 Please welcome tonight's moderator for KCRTV, current communications director at UC Davis School of Law, and contributing host for Capital Public Radio, Ms. Pamela Wu. For joining us for an evening featuring Madeline Levine, presented by the Davis Parent University Lecture Series. Dr. Levine's work first came to my attention last summer when her opinion column raising successful children topped the list of most emailed articles on the New York Times website. I was among those who emailed it, and perhaps you were as well. Some of you may know from my past participation in this series, I'm relatively new to parenthood. My son, Eric, recently turned two. But already I feel the anxiety that I presume many of you must feel about doing the right thing to parent correctly, to shape his future and help assure his success. I wonder if I'm praising him too much or too little. I stress out over whether I'm supposed to be reading to him or giving him unstructured playtime and over how many carefully calculated minutes of each activity I should be doing, which is kind of crazy because he's not taking the SATs. He's stacking blocks and wiping his hands on our cat. But where do you find the balance between over-parenting and under-parenting? See, in my mind, because I'm kind of a person of extremes, the choices play out like these quotes that I found on this great humor website called Tiger Mom Says. Tiger Mom Says, plenty of time to enjoy life after Harvard. And by Harvard, I mean Harvard Med. Permissive Mom Says, you did your best. Who wants ice cream? Let's go visit your uncles, Ben and Jerry. Tiger Mom Says, we didn't name you Stanford for nothing. Permissive Mom Says, C's still get degrees. This one's my favorite. Tiger Mom Says, you want playtime? Okay, time to play violin. Madeline Levine is here to help us through these artificial choices, and that's really what they are, artificial choices between over-parenting and under-parenting, and to help us find balance in our quest to raise independent, joyful, well-adjusted young people. First though, it does take a community to support the well-being of every child, so I would like to recognize our community sponsors and leaders for partnering with Parent Education K-12. Please stand up so that you may be recognized. Chad Dimasi of Coldwell Banker, Dr. Steve Nowicki of Davis Pediatrics Group, Pam Maury and Kate Snow of DJUSD, school board member Susan Lovenberg and Gina Deladen, Trace Peterson of the Davis Police Department, and Anne Bellamy of the Davis Enterprise. Thank you to our partners for your support. Now, it is my distinct honor to introduce Dr. Madeline Levine. Dr. Levine has over 25 years of experience as a psychologist, consultant, and educator. Her best-selling book, The Price of Privilege, explores the reasons why teenagers from more affluent families are experiencing epidemic rates of emotional problems. Her more recently published book, Teach Your Children Well, was the DJUSD and community-wide K-12 parent and collaboratives book pick for the current school year. Dr. Levine began her career as an elementary and junior high school teacher in the South Bronx of New York before coming here to California to pursue her education and career in psychology. She is a co-founder of Challenge Success, a program founded at the Stanford School of Education that addresses education reform and student well-being. She is featured in the education documentary, Race to Nowhere, and she's a go-to person for journalists across the country who are seeking expert sources on education and parenting. She lives outside San Francisco with her husband and is the proud mother of what she likes to call three newly minted adult sons. Please welcome to Davis Parent University, Dr. Madeline Levine. That's loud. And oh thank God they took my picture off. That was just like creeping me out because my son took that actually, my middle son, who you'll hear about, but it was clearly airbrushed, and so it's like, okay. Anyway, you probably can't see what I've written up here and the reason I've done it is because, it's really mostly for me because I tend to wander if you've seen me speak before and I end up talking about the fiscal clip or Hillary Clinton or the snowstorm in the east. I don't wanna do that, so this keeps me focused. This is my favorite little graphic. It's by Dimitri Martin, who I like, he's a comedian, and when he writes about success, he says, this is what people think success looks like, straight line, meaning you went to the right private school and then you went to Harvard and then you got your MBA from Duke, and then you worked for Goldman Sachs and you lived happily ever after. And that is a story that, shockingly, I hear in my office often. So I'll have an eight-year-old boy on the couch and I'll ask him what he wants to be when he grows up and he'll tell me that he wants to be a venture capitalist. And I tell him to go find a frog, you know? It's kind of like, and the scarier thing is the 10-year-old girl on my couch who tells me she wants to marry a venture capitalist. So this is a version of success and this is what I think success actually looks like. It's a little hard for me to see, but I'm curious. We have a pretty big audience here. I am terrible with numbers. How many people does the auditorium hold? Any idea? 500 people or so? Okay, so how many of you have followed the straight and narrow path? How many of you went to the right schools, the right graduate degree, got the right job, and you know, let her raise her hand herself. Come on, we're being honest. How many people? There's always people who did that. Okay, I've got three down in their lap there. Three. Anybody here? Nobody on this side, it's all on that side? Okay. You're in a cluster, you three, right over there, right over there. The reality is that some kids actually do manage that just fine. They fly through, they're not stressed, they manage all that stuff, and you can say success was a straight line for them. Is there any way to lower that just a little bit? If anybody out there hears me, lower it a little bit. Okay, so that's three out of 500. So another numbers person. What percentage is that? Kind of about less than 1%. Okay. Okay, so that leaves 99% of us who have followed a different route to success. And I actually think that one of the greatest secrets that adults keep from children is that fact that in reality, in real life, you don't have to be a straight A student, right? If you take a minute and think about the things that you are profoundly good at, when I think about it, you know, this is easy, I love doing this, I like speaking, I write pretty well. I think I was a good mom. Those are the things I think I was really outstanding at, three things. And then, Susan Lovinger, I only asked you three times, was so kind to walk me to the bathroom because I have very impaired visual spatial relationships. I was at Nutrier on the North Shore of Chicago very recently and they sent me to the bathroom alone and 40 minutes later, they found me in the boiler room downstairs, so a whole auditorium like this, waiting because, and I think that's the case for everybody or almost everybody, that we have things that we're very strong in, things that we kind of suck at and a whole bunch of things that we're very average at. And if my kids were here, they would be sure to tell you about the time that they asked for a hard-boiled egg, so I took the eggs in the shell and I put them in the microwave. And yeah, that was a mess, actually. So like, when you go home, give that some thought in your own life, how many things that you're really extraordinary at. The Gallup poll just came out with some fascinating research on the people who had risen to the top managers, CEO, CFOs, COOs, and out of 32 variables, how many they had to be outstanding at and outstanding was defined as in the 90th percentile above of their peer group and the 32 variables were everything from content, really knows their stuff, content-based things, to good communication skills, the span, the range, to be a top corporate manager, how many of those 32 variables do you think you had to be in the 90th percentile at? Three, okay, anybody else? 10, one, three to five, three to five, leaving, again, a number, somebody else doing for me, leaving a whole bunch of things that even the top people weren't really very good at and kids in my office are devastated if they have like four A's and a C or if a parent comes to see me, they're never coming to see me about the four A's, they're coming to see me about the C. And what I'm about to say you may agree or disagree with and we can have a conversation about it afterwards, I think we spend too much time worrying about our kids' deficits and not enough time helping them cultivate their strengths because in real life, I'm a basketball fan, you go to your right, you go to the things that you're strong at and so for most kids, if they're getting A's in English and C's in math, they're probably gonna end up doing something with language in the same way that I depend on the kindness of strangers to help me with visual spatial or with figuring out less than 1%. And if a lot of my education had been trying to correct that deficit, I don't think I would have gotten to be a writer and a speaker and do what I did. So this tremendous anxiety about my kid is not performing at the same level in something or another is so heightened. I was at the Hill Schools in New York that's fields thin and Riverside and Horace Mann and we're on the wrong profession. A tutor there is $1,000 an hour. And I didn't believe it. I was told this in these little focus groups I was doing so I spoke to the headmasters and in fact that's accurate. It's $1,000 an hour, not for everybody but the top tutors are. And who do you think they're tutoring? The kids who need help or not? Not, they're tutoring the A minus students, sometimes the B plus student but the student who's almost perfect and the parents is really worried that that B plus or A minus is going to ruin their chances to get into a very prestigious school. So I think kids could use a dose of reality about what the real world is like and the fact that you don't have to be good at everything. Because that's kind of the definition of success, this sort of narrow definition and it's all metric based, like what's your GPA and what's your SAT score and how much money do you make? A lot of materialism. I was just in New York and it was just so interesting. I was walking down Fifth Avenue and I passed the Gucci store and in the window there is nothing but a shoe, a single shoe on a platform, not a platform shoe, a shoe on a platform with like lights on it, like it looks like an altar basically. And it is, it is, that's the point. It's supposed to be iconic. It's supposed to be something to be worshiped. And I like nice shoes as much as the next gal but that's not the point. The