Julie Lythcott-Haims

“Young adults come to resent the people who did the thinking for them.”

“A sense of purpose is essential for achieving happiness and satisfaction in life.”

“Resilience is built from real hardship and cannot be bought or manufactured.”

“The best predictor of success is a sense of resiliency, grit, capacity to fail and get up. If you're prevented from feeling discomfort of failure, you have no sense of how to handle those things at all.”

“But we should open our eyes to the many ways in which hypervigilance keeps them penned in from the more liberated life they deserve to live and that in turn would prepare them for adulthood.”

“We’re depriving our kids of the chance to do the work of life for themselves.”

“There is something that's a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That's what it means to become an adult.”

“When you intervene on behalf of your child, your child becomes the victim. You're expressing the message 'You're incapable, you're not sturdy enough to resolve this yourself, you need me to come in and take care of this for you.'" You are, in essence, disempowering your child.”

“Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do but you suck it up and do it anyway, and that's what teaches you humility, work ethic, responsibility, and follow-through.”

“What is shaping the way we dream? Yes we dream of our selves, of what we will become, but it's the environment that tells us what is possible. I don't think our dreams are limitless; they are bounded by the society we live in and its conception of what is respectable and good.”