Nonfiction4Life

 SUMMARY

In her memoir, The Gift of an Ordinary Day, Katrina Kenison becomes a voice for all women who begin motherhood blowing bubbles and tickling tiny toes but are all-too-soon pulled into the tumultuous years of teenage angst. Looking back, Kenison is surprised to find her most precious memories are “the ones no one ever thought to photograph.” Fortunately, she had the good sense to slow down enough to relish "the gift of an ordinary day.” Then, while transitioning from mothering teens and emptying her nest, Kenison simultaneously experiences physical upheaval as well. For three years, her family lives in a state of “constant impermanence” as they leave one house, tear down another, and build a new one. In this “Mother’s Memoir,” Kenison gives us a front-row seat to her intense, maternal emotions while “stumbling through the intricate dance of holding on and letting go.”

KEY MENTORS

• Olive Ann Burns: after being newly diagnosed with cancer, this author of Cold Sassy Tree teaches Kenison how to live in the moment
• Krishna Das: leads the only retreat Kenison ever attends; in spite of traveling 300 days/year, he proclaims he is “always home”
• Kenison’s parents: offer to let Kenison and her family live with them for three years during their home construction; help her “pick her battles” while raising teenagers

QUOTES FROM KENISON

• “The idea of an ordinary day as a gift was profoundly powerful to me, and it didn’t change the way I parented in any way my sons would particularly notice, but it changed everything for me because I didn’t want to miss a single minute. I didn’t want to find myself looking back someday with regret because I’d been too busy racing through my life when I could have been enjoying it and savoring it.”
• “My job [as a mother] was to make sure that my family was always ‘home.’ So, when we were feeling a little uprooted and at loose ends, I realized ‘home’ was something we could create wherever we were.”
• “[To bring love into our home], I did a lot of work on myself, my own 'soul aerobics.'"
• “We have so much practice with “lasts,’ and they begin in infancy…so by the time we send them off to college, we’ve had a lot of experiences with ‘lasts,’ and yet that is such a huge transition.”
• “It’s about process, not product….The more we can let go of attachment to outcomes, the happier we are.”

BUY The Gift of an Ordinary Day Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; Reprint edition

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BUY Mitten Strings for God: Reflections for Mothers in a Hurry
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BUY Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids

Watch Kenison read a chapter from her book, "The Gift of an Ordinary Day."

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SUMMARY

Pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom, author of “Balanced and Barefoot,” urges parents, teachers, and administrators to embrace “active free play" to benefit children of all ages. Today, without merry-go-rounds and teeter-totters, time to roll down hills and get dirty, these modern kids are experiencing an alarming increase in sensory and emotional disorders. But Hanscom, comes to their rescue with “Balanced and Barefoot,” a book full of compelling reasons to encourage unrestrained outdoor play and movement. Not only is free play more fun, she argues, but, without it, cognitive and physical development are stunted. Furthermore, Hanscom believes "unrestricted outdoor play makes for strong, confident, and capable children." 

As a young mother and therapist, Angela Hanscom observed a steep decline in sensory-motor development among her children’s peers. So, she started TimberNook as a vehicle to get children outdoors where they could be balanced and barefoot, enjoying the rich sensory experiences nature offers. What began as a backyard experiment has now grown into a movement to inspire, restore, and challenge little minds and bodies in communities across the world.  

KEY TERMS

• “Active free play”- being fully engrossed in whole-body experiences 
• “Deep play” – play that involves purpose and teaches social skills
• “Vestibular sense” – a sense of balance controlled by little hairs in our inner ear; helps us effectively navigate and move around our environment
• “Proprioception” – the ability to sense what different parts of our body are doing without even looking at them; awareness of where our body is in space
• “Loose parts” – multi-purpose play items (e.g., sticks, planks, empty baskets)

KEY POINTS

• Research shows kids are in a seated position for about 9 hrs/day.
• Spinning helps kids to integrate all their senses and to organize their brains.
• Playgrounds have morphed into colorful, very safe, low-to-the-ground, low-risk places for play easily mastered by age four or five.
• The unpredictability of outdoors challenges and develops all the senses.
• Constantly keeping a baby upright endangers a child, including creating more ear infections.

