 Thank you all so much for coming. My name is Liza Mundy. I am the director of the work family program at the New America Foundation, which we are calling breadwinning and caregiving in recognition of the fact that men and women alike these days have breadwinning and caregiving responsibilities and we aspire to help create a world in which men and women can fulfill these responsibilities somewhat more easily than many people find it to do now. We have an incredibly illustrious panel here. I'll start with Anne-Marie Slaughter, who is the CEO of New America and president and she and I started on the same day on September 1st of last year and it's just been so thrilling to get to work with her and she is, as I'm sure you all know, a public intellectual and policy expert in many domains, national security, as well as work family issues. And beside her is Melvin White, who has been kind enough to visit us after an Easter weekend with his family in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the lead counsel for litigation and risk management at Clear Spire, which is a law firm based in Washington DC that is doing incredibly interesting and innovative things with their workplace that Melvin will talk about. We have, I'm sorry, Dr. Anne-Marie Slaughter and we have Dr. Lisa Evette Waller, who is director of the high school at the Dalton School and an expert in contemporary notions of success and how they are impacting the family and we're incredibly grateful to her for coming here on Easter Monday and we have Dr. Andrew Solomon, who, as I'm sure you all know, is author of most recently, A Far From the Tree, which is an extraordinary book about family life and parents and children who are loving each other and at the same time struggling with the challenges of difference between parents and children. He also writes, as I'm sure you know, for The New Yorker and other places and as a speaker. So it is an incredible honor to get to moderate this panel and I'm a little bit nervous, but it'll be fine. And it's a casual conversation. So people, I have questions, but people may pick up on on each other's comments and then we will have some Q&A also at the end. So I wanted to start with a question about contemporary notions of success and how they're impacting the American family. I wanted to start with a question for Lisa Waller and just as a brief introduction to show that parents all over the country are incredibly concerned about the success of their children. I happened to be chatting with a woman from Houston who is an attorney in Houston and her daughter is starting college next year and was still trying to decide which college she was going to go to. One of them is a Texas university that has 12 sororities where it is very common for a young woman to rush at all 12 the first week of school. And it was her responsibility as the mom to get letters of recommendation from three alumni of each sorority. So that's 36 letters of recommendation and get them all on formal stationery, tie them up with a bow. So 12 bow tied packages to present to each sorority on behalf of her daughter. And so she was doing this at the same time that she was doing her legal career and hopefully spending some time with her daughter. This was a revelation to me and I was saying what would happen if you didn't do it? Wouldn't she still get in? And she said all the other parents are doing it. So all these mothers had Excel spreadsheets of desperately trying to find alumni of all these sororities. And when I was talking about sorority life she said the purpose is then as you go through life, wherever you go, whatever city you go, you'll have friends there automatically. So she felt as though it was her responsibility as a working mom to have these Excel spreadsheets and make sure that she got her daughter's letters. And I thought that was such an interesting example of how around the country there are sort of microclimates of what success is. And so the idea that parents have to be extremely involved in their children's schooling starting with preschool and you know sort of co-op work hours extending and I didn't realize this to college and getting letters of recommendation. When did this start? When did this notion start that parents had to be so involved in their children's school experience in order for children to be successful? And when will it stop? More importantly, you know as I think about it I do think that looking at the late 90s and into the 2000s that's really where it starts in my world. And I concede at the start that my world is a particular world. The Dalton school and schools like it are blessed with abundance. There is a sense that families actually can tie it up with a bow literally as in the case of this sorority and this is not true in every place. So I start with that. But I do think that as families perceive rather rightly or wrongly scarcity, parents have come to believe that one way of providing some insurance to their kids is to be in there with them. And one thing that I often think about is when I talk to students at Dalton about my own college run, they look at me with what I disbelieve. When I say to them my parents said go to college. Good thing for you. And that was pretty much it. Go to college. It's an important thing. Not which college, not how to do it. You know got out there on my own, applied to only three schools, had no one really guiding me through the process. And of course, no one knew what the SATs were. They told us you should come to school having gotten a good night's sleep and be sure to bring some candies that you can nibble on while you're taking the test. And that was the extent of it. I think that that is unthinkable for many students today. They can't imagine that world where there isn't an adult hand guiding them. And while I understand that desire to shepherd one's children and I have it myself, I do think it can militate against a sense of agency for kids against a kind of resiliency that ultimately fortifies them for adulthood. And so, you know, when exactly did it happen? I can't say but I do I do chart in my own professional life, a shift in the late 90s, a sense that really, the stakes are so high, the opportunities so slim, ironically, even in this world, and you really have to do everything that you can to gain an edge. I think that's about the time. I would just throw in that some version of it started well, before that time, I can remember when the director of scheduling at my high school said to me in the spring of my sophomore year, he said, could you ask your mother to get her teacher requests in early this year? And I said, yes, I'd be glad to. I said, why? And he said, I thought it would be best if I had them before I wrote the teacher's schedules. So there was the sense that he said if just the whole thing, I mean, I felt when I was growing up and going to school in New York, as though parents were many parents were very involved. And as though the involvement of parents made an enormous difference in the success of the of the students. There was really a I mean, there were many people who succeeded without having all of that support. But I think that support was a tremendous advantage. And going through the school's application process with my son, who just turned five last week. In the first place, I thought in connection with what you were saying about those women in the sororities, I spent an enormous amount of time on my child that I would have preferred to spend with my child. And I felt like which one is more important if I'm to be a good parent, the time on or the time with. But I also felt as I went through the process, that while obviously there's sort of enormous injustice, and some people are born into hard, horrifying poverty and so on, I also felt going through this process that there were parents who knew how to work the process. And there were parents who did not seem to know how to work it or who did not know that it was necessary to work it and who didn't seem to grasp it. And I felt that in a world full of injustice, it seemed particularly unfair that the children of some of those parents who I believe are just as bright and have just as much potential as my children and the children of other parents who are more adept in that process, that those children weren't going to be able to have the same opportunities. And that was apart from