The following podcast is a dear media production.

Welcome to Raising Good Humans.

I'm Dr. Lisa Pressman,

and I am so grateful to have with me Dr. Pala Young Eisendreth, a

Youngian psychologist, a professor, the founder and director of the Institute for

Dialogue Therapy and an author of many books and chapters and papers, as well as the founder of

Enlightenment Conversations, Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, Meeting in Person.

Polly's been a featured speaker at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Ted X, and has a

podcast called enemies from war to wisdom. Thank you so much for coming.

Oh, it's wonderful to be here, really wonderful. I wanted to have a discussion around the premise of the self-esteem trap, raising

confident and compassionate kids in an age of self-importance.

That's... I was kind of at the beginning of a wave of books about parenting that involve the kind of parenting that would be the privileged parents and by privileged here people mean middle class and

upper middle class that actually lead to bad outcomes.

So there's a style of over parenting

and also having these amazing expectations for your kids that actually leads to problematic outcomes and now we know and have much more research than when I wrote the book and so this whole

trend in parenting which is connected again primarily to privileged children and privileged parenting has very much sort of reached

its, let's say, epitome now and we see in the elite colleges and universities the outcome of

over parenting and running interference for your kids and the outcome is that we've produced

generation of overly sensitive young adults who cannot seem to enter adulthood directly and have a lot of

anxiety about their own self-esteem and about being separate from their parents and instead of looking upon themselves as competent

adults they look upon themselves as, you know, perennial children and

they value childhood often more than adulthood.

...