Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success

This book offers amazing insight about the ways we may unintentionally be harming our children AND what we can do about it. I have already started incorporating the suggestions, and find myself referring to it often. HIGHLY recommended!

Great book, anyone with less than easy teenagers can benefit from reading it. For example amongst many useful advices, the reference about number of kids abducted over the past decades to refute media hype about the unsafe environment our children are in was much appreciated. I agreed, I would rather teach my teenagers how to protect themselves and stay safe while they are learning to be independent.

The book's message is good, despite simple. The problem is that the author take to long to reach the point with too many humble examples. The ideia could be resumed in a paper of one tenth of the book.

Makes a great argument for the epidemic of over parenting, but not much practical advice on alternative methods or how to turn things around if you're already over parenting. There is also a chapter on the over use of stimulants, which I agree with, but as a life long sufferer of ADD I felt like she didn't get that some peoples brains actually work differently. It was offensive.

A friend in our book club recommended this book. I was very resistant to reading another parenting book! I am so glad she did! This book is exactly what I needed to read at exactly the right time! Thank you!!!

Makes a great argument for the epidemic of over parenting, but not much practical advice on alternative methods or how to turn things around if you're already over parenting. There is also a chapter on the over use of stimulants, which I agree with, but as a life long sufferer of ADD I felt like she didn't get that some peoples brains actually work differently. It was offensive.

A friend in our book club recommended this book. I was very resistant to reading another parenting book! I am so glad she did! This book is exactly what I needed to read at exactly the right time! Thank you!!!

I thoroughly enjoyed the audiobook, I can't get enough listening time! Of particular interest are the sections about the helicopter parents, especially the mother who complained to her son's supervisor about the long hours her son works on Wall Street. Her phone call led to her son's unceremonious termination when her son was greeted by a security guard bearing a box of belongings with a note affixed to it saying "ask your mother"! We're talking about typically developing adult children going to job interviews-with their parents acting like personal care attendants or house counselors of group homes! Spoon-feeding at its worst! You got to get this book! Once you open this book or listen to the audiobook CD or mp3, you'll get hooked!

This is an excellent book: warm, wise, and insightful. Julie's stories fit with my experience as a parent trying to raise caring, responsible, and resilient children, as the wife of a teacher in a high-powered school district who regularly interacts with parents who can't allow their children to make their own way, and as a teacher and adviser at a highly selective college, where I work with many students who have been over-parented. Having "won" the admissions race, some of my students arrive on campus with a long list of accomplishments but little sense of self, no toolkit to deal with setbacks, and an inability to organize their lives without a parent looking over their shoulder. One thing I love about this book is that as a parent herself, Julie knows that these are issues we ALL struggle with; no one is immune to the pressures of our achievement-oriented society. We ALL love our children and want them to be happy. Julie's book shows another way, and it ought to be at the top of everyone's summer reading list.

revolutionary book in these times. great perspective. smart, practical. I think the approach helps create capable resourceful and resilient kids and adults.

I couldn't think of any parent in the U.S. whom I could have a conversation with about this book (unless they brought it up first).
The current protective parenting belief system is so super thick.

If you want kids who can take care of themselves and be savvy and empowered enough to be who they can be, read this book.
If you want kids who move back home to be taken care of for large chunks of their life, who may remain aimless and entitled, pass it by.

Great book. I hope every parent in America reads this so we can try to return our educational system and school culture to some level of sanity! C'mon people! My daughter is 4 now and we need to act before she gets much older!

Fantastic read! My children will not be sweating college applications anytime soon, however there was a lot of really great info here on raising your kids from a very young age. So much of what the author presents just makes perfect sense with regards to the recent phenomena of helicopter parenting and the damage it does to your children's efficacy at guiding their own lives once they set out on their own

In my opinion, this is the best book ever written about the kind of overparenting that has produced the struggling young adults of the Millennial generation.

The mother of two young adults and former dean of freshmen at Stanford University knows what she’s talking about. She’s done her homework; the book cites hundreds of studies, interviews and stories that shock and convince. No other book has so thoroughly identified the reasons for this flawed parenting trend. Parents need to know that by over-managing a child’s path to success, they are making this success impossible.

One of the stories from the book comes from Ellen Nodelman, academic dean at Rockland Country Day School, where she has served for over 40 years: “A good half of the kids who could take the bus are driven by a parent. Rather than just drop kids off, parents of younger students will sometimes come inside the school with their kids, and some want to come right into the classroom with them. We try to keep them from coming beyond the main lobby. If they could do what they wanted they would spend the whole day in class with them. We’ve had some ask.”

What most parents fail to understand is that their child won’t magically engage vital strengths and skills such as grit, resilience and a strong work ethic, simply because their parents managed to get them into one of the “best” schools. A young adult will display these behavior patterns only if they are practiced and reinforced consistently throughout youth, and this won’t happen if parents are intervening and doing the hard things for the child.

In short, helicopter parents may be raising smart adults, but they are weak, indecisive and dependent adults, people in their mid-twenties who still need their parents to be full partners in their success. This is the kind of prospective employee that organizations have no use for.

Fully half of her book focuses on what well-intentioned parents need to do differently:
- Give kids unstructured time
- Teach life skills
- Teach them how to think
- Prepare them for hard work
- Let them chart their own path
- Normalize struggle
- Have a wider mindset about colleges
- Listen to them

How to Raise an Adult is a parenting book for our times. If anything can get the attention of helicopter parents and convince them to take another approach, it’s this book.

Well researched and well crafted. Likely to be a popular read this yeat. The author is from my area so as I read there are many familiar statement about driven parents and many are indeed a part of not only the local community but generously sprinkled through the the Silicon Valley schools. This is an important read so make time this summer!

Filled with real-life, real-time examples of how parents are doing perhaps too much for children to "help" them succeed. Dean Julie notes that in the process of doing for our children, we are taking away from our children the life experiences that help to shape them to become fully-formed humans. The Former Dean of freshmen at Stanford raises the call to parents and educators to create systems and mindsets that fit our children, not try to stuff our children into particular molds so that they are appealing to the Ivy League. Dean Julie is real, and so is her book. Let's create a better environment for our young humans so that we can optimize their development, for the greater good.

Raising children has never been an easy job and Julie Lythcott-Haims does a great job describing the particular challenges facing today's parents. In previous generations, large families meant that parental attention and involvement was at a premium and something of a luxury. Ironically, today's problems stem from "too much of a good thing" - too much contact, supervision, provision of concierge services and involvement. In a word, helicoptering. She makes a convincing case on the need for us all to step back and allow our children to find their own paths, fraught with setbacks and disappointments so they can develop resilience and make a healthy transition to adulthood.

I really like the book... It is geared toward parents who want their kids to go to highly selective universities, but still applicable to most parents who tend to do more for their kids than necessary. The goal is to help kids achieve independence.