the obvious inequalities of income and so on that people have. So I see that as an entrenched injustice and a sort of heartbreaking one. You know, and I think some parents are able to turn the time they spend on their children into a message of love and make the children feel very loved and some parents who do that make the children feel unseen and very disaffected. I mean, there is a there's another way to look at it. I mean, the first thing is I totally agree with the just the change in philosophy. My mother always said that her child rearing philosophy was benign neglect, which I actually think is great, right? It was benign and she was always there if you needed it, you needed her. But essentially it was, you know, you do your thing and I'm here, but I've got my own things to do. And that clearly today practically sounds like child abuse in in in New York. But another way to look at it is, you know, the competition at these top schools has just gotten worse and worse and worse, partly because they are trying to be much more diverse, right? They are now reaching first it was nationally. So the Ivy League schools used to be really East Coast and now they there was geographic diversity, then ethnic diversity and gender diversity and now income diversity. So actually, if you are in one of those categories, you have a better shot, they're going to go out, they're going to look for you, they're really going to try to recruit you. If you are from a privileged background, you have now got to stand out even more, right? And the kids do, right? I mean, they have unbelievable opportunities. But another way to see this is that the competition really has gotten much worse, and it's gotten particularly much worse precisely for the kinds of parents who can just over well, you know, do nothing, nothing else, just a depressing this. Right. So then it becomes an arms race of a bit, a bit. Yeah. Melvin, was that your experience when you were in school? My parents were not. I mean, I like I asked myself, did my mother ever set foot in my elementary school? And I'm not sure that she I mean, it was like, she just wasn't expected to that we didn't have we didn't have like book fairs and silent auctions and a drama day and teacher appreciation week, which they had at my children's school, you know, today's the day when every child brings a flower to there, you know, and so like I live, I lived in fear of forgetting or getting the wrong pajama day, you know, like has sending your kids in their pajamas on the wrong day. I attended school in rural Arkansas in the 1960s and 70s. It was enough for me to make it to class and not be hungry. Right. Right. And so I was I sort of charted my own course, right and speak with the with the help of whatever meager resources the school had the counselor and certain teachers who took an interest. And and I guess I got here by the grace of God, I suppose, and the help of certain people. My parents did what they could, of course, right, right, but they certainly weren't helping me with application processes or suggesting that I go here or there. Because frankly, they hadn't gone right to college. Right. I mean, maybe there are some regionalism. Certainly my peers who are from New York talk about New York as a particular kind of place, even when they were growing up, and I grew up in Chicago, grew up in the Midwest, but even in a school that one had to test into, where there was the expectation that everyone would go to college and that this would be the beginning of a kind of opening of doors. No one I don't think anyone had a tutor. No one talked about these standardized tests. Everyone assumed that it was going to be okay. And parents, you know, there were some moms who were on the committees that put together the benefit in this sort of thing. But certainly my mother was not one of them. And there wasn't the sense that there was a liability in that, you know, there wasn't the sense that you would lose something for that. And really, what was focused upon in my school was was doing well, you know, doing well in terms of your academics, and, you know, maybe throwing in some extra curriculars on the side. I think that now, you know, that that seems quaint, even and I would I would posit that even in Chicago, that's probably the case, even in my old school, people would think that that is just not enough. That is not sufficient. And so some of it is is a change over time. And I think some of it is potentially regional as well. But do you think that the notion of success, I mean, to really has also expanded in the sense that there's a much wider range of really good schools that your kids can get into and that you feel like that's great. Whereas, as I recall, there was a much greater divide, say, between the Ivy League and other schools or between the the schools like Duke or UVA were much more regional. They were not sort of great national schools. Is it your sense that that our definition, at least of what success is in getting into college has also broadened? Or is it still everybody trying to get into this small handful of schools? You know, I think more schools are responsibly talking about the match and wanting a student to go to the school that suits them and this sort of thing. But I guess one way that I think about it anecdotally is I recall a time when a student might say something like, well, I'm more of a humanities person or I'm more of a math science person and certainly you don't want kids to become narrow and to focus overly much when they're young. But you know, there was a sense that it's all good to really give it your all in terms of math science and then to be perfectly fine in terms of the other disciplines. And I think that has tended to erode and there's the sense that kids should be at the top of their game across all domains. You should be at the top of your game in everything. Plus you should have a nice battery of co-curriculars to add in there. You know, some saving of the world on some level would be important as well. And perhaps a patent. And so you start to feel the kids are meant to be more accomplished than the professoriate to which they'll be exposed when they get there. And one has to sort of interrogate that. And so I talk to students who I think are prepared to hear what we have to say about making choices. You know, if you need to do all of that to cross the threshold of this school, maybe it isn't the school that you want. It's also interrogating the difference between the process of getting into college and the reality of being in college, of being a young scholar. These are things that I think we have to ask kids about. And so the families, and I would ask this of anybody, but at least I guess in particular, the families, is college what the form of success that everybody is focused on? Is that or is there a broader definition of success in the families that you work with? I mean, certainly looking at our families adults, and I think there's a broad understanding of success. People want their kids to be happy, well adjusted, confident to, you know, mix it up a little bit on the playing field and also do a bit of art. You know, people want kids who are happy and trying a lot of different things. And college is one piece of that at the end of the school road, at least the Dalton school road. But I do think there are messages and pressures that extend beyond the family, beyond the classroom teacher that say, for a young scholar, the college run is a kind of indicator of how life will be. You know, and so I often tell the joke to my kids, you know, you start to worry that if you don't do so well on the Latin test, well, that means you're not going to get into the college of your choice, which means you won't get the optimal job, which means your life partner will not be the one you actually wanted and the co-op for it will then not accept you and you'll have outdoor parking instead of indoor, you know. Not to catastrophize. So there's a way in which college becomes emblematic of something that people want for their kids and it can seed all kinds of anxiety. I think that when you really peel it back, people can think rationally about this, but it is that thing for teenagers that they think about, that their parents think about, and that they think about even before they reach the team. I think also that it's quantifiable. So you did get in