Episode 18: Over-Parenting is Harming Your Kids with Julie Lythcott-Haims

Jul 25, 2021

2 min read

Updated: Jan 2, 2025

Brief summary of show:

In this week’s episode, I sit down with Julie Lythcott-Haims, the New York Times bestselling author of the anti-helicopter parenting manifesto How to Raise an Adult which gave rise to a TED Talk that has more than 5 million views.

Julie believes in humans and is deeply interested in what gets in our way. Her second book is the critically-acclaimed and award-winning prose poetry memoir Real American, which illustrates her experience as a Black and biracial person in white spaces. A third book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, is out now.

Listen in as we talk about:

The boundary between letting your kids do things for themselves and you doing it for them
The four-step method to teaching any child any skill
Why we over-parent and why it’s detrimental to our kids’ success
How to step outside of your comfort zone and live on purpose

Julie is a former corporate lawyer and Stanford dean, and she holds a BA from Stanford, a JD from Harvard, and an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. She serves on the board of Common Sense Media, and on the advisory board of LeanIn.Org, and she is a former board member at Foundation for a College Education, Global Citizen Year, The Writers Grotto, and Challenge Success. She volunteers with the hospital program No One Dies Alone.

She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner of over thirty years, their itinerant young adults, and her mother.