QUOTES FROM HANSCOM

"Active free play outdoors is a kind of play that promotes healthy sensory and motor development in children. It is the antidote to your child spending hours sitting indoors and staring at screens, and to you as a parent being too busy and overscheduled with kid activities to enjoy parenting. The outdoors awakens and rejuvenates the mind and engages all the senses." 

"In nature, children learn to take risks, overcome fears, make new friends, regulate emotions, and create imaginary worlds.

"Active free play--particularly in the outdoors--is absolutely the most beneficial gift we as parents, teachers, and caregivers can bestow on our children to ensure healthy bodies, creative minds academic success, emotional stability, and strong social skills."  

"Having the ability to play away from the adult world opens up many opportunities and feelings of freedom." 

"When children play outdoors, they are naturally motivated to move--strengthening their muscles with each move, each step, and every encounter with nature." 

BUY Balanced and Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children 

RECOMMENDATION

Check out the Playgroundology website and blog.

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SUMMARY 

Brian Jay Jones brings us “Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination,” the sweeping biography of the iconic American children’s book author and illustrator. More than 80 years after Theodor Geisel (also known as “Ted” then later by his pen name “Dr. Seuss”) published his first children’s book, his books continue to resonate with readers of all ages. But far from being a born to write children’s books, he takes a circuitous journey to becoming Dr. Seuss: from high-school journalist to advertising agent to Pulitzer Prize winner. How did he create some of the best-loved children’s works ever printed? By eschewing “bunny books” (the books adults think kids want to read) and refusing to talk down to kids.

KEY EXPERIENCES

• Theodor Geisel learns his love of language and plays on words from his German mother; he likely gains his love of animals from his father who often takes him to the zoo.
• “Flit Insecticide” ad campaign for Standard Oil becomes his 17-year-long gig, providing him with a bread-and-butter job while he sells cartoons.
• His most useful training in storytelling comes while serving in the Army under commanding officer Frank Capra. Together, they make “Private Snafu” training films designed to educate illiterate troops.
• A seminal moment comes while teaching at a writers’ workshop at the University of Utah where Geisel formulates then articulates his treatise for becoming a children’s author.
• Seuss and his wife Helen could never have their own children, so they invent an imaginary child they call “Chrysanthemum Pearl.”
• The Cat in the Hat - breakout bestseller aimed at early readers; includes 280 educator-approved words as well as bouncy, whimsical illustrations that would soon come to characterize all his books
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas – one of Dr. Seuss’s “big books” and one whose main character captures much of his own persona—a villain turned hero.
• Oh, the Places You’ll Go – the last published book in Dr. Seuss’s lifetime and a type of benedictory at the end of his career

QUOTES FROM JONES

• “Plot would always be king for the rest of his life because of [Frank] Capra.”
• “You have them; I’ll entertain them.” (Dr. Seuss’s quip when asked if he liked children.)
• “He had the ability to create very organic-sounding words that were made up but sounded like they always existed.” (e.g., “grinch,” “lorax,” “sneetch”)
• “The Cat in the Hat is the book that changes everything—not just for him but for children’s literature.”
• “I think his message, more than anything else, was ‘Reading doesn’t have to be a task; reading doesn’t have to be dull; reading can and should be exciting; reading should be something you want to do.’”

