Speaker 1:
Today my guest is Julie Lythcott-Haims. I'm so glad you're here. I'll say a little bit about you and then I just want to jump here, jump right in. If you don't know, and I hope you do already is the author of the anti helicopter parenting manifesto, How To Raise An Adult. What a great line, and the New York times bestselling author of the critically acclaimed, a memoir on race, Real American. And then you have this brand new book. I really want to dive into it. It's called Your Turn, How To Be An Adult. And I just get chills thinking about how important it is and, and, and this niche that you have landed in that is so underserved and so vital to those of us wanting to raise kids who grow up to be who they're supposed to be. So thank you for that. And I'll just add that you're a former Stanford Dean known for her fierce advocacy for young adults. Yeah. Anyway, Julie, you're someone I look to for clarity on all things about related to raising a great human and I want to get started. But today as it happened, we're recording this on, on a, quite a momentous day, which is in the aftermath of the George Floyd trial and the verdict of guilty. Please just jump in wherever you want.

Speaker 2:
I'm grateful to be here, Susan and grateful to be with you and your amazing community. And yesterday when the verdict came down, I was in my home on my couch. I'd been avoiding the news of the trial, which has been hard to do well on a book tour because every time I'm in the green room, for some piece of radio or TV, they're talking about it, or they're talking about some other act of police brutality against black and Brown people. And when the verdict came, I cried with relief and with exhale. And then I noticed within 15 minutes, my body was just limp, weary. I don't mean I was paralyzed. I just mean I was overcome with exhaustion almost as a body does when you're carrying something heavy and you just set it down and then you realize the weight of what you've been carrying.

Speaker 2:
And you're just like, wow, I am tired. And here I am a light-skinned black biracial woman. I am highly privileged. I have white adjacency through my mother and through my husband, I have not led the typical black experience. I 100% know that and yet I am black and my heart is with blackness and with black people and all people, I tend to root for the most marginalized among us. I root for the underdog. I just really rooting for all of us to make it and for all lives to actually matter. And so I appreciate that you opened with this, I think for anybody listening, who's like, this is not what I came here to listen to. I just want you to know that it's so important in these times, whenever there is an act of violence perpetrated against a community, a particular degree of suffering within a community, whether it's the tree of life, synagogue in Pittsburgh or the Asian American community in Atlanta or, or, or dot.dot, there's always human tragedy and suffering it behooves the rest of us to pause when we're with the people most closely impacted and just say, Hey, how are you?

Speaker 2:
You're on my mind. How are you today? Just wanted to check in. You're not obligated to respond, but that's the kind of kindness that so many of us are looking for from our colleagues, from our family members, from our friends. In other words that you didn't say, Hey, how you doing Julie? That signals to me that you get it. And I'm grateful for that. And so yeah, thanks for asking.

Speaker 1:
I mean, it's really, I think just because I want to circle to your newest book, it's so overlapping to think about the kind of humans we want to raise the kind of adults that we want to send forth into the world. So, you know, you're talking about your turn, how to be an adult. And I know that that's a book largely for 18 and up, but kids to actually read, to start to learn about some of the practicalities of moving through the world as a grownup, because we don't teach those skills. And I hope that you'll say a little bit more about it, but, but also, you know, that the big picture is the values that we instill on a day-to-day basis in our children, the things we pay attention, attention to the things we value and honor in front of them. And, and so really the work that parents are doing and in our little way, you know, the parents that I work with parents, you know, I have a membership twice a week, twice a month, I'm doing, you know, how to get your shoes on or how they stopped sibling arguments. And it might seem small, but the outcome is huge. So can you say more about this idea of the adults that we're raising and how to support them to be, to be who they can be?

Speaker 2:
Absolutely. And I so respect every aspect of your content and it does seem small. And yet it is in through these cumulative small moments that a human grows from being an, a helpless infant to being a freestanding or freely moving adult. These aren't two separate stages of life. It's a continuum. I will define adulting as the stage of life between childhood and death. If you survive your childhood, you become an adult. And what does that mean? It means you're no carried on someone else's hip. You're no longer handheld through life. You feel a degree of agency. I can a degree of resilience. I can cope and you have good character. I know there's more than me in this world, and I have to be mindful of how I'm interacting with others. I think frankly, those are the three things our children need to leave our home with.

