Julie Lythcott-Haims
in Conversation with Paula Farmer
Recorded June 14th, 2020
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Julie Lythcott-Haims in conversation with Paula Farmer
Sunday, June 14, 2020
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Julie Lythcott-Haims believes in humans and is deeply interested in what gets in our way. She is the New York Timesbestselling author of the anti-helicopter parenting manifesto How to Raise an Adult. Her TED Talk on the subject was one of the top talks of 2016, and in 2020 she became a regular contributor with CBS This Morning on parenting. Her second book is the critically-acclaimed and award-winning prose poetry memoir Real American, which illustrates her experience as a Black and biracial person in white spaces. A third book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, will be out in April 2021. She also wrote the foreword for Writing Memoir, a book of writing prompts developed by Julie and The Writers Grotto for those hungry to share their lived experience.
Julie is a former corporate lawyer and Stanford dean, and she holds a BA from Stanford, a JD from Harvard, and an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. She serves on the boards of Foundation for a College Education, Global Citizen Year, andCommon Sense Media, and on the advisory board of LeanIn.Org. She volunteers with the hospital program No One Dies Alone.
She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner of over thirty years, their young adults, and her mother.
“After hundreds of talks with parents around the world, here’s what I’ve come to. We parents are the lucky humans given the humbling task of raising a child. We’re supposed to be alongside them, guiding them, giving them more and more room to try, learn, grow, persevere, achieve. But, these days, we can tend to get in the way, by micromanaging our kid’s path or by outright dragging them down it. We think we know what we’re doing—but we end up depriving them of developing self-efficacy. And that leads to anxiety and depression. So. We have to get our act together. We have to get out of our kid’s way so they can develop the skills and smarts they’ll need in order to thrive as adults.”
– Julie Lythcott-Haims
Julie Lythcott-Haims believes in humans and is deeply interested in what gets in our way. She is the New York Timesbestselling author of the anti-helicopter parenting manifesto How to Raise an Adult. Her TED Talk on the subject was one of the top talks of 2016, and in 2020 she became a regular contributor with CBS This Morning on parenting. Her second book is the critically-acclaimed and award-winning prose poetry memoir Real American, which illustrates her experience as a Black and biracial person in white spaces. A third book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, will be out in April 2021. She also wrote the foreword for Writing Memoir, a book of writing prompts developed by Julie and The Writers Grotto for those hungry to share their lived experience.
Julie is a former corporate lawyer and Stanford dean, and she holds a BA from Stanford, a JD from Harvard, and an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. She serves on the boards of Foundation for a College Education, Global Citizen Year, andCommon Sense Media, and on the advisory board of LeanIn.Org. She volunteers with the hospital program No One Dies Alone.
She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her partner of over thirty years, their young adults, and her mother.
Visit the Book Passage website to have any of Julie’s books delivered right to your door.
You’re sure to enjoy these Book Passage favorites:
How to Raise an Adult
Real American: A Memoir
Writing Memoir
A personal note from Julie Lythcott-Haims.
Sent June 18th, following her Conversations with Authors session.
Dear Viewers,
I want to thank you for devoting your time this past Sunday to listen to a conversation between me and Paula Farmer. I have always enjoyed coming “up” to Book Passage from my home in Palo Alto, and despite being virtual I felt the love and engagement of the Book Passage community to be as nourishing as ever. And as ever Paula was a terrific partner.
Both How to Be An AntiRacist by Ibram X. Kendi, and Educated by Tara Westover were in my MUST READ stack for a year, and I’m happy to say I finally checked them off my list. While Kendi’s book is a treatise written by a public scholar and Westover’s is memoir, they have in common the insistence that we have the power to transform our circumstances and our way of being in order to live a life that feels free.
Since you’re all hard core readers I’m going to assume those books may already be on your list (of completed or intended), so I’ll toss out a third, Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, published in 2016, which, though a novel, manages to portray the profound impact of slavery and racist policies by tracing the descendants of two Ghanaian sisters, one who remained in Ghana and one who was enslaved and came to America. It is a meditation on cause and effect, and sheds light on how we got to this point of such devastating discrepancies in America.
I hope to be back up at Book Passage in person before long, which is an aspect of “normal” we all yearn for. But in saying so I want to end with a quote from Roxane Gay who wrote in the New York Times a few weeks back “For black people, normal is the very thing from which we yearn to be free.”
Virtual hugs,
Julie
