The dean who told parents to back off was still cutting her 10-year-old's meat
She says college rankings helped turn childhood into a pursuit of perfect, and parents, herself included, went along.
Talks at Google · Julie Lythcott-Haims | Your Turn: How to Be an Adult | Talks at GoogleJulie Lythcott-Haims had spent the day railing against overparenting. Then she came home and picked up a knife to cut her 10-year-old son's meat.
Lythcott-Haims, who was a dean at Stanford University, was becoming known for telling parents to stop hovering over every part of their children's lives. In her own kitchen, she realized she could not let go either.
That small embarrassment is the point of her larger warning. She argues that American childhood was remade in the mid-1980s into a tightly managed contest, and even parents who saw the problem could not easily escape it.
Before that shift, she says, childhood was more free range. Kids met up with friends on their own, did homework on their own schedule, and followed activities that called to them, rather than activities chosen to impress a college.
Then came college rankings, especially the best colleges list from U.S. News and World Report, which she calls nonsense. Parents began steering childhood toward what a brand name college seemed to want, micromanaging school, activities, and praise.
Anyone 36 or younger, she says, likely grew up hearing constant praise for everything. A drawing was perfect, sliding down the slide was perfect, not hitting another child was perfect. The result was an expectation of perfection built into a generation.
That expectation came from fear, she says, the worry that if a child was not perfect, the child would not make it in life. But she argues the opposite happened. Children taught to be perfect struggle to try, fail, try again, and get stronger, and perfectionists, in her words, are impossible to be around.
Lythcott-Haims tells the meat cutting story on herself for that reason. She presents herself not as a perfect parent who figured it out, but as someone who lived the same habit, noticed it in real time, and is trying to help younger people avoid the pitfalls she saw from her vantage point as a parent and dean.
Questions people ask
What exactly is helicopter parenting?
Helicopter parenting means hovering over children, managing their schoolwork, activities, friendships, and problems well past the age when they could handle those things themselves. The term took off in the 1990s and 2000s as college competition grew, and it is linked in popular discussion to less independence and more anxiety in young adults.
When did college rankings start to matter so much?
U.S. News started its Best Colleges rankings in 1983 and made them annual in 1987. Colleges and families quickly treated the list as a measure of prestige, and critics have long said the formula rewards selectivity, spending, and reputation more than teaching or student growth.
Is trying to be perfect really that harmful?
High standards can help, but psychologists distinguish that from perfectionism, which is fear of mistakes and harsh self judgment after them. Research associates perfectionism with more stress, procrastination, and depression, and with harder relationships, since others feel constantly judged too.