or you didn't get in. I mean whether your child is happy is a very complicated measurement and you may believe the child is happy when your child isn't happy, or you may believe otherwise, you know whether your child got into Princeton or not. That's very clear and I think that clarity ends up formalizing a sense of success. And I, without wishing to dwell excessively on autobiography, would say that I found the process of going through the kindergarten application process with my son had many of these same characteristics, and if that seems like a narrow definition of success for someone who's 18, it seems like a much more narrow and indeed ludicrous definition of success for someone who's five. And the process felt to me very ex-cathedra. There are a limited number of schools. There are an enormous number of people who want their children to get into those schools. The competition is stiff and complicated. It requires, as I say, that you go through these various rituals, but also in the pronouncements that you receive, your child's admission or not admission, appears already at that stage to say this child is destined for success. Yes. And this child only for sadness and failure. And having gone to such a school, I can tell you that there are many idiots who get in through that process. Is your child, is your child aware of this process? We try to keep him as unaware of it as we could and never to give him any sense that it was a measure of success or failure, but also to keep him on his, at his best. I mean, I'll tell you the story. We were fortunately a school that we weren't very interested in, but it was the second one we'd gone to for the child play date. Let's begin by saying it's suggested to apply to 10 schools, as many of you doubtless know, each of the schools requires a parent interview, a child interview, an open house and a school, whatever a school tour. So you have all of these 40 events that you have to get scheduled in. Anyway, we got to this particular one. We arrived with George and there were the other children and the teacher who was going to take them all up for a play date came down. Now, some children love getting thrown into a room with a bunch of strange children and some new toys to do things. And some children do not. One came down and she stepped outside and she said, okay, she said, now parents wait down here, kids, you're going to come up with us and we're all going to go and play together for a few minutes. And George, who had really been quite cheerful up until that point, suddenly said, I'm not getting in that elevator. And John and I said, George, remember it's a school visit, best behavior. We talked about it. I hate this school. Showing admirable. You have a strong point of view. So anyway, but it just felt as though I did, we didn't want to pressure him, but we did have to say to him, actually, this matters enough so that you really should do your best. And you know, we resorted as I think almost everyone does to a little bit of if you do really well today, George, I have some ice cream afterwards. So Haagen-Daz, I think, has done very well out of this application process. Is this really where America is going? Is this really broader than just this a slice of life on the West Coast and in New York? I certainly hope not. I don't have enough. But you're really focused in a humorous way. That's something that I think would be like a foreign language to most Americans. I think it's true in a remarkable number of American cities for the elite. In other words, just having New York, Boston, certainly San Francisco, so I think that's still, it is insanely narrow, but I don't think it's just New York. I think it's worse in New York probably, but I think it does. You're putting your finger on a gap between the experience of the elite from the beginning, like getting into kindergarten versus the experience of the vast majority of the population. Of course. That's what? When you say that, what do you mean? Then going to a regular school. If you don't go to Harvard, and if you don't go to Harvard, but you go to Amherst, or whatever, a decent school somewhere else, does that condemn you in a way to a different type of life? I'm sorry, I didn't think you were talking about Amherst. I thought you were talking about people who were dealing with, you were the one who was saying, I'm the who I was thinking, but I think if you're talking about people who don't have real educational opportunity, who are going to schools within a broken system, I think that that does condemn them too. So let's separate that conversation. Go to college, not go to college. You know, clearly there's a difference. We've read a lot of articles about if college adds economic value. But let's just talk about all kids who go to college, decent colleges. I'm not talking about mail order colleges or quasi bankrupt schools. You know, sort of decent schools defined as you will. Is our society so broken that someone who goes to a good university of Iowa has such significantly different opportunities than people who go to Ivy's. Not remote. You know, I think that you have to add so much into that calculus, right? So you have the schools that people go to, but also, you know, what those students bring to those schools, etc. But I don't think there's any question but that there are institutions in our society that have been protected from broad access over history for reasons and that can bring to those who enter them opportunities that otherwise would not present to them. I think that's true. Is it the difference between Harvard and Amherst? Absolutely not. Is it the difference between Harvard and, you know, the University of Iowa? Probably not. But when you start talking about the sort of gross inequity and injustice in the American educational system, there are schools where kids are not have the conversation about definitions of success and how they impact the family aren't happening because the assumption is that those kids will not have success. And in fact, wheels are not turning to try to bring success to those students. And so in that, once you start having that conversation, you know, these are problems of a particular subset of our society as I indicated, but it's a subset that will not soon relinquish power will not soon be out of power. And to the extent that we can think broadly about the implications of these problems on the whole in the aggregate, I think we do well. And there is a broader pattern here where Elizabeth Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Chaggy wrote this book, The Double Income Trap, where she argues that what we've seen as women have gone into the workforce, they went into the workforce increasingly and then she's looking across the middle class and lower income, because that was the only way their families could keep up. So what she says is really what you've seen, and this is why so many of these families are on the brink of bankruptcy. It wasn't women wanting to work. I mean, yes, there was part of that, but it was to be able to get my kids to compete with their neighbors kids, we have to add this extra income. That's what gives them the lessons. That's what gives them the extra bit that they need. So she actually does chronicle this notion of increasing competition to get into schools, to get jobs, as driving this broader dual income trap. And the trap is that if something goes wrong, there's no cushion. In the old days, if something went wrong, mom went to work. But if mom and dad are both working and you're on the edge, then you don't have something. So there is some suggestion that this hot house notion of success has a broader application. Yes, there are more seats in the front. And we see it play out in the legal profession. I believe most of our Supreme Court justices not only attended Ivy League schools, but I believe most of them are from New York. And unusually high percentage of them are from New York City. Maybe their parents went through that process at kindergarten that started them on the track to becoming Supreme Court justices. But I'm not a policy person, but perhaps when you're looking at a profession, certainly the pedigree of school, the professional school plays a great deal of emphasis on success. Are there only higher people who go to Ivy? No, no, but there is another hierarchy beyond Ivy's. There's the top 10. And then there's