Speaker 2:
If they leave our homes and go out into the world of work or college or the military, or I think those are the three broadest ways to describe the options. If they leave with those pillars or foundations underneath them they're going to succeed in life, period. I don't care what college they go to, what their GPA is, how much money they make. They will lead a meaningful, successful, purposeful life. So we've got to teach them those things. And part of it is skills. And part of it is values as you've articulated and in our current Milia and certain communities in this world, particularly communities of means we're doing too much. We're holding them by the hand too long, were metaphorically holding the hands of our 19 year olds when we should have let go of their hands at seven and stood next to them and said, okay, how you doing?

Speaker 2:
You know, not stand them on the edge of a cliff and hold and let go. But you know, the path of life is meant to be first. We hold them, then we hold their hands. Then we walk alongside them. And then we know they can walk by themselves. We have to contemplate our own death. Susan, we have to look into the abyss of our own mortality and realize we'll be gone. And our greatest success as parents is to know that our children can fend without us. Not that we will do everything for them and always be there for them. That feels like love. It's not love is to teach them to do for themselves so that when we can't any longer, they're still perfectly fine.

Speaker 1:
Hmm. Wow. What an incredible analogy. First we hold them. Then we hold their hand and we walk alongside them. I, I, it's brilliant. It's so elegant and, and clear. And I love this thing that you talk about fending. And I know that you also talk about resilience. Can you sort of speak to some of that?

Speaker 2:
Fending is just taking care of business. As I like to say, it is the basic basics that a human has to be able to do for themselves. And I want to say here, caveat this is barring significant disability. There are some among us who will need a caretaker in life, always, and that's valid. And that person still wants to be treated with dignity and to have as much agency as possible for the things they can be in charge of. So let's never forget that, but barring a significant disability, it is expected that you will be able to take care of your own needs, which means be able to procure food and shelter earn some money or have resources somehow, so that you can pay for the things you need to pay for. Keep track of your own belongings and your own deadlines and your own responsibilities, reply and show up treat others with basic dignity and kindness.

Speaker 2:
Why? Because it's the right thing to do. But also it'll get you farther in life when you know how to interact with humans and advocate for what you need, but also treat them with respect now, how to navigate a bureaucracy because life is full of them. These are just sort of the base. Get yourself places, transport, transport yourself, somehow to the places you need to go look after your body and its needs your mental health, your situation. I call it whether it's a diagnosis or no diagnosis, but something is not quite great. And you've got to deal with it. Therapy, meds, physicians, homeopaths, whatever it may be. You know, know what you need, you are responsible and I'm not saying you have to go it alone. Completely alone. Humans are everywhere. We just all need to everyone to be kind of primarily taking care of the self and then asking for help when you need it.

Speaker 2:
Humans do want to be of use and helped. It's just that prime. It's put your own oxygen mask on first do what you can to look after yourself so that you can be abused to others and do ask for help when you need it. Resilience is simply, it's sort of the opposite. It's the yin and yang agency is I can do stuff. Resilience is I can cope when things go badly. Cause guess what? Y'all things will go badly. Hello, pandemic. Hello, structural inequality. Hello, climate change. Hello. The totally unpredictable thing that is going to happen big and small things. Well out of our control constantly happen. Most of it is not in our control. We are in charge of how we act and how we respond or react. And that's it. And there's a whole lot of control in there though when we get good at knowing who we are and what we want and the emotions that come up for us and naming them and validating them and working through them and learning and growing, we live a really beautiful life.

Speaker 2:
Resilience is just getting stronger. It's letting the truth of the bad things flow through us and like, all right, that sucks. You know, but I'm okay. And I might cry for three days as my friend, Dana Glickman says and your turn, but at some point you got to stop crying. Cause you gotta go pee, you know, or you gotta drink some water and you stop crying for a moment. You might go back to crime, but at some point you stop crying and you look around. You're like, well that was some stuff, but now it's behind me and I will be more capable of meeting the next thing that comes. Cause I just survived that thing.

