Unless you’re a parent or student at Colorado Academy, you didn’t have the opportunity to hear their recent guest speaker, Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former dean of freshmen at Stanford and the author of How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success. But thankfully, their generous counseling department not only wrote a summary of the talk, but also posted an announcement to social media inviting anyone interested to read—and benefit from—gems like this one:
“As dean at Stanford, Lythcott-Haims was in an ideal position to see the harm that over-helping does to our children. Particularly in the age of the smartphone, when parents are just a text away, kids become dependent on this lifeline and rely on it because they’ve never had to figure out life’s little details on their own. She met a student who texted her mom several time zones away to figure out where one of her college classes was held. The student had many more resources to figure it out being the one physically on campus, yet she had her mom ‘Google it’ for her. Parents are reaching out to college professors, residence hall directors, and deans to manage details and disagreements that students can and should be navigating on their own. If this is the culture we create with our children, when and how does it change?”
You can read the entire summary here. Thanks, CA counselors, for sharing the lessons with those who couldn’t be there.