the top 15. And once you get beyond the top 15, it really becomes a whole another ball game in terms of getting positions in the legal profession. And there are the kids, I'm sorry, the kids who are underserved. I mean, many of the so-called top schools in our cities have programs that are specifically designed to draw students and who otherwise wouldn't have that access. And those kids come in, they work hard, they do well, they compete, they go off to other schools, and they come back and talk about the fact that their lives were changed for having had that opportunity. And I guess one must think about how to acknowledge one's own privilege while also giving attention to a broader world. But again, I give no credence to the notion that this is the particular school that's going to make it for you because there's much more that goes to it than that. But the schools that we're talking about, the schools that our schools are sending kids to, all of those schools are wonderful with professors who are committed in programs that are outstanding, but that's still with all of the kids that are in these schools who come from very different backgrounds, many of them from no privilege at all at schools like Dalton Trinity, what have you, that still is a subset of privilege just by virtue of having access that is completely different than what many kids who are in direct proximity to our schools are experiencing on a daily basis. And I would just also say that I work for a while in a facility for juvenile felons. And one of the things that was really striking to me when I worked there was how many of the kids I was working with were incredibly bright. I sort of thought these were people who were effectively from the bottom end of the society. Many of them were very bright. And I think they had the perception, which I think was to some degree accurate, that they did not have access to a lot of what our society at large has defined as success. And so they had gotten involved in criminal activity early and especially in gangs, because that was a context within which it was possible for them to achieve success. And we live in a society which is focused on success one way or another all over the place and people living at any stratum of it are engaged with the question of how and where they can be successful. And I think there was a sense, and I think it was an accurate sense, that they could not have some of the successes that would accrue to people who had gone to these universities. And there were some of them who I thought really didn't have very many native abilities, but there were a bunch of them who I thought if they had grown up in other circumstances could have been going to Dalton, could have been going to a fine university, could have been building a very different life for themselves. Andrew, you've also reported in a number of different sorts of communities. And you, in far from the tree, have reported on families where the parents might have had very conventional notions of success for their child. And then it turns out that they are the parent of a child who is disabled or a child who is deaf or a child who you know is significantly different from them and have to then reimagine their notions of success and success for their child. Can you talk about families who have successfully gone through that transition and reordering their thinking about success? Many of the families I talked to said that it was actually I mean it was traumatic but it was also very liberating to have a child who is not going to succeed in those obvious conventional ways because of a difference or disability. I mean it depends on what the difference is. There are deaf people who have gone on and achieved in every possible way. But some of the children with multiple severe disabilities, for example, those children weren't going to be able to succeed and the parents by and large found that the process of reimagining what constituted success was amazing. I remember one father I was dealing with autism who said called me one day and he was said to me incredibly proudly. He said my son loaded the whole dishwasher tonight. He said you know what I'm as proud of that as many people are when their children get admitted it was in England. Their children get admitted to Oxford and Cambridge. She said it's extraordinary that he reached the point at which he's able to do that. And he talked about it very movingly and very compellingly. Now it's not an easy transition to make and it's not that people can readily give up all of their ideas of what constituted success but I think I think for a lot of these families it was actually a sort of joyful process and it changed the way they interacted with the world. So I think about a family I've talked about any number of times Tom and Karen Robards who live in New York and were sort of hard charging wall street types and had a son with Down syndrome and they were unsatisfied with the educational opportunities that were available to him and so they with a few other parents started something where their kids could be educated by a teacher they found and that one little classroom for these three students has now run into the thing called the Cook Center where tens of thousands of people with intellectual disabilities have been educated a place where some of the changes in education for people with intellectual disabilities has been worked out allowing such people now to lead lives that were really unimaginable 30 or 40 years ago in terms of their scope in terms of the accomplishments and I said to them I said do you wish that your child didn't have Down syndrome if you wish you'd never heard of it I said this has been such a big part of your life and his father said well for our son David I wish he didn't have it because it's a difficult way to be in the world and I would like to give him an easier life but I think if we lost everyone with Down syndrome it would be a real loss to us as a society and his mother Karen said for our son I suppose I wish he didn't have it because he might have an easier life but speaking for myself it's given me so much deeper and more purposeful and more engaged to life than I would ever otherwise have had that speaking for myself though I wouldn't have believed when he was born I could come to such a point I wouldn't exchange these experiences for anything in the world and I found over and over again that there were people who in due to your word having their sense of success interrogated in this profound way actually grew from the experience and I took away from it in part the sense that I had always thought inclusion programs were very nice for the disabled people who were being included because they meant that they would get access to a non-separate educational system separate educational systems being in general unequal ones but I thought it must kind of slow down the other kids and that's too bad and at this point I very much hope that my children will end up in classrooms with people with disabilities and in inclusion classrooms because I think the lessons in humanity that are taught the questioning of what it means to be successful and to go back to the theme of this talk is actually much more valuable than getting to long division two weeks earlier if they still do long division and Melvin I just wonder again to Heidi's point about whether this conversation it would be unrecognizable to people in many different parts of the country I mean I'm from far southwestern Virginia and you know I think you're from you're originally from Arkansas so I mean what do you think do you think that this conversation would be unrecognizable to friends and family who still live where you grew up or I would say for the overwhelmingly vast majority of people it would be but I'm sure there is a very small elite in every community in this country that where this would not be a foreign conversation or not unusual conversation but I think for the vast majority of people yes overwhelmingly yes well that's interesting because I'm just thinking again I have reporting that I've done over the years was a piece I was working on for the Washington Post and I was reporting on a couple a teenage couple and the young woman was pregnant and I think she was 16 and he was 16 and he had been part of a gang and and she she had run away from home and they were they were really happy about the