Speaker 1:
Ooh. And you know where I go with a lot of that, because I'm also a psychotherapist is I look at what gets in the way for a parent. What is the story? The belief, the grip inside of a parent that believes that to be a loving, connected, attentive parent means to do everything we can possibly do to soften the edges of our child's world. And I, I, what's thrilled me about the conversations I've had with you in the past. And certainly this one is how, how that's ultimately going to be the antithesis of love because human beings have a tremendous need for mastery. We have a need to bump up against the world and discover that we survived and we can push the edge a little further or climb over it. So when a parent confesses to me, I just, I just love him so much. I can't stand to see him unhappy. So I bought him the thing or I paid for his apartment or I bought him the car he really wanted versus the one we could afford. It's not an act of love folks. It's, it's, it's a, it's a confused thinking it's comes from of course a loving heart. But you know, I think what we're here to say is we can help you rethink that because true love looks a little different. Do you want to play off of that?

Speaker 2:
The first thing is I'm not a psychotherapist, but as you know, I try to practice a psychotherapy without a license. I mean, I, I respect and value the field so much and think in a different lifetime, I might have chosen that path. So my work does rest on top of the expertise of people in the field of psychology which is why it's a joy to be with you and to feel that you and I can be in dialogue. And that I make sense to you. Because you know, I, I don't come from that field. Just have a high degree of respect for it. And really when I began to see young adults struggling on my campus with their mental health, I could see the connection between the parental over help and the mental health struggles. I didn't need studies to show me I can see it.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, so we're really unwell as parents, as it turns out. And I say, we cause Susan, I've got a 21 year old son and a 19 year old daughter and I've written the manifesto on the harm of helicopter parenting only to discover, Oh, Hey, I'm one of them how humbling I am working now actively today, tomorrow, yesterday on repatterning. Yeah. Yeah. The patterns laying down new patterns with my kids. We are in family therapy. In fact, that's where I'm headed in about a half an hour. Yes. To continue this work I have a son who has ADHD and anxiety, which I'm allowed to share with his permission, write about this in the book. Really didn't quite get those things. Didn't understand them as well as a highly educated person like myself, certainly had the opportunity to understand. We have finally realized we got to support the kid we've got instead of trying to paper over his challenges and just keep pushing him from behind.

Speaker 2:
And that has been an epiphany for us. I think we thought there were ways in which he was fragile, sensitive, had needs, and we tiptoed on eggshells around him. And so we treat him as if he is fragile, is if he can't handle the tough, conversational, we can't handle having the tough conversation. So letting people have their feelings rather than trying to avoid the situation where the feelings will happen. Turns out to be the truer course. As we know from Bernay Brown, as we know from the recent year or so old research out of Yale Ellie Liebowitz has written about how we foment a child's anxiety when we take their fear and completely curate the world so that they never have to face that thing. We think it's loving. We love them so much. They'll never have to be in the dark.

Speaker 2:
And then we have fomented that anxiety. So I'm learning, I'm learning. I think we could, all, I think therapy will be a booming industry beyond what it currently is because so many of us will benefit from being able to work through our fears. Why do we need to control our kids outcomes? What are we so afraid of? Why are we trying to manufacture our kids to be best in breed at the Westminster dog show? You know, what is so lacking in us, such that our child has become the evidence of our worth. All of these things are in meshing us in our child's life. And as you know that isn't healthy. Let me tell you, I want to end with this question with this. I got a phone call from a mom. I said, Julie, I finally got it. I got what you've been saying all along.

Speaker 2:
I have two sons, a 17 year old and a 15 year old, 17 year old is my bio kids. She says, meaning biologically mine. My 15 year old is my adopted son. My 17 year old is in a therapeutic boarding school environment. Things started to go off the rails for that kid. We have family therapy by phone. And this week he said to me, mom, every time you say, did you do that? Are you going to do that? When are you going to do that? Don't forget to do that. You make me feel like you don't think I will ever be able to handle that stuff. She said, Julie, I got it. I feel responsible for whether he turns in his stuff, what grades he gets because he's biologically half my genetic material. I realized Julie with my adopted son, I don't feel responsible. I love the heck out of him.

