How to Raise an Adult

As a former dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising at Stanford, author Julie Lythcott-Haims learned a good deal about what she calls “overhelped” students, who were so used to their parents’ telling them what to do that they couldn’t make decisions on their own. In this book, she outlines different strategies to help guardians avoid the “overparenting trap” and empower their children to succeed on their own. Among them: making kids clean up after themselves, refusing to bring forgotten items to school and asking kids how they plan to fix their problems instead of offering a solution. Lythcott-Haims, a mother of two, knows ceding control can be nerve-racking. But “for our kids’ sakes, and also for our own,” she writes, “we need to stop parenting from fear.”

–OLIVIA B. WAXMAN