baby they were having together they thought it was going to change their lives and they were they had gotten the Mozart CDs I mean they I'm not I mean I I was interested to see that that you know the sense that we need to give our baby all the advantages and we need to get the Mozart CDs and play them in utero it was it was something that that you know had permeated their thinking about what they wanted to be able to give their child and I mean I don't know the conversations of you know the level of parental involvement in the public school system where I grew up you know that my mom didn't feel like she had to do pajama day and you know get all over involved in the school but I I don't know to what sense that's that's changed where I I'm seeing in in the mid-south area where I'm from which I just came from today I was there for the holiday weekend people are concerned about basic survival yeah it's a small area near Memphis Tennessee but there used to be a very vibrant a manufacturing center there and as I was driving to church with my mother we drove down the street where my dad worked a lot of my uncles worked a lot of my cousins worked who were my around my age and all of them are shut are closed and so what are people doing the question is how are people surviving day to day and I think that question unfortunately takes precedence for for the people in a community like that I was thinking about that as you were I was just thinking so if I said in at the dinner table how do we define success in other words it's worth thinking about you know what what is it that you and your husband or your partner say to each other and what is it that your kids absorb and and I I always felt that I grew up in an academic town I had no academic family but I saw plenty of kids of academics who flamed out I mean who really the pressure to succeed academically was too great and they didn't it really blighted them and I always had the view that if our kids even went to college this was a this was good in the sense that they were in this hyper academic environment and were likely to rebel but I would define success as the ability to fulfill your potential right I mean that's that's what as a parent my definition of success is that my children have the ability to pursue to fulfill whatever their potential is but as I was listening to I was thinking I don't think that's an uncommon definition of success but I think it does reflect a very a wealthy society right there was a time you would define success as more than survival but the ability to get a good job and to have a family and to and to continue rather than this much more individual idea of fulfilling your your potential it's interesting because I think of being meaningfully connected to others as a central component of success and that's something that I actively talk to my children about we are fortunate to have college friends who we've remained very very close to and I'm we are called the usual suspects and the kids will say you know are we gonna see the usual are we gonna see the usual this weekend and what I think has come from this is an understanding that my success is a you know partly about my education about my work about you know maybe the way I parent but it's also largely that I have this connected community that I've been able to knit them into and that they hope to keep going through the younger kids who are part of that usuals configuration and so that meaningful connectedness I think has certainly in the African-American tradition has meant survival that has been central to survival but it also produces a context within which intellectual discourse and you know all of this can happen outside of the sort of standard understanding of the classroom or the university and I think that definition of success is important for kids as well that they see that you know where they can at an early age and that that persists I mean I've written a good bit about depression both from my own perspective and from that of many other people whom I've interviewed there are many people for whom success is actually keeping their illness in check I mean one's definition of success changes as one evolves over time and I certainly think to your point that the sense of friendship and love I mean those are central components to success I think there are a lot of dividing lines it seems to me one of the most profound ones is between people who are doing work that they find interesting yes even if it has its tedious moments and people who are doing work which is mind numbingly tedious to them but which they must do in order to continue to feed themselves and their families and I think to some degree success can be defined in part I mean in part it has to do with family and so on but in part with whether you actually spend most of your time most of your days doing something that you are reasonably pleased to be doing absolutely Melvin how would you define how would you define success when you think about a successful life yes well I don't have kids but I think that for any person a successful life involves a balance of all the different facets of being a human being and I mean that in the broad general sense of family of faith of personal achievement in a meaningful way and as you mentioned when you get up every day the thing that you spend most of your time on if it makes you unhappy no matter if you're making a million dollars or five million dollars which we see a lot of that in the legal profession people who are doing very well making lots of money but who are extremely unhappy and are they successful I would answer that question maybe not and when you go home to visit do you think that you're regarded as you know a success and do you feel that you know because you're in DC because you're an attorney that you're leading a different life a more successful life I believe so I mean I'm from an area that is pretty poor it's the Arkansas version of the Mississippi Delta I guess is what it would be called only on the Arkansas side so anybody who's done anything to achieve any material success in life is viewed as a success and I don't cater to that I don't encourage it but I do try to encourage people to do what they feel they need to do to make their lives successful and I try to for the younger kids I try to be a resource in terms of information about schools and colleges and what life is like in the rest of the country so I do think that we're talking about a whole different paradigm when we're talking about that kind of environment in our country and I don't you know my life has ups and downs like everyone's and you know I don't have a family I've never started a family and a lot of reasons for that so some people who are there who might have five or six kids but they're struggling to put food on the table they may be more successful than me in regard to to that aspect of life so I think my own attitude is to just be grateful that I can be helpful to my family and to others in the community that is a meaningful connection to others I mean going to Lisa's kind of the definition be it as being a role model or answering questions about well what does a lawyer what does a lawyer do I mean what do you do every day said you don't want me to answer that but it's all I have a huge family so on both sides my dad had eight brothers and sisters my mother had 10 and so you know family reunion is a big it's it's a huge it's a huge amount of people and I'm not the only person who's done reasonably well in life in terms of education and career so there's a good there are a good number of us who can be helpful and who are helpful in that regard and in the African-American tradition as you mentioned I mean it's it's all about nurturing and being that resource for your family and can you talk about the changes that Clear Spire has made to its workplace and the work day and whether that speaks to trying to change the definition of what it is to be a successful attorney sure sure Clear Spire is a small law firm in Washington we have about 30 lawyers we started three years ago it's made up of lawyers who have come from other settings who've been very accomplished in their careers who attended mostly top law schools and who worked at large law firms and we came together at Clear Spire to try to implement a new way of servicing clients practicing law we are in a service industry we are