BUY Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination

RECOMMENDATION

BUY The Secret Art of Dr. Seuss

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SUMMARY

Dr. Edward T. Creagan, author of Farewell: Vital End-of-Life Questions with Candid Answers from a Leading Palliative and Hospice Physician, has literally dedicated his life to death. The first Mayo Clinic physician to become board-certified in palliative care, Creagan examines death and events beyond our control from both a medical standpoint and an acutely emotional perspective. His forty years at the bedside of dying patients gives him expertise in "how to die a good death." His observations and learnings, captured in his latest book, Farewell, inform both the dying and their loved ones. As he describes it, "This is a cookbook, a GPS of the soul, an MRI of the human experience to teach how to do [death] the right way.” By putting his suggestions into practice, we can navigate those last days and say “farewell” with hope, love, and compassion.

KEY POINTS

• Without an advanced directive and a will or living trust prepared ahead of time, a death in the family can leave a rift that can last for generations.
• Death = “the cessation of normal bodily functions which cannot be sustained with interventions” (as defined by the medical profession)
• Many millennials may be more impacted by the death of a pet than by the death of a loved one.
• “A good death” includes asking for forgiveness, forgiving yourself, and giving thanks.
• At the time of death, most talk about regrets rather than focusing on achievements.
• Hearing is the last sense a dying patient loses.
• The advanced directive should include who will speak for the dying person if he is unable to speak for himself.
• Hospice – care that is given to patients expected to die within six months; no focus on life-promoting or life-extending intervention; paid for by Medicare
• After saying "farewell" to a loved one, most say they wish they had started hospice care sooner.
• Palliative care – a branch of internal medicine designed to provide comfort and well-being in conjunction with potentially curative treatment
• In addition to and physical-therapy training, caregivers absolutely must get daily exercise, proper nutrition, adequate rest, and occasional respite.

QUOTES FROM CREAGAN

• “We are a death-denying culture…we are a culture that worships the athlete, the celebrity, the millennial, and we worship at the altar of technology. We somehow believe there is a guru, a potion, or a pill that will provide eternal life.”
• “Grandma is not dying because she’s not eating. She’s not eating because she’s dying.”
• “Everyone comes to the terminally-ill table with baggage, mistakes, and painful decisions that they’ve made. And if those issues are not reconciled and addressed and dealt with, all the morphine in the world or all the marijuana in Canada will not heal that wound.”
• “No one can sustain caregiving 24/7 without their own health and well-being deteriorating.”

BUY Farewell: Vital End-of-Life Questions with Candid Answers from a Leading Palliative and Hospice Physician

RECOMMENDATION
BUY Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

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 SUMMARY

Astrobiologist, planetary scientist, and award-winning science writer David Grinspoon captures the bigger-than-life true adventure story of the pioneer flight to Pluto in Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto. According to Grinspoon and coauthor Alan Stern, “The effort to explore Pluto was an unlikely and sometimes harrowing story, with so many unexpected twists and turns, seeming dead ends, and narrow escapes that it hardly seems possible that it actually succeeded—but it did.”

At a now-legendary dinner at an Italian restaurant in Baltimore, Maryland, a small group of “Plutophiles” meets to strategize how to increase public interest in planning a space mission to Pluto. The same people eventually become the New Horizons team. But first, they implement letter-writing campaign to flood NASA Headquarters and political stakeholders, giving evidence of broad public interest in Pluto. They also organize conferences for presenting serious academic papers about Pluto exploration. Finally, after years of fighting an uphill David-and-Goliath battle, the New Horizons team celebrates its victory against Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). But not for long. Winning the tough, competitive bid is only the beginning. The underdogs continue to face hundreds of unprecedented challenges, and they must avoid even the smallest snag, or they risk losing the opportunity to build the first spacecraft to reach Pluto.

Somehow, however, against all odds, in 2006 New Horizons is on the launchpad in Florida ready to make the epic first flyby mission to planet Pluto, marking the beginning of reigniting the thrill of space exploration. In the words of authors Stern and Grinspoon, “Nothing quite like New Horizons has occurred in a generation—the raw exploration of new worlds. And nothing quite like it is currently planned to happen, ever again.”