point is that kids at the youngest ages now are talking to me about their need for material goods and their need to make a lot of money. And there are many problems with that in terms of values but there's also a big problem with that in terms of what gets pushed aside for children. So if you're a young kid and you're very worried about whether or not you're gonna get into Harvard, I was at a preschool recently and a little kid is pulling on my pants and pulling on my pants and adorable and I get down to talk to him and I said, what did you want honey? And he goes, I wanna go to Harvard. And I said, really, how do you know about it? And he said, well, I'm taking Manchurian so in a child's voice so that I can go to Harvard. Now, his taking Manchurian may or may not be a good idea but for that three or four year old child whose real task is things like self control, not hitting his friend over the head in the playground, learning how to sit still so he can go on to kindergarten, five days a week of learning a foreign language may not be the best use of his time. It may be but it may not be. And I think, I know this concern about how many extracurriculars things kids are involved in but I'd like you to remember how tough growing up was which we forget, we forget what it was like to be young and have nobody sit with you at the table or wake up to an absolutely foreign body every day, literally foreign body every day. I mean, those are the things that we forget about and when I was listening to Pamela talking about all the stress, it's like that's not what childhood is supposed to be. Childhood needs this big space of time so that kids can figure out many things but the two major tasks of childhood are friendships and exploration. And so specialized camps, constant tutoring, traveling teams, I'll talk more about, I don't like any of those things for kids because I think they get in the way of what the developmental task is. If you've been on a traveling team from the time you were seven for soccer, you're never gonna know if La Crosse was really your game and that's the period of time where kids have the ability to explore that way. There's a reason why this is a narrow definition of success and that's because parents are very anxious as we heard from Pamela, is it enough, is it too much, did I buy the right toys? First of all, you're never gonna get it right so let's start with that. And I want you to hear one thing that's really important to me when I speak and that's that I don't know your child, your particular child. And so you can listen to me or other child developmental experts or educational experts and we have research behind us and I certainly believe what I have to say and it's true in general but it may not be true for your particular child and your greatest job is to know your own child profoundly and deeply so that you can filter what I have to say through the reality of who your kid is. Every child is different but we are nervous and we're nervous as a group. Why are we so nervous? Well, we have some good reasons to be nervous. We have a terrible economy, right? I have three newly minted sons which is a source of great satisfaction and a little bit of relief actually and you know, what am I worried about that they're gonna graduate, well two are out in the world, one's still in college, that they're gonna graduate, come home, sleep in the basement, play video games and hit the bong. I mean, you know, that's the fear of many, many parents is that their kids will not be employable, right? The world has gone flat. We're in competition with Asia, we're in competition with India and how do we make sure that our kids are really able to compete? So I wanna tell you a story that threw a lot of light on that question for me. I was on a panel with one of the head engineers of NASA and that was quite an honor actually and he was a guy from India and so I got to ask him the questions that I get asked a lot, like are we really losing, are our kids not doing well, are you taking all the kids from Asia, from India and are kids will all be unemployed and his answer was profoundly interesting to me. He said in terms of content, American kids were as good as anybody. They knew their content really well but in terms of a sense of entitlement, they were the most entitled of any group of kids he worked with. They expected raises before they ever got their hands dirty and they also needed help all the time. So the kind of collaborative work that is absolutely mandatory in the 21st century, like the problems are so complex and never gonna be solved by one guy sitting in an office with a bolt of lightning hitting him. It's gonna be collaborative work across time zones, across cultures and he said that's where American kids suck as he said. That they need the kind of constant extrinsic reinforcement that no business now, because businesses have to be lean, have the resources for. And he told me about a kid who when he said to him, you will get a yearly evaluation. He said, the kid went crazy and said, what do you mean yearly? I need you to tell me like every day how I'm doing. And he said, that's kind of a typical thing. So we have a reason to be concerned about how our kids are going to do, but we're concerned with the wrong things. We're paying all attention to content, which I'm down by Silicon Valley so I get to talk to a lot of people. The content is rolling over and rolling over and rolling over. My youngest kid was in engineering and they told him by the time you graduate, this will all be obsolete. But the kinds of skills that are really necessary, collaboration, creativity, thinking outside the box, those things are getting short shrift because we're so anxious about grades. And grades are something that are easy to measure, right? They're just easy to measure and they let us know how we're doing as parents. So all those bumper stickers, my child is an A student and my child can kick your A student's ass and all these bumper stickers about how well your child is or isn't doing is an easy way to tell the world how you're doing as a parent, right? Because we don't have the kind of safety nets that parents have always had, right? Mom doesn't live down the block and the rabbi or the priest doesn't stop by to see if you're having difficulty anymore. I believe we're kind of on our own and because we're on our own and many women have gone back to work, that there is a little bit of, as opposed to ourselves being collaborative, there's a tremendous amount of competition among parents. There's a fancy little grocery store where I live called The Woodlands. See, I can't tell this in my own neighborhood. And when my kids went to the school right across the street, all the moms would drop the kids off because we lived a block away and we would drop the kids off and then we'd all go have a latte because we liked being as stereotypical as possible about being a Marinite. And you'd wait on this line and I'd hear all these mothers talking about how terrific their family was. Oh, we get along so well and the kids love each other and they can't wait to go on vacation. And yes, he got into Stanford and Harvard and he's trying to figure out where to go. And I'm like, I see your kids, they are really fucked up. I'm sorry. At least I'm not in a church. You know, they're having problems and I know they're having problems. And that's the kind of competition. I can't believe I said that. That's when I leave my notes on the side. That's the kind of competition that it feels like living in these kind of affluent communities where people are vying not to help each other so much but to see who's doing better than the other person. So my oldest kid is 32. If he had a problem, I could call my neighbor who had a kid that's a year older and say, Lauren's needs will help with calculus and she would say, oh, my son passed out last year. Let me send them over. It felt much more collaborative than with my youngest son who's like 21 and there wasn't that kind of collaboration. It would be more like, oh, he's having trouble. I don't know why because my son's doing just fine. So you don't make too many of those phone calls, right? So I think there's a lot of pressure on us as parents and we default to this miserable model of treating parenting sort of like CEOs treat their shareholders. CEO is worried about the end of the quarter and the return for their shareholders and we're like, what's your GPA? What's it this semester? What's it this semester? We're always looking at the bottom line and if I make no other case tonight, it would be that we have our eye on the wrong ball. That parenting is not at the end of the quarter. You're not looking at results at the end of the quarter. You're looking at results 20 years down the line, 30 years down the line. I wanna read to you my definition of successful parenting. Well, we all hope that our children will do well in school. We hope with even greater fervor that they will do well in life. Our job is to help them know and appreciate themselves deeply, to be resilient in the face of adversity, to approach the world with zest, to find work that is satisfying, friends and spouses who are loving and loyal and to hold a deep belief that they have something meaningful to contribute to the world. That's what I consider a job well done and there's no mention of grades or schools or anything like that in there. And I think if we were all sitting down kind of eyeball to eyeball, I think that's what most parents want for their kids. Do I want my kids to make a good living? Sure, but I think because I have the advantage of perspective, because my kids are older, which means I'm older, I can see how co-arcted, how thin sort of a metric definition is. And I think I got really interested in this because I have three profoundly different sons, profoundly different. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about them because when they graduated, I have this really clear visual of what graduation looked like for each of them. And it really is what sort of got me going in this whole arena of, if all we care about is metrics, we're kind of pressuring very highly academically talented kids, but more importantly, we're marginalizing a far greater group of kids with talents that are not necessarily academic. They may be creative, they may be hands-on, they may be intuitive, they may be interpersonal. I recently spoke at something called the Orphola Foundation down in Santa Barbara, and that's the guy who started Kinkos. And he met me at the airport and he was literally like this, I thought to myself, it's such a pleasure to meet you, I've always wanted to meet you, can you tell, I had ADD as a kid, and it's like really, no, no clue, no clue. And that's who he was. However, somehow he found out that I liked roses. There were roses all over my hotel room when I got there. There were roses waiting for me when I could, this guy had the best social skills of anybody I've ever met. And his story was, he was never a good student and that was fine with his parents because they understood that he had these other skills. And he ended up doing Kinkos and there's a million stories like that. I don't love, people will often say, especially down where I live, well, I don't have to go to college because Bill Gates didn't finish college or Steve Jobs didn't finish college. And it's like, guess what? You're not Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. So it, you know, it doesn't really, right? But there are millions, thousands, I don't know, thousands, let's say thousands of stories like that of people who you go, really that kid is the one who ended up doing well. When my kids were little, that my oldest kid had a friend who whenever they played softball, you know, the kid who just like wanders off, right? You know, it's like, where's Tony? I'm not at third base anymore. He was out in the bushes finding plants, you know, and everybody thought he was like such a weird kid. Tony's married and happy and is the head of botany at I think the University of Michigan. So there's no, you know, it's like expanding our notion about what can lead to success for our kids. And there are many things that lead to success. So I started to tell you about my three kids in this graduation scene. My oldest kid's name is Lauren. And he was this kid, you know, the one percenter. He was a straight A student and he was the student athlete of the school and life came pretty easy for him. The school was great. I had dozens of events to go to, you know, the Dean's List, the Merit List, the Honor List, right? And he went on to a very good school and he became a lawyer and it was like, duh, you know, it was clear that that's what he was going to do. And when he graduated Redwood, my local high school, he had stuff all over him at graduation. So they're wearing red gowns and then they have like tinsel for being a student athlete and for being on the honor roll and for, so you know, he's got stuff hanging all over. He looks like a Christmas tree or something. And I'm proud of him. He's proud of himself. But it was like, that's the visual of what it means to be the straight A student, you know, the really outstanding student. And there was a lot of recognition for him. And that was my first, you know, and when your first kid is like that kind of kid, you know, a really good, easy straight A, you just think you're the world's best mother, right? Because it's all about you. Well, when you have that kind of, and then you have the tough kid and it's all about genetics, right? Because he's my... So that's how he walks down. It's a very, very clear visual to me. My middle kid, Michael, who is now in New York as a director some of the time. So some of the time he's at Lincoln Center and some of the time he's handing out flyers for Banana Republic. And he was actually a very good student but he didn't care about grades at all. He just didn't get it. He never understood grades. So I got called up to school two or three times in his career because he'd get a test back. He'd look at it and he put it in the garbage. And so I got these calls saying your son was disrespectful about his test. And I'd have to come up and talk to them and I'd come home and it's like, Michael, you know, don't throw it in front of the teacher like any... He would say to me like, what am I supposed to do? Frame it? I mean, you know, I'm done. I saw my grade. So he just happened to be a good student also but not as good as his brother. And when he graduated, he had some stuff on his, some of this stuff on his gown. But he really couldn't care less because he took the whole gown and he sewed it up so that it was a suit and he wrote on it and decorated it. Like, so that was the creative child. And I got to walk through the back of this high school and see the, I get to see the theater here. I got to see the stage, the set equipment in the back. In a lot of communities, particularly affluent communities, the arts are valued. And so, well, there wasn't as much for him. There still was a theater and a drama course and a drama department and those kinds of things. And if any of you happen to have a creative child, I'm gonna have a word with you for a minute as I'm thinking about my son, Michael. And that is that creative children, they're not as easy as that straight, you know, the kid that just goes straight and does everything right, wants to do everything right. And this may not be true for your child but it's my experience that those kids, you cannot change that. You know, do I have hard days when after he's had a big gig, there's nothing lined up and he's living in his closet in New York and eating top ramen? I really do. It would be a lie to say I didn't. But all you can do with a really creative kid, they're like a stream and you can be a rock. You can get in the middle of it. They will flow around you. You cannot turn that child into a lawyer. But at one point when I was really, when he was making no money, when he first moved to New York, and it was about six months, and I said, you know, Michael, you've always been so interested in theater. Have you ever thought about the business side of theater? And he said, you're the woman who goes around the country saying, see the child? Do you think I'm getting an MBA ever? You know, and he was right. So I don't do that anymore. Although am I tempted? Yeah, of course, occasionally. But anyway, so he was the creative child. And if he was here, he would be very unhappy because they don't like being categorized. So my kids would often say to me, don't categorize me. If I'm the creative child, I can't be the smart child. If I'm the smart child, I can't be interesting. So it's a shorthand and they're not here. So I get to do it and I only have 45 minutes. But my third kid, Jeremy, was the most average child in the world. How many people here have average children? Nice, nice, an honest group. This is, you know, my usual audience size and I was scheduled to give a talk in Marin entitled The Average Child and it was advertised and nobody, nobody, nobody came to it. So I'm very impressed with you guys cause in Marin apparently there is not a single average child, whereas here there are many. Actually we're all, as I was saying in the beginning, we're all rather average in many, many ways and it would be nice to acknowledge as much. So my middle kids graduated the middle person in his high school class making him the most average child possible and he was a total hands-on learner. Guy named Sternberg, yeah, Sternberg, has something called the Triarchic Theory of Intelligence. He was at Yale, now he's at Tufts and he's bringing in a percentage of the incoming class at Tufts and they're doing the same thing at MIT because in broad brush strokes he says there's kind of three kinds of intelligence there are kids who are analytic, that's like my oldest kid, there are kids who really are creative, a middle kid and there are kids who learn by doing, who are hands-on, who are street smart kind of kids and there are a number of schools now who are forgoing a percentage of their class to bring kids in from those other categories. So Jeremy, total hands-on learner. If he could touch it he could learn it and if he couldn't touch it he couldn't learn it and that was challenging for me because I've got a lawyer and actor, I'm a speaker, my husband does a lot of teaching and then I have this totally non-verbal child where it's very tempting to sort of say what's wrong with you but his temperament was just very, very different and when he graduated he had nothing on his gown, not a thing and I got really teary, not that he was particularly bothered by it but Jeremy is the child in my house because he was a hands-on kind of kid he worked in construction summers because it was something he could feel good about and he used to wake up at five o'clock in the morning to make sandwiches for his Hispanic in Marin County, it's Hispanic construction workers for the Hispanic guys on the team with him because he couldn't understand how anybody could support a family on the 12 bucks an hour they all made so that's the kid who would wake up at five in the morning and so his strengths were, and I'm proud of that, his strengths were empathy and compassion, he's like a really good person and when he walked down completely unadorned it struck me hard that some of the things that are most useful out in the world who do you wanna work with? You wanna work with a good person, right? You wanna work with somebody who's generous you wanna work with somebody who's compassionate is unrecognized in school and often in our communities. I have been at, I don't know, probably about close to 300 schools around the country now and the entrances are invariably the same they've got the honor roll and they've got the athletic cabinet and the athletic cabinet can go back like centuries, you know. In Marin, we've got Gavin Newsom's trophy it's still in Redwood, you know, so there are a few schools around the country that are different, this school called Wildwood that I like down in LA there are some schools where you walk in and there's all kinds of things there is the honor roll but there's also photography and ceramics and HPVs, human powered vehicles, stuff like that. Now I must say the school made some attempt to find things for kids like this because these are the boys that if you don't engage them they're gonna be smoking dope behind the gym, right? So the school knew that so they started a engineering track, a four year engineering track and like I was so excited that was a great idea but they never bothered to have it recognized by the UCs so for my son, every A that he got didn't count, right? And it was partly a reflection of the community which said the wood shop does not count it didn't matter that they learned, you know, CAD, computer assisted drawing and they learned engineering and architecture nobody wanted their kids to end up being a mechanic we just had a thing in my community about having a culinary academy at the school voted down by the parents I don't want my kid to be a chef they don't make much money I mean what's a more useful thing to know than how to cook yourself dinner, right? And yet they decided that was a bad idea you know one more AP class so and I wanna be clear about something it's not every once in a while somebody will say well aren't you being like anti-intellectual or you know are you trying to like get away from standards and stuff and that's not the point at all I always say I am a Jewish PhD from New York City married to what my family likes to call a real doctor because he's a surgeon and this is not at all about lowering standards or not having kids perform academically it's all about what will be recognized out in the world as being