driven by client demands and so that always is at the forefront of our thinking and our processes but what the founders did and those of us who come after to try to implement this is that we've taken the three stakeholders in the attorney industry the client the lawyer and the firm and we've tried to create a setting that allows first of all and foremost the client matters to be serviced to the highest level of of competency and secondly to do that at a fair and reasonable price but by the same token we haven't instituted a system that requires lawyers to spend the vast majority of their working day billing time to client matters we aren't matter-centric a client hourly-centric I should say we don't have quotas in terms of the amount of hours that lawyers should bill we don't expect lawyers to show up every day at an office as a matter of fact given some of the IT innovations that we've implemented lawyers are able to work from their home offices unless there's a meeting or unless there's a court date our commute is to our home office and that in and of itself revolutionizes the work day because so many people in Washington live in Virginia and we have pretty horrible traffic it's pretty well documented you're saving people a huge amount of time just in terms of commuting and you're giving people the freedom to structure their day around their whole life not just billing hours to meet a quota so that partners per profit can be at a certain level the thing that makes it work really is teamwork and collaboration we don't incentivize competition among the attorneys we work as a team so that when an attorney has a need to attend to a family matter that is accommodated we support each other and it's working pretty well so far it's the legal profession is is lawyers bring about a lot of change in our culture always have all the way from the beginning of the country but we are probably the most one of the most tradition bound of any of the professions and so to change that dynamic of how lawyers work is a major endeavor but we're committed to it right and you've talked about a period in your life before you were with Gerspire when you were at a different law firm and you had responsibilities to your father to your elderly father right caregiving long distance caregiving responsibilities is the reason for the changes that Gerspire to enable attorneys to be successful human beings in terms of their caregiving responsibilities to others is that part of the reason for making this change or is it something that's happening more because the profession is changing that is one of the core principles upon which we found it that people should be able to live whole lives and to take care of their families their children their elderly adults others who may have a need and if the underlying concept is that if lawyers are not happy or if they're stressed they're not doing their best work so we I mean that's sort of a no-brainer there's a lot of bad work being done in the city as one who's spent time I spent 20 years in the large law firm setting and working on the vast majority of days and nights and so yes you when you're relaxed and let's face it the work is difficult it's one of the most difficult jobs that could be done I think and especially given that it's in the service industry so the work in itself is difficult but when you layer on top of that this notion that you've got to bill x number of hours or you are not a success you're a failure no matter if you win major victories for your client but if you don't reach that quota you're not considered a success that is a huge burden for lawyers in law firm settings so you take that away that in and of itself is a great relief for lawyers and so we we're making a go of it that's great and so on the theme of sort of changing the definition of success and pushing back against some of the escalation of particularly what we're talking about at the beginning Lisa I think at understand that at the Dalton School you all are pushing back against the homework load that I think probably I mean I can't speak for schools all over the country but I suspect that the escalation of homework is something that's being that that's taking place outside of Manhattan and in many school systems are you all successfully pushing back against I think so and I should say that with regard to the homework load for a very long time and even before I was in the directorship we had articulated a policy that students should have approximately four to five minutes worth of homework per night that a class actually met and I think that one of the things that we needed to have a look at is creep you know how you're 45, 60 and you know if everyone is doing that then what happens and I think there was a very receptive audience at Dalton because the founding of our school represented an educator pushing back against assumptions about how students best learned in 1919 when the school was founded you know Helen Parkhurst the founder herself said kids learning through these rote methods where they are slaves to the timetable this is not optimal and because we have that legacy to draw on I thought it was important to look back at it and so we did remind everyone about the 45 minute rule and the why even further we also wanted to interrogate the numbers of assessments major assessments the kids might have in a week we were controlling for the number in a day but not during the week and in fact kids experience school more in stretches of weeks rather than one day to the next and you could get a kind of feast or famine thing going on and so meeting with students with department chairs with faculty members we all together came up with a system that we are using now that rotates the weeks that a given discipline might use for their major assessments and I think that the product that we have is a good one but I think the process is even more important that this was done with students and adults working in tandem you know one of the first things I did was say let's look at the 24 hour clock or 24 hours in a day and there are no more no matter what we'd like to believe so if we take out the hours that the kids are actually here in the building with us and then we should factor in sports or clubs because we say we want kids to do that having dinner could be good maybe talking to the folks might want to get a shower let's look at the clock and determine the extent to which we are taking full responsibility for how we draw on that clock and one of the ground rules was in looking at this clock I cannot say to you as the coach well if only they weren't playing so much football and you cannot say to the parent if only you know they weren't doing so much Facebook we have to all look at what we control we do not control the Facebook we do not control the family chores we control the schoolwork that we ask of the kids and looking at that responsibly was really important it was not seamless it wasn't easy but I do think it was an important thing to do and it's still in process I'm always open to us revisiting this but I think it's something that we really fundamentally had to take responsibility for kids need time to reflect on the work that they are doing in order to really grow from it so it's an important undertaking right well as we're talking about the clock I think I forgot to address the question you actually asked me about my father's situation which came about while I was in the big law setting and working hours around the clock sometimes and on big matters and it was just a matter of my father was 85 years old and he had gone through some difficult medical situations and my mother was in is in her 70s and was the primary caregiver but she couldn't do it alone and so I needed to be there to help and so I went there to help and I didn't have any obvious no one said don't go see about your father I mean it's not that kind of setting people are supportive were supportive on my core team but in terms of how I did it there was no formal process I did it as we would say on the DL my assistant covered for me my other colleagues covered for me so there was nothing and there was always this underlying feeling of whether I was actually keeping everything going that I should have been keeping going and so kept going and so I don't know if I'm responding to what you asked but there's no structure in these types of settings