Speaker 2:
I root for him to be the best he can be. I'm just championing him. I'm like at the side of the road with the water and the love and the like watching him go that mom came to realize she's got the healthier relationship with her adopted son. She's too controlling of her. You know, just needing these things to happen for the older son, because she feels somehow it reflects back on her. That's how she's made sense of it in her mind. Genetically, he's got my DNA. So therefore, if he succeeds or fails in life or chooses the right profession or the wrong profession, it looks bad for me. So I need to control it. Wow. I thought that was such an epiphany. Oh,

Speaker 1:
Oh my gosh. I mean, yeah. And that's sort of the essence of what my work is in the world is helping parents, as you said, I love you. You use the word, the pattern, helping them identify the patterns that aren't working, because some of them of course are often they're inherited and make different choices, make the choices that are congruent and aligned with how you want to show up in the world who you want to be. And what is in the best interest, ultimately in the best interest of your kids, which may not have been something you took in as a child, you may not have witnessed or experienced being on the receiving end of that. So we're all forging new paths here. We're trailblazers. But thank goodness. There are people like you and you know, kind of making some noise

Speaker 2:
And people like you, what an incredible community you have. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I want your listeners to know your community. To know I have written books and therefore have some expertise conferred upon me, but I'm very much walking this human path with curiosity and humility and respect. I'm 53. I am just beginning to know myself and loving what I know. And I think you get to an agent stage where you have worked most of your stuff out. I don't know if this is a podcast where I can swear, so I'm not swearing, but I want to swear. You get to a place where you just hope to live a long life. Now that you've gotten, most of your stuff worked out, you know who you are, you know what you want, you know, what you value, you know what you're good at? You know, with whom you feel a sense of belonging, the communities where you feel accepted and loved and the work you want to do, you know, it just, the life is, is super sweet when you get to that point and you just want to be here for as much of it as you can.

Speaker 2:
Yeah.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're here. I'm glad I'm here. Those of you all listening or watching, I'm glad you're here. And Julie, will you let people know? Well, one thing before let's just invite people to consider one tiny little itsy-bitsy tweak or course correction they might want to make in the week ahead. Just something that might inspire them to try on something they've heard today.

Speaker 2:
Well, I think what, what I probably haven't mentioned, but should is that kindness is your go-to magic potion to right every wrong, to make a gloomy day better, to make yourself feel better, to make everybody else in your life. Anybody else potentially in your life feel better. So I'm going to leave off with this particular piece of practical advice, which is in the pages of your turn. At the end, I call it unleash your superpowers, kindness, mindfulness, and gratitude. And I say, we have capacities for all these things. We just got to get better at, you know, strengthening and deploying them a year ago when the pandemic was new, it was a Saturday morning. I was in bed, already doing work, meaning rolled over to my bedside table where my phone is plugged in and I'm doing all the responses to the emails and the social media work was kind of a mess, right? Then I, you know, it was the end of April. I'm I speak for a living and all of my speaking engagements had ended just canceled, right? So I'm losing revenue and worried about that. And, and my beloved, amazing life partner, Dan, the best things ever happened to me across a life that has offered so much beauty and opportunity. Dan rolls over in bed, presses his forehead against my back and says, baby, what can I do to make today easier for you?

Speaker 2:
And when I tell this Susan, as I have over the months, people often say in the chat, how can I find a dad? Does Dan have a brother? And I give him his due. Obviously he's an incredible human. And I understand why people might want to be with someone like him. But I think the better question is how can I be someone like Dan? How can I show up in the lives of my partner, children loved ones, family members, work, coworkers, neighbors, an offer that simple act of kindness, just being asked. The question makes people, lifts people. So I encourage us all to try to be like, Dan, imagine how we could level up in a human evolution sense. If we could lead with those kinds of intentions,

Speaker 1:
How can they make your day better? How can I lighten your load? How can I

Speaker 2:
That's one thing what's is there anything I can do today to make your day not fix the world? Not end poverty, not end systemic racial, racialized violence, but just, can I make your day easier somehow today? Is there anything I can do for you?

Speaker 1:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That is it go forth and be kind. And Julie, please tell people how to find first of all, your book and then everything else that you're

Speaker 2:
Up to. Sure thing. Thanks so much for everybody who's here. Listening. The book is available. Wherever books are sold, I recorded the audio book. If you dig that format, please please check that out. E-Book, hard cover, wherever books are sold. My website is https://www.julielythcotthaims.com. That's where you can kinda just see all my work, what I'm up to, where I'm speaking next. And I'm on social. I'm pretty active on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Clubhouse, increasingly, and maybe Tik TOK. We'll see. Not yet, but I'm Jlythcotthaims in every place we call social media. So please do follow. Please do connect. I do love to be in dialogue and community with, with humans. I'm rooting for all of us.

Speaker 1:
I have great faith, but it's going to take, you know, a little bit or a big amount of overhaul and it starts with these kinds of conversations and opening our eyes a little wider and being kind.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Susan. susanstiffelman.com