helpful for kids as they march into the 21st century and I think we're looking at I think we're missing and marginalizing kids with tremendous I think every kid has a superpower and I think our job is to find that as parents and the school's job is to value it and I don't think that happens I think that many of those kids are sort of left behind and you know personally I think it's tragic but I've also spent almost 30 years now treating kids who have felt like they you know they'll say to me I'm only as good as my last performance meaning if I did, if I got an A my parents are happy and if I didn't I feel like they're disappointed in me and that's sad okay so back to why we're so anxious one part of it has to do with the economy let me get my notes so I don't get too far off track I can't find them okay part of it has to do with the economy part of it has to do with parental pressure part of it has to do with the isolation I think we all feel I think parents and maybe we'll get to talk about this a little bit later I think parents feel very isolated and I think it can be particularly piercing in communities where people have a lot of stuff and they feel that they have nothing to complain about so that your child becomes your best bet like this New York Times piece on over parenting you know I wish I could tell you it was like the most brilliant thing I'd ever written but it wasn't it was just this incredibly straightforward piece and when they called and said it's the most email piece in the history of the New York Times it's like you've got to be kidding me I mean that had to be you know Osama bin Laden's death or the fiscal cliff or the first block press it had to be something not like raising children and I realized at the end of the day that after we've worried about all those things we worry about our children and we worry about our children most and that's why it was so incredibly popular and I think that there's a need to have some sense that we're kind of doing this together that we're not completely on our own that we're not in competition with each other and that we can take the time ourselves to raise children remember the other side of kids being over scheduled his parents being over scheduled so I just did this crazy thing down in you know with the young Turks of Silicon Valley and it was supposed to be about their blackberries and because they're on them all the time constantly and so you know I figure I'm gonna go in and really help the moms out and get the guys off the blackberries because it's all guys down there and it's like no way you know can you give it up for dinner oh no no well okay could you give it up for part of dinner no can you give it up when you go up no all I got was the agreement that upon waking instead of reaching immediately for that blackberry they would first say hello to their spouse and then they would reach for that blackberry so and that had to do with the sense that every moment that they weren't involved in work was a moment lost and you can't raise children like that I mean the reality of raising children is that you have to be present that knowing your child in deep substantial ways takes time and it takes being fully present so even if you're down on the floor playing and you're thinking about what you're missing at work you can't be fully present and then a child can't really develop the sense of who they are children don't start out with the sense of who they are they get it from your accurate reflection back to them so we have to be a we have to be clear enough to reflect back to our children accurately and instead what we're doing is being anxious and over parenting and what do I think over parenting is I think it has three components the first is doing for our children what they can already do you know that's when your kid already knows she didn't notice you doing that at all people are going like this if your child knows math please don't hover over them while they do their math homework yes they will make a mistake here or there but they know it consider that you've done your job well which was to shepherd them to that point and let them do it and it doesn't matter if they make a mistake or two you're not the night teacher you have teachers who are going to correct their the children's work and you know teachers of the most for me I was a teacher they're the most under-respected profession imaginable they do a great job don't bother them don't call them because your kid got an A minus and he should have gotten it just let them do their work I really feel that pretty strongly teachers teachers in the house okay so don't do what your kid can already do that that was pretty easy even though we like sort of step in that makes sense to most people the next one is don't do what your child can almost do and that's harder for people because like isn't that what a parent supposed to do if your child can't do it yet aren't you supposed to help them in education called the zone of proximal development right it's the area where the child can almost do something but still needs a little bit of adult help but I think about it this way I think that's the zone of growth and coping skills and because I'm an adolescent therapist uh... there is nothing that matters more than self-control you have an adolescent thing you want to make sure that teenager has is some ability to control their impulses because believe it or not a teenager actually can think as well as you can which is shocking isn't it but they have the capacity to think abstractly what they don't have is any experience or judgment so you know it's kind of like I kid around sometimes and say you know what's stupider than a fourteen-year-old three fourteen-year-olds put them together in the IQ sort of plum it's because they don't have they don't have judgment uh... speaking of IQ, this is a totally unrelated fact I'll get back to over parenting in a minute uh... one of the things that happens in affluent communities is because people tend to be successful there's some uh... assumption that their kids will also be very very academic interestingly we tend to marry people with very similar IQs to ourselves it's an interesting fact and there is a degree of heritability in intelligence so people think that if they're really smart are you too married? I just want to make sure that you know I got it wrong once and it was very embarrassing okay so like if you have an IQ of 140 and she has an IQ of 145 because Gallo always gets the five more points it's not additive your child's not 285 and well it's funny I hear that all the time people say but my husband's so smart and it's like that's your husband you know it's not your child as a matter of fact there's something called regression to the mean which means that it's just as likely if you're really really really smart in that IQ kind of way which means you know how to take IQ tests really well um... then uh... it's just as likely that your kid won't be quite as IQ facile as you are because there's this tendency to regress to the mean okay that was just a diversion and just whatever so don't do what your child can almost do I'm the co-founder of this organization called Challenge Success Down at Stanford and my co-founder Janice Pope and I have a running argument about this particular thing we always ask the question if your child left their homework on the table and it was a really important assignment let's say he's eleven um... and he'd been working on it for ten days would you bring it up to school how many of you would bring it up to school the majority and how many of you wouldn't a significant minority but but you're the minority um... so she and I have a very big disagreement about this the correct answer the correct answer is you don't bring it up to school why? because it's what we would call a successful failure your child forgot it um... he learns two really important things out of that one he learns just the logistics of how to remember things right next time maybe he'll put it next to the door or he'll leave himself a note or he'll put it in the car so he learns the logistics but from my point of view he also learns how to tolerate the unhappy feelings that come with having made a mistake but he's at school he's not going to go crazy he's not going to put his head through the wall he's not going to cry in front of his friends he's going to have to go inside of himself and figure out a way to calm himself down and deal with the uncomfortable feelings he has and that's sort of the definition my definition of what a successful failure is is it's within the realm of the possible I'm not talking about something like being terribly bullied something that's outside the realm of the possible but it's within the realm of the possible and there's something to be learned the child who does that hopefully the next time of the time after the time after will remember his homework and the next time he's upset by the way he will remember I remember you know that day I forgot my homework and I made it through the day you know he has the memory now of having mastered of having been able to get through uncomfortable feelings the disagreement that Denise and I have my co-founder and I is she says you never bring it up to school never if she was saying you never bring it up to school I can't help but think that if I was like in two days I'm giving the keynote in Dallas to the National Camping Association like I you know I don't know much about camping and so I'm going to really need my notes with me that day and if I left them on the table on my way to the airport and my husband saw them and said you know I think Madeleine could use a successful failure I would be so mad because part for me part of being in a family is we have each other's backs so would I ever bring something up for a kid? Sure you know would I do it a lot? No but so even within experts you know there's some disagreement about what you do and don't do but in general you want to let kids experience discomfort necessity challenge in their lives because here's the real hard part of being a parent and Pamela and I were talking about this about having a sick child on the way over the toughest part of being a parent is seeing your child in pain I can't tell you how many mothers have sat I see mostly moms have sat in my office and said I can't stand to see my child unhappy and my answer always is if you can't stand to see your child unhappy you are in the wrong business because your child has to be unhappy in order to learn how to navigate what is an inevitable part of life so you know we've got five hundred people here how many people have never had a divorce, a death, a loss, a financial reverse a separation how many of you have never had that in your lives one person and if I get one person I'm always like when you go out in the parking lot just be careful so that's the reality of life everyone except