Are we raising adults?

Prep School Admissions Prep School Parents
1

I just read Julie Lythcott-Haims How to Raise an Adult and also went to hear her speak. The book brings together two topics that are popular today - rising mental health issues in teens and young adults, and helicopter parenting. What Lythcott-Haims does that’s interesting is connect the two. She came to the conclusion (after spending about a decade as a freshman dean at Stanford) that the overparenting/helicopter parenting style is leading to kids who don’t have a sense of their own capabilities and fortitude, and sooner or later it can make them crack when turning to your parents to fix, solve, and do everything becomes unworkable.

Another interesting thing about the book is that she turns the lens on herself and talks about struggling to let go with her own kids. As a result, there are a lot more concrete suggestions for parents than most other books contain about how to back off, and what kinds of steps really matter for kids.

It was interesting attending the program. Clearly, the parents in the audience wanted to hear “Dean Julie” say that you could back off, let kids handle things for themselves, and in the end they would still get into Harvard. Actually, she was saying that if you back off and the kid doesn’t get into Harvard then they probably shouldn’t be there in the first place (she didn’t say this in so many words - it was more about your kid having a chance to develop their own self, and end up at the college that is the best fit for the person they are not the person you as a parent want them to be).

To get back to the boarding school issue - obviously as boarding school parents we have no choice but to let our kids handle more for themselves than kids at day school. Yet I do think there is still a lot of helicopter parenting/ivy league pressure from parents that weighs hard on our kids. Whether you’re read the book or not - do you think you’re doing what you can to make it possible for your kid to be an “adult” by the time they get to college? (by that Lythcott-Haims means making their own decisions, self-advocating, fixing their mistakes, looking to themselves to manage their daily lives). I’m interested to hear what others think!

2

I read an article about that and thought it was fascinating. I don’t doubt at all that she’s right that there’s a connection between these two trends. I’d describe my parenting style as the “you can lead a horse to water” method. It’s not totally hands off, because I think there are things that my kids would just never even think of if left entirely to their own devices – like going to talk to a teacher after getting a mediocre grade, or how to use their advisors effectively, or being thoughtful about what extracurriculars to get involved with. So I may make a fairly concrete suggestion – for instance, “I know you feel that you understand the mistakes you made on that math test and don’t need extra help, but you might want to at least tell your math teacher that you figured out where you went astray so that she knows you cared about the fact that you got it wrong and really are trying to improve.” I might thereafter follow up by asking my kid if they ever talked to the teacher about that test. But if they didn’t do it on their own, I’m not going to push the issue further with my kid, or god forbid, contact the teacher myself.

I guess what I’m saying is that I totally agree that the goal is to produce a young adult who self-advocates, makes their own decisions, fixes their own mistakes, etc, and the junior high/high school period is when they learn those skills. But they are in fact “skills” that need to be learned, that is to say most teenagers aren’t just naturally going to know these things. So parenting a teenager is about helping them learn those skills - which has to be accomplished neither by doing it all for them nor by dropping them in off the deep end.