KEY PLAYERS & TERMS

• Alan Stern – known as “Mr. Pluto” and THE insider of the mission
• Clyde Tombaugh – a poor young farm poor from Kansas and unknown American hero who discovers Pluto at age 24
• “Pluto Underground” – a group of young underdogs who politick NASA to fund a mission to the outer planet
• Ted Nichols – a high-school teenager who starts a “Save-the-Pluto-Mission” website and uses his own initiative, pluck, and a knack for publicity to persuade NASA to explore Pluto
• JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) – (in Pasadena, California) the premiere U.S. center for planetary exploration that is behind almost all the greatest space missions
• APL (Applied Physics Laboratory) – (in Baltimore, Maryland) a small upstart lab that outcompetes JPL by pushing the boundaries to design a less expensive spacecraft ready to launch more quickly
• New Horizons – spacecraft the size of a baby grand piano (with no moving parts) designed by APL for the 9-year flyby mission to Pluto
• Bill Nye, the Science Guy – one of many celebrity influencers who helps ignite and communicate public excitement and interest in Pluto exploration
• Brian May – guitar player from rock band Queen and card-carrying PhD astrophysicist who is involved in the science team and who writes an original song for New Horizons
• Gravity assist – a cost-saving technique using the gravity of Jupiter to fling New Horizons out towards Pluto
• Hibernation mode – another cost-saving technique that shuts down communication with the spacecraft intermittently, resulting in a decreased need for the ship’s energy in the air and fewer ground-team personnel on Earth

QUOTES FROM GRINSPOON

• “Once a mission gets flown, then everybody pulls behind it.”
• “The public reaction to the exploration of Pluto helped to reawaken something partially forgotten since Voyager and Apollo: that people across the world love bold space exploration, are inspired by missions to never before explored places, and that such missions even have the power to inspire people and change lives.”

BUY Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

RECOMMENDATION

Watch "Pluto in a Minute" YouTube videos. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6BBgLGgB7g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1qUMY1oEvY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-zurr9PHKg&t=8s

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 Dr. Thomas Caulfield, academician and father, shares his memoir,  “Ephphatha: Growing Up Profoundly Deaf and Not Dumb in the Hearing World: A Basketball Player’s Transformational Journey to the Ivy League.” A compilation of personal journal entries Dr. Caulfield painstakingly wrote over a twenty-year period, Ephphatha documents the legendary journey of his Deaf son Christopher and his family's valiant attempts at helping Christopher be the best he could be. We learn that only 1/10 of one percent of the world knows sign language. So, early on, the Caulfields intentionally chose oral language training for Christopher, believing that path would better equip him to handle written academic and professional materials in the future.

KEY POINTS

• “Ephphatha” – to be open, to open up
• After receiving a cochlear implant at 16-months-old, Christopher began 1500 hours of therapy before age nine.
• Alexander Graham Bell Association – a national support network for families of Deaf children
• Not all sports are suitable for kids with cochlear implants; however, Deaf kids often develop and leverage acute sensitivity with other senses.
• Rochester Institute of Technology – Christopher’s alma mater where ten percent of 13K students are profoundly Deaf
• At Cornell, Christopher’s team won $100K for developing glasses with real-time voice-recognition captioning that have an almost unbelievable 99.8% accuracy!

QUOTES FROM CAULFIELD

• “Everyone has the right to be understood.”
• “It has been well documented that deaf kids can suffer serious bouts of loneliness and alienation.”
• “To be on the basketball floor was somewhat of a sanctuary for [Christopher].”
• "Some of the world’s best scholars believe that the true measure of our society is determined by how we treat the needy and disenfranchised.”

BUY Ephphatha: Growing Up Profoundly Deaf and Not Dumb in the Hearing World: A Basketball Player’s Transformational Journey to the Ivy League

RECOMMENDATION

Listen to Christopher Caulfield's graduation speech at Cornell Tech.

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SUMMARY

Jason Chin is both author and illustrator of Grand Canyon, a Caldecott Honor Book, and a Robert R. Sibert Honor Book. Combining imaginative storytelling with intriguing science, Chin creates books that both enchant and educate. To research this book, he camped with scorpions at the bottom of the Grand Canyon and was “hit by the geology bug.”

In order to tell the origin story of the vast region, Chin invites us to follow a father and daughter hiking along the trails of the Grand Canyon, passing through extremes in climate and temperature all within a 5-mile walk. Along the way, they spy fossils (discovered through ingeniously placed die cuts) trapped in rock layers. Then, on the subsequent pages, they find themselves transported into ancient environments.

Throughout the book, Chin embeds rich secondary information using sidebar illustrations of flora and fauna to surround the main picture. Serious science students will enjoy exploring the dozens of books, websites, and papers he lists at the end of his book. And every reader will find the four-page spread illustrating the magnificent vista overlooking the Grand Canyon! 

Targeted at children, Grand Canyon is equally appealing to adults. Hiking the Grand Canyon with Chin’s book in hand will make the region come alive for all ages!

Other books by Jason Chin include Redwoods, Island: A Story of the Galápagos, Gravity. Most recently, he illustrated Miranda Paul’s book, Nine Months, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor.

BUY Grand Canyon by Jason Chin

RECOMMENDATION
BUY National Parks of the USA

ALSO BY JASON CHIN
BUY Nine Months: Before a Baby Is Born 

Listen to Nonfiction4Life Episode 8 with Annette Pimentel

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SUMMARY

Ron Hall and his once-homeless friend Denver Moore chronicle the story of their friendship in "Same Kind of Different As Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together." Through word-of-mouth, the book became a New York Times #1 platinum bestseller and stayed on the list for more than three and a half years. Now, with more than a million copies in circulation, the book is inspiring many to reach out to help the homeless in their own communities. With the strong urging of his wife Debbie, Ron Hall, a modern-day Good Samaritan, has spent the last 20 years replacing his high-society lifestyle with authentic concern for the downtrodden and tireless effort to lift the homeless.

KEY POINTS

• Some homeless people genuinely like the freedom of not having to conform to rules and expectations and of circumventing responsibility and accountability.
• Denver would have none of the white man’s “catch-and-release” type of friendship.
• What the homeless want more than anything is to be dignified and to be humanized.
• Denver’s coins the phrase “Same kind of different as me” to describe how we all have more in common than not.
• We make the homeless invisible by not looking at them and connecting with them as humans.
• Ways to help humanize and give dignity to the homeless: ask their name; sit down and have a conversation with them; offer to let them use your cell phone to call their mother; buy them a bus ticket home; pray for what it is they most want; don’t judge them.

QUOTES FROM HALL AND DENVER

Ron Hall

• “While I dedicated my life to making money and spent a few minutes parked in a church pew on Sundays, she spent hours at Brian’s House, a ministry to homeless babies with AIDS. When I stormed Europe impressing billionaires with my art savvy, she stormed heaven, praying for the needy. My passion was recognition and success. Her passion was to know God.”
• "But he [Denver] remained absolutely convinced that his way of life was no worse than mine, only different, pointing out in the process certain inconsistencies: Why, he wondered, did rich people call it sushi while poor people called it bait?"
• "Driving home, [Debbie] reflected aloud on how society generally regards the homeless as lazy and foolish, and maybe some were. But she felt there was so much more below that surface image: dysfunction and addiction, yes. But also gifts—like love, faith, and wisdom—that lay hidden like pearls waiting only to be discovered, polished, and set."
• "It’s just a simple fact that in America drugs and booze cost money, but food is free to anyone willing to snooze through a gospel message."
• “You don’t become homeless because you run out of money; you become homeless when you run out of friends and family who will take you in.”