or that typically aren't any structures formal structures particularly for a guy there are formal leave programs for maternity and paternity although fewer men take paternity I think but I didn't know what I was supposed to do other than I knew that I needed to be there for long stretches of time so we made it work but it's one of the things I think that needs to be addressed in terms of professionals and who are in charge of caregiving or responsible for it I'd like to say also that I think the notion of what constitutes success is always in flux and the tendency is to feel that it's become a more and more oppressive definition of success and that the school applications and everything else have become worse and worse but I would throw out the perspective that when I was growing up being gay was seen as a failure and as antithetical to being able to describe your life who's genuinely successful and I grew up with the feeling myself that being gay meant that I was not a success and I think I tried very hard to be successful in many other areas in some measure because I wanted to compensate for this tragic deficit and now I lead a life which was unimaginable when I was a child with a husband and children and sort of full acknowledgement of our relationship and so on and I think that we have allowed not for everyone in the country not in all geographical locations and so on but that there has been a sea change really in the sense of what constitutes failure there and in this particular regard it's been actually a very constructive and positive one in terms of the question of balance which I think is a constant thing I keep thinking as I listen to what everyone is saying about the wonderful moment in Mrs. Dalloway in which she's described just perceiving that her life was a thing running two blocks ahead of her that she could never quite catch up with and I think that defines a lot of the downside of success well I think and I get what you said at the beginning about sort of with time versus on time time that you're with your child versus time that you're on your child and I think what you were talking about with your father is the with time you know where you're there and you're enjoying your time together and I think that is the struggle and again I'm not convinced that it's a purely elite conversation I mean I feel like in my reporting around the country I'm thinking about time that I spent in Michigan after the recession with families where one or the other of the spouses had lost a job and these were families these are very working class families that felt a lot of pressure for their kids to be on the cheerleading squad and pay those cheerleading fees and the hockey team and pay those hockey fees and families that were struggling with the fact that they couldn't pay the hockey fees anymore and feeling as though their kids were going to lose out so I guess the reporting that I've done and it's not universal has given me a sense that in part because of our economic anxiety that so many families feel that there is always this escalation of what you feel like you should be providing your children I mean to combine that view with what Andrew said I think I was thinking Andrew as you said I mean to not I grew up in Virginia also and certainly no one was gay and that was another question but even to be a smart woman was really not okay right I mean girls who were outspoken were decidedly frowned upon and so there's no question if I just look around at the number of different kinds of people and ways of being that can flourish on the individual level there seems much much more opportunity but I was thinking I mean just going back to the point of the family right that a large part of you know people were sublimated into expected family roles so if you were a guy you were supposed to be a father and you were supposed to be a provider and you were supposed to be attracted to a woman and vice versa and so you know and that but also in that and if you're a woman you were supposed to be a wife and you're supposed to take care of a family and that made it possible to have family dinner right I mean as you start thinking about you know the structure of the family somebody was home you could have family dinner we didn't have an endless number of activities so you could actually sit down for family dinner I mean even when I'm home the only night we can reliably have dinner where everybody can sit down together it's Sunday night right because every other night there are all things going on so you could squeeze in 20 minutes of supposed family dinner but somebody is running off to something or just the sheer volume of homework right that there can't be so I was just thinking there are many ways in which people can flourish according to their own definition but I do think it does affect that even that notion of individual striving and what it takes to get there has an impact on our family life on how we think about it absolutely and the notion of family is broader than it's probably ever been in our society I mean people may look at me and see I happen also to be gay but I'm a single gay professional and some of my straight friends look at me and they go oh you must have a wonderful life it's just you you don't have to do anything but in reality and we spoke about this Liza in Washington in the LGBT community particularly in the African American LGBT community your friends are your family become your family and they are very much and I gave the example of a friend of mine who unfortunately has been diagnosed with cancer and I'm going to be there for her as though she is my sister through the every process but there's no formal way to recognize that there's no leave policy and added to that is that LGBT people for reasons that you touched on Andrew tend to overachieve to achieve success to compensate and hence they are viewed as having the resources to provide for the extended family and that's okay I mean and that's fine but the notion that because someone is single and a professional and that their life is carefree and they don't have these notions of caregiving to be concerned about and success or it's a fallacy it's very central actually even more so because if you're from a background like mine where there's not a lot of economic success and then you that the bread you are a breadwinner for a huge number of people to put it highly right and so yes you're a loaf winner a loaf winner there was a perhaps discouraging study that was done some years ago that attempted to see how much of a correlation there was between wealth and happiness and it concluded that once you got above a certain income level that there was not really a strong correlation between wealth and happiness obviously people who are impoverished or struggling in all kinds of terrible ways what did have a bearing on happiness was how wealthy you were in relation to the other people in your social group so if you were moderately more successful than all the people who spent time with you tended to have quite a high happiness rating and if you were a millionaire who moved in a circle of billionaires who tended to have quite a low happiness rating not very attractive but that's what they found that's funny you know thinking about the family one contrast that I'm able to think on often is when my oldest child was born I took off a year from work because I realized that I could simply give my paycheck to the person who I would hire to look after her I could look after her myself and so I decided that I had the cushion to do this for a year and then my mother and my father came to New York from Chicago complete long-time Chicago people who had done the great migration up from the Deep South they came to New York to live with us and the other component of this is that my brother who actually has autism had just aged out of the public school system in Chicago at the age of 21 I could not find resources in Chicago that I thought were suitable but I could find in New York and so all things came together so my parents and my brother came to New York we all moved into a house together with my husband my older daughter and then ultimately my younger child was born and I will say those were the golden years because you know we all get on very well together and my parents have a lot of autonomy they do their thing we do our thing and then we do our things