for one person in this room understands that eventually your children will face those exact same tragedies that you've had to navigate yourself in your own life and if they don't have coping skills they're lost these are the kids I see these are the kids who go away to college have you know we're a tiger mom in ways that didn't ever allow them to be independent one of my favorite stories is the dean of freshman at Stanford tells the girls walking across and she forgets where her next class is she's a freshman and instead of reaching in her backpack to get her class schedule she reaches into her pocket takes out her phone and calls her mother in Asia sixteen time zones away to find out where her next class is and her mother tells her now it's a tiny little example but magnify that a thousand times over every challenge that a child faces and you have a child with no coping skills now if we do that do we all do that from time to time of course when my oldest kid went away to college and I didn't hear from him the first day I was like oh you know he's so independent and we didn't hear from him the second day or the third day and I'm like you know telling my husband what a great job I did and on the fourth day Lauren calls me and says mom you know that number that you used to call when I needed a phone number what was it and I realized it's 411 and I understand why he didn't know it because I can still visualize it there's a long haul in his room stand there and say I want to call for some pizza and I'd say don't worry honey I'll call for you so he really never learned how to dial 411 so I say 411 I hang up the phone and then I pick it up immediately and call him back and say Lauren do you know about 9-1-1 because then I was really worried so on did that did that ruin him no of course it didn't ruin him it made him younger than he should have been an 18 year old should not have to dial 411 we do this occasionally all of us do it occasionally but to do it regularly because you can't stand to see your child unhappy is to abdicate one of your responsibilities which is to allow your child not externally to figure out to depend on the external world to tell them what to do like the kid who needs a pat on the shoulder every day but internally to be able to go inside and figure out and one of the things I get asked often is well how do you know if your kid is ready and it's a really good question because if I remember raising kids accurately that was the toughest part of raising kids uh... was the day how many of you have kids who drive some of you okay you know the day that your child says I'm taking the car to Tahoe it's like and I'm taking Xanax till you come back I mean I just make me unconscious until because I'm scared to death the same way that we held our breath the first time we allowed our child to cross the street until they got to the other side right it's terrifying right that was the word you used terrifying that's our issue we have to tolerate the anxiety that comes with the inevitable moving forward of our children and we have to have some guidelines how do you know how do I know when my kid is ready to go to Tahoe how do you know any kids ready to cross the street how do you know when they're ready to take the bike around the neighborhood and I think the best rule of thumb I can offer is you look at the developmental tasks right before what they want to do and see how they've managed that so if your your fifteen-year-old daughter now wants an eleven o'clock curfew she has a ten o'clock curfew she's never made at home on time she doesn't call you you don't know where I guarantee you that the eleven o'clock curfew will be unsuccessful but if she has made it home on time if she does call you if there's a problem then you know she's ready for the next step if your kid can ride on the bike the bike down the street come home when you call not fall off not cry know where he is find the house then he's probably ready to try going around the block and it's our task to tolerate the anxiety that comes with it and there will be anxiety but that's the best rule of thumb I have so that's kind of this middle area and that's where I think coping skills developing I think coping skills you know as a psychologist is uh... I can't over over uh... value uh... or overstate the importance of coping skills for kids getting through because if all their stuff is extrinsic what happens to the kids that I see is they go immediately to drugs because they've never sort of developed enough internal stuff they're always looking outside of themselves for a solution you know we haven't virtual epidemic of depression anxiety cutting all these kinds of things now and there are many reasons for it there's not a single reason for it but I think that one of them is that kids simply have not learned how to manage internally their own challenges in the absence of adult help and adult help is not always there for example they just did a study on self-mutilation at the Ivy Leagues seventeen percent of kids at the Ivy Leagues are self-mutilating that is a really high number uh... twenty five percent are substance abusing not using twenty five percent meet the criteria for an anxiety disorder and depression and there's a lot of comorbidity there so you know I could keep giving you numbers and they'd add up to two thousand but you know the kid who cuts and drinks and is depressed that often goes together the third part of over parenting which is the toughest part uh... I think has to do with the inability to tell the difference between our child's needs and our own needs uh... and this is the hardest part because it calls us to account for things in our own life I think that aren't going as well as they might be so I have a dad and a son in my office I know them very well they're not crazy um... the kid has played lacrosse with my youngest son for years and they're there to discuss college choice for uh... the son and he's really really smart kid he probably could go anywhere you know now it's not enough to have your school counselor and the paid counselor you also apparently need a psychologist also to help you figure out like what's the perfect match for your child and um... so the kid you know is kind of talking about where he might go to school he starts with the trinity of schools in uh... california which is like stanford and davis stanford and cal and ucla or claremont or whatever and um... that dad is like he's like coiled like a snake you know and you can tell that his wife said keep your mouth shut because he's just not saying anything and the kid very tentatively starts making his way across the united states maybe michigan maybe wisconsin dad's so quiet he finally gets to the east coast he starts with like william some of the small colgate some of the small schools and that you can cut the tension in the air with a knife and the kid finally says well i guess i could apply to harvard and this dad leaps off the couch and says now there's a school i would give my left testicle for my son to get into and you know sometimes you're just not prepared in life to answer something and that was what i mean you know you can't make this stuff up because it's so weird and uh... the issue with that there are many to say the least but the issue with that is look this kid's got a million things on his plate to worry about right he's sixteen years old he's really smart he's taking very difficult courses he's got his first girlfriend you know his body is betraying him every day's got things happening down there that are like completely out of his control he's got pimples his hair doesn't look right he got cut you know that's what being sixteen is he's got a million things to worry about he doesn't need to worry about his father's gonads and you know that that's both literal and figurative when i say that i mean he doesn't need to worry about his father's concerns or worries or aspirations for him he's got to figure out his own aspirations and like everything you know there's a story the father was one of four kids three of them went to ivy league schools the dad didn't go he was gonna make it up by having his kid go and you know my advice to the dad actually once i could gather any semblance of coherence was i said you know if it's that important for you to to be able to say you have a kid at harvard go online go to the bookstore seventy five cents you can buy a bumper sticker put it on your car drive around not this time the next time and leave your kid out of it right because that's your issue if if you take one thing away from tonight it's go home and think about like when you sound crazy like am i the only person like i i used to sound crazy how many people sound crazy sometimes those of you who are not raising your hands a line so i'm gonna give you an example of time i sounded crazy and i'm giving it to you because it really is like the hard work the hardest work of parenting so i've told you about my youngest son who was a very average student and he went into his he didn't do well in english because he had a language deficit and he was going into finals and he had an A minus this is all the wrong things to do everything i'm about to tell you and i'm telling him you know i knew you could do it that's terrific you're supposed if you want to praise your kids praise effort and improvement not not performance not the grade but i'm telling him you know i know you could have done it it's great you all you had to do was you know step up to the plate man up and blah blah blah and then he goes in and he takes the final and he ends up with the b-plus in the class which for him was really a very good grade and i go crazy i go crazy i'm screaming at him i knew you couldn't do it you're a slacker you never can get i mean it's just it is abysmal he's on the bed he's got the covers over his head crying i'm crying i mean it was very very painful and i knew that i had to get out of the room that i was you know i had a you can tell i have a soft spot for this kid i had a very close to have a very close relationship with him and i knew i was blowing it in that minute of going after him personally that's breaking a boundary a psychological boundary so i get out of the room and i go into the bathroom and look at myself i got tears all over the place my first thought is you know i have to call my publisher and my agent they can't publish the price of privilege cause who am i to tell anybody how to raise a child i can't raise my own but then i decided i really had to understand it because i really did know better uh... this is my life's work and yet i was totally losing it why and so i went and i talked to somebody over some time about what had happened and you know what i ended up realizing was my own dad had died at the exact same age that i was uh... that jeremy was at that time that this happened at sixteen and that we had no money we were on assistance and the only way i got to go to college was i had good verbal skills and so when i was yelling at him like that it had nothing to do with him like he was going to college and his father was alive and we had resources but i wasn't seeing him at all i was just remembering a time when i just didn't know if i was going to be able to manage and that's what freaked me out that's why i was yelling and i would suggest that often when we find ourselves on the wrong side of an argument when we hear ourselves being really crazy that's what it has to do with a loss a disappointment just like the dad who didn't make it to harvard with his kid that those things are profoundly tied to some of our own issues and they get projected onto our kids we don't make the distinction between their needs and our needs and it's usually for the worst so if so you have two little assignments you can do when you go home it's to think about how average you are and and to figure out where your vulnerability is in terms of what you aspire your kids to be you know your child is you plant a red rose you are getting a red rose you are not gonna get a white rose or an oak tree or that you're getting a red rose and your job is to figure out how to maximize that red rose and that means being creative and innovative and thinking outside your own comfort zone uh... and i think we're going to talk about this a little bit actually and i want to make sure i'm not over time which i am so let me just wrap up with a couple of solutions because when i had three kids and if i took a night to go out i wanted to walk away with something like i could do when i got home well actually sometimes i just wanted to get out of the house but so i think there are a couple things to do you know one is to be very careful about what your value system is and i don't like exercises in books i've never done an exercise in a book but this book actually does have exercises for values clarification because i think it brings into relief uh... if you say you value health and your child's getting six hours of sleep at night when the american academy of pediatrics says nine and a quarter for high schoolers and ten hours for middle schoolers then then there's something wrong with they're not aligned you've got a misalignment between what you think of your values and what you're actually doing so i i actually think it's helpful to do that so you you need to be really clear on values i think it's really important that kids have chores and jobs and and that they don't get paid for them like when's the last time you got paid for you know going food shopping or something like that that you know part your child's going to go out in the world and be part of a community and their home is their first community so i think they need to learn to pitch in just like everybody else pitches in in a community i just got asked in this same uh... young turks thing by somebody should my child learn how to make a bed i get paid for this you know it's just like what a job and and you know so i said like why would you ask that and he said well you know we have a full staff and they make our bed so what what does my child have to learn how to make a bed and it's like i think you're hoping one day like maybe your child will like leave the house and then they'll have a roommate or a spouse will say you know what's matter with you don't you know make your bed and i find often that kids who are entitled and it's very easy to brush them off as being annoying uh... really don't know how to do stuff i had one kid in my practice she was it was so it looked like such entitlement she wouldn't pack a suitcase had their own plane and she wouldn't pack and you know it's so easy to brush she had no clue what she needed to pack or how to pack a suitcase so you know these really basic kinds of things it's very important that that your kid know how to do them and the other thing that i think falls into the solution bucket it has to do with making sure that your life is satisfying uh... i think we've become unbelievably child-centric and while there are many good things you know there's a lot more communication and openness uh... there is also the single most frequently heard line in my office which is help my mother get a hobby besides me uh... kids desperately want to be able to model themselves we have to make adulthood look attractive for for a lot of kids adulthood you know what this is adulthood sucks why do i want to grow up uh... they see us work hard all week long and then what do we do we go sit in the bleachers you know for nine months out of the year and watch them play there on their select team while we you know text or something and i think you know if you turn that around and think about what if for six months you said to your kids uh... i'm trying to get a lot better vacuum cleaning so you know for the next six months the whole family is going to get to get we're all going to watch me vacuum in retrospect i had you know three boys so i had a lot of athletic stuff and a lot of it i like but in retrospect i would have taken some of those saturday mornings and spent it with a girlfriend or my husband or read a book i wanted to or just maintain my own interests and i think that this business of constantly being focused and worried and planning around children makes adulthood look unattractive to them but also saps us of vitality and you know there's a million things that people will tell you to do the best thing you can do for your child is be happy yourself uh... and i think i'm gonna stop at that point since god knows how much over i am and uh... we're going to go to the second part of the program which is going to be sort of a discussion okay thank you thank you so much to madeline levin now like she said we're going to have more from dr levin in just a moment many of you sent questions to our new email address davis parent ed at gmail dot com and madeline is going to answer some of your questions after we set up the stage for q and a in the meantime please welcome the chair of the community-wide k-12 parent ed collaborative jody leaderman very cool fantastic nice seeing you all here tonight with a show of hands how many people feel it was worth their while to come out this evening to see madeline madeline i think we got more than five hundred hands up here we got two for each good great uh... next year we're definitely going to have to find a larger venue uh... as many of you know uh... the people who did reserve their seats uh... each one reserved we had somebody else who wanted to uh... to join us tonight and uh... there was a waiting list and i think some people with we have some extra seats to i kind of feel bad but we really did think that uh... we were sold out and kathy peterson the director of this theater would not be happy with us if we uh... didn't didn't follow fire code uh... you know how did we get uh... this top-notch speaker a rock store as they say for parent ed uh... how did we get madeline levin well it not only took all of your interest in hard work for our amazing uh... it didn't just take all of you it took our amazing parent ed group take a stand you amazing women put this together look around appear to there is k through twelve we have about pan what sixteen schools we have a representative from every school who joins us at meetings on a monthly basis to talk about the buzz is on their campus and you know what type of speaker may work for k through twelve which isn't always easy but these women go back make sure their sites know what's happening uh... and then again bring information so it's it's really been uh... a great collaboration so again that is the parent ed collaborative is what brought madeline tonight uh... but we also also had to raise funds and uh... because it turns out that madeline actually doesn't work for free and go figure uh... the way we've been able to raise funds uh... is with your financial support and join me in thanking the school district uh... our community sponsors as panelist ed chad demasi of coldwell banker and dr steve new wiki of davis pediatrics uh... for their tremendous generosity however just like uh... with public uh... uh... what is it with public radio uh... over half of our funds come from you and you who find the value parent university so you all have an envelope uh... that our parent ed reps gave you when you walked in it's a really nice yellow envelope here and uh... take a look at the front which will tell you how to make your check out to why f r c which is our pastor account uh... or of course you can give cash uh... we have found that uh... ten dollar donation per person uh... is typical and just give whatever you feel tonight's event was worth to you so uh... your parent ed representatives uh... will now uh... stand up with their little baskets and you can just pass to your neighbor the envelope no you're not in church and uh... just pass it along to your representatives uh... if you don't have like my husband said just stop talking at that point again thank you again for your awesome support so while you're reaching into your wallets i'll go ahead and tell you a few things about our next uh... lecture that's coming up in march my name is christie frieze and i'm the parent of two children here in davis that says our job as elementary one daughter that's in third grade and a son that's in sixth grade so our next lecture is uh... march nine in the morning on a saturday and the topic is drugs and alcohol and you might think why would i be interested in that i have a third grader in a sixth grader they're not cracking beers yet uh... but i am really interested in i think all of us should be like madeline levin was saying uh... she doesn't want her son to grow up and play video games and what did she say hit the bong in the basement uh... and i think that statistic show in davis that kids are drinking alcohol and starting to use drugs at age eleven that was shocking shocking to me because my son is eleven uh... and i just think it's never too early to open the lines of communication with our kids uh... kind of pave the roadways and i think that these uh... parent ed lectures give us some talking points with our kids and help us open those lines of communication because if we're talking about these things now when our kids are in third and sixth grade it's going to be so much easier to talk about them when they are in junior high and high school and they're being faced with you know situations in which maybe their peers and their friends are drinking a beer or smoking pot i think that all of our kids even the kids that are very productive and involved are going to be faced with this and affected by peer pressure so i'm just here to encourage you to come to our next event uh... it's also here in brunel theater and we will have the same restraint as far as who will be able to fit in the hall so please come and um... help us make sure that our kids are healthy and safe in the future and um... kathy pharnem is also going to speak to you she has a different perspective she has older children so she's going to talk to you for just a second as well i'm kathy pharnem and i'm the davis high pta president and also the co-founder of the joint pta project davis parents do davis parents do's mission is to educate parents and promote discussion among davis parents about the prevalence of alcohol and drug use in our town and i do have two children one is a graduating senior this year from davis high and then i have a daughter who's a junior in college and so the other thing about me is i went to davis high i went here in the seventies and i can tell you i was a really good girl but my friends were not in the seventies i had friends who were drinking i had friends who did drugs marijuana and mushrooms lsd you name it they tried it and and most weekends were parties finding out the parents who were leaving town and leaving their house unoccupied the party was there if there was no unoccupied house then we'd go to the greenbelt or out in the country or i shudder to think of it now we'd drive up to barriessa i was the sober one and there were other sober ones too but i was one of the sober ones who kept an eye on things to make sure didn't get two at a hand but the point is my friends were good kids too they were nice they were good students they were athletes they were musicians they weren't student government it's not there's no student in davis that's immune from the opportunity to try drugs and alcohol and as my children entered in junior high in high school i you know discovered that things really weren't any different now than they were in the seventies so i knew that my children would have easy access to drugs and alcohol and that they would definitely have the opportunity to make a choice to use it so my my approach was in spite of everything i might do to teach them to say no i needed to educate myself i wanted to enter into the teen years understanding what the opportunities were what was out there and being able to talk to my children about drugs and alcohol so i encourage you to come to the march ninth event to learn what's happening in our community and how to get some tips to talk not just to your children but to other parents in the community about the use of drugs and alcohol in our community we hope to see you and you can register on it so you have the information that you do need to register again and get your ticket so thank you very much we hope to see you on march night please welcome back to the stage our guest doctor madeline levin i will never mind all right now many of you sent questions to our new email address davis parent ed at gmail dot com madeline is going to answer some of those questions right now thank you to you as well for sending in all of these really great questions i think the first one's really going to strike a chord for a lot of folks what recommendations do you have dr levine for communicating with a highly introverted child or adolescent especially if you're an extroverted parent i'm going to take the word highly out of that okay moment because you know it brings a highly introverted so like maybe it's depression or spectrum disorders or something but being introverted or extroverted is temperament and we're all born with temperament and unfortunately temperament actually stays very consistent over the course of a lifetime fortunately or unfortunately so you know part of this whole issue of seeing who your child really is and then having a big enough heart to to embrace who that kid is is harder when your child's temperament is very different so it was it you know you've heard about my kids a lot it was it easier to relate to the talkative child sure but actually the opportunity for growth in some ways is greater with the child who's different from you and it's an incredible gift to be able to see the world through the eyes of somebody who's not like you the danger of course if you're an extrovert you have an introverted child is saying you know what's the matter with you you don't have any friends or don't be a bump on the log go out there and stuff none of which is helpful and just makes the child feel bad about themselves so it's finding places that that child likes which may be having one friend and reading or with with my kid who is a little more introverted you know i didn't know that there was still such a thing as blacks you know there's some blacksmiths in california we took a blacksmith because he like you know he's quiet and he liked working with his hands and would i have ever done that like not in a million years so i mean i think it's such an opportunity if you can lay aside your preference for your own style and crawl up behind the eyes of your kid i can remember i'm a writer so i got sleep really late and that means i wake up late and that creative child would wake me up when the sun would come up because it was so beautiful right and i had just like gone to bed two hours before but now i'm very grateful that i got those were the only sunrises i ever got to see so yeah so basically you know recognizing what's temperament and you're not going to change it and and if the other thing is very introverted one expects a child to get more introverted in puberty puberty you're not imagining puberty in fact is the most contentious time of child rearing so we tend to think like maybe it's going to be a teenager like 17 but it's really like 12 or 13 that there's the highest level of disconnection and conflict in the house but that's part of you know that's normal part of separation so finding a way to relate yeah and let you know like let the kid lead you in that one of the things kids say all the time is they don't feel listened to and i think that you know especially if you're like very you're like blah blah blah all the time with the kids and i think just being available when they feel like talking and actually listening to them is a really good idea you know teenagers argue because they're cultivating a new skill which is abstract thinking so unfortunately they usually want to argue about things like drugs and sex and things like that but you should engage with them if you can do it calmly because it is helping them to think more clearly okay what suggestions do you have for balancing the many academic enrichment programs that are now available to students and balancing that with my child's stress levels your child shouldn't have much of the stress level i mean that's how a childhood it's like we should all go back and read Wordsworth who describe childhood beautifully as a you know this like idyllic romantic time where which doesn't exist anymore for kids usually you know your kid is being stressed children usually show stress with psychosomatic symptoms so if your kid has a headache or stomach ache or trouble sleeping those kinds of things that's usually the indication that they're being stressed the value of extracurriculars for young children to me is incredibly questionable baby Einstein which was in one out of every three homes in america that had a child under two to encourage language skills has actually been shown to retard language development by 10 a month really right how counterintuitive no no i don't think it is counterintuitive okay how's that you've got a two-year-old ideal so think about how your child learns anything or learns to speak right i bet you she she he he he's sitting with you yes he's looking at you you're happy with him it feels delicious right yeah and contrast that with sitting in a swing and watching a screen totally different emotional experience and one is passive in the other one is passive but but the the the biggest motivation for learning is the connection with you he wants to learn because he's driven to learn and you you just bloom when you see him learning and there's none of that with a television screen that makes sense that it is a it's a shared experience that yeah and and i don't and it doesn't matter whether you watch with your child or not it's the eye contact and touch that matters so isn't it interesting right that like everybody who goes like but this this research done at the university of washington has been known for for many many years and it's only this year that disney actually offered a refund and an apology and how to take the word educational off the video and and by the way the refund they offered is you can buy another one of their videos not exactly a refund but you know i was just talking to a you know there was kuman and now there's junior kuman for reading and so i was calling around trying to figure out what these guys do and i asked one local kuman local where i am like uh how young do you start children and he said well you know as long as your child doesn't poop in his pants we'll take him and i thought what a low bar for learning so you know the play is where children learn i'm not in the least bit convinced that they need much else than you know somebody to sort of watch make sure they're safe give them a good place in a pot in a pan and a spoon and another friend or two here and there friend um because it's parallel play and um you know i get asked a lot about like academic preschools versus play-based preschools and the research on that is incredibly clear that three years after preschool the kids who went to the play-based preschool do better academically than the kids who went to the academic preschool it's just not in line with development so you know sort of what you do has to be in line um and uh you know kids kids learn most everything that they need through play okay so what i'm hearing you say an answer to the question then about balancing enrichment programs my child's stress level is to take care of your child's health yes yes health and well-being you know uh physical health and emotional well-being absolutely all right um while my husband this is the next question well my husband and i do not put pressure on or even have expectations in terms of letter grades my fourth grader is upset with getting a b or maybe even an a minus and i know you wrote in your book that early elementary school is a time when kids start to categorize themselves so how do we help our doctor take your approach and our approach to that it is the other things that matter more that her effort is good enough regardless of the letter grade how do we help her stop comparing herself to others in terms of her letter grades that's interesting and that's that's become a very recent question like when i wrote the price of privilege it was always about the parents you know yeah i am pushing too hard now people constantly are saying it's not me and and i believe it's not them so you know we're faced with this notion that we we've all sort of heard what how did children develop well it's 50% nature 50% nurture that's what the studies