Julie Lythcott-Haims Quotes

#1. Yes we dream of our selves, of what we will become," Chi Ling told me, "but it's the environment that tells us what is possible. I don't think our dreams are limitless; they are bounded by the society we live in and its conception of what is respectable and good.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#2. The best predictor of success is a sense of resiliency, grit, capacity to fail and get up. If you're prevented from feeling discomfort of failure, you have no sense of how to handle those things at all.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#3. The cultivation of a willingness to defy, debunk, or just plain old disappoint one's parents, that is the absolute precondition, now more than ever, for intellectual and emotional freedom.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#4. like-minded college presidents and deans of admission to see if something could

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#5. Resilience is built from real hardship and cannot be bought or manufactured.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#6. We're depriving our kids of the chance to do the work of life for themselves.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#7. When you intervene on behalf of your child, your child becomes the victim. You're expressing the message 'You're incapable, you're not sturdy enough to resolve this yourself, you need me to come in and take care of this for you.'" You are, in essence, disempowering your child.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#8. I suspect that twenty years down the road they'll be having midlife crises, feeling they were in a straitjacket. Failure to recognize that an education has to be seized rather than delivered to you is the harm that's really done.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#9. Words like "perfect," "brilliant," "amazing," "wonderful," and "great" sound like compliments when they trip off our tongues, but over time they are daggers in the soul of a developing kid and end up undercutting resilience.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#10. Once parents started scheduling play, they then began observing play, which led to involving themselves in play.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#11. Saying you just want your kid to be happy puts enormous pressure on the child. They feel if they're not happy, they're failing. Periods of unhappiness are okay and our kids need to know that; it's the struggle that makes you who you are.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#12. Not only does overparenting hurt our children; it harms us, too. Parents today are scared, not to mention exhausted, anxious, and depressed.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#13. Young adults come to resent the people who did the thinking for them.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#14. A sense of purpose is essential for achieving happiness and satisfaction in life.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#15. There is something that's a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That's what it means to become an adult."15

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#16. But we should open our eyes to the many ways in which hypervigilance keeps them penned in from the more liberated life they deserve to live and that in turn would prepare them for adulthood.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#17. Why did parenting change from preparing our kids for life to protecting them from life, which means they're not prepared to live life on their own?

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#18. We're [as parents] striving for an unattainable, inauthentic shell, and ignoring the real nut, the gooey inside: love, laughter, and fulfillment from simple things.

Julie Lythcott-Haims

#19. Moms seem so overinvolved in solving problems for their children instead of letting the kids learn to work it out. Whatever happens between the kids becomes a drama between the moms.

Julie Lythcott-Haims