Recent Read: How to Raise an Adult

I recently finished the book, “How to Raise an Adult: Break free of the overparenting trap and prepare your kid for success” by Julie Lythcott-Haimes. As you can probably guess, the book focuses on the effect that our hyper vigilant parenting is having on the generations we are raising. Sometimes books/topics fall into your lap at just the right time. That would be the case with this book. It triggered us to take a candid look at what opportunities we were missing to allow our kids to grow in confidence by doing less parenting. I have a feeling it won’t be the last pivot point in this journey of raising adults, but I am grateful for the opportunity the book gave us to make some shifts.

One of the interesting aspects of this book is that that author, Julie Lythcott-Haims, wrote it from her perspective having served as the freshman dean at Stanford University for many years. She comes at the topic of overparenting from the endpoint, you might say. When children have entered into adulthood, yet don’t seem to be arriving with the necessary life skills. She tells story after story of young adults unable to make decisions for themselves, lacking in confidence in their own abilities, and crushed under the pressure of parental expectations. She was seeing the effects of overparented kids manifest itself as anxiety, stress and depression in college students.

Although Lythcott-Haims spends quite a bit of time addressing the pressure-cooker that is the college admissions process, she also spends quite a bit of the book addressing the new(ish) parenting culture we live in. She addresses the intense concern to make everything as safe as it can be. The narrow-minded focus to ensure that our kids getting into a handful of elite colleges so that they can have namedrop-worthy careers. The overscheduling of extracurriculars and diminishing free play opportunities. She accurately points out that all of this is done from a place of love and parents wanting the best for their children. She sympathizes with the pressures as a parent of a middle and high schooler herself and comes at it from a place of understanding, not accusation.

Starting at a young age, we seem to involve ourselves in their lives a whole lot more than our own parents did. And in doing so, we are taking away the opportunity for our kids to grow in self-confidence and independence. In the author’s words:

“We’ve been given the awesome, humbling task of helping a young human unfold. What they need most of all is our love and support as they go about the hard and joyful work of learning the skills and mindsets needed to be a thriving, successful, adult.” 

The real actionable and encouraging part of the book was Part 3, “Another Way”. This is where she outlines how we can make positive changes in our overparenting culture. Lythcott-Haims goes on to identify several areas where we can help our children grow and develop into resilient and confident adults. The topics and recommendations she dives into in detail include:

• The value of free play and unstructured time for children (at all ages)
• The importance of teaching life skills at school and at home
• Giving kids the opportunity to speak for themselves at a young age
• Preparing them for hard work
• Letting them chart their own path.
• Normalizing struggle and not preventing it
• Being there to support who they are, not who you want them to be.

The book has a wonderful checklist of things children should start being able to do for themselves starting as young as 2 and 3 years-old. I am ashamed to admit that we were woefully behind in some areas. But we actually read the list together as a family and told the the boys we were going to catch up on some things that they should be doing for themselves now because we want to make sure we are helping them grow up to be independent.

If you are wondering how you transition your kids to starting to do things for themselves, Lythcott-Haims recommends a transition where:

• Your child watches as you do the task
• You do the task together
• Your child does the task with you watching
• Your child is able to complete the task independently.

I am sure that every person who reads this will find areas where they are doing well, and their own unique weak spots. For us personally, this has been eye-opening in identifying areas where we can help our children less often. We realized that we were taking on a lot of tasks because it was faster and more convenient. Not realizing that by doing everything for our kids and even speaking for them we could be neglecting the life skills that they need to be learning.

We are now looking for opportunities in our daily lives to get them to step up and do things that they were used to being done for them. One example of several changes we have made is the morning routine. We used to just spend all morning telling them what to do. “Go get dressed”. “Brush your teeth.” “Put on your shoes.” Not only was that annoying to have to do, more importantly, it was teaching them nothing. How will they ever learn initiative, timing and process if they are just waiting for the next command? Other examples include allowing them to go to the park by themselves for short intervals, and having them pay for their own items at a store so that they get more practice interacting with adults.

The other way that this book helped tremendously was in reminding me that the role of being a parent is to help your child become who they are, versus who you want them to be. Basically, as hard as it may be, stay in the passenger seat of their life, not the driver’s seat. If you push them into a career or major because you want them to  make a certain salary and have security, no doubt it is coming from a good place. However, if that is not being driven or decided on by the child, you most likely are doing more harm than good.

Although I came at this book’s message from the perspective of a family with elementary-age kids, there is value in reading it no matter what age your kids may be. If you have toddlers/preschoolers, you will get such insight into what you might be doing in the name of keeping them “safe” that is not necessarily helpful. If you have middle schoolers or high schoolers, the perspective on the pressures of extracurriculars and preparing for the college admissions gauntlet will be extremely eye-opening. And if you have a child in college or preparing to enter the workforce, there is plenty of actionable guidance around that. I hope you enjoy the read as much as I did!

Posted by Ale & filed under Books. This post has 9 comments.