together but those were the golden years I remember calling my mom and saying you know I'm at Dalton and I'm going to be late and she said Lisa why do you call me I'm with my grandchild do not call me just come home when you're coming and you know I process that and just the weight that fell off of my shoulders because I was like they're all taking care of and it got to the point you know my dad would drive us to school you know my mom was making the lunch my husband was looking after this from my mother the whole organism worked together so well and again I recognize that there is a blessing in my family being able to get on with each other but this is something that I had hoped to construct even before I had kids and that it all came together was amazing and being able to compare now that they've gone back to Chicago the difference is quite profound I think the compensatory component is that my older child is now old enough to do more things on her own but my parents are looking to come back with my brother because they will be aging and my brother is only 30 some years old you know so someone has to look after him I want to be sure that he's with me that my kids know him for who he is their uncle and not like that weird guy from Chicago the fact that they grew up with him has made a profound difference in terms of how they respond to him and his ways and so I have met a number of people who've talked about the extent to which extended family whether by blood or fictive extended family can really help to negotiate these questions of how the family dynamic operates within the context of increasing demands on the individual members we've got lots of questions we have time for maybe one or two questions or if ask if you speak really quickly so right there in the middle you're slowly lowering your hand yes very interesting conversation my name is Susan Oxhorn and hello again and you've talked a lot about the definition of success in terms of the adults but one of the things that I'm interested in because I'm interested in child development and early child early care and education is the effect of the anxiety and these expectations of success on our children and I think that it's it can be quite toxic so I'm wondering if you might talk about it I also wanted to say that I have my children I grew up in I raised my children in New York they went to public school until high school I have friends who have children at Dalton which is a wonderful school but the children in public schools are being subject to a race to the top where how much homework they have is really irrelevant there are children in kindergarten who are bubbling in on standardized tests so there's a lot going on universally and also here we have universal for kindergarten that's that's being implemented so I'd be interested to know the question would be the impact of everything we've talked about on children that who are internalizing this well certainly from my vantage I'll say again that I think that students who are overly rushed overly programmed lose the opportunity to reflect and to really process what they're learning I think also high school students who are driven to acquire courses experiences scores just at the moment that they're sort of developing adult identity can lose a valuable access to their authenticity to who they want to be and to what they value and this is to say that students can do whatever they want but I do think there's a way in which these success paradigms tend to have a cookie cutter component so that you know success for you is meant to look the same as success for me when that is of course not the case and so I go back to that word interrogation because I use it quite often with the students ask yourself why you want to go to that school ask yourself why you want to take this particular course ask yourself why you need to be a three-season athlete instead of two and there could be good reasons for being a three instead of a two but you need to ask it needs to be deliberate and to the extent that we can help kids to ask these questions and to sit with the answers and to try to access their own authenticity I think we can militate against some of the anxiety that can be around that right how do you mean they don't have the choice to interrogate you mean in terms of I have a child in public school as well are being that are being created are mitigating against that very very important process and obviously children aren't playing they don't have research recess they are spending time you know in testing so and then they have on top of this this notion of what success should be that they need to be on the track to that I mean I have a child in public school and I have a child in private school and I guess I would say that as is always the case we must function within our context and we can certainly push against that context but you also in one way have to dare to dream so you know if the issue is whether it's a regents test or the common core or the APs or the SAT2s I guess again part of what it has meant to grow up on the margins is you can learn to do those things while not buying what they signify while not accepting what they signify within reason I mean because I can't wave my wand and completely change the school system as it currently stands I think then to try to be as subversive as you can in terms of undoing what those those batteries signify for those kids is one beginning at least it's not a solution but it's a beginning so if we I'm sorry go ahead in writing my book I have a chapter of the last book a chapter about prodigies and about families of prodigies and it was very interesting research to do in the first place I think many families confuse developing quickly with developing are and those are two different things and being way ahead of your age group does not necessarily mean that you'll be great at what you're doing when you got to be older there were many of the children of course fell into the sort of hackneyed thing of having so much exposure so early on and developing such a sense that their validity was contingent on their ability to perform in this specific way that they actually had a very low self image even though they garnered a great deal of applause but there were also interesting conversations that I had about the question really of how we define success and much of how we define success in this perhaps the elitist way but I think fairly generally is in this sense of broad accomplishment and there was one young man who I interviewed I interviewed him and I interviewed his mother and I interviewed them together he was at the time that I met him he was eight he looked like he was six he was taking counter lessons and practicing for up to eight hours a day he was flying once a month from San Francisco where he lived to Shanghai because he wanted to get a Chinese technique as well as Western I mean there was a whole sort of scenario and I was sitting in the house and I said to his mother I said do you worry at all about Mark having a normal childhood? and Mark said I already have a normal childhood do you want to come upstairs and see my room it's really messy but you can come anyway we went upstairs and he showed me his favorite cartoons and I noticed a big stack of Sesame Street videos sitting next to the TV and then he said okay now let's go downstairs and I'll tell you the Chopin Fantasy impromptu and we went downstairs and he sat down at the piano and played that piece with an adult yearning and nuance that seemed inconceivable in someone who's still like cooking monster and when he finished his mother turned to me and said you see he's not a normal child why should he have a normal childhood it wouldn't have been my position but I thought it was an interesting one and she said why should he expend energy on learning all kinds of other things that don't interest him when he has this extraordinary talent that gives him so much joy I think it's an interesting dialectic to contemplate as long as it gives him joy that would be my test you know we were supposed to do a hard stop at 745 so I think I'm probably going to have to end it yeah yeah yeah so thank you I hope that whatever question you had I hope that we at least somehow broached it during the course of this incredibly interesting and to me moving conversation so thank you so much for coming thank you all so much