1KHO 546: When Parents Thrive, Kids Thrive: A Blueprint for Healthy Child Development in an Anxious World | Dr. Madeline Levine, Teach Your Children Well

Summary

The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast: Episode 1KHO 546 Summary

Title: When Parents Thrive, Kids Thrive: A Blueprint for Healthy Child Development in an Anxious World
Guest: Dr. Madeline Levine, Author of Teach Your Children Well
Release Date: August 11, 2025

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Introduction

In the 546th episode of The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast, host Ginny Urch engages in a profound conversation with Dr. Madeline Levine, a renowned psychologist and author of the influential book Teach Your Children Well: Why Values and Coping Skills Matter More Than Grades, Trophies, or Fat Envelopes. This episode delves deep into the intersection of parenting, child development, and the pervasive anxiety affecting both parents and children in today's rapidly changing world.

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Parental Anxiety and Its Impact on Children

Dr. Levine opens the discussion by highlighting the root cause of widespread anxiety among parents: fear of the unknown. She explains how this fear leads to "hyper parenting," where parents exert excessive control over every aspect of their children's lives in an attempt to shield them from potential failures and uncertainties.

Notable Quote:
"We're feeling it quite a bit and it often leads us to hyper parenting. It leads us to really trying to control things. And that's not good for anyone, really."
— Dr. Madeline Levine [02:24]

Dr. Levine underscores that this overbearing approach not only stifles children's natural development but also robs them of the opportunity to build resilience. She shares a poignant story about her son Jeremy, illustrating how parental control can misalign with a child's true aspirations.

Notable Quote:
"She asks me, 'I'd like to teach him about mortgages and banking. I can't teach him to be a good person. He's the kind of kid I want next to me at work.' So he ended up... a lawyer... Something entirely different."
— Dr. Madeline Levine [06:24]

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The Price of Privilege

Dr. Levine expands on her book The Price of Privilege, discussing how material advantages and parental pressure contribute to the disconnection and unhappiness observed in today's youth. She emphasizes that despite economic and material privileges, children often struggle with mental health issues like anxiety and depression.

Notable Quote:
"Depression really is sadness. Usually underlying depression is sadness. And we have these very high rates of... anxiety and depression are still high."
— Dr. Madeline Levine [36:04]

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Resilience Over Traditional Achievements

A significant portion of the conversation revolves around redefining success. Dr. Levine argues that traditional markers of achievement—grades, trophies, and prestigious college admissions—are no longer sufficient in preparing children for an uncertain future. Instead, she advocates for fostering resilience, emotional intelligence, and creative problem-solving skills.

Notable Quote:
"If you expose them to challenges, they'll learn how to manage and become resilient. When you protect them from every little difficulty, you're robbing them of the opportunity to learn how to be competent."
— Dr. Madeline Levine [46:51]

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Importance of Play and Outdoor Activities

Aligned with the podcast's overarching theme, Dr. Levine passionately defends the critical role of play and outdoor activities in child development. She presents compelling evidence that unrestricted play contributes significantly to areas like emotional health, self-esteem, and social skills.

Notable Quote:
"Play can't wait. It is the most efficient driver of learning for children."
— Dr. Madeline Levine [53:45]

Dr. Levine contrasts societies where play is undervalued, such as in her observations in Russia, with those that embrace it, highlighting the stark differences in children's happiness and social competence.

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Autonomy and Parents' Own Lives

A transformative idea introduced by Dr. Levine is that for children to thrive, parents must also prioritize their well-being and autonomy. By developing their own interests and communities, parents can model enthusiasm, resilience, and a balanced approach to life, thereby fostering similar traits in their children.

Notable Quote:
"Parents who are thriving, it's going to be easier for the child to thrive."
— Dr. Madeline Levine [20:35]

She shares personal anecdotes, including her realization post her 50th wedding anniversary about the importance of maintaining a separate community and interests outside of parenting.

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Practical Examples and Stories

Throughout the episode, Dr. Levine employs real-life stories to illustrate her points. One such story involves a parent excessively tracking a child's grades, leading to severe anxiety and detrimental mental health outcomes. Another example highlights the importance of allowing children to face and overcome small challenges, such as changing a tire, to build self-reliance and problem-solving skills.

Notable Quote:
"There is a gray area called the zone of proximal development, where kids aren't skilled yet and need to learn. It's okay if scrambled eggs taste awful or if a bike tire blows out. These are opportunities for learning."
— Dr. Madeline Levine [46:51]

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Redefining Success in the Modern World

Addressing the mismatch between educational systems designed during the Industrial Revolution and the needs of today's knowledge economy, Dr. Levine emphasizes the urgent need to adapt parenting and educational strategies. She advocates for educational environments that prioritize creativity, critical thinking, and adaptability over rote memorization and standardized testing.

Notable Quote:
"We're teaching as if we're in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, but the world has changed. Play is essential for developing the skills needed for today's global economy."
— Dr. Madeline Levine [41:25]

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Conclusion and Recommendations

Dr. Levine concludes by urging parents to cultivate their own lives and passions alongside their children's development. She emphasizes that autonomous and thriving parents are the foundation for resilient and well-rounded children. The key takeaway is the importance of balancing guidance with freedom, allowing children to explore, make mistakes, and develop their unique paths.

Notable Quote:
"Autonomous teen is a parent's badge of accomplishment. It presents an opportunity for us to shift gears, widen our own interests, and deepen our own connections."
— Dr. Madeline Levine [60:16]

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Final Thoughts

This episode serves as a compelling guide for parents navigating the complexities of raising children in an anxiety-ridden world. Dr. Madeline Levine provides actionable insights and heartfelt advice, urging a shift from controlling parenting styles to fostering environments where both parents and children can thrive. By prioritizing resilience, play, and parental well-being, the podcast offers a blueprint for nurturing healthy, happy, and adaptable future generations.