the research shows but that 50% that's nurture isn't just us like nobody knows nobody has any idea what percentage of how your child turns out is because of the way you parent it i mean we can say that statistically but not for anyone child so there's you know there's how you parent there's the culture there's the child's own temperament there's you know whether they're sitting next to a merit scholar or the local drug dealer and there's just so many luck you know there's so many things that go into it and temperament so are there kids who are more perfectionistic absolutely are there kids who are more driven absolutely um and i think the only time you worry about that child who's driven perfectionistic because perfectionism aside from genetics is is the greatest predictor of depression so you want to watch a very very perfectionistic kid um but i i think what you have to do is help the child take the emphasis off the end result and put it on to the process you know carol dweck who has just done marvelous research on this and shows that you take two groups of kids and you tell and give them puzzles and you tell one group how smart they are you tell the other group nothing who does better well it's the group that was told nothing buy a lot and talk about counterintuitive it's like really because like i think i do better when people tell me i did a good job but not so much and certainly not for kids because once you've told your child oh you're really smart to take the next step means they run the risk of losing face right of losing face losing your admiration and stuff like that so they tend to stay very conservative in their learning whereas the kids who have nothing to lose are just involved in learning process and they tend to be more creative more interested more engaged with learning next question is from our davis parent poll that was done in the beginning of the academic year an overwhelming responsive parents had to do with anxiety in students and families it appears that one area that we carry so much anxiety in that also carries over to our children is to succeed succeed has quotes around it succeed not one percent away maybe why do you think we as a generation are so worried that our children will not succeed and do you think this is a legitimate worry so i think i addressed a lot of that in what i had to say i know when they thank people they thanked the police department who's is there somebody here from the police department well it's like a shout out to the police department my father was policeman and i just uh i was happy to hear that i was happy to hear i'm just gonna divert for a minute i was happy to hear how many different parts of the community came together um that's the beginning of changing things is when the community does something it's very hard to do something individually yeah somebody says you know my kid has too much homework it's like you gotta go find other parents whose kids have too much homework and work in collaboration with the school we don't so this is a model here tonight what you guys have done is really a model for how a community comes together and supports something you know you've heard what i have to say about success i come from this really blue collar background it it has so much to recommend itself you know nobody had money so you if somebody was sick you had to go actually help them yourself you had to go cook the lasagna yourself instead of buying it premade um and i you know i read my definition of success it really does not have much to do i mean i having been a psychologist all these years i have seen the most successful people evacuated nothing inside finished with life and i have seen um you know people with blue collar jobs who lead fabulously wonderful lives and vice versa so i mean money doesn't either buy uh happiness or or mean that you're not going to be happy it's sort of neutral the the research is once you make once a family makes seventy thousand dollars this is a matter if you make seventy thousand or seven hundred thousand the level of happiness in the house has to do with many different factors but not with money i like what you said just now about on this collaborative effort not just because i'm a part of it but because we're all part of it um but because it suggests that there is on a on a larger scale on a community-wide effort that efforts can be made right um to to change social norms right that's right and and seriously it is really hard to to have any of that happen alone but there's a group in chicago that i've worked with and they bring in everybody's in there the janitors are in there the people who you know are serving the kids stacks afterwards and that's how you change a community so yeah you guys are a model can i use can i use you all when i go around the country oh yeah yeah all right many of us can name what it means to have our own beliefs and family values and you talked about being true to your values but once we start to talk to other parents open up the paper we often find ourselves getting caught up in this race it says it's like you're talking about the latte moms and how many of us are f'd up um what can we do um practically in practical terms what can we do as parents so that we can stay out of the race and adhere to what we believe in um well part of it is to be part of it it's right here that's part that's part of what you can do and and part of it you know embedded in that question is something about um what it takes does does it really take something that i'm not acknowledging to be successful like you know if you go to the top school will that in some way make life easier for you and if that was the case then a lot of my argument wouldn't hold water you know it would be short term like short term you have to suffer but the long-term gain is great but there's research on this so people have looked at people look for example the the sort of gold standard study was done at Yale so they took people who were um accepted to Yale which meant that they were all capable of going to Yale and then they looked at the kids who went and the kids who couldn't afford it or had a sick parent or something like that they looked at them a year after graduation a year after graduation you could tell who was who um so on a first job it actually did make a small difference but when they looked at them 10 years down the line you could not tell the two groups apart so if you if you have this like 20 year parenting plan as opposed to the six month parenting plan um it makes much less difference than we think it does the grades are children you know when when you're in the middle of these kinds of decisions right they all feel critical huge they feel huge right um i can remember when when i moved to kentfield which is where i live and my son had gone to a um to brandycelel to the little jewish day school and so i was just nervous like everybody and i wanted to send him to the public three kids and um so i took him to the shrink and i took him for testing and the testing said no he can't possibly go to a different school he's got to stay in a small school he's only going to thrive in a small school and i didn't listen to it for whatever reason and he did just fine um it you know it was they were wrong um which is not to indict my profession but it's to say or maybe it is or you know it's just to say that at the moment when i think about it now the money i spent in the anxiety it's like i can't believe i did that but at the moment it seemed like the most critical decision i was ever going to make and it wasn't and i think i think that so many of the things that feel huge when we're in them if we can step back and go back to you know what do we want when our kid is out in the world what kind of husband do you or wife do you want your child to be i mean it's hard when you have a two-year-old but i actually i actually think about that though you do yeah i do i do i think about you know the sort of modeling that my husband and i do and how um how influential my own parents relationship was on me and what kind of wife and mom i've become right right and and so you know it i think it just helps to step back and understand you know that thing about um uh how they'll do eventually that that how they'll do eventually is a function of how well you've prepared them it's a combination of their own interest capacities talents um how well you've prepared them to manage challenge in their life how accurately you've been able to reflect back in a really positive way who they are which is you know this line see the child in front of you like don't try and make them somebody else but with a full and loving heart except who they are and that doesn't mean don't discipline or anything like that kids have to be disciplined um but those are the things in the long run that that really matter i mean everybody you talk to my books dedicated one to my father one to my mother just like you're talking about that what you do is model a way of living to your children and children end up being much more similar to their parents than different from them do any final words of wisdom for us tonight words of wisdom um there's a part of me that really feels because i i think because i'm getting older it's like life is party um not every day that's for sure um and everybody gets to play and i think what happens um when you're raising children you're so busy um there's so many demands on you that you forget that you're entitled to some playtime also and you know we know depressed moms tend to turn out kids with really high rates of emotional problems that um instead of always thinking in terms of what would be in your child's best interest what's really in your child's best interest is that you feel a sense of fulfillment and meaning in your own life both within your family and in terms of your own life and that you prepare in some way for the fact that at some point your child will grow up and you will want them to leave the house and you don't want to be absolutely reft i mean thank god we're all living longer and this is my shtatal heritage here um that you want to have that when you talk about modeling that you want to have interests and things that you can return to and that show your child that you know life is really endlessly interesting and um that that would be those are my words of wisdom excellent we love it thank you again for being here ladies and gentlemen madeline who joined us here tonight madeline is going to be here signing books on stage it's just going to take a couple of minutes to set things up her books are available for sale in the lobby if you haven't already purchased one if you're interested if you didn't get a chance to make your donation in the bucket there are donation boxes out in the foyer and we certainly look forward to seeing you with the next davis parent university lecture on march 9th thank you for being with us good night