Teach Your Children Well. Book Summary.
Why Values and Coping Skills Matter More Than Grades, Trophies, or “Fat Envelopes”
Madeline Levine
Harper; Reprint edition (24 July 2012)
About the author
Dr. Madeline Levine, Ph.D. is a clinician, consultant, and educator with over twenty-five years of experience. She began her career as an elementary and junior high school teacher in the South Bronx of New York before moving to California and earning her degrees in psychology. For many years, Dr. Levine has been a consultant to various Bay Area schools, from preschool through High School. She lectures extensively to parent and school audiences at public and private schools nationwide. She has also taught Child Development classes to graduate students at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco.
About the book:
“Teach Your Children Well aims to help you identify and strengthen the basic strategies that are known to promote effective parenting. This will make it easier for you to stay on target as you guide your children through the different stages of development and help them strengthen the coping skills that they will need to move successfully from one level to the next. Think of child development as a scaffold. A scaffold needs a sturdy base in order to support its higher rungs. It is important that we respect this progression as our children climb rung by rung, and not push them to the top prematurely or without adequate support. Good parenting skills make this climb safer, more satisfying, and ultimately more successful for our kids. […]
The other major goal of this book is to help you clarify and prioritize your values and your definition of success so that there is greater alignment between what you believe is important and what is emphasized in your home and communicated to your children. […]
This book is about choices and courage. Choices about how we view success, raise our children, and expend our energies and resources. It is also about the courage to make the changes we believe in even in the face of collective pressure to act otherwise.”
I came across this book when I was searching for a good source of information on what parents can do to help their children grow into happy and successful adults. In particular, I was interested in research-based tips on promoting specific skills that directly correlate with future success.
And after Mind in the Making by Ellen Galinsky and How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, I was super excited to dive into Madeline Levine’s ideas in Teach your Children Well.
Firstly, Dr Levine challenges us to reflect deeply on the type of success we truly want for our children. It resonated a lot with what many positive psychologists and educators (e.g. Martin Seligman, William Daimon, Carol Dweck, Sir Ken Robinson, Julie Lythcot-Haims) have tried to communicate to parents over the last couple of decades.
Secondly, Dr Levine draws on modern research and real-life examples to teach us how to help our kids achieve this authentic success.
It’s a good read for parents of older kids (especially teenagers), but if you have younger children, the book also offers food for thought.
Let’s jump straight into our favourite ideas.
P.S.: Dr Levine also cofounded the Challenge Success program. It was birthed at the Stanford School of Education that addresses school reform, parent education, and student well-being. Check out their tips for raising well-balanced children!
Key insights:
Authentic success and why we should focus on it
“The “authentic success” that is the subