Julie Lythcott-Haims

Guy Kawasaki:
Hi, I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is Remarkable People. This episode's remarkable guest is Julie Lythcott-Haims.
She is an author speaker, former educator and former corporate lawyer. Julie holds a BA from Stanford, a law degree from Harvard and an MFA in writing from the California College of the Arts.
She ended her legal career to go to work at Stanford and was the Dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising; in other words, she advised incoming freshmen.
She's the author of four books - How to Raise an Adult, Real American, Writing Memoir, and soon to be released Your Turn. This is the most passionate and eloquent interview I've ever conducted. You'll hear what I mean shortly.
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I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People, and now here's Julie Lythcott-Haims.

Guy Kawasaki:
What is your current hairstyle?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Oh, my God. Guy, I'm a fifty-two-year-old woman and I am definitely hitting menopause, and my hair is thinning. This may be TMI for some of your listeners, but I believe in truth telling whenever possible.
I'm telling you that because my hair which is - I'm a biracial black woman, so I have this kind of cork-screwy hair that I hated for much of my life because I was taught that people like me were not beautiful hair like mine was not beautiful, but I grew to love it as I grew to love myself in my thirties, and I loved my crazy corkscrew biracial hair, and then it started thinning, hence the reference to the pre-menopause so I cut it off. I cut it really short.
It's still corkscrew curls, but I feel like it's about a third the volume that it was. So it's a short, curly style. I rake it every morning with leave-in conditioner because that's what hair like mine requires.
Guy Kawasaki:
Of course it's a deeper question than me trying to figure out what your hairstyle is because hair enters a lot into your book. Maybe you can trace the meaning of your hairstyle through your career.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
So the book you're referring to is my second book, my memoir Real American, which chronicles my life as a black and biracial kid and then woman in mostly white spaces, and hair is a motif in that book. Thank you for noticing.
I straightened my hair to make it look like my white friends' hair in the Seventies, and in the Eighties. I grew up in white spaces, my friends will always white, almost always. I just like any kid does, I wanted to fit in. I wanted hair that did what the white girl's hair did, which meant flipping like Farrah Fawcett in the Seventies, which my hair would not do.
I would press it straight, I would press it straight so that I would feel okay walking into the Stanford Shopping Center, which is the fancy shopping center near the college I attended Stanford.
I would press it straight before going to a restaurant because I didn't want the scrutiny, the stares, from white folks critiquing my type of hair. As I alluded to earlier, as I grew to love myself in this black and biracial existence, I began to embrace my hair so the curlier my hair got, the more self-loving, or the more self-loving I got, the curlier my hair got; The more I allowed myself to just wear the actual hair that God gave me.
Guy Kawasaki:
What do you think when you see Michelle Obama then?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
You mean like at the Democratic Convention last night?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, because her hair is straight.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah, but her hair has very recently been curly. In fact, I saw a lot of comments online after the convention saying, "Loved the speech, but where was your curly hair?"
Look, fundamentally, I think it's on us as black women to wear the hair that makes us feel beautiful and proud. We can do so many things with our hair. I'm not here to judge anybody else. I'm not here to say that she presses her hair out of self-loathing the way I pressed my hair out of self-loathing.
She's a grown woman, and she will do what she feels is needed in the moment. Frankly, I mean, to be very serious, there are a lot of folks still even in her intended audience, the Democratic party, who would see a black woman wearing her hair natural as being inappropriate. They would see it as less professional and not what it quote unquote, should be. I think Michelle Obama knows that.
So when she is asked to ascend to an important podium and give one of the greatest speeches of her life, she's probably being very strategic and thinking, “You know? Today is a day for pressed hair because that will be what will allow me to be heard by the most people.”
Guy Kawasaki:
I don't want you to think I'm obsessed with hair, but I just see it as just a little lens into, maybe not your soul, but the soul of black existence. What's the hair of Sawyer and Avery?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Wow, yeah. Just as an aside, I don't know if you ever took a class from Kennell Jackson when you were at Stanford; he was a history professor, a professor of African and African American History, a black man, and he had a class back in the Eighties or early Nineties on black hair.
The Stanford review lambasted him for that. The conservative newspaper thought this was ridiculous. They had no insight into the fact that black hair is a wonderful representation of much deeper cultural, psychological, historical truths. So I just want to put a pin in that because you're absolutely right. It matters.
My kids are a quarter black half Jewish, a quarter, Yorkshire coal-men, coal mining people, so just to try to give us a visual my husband is white and Jewish. My son's hair is thicker and more coarse than mine.
He wears it - he has an enormous Afro when he's wearing it out. In this hot summer, he's pulling it back into two ponytails. He has one big poof right on the top of his forehead and another at the nape of his neck. And but when it's not hot, he likes to wear it out and it's beautiful, beautiful, black hair.
My daughter has much thinner, not coarse, ringlety, it's a long, ringlety hairstyle. Her hair is the combination of her dad's and mine. He's, like I said, this white Jewish guy who wears his hair quite long and has a slight curl to it. I've got these coils and our daughter is sort of halfway between his and mine.
Guy Kawasaki:
Because your son has this kind of hair, have you ever had the quote unquote, talk? And where does he live? Because that influences the talk.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
So the “talk” is a conversation black parents have with black children before we let them out into the world to try to... We hope we have, all along, infused them with a sense of their right to be loved and treated with dignity and kindness. We hope that their childhood has been one of unconditional love. That's the first piece of armor we put on our kids, but then we also have to prepare them for how they might be treated in the world.
The talk is to remove the veil of innocence and give them a glimpse of what could happen out in the world at the hands of law enforcement and others. I have very much had to give the talk to my son.
He's now twenty-one which means he was twelve when Trayvon Martin was murdered, and Trayvon was seventeen. I think Trayvon's murder shattered my false sense that somehow we were protected as upper middle class people because he was killed while walking back from a convenience store in a gated neighborhood in Florida.
So I was, as were millions of others, scared to my core by the killing of Trayvon Martin and desperately searching about for what I could do to try to ensure my own child would not meet that kind of fate. So yes, I've had the talk with my son not just because of his hair, which he'd always worn quite short, we took him to the barber every six weeks in childhood, but when he got to college, he let it grow and grow and grow and it is now this, like I said, his Afro, if you can see me I'm holding my hands out, like seven inches on either side.
Guy Kawasaki:
Like Colin Kaepernick style?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Absolutely, yeah. It's not just his hair, it's his skin color. I'm this kind of light toffee Brown, my son is slightly darker than me.
He's not ambiguous in his phenotype. He is a light skinned, African American male, he presents to the world that way. So yeah, we've had to have the talk. Every time he leaves the house, particularly when he leaves at night, I just send a prayer to the universe to look after my son.
Guy Kawasaki:
And this is 2020.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Just mathematically, or genetically, he's as much Jewish as he's black.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah, more so probably. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
How do kids like that make a decision? Do I identify as Jewish? Do I identify as black?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I think it was W.B. Dubois who said that identity is in part how we see ourselves and impart how others see us. How my children and your children and anyone sees themselves is, in part, up to them, but our sense of self is also about what gets reflected back to us when we go out into the world so sometimes a choice can be made. If we seem to be straddling the lines of culture that are obvious and discernible to others. If we show up, phenotypically, as one thing to others, then those others will treat us that way.
When you told that story in your TEDx talk about clipping the bougainvilleas outside your home in San Francisco…
Guy Kawasaki:
I was coming to that! Yes!
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
So let me not scoop your own show.
Guy Kawasaki:
No, it's okay.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Well here you are this Japanese-American man clipping bougainvilleas outside a lovely house, which is your own, in a nice neighborhood of San Francisco and an older white woman, as you put it, comes by and notices you and asks if you do yards too. She decided that Japanese man doing this bougainvilleas clipping must be the yard man.
You could have been a quarter Japanese, half Japanese, full Japanese, but whatever she saw was to her, Japanese. She was going to apply that stereotype to you.
So a kid like mine - first of all, my husband, the Jewish, is an atheist so he has not wanted to raise them with kind of touchstones to Jewish religion, or really much of Jewish culture. We celebrate Hanukkah, my kids know the prayers in Hebrew, which is amazing. I think as they age and go out in the world, they're both college age now, they will have opportunities to go to Hillel and to show up at functions and events and take some classes and really kind of tap into their own self knowing around being part Jewish. I hope they do that.
I certainly having been raised in white environments. When I finally got to college, I was an American Studies major at Stanford which allowed me to study the experience of African Americans and other marginalized people in this country. It was really the first time I was being offered a menu, a diet that included black writers and black stories and so I hope for both of my kids that they pursue that deeper learning into the cultures and people who are their ancestors.
Guy Kawasaki:
Since we're on the gardening story already, the punchline in my story was that my father, who I thought would go off the rails when I told him this story, in fact, told me that, mathematically, that woman was right to make that assumption. That Japanese man, where we were living cutting the hedge, probably was the gardener.
Now, your father had a similar story where he was on his lawn more cutting the lawn and your neighbor, your friend, thought that he was the gardener. So what did you take... You know what I took from my father's explanation; what did you take from your father's experience and assumption that he was the gardener?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
For listeners who may not have heard you tell that story. Your dad told you “Don't look for prejudice. Don't look for problems. You can't go through life, assuming people have bad intentions.” I think there's wisdom in that.
You don't want other people's stereotypes of you or micro aggressions toward you or outright racism to eat you up but also because it can, over time, eat away at you as somebody less emotionally resilient than you, Guy. Those kinds of stories, or experiences, in the aggregate can really kind of eat up a person's sense of self. I think that's what my memoir tries to illustrate.
My dad never knew that the neighbor said that. The neighbor's child confided to me, and I must have been in ninth grade, that her older sister had thought my father was the gardener when we first moved in. I never told my father that.
Guy, my father had been the Assistant Surgeon General of the United States a year before this assumption was made about him. He had played that role in President Carter's administration - Carter lost to Reagan, we moved to the middle of nowhere, Wisconsin, and that's when the comment was made. I wanted to protect my father from it.
First of all, he was friends with these people across the street. I thought it was best for us all that story not come out.
I was ashamed to be the black family. My self-loathing was the starting to gather steam. I was ashamed to be black when everyone else was white. I was ashamed that my father had been presumed to be the gardener, because that was classism within me, feeling like gardeners are lower than doctors, which my father was.
So it was a whole lot of stuff going on inside me that said, "I'd better not tell anybody this story, I better just sweep it under the rug." I never told him and I just let it sit in me, and it became, you know how you throw out trash and it starts to... You put things in the compost, I think there are a lifetime's worth of experience of me putting the racism, or the micro aggression, in the compost pile and it has sort of settled down and decomposed but it became the ‘new dirt’ that was the stuff into which I rooted my life by which I'm trying to say, it was very much with me for quite some time.
Guy Kawasaki:
If your father were alive today and you told him this story, what do you think his reaction would be?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Guy, my father was born in 1918 and grew up in the segregated, Jim Crow South. So he’d probably have a quip, some kind of witty retort that basically told me “There are far worse things in life than that, kiddo.” I think his perspective was vastly different than mine.
I grew up post-Martin Luther King, I grew up after the Loving versus Virginia case said that my parents' marriage could not be rendered illegal by any states. I grew up in a time of hope and optimism around racial equality whereas my father was fleeing Jim Crow and segregation and racial violence that, frankly, we thought had gone away or we thought was behind us and of course has resurged with permission from our forty-fifth president.
I think he'd be like your dad, frankly. Your dad said, “Don't look for it. Don't look for problems.” He didn't have a lot of faith in white folks' ability to be better than that. I think that's what life had taught him. So he had a skill set around moving on, whereas I had this much more bleeding heart, openness, like “Wait a minute, this isn't fair. This isn't right.”
Guy Kawasaki:
What's your assessment of where we are today, the American society, in terms of racism?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Guy, lately, I've been asking myself, “What does it mean to be in a society?” I think, with the pandemic, and our completely botched response, the ‘not believing in science,’ the ‘not listening to public health officials.’
My father was a leader in public health, and so I revere that profession and those people. I have been asking myself, “What does it mean to be in a society?” Because I thought society meant, “Yes, we're all individuals.” However, we've decided to be collective to some extent about our experience, because there are benefits of being a collective. There are things we can achieve together. We can make this a better human existence if we come together around certain things and, call me crazy, but I assumed viral pandemic would be one of them.
So that's A, response to your question. B is, and then George Floyd was murdered under the knee of a Minneapolis cop on May 25, and unlike millions, I haven't watched the video. I was just listening to an NPR podcast today that started to recap the summer and they started to play the audio of the video and I had to turn it off because that imagery and that sound, that audio is incredibly violent and triggering for any one of us who ourselves walk out into the world with brown skin, or who have loved ones who walk out into the world with brown skin.
I think of it today, here in August, as this twin pandemic, the racism, the systemic racism that has been a part of this country's soil for 401 years or longer. I’m saying 401 because of the Africans came in 1619 for the first time, but the Native Americans who had their land stolen from them by the Europeans, the Europeans dared to call the natives ‘savages’ for defending their own land.
So we've had this systemic racism, this systemic classification of people on the basis of skin color and ancestry going all the way back to before America was America, that has yet again reared its head in our modern moment alongside a pandemic.
Where do I see things? I think things around race are more bleak than they've been in my lifetime. I was born in Sixty-Seven. I think we thought Barack Obama's election was the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, and perhaps it was, but if it was the crowning achievement of that movement it also spawned the creation of a new movement which is the re-rise of white nationalism, of white supremacy, of those who feel fundamentally that this was and always meant to be and is and should forever be a white nation.
They have crawled out from under the rock under which they've been hiding for decades where they were growing stronger in number and taking up arms, and they feel permission to march in plain clothes, without hoods covering their faces, and I think they very much want a race war. It feels crazy to say this, but I think it is simply to pay attention to say that.
So the question is: what are we going to do about it?

Guy Kawasaki:
Yes.

Julie Lythcott-Haims:
The question is: when Trump ultimately has to leave office, whether he's voted out or term limited out, will he leave peacefully? Will there be a peaceful transition of power? Will his followers, particularly the violent white nationalist ones, will they decide this is their moment to take their country back as they see it?
I think the answer is ‘yes, they will try.’ I don't know if they will take to the streets in three cities, or ten cities or thirty cities, and I don't know if it'll last three days or three weeks or three months, but that is coming, and if you don't believe me, you haven't been paying attention. That's where I think we are. I think we have reached an Israel-Palestine state of distrust and finger-pointing about who's to blame, who started this.
My news feed, Guy, is a bubble of people who agree with me, which is comforting, but when I step outside it and I see people I know and love who articulate perspectives about the media has made us hate one another. The media is dramatizing all this stuff about black people. When I see the extent to which their worldview so differs from mine. I am so optimistic as a set point, and yet, I am so fearful that we have crossed a line around facts where we can't even agree what is factual anymore. We don't believe in science in many parts of this country. Many children are not taught adequately in public schools.
I really think we are at a reckoning about our society, about our America, about our democracy, and about our future. The optimist in me says, “I believe in humans. I think if we can send machines to Mars, and we can decode the human genome, and a beautiful wiziwig interface known as Apple and the Mac and all of that can be created, why can't we root out the hatred that exists in our hearts toward people who look different than us?” I believe we can, and that is why my theory of change is at the individual level, it is about one heart open, vulnerable, bearing itself, speaking with another.
The question I ask people these days, Guy is: what are you doing to make your world kinder and safer for black people? Do you see black people as fully human? And if so, how do you know? How does it show? How would your kids know that you actually believe black people are equal to white folks, are as deserving of dignity and love. Those are the two questions I like to press upon audiences in furtherance of changing hearts, in furtherance of getting people out of a place of complacency toward a place of, "I am going to reclaim this democracy and the society from the forces that are trying to erode it."
Guy Kawasaki:
Let's say I'm listening to this and I believe and agree with what you said, and I'm a white person, or at least I'm not a black person. So in practical and tactical terms, what should I do?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah, the first thing is to ask yourself those two questions. Do I see black people as fully human? Look for the evidence in your own life that it is true. Do you have black friends? Have you chosen to live near black people? Do you send your kids to school where there are black people? Do I consume any media, listen to podcasts, watch movies, read books, television shows, et cetera? Am I consuming any narratives about black people? Ask yourself this question.
Get to know yourself around this value you may feel you have which is that you do regard blacks as your equal. Interrogate yourself and be curious about what comes up.
In terms of what to actually do in the workplace, in your home, in your neighborhood, you have got to use your non-black privilege to call out the racism and the micro aggressions when you see them. It takes bravery. It takes guts to stand up.
The more awful it is, the more violent it is, the more bravery it takes. You know what, it also takes bravery and guts to show up in a corporate environment where everybody's educated, and everybody's white collar and everybody's saying what they think they're supposed to say, and somebody slips and says something racist. It takes a lot of guts in that environment to say, "Hey, what did you say? That's not cool with..." Or, "I want to talk more about what you just said because it really concerns me."
It's putting your values into practice, it is putting your language and your behavior where you say your values are. So it's calling people out kindly, but also clearly, unambiguously. It is saying “Racism is not okay with me. It's not just that it hurts those black people, or those Asian people, those Latino people, those native people,” et cetera. “It's not okay with me, this white person you thought would just sit here and nod and smile as you said it.” That's what we need white folks to stand up and do.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is the end goal, or what is the end goal? Quote unquote, colorblindness, quote, unquote, appreciate our differences, quote, unquote, doesn't matter. I mean, white people say that. They say, “I'm colorblind.” Well, what the hell does that mean?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
It means they have the luxury of never having to care about their own color because whiteness is seen as supreme and better and loyal and trustworthy, and all of that. Those of us who are of color don't have the luxury of longing for a colorblind world, because in the very present moment, our color matters in the eyes of many.
So to say you're colorblind is not to see others. What we want to do is, I think, it was the second suggestion you threw out which is that to recognize that we're all different, and that the differences are beautiful. It's to recognize difference without creating a hierarchy around the difference.
People come from all different kinds of backgrounds, and lead all different kinds of lives, but none is inherently better or worse than the other. It is to erase the kind of valuing of racial differences where some are on top and some are on the bottom. That's what we want, and America is that.
If you look at our documents, where we describe who we aim to be. "Of liberty and justice for all." The Statue of Liberty, "Give us your tired huddled want the yearning to be free." Which, by the way, wasn't about immigrants, but about a gift from France when we ended slavery.
We think we are this place to which all can come and get a little piece of land a little place to live, find work, work hard, create a life for ourselves. We actually - many of us believe that that's what America is and that that's what makes America different from every other place. So I think it is a reclamation of, that this was an experiment. This democracy thing called ‘America’ back in the late 1700s was an experiment. Our diversity is unlike that of any other place on the planet.
You know, as a business leader, that diverse groups may better decisions. That diverse environments lead to better outcomes because different perspectives push us all to be greater and better and more innovative, et cetera. I mean, there are all kinds of justifications for why America, given our diversity, should be on fire in the best possible way.
So I'm excited to return to that ideal. I'm excited to kind of put that ideal back at the forefront of our minds, but if we are to go forward, we must have a reckoning with who we have been.
In South Africa, they had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that slogged through the terror, horror, pain and anguish of apartheid. In Germany, I'm told they teach their children about what went wrong that contributed to the rise of fascism and Hitler.
We - instead of doing either of those things – we instead minimize our history, relegate the bad things to a paragraph in our kid’s history books. We leave up monuments to people who tried to bring the country down, aka the Confederacy. We've not reckoned with our racist past, and I think until we do, we will never be the America our idealistic, linguistic intentions, suggest that we could be.
Guy Kawasaki:
How do we do that? I mean, it's not as simple as rewriting a few textbooks. Where do we even start?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
My theory of change is at the level of the individual heart. I do believe that humans, opening up to one another, sharing their own story of their lived experience, listening to the other person share, starts to build a sense of commonality. That we are, in fact quite different and yet, so inherently similar as humans. I think promoting those conversations at the level of neighborhood, and town, and community, and nation. I think that matters. That's the sort of grassroots: “Can we all just figure out how to...”
Rodney King said, “Can't we all just get along?” And Rodney King, who was beaten within inches of his life by the Simi Valley police in Los Angeles in 1991, I believe it was, asked that as the riots were happening around him.
At the level of leadership, we need a bipartisan - all partisan - approach to this truth and reconciliation. We need trusted leaders on all sides to get together and say, “We are hurting. We are less capable than we could be because we have failed to heal this festering wound.”
I was really moved, for example, when I saw some white leaders, and I wish I could remember who they were, but it had to do with Native American land, maybe around the pipeline. Some white leaders went and sat with Native Americans and said something to the effect of, "We apologize for what our people have historically done to yours." It was moving and it seemed sincere, and some people might think, “That's silly. That doesn't make a difference.” It makes a difference!
None of us can apologize on behalf of all of our ancestors, but some effort toward recognizing the systemic historic pain that lives out today in our structures and our policies and the disparate outcomes people experience in this country, some kind of philosophical, partly symbolic gesture, on behalf of America, toward many Americans would go a long way. It would never happen in a regime like the one we live under, but it is possible.
It takes will. You think about gun violence, Guy, there are some societies where a deranged gunman has mowed down a group of children or a group of adults, and that entire society's leadership has said "You know what, this has got to stop. This has to be the last time this happens,” and they've set their political partisanship to the side and they've said, “We need to do what's right for our people instead of what's right for me, for my next election.” If America could do that… Wow, what a place this would be.
Guy Kawasaki:
It would be New Zealand with more people!
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
It would be New Zealand with more people.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would like to switch gears now to another of your passions which is helicopter parents and the creation of a generation of kids who are not prepared for the world. First, what is your definition of success for kids? Because clearly, it is not, ironically, getting into Stanford or Harvard, even though you went to Stanford and Harvard. So what is the definition of success today?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I think a successful person is one who knows who they are, what they're good at, what they love, and is able to craft work and be in community. Craft work that fits that definition of, “What am I good at?” And “What do I love? Let me create work out of that.” A person who can be in community with people who love and accept them as they are. It's knowing the self and putting that self to work and in relationship with others.
Success isn't money. It isn't prestige, it isn't title, isn't an accumulation of things. It is an inner knowing that I am living a life that feels good to me. It is not about the judgment of others. It is an intrinsically derived definition, no one can tell you what you should do with this life, and only you can tell yourself that if.
You can learn to discern your own voice out of the noise in your head, which is the cacophony of other people's expectations and judgments, you can be successful. That's what I want for every single one of us, including all the kids who are over parented.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, would you say that going to Stanford, or Harvard makes that more difficult?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I think when we ascend to places of elite privilege and status, they have their own culture, they have their own language, they have their own mores. One's personal brand, if you will, becomes affiliated with that brand, and then it's often hard to discern who you actually are, when you are perhaps overshadowed by that much larger thing that is very interested in perpetuating itself.
So here's an example. My next book is on adulting. It's for young adults on how to be an adult, if you will, the generation raised by helicopter parents who are now struggling with how to actually stand on their own two feet. In it, I interviewed Laurie Gottlieb, a psychologist in Los Angeles, who wrote the amazing book, Maybe You Should Talk to Somebody about her therapy practice. She told this story of a client in her therapy practice who texted her in an emergency. "I need an emergency session, I need an emergency session."
A guy had just proposed to her client. Client was a woman that she'd just been proposed to by her boyfriend and she panicked and she froze. She came and told her therapist, Laurie Gottlieb, about it. She froze because this was the perfect guy for her. Everyone said he was perfect. He'd gone to the right schools, double Harvard, he had the right job. They were running in the same circles. Everything about him on paper was right, except, in her heart, she knew this is not who I want to be with.
It was so hard. She panicked at the thought of not accepting his invitation, and yet panicked at the thought also of accepting his invitation to marry him. I think that example speaks to the question you just raised which is, when we've walked on the path of life that has been applauded by everyone, at every turn, and then we dare to say, “Actually, I'd rather be over here.” It is a real act of divergence, maybe even seen as defiance, and it can be hard to get out from under it.
Guy Kawasaki:
Would you say that your transition from Cooley Godward to Stanford, as a Stanford staff member, you stepped out of the legal career into an education career. Was that an act of defiance?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I went to law school to help people, Guy. As an American Studies major at Stanford, I had fallen in love with law as a tool to help heal society, fix things, make things better. I went to law school with that purpose in mind.
What I can tell you now, in my early fifties, is looking back as I now know, I was so insecure as a young woman of color at Harvard Law School, that I felt the need to go get the corporate job, that would be the imprimatur stamped on me that, “She is legitimate, she is smart, she is capable. She can earn the big salary,” and off I went toward corporate law which sucked the life out of me one billable hour at a time.
I knew how to protect trademarks, that was the branch of corporate law that I developed expertise in. Intel Inside was a trademark I got to protect, and Pentium. I know for an Apple guy that this was common.
Guy Kawasaki:
Heresy, heresy!
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
There I was, and I thought to myself, “I'm not here, on the planet, to protect trademarks. I think I'm here on the planet to help humans.” I was discerning that about myself and managed to say, "Okay, you're desperately unhappy. The law isn't what you thought it was going to be. At least you've gone into corporate law you now hate law." Frankly, I should have pivoted to public interest law but I felt like such a sellout at that point, because I'd spent four years in corporate law. I should have gone to legal aid. I should have gotten to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. I should have, should have, should have.
When I went to the border last summer, I drove my Jeep Wrangler down to Clint, Texas, to make signs and stand on street corners and protest what we're doing to migrant children. A piece of me was weeping inside that I'm not an active member of the bar anymore. I've got the legal training, but I haven't practiced law for twenty-two years, I couldn't go be a lawyer and help in that scenario but I could go be a human and try to draw attention to the plight of migrant children in cages.
So I pivoted toward academia because, at that point, I was thinking, “I need to help humans and I want to help humans, and I think I could help students make better choices about their career. I just made a terrible choice. Let me now go try to be of service to humans who are younger than me. I'm farther down the path of life. Let me go back with what I've learned. Shine a light that might illuminate for them the possibilities that await them, and help them better discern their own voice, their own intentions and their own dreams.”
I pivoted and had an amazing career in academia that lasted fourteen years, which was just fun. It was absolute fun and joy. Of course working for our alma mater was a privilege, an institution I have great respect for, and it was a great place to work.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. But what if some asshole is listening to this and says, "Well, easy for her to say all that. She went to Stanford, she went to Harvard, she worked for a prestigious Silicon Valley law firm, then she worked for Intel. Then her idea of going to academia is, of course, going back to Stanford. Is there not irony or hypocrisy there? I mean, not everybody can be her."
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Irony or hypocrisy in what? In saying that big brand name schools don't matter?
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, irony and hypocrisy in that you went to Stanford, arguably the second or first most prestigious place, educational institution. You didn't go to a small state college. You didn't go to whatever, you went to the top of the pyramid again.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah, what I hear often is, because in my helicopter parenting book, I critique the notion in the minds of many parents that your kid has to go to a big brand name school to have a successful or meaningful life. I think that it's easy for her to say, because she went there often in response to that to which my first response is, “You wouldn't be listening to me - if you're that kind of person - you wouldn't be listening to me if I hadn't gone to these places.”
So in some ways, these places do bolster my credibility in the minds of those who are beholden to brand. The proof for me of the veracity of my statement is - my son went off to a small liberal arts college, many people haven't heard of. I know an excellent education can be had there. In fact, small liberal arts schools often offer a better education that can be found at big, elite research universities. Why? Because the faculty have the time and inclination to teach and mentor undergraduates.
So in terms of where I was proud to send my own child, I think that's the proof in the pudding that you don't have to go to a big brand name place to have a meaningful, rewarding experience.
Guy Kawasaki:
Were you ever helicopter-ish for your kids?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Oh yeah, for sure. That's the irony. Here I was, railing against the overparenting I was seeing on the Stanford campus, which by the way, was not unique to Stanford. We were simply seeing on our campus what every campus was seeing.
We were seeing changes in childhood that manifest themselves now in different behaviors by college students and different behaviors by their parents. Parents wanting to know about every class, every assignment, and what's coming up, let me remind you about this. Parents wanting to get involved in roommate disputes, ridiculous things where you just shrugged and laughed, the person thought, what the heck.
I lost my train of thought again. See? It does happen.
Guy Kawasaki:
God, you made me lose my train of thought too! Between the two of us we have one whole brain.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
One whole brain.
Guy Kawasaki:
We're going to have to erase this part of the podcast.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I'm not taking notes and I should be okay.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, wait, wait. We can figure this out. This is bad. I mean, do you think Terry Gross has this kind of moments?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I think she does. I think that podcasts are known for this, and this kind of thing does happen.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I started off by asking you were you a helicopter parent, you said ‘yes.’
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Oh right. There we go. All right, there we go.
So was I a helicopter parent? It turns out... Or am I a helicopter parent? Turns out I was. I was railing against what I was seeing on my campus because it was such a change in how college students behaved compared to how they used to behave.
I'm railing against it. I'm giving speeches, telling parents like, “Time to go, back off, let go, it's good. They could be in the Marines, they're here at Stanford, they'll be fine,” and then after seven years of railing against this, I came home for dinner one night with my own kids who were eight and ten at the time, and I leaned over my ten-year-old son's plate, and I began cutting his meat.
That's how I knew – “Holy shit! I am going to be one of those parents who can't let go of an eighteen-year-old. Why? Because I'm cutting the meat of a ten-year-old. There are so many skills a human needs to develop between cutting meat and be prepared to launch out into the world, okay?
I at that point went from this finger wagging dean, who has tut tutting at my fellow parents to this very compassionate person who can say, "Look, what we with the best of intentions, look what we are doing to our kids." We are over helping, with the best of intentions, we're over helping, it undermines them.
Working with other people's eighteen to twenty-two year olds, made me want to run back to the present with those of us still raising younger children and say, "Stop, there's a cliff up ahead. I've seen it because I've been working with other people's older kids. We need to retool what we do with ours. We are over protecting, we are fiercely directing, and we are holding their hands too long, and that undermines agency and resilience.”
When you asked me what do I think of success. What do I think a successful life is, it circles around back to those two things for me - a person that has agency, a person who has resilience is going to be successful in life, and helicopter parenting undermines those things.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you did not proofread your kids' college essays. You didn't hire them SAT tutors, you didn't do any of that?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I didn't proofread their essays, I didn't hire SAT tutors. I did hire a college coach, somebody who could explain the process to them and help them manage, kind of keep track of the deadlines, all the stuff that's coming. I know it's a privilege to have the money to be able to do that. It's a very common thing in the community in which I live and my kids have been raised.
I didn't want the stress of that stuff. It's college time, it's college application time, I didn't want that to infect the parent-child dynamic. I wanted to outsource that task to somebody else.
I hired somebody, a Stanford grad named Luke Taylor, who's got a practice around supporting kids through this process. That isn't a guarantee of getting them into X, Y, or Z place, or improving their scores by this amount. It's about he sits with young people and tries to bring them to a greater awareness of their own self. Who am I? What am I good at? What makes me tick? So that they can write an essay that is authentic about them, not some kind of canned essay.
I chose somebody for my kids to work with, who came from this place of integrity, and authenticity and had a shared set of values.
Guy Kawasaki:
So I have kids who are twenty-seven, twenty-five, eighteen and fifteen, and I am on the spectrum of helicopter slash lawn mower parents, I freely admit that, but where do you draw the line? So if I were to interpret you, perhaps incorrectly, if one of my kids is not applying himself or herself, do I say, "Well, you're making your own decision, there's going to be consequences?" Or do I say, "No, getting a D in math or physics or English is not acceptable." How do you draw the line?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Well, first of all, it's a philosophical drawing of the line. You accept that this child is not your pet, or your project, or your plant, that is, not something you will sort of effect change on and it will emerge to become this thing for which you can receive a trophy. This is like a tree.
Guy Kawasaki:
Like a bonsai?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah, this is a being given to you by the universe, or God, or however you believe we got here, and your job is to put shelter over their heads and feed them and love the heck out of them and support them in becoming who they are. So that's a psychological frame first of all.
Then you realize, “I'm going to be dead one day, like it or not. I hope I predecease my kids rather than the other way around. Because that's just anguish and horror.” So you have to prepare for the fact that one day you'll be dead, and you don't want your kids to be helpless when you're dead. Okay, so dial back from that you're supposed to be instilling skills in your kids, so that they can be self-sufficient without you one day rather than doing every little thing for them.
So when it comes to your kid's lack of motivation, or lack of success in this class in which they're getting a D, I think you got to ask yourself, “Okay, is there some kind of external thing going on? Is my kid being bullied in school? Are there psychological problems? Is something impeding my kid? And you can deploy your resources to kind of supporting the resolution of that thing.
But if it's about “My kid hasn't figured out who they are. My kid hasn't figured out that hard work matters,” what I would say to that kid is, "Hey kid, you know what? It looks like you're getting a D in algebra, and I could do all of this for you as some parents do but I'm not going to because I've taken algebra, and now it's your turn. If you get a D, what's going to suck is you're going to have to repeat algebra when all your friends move forward to geometry, that would suck for you. But hey, dude, it's your life. Dinner's at 7:00." We have to have the courage to say that. I know, right?
What happens then? Here's what happens, Guy. Psychologically, here's what happens. Your kid hears “It's my life. It's not my dad's life, it's on me, it's not on him, he's not going to fix this.” You're actually creating psychological room for your kid to show up and care about their own obligations, okay?
Dan Pink writes about intrinsic motivation; Jessica Lahey writes about intrinsic motivation. We do not want our kids to be extrinsically motivated by our love, or withholding it, or by being afraid of us. They need to develop intrinsic motivation to do their work, to get places on time, to meet their obligations. In order to develop intrinsic motivation, they need connection, a meaningful relationship with us, but they need autonomy; they need room to fail, we need to let them get the... Again, assuming there isn't some learning disability. There's something in the way.
We need to let the natural consequences of their actions must play out. Okay, we don't want them to walk into the ocean and drown, drive off of a cliff and die, but short of those life and death things we're supposed to let life happen to them, because life is the greatest teacher. Life will teach them "Whoops, I should have worked harder on that."
They will get there, we just have to stop seeing kind of every day as the universe, like, “They have to get an A today.” No, you want them to learn to be the student who can achieve the A on their own. So you have to be willing to tolerate these discomforts along the way. That's how ultimately your kid is going to be able to do for themselves.
It's easy for me to say, I've told this to thousands of people. I've also confessed, I have been a helicopter parent to my own, and I can see how it plays out in the one that I helicoptered more than the other, I can see the dynamic. I can see that I've undermined one kid's ability to do for himself.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, I have a very specific question here. So in your TED Talk, you emphasize the value from a Harvard study, ironically, of chores, and I want to know, very specifically, how you foster intrinsic motivation to do chores. Because that, to me, it's like the greatest mystery in life.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Nobody's ever framed it to me like that. Intrinsic motivation.
I think this is where it's a responsibility to participate. We all live in this house, the house needs things to get done in order to for the house to be maintained, and we all do this because we all pitch in and contribute.
I think this is where you show them praise for when they do it, which is an external reward, just eye contact and a smile when they've done it. You say, "Thanks for taking out the trash. I appreciate." Smile, move on. Don't overpraise like, "Oh, you're the most amazing child. You did the dishwasher." No. Just say, “Thanks. I noticed, thanks.”
If they do someone else's chore, that's where you say, "That was really kind of you. Yeah, I love seeing that in you. Thank you so much." Move on. It's dropping the praise and moving on to something else. You might even physically have to leave the room so you don't overpraise. But your child will be hungry for more of that praise. They want to be noticed as being hard workers, they want to be noticed as being good people and so that's what I advocate, what I recommend that you do around chores.
Speaking of my TED Talk, Guy, you can help me. I am just 9,000 views away from 5 million. I'm going to million mark and I think it could happen. So anybody listening to this, if you're willing to go watch my TED Talk!
Guy Kawasaki:
I highly recommend it.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
It's a good one!
Guy Kawasaki:
I highly recommend it.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I'm just thrilled, I can't believe it's... When they asked you to do these things, it's an honor, as you've said. You have no idea where it's going to go. And I just loved it. That message has resonated around the world. So, yeah, cool.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think I have a TED Talk or two that have a couple million, but 5 million is a magic number that is... Now that we're going to extrinsic rewards.
I've got another very tactical question. So let's say I'm listening to this and I say to myself, "Oh, my God, she is so right. I am so totally convicted. I am a lawnmower, a helicopter parent. I'm just clearing everything for my kids. I am guilty as charged,” and your kids are, I don't know, between five and sixteen. So they're still a little malleable.
Well, “How do I turn the tide? How do I change? I've been taking them to violin class, and then they're getting tutored at Kumon. I'm doing all their chores so they can focus on their studies. I've hired a professional soccer coach. I mean, I've done everything. I am Tiger mom, Tiger Dad, I listen to this, I see your fricking absolutely right. What do I do next?”
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah. So if you're co-parenting with somebody, you got to get them on board, because when the parents aren't on the same page, that can be hell. So you got to talk, if you have a co-parent, a partner, an ex, whomever, talk with them.
It's the philosophical change I talked about. Get right in your head that this child is not your pet. It's almost like you're trying to make your dog into best in breed in the Westminster dog show by taking them to all of these dog shows.
Guy Kawasaki:
As long as I don't have to run around like a dope.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
That's what you're doing. That's what helicopter parenting is! Running around like a dope with your child on leash. Get that image in your head and be like, “Okay, I do not want that.”
What you want to do is to say to your kids, because this is going to be a real shift for them. They're used to you're being at their beck and call, taking them everywhere, watching over everything, dropping everything to make their lives easier.
So what you want to say, and you'd say it differently to a five-year-old versus an eight-year-old versus a sixteen-year-old, is essentially... Like to the sixteen-year-old, I would say, “What I realized is that we've been doing too much for you and it's time that we back off a little bit and teach you to do more for yourselves because that's what's going to lead to success in life."
There's this four-step method for teaching any kid any skill. First you do it for them, which helicopter parents are really good at, then you don’t look at them, which means they're there near you, but you're sort of doing it all. Step three is you watch them do it, and between step two, and step three, you've really taught them to make the sandwich on the stove or to cross the street. You've narrated it out loud, they've watched you do it now you're still there to see if they can do it without harming themselves. Okay, you move to step three, do step three a lot, then you can move to step four, which is your kid can do it independently.
My point being you don't go from complete dependency on you to complete independence of your child. Step two: you do it with them. Step three: watch them do it. Those steps have to happen. We're supposed to be teaching our kids to do all these things and that's what we're failing to do.
So I would deploy that four-step method to if it's a little one, I would say they've got to be tying their own shoes. Are you teaching them to do that? Or are you in such a hurry to get out of the house you're always Velcro-ing or tying their shoes for them? If it's crossing the street are you still holding your ten year olds hand as they cross the street? Stop holding their hands. Stop being the one who looks both ways, teach them how to look both ways. We need to have confidence our kids are safe without us not pretend that we're always going to keep them safe. Okay, so those are just a couple examples.
Guy Kawasaki:
So my new goal in life is going to be that my fifteen-year-old can wake up and make his own breakfast.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah. Okay, so what are you going to do about that?
Guy Kawasaki:
First, I got to clear that with my wife.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
So, hunger is quite a motivator. So all you have to do is... Here's another example. A lot of people are waking their fifteen-year-old up for school.
Guy Kawasaki:
We don't do that.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Good for you, Guy. Then you become - not you, but others become the person who's waking up their college student because they realize, "Well, now they're in college, I'm paying all this money, they still don't know how to wake themselves up, I'd better wake them up,” and that's an epic fail. As a parent, you're supposed to have taught your kid well before eighteen, or fifteen, or thirteen to wake themselves up and to make breakfast.
So all you got to do is say, "All right. Hey, kid. I love cooking for you. It's a way that I show love. But I want to make sure you know how to make your own food." Your kid will say, "Oh, you never make me breakfast,” or “You don't make it all the time." You'll be like, “All right, fine. We're going to see how this goes. Say "Tomorrow..." This works with waking themselves up too. "As of tomorrow, I'm going to not make you breakfast. I'm going to leave that task to you. Let me know if you need any help figuring anything out. I'm happy to help in the beginning."
Guy Kawasaki:
Wait, wait, wait, we skipped a step in the four steps. Isn't the intermediate step that he and I are going to make the breakfast together. So he sees how it's done, and then mimics.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I presume... I'm sorry, Guy. I assumed that was already happening.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, I don't know.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Okay, let's play that out. Okay, step one, you're doing it all. Your kid is in the other room, on their device or reading a book, and breakfast magically appears in your hands. That's step one, you've done it all for him. Step two. You say, "Hey, kid, I want to teach you to make breakfast. We're going to do it together for the next couple of days,” and you're gathering the ingredients and you're putting the stuff on the stove but you're like, "Hey, try this. Take that."
You're sort of inviting them to be a part of it like a young apprentice in the workplace. You're give him not the hardest task but letting him participate. Step three is, "Hey, kid. Now it looks like you know how to use a knife. You know how to turn on the stove without burning yourself? You know how to make... You've watched me. I'm going to stand here now while you do it."
Okay, now, Guy, this is where you have to maybe sit on your hands. Okay, resist the urge to say, "Wait, wait, wait, what about..." Remember, they're not going to die.
If he takes out a machete and is trying to chop something small, tell him to get a smaller knife, okay? But try not to swoop in unless it's really life or death.
You watch that, “Hey, he's able to do it!” Guess what? He's going to be imperfect. It's going to be messy. Okay, he's going to get some egg shells in the scrambled eggs. He's going to undercook the bacon. I don't know what y'all eat, okay, but it's not going to be as good as you did it. Why? Because you're fifty something and your kid is fifteen, okay? He's got to practice it more and more and more times in order to get competent at it. Don't deprive him of that.
Step four, one day, he can not only make himself breakfast while you sit in the other room, he can bring a second serving so that you can eat breakfast together.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think that my fifteen-year-old is further along the spectrum of accomplishment than - because I know he can do it.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
It gets to your ego.
Guy Kawasaki:
If I had a choice between getting served or making my own? Guess what? I would do too. I know my son could do it.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
But let me point to something else. You haven't asked me what causes helicopter parenting?
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, what causes helicopter parents?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
One of the things is a fear for their future, like, “They won't succeed unless I do everything for them.” Paradoxically, they actually won't succeed if you do everything for them, because they'll get out into the world and be veal-like and unable to take care of themselves, but another thing that makes us helicopter parents is our ego.
We want to be able to say to our own selves, to our partner, to our friends, to our colleagues, "Oh, I dropped everything. My son left his backpack at home and I had to leave the meeting and go take his backpack." It's become the mark of a good parent to drop everything and handle. So our ego needs to say, "Oh, I'm so busy, but I made my son breakfast today." It's loving.
Loving acts of kindness toward our kids are amazing. Just make sure you're not depriving your kid of learning the skills they need to learn because one day that fifteen-year-old is going to be in an apartment somewhere in a different city making their own food and you want them to have had the chance to practice that along the way in childhood.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so not that it'll happen now because no one's going to school but let's say that your kid does forget the backpack and then he calls and says, "Mom, can you bring my backpack to school?" You say what?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
You say, "I'm so sorry." First you empathize, and then you empower. So you empathize by saying, "Oh, I'm sorry, that happened to you." Or "Oh, that must not feel very good." You just say something kind and empathetic, and you pause. If this is on text that's all you text.
If it's live on the phone, you just shut up after you say that and let your kid respond with what they're going to say, which is, "Well, can you bring it to me or I need you to bring it?" At which point you grit your teeth and you say, "I'm sorry, honey, but I'm busy. Sounds like it's a problem you can solve." Some people will say, like your kids are twenty-seven, twenty-five, eighteen and fifteen. Did I get that right?
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
You would say, "Gee, honey, that sounds like a problem a fifteen-year-old can solve." You can say that to an eight-year-old. You can say that to a five-year-old. When an eight-year-old leaves her backpack at school, "Oh my gosh, I love my backpack." Empathize. “Oh that's frustrating. I hate it when that happens. I hate it when I leave my bag at work. Pause. How do you think you're going to handle it? Or that sounds like a problem an eight-year-old consultant.
This is one of the most empowering things we can say to a child and to an employee. Helicopter parenting is micromanagement in the family. Nobody wants to be micromanaged in a workplace. People don't thrive under micromanagers. They resent them, and they don't learn to really develop confidence and do for themselves because they're always being nitpicked.
All right, we don't want to be micromanaging our kids. So you say, "How do you think you're going to handle it?" And your eight-year-old sputters, or your twelve-year-old, or your fifteen... "I don't know." Because they're used to you're coming and handling it, and you say, "Well, let's think it through." Help them do critical thing. “What might you do about it? “
Guy Kawasaki:
How about if I just play them this podcast, and I say, "This is how it's going to be. Listen to this."
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Exactly. The solution might be, “There's nothing that can be done. The backpack is at a school far away,” or “The backpack is at home and the school is far... Nobody can get it.” Nobody's going to get it to them, the kid can't walk back home and get it or bike back home, and the solution might be, “All right, so you left your backpack at home today. Life goes on, tell your teacher, apologize to your teacher, or call a friend and see...”
You're trying to get the kid to think through: “What can I do? I could email my teacher and explain. I could ask a friend what the homework is. Instead of you being the solver, you being the fixer, you're helping them think it through. Ultimately, if they can't solve it, it's an important lesson learned. That's how the brain learns to remember the backpack is because I was miserable when they forgot the backpack, I am dead serious.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so that would all be good teaching moments. But now seriously, in a pandemic, where the classroom is ten feet from us and it's a window on a computer. Now what I mean are we going to have even... The helicopter parent is not just hovering. The helicopter parent is right there, what's going to happen now?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
This gets to class. Helicopter parenting tends to be a function of privilege, meaning you have time on your hands, and you have resources on your hands and you deploy them toward perfecting your child's life. So poor families and working class families, where parents may not have the time or the resources to kind of drop everything and go fix and handle. Their kids actually have a leg up in the game in a very wonderful ironic way.
At the college level, for example, my students who were not over-parented who had a greater sense of self and were more self-reliant and more resilient were kids from poor and working class backgrounds. It was this beautiful irony, okay.
So in the pandemic, if everybody's a worker, if everybody's at work from home, parents are hella busy, they can't drop everything and make sure that this kid and that kid and the other kid has everything they need. There's a upside and a downside to that.
The downside is the kids can be floundering and they don't know what to do, and they don't have help. Hopefully, we parents are able to kind of get those parameters squared away, like, “Okay, your class is set up, you're ready to start particularly for little ones.” The upside is you can't hover, the kid is going to have to do some troubleshooting and some problem solving. The kid is going to have to reach out to hit the chat feature and talk to their teacher or text a classmate or whatever it is.
The pandemic is actually an opportunity for kids to be doing more chores, to be developing more skills. They’re designing their way out of boredom. Look, you're a creative guy - that creativity flourishes out of boredom.
You don't know what to do. You have a set of things. Figure it out. You want to solve that problem in your rocket ship. You got this box of stuff, like, figure it out! Where's the duct tape? Where's the wire? Where's the whatever?
Kids are deprived of having those opportunities today to really kind of grow and stretch and push their creativity and imagination because childhood is rote, planned, fixed, managed, scheduled, handled. It is boring as hell, and they emerge from it highly accomplished on paper, but they haven't had those experiences that really strengthened that right brain.
So the pandemic, when you're busy you're at work your partner's at work, your kid it's... They have downtime from pandemic school. They're bored. Say, “Go look in the broom closet. There are a lot of interesting things in there. Call me if someone's bleeding, but just go play.” We're trying to get them back out into the world for some free play, stuff of your childhood and mine.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my God, what a great podcast.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I have one more thing. I got to say one more thing, because I think this turn out to be an important thing. There's recent research out of Yale that links parenting behavior with the creation of anxiety in children.
As we all know there's anxiety on the rise in younger populations. Everyone's asking, “Where is this coming from? Are we better diagnosing it or something in the environment creating more of it?”
There's research from this guy named Eli Liebowitz, who has linked parental behavior with anxiety. Here are three examples.
When a kid is afraid of the dark, and the parents say, "Okay, you'll never be in the dark, don't worry, you'll never be in the dark." When a kid only eat certain foods, and the parents say "Okay, we'll make sure you always have those foods." When the kid can never be alone so the parents, say, "Okay, you'll never be alone." We think we're helping, but instead, what we're telling that child's developing mind is that food, that fear, that fear of being alone is so real and so potentially catastrophic, that we will make sure it never happens to you, okay, that's what creates the anxiety.
What we're supposed to say is, "I know you don't like a lot of different things, I want you to try a few new things, you will get more and more used to eating different foods. It's going to take time, but I believe in you. You can do it." Or "I know you're afraid of the dark, that's natural, it's okay, I'm going to sit here with you for a while, you're going to be all right." You sort of ease them into coping with it, instead of sanitizing the environment so you never have to deal with it.
This is a behavior that's at the heart of helicopter parenting. Again, you act with the best of intentions, you think, “I just have to make sure this never happens to my child, instead of preparing your child to be tougher and stronger in the face of all these things.”
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you want to insert a little ad about your next book about how to be an adult?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Yeah, awesome. My next book will be out on April 6, 2021. It's called Your Turn: How to be an Adult. It's pitched at eighteen to thirty-four-year-olds who are struggling with hashtag “adulting,” which is about wanting to, having to, and knowing how to be an adult. I'm super excited about that book.
The voice is very warm, very compassionate, very kind of I'm an older adult who cares, knows it's terrifying, but believes in you and is rooting for you to make your way as an adult. So I'm finishing writing it as we speak. In fact, when you and I hang up, I'm going back to my second to last chapter.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is it like your memoir? Or is it more tactical, practical, as opposed to this is what happened to me?
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
You know what, it's a mash up. I'm published by Henry Holt and my editor there said, “This is really quite different from anything we've seen.” Hopefully, that'll be a good thing, or it'll be a bad thing, but it's basically a mash up of personal narrative. So there's a lot of stuff that sounds like memoir.
There's a lot of self-help listicles. Here's what you should do, boom, boom, boom. The final section of each chapter are micro-biographies of other people whose lived experience illustrates the point in the chapter.
Fundamentally, I believe in humans; I root for humans. Whether I'm writing about helicopter parenting, which harms humans, or racism which harms humans, or adulting, which is about just being a freaking human who's not in the care of others in childhood or elderlyhood. It's just - I'm rooting for us, Guy. I believe in humans, I love humans, I'm rooting for all of them.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well come in the middle of March. Just ping me and I will do whatever I can to help you with the introduction of this book.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
No way! Thank you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, absolutely. My social media is your social media. It would be a delightful honor for me to help you with your book.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
Wow, Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
I will do that.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I don't know what to say.
Guy Kawasaki:
Just say okay.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
I was going to say thank you, and thank you, and thank you again. It's also very consistently you.
As I listen to you, you are so generous of heart. You're generous with your time, you're generous with your spirit, and you can rest assured that I will pay this forward. Thank you.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's not why I'm doing it, though.
Julie Lythcott-Haims:
But why not? Why shouldn't I love to help people who are behind me on the path in life. You're doing the same thing for me. So I'm grateful to you for that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Now it's time to read reviews. A five-star review from Bo9. "Guy does an incredible, or should I say, remarkable job on all his podcasts."
Another five-star review. This one from Chris in New York, quote, "I am a part of all that I have. Met this guy quoting Lord Tennyson when acknowledging the interviewees for his 1991 book Selling the Dream in 2020. Guy Kawasaki's Remarkable People is one of the best collections of podcast episodes to play while simply folding your laundry, for example. Everyday evangelists will be treated to special time and attention spent with those who have made a dent in the universe. Bonus episodes include Guy's own mini keynotes speaking from over four decades of experience in the trenches of companies like Apple. Enjoy."

Well, there you have it. From here to helicopter parents. I learned so much from Julie. Actually, that's an understatement. I really felt convicted by what she said a few times. I thought about cutting the funny part where we both lost our train of thought, but that was a moment to show you how much we got into the interview. A great guest will do that to you.
As an action item, I strongly suggest you watch her YouTube video called, “How to Raise Successful Kids Without Overparenting.” Keep an eye out for her upcoming book Your Turn.
I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is Remarkable People. My thanks to Jeff Sieh and Peg Fitzpatrick for making this a remarkable podcast.
Remember, wash your hands, stay at least six feet away from people, don't go into crowded interior spaces, and wear a mask. Also, listen to scientists and doctors, not politicians.

Until next time, mahalo and aloha.

This is Remarkable People.