Former Stanford Dean of Freshman Students (ten years); Author of How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kids for Success
The Harm of Helicopter Parenting
Julie Lythcott-Haims likes to say that she’s becoming, as we all are becoming, our selves. A former corporate lawyer and university dean, Julie now works primarily as a writer and speaker who shifts observation, beliefs, and knowledge into compassion and concern, and then translates those feelings into words she hopes will interact with the ear, eye, and soul in some kind of meaningful way. As she continues to hone her own voice, she continues also to be concerned with each of us finding our own voice and honoring it, and in the obstacles that can get in the way.
Her first book, the New York Times best-selling book How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success emerged from her decade as Stanford University’s Dean of Freshmen, where she was known for her fierce advocacy for young adults and received Stanford’s Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for creating “the” atmosphere that defines the undergraduate experience at Stanford. She was also known for her equally fierce critique of the growing trend of parental involvement in the day-to-day lives of college students, and toward the end of her tenure she began speaking and writing widely on the phenomenon of helicopter parenting and its harms. How to Raise an Adult is being published in over two dozen countries and gave rise to a TED Talk that [will be out/came out] in September of this year, as well as a sequel – How to Be an Adult – which is planned for 2018. In the meantime, her memoir on race, Real American, will be out in Fall 2017.
Julie is a graduate of Stanford University, Harvard Law School, and most recently she received an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. She lives in Silicon Valley with her partner of over twenty five years, their two teenagers, and her mother.