Denver Moore

• "If you took a normal fella and dropped him off in the hobo jungle or under the bridge, he wouldn’t know what to do. You got to be taught to live homeless."
• "You…feel like nobody in the world cares nothin about you. Don’t matter if you live or die. People with that spirit get mean, dangerous. They play by the rules of the jungle.”
• "I didn’t scare everybody, though. I slept in the doorway of that United Way over on Commerce Street for a whole lotta years. And every mornin for all that time, a lady who worked there brought me a sandwich. I never knowed her name and she never knowed mine. I wish I could thank her. Funny, though. That United Way buildin was right next door to a church, and for all them years, nobody at that church ever looked my way."
• "The Word says God don’t give us credit for lovin the folks we want to love anyway. No, He gives us credit for loving the unlovable. The perfect love of God don’t come with no conditions, and that’s the kind of love Miss Debbie showed the folks at the mission."
• “I want to know why all you Christians worship one homeless man on Sunday, then you turn your back on the first one you see on Monday.”
• “We’re all just regular folks walkin down the road God done set in front of us. The truth about it is, whether we is rich or poor or somethin in between, this earth ain’t no final restin place. So in a way, we is all homeless—just workin our way toward home."

BUY Same Kind of Different As Me (book)

RECOMMENDATION

BUY Same Kind of Different as Me (DVD) or watch it on Netflix.

Other books by Ron Hall

BUY Workin' Our Way Home: The Incredible True Story of a Homeless Ex-Con and a Grieving Millionaire Thrown Together to Save Each Other(sequel to Same Kind of Different As Me and story of the 10 years Ron and Denver lived together and traveled across America helping to raise nearly $100 million for the homeless)

BUY What Difference Do It Make?: Stories of Hope and Healing

Visit Ron's foundation to make a difference and bless the homeless.

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 SUMMARY

Dr. Louann Brizendine’s bestselling, seminal book “The Female Brain” has been translated into more than 30 languages and sold over a million copies. Brizendine guides us through all the stages of a woman’s life, from birth to menopause, explaining what hormones trigger her feelings, skills, and behaviors. Beyond male-female stereotypes, Dr. Brizendine cites solid research to substantiate some commonly held beliefs about women and to explode some myths as well. “The female brain has tremendous unique aptitudes—outstanding verbal agility, the ability to connect deeply in friendship, a nearly psychic capacity to read faces and tone of voice for emotions and states of mind, and the ability to defuse conflict,” says Brizendine. “All of this is hardwired into the brains of women.”   

KEY POINTS

• “Overlapping speech” – when women pick up and continue a line of thought for other women; by men, this form of spoken language is mistaken as interrupting
• Botox treatments and facelifts – interrupt the tiny muscles in the face, making it very difficult to pick up on nonverbal cues and can change our very essence
• Estrogen escalation during the first two weeks of the menstrual cycle makes women more flirtatious and verbal.
• Childbirth triggers gargantuan hormonal changes, including overwhelming protectiveness, and makes women more flexible, adaptive, and courageous and increases their spatial memory.
• Postpartum, new mothers lose an average of 700 hours of sleep in the first twelve months!
• About 80 percent of women get “the baby blues” (day 7-9 postpartum) when hormones drop dramatically before the brain regains its normal balance.
• Sleep and bright sunlight can help women combat postpartum depression.
• Social isolation postpartum can be devastating to a woman, especially if she has left the workplace to have a baby.
• Perimenopause is “like adolescence without the fun” (e.g., night sweats, heavy bleeding, mood swings).

QUOTES FROM BRIZENDINE

• “The male and female brain are more alike than different. After all, we are the same species.”
• “Language is the glue that connects one female to another.”
• “Sleep has to be your touchstone for being your best brain you can be while you’re awake, so anything you can do to improve your sleep and the baby’s sleep will follow… You need to focus intensely on sleep postpartum.”
• “[Childbirth] is a complicated time in a couple’s relationship, especially the first baby.”
• “[Getting] social interaction is like taking an essential daily vitamin.”
• “[I believe in] honoring who you are and whatever it is that makes you feel normal after you’ve had a baby.”
• “Tears in a woman make evoke brain pain in men, and the male brain registers helplessness when they see a woman crying.”
• After menopause: “There’s a regrouping…you’re in a different state where you’re able to embrace that authenticity of who you are again. It’s really an upgrade. It’s wonderful. So, you have that to look forward to.”

BUY The Female Brain
BUY The Male Brain: A Breakthrough Understanding of How Men and Boys Think

RECOMMENDATION
BUY Steel Magnolias (DVD)

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SUMMARY

Julie Lythcott-Haims, former Dean of Freshman at Stanford University, offers her New York Times bestselling anti-parenting manifesto, How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success. In the book, Lythcott-Haims explores how and why hyper-attentive parenting, or helicopter parenting, has taken parents and their children hostage in this country. This trend of well-intentioned parents who hover is creating real-life dangers for 21st-century smart kids who can’t even make their own beds. Their parents have been lured into creating "check-listed childhoods" or "redshirting" their kindergartners. Left inept in essential life skills because their parents watch, handle, fix, and organize everything for them, these kids are unprepared to work, lead, and take their rightful place as the next generation of adults. So, here to stop the madness of overprotecting, overscheduling, and overparenting is Lythcott-Haims. She speaks with the compassion of a parent yet the unapologetic urgency of someone who spent a decade observing some of our brightest young people fail to launch. In short, Lythcott-Haims teaches us how to change the definition of success and how to raise an adult.

KEY POINTS

• “Existential impotence” – a state of being among young adults who remain, effectively, small children-in-arms lovingly attended to almost 24/7 and who feel perfectly content to be cared for by parents indefinitely
• Helicopter parenting is borne of five causes during the 1980s: 1- the playdate, 2 - the self-esteem movement, 3 - “stranger danger” 4 - seatbelt and bicycle helmets laws, and 5 - A Nation at Risk.
• Three types of overparenting: overprotecting, overdirecting, and hand-holding. 
• The shift to round-the-clock parenting has short-term gains but long-term losses.
• Four-step method for teaching children skills: do it for them, do it with them, watch them do it, and they do it themselves.
• Baby Boomers started helicopter parenting, and the movement has now continued into the present when Millennials are parenting.
• Give kids unstructured time for free play with no adult supervision.
• Kids are more likely to be harmed as a passenger in a car than to be abducted.
• Normalizing struggle by allowing small setbacks to teach is what leads to having autonomous kids and independent adults.

QUOTES FROM LYTHCOTT-HAIMES

• “The most loving thing we can do as parents is to prepare ourselves to fend without us.”
• “Short of the disasters that can befall them, we’re supposed to let life teach our kids lessons.”
• “We have to as a community, as a neighborhood, as a school district, as a town—we have to call time out…and blow the whistle. We need to do things differently!”
• “Free play is essential the developmental wellness of children, so this is not some fuzzy thing…They will be mentally unwell (compromised) if their childhood doesn’t include a pretty regular dose of free play.”
• “A long-term study conducted over decades [the Harvard Study] shows that a kid who did chores in childhood is more likely to be professionally successful later in life. Why? Because chores build a work ethic and also a mindset of ‘Pitch in, and be useful!’”
• “What’s really best for a child is to figure out, ‘What do I want? What am I good at? Let me craft my life accordingly.’”

Connect with Julie Lythcott-Haims on her website, and check out her wildly popular TEDTalk (with over 4 million views) about how to raise a successful kid without overparenting.

Check out the Wilton Connecticut Free Play Matters Task Force website.

Read articles by Peter Gray, the guru of free play, found at the Natural Child Project website.

Visit the Let Grow website for “future-proofing our kids and our country.”

BUY How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success

RECOMMENDATION

For student-centered college searches, visit the Colleges That Change Lives website, OR BUY Colleges That Change Lives: 40 Schools That Will Change the Way You Think About Colleges.

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