How to Raise An Adult Book Summary

Book Summary

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Brief Summary

No one ever said that parenting would be easy. No one ever said that parenting would be worth the effort 100 percent of the time. However, one thing is for certain: in order to raise happy kids, you must strike the balance between challenging and supporting your children’s endeavors. You must set rules, but explain why they exist. You must know when to step in and involve yourself and you should also know when to step back and let events unfold on their own. How to Raise an Adult turns the idea of overparenting on its head and explains why, in our efforts to raise fully functional young adults, we are actually underestimating the resilience of our children.

Through the employment of an authoritarian parenting style as well as instilling confidence in our kids by allowing them to stand on their own two feet, we will raise a generation of smart, well-adjusted adults who know how to advocate for the things they want out of life.

About the Author

Julie Lythcott-Haims was born in 1967 in Lagos, Nigeria. The former Dean of Freshmen and Undergraduate Advising at Stanford University is an author, speaker, and activist who studies the barriers that commonly prevent humans from being their most authentic selves. In addition to How to Raise an Adult, Lythcott-Haims has written and published two other books, Real American: A Memoir and Your Turn: How to Be an Adult. Currently, Lythcott-Haims is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at San Francisco’s California College of the Arts.

Topics

Parenting

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Key Insights

Parents always want their children to have better than what they had and to achieve more than what they were able to achieve. Most parents hope for this, anyway. For these parents, the internal battle is ever-present: how do we best support our children while simultaneously encouraging them to be their own true selves? How do we allow them to make independent choices while still preventing them from enduring big missteps? The line is a fine one and many parents dance precariously close to the edge.

At the end of the day, helicopter parenting is a disservice to our children, and even if it feels like the appropriate course of action at a particular time, its long-term effects can actually be very harmful to our kids. Let’s keep the helicopters in the sky...and the parents safely on the ground.

Too Much

Helicopter parenting, a term that was coined in the 1990s, refers to people who hover--like helicopters--over their children rather than allowing them to make choices independently.

We see this trend among parents in the United States, especially as children go off to college and become overwhelmed at the prospect of handling life’s nuances all on their own after being coddled for so long. We see college students who are incredibly book smart, but are ill-equipped to do their own laundry or to figure out how to set up a bank account.

In life, there is certainly a lot to be afraid of. We’ve got accidents, strangers, and illnesses. But, it is important to remember that our fears are not always directly proportional to the level of actual risk we face.

For instance, a common fear of both parents and children alike is kidnapping. As it turns out, though, your child is significantly more likely to die in an equestrian accident than be abducted.

But, helicopter parents are not motivated to protect and intervene in their children’s lives based on fear alone. These well-intended but often misguided individuals are instead thinking about opportunity. Simply put: they want their kids to succeed.

As a means to this end, you will see helicopter parents packing their children’s resumes with every extracurricular activity under the sun, even if the child would really just like some time to decompress.

Don’t forget, though. Just because your child is accepted into a big-name school or lands the job you had always hoped they would have, this doesn’t mean they will be happy. And, at the end of the day, isn’t our childrens’ true happiness what should really matter most?

Battling the Demons

So, we’ve talked about why overparenting is bad ideologically, but in practice, it can also lead to serious health concerns. Kids who grow up without learning how to connect with others and how to complete basic life tasks often end up socially shunned and isolated as they get older.

According to a 2013 study out of the American College Health Association, 83.4 percent of college freshmen felt overwhelmed by their obligations and as many as 8 percent had gone so far as to consider suicide.

Of...