How To Raise An Adult & Be An Adult
Conversations with Former Stanford Dean — Julie Lythcott-Haims — About Her First Book, on Parenting, and Her Latest, on Adulting
As a father of three young adults, I have spent a good amount of time in recent years searching out leading voices on parenting. I was struck when I first discovered the work of this week's guest, Julie Lythcott-Haims.
When Lythcott-Haims was Dean of Freshmen at Stanford University, a first-year student, struggling to find the location of a class, walked into her office.
She said ‘Dean Julie, I don’t know where my next class is. And I said ‘Oh, well, we can help you figure that out.’ And she’s like, ‘it’s okay. I’ve just dialed my mom.’ …. She decides to call her mom in another country, many time zones away to have the mom figure out where the next class is.
It was an eye opener for the Dean.
As mom answered the phone, she sort of waved me off politely, ‘I don't need you anymore. I've got my mom here on the other end.’ And I began to see the manifestation of what researchers have said is the world's longest umbilical cord, which is the cell phone.
Lythcott-Haims drew on her decade advising undergraduates for her first book: How To Raise An Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success.
We sat down for a Wavemaker Conversation in 2015, when How To Raise An Adult became a New York Times bestseller.
What I saw as Dean of Freshmen was over the years, more and more of our students were coming highly accomplished in a transcript and resumé sense, but really quite unfamiliar with their own selves.… They'd not been allowed to fall or fail. And so they'd arrived at this destination, ill-equipped for what real life would sort of throw at them.
In our conversation, Lythcott-Haims provided approaches for parents to ensure that we don’t “inadvertently rob our children of agency and resilience when we do too much for them.”
You can listen on the Soundcloud link below, or read along with the transcript here.
If your children have moved on to college or beyond, then our Wavemaker Conversation about her newest book, out this week, is for them. The book is called Your Turn: How To Be An Adult.
And because the book is aimed at young adults, I had my producer, Zahin Sen Das, who graduated from college last spring, enter the conversation. Click the image below to watch their exchange about feeling in limbo and searching for purpose in these unsettling times.
You can listen to the entire episode about Your Turn on the podcast player here.
If you do, you may understand why I believe that Julie Lythcott-Haims, who went from adviser of undergrads — to adviser of parents — and now adviser to a new generation of adults — is becoming a Dean for all seasons.
You can follow her and buy her books here.
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