Kayfa Tourabbi Teflon Belghaa | Julie Lythcott-Haims

This book is about parents who are overly involved in their children's lives. It deals with the fear and love that lie behind our excessive involvement in their lives. It also deals with the harm that results when we overdo what we do. It also addresses how we can achieve better long-term results - and help our children achieve greater success - by practicing parenting differently.

I love my children as fiercely as all parents, and I know that love is the foundation of everything we do as parents. But during the years of researching this book, I also learned that many of our behaviors stem from fears; Perhaps the biggest of these fears is the fear that our children will not succeed in this world. Of course, it's natural for parents to want their children to succeed, but according to research, interviews with over a hundred people, and my own experiences, I've come to the conclusion that we define success too narrowly. Even worse, this misleadingly narrow definition of success has us hurting an entire generation of young adults - our children.

Over the course of my first ten years as dean of Stanford University, I became familiar with, cared, and worried about young adults. I loved that work, and found it an honor to be alongside the sons and daughters of other eighteen to twenty-year-olds who are about to reveal who they will become as adults. My students made me laugh, and they also made me cry, and I encouraged them both ways. This book is not an indictment of them or their generation, those people born after 1980 - called millennials, though - whose parents, I will say we as parents, since I am also one of them - is another story.

I like to put all my cards on the table. Not only am I a former dean of Stanford University, I'm a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School as well. As I write this book, not because of these opportunities, or in spite of them, but because of all of them, I consider at every stage that my own knowledge and experience may be an aid or a hindrance in this analysis. Like I said, I'm also a mother. My husband and I have two teenage children - a son and a daughter two years apart - and are raising our two children in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, which is as vibrant a hive of over-care as you are likely to find on this planet. Although I was once the dean of a very distinguished university and was critical of the overly engaging behavior of parents, in the years I have spent thinking about this subject I have slowly come to the realization that I am not much different from the parents I once criticized so violently