Over-Parenting is Harming Your Kids with Julie Lythcott-Haims
[00:01:53]Why she wrote her first book:
So that book is written from the vantage point of my being a Dean at Stanford and being a mom in Silicon valley. So like you, I'm a parent. My own kids are now crazy for me to say, I just can't believe it, but they're 22 and almost 20. In fact, by the time this comes out, my little one will be 20.
[00:02:11] And so here I am raising kids and Silicon valley Palo Alto, trying to do the right thing. And I'm at this elite institution where my job is to advocate for and care about other people's grown-up kids. And I began to see some things that were really concerning parents were behaving at the university level in ways they had been behaving K through 12.
[00:03:03] Being a Dean at Stanford:
And I was really in this place of rooting for these young adults to be able to register themselves for class and all their own routine problems and make choices and go off in directions that felt right to them without sort of being overly attended. Um, Like such an encroach. Into their agency. And of course we were seeing the rise in mental health challenges in the young adult population.
[00:03:27] Realizing the problem:
I'm cutting a ten-year-olds meat and for anybody listening, 10 is too old to be cutting your kids. Meat 10 is too old to be bathing your kid in the bathtub. Okay. Kids have to learn to do things for themselves.
[00:04:11] They need increasing privacy over their bodies. They need increasing decision-making power. They need increasing problem solving opportunities. Okay. So I'm seeing all of this and feeling really, once I got that, I was part of the problem. I became very invested in understanding what are we doing? Why are we doing it?
[00:05:25] Love versus enabling:
You know, food nourishes us, you know, eating is important for our health and wellness. Usually there's some good family time around it. These are good things we want to be offering. We also want to know our kids can learn to do this stuff for themselves. So it's both. Let me give you an example of the four step method we can use to teach any child any skill.
[00:05:43]So let's go to making a grilled cheese sandwich. I don't know if your family. Grilled cheese. Of course. Yeah. Every kid has to learn every skill before they, you know, at some point in life and much of it before they leave our home. So making a sandwich, a hot sandwich on the stove. the four step method for teaching any kid, any skill is first, you do it for them.
[00:06:01] Then you do it with them. Then you watch them do it. And finally they can do it. So in the early years you're making the grilled cheese sandwich and your little one is in the family room or in their booster chair or wherever you're doing all the work they're going to. They have nothing to do with the work of it.
[00:07:40] When did the over parenting trend start?
As you know, from the book it's I lay it out in the introduction, basically in the eighties, in the mid eighties, there were a lot of changes at foot, a foot around safety around kids, activities, more
So stranger danger was born. right play dates were born. Kids could no longer play freely. Parents had to arrange it or over it and intervene. We began doing the self-esteem movement. Yeah, you're amazing all the time patient trophies which led to the expectation that they would get constant praise and feedback and everything.
[00:14:20] And also what you want is trust between parent and child. You want to say you're old enough now to be out until I presume, like, let me give you an example about curfews. I'm a curfew person.
[00:14:32] If I've told you my kids are now 20 and 22, when my daughter was a freshman in high school, I think her weekend curfew was. 10:00 PM. And she said you know, mom, none of my friends have curfews. This is unfair. And I was like, really? How do they, how do they do it? How do your friend's parents do it? She says, well, my friends just text their parents constantly through the night.
The New book [00:18:36] Okay. Your turn. Yes. And, and
[00:18:40] Natalie: [00:18:40] knowing who you are there it is. It's a beautiful book. I'm excited to read it. I loved your writing and I think it's a great transition. And you can tell me more about the book because we have to love ourselves. We have to know who we are.
[00:18:53] We have to always become a better person. And part of doing that is not relying on on the happiness of our children to be happy.
[00:19:02]Julie: [00:19:02] Yeah, no one can give you happiness. You've got to find that space within yourself. They say that happiness is the distance between what you have and what you want.
[00:19:12] And so if there's a great distance are less happy. So the, the greater, the distance, the less happy you are, you want what you have and what you want to be as close together.
