On the Julie Lythcott-Haims scandal, and parenting advice

She boinked a student when she was Dean at Stanford.

Julie Lythcott-Haims, pillar of Palo Alto

For the past decade when I’ve been in the Bay Area, it has been impossible to avoid bestselling author and former Stanford Dean Julie Lythcott-Haims.

Her name was somehow everywhere. I first remember seeing it on an auditorium billboard in Palo Alto, where she was giving a talk provocatively titled How To Let Your Kids Fail. Now, Palo Alto is KNOWN for too many children ending their lives on the Caltrain tracks over academic pressure, so this kind of counterintuitive messaging with its undertones of chiding, scolding, and lecturing was something parents were happy to pay a chunk of change to attend, especially since coming from a former Stanford Dean and pillar of the community, it hinted at cheat codes to get into Ivies without becoming a box-ticking robot.

Then there was the TED talk. How To Raise Successful Kids Without Overparenting. Followed by endless talks elsewhere. Followed by a bestselling book, How To Raise An Adult - Break Free Of The Overparenting Trap And Prepare Your Kid For Success.

More recently, while playing games on my phone, I kept being assaulted by ads to vote for Julie Lythcott Haims for City Council, and then for Congress. I think she is now a City Councillor. I don’t reside in her area, and I can’t vote in America anyway. So that part I have not kept track of, but we will focus on the rest of her work.

Some parenting advice that didn’t sit well with me

I think somewhere in a talk, she mentioned something about college not being that important. That raised my hackles because… that’s one of the few ways to be predictably upwardly mobile in this world, especially if you’re an immigrant or child of immigrants. It’s easy to say “college doesn’t matter” when you went to Stanford and then worked there and your kids are legacies.

I know Amy Chua, everyone’s favorite Tiger Mom gets a lot of flak for pressuring her kids etc, and all the chill-parent sorts get a kick out of bashing her. Seems like Ms. Chua is a serious researcher and Tiger Mother was a fun outing for her, so she seems to welcome the hate. She once debated with Esther Wojcicki, another bestselling author from the Palo Alto stables (she teaches in the public school, Google was founded in her garage), and Esther said her parenting is superior because her daughters are CEOs of Youtube and 23AndMe, while Amy’s daughters are lowly clerks for Supreme Court justices. I attended a book event for Esther’s book How To Raise Successful People, where she regaled the crowd of stressed-out Palo Alto and Menlo Park moms with this story to wide cheers, told concerned parents they should buy their kid an apartment so they can be more independent and don’t have to live with their parents even if they are working in the Bay, and then when I asked her how her principles applied to poor kids, they all looked at me like I was poor…. that’s a story that warrants a whole new post for another day.

Anyway, the reason I bring up Amy Chua is Julie Lythcott-Haims bashes her every now and then. I’m not a fan of Ms. Chua’s parenting style and think she misses the whole point in her book, but being an Indian immigrant, I do not like the Western criticisms of Asian determination and success. Ms. Lythcott-Haims’s Gen X Slacker vibe doesn’t help with this.

Eventually, as a parent, I was devouring parenting audiobooks while carrying my kid home from the park or giving her a large piece of fruit to entertain herself while I zoned out for a minute. Ms. Lythcott-Haims’s book was one I read.

The Anti-Coddle Cabal

As a prelude, Julie Lythcott-Haims is part of the free-range-kids cabal with Jonathan Haidt and a few other people. If you read one of their books, they’ll reference the others’ works in a not-quite-reference-mill way, just like Robert Lustig, Chris Palme,r and Jason Fung all give each others’ books glowing praises while ranting against sugar. That’s just an aside, it’s not a big deal. But anyway, that’s where she fits in the landscape of parenting literature.

This cabal is all about “we are coddling our kids too much” and “no one plays outside anymore” and “parents call West Point to ask for exemptions for their enrolled kids zoinks!” and similar stuff that all points to “we are making our kids too fragile” and “they come to college not knowing to do laundry” and it all goes straight into “this is why they are all offing themselves”. As an aside, just as I was reading JLH’s book, twitter showed me a video of Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and other such weirdos talking about how they are clueless about how laundry works. They seemed very alive and quite happy, so not doing laundry doesn’t impact your life.

In any case, the thing that bothered me is JLH in her book doesn’t talk about WHY parents are more protective these days. Not honestly anyway. She says “crime is down, IDK what parents are worrying about”. I don’t know why this entire cabal doesn’t consider that crime might be down precisely because parents don’t send their kids out unaccompanied, they never address that angle. But… it’s gotten quite clear over the past couple of decades that A LOT of folks who are parents now who had the free-range childhood were sexually abused and never told anyone. The Catholic Church has had scandals. And we know that the rate of sexual abuse in American public schools rivals that of the Catholic Church. Joe Paterno happened. We also saw the very public trial of Larry Nassar who abused sportswomen in the presence of their parents and they didn’t know anything was wrong. WHY would any parent trust institutions with their kids?

Julie Lythcott-Haims wants y’all to leave your college kids alone

Another thing that bothered me is that she complains a lot about parents making calls to schools and colleges to get their kids exempted from the consequences of their behavior. That sounds valid. But here’s the thing - this has always been possible if you were wealthy or influential. The relentless suburban mom has closed the wealth gap for this with her dogged determination, so the schools are forced to bend the made-up rules for her kids as well, not just the fancy ones. If a rule can be negotiated, people are going to negotiate, JLH is complaining about is that the price for negotiation has come down.

When she complains about how parents call her university to keep track of their kids, I realized she isn’t quite being honest. There’s this excellent book I wrote about called Paying For The Party which is an extended case study of girls in a college dorm and what outcomes they come to. I wrote a nice review of it here. The relevant part is that these researchers found that girls with helicopter parents had better outcomes at college because college has gotten too complicated to navigate without an informed adult in your corner.

JLH here doesn’t critique the college admissions process, how balancing work and play is hard on campus, how professional paths are incredibly hard to navigate for working class students. She doesn’t bring up the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses or adderall abuse. Instead, she just chooses to blame parents for being too involved and stunting the growth of their kids.

She goes as far as to have a chapter titled “The Orphan As Role Model”. This chapter is her admiringly quoting an essay by a Stanford literary scholar named Terry Castle, which advocates for “breaking up with parents”. Ms. Castle, who comes from an acrimonious home, is upset that her students stay in regular touch with their parents and share a lot of their lives with them and dads text their kids “jokes and stuff”.

There’s a valid complaint in that your parents ought not do your homework. But the annoyance with that extends to parents texting their kids? That’s just bitterness. JLH does not attempt to moderate Ms. Castle’s extreme opinions. You’re supposed to make like a Disney character, according to Julie Lythcott-Haims, and consider your parents gone so you can have your little adventures.

Shortly after this chapter, I had to put down Julie Lythcott-Haims’s book. It didn’t have any secrets about how to get my toddler on Stanford track, just scolding me for parenting like an Indian mom.

Turns out, Julie is a predator

As we’ve previously established, Julie Lythcott-Haims was a pillar of the community in Palo Alto and Stanford. She was the Dean of Freshmen and Undergraduate Education. This makes her a very powerful and influential figure in the lives of young men and women joining Stanford. Most if not all of these children are away from home for the very first time. They are probably lonely and lost at some point or another. Students from underprivileged backgrounds probably stick out like a sore thumb and need more assurance and guidance from people like Julie so they can figure out where they can fit in and how to deal with the coursework.

A woman named Olivia Swanson-Haas, from the Stanford class of 2011, wrote a personal essay titled I Had An Affair With My College Dean. She details how this married Dean made her keep their relationship a secret, a secret that was incredibly stressful to bear. She broke off their relationship after a year. She was overcome with stress and loathing and told her parents about the affair.

Immediately, her parents were aghast at this breach of trust, from the Dean of Students, no less.

They were horrified. Suddenly words like manipulated and abuse of power were being used and shame started to calcify in the parts of me that had desired her—tremendous embarrassment—as I began to see my great love story through a very different lens. I had felt like such an adult, living this beautiful, sexy adventure of intimacy and growth, swirling in a soft glow. But I told my parents and in an instant it was now closing time at a grimy bar—blinding fluorescent lights revealing makeup caked on cheeks sweaty from too many cheap shots. All at once, I was too drunk, my clothes were too tight, and I was very exposed. What happened was shocking; I had been groomed. Yet I couldn’t forget how I had pursued her and I hated myself for having been so desperate.

Subsequently, Olivia’s mother called Stanford and informed them of the affair. Not long after, it was announced that Julie Lythcott-Haims would be leaving Stanford, to pursue an MFA. All of Stanford celebrated JLH’s commitment to her authenticity for leaving a lucrative and influential career for an MFA of all things.

What followed was a hit career where Julie Lythcott-Haims came in contact with even more youth and their desperate parents and wielded way more influence on young minds, and she told them all to not keep too much in touch with their kids or try to help them out with their struggles.

No one said anything. No one knew. Julie Lythcott-Haims went from height to height, and there seemed no stopping her.

Until now.

Coach Carr, Step Away From The Underage Girls

Someone named Emily comments on the personal essay above:

I was at Stanford and had the same individual as dean. In the fall of my junior year I had some social anxiety issues and didn’t know where to turn on campus – I was very lost. People always talk about how many resources there are available etc, but at the time, it seems beyond me. I had just declared my major the end of the previous academic year but I wasn’t sure it was the right move, or if I was sufficiently “passionate” about it. I ended up cold emailing the dean and we met up for 1 on 1 session in her office to talk about academic pursuits.

She was open and friendly and we ended up having a number of more academic meetings on campus together. A few meetings in she had asked me to go on an off campus hike in the redwoods and a meal. I was 20 at the time and at the time I felt was a bit odd. I didn’t take her up on it (being a busy undergrad, it was very easy to have or claim scheduling conflicts). Looking back now more than 10 years later, it sounds like may have been date.

I don’t have much to report as nothing happened, but I wonder if I dodged a bullet.

So this could be a pattern with Julie Lythcott-Haims. At this time, there haven’t been any others come forward with their stories, so it could be isolated as well, but as someone who has been on a college campus, predatory faculty and admin rarely strike out just at one time. They see hundreds of kids every year, it’s unlikely love is like a lightning strike amid the hundreds of students with similar anxieties and concerns. Predators usually have patterns.

In any case, she is now a city councilwoman, and here’s to hoping there are consequences. So far, it seems like she has been asked to step down from committees she was on, which had to do with youth, Stanford, and youth mental health.

She has taken to her Substack, where in a post titled “I want you to hear this from me”, she says she’s apologized for what she did and other blah. She also says she knew the relationship was inappropriate. Well, that much was obvious, because when Ms. Olivia brought that up that people were suspecting them of having an affair, she just told Olivia to “be more careful”. She’s “taking some time away” to lay low until it all blows over.

The comments are closed now but they are full of people praising her transparency and honesty and “we are all flawed”, and only a small minority are calling her out for perpetrating this on a student. She has never talked publicly of the circumstances in which she stopped being a “Stanford Dean”, and even now, she’s only talking about this because she was caught. Not out of a need for honesty or anything.

Because Of The Implication

Circling back, it feels weird that right after a parent outed her affair and caused her firing, she made money off of taking a hard stance on parents being too involved in their college kids’ lives. She has a whole chapter dedicated to talking about how overparenting is causing kids to off themselves.

Think of the implication - A predator is telling parents that if they stay involved in their kids’ college lives, their kids’ mental health will deteriorate so much that they will fall into self-harm.

The audacity.

Yeah I think I’m on the side of helicopter parenting well into college. If college is going to be a place where creepy professors and administrators prey on students’ loneliness and naivete to take advantage of them and hold their future hostage, maybe just like in daycares, we need livestreams of the goings-on in classrooms and professors’ offices for parents to monitor.

On coddling and mental health

Just this morning, I was reading this long piece on how kids now are forced to grow up too quickly until adolescence and then they don’t grow up at all.

And that seems like a great take on the whole “coddling” phenomenon.

In India, kids are held and rocked to sleep and sung to and soothed for as long as they need it. It’s just expected to keep a child happy and occupied in the initial years. You’re not supposed to hear a kid cry for more than a year in the first 6 months. There is none of the sleep training or Ferber method or timeouts or independent play foisted on the child. So when these things are commonplace in the US, I balk.

There’s so much room for a child to be a child in India, and possibly a lot of the world. In America though, kids are expected to be seen and not heard in public, allowed to cry themselves to sleep in private, and parents worry that giving a kid too much 1-1 care would make them less independent as would not forcing them to play by themselves.

When I think about what my toddler needs, it almost always seems to be a stable adult figure holding their hand as they learn to be a person. As kids get older, this seems to be what they need in different forms. Parents’ presence is very important to children as parents have all the context to help them process the world they experience.

The anti-coddling crowd will make you think you are damaging your baby by responding to their every cry. This is not based on science. There’s a lot of “your baby controls your life haha” type narrative that comes in here. Maybe, MAYBE those ideas come into the picture when your kids are in middle school or whatever. But I don’t think babies and toddlers have much to lose by spending a lot of time with their moms. If anything, this is the foundation for stable emotional health on which every other aspect of life can be built.

If anything, kids are more fragile because in a lot of the West, they aren’t getting this kind of care in early life. Unsurprisingly, none of the anti-coddling cabal will ever touch on what is necessary in early life to make kids more emotionally resilient.

So far, I’ve considered that it’s just a blind spot that this cabal has as they are all old people with a very Western upbringing that they don’t know or remember what babies need, or that they are more focused on changing social norms and laws so kids can have the freedom to be by themselves in public.

But following the line Julie Lythcott Haims took after her being fired for predation, I wonder if this hate for parental involvement comes from a darker place.