Have you ever done your children's homework for them? Have you driven to school to drop off an assignment that they forgot? Have you done a college student's laundry? What about coming along to Junior's first job interview?
These examples are drawn from two new books — How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims and The Gift of Failureby Jessica Lahey. Both are by women writing from their experience as parents and as educators. Lahey is a middle school teacher and a writer for The New York Times and The Atlantic; Lythcott-Haims was the longtime freshman dean at Stanford.
Interview excerpt:
How do you respond to the criticism that the problems you're describing affect only privileged kids?
Lahey: Guilty. ... However, just because some kids are suffering more than others from a particular kind of trauma — whether that's poverty or depression or anxiety — that does not mean that the trauma is not worth our time or our ink. The good news is that the effects of high anxiety and academic pressure are far easier to heal than poverty, violence and childhood trauma. If parents and teachers in high SEL schools would just calm down and value individual autonomy, learning, competence, and personal fulfillment more than grades and wish-fulfillment, we could fix the high-SEL problems pretty darn fast.
Lythcott-Haims: It's a true statement and I don't see it as criticism, actually. If the kids subjected to this type of parenting weren't suffering greater rates of anxiety and depression than the general population, then maybe we could wave this off as not-a-real problem. But they are suffering; there's no way around that fact. I certainly hope we won't divert policy and resources away from those kids in order to help the elite; it doesn't take policy or resources to fix the problem I'm writing about, after all — parents just need to back the hell off.
[For more of this story, written by Anya Kamenetz, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/ed...overparenting-crisis]
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