How to Raise an Adult

—Singer/songwriter Dar Williams, “The One Who Knows,” from the album The Beauty of the Rain

Dar Williams is one of my favorite recording artists. Her lyrics are miniature stories, her voice is etched with breathless realism, and she picks the guitar well. I’ve sung along to her song “The One Who Knows” hundreds of times but have yet to get through the final stanza (above) without choking up. Parental love is piercing, fierce, and beautiful. It is hard to comprehend that we’ll be able to cope with our kids leaving home, let alone that at times we won’t even know where they are. Yet we gave them life. And life is to be lived.

And we are mammals, after all. We may be mammals with clothing and cell phones; nevertheless, we are mammals. In the wild, our mammal counterparts raise offspring until they can fend for themselves. Regardless of the duration of the raising period—weeks, months, or years—at some point the young mammal becomes independent. In fact, it is the job of a mammal parent to put itself out of a job by raising offspring who will be able to thrive in the absence of the parent, and who in turn will be capable of raising the next generation. This is our biological imperative. But our fellow creatures are much better than we are at letting go.

Of course, we’re not living in the wild, and we’re fortunate that neither our own mortality nor that of our offspring needs to be the predominant motivator of our twenty-first-century middle- and upper-middle-class American behaviors. Yes, it is scary out there. Terrorism lurks and looms, the economy is at times perilous, the middle class is shrinking, a college degree is necessary for a good job, student loan debt is an enormous burden for many, and it’s hard to predict what kinds of jobs will lead to success in a constantly shifting information- and technology-based economy. Moreover, from the poor economy, to unemployment rates for young adults, to the high cost of living, there can be good reasons for providing our grown kids some financial support until they can stand on their own, for using our networks and knowledge to help them negotiate the world of work, and for allowing our adult children to move back home when times are tough.

But what will become of our children if we lose touch with our basic mammalian imperative to position them to begin their own adult life, maybe even with a partner and kids of their own one day? Parents protect, direct, and handle so much for children today that we prevent them from the very growth that is essential to their development into adult human beings. And precisely because we’re so helpful and supportive, we take away their need for what was once a common adolescent and young adult cry for independence. Today’s kids are, for the most part, grateful for our presence, which feels damn wonderful. But have we bred the desire for independence right out of the next generation? Clark University psychology professor Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, purveyor of the new concept of “emerging adulthood,” has a new book out called Getting to 30: A Parent’s Guide to the 20-Something Years.1 Really? A parent’s guide? Darwin must be rolling over in his grave.

THE CORE OF THE SELF

Between their late teens and early twenties, we want to launch a kid who still loves us and wants to see us, but who also has the wherewithal to make his or her way in life, with a lot of skills and a mind-set of “I think I can, I think I can!” Another word for that mind-set is “self-efficacy,” a central concept within the field of human psychology developed in the 1970s by eminent psychologist Albert Bandura. Self-efficacy means having the belief in your abilities to complete a task, reach goals, and manage a situation.2 It means believing in your abilities—not in your parents’ abilities to help you do those things or to do them for you.

Self-efficacy is more than just believing in yourself like that small blue train in The Little Engine That Could. Self-efficacy is about having a realistic sense of one’s accomplishments (neither overblown nor undersold). It’s about learning that when at first you don’t succeed you can indeed try, try again and you’re likely to make progress perhaps even to a point of recognizable achievement and maybe even to a point of mastery. Self-efficacy is different than self-esteem, which is the belief in one’s worth or value. Self-esteem influences self-efficacy, but self-efficacy is built by doing the work and seeing that success came from effort.3 Self-efficacy is built in large part by the repeated trial-and-error opportunities afforded by childhood. It’s in fact what the years we call “childhood” are for in the life of a developing human, what these years have always been for, what these years have always offered until relatively recently when we parents began doing so much of the work of life for our kids.

Believe it or not your kid will be eighteen one day, and although you adore them and love doing for them, you don’t want to keep them dependent upon you until they turn eighteen and then dump them out into the real world cold-turkey and wave good-bye; we’re supposed to raise them—to parent them—in a manner that inculcates in them a sense of how to be adult in the world, in age-appropriate ways, beginning in early childhood.

So again I’ll ask, what does it mean to be an adult? We began to look at this question at the start of Part 2, in the chapter “Our Kids Lack Basic Life Skills.” For guidance I turned to someone I know and greatly admire: Professor William (Bill) Damon, professor of education at Stanford and director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence. Bill is one of the world’s leading scholars of human development and has raised a handful of humans of his own who are now in their thirties and forties. Based on his research, Bill coined the definitive description of “adolescence” as “that period of time between the onset of puberty and a firm commitment to an adult social role.”4 I visited Bill in his office on the Stanford campus on a busy day in the fall quarter of 2014 to ask him to unpack the latter portion of that phrase: What does it mean to make a firm commitment to an adult social role, and how can parents help a kid mature to that point?5

Bill explains that an adult social role is one that is intrinsically not about you. A wide range of things qualify, including being a parent, having a commitment to a vocation (job), or joining the military. Inherent in these adult social roles is that you have responsibilities and obligations beyond your personal care and pleasure. So, how can we approach our job as parents so that we raise kids who are able to make firm commitments to adult social roles instead of living in a prolonged adolescence (and dependence upon us)?

WAYS TO PARENT

In the 1960s, University of California–Berkeley developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind researched different parenting techniques and their impact on children. Her 1967 paper articulated three distinct types of parenting—permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative—which were considered standard in the field for the ensuing fifteen years. In 1983 psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and John Martin modified Baumrind’s classification, replacing “permissive” with “indulgent,” and adding “neglectful.” Developmental psychologists around the world now, mostly, regard these four types as definitive.

The four types of parenting describe the extent to which a parent is more or less demanding of a child, on the one hand, and more or less responsive to a child, on the other. They can be plotted on a simple Cartesian chart where the x-axis goes from less demanding on the left to more demanding on the right, and the y-axis goes from less responsive at the bottom to more responsive at the top.

The four types are described as follows:6

• AUTHORITARIAN: demanding and unresponsive. These parents are strict, expect obedience and respect, and punish their children for failing to comply. They don’t explain the reasoning for their actions—they are the “because I said so” type. They value achievement, order, discipline, and self-control. Their children have a lot of responsibility in the home and few freedoms outside of it. These parenting characteristics were particularly important during the agricultural and industrial eras. Today this style of parenting is more prevalent in poor and working-class families, immigrant families, and in African American and Chicano/Latino households. However, the affluent, Chinese American, self-described “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua may fall into this category as well, if her fear-based approach and complete dismissiveness of her daughters’ own interests is more truth than satire (she’s indicated her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is part parody, so we don’t know quite how authoritarian she really is).

• PERMISSIVE/INDULGENT: undemanding and responsive. These parents tend to attend to their child’s every need and comply with their child’s every request. They are reluctant to establish rules or expectations, and thus have little basis for or need to discipline. They remind to the point of nagging, but the behavioral consequence they threaten rarely comes. They “give in” regularly and are reluctant to say no or to enforce consequences when they do say it, and feel their kid can do no wrong. Some are very present physically in their child’s life. They want their child to like them, and act more like friends than parents. Some are very present at a surface level without being engaged in what their child is actually doing. Permissive parents tend to be wealthier and more educated than other parents.

• NEGLECTFUL: undemanding and unresponsive. These parents are, at best, “hands off,” and at worst criminally negligent. They are uninvolved in their child’s school and home life, are emotionally distant, and often physically absent. They can be unreliable when it comes to providing the necessities of food, shelter, and clothing. They are more likely to live in poverty, and their neglect may be caused by that, or by mental health problems such as depression and anxiety.

• AUTHORITATIVE: demanding and responsive. These parents set high standards, expectations, and limits, which they uphold with consequences. They are also emotionally warm, and responsive to their child’s emotional needs. They reason with their kids, engaging in a give-and-take for the sake of learning. They give their child freedom to explore, to fail, and to make their own choices.

Helicopter parenting tendencies fall into one or both of two types: authoritarian and permissive/indulgent. They are authoritarian if they bring a heavy hand of direction to their kids’ academic, extracurricular, and home lives, instilling a fear of failure with little regard for what each kid wants to pursue. They are permissive/indulgent if they are focused on pleasing their kid, praising their kid, protecting them from failure or harm, and sticking up for them in the world, with little regard for building skills, a strong work ethic, or character. The third type of parent—“neglectful”—is the antithesis of a helicopter parent as they exhibit disinterest in the developmental needs of the child.

The fourth type of parent—“authoritative”—sounds like a combination of “authoritarian” and “permissive,” and rightly so. Like authoritarian parents, authoritative parents enforce rules. But unlike authoritarian parents, authoritative parents explain the reason behind the rules, treat their child like an independent, rational being, and are emotionally warm with their children. Authoritative parents also share some traits with permissive/indulgent parents—they are involved in their kids’ lives and are responsive to their needs, but unlike permissive parents, authoritative parents don’t let their kids get away with things. Authoritative parents balance warmth with strictness, direction with freedom. For this reason, investigative journalist Amanda Ripley describes “authoritative” parents as sitting at “the sweet spot”7 between “authoritarian” and “permissive” parents.

In her New York Times best seller about the world’s education superpowers, The Smartest Kids in the World, Ripley examines the role of parenting in explaining why American students have a lower degree of academic achievement compared to their peers in dozens of countries around the world. She describes the authoritarian style of parents who “go too far with the drills and practice in academics,” and the indulgent/permissive style who raise kids with a “coddled, moon bounce of a childhood.” She concludes that the authoritative style of parenting is best—with its balance of strictness and warmth that gains kids’ trust and respect. She supports her conclusions with the work of another researcher, Northwestern University’s Jelani Mandara, who in a study of close to five thousand U.S. teenagers and their parents found that children raised by authoritative parents have higher academic achievement, fewer symptoms of depression, and fewer problems with aggression, disobedience, and other antisocial behaviors.8

We can look at these parenting types and the evidence presented and come to some quick conclusions about the type of parent we think we are, and want to be. But it’s not that simple. Many of us derive real pleasure from feeling like our kid’s best friend. Many of us are fearful that if we don’t force our kid to study or pursue what we’re sure is best, they will become failures in life. Amy Chua herself says, “All decent parents want to do what’s best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.”9 Indeed, we’re all trying to do the right thing.

* * *

So, Part 3 of this book is about specific ways to cultivate an authoritative parenting style. It’s not easy. It will take practice. We will stumble and have moments of tremendous satisfaction and accomplishment, only to stumble again. But by cutting ourselves some slack, widening our definition of success, and focusing on how to unconditionally love our kids and ourselves, we can, in fact, get it right.

It’ll involve letting go of an illusory sense that we can control or manufacture everything in our children’s lives, and letting them go about the important work of figuring things out for themselves. It’ll involve making them do for themselves, so they develop competencies and confidence. It’ll involve teaching them to think for themselves rather than rely on others to tell them what’s what or what matters. It’s also about being adult enough to set standards and expectations about our children’s character and effort, and being able to enforce those standards and expectations. And about accepting our own imperfection—and theirs; neither we, nor they, will get things right all of the time and life is so much more joyously lived when we accept this.

We’ve been given the awesome, humbling task of helping a young human unfold. What they need most of all is our love and support as they go about the hard and joyful work of learning the skills and mind-sets needed to be a thriving, successful, adult. The “sweet spot” of authoritative parenting—halfway between permissive and authoritarian, and not in any way neglectful—will help us raise our children to truly succeed in life, where we can be proud not only of them, but of ourselves.