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Key Takeaways:

1. Combat Hyper Parenting: Excessive control driven by parental anxiety can hinder children's development. Allowing children to face and overcome challenges builds resilience.

2. Value Play and Outdoor Activities: Unstructured play is vital for emotional and social growth, offering unparalleled learning opportunities.

3. Foster Parental Autonomy: Parents must maintain their own interests and communities to model enthusiasm and balanced living for their children.

4. Redefine Success: Shift focus from traditional achievements to cultivating emotional intelligence, creativity, and adaptability to prepare children for an uncertain future.

5. Encourage Autonomy in Children: Allowing children to make choices and learn from mistakes empowers them to become independent and confident individuals.

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For more insights into healthy child development and parenting strategies, tune into future episodes of The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast.

Transcript

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[Ginny Urch]

Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast. My name is Ginny Urch. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

And Dr. Madeline Levine is back. She's back. Welcome.

Thank you, Ginny.

Oh, goodness. I'm just so.

[Ginny Urch]

I'm so thrilled because these books are so good that you have written and to get the opportunity to talk to you about them and talk about these topics that matter so much. We talked last time about your book, Ready or Not, Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and Rapidly Changing World. Today, we're going to talk quite a bit about your book. Teach your children well. Why values and coping skills matter more than grades, trophies, or fat envelopes. You also have the price of privilege. How parental pressure and material advantage are creating a generation of disconnected and unhappy kids. Books that will change your parenting and will have a generational impact. Thank you for being here.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Well, thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for your enthusiasm. Aw.

[Ginny Urch]

You talk about enthusiasm, how important enthusiasm is. I don't think anybody really talks about enthusiasm and how important it is for our kids. But you have got this experience and decades of experience of working with kids, kids coming in and out of your practice, parents coming in and out of your practice. Over 25 years of experience. And so you're just seeing firsthand the kids are struggling with different things, and you start to see patterns and things that are happening on a larger scale.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

But partially because we're scared.

[Ginny Urch]

And you talk about how we're kind of doubling down on old ways because we don't really know what to do. And the job market's changing and they say the jobs of the future, we don't even know what they are yet. How are we supposed to parent in light of that? So can we just kick it off with this fear that we are all feeling? We're feeling it quite a bit and it often leads us to hyper parenting. It leads us to really trying to control things. And that's not good for anyone, really.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Right. So thank you for 25 years. It's actually closer to 45 years. I'm an old lady at this point.

[Ginny Urch]

Because this book must be about a couple decades then.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Price of privilege.

[Ginny Urch]

Oh, yeah. But.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

But here's the thing about it. Like, some things have changed radically and many things have not changed at all in terms of what parents worry about and where that worry is well placed and where it is really getting in the way of child development. So I'm going to start with a little story about how I think things have changed. I live in San Francisco. This is about eight, eight years ago. I'm going for a. To refinance my house. And I go to First Republic bank, which doesn't exist anymore. And my. I have three sons and my youngest son, Jeremy. I say, do you want to come? He says, sure. And we go and we end up talking to the head of the mortgage department, gal named Carmen. And it's about an hour that we're there, the three of us are sitting there. And out of that hour, maybe 90 sec, maybe 90 seconds, my son looks at his watch and he goes, oh my. You know, it's an hour. Can I put a quarter in for you? This is years ago. Can I put a quarter in for you? And I say, yes. That happens twice. And then my voice is often scratchy because I'm talking so much. And he says, I saw tea outside. Can I get you a cup of tea? Turns to Carmen, the head of the department, can I get it for you? And we just go on like that. My voice is like that. And at the end of it, you know, I get my mortgage. And she turns to my son and says to him, I'd like to offer you a job. Now she knows nothing about him. She doesn't know if he's in college or he happened to be in college at the time, whether he's in college or out of college, whether he has any interest in banking, absolutely nothing. And this was actually the start of Ready or Not. And you know, my mouth drops. You know, you don't know him. How do you. How do you think you would want to work with him? And she says to me, which I can still see it, she says, I can teach him about mortgages and banking. I can't teach him to be a good person. He's the kind of kid I want next to me at work. So he ended up. He wasn't done with college. He ended up in banking for three years, hated it, and is now a lawyer and doing something entirely different. But that was the start of my understanding that there was a whole different skill set. She didn't ask him where he was going to college or what his. None of that stuff. And the more I dove into that, the more I saw how it wasn't particularly unusual that, you know, I'm in near Silicon Valley. The places that only used to look at the Ivy League schools weren't doing that anymore. LinkedIn had a great thing about I don't want to know your grades. I want to know what they call soft skills, which I don't like, makes it sound like it's easy, but, you know, it's basically emotional intelligence. And I was thinking before I got on with you, Ginny, that where do kids learn emotional intelligence? I mean, there's a lot of places, but they learn most of that outside on the playground. And why is that? Because there's nobody telling them how great they are. They're in an environment. I mean, I know that's your thing, but I was just thinking about it in terms of how kids come to have that skill. And you learn, whether you're a leader, a follower, you learn what the rules are, what you can break, what you can't break. And so it's just one more reason for kids to be outside playing with each other. But on a really big scale in terms of the things I look at, there was a huge shift in what was value. And it's. I want to be clear, it's not to say doing well is not valued anymore. It is. But if I had to pick one thing that has become very important, it would be resilience. Because I'm sure, you know, you got a bunch of kids, I've got grandkids now. You have to be light on your feet in terms of trying to adapt what's going on in the world and the changes. Not easy, right.

[Ginny Urch]

And it's hard to be resilient if someone does everything for you. And so a big part of this book, teach your children well, you talk about and, and this makes sense. We're looking for certainty because things are changing so rapidly. So you're right. In uncertain times, which that's what right now is, and I would imagine we're always going to be in uncertain times here on Forward, especially if the stakes are high. Check. All of us are looking for pockets of certainty. If that certainty is attached to a degree from Harvard or a profession like medicine, then what we end up doing is we overlook that the kids are too tired, that they're really stressed out. And so we're thinking, well, it's going to be wor it where it's going to be worth it. Because then we're controlling their future. The outcome is going to be good for them. But you write, no parent should tolerate what has become a culturally normalized form of child abuse. A complete disregard for the known protective factors of child development. So really, I'd like to talk about two things. You say the problem is the thinking is flawed. We're starting basically in preschool prep for college. Because if they get in this preschool, then they can get. And people are talking about if they get in this daycare, then that preschool, then that kindergarten, then they're going to go to Harvard and they're going to be okay. Now this is, well, meaning we want our kids to do all right, so we're looking for certainty. But you say that is flawed and also that we're not regarding most of the things, you know, that are important for kids to thrive.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Right.

So, because I like stories. So I have a kid in my office who has trichotillomania, which is pulling his eyebrows out and his hair on his arms, and brilliant kid. And he's an advanced, I don't remember if it's in that book or not. He's an advanced calculus. And he's there with his dad. And his dad charts every single test grade, pop quiz, final, whatever. And the kid is just sitting there pulling every hair out of himself. And I say to the dad, you know, you gotta stop this. He's an advanced calculus. What do you want? And advanced calculus, you know, you could chart your own grades if you wanted to. And the dad says to me, I will stop this when he gets into mit. Now the reality is he's not getting into mit. He is most likely getting into a hospital bed because he is so stressed out and has very poor, what we would call defense mechanisms for dealing with his anxiety. And again, I want to be clear, it's not that going to MIT or Harvard is a bad idea. For some kids it's a great idea. And for some professions it's a great idea. But I don't know if you've seen the new report that came out about where going to a very elite school makes a difference. Have you by any chance seen that?

[Ginny Urch]

No, I haven't seen that.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

So let me be a little. Because there's brand new research on it, okay? So for the most part, it doesn't matter at all. If you're in tech, if you're in engineering, if you're in any of the sciences, where you go to school has no impact on your eventual income. The place where it has a small impact, actually, surprisingly is in the liberal arts, which is interesting. And I think, as I understood the research, it's at least partly because if you're taking computer science, the curriculum is exactly the same whether you're at State university of wherever or Yale, you know, it's the same curriculum. My point is not so much about money, although this big study actually verified how little impact it has. But it's much more about mental health. You know, you can push a kid till they break, like my trichotillomania kid. You can say things like I hear all the time, a kid who's being pushed in doubt will say, I went to Brown. Look at me, I'm doing well. I want my daughter to go there without understanding that first of all, he went there 40 years ago in a particular field at a particular time. Maybe Brown's good for her, but maybe not. Maybe she's the wrong kind of person. And it's tremendous anxiety, which I get, I'm sure you get, about how your kid's going to do in the future. Historically, in America, every generation does better than the generation before. That's the American story. And it's not clear that that is going to happen anymore. And if it doesn't, it's a big so what? So your kid makes a few bucks less than you do. Are they happy? Do they have a good relationship? So another story, just because it's on my mind. It was my 50th wedding anniversary this past weekend.

Oh my goodness.

[Ginny Urch]

Do you know, my mom talks about that. She said that only I think 5% make it to 50 years.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Thank you.

[Ginny Urch]

Yes.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Congratulations to you.

You know, marriage is wonderful and hard and we had all our friends there. And what I noticed about my group of friends, we had about 35 people was they all had close families. All of them are close with their children. And I've been thinking about that. This was three days ago. Two days ago. Sorry. I've been thinking about that ever since, about how is it that these people, we all ended up close friends and it was, I think it's a very successful group of presidents of various organizations and doctors and psychologists and lawyers and stuff like that. But it's all, every family there was family oriented. And what does that mean? It means coming up with a series of traditions that belong to your family. In my family it was white water rafting. You've got five kids, you said, what do you do with the nine year old and the 17 year old? They're in such different stages of development. My kids, top to bottom or 11 years apart, we stumbled on rafting because we could all do that. So it was having for every family there traditions that were important to the family that were Shabbat for some of them, river rafting for some of them and nobody being terribly materialistic and everybody understanding that kids are different, they're just different. And you don't know when you have young children, so some of your kids are a little older, but when you have really young children, you don't know who that child grows up to be. I want to make the case particularly with boys. Since I only had boys, some of them develop a little differently than girls or a little slower than girls. My youngest son who was average student, average ball player, he was just average and wanted to be worked in construction, wanted a Ford truck, wanted to live in the country, et cetera, et cetera at 9 or 10 and 11. If you had told me then that he would be a lawyer at city hall. Not in a million years, Ginny, not in a million years. He was at that time he was a hands on, put me out in the country kind of kid. And then he changed. And I think we need to leave. And there again play is critical. That's why you try out being a fireman and being a policeman and being. And a lot of that does happen outside. Not all of it, but a lot of it. So I'm making a case for not prematurely deciding that you're what or, or what profession your child is going to be in. First of all, it's not up to you. It's not up to you. And second of all, you don't know really kids strengths and weaknesses when they're little ones.

[Ginny Urch]

Yeah. And just letting them be.

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[Ginny Urch]

You talk so much about how. So this book is called teach your children well. But you have this whole section about how our families are suffering, that mothering has just become crisis intervention. And you talk a lot about how kids will come and see you 45 years. And you say a common complaint that you hear is, nobody knows me. So if you're talking about these close families, well, what's happening? They have time for each other and there's not so much stress. You know, the family still ends up being a unit. We've gone whitewater rafting.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Have you?

[Ginny Urch]

As a family, Outdoors really facilitates, right? There's a lot of things that you can do outdoors if you have a large age range.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

So one of the things that you.

[Ginny Urch]

Talk about, and I think this is a really important piece of the puzzle, is that we are seduced by the possibility of having this super kid. And you say there's this marketing that you can cultivate it. You know, you can make your kid outstanding. And you say when you get up.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

And speak and you're like, no one's really that special. You know, they're like, there's not much applause. But you say decreasing the sphere of.

[Ginny Urch]

Our own lives makes us increasingly dependent on our children for a sense of meaning and accomplishment.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

And I think this is a really tricky part.

[Ginny Urch]

And especially in the uncertain world, it's like we feel like we're supposed to give up everything to give our kid every single advantage. You wrote people have this view of, I'll go back to my own life when my kids are grown. For now, my job is to give them everything possible they need to be successful. That's my legacy. And that kind of, you know, makes sense. It could draw you in, but then you become too dependent on it and too controlling on it. And so you really talk about this piece that's a little counterintuitive, but that kids thrive when their parents thrive.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

I think that is so critical. So since for whatever reason, I'm in a storytelling mood today, I don't know if your kids, girls, boys or Two.

Boys and three girls.

Two boys and three girls. So sports in there somewhere. And so I had three boys. Sports was a big deal and one of the most important interchanges of my life. I don't know about you. I used to go to all the games and the practice practices, just like everybody else did, and it was really boring. The practices weren't going, what am I doing watching him practice? But that's what we all did. We went and to show our support, right? And one day, my son, my youngest son again, Jeremy, walks over to me. All the parents are in the stands looking at their phones, right? Because there's nothing that interesting happening. And Jeremy says, you know, the field right next to ours is free. Why don't you all go play? And wow, you know, you have those moments in parenting where that's going to stay forever. And I've given this a huge amount of thought. Why did I spend. And with three boys, so my husband's with one at soccer somewhere, you know, down the road, and I'm with another one at rugby or lacrosse. What am I doing there? And I think this is a really important point. And the older I get, the more important it becomes when that period of time is over, of watching your kid every week yelling and cheering for them, when they go off, your biggest community disintegrates. My biggest community when I was raising my kids was the sports community around them and the school community. But that was where I hung out. That's where I was Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon. And then the kids grow up and leave. And I think moms, particularly, because we're the ones who are always there, not only, but we're always there, moms are left with no community. And I've had a couple of patients who just go hang out. The kids are grown and they still are hanging out at the baseball field or the basketball court at the local high school, because that's when they had a community. So I feel really strongly that part of what we should be doing, and I wish I had done a little bit more of, was developing my own community when my kids were developing their communities, so that when they outgrew their communities, it wasn't hard to move on. And this whole business about our kids excelling, you know, being the best on the team and being great in school and great in everything. For a while, I had a slide, you know, I was talking a lot and all over the world and I had this slide of how many of you knew what you wanted to do, went to the right school, went to A great college are doing. What did I say about this last time? You were shaking your head.

[Ginny Urch]

Well, you talk about how the. And it's something that I think about a lot. No one has a straight shot. Everyone's got the squiggly line, right?

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

So not no one. 90 to 99% of people, depending where I was, took that the. The squiggly path, including me, who was a teacher and a social worker before I was a psychologist or a writer. This whole notion of, you know, just stay on track at great grades. I hope I'm being clear. There are some kids for whom that works. Not most kids. Not most kids. And we're thinking that our kids are so special. You know, all the bumper stickers, my kid is honor roll student. And then the. The Harvard, you know, Brown, Yale, on the. On the back of the car.

It'S.

Really saying, this is me. I raised an honor roll student. Because kids are mortified by not so much the college, but the high school stuff. They're mortified by it. So this idea of how average all of us are, all of us, if you ask me what way I'm facing talking to you, I'd have a 25% chance of getting it right because there's only four. I can't tell anything spatial. My husband is an eye surgeon. He can tell anything spatial. Emotions and stuff.

Not so much.

He's a surgeon. But this idea of specialness is sort of interesting to me. Like, we all know that we have skills. You know, we have a toolbox of skills. And if we're really lucky in life, we end up in a profession where we can use those skills. But it's arrogant and wrong to think we're special in all ways. We're just not. And when I used to do a lot of traveling, when I get back to my hotel room, and I'd call my kids when they were younger, and I would always tell them what mistake I made. Because I can promise you, when you're up on a stage and there's 500 people in front of you, you're going to make a mistake. I would trip over, you know, going up the stairs or the microphone wouldn't work. And it's not like I made a big deal out of it, but it was a very intentional. We all make mistakes. You know, you figure it out. If you fall, you get up and go on. I think it's really helpful. I've talked to a lot of my patients about this. To know that your parents weren't perfect. You know, they're little and you're big and you look like you know how to do everything, but you really don't. And the piece of research by Carol Dweck at Stanford, where she took young kids, did a baseline study, four year old kids with simple puzzles and then put half of them in a room telling them how brilliant they were. And you knew they were going to do great because they were so smart. And she put the other half in a room and said just go play. And who does better? I mean, I know you know the answer to that. It's the kids who you don't say anything to, who have the freedom to make mistakes and try again. So our own anxiety really gets in the way of kids meeting challenge. And in this environment in particular, the capacity to meet challenge is absolutely mandatory.

[Ginny Urch]

Yeah. And so if we can just, if we can increase the sphere of our own lives, we will be less dependent on our children and what they're doing. And it just lessens the pressure instead of looking to the kids achievement as tangible evidence of our own competence. So you write in this book, I mean, this is a book about teaching your children well. And it says parents are entitled to a life of their own. And you talk about on Mother's Day you have these moms that they call you.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

You know, you're like, well, it's Mother's Day le alone. You know, I've got, I've got grandkids now. You know, I'm a mother, I'm a mother myself. And you're getting these phone calls and.

[Ginny Urch]

These moms are upset, they're getting, they're calling them tired flowers.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Tired flowers.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and, and you say, but.

[Ginny Urch]

You shouldn't be surprised if you were willing to give up everything, your whole life, your interests, your friendships, your profession, you taught your kids that the moon and stars revolve around them and that turns them into entitled kids. And that's sort of the inevitable outcome.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

So there is a piece here where.

[Ginny Urch]

Especially today, I think you have to be enthusiastic about your own life as a parent and in doing so, you help your kids.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Right. I noticed in the beginning, Ginny, when I said five kids, that's a lot of work. And you said, yeah, it's a lot of fun. That was interesting to me because it's both, obviously it's both a joy and it's hard work. But all emphasis is on the children. First of all, they don't make very good partners when they grow up because they think the moon and the sun revolve around them. They don't have good friends, you know, you don't want that kind of kid. I'm a storyteller today for whatever reason. So I have a mom who calls me, her son is first year this first year of college in la and he's depressed and she calls and she wants to know whether or not it would be okay to buy him a Tesla. A few years ago, Tessa didn't have.

I was not expecting you. I was like to get him a microwave or to buy him some granola. Okay, all right, all right.

So it was a great opportunity to, you know, go off on my thing about, you know, why would you buy an 18 year old a Tesla? And she said, well, he's really depressed and it's Los Angeles. All my kids went to school in Los Angeles. Transportation is hard and this will take his mind off it. And I said, you know, it's probably a good thing for his mind to be on it to be. Cause he's, it's an opportunity to learn. Anyway, I think I've done a great job. And I get a call two weeks later from the same mother saying to me, how would you feel if it was a used Tesla? I guess I didn't make my point that the capacity to see our children, you know, it's. Yes, that's a funny story. But the capacity to see our children unhappy is so hard. So I'm not saying just like go around and make your kid unhappy for no reason. Life presents endless small challenges. You know, I think I got an A minus instead of an A. Or my fiance broke up with me, my girlfriend broke up with me. All kinds of challenges. And the best gift is to teach children in a developmentally appropriate way. And so for anybody who's listening, underline developmentally appropriate way to manage challenge. So I'm not talking about, you know, the drug dealer who's approaching your six year old, but I am talking about my kid was on his bike and he and his tire went flat. So I went and got him. How about teaching him or letting him learn how to change a tire? He'll have a bike tire, he'll have a car tire, he'll have a child with a tire. But I think I'm somebody who is an anxious person and really dealt with an anxiety disorder in my own life. And to see my children, I worked so hard on never letting that get in the way of my kids development. So when one of them goes to a rock climbing camp and has asthma and I'm deliriously anxious because what if he has an asthmatic attack and he's in the middle of Yellowstone. But he was fine and he knew how to manage himself. And I always say he breathed fine. That weekend I didn't take a breath, I was like, till he came home. But it was really important not to have my anxiety limit his challenges and joys. And I think that so many, you know, everybody thinks I'm talking about children. My books are all about children, but they're really all about parenting, which means adults. And so we live in an incredibly anxiety provoking time. Right? Incredibly anxiety proof. Who knows? You know, the, the relentless acceleration of technology. It took, I don't know, 70 years for the, for electricity to be in the majority of homes. 70 years, right. It took 10 years for the Internet to be in most homes. It's taken one year for AI and chat GPT. So this crazy acceleration means that we just don't know. We don't know if any of the jobs we're pushing our kids to get into will even exist in a few years. So we have to tolerate the anxiety. And I think a good way to start thinking about that is the idea of co management. I was very afraid to fly for a bunch of years and you can't be afraid to fly if you have books because. And so I got over it, at least in part by watching the stewardess or flight attendants, excuse me. And I watched the flight attendants like crazy and they weren't anxious so I became less and less anxious and that's co management. If I could watch somebody who could handle what I felt was an anxiety provoking situation, it kind of like rubs off on you because you see somebody managing well and I think we need to do a much better job of that with our kids. Oh, mom, you know, I didn't get on, on a roll this semester or I don't know where you live. Do you have that power school thing where you can see your child's grades during the day?

Well, okay, we homeschool. So I don't know, you know, we.

[Ginny Urch]

Did this past year this homeschool co op at this local. It's like a private school and it.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Has been just so wonderful, Adeline.

[Ginny Urch]

It just like phenomenal for our kids. Everybody loved it.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

And we only did it so that.

[Ginny Urch]

They could play sports and have community. But in order to do that they have to take at least one class.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

So I mean they send grades every.

[Ginny Urch]

Week and like at one point one kid was getting a D minus but.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

It'S, it's because we were traveling and it didn't and it's an elective.

[Ginny Urch]

So it just didn't really matter.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

I was like, well, you're not failing job.

[Ginny Urch]

But I do see that we're out of the system. And so I have had. I just feel very, I guess, blessed. I didn't even. I stumbled into it really.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

You know, you make these decisions when.

[Ginny Urch]

Your kids are young and then you're 10 years into it and you look back and you're like, gosh, this really was such a blessing for everybody.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

You know, the five kids makes it.

[Ginny Urch]

So you can't control. And in some ways that turned out to be a great thing. I think we all have propensity to control. And when you have too many, you can't control. You see naturally that they grow, they grow on their own.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

And it's okay that they get a.

[Ginny Urch]

D minus in visual media.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

It's like how they're making the yearbook. I'm like, well, as long as you just, you know, like whatever, as long.

[Ginny Urch]

As the yearbook's not messed up. But you can see though how you can get really trapped in because of fear.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Absolutely right. And you know, they, they talk about depression. Depression is up, anxiety is up. Depression really is sadness. Usually underlying depression is sadness. And we have these very high rates of, you know, and I've been saying this, I feel like I keep going back and checking my numbers because when I wrote the Price of privilege, which is 20 something, 22 years ago, and then it came out, anxiety and depression were high. And then I write a book 20 years later and anxiety and depression are still high. Which is a little discouraging for me since that was the original emphasis. Now individual families, individual school districts have changed, but the culture hasn't changed. And that could be depressing, right? That could have knocked me on my butt a little bit. It's like I just spent 20 years talking about like, don't pressure your kids. And we have even higher rates of anxiety and depression, a lot of which I think have to do with social media. But it's not like it's going down. And yet this, this started, this rant of mine started with do you have power school? The idea which we had in my kids district of watching your kid every pop quiz every day to see how they're doing compared to everybody else.

[Ginny Urch]

That's what power school is. It's like automatic. You can see the grades and yeah.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

You as a parent, you get on and you can see everything. I call, I used to call it Power Snoop because it felt like, ah.

That'S not good for anyone.

And, and you know, you work, you know that at some moments you're absolutely brilliant and at some moments you're not. And so if somebody watches you every moment, how disconcerting that is. So I, I had, and, and it's addictive, just like so much of social media is addictive. So I had it shut off because I would get curious and I knew it was a bad idea. I don't want to know on a daily basis if my kid got an A or an A minus or a B or B. I don't want to know.

[Ginny Urch]

Well, it didn't used to be like that. You brought home our progress reports every 10 weeks, right?

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Yeah. Two and a half months with your kid. And that lack of, that's more of.

[Ginny Urch]

A lack of control. You feel better though, as a parent? I feel better as a parent not tracking my child.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Right.

[Ginny Urch]

Because otherwise you check, check, check. It's addictive and you're nervous and it's, it's feeding that.

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[Ginny Urch]

And so you talk in this book a lot about school. You are very clear to say high grades do have some value. Grades have some value. You're not discounting that at all. But you're saying healthy development takes more than grades. And you're talking about the needs of an expanding global knowledge economy. And what are the costs if we continue to teach as if we're in the middle of the Industrial Revolution?

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Right? Right. Which is where that's when school started, with rows and desks and sick kids at desks. I remember my oldest, Lauren, who's very physical kid, and I took him to preschool, so he's three, and I was looking at preschools and the teacher said, brings me into a room and says, see, you can hear a pin drop. And I thought, my son will spend his entire preschool career in her office. The idea of hearing a pin drop had never entered my mind. So I think it's a reaction to the uncertainty. And you know, the pitch I would make is for parents to understand how stepping in prematurely for your child in order to alleviate distress is exactly the wrong thing to do. Because the opportunity to be challenged is what makes us resilient. When you say, well, it's really hard to be resilient now, which we just came through Covid, so it's a very hard time to be resilient and you need even more of it. And every time you come in unnecessarily, it's really like robbery. You're robbing your child of the opportunity to learn how to manage. And so, you know, life, it seems to me, is a series of bigger and bigger challenges and you want to titrate those. So if you have this one patient whose child didn't like sauce. Sauce. So mom never cooked anything with sauce. And then the kid grew up a little. I saw this kid over a very long period of time, and then it was time for a sleepover, and mom would have to call the mom of the sleepover and say, my daughter doesn't like sauce. Please don't make any sauce. And then the kid went away to college and had to come home because this is a while back. College food was mystery meat covered in sauce, and she couldn't eat, so she had to come back. That's crazy that nobody said, you don't like sauce, don't eat it. Because that was a small challenge. By the time she got to College and had 14 years of indulgence behind her, she probably couldn't eat sauce and had to come home. And, you know, so not doing. You're doing only a false favor to yourself by lowering your own anxiety when you come in and protect your children. And it's hard. Nobody likes to see their kids suffer, but most of us have good intuition. And if your kid is. We call this the zone of proximal development. There's what your kid can do and what your kid can't do. Okay? So, you know, feeding themselves is fine. Making a complicated dish is not fine if you're five, but you want to maybe have them scramble eggs or make the toast or whatever. And the kid says, I don't know how to scramble eggs, and one time it's me, and the next time is now you try it. Right? That's the zone of proximal development. It's that gray area where kids aren't skilled yet and need to learn, and we have to tolerate. The eggs can taste awful, the pot can burn. You know, there's all kinds of things, but no big deal. That's just. I call that, like, tolerating the dog. Because one of the things that happens a lot is a kid will get scared by a dog. And, you know, my kids were raised suburban. And if you walk past the dog and the dog goes nuts and starts yakking at you and barking and snarling and the kid is fearful, that's a normal reaction. And comes home and is teary. I can't walk past the dog. I'm scared of the dog. And you have a couple choices. You can have that child be terrified and walk past the dog and get over it. Most likely, you can put the child in the car and then drive him to school every single day so they don't have to go Past the dog, you can find another route and walk around the block, but it doesn't expose them to the thing that's scary. Or you can go with that child once or twice, talk about it. The dog, you know, you know, this dog has never bitten anybody. This kind of dog barks a lot. And then tolerate the fact that your kid will be anxious when they walk past the dog. But the only way they'll get not anxious is repetition. And in the office, what do we do with things that kids or teenagers are afraid of? We expose them in little doses to what's making them afraid. And over time, they get over it. And parents who intervene in that process because of their own anxiety really get in the way of a kid learning to be competent.

[Ginny Urch]

So these are all the things you're talking about outside of a school day, outside of grades, high grades that matter a lot.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

And really, it's like you said, it's.

[Ginny Urch]

All about the parent as well. If you're anxious in low doses, can you not check the surveillance grades, whatever.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

You called it, Power snoop.

Power snoop.

Right, right. Can, you know, can you take a.

[Ginny Urch]

Day and not check? Then could you go two days and not check? You know, these are the types of things where you're doing the same thing as a parent and trying to learn and deal with these uncomfortable feelings. That's why you're saying, like, have a life of your own. Make sure that you are also doing these things, because a parent who's thriving, it's going to be easier for the child to thrive. You also talk about two other pieces, and like you said, you're talking to the adults. Enthusiasm. I don't know if we've ever talked about enthusiasm on the show. You say enthusiasm is the internal driver of accomplishment. You're talking about enthusiasm and creativity. And so often I think when we talk about creativity, we're talking about the kids, let them be bored so they can be creative. And we're in this global economy.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

But you're like, no, parents have to be creative, too. And I'm like, yes. I don't know if we've ever talked about that. There takes a, a large degree of.

[Ginny Urch]

Creativity, I think, to be, to be a parent. Because you're like, I, I don't know.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Do you tell a story?

[Ginny Urch]

One of your kids comes home in a cop car and he's six, and, you know, it was like your youngest.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

One professional mother, you know? You know, and you're like, it takes creativity to figure out, like, what was he thinking?

[Ginny Urch]

And, you know, he was just on an adventure. And he thought it was really fun. And you have to be able to be empathetic and creative and, and enthusiastic as a parent. And then that's going to really help your kids. You say you' enthusiasm helps, helps lay the groundwork for the child's capacity to be enthusiastic. So one of the things that you talk about is you may think that their interest is ridiculous. They like salamanders. You're like, well, that's ridiculous. That's not going to help your future. It's irrelevant to me. It's irrelevant to you. But how should we be responding to the things that our kids are naturally interested in?

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Enthusiastically? Yes.

Yes.

You know, what's a better marker of healthy development than interest and enthusiasm and creativity? I mean, that's exactly as opposed to grades and being on the select soccer team, as opposed to the neighborhood soccer team. Those are exactly the things that tell us that kids will do well is to be interested is to be a lifelong. Which turns into a lifelong learner. Right? Is I'm older at this point and I was talking to somebody about hobbies. Like, what am I? One of my hobbies now that I have a little more time? Because I'm not working as much. I'm still working a lot, but not as much. And I said, my hobby is learning. That's my hobby. It's reading and learning. And that's a perfectly good. I'm not gonna knit, you know, sweaters. I'm just. That's not happening for me. And so again, that's co regulation. Your child learns how to be in the world by watching you. Right. Are you afraid of the world? Are you enthusiastic about the world? Is it okay? I think one of my books, I had a kid that I did a whole therapy about fish with him. That was his thing, fish. I knew nothing about fish and I learned a lot and it was a good kid. Ended up fine. And if you had said to me, can you do therapy about fish? I think before I had done a lot of work, I would have said no. But now you take whatever a kid is interested in and you, you learn so much about their process and how they think about things. And I'm just having another story thought I have to think about this after the podcast. But my youngest son, again, Jeremy, who did construction in the summers with the local guys who were doing construction. And I'm like, construction? Like, what do you. You know? And it was foreign to me. And I come from a very working class background. My dad was a cop and. Except I had no Idea where he learned to like this. But he was very good with his hands. And he was Jeremy, the kid who said, your throat sounds scratchy. So he would in the morning make sandwiches for his team because they didn't have much money and he could help them by making a sandwich for the six guys on the team. Is there anything better to be enthusiastic about than your child's generosity and moral development? I mean, if I'm going to pick something to pay attention to, it's going to be moral development and values and being a good person. And did I like when they got good grades? Yes. But did I like him making sandwiches? Yes. Times a thousand.

[Ginny Urch]

Yeah. Yeah. Really, this is the whole premise of the book is really doing a deep dive into our own situation and our own motivations. And you talk about how really the worst situation is a kid who is uninterested and uninteresting. Any adult psychologist can tell you that the toughest kids to treat are those who don't have the energy to be engaged. Give me a tough, blustery, foul mouth.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Kid to work with.

[Ginny Urch]

It's a much easier job than a kid who has been emptied of vigor and enthusiasm. And you write this, if you don't have things in your life that you are enthusiastic about, try and figure out why. And so it's just this whole message again and again about you have to do the work on yourself as a parent and then that's how you teach your children. Well, you talked about this. You know someone that comes in your practice and he really likes art. And his parents are these professional people and they're like, well, art's a waste of time. And you're like, well, that's up to the kid to figure out. Some hobbies become professions and some don't. Sometimes they're just a love, sometimes it's a calling, sometimes it's not. But it's their call to figure out if that's going to be a part of their satisfying and meaningful life and not yours. Entitlement kills enthusiasm. So much in here. Creativity. These are all the skills that kids need. Flexible, innovative thinking for this global economy. I just want to, I want to wrap it up with play. This is a group of parents that are valuing play. It's a group of people that are valuing play, Grandparents that are valuing play. And you wrote this play can't wait.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

It's very good. It can't wait. But we try and derail it because.

[Ginny Urch]

Of our anxiety, right? We're nervous and it doesn't seem like it's doing anything. But you say it is the most efficient driver of learning for children. You talked about the superintendent. He's like, the kids can't go on the monkey bars. You know, they've got to be doing their academics. You're like, that's wrong. For a lot of reasons, but mostly because kids are entitled to a childhood. Can you just give us a reminder? Everyone is a little nervous. AI is here, it's taking all the jobs. So it feels like we should be doubling down on these old ways and tests and tests and standardized everything. But play continues to be something that cannot be delayed and something that is necessary for today and for tomorrow.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Right. And you know, I think, I think play somehow got characterized as what you do in your extra time when there's nothing really to be done. And you know, you and other organizations have done an astounding job of making clear the role that play plays in child development. And so it's not just like some woo woo, well, we should all be outside. And which would be good enough actually because we should be outside. But there is a mountain of data on the benefits of play in terms of decreased stress and better mental health. And whenever I travel, Jenny, the place I go to, like I was in Russia recently, I go to the school playground to see what is happening between the mothers and the children in the school playground. And this really profound experience I had in Russia was the kids come out and none of them play and the mothers don't laugh and they take the child and it's such. Now what goes on at home, I don't know. But culturally, normatively, play was not something and you could feel it. You could feel the kids dragging themselves out of school. Unhappy, sad. Play is where you learn what roles you can play, what your talents are. I said earlier, are you a leader or follower? Are you the big thinker or the detail oriented person? It is the biggest classroom there is for children.

[Ginny Urch]

Yeah. You talk about and even especially nature. The natural world offers an unparalleled opportunity for developing the kids powers of observation, compassion, self esteem, self reliance. Childhood is precious. It is not preparation for high school, college or profession, but a brief and irreplaceable period of time when children are entitled to the privilege of being children. The outdoors, which is free, is rarely considered a learning environment, but in fact is one of the most important learning environments available to our children. No educational toy in the world can hold a candle to a creek. It's good, it's good. It's such a good reminder.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

And I don't know how play became kind of trivialized. That had something to do with the industrial revolution and putting kids indoors. And I know, you know, that kids who live in areas with more play opportunities, even though parents are crazy anxious about having their kids go outside and play at a time when the crime against kids is at an all time low. Right, but that's, we're back to that controlling your own anxiety issue. It's not that your kids are in any danger. It's that you have a mistaken appreciation of what it means to send your child out of doors. And that's, you know, that's where kids learn everything. I told you, I have three very young grandchildren and the houses are filled with garbage. No, I didn't say that to my. Don't let my kids hear that. But you know, they get all kinds of toys and any, any toy that has the word Einstein in it, please stay away from them. They've been shown to decrease language acquisition, but you take them outside and they sit on the ground and find a flower and that's a good ten minutes of intense concentration. And this isn't a two year old. And that is if I have to pick my idea of learning, that's it.

[Ginny Urch]

Yeah, I love these books. I love them. I think that they're the reminder that we all need and we need them a lot. Because you even talk about there's these cultural pressures. Even if in your home you're not really pushing the grades or you don't care, they're getting it from out outside the, you know, you say, well, what's going on outside your door? There are other things going on out there. I love that you talked about your grandkids. When people come on, come back, I'll.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Say, well, do, you know, do you.

[Ginny Urch]

Have anything new going on? You know, and they'll be like, yeah.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

I got this new project, got this new book. You were like, I've got grandkids. You're the first one that's new over there. You're like, oh yeah, we started this new club, this new community, this new whatever. And you're like, I have three grandkids, right?

So that, that, you know, I co founded a project at Stanford, maybe 10 probably before you were on. I do a tremendous amount of consulting now to very high end businesses. But somebody wants to know what's new in my life. It's my grandkids.

[Ginny Urch]

It's grandkids, it's grandkids. I want to wrap it up here because this is hard and, and you acknowledge that time and time again, but it really matters. And you say parenting in ways that advance autonomy. And this is what we're looking at. The book is a lot about what are the skills that are necessary now, you know, and the future that's to come. But it's really now. Teach your children well, you say parenting in ways that advance autonomy can be extremely challenging for us. You say, but we should acknowledge that an autonomous teen is a parent's badge of accomplishment. And when we get to those spots, when we reach that badge of accomplishment, we have this autonomous teen. It also presents an opportunity for us to shift gears, widen our own interests, and deepen our own connections. And that's where your writing career kicked off. And I'm so glad that you did that. I'm so glad that you kicked off your writing career. These books are phenomenal. You said this. Just as there is a world waiting for our children, there is also a world waiting for us.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

And I just want to add to that that, you know, women don't. We. Whether you think your job is all joy, and I think five kids is a lot of kids, we don't get to put ourselves first. And I don't like, I wish I had another way to frame that, because it's not about selfishness. It's not about any of those things. It's about making our life meaningful. I mean, to me, the greatest driver of a life well lived is, do you have a purpose? You know, is there something bigger than you that's worth getting up for in the morning? And you don't want to stop that at whatever 50 or 55 when your kids go off to college because it's a lousy model for them in terms of what they can do when they get a little bit older. And I'm very strong on, you know, we. The world's broken. We need to do whatever we can, wherever our skill is, to see if we can make it a little bit better.

[Ginny Urch]

And as we're trying to get our kids prepared for this global. I mean, a global economy has been.

[Cosmo]

Around for a long time, but these.

[Ginny Urch]

21St century skills, with this rapidly changing world, I think that the charge you give is you do it, too.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Yeah, do it too.

[Ginny Urch]

Do it alongside of them and enjoy it and be enthusiastic and optimistic and resilient and creative and flexible and try all the things and make sure you're playing, too, and make sure that you are thriving and try and thrive and be entitled to a life of your own and all of those certain things. And if it's not going well, like.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

If your counselor is saying your kids.

[Ginny Urch]

Should get an A and they're getting.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

A B, then switch the counselor, you know? You know, do what you can.

[Ginny Urch]

Do what you can.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Because this is, this is our time.

[Ginny Urch]

This is our time to really help our kids and to change the environment for them so they're not exhausted and doing awful. We're going to embrace a healthier and radically different way of thinking about success.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Dr. Madeline Levine, thank you. These books are wonderful.

[Ginny Urch]

I so appreciate your time and grant on those three wonderful grandkids.

[Dr. Madeline Levine]

Yeah. Thank you. This was a lot of fun for me. I appreciate it.