Welcome back everyone. I'm Dr. Ellen Hendrickson and this is the

savvy psychologist podcast and every week I'll hope you meet life's

challenges with evidence-based research, a sympathetic

ear, and zero judgment.

Now, over-parenting is a verb that didn't exist some years ago. But over a decade as Stanford University's dean of

freshman, Julie Lithcott Hames noticed a precipitous rise in parental

involvement in students' lives. Every year parents were exerting more control over their kids

academic work, extracurriculars, even their career choices, with the resulting effect of kids who

were accomplished but couldn't think, advocate, or fend for themselves.

So she wrote what is now the New York Times best-selling book, How to Raise an Adult.

Break free of the over-parenting trap and prepare your kid for success.

It's been described as a provocative manifesto. And in it, Lithcott Hames reveals the research

on the detrimental effects of helicopter parenting and offers an alternative philosophy for raising self-sufficient young adults.

Julie Lothkott Hames, welcome to the show.

Ellen, thank you so much for having me.

You know, I was struck when you first opened the show.

You told your listeners that you would bring a sympathetic ear and no judgment and in some ways that's finally

what I've been able to do with this book. I was once a very judgmental dean

concerned about what I was seeing in my young adult students, the extent to

which they seemed so beholden to parents to tell them what to do and how to do it and

remind them what to do and fix things when things went wrong.

And I was concerned and I was frustrated.

...