigate the world beyond our front yard, it will only come back to haunt them later on when they feel frightened, bewildered, lost, or confused out on the streets.”
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Book Keywords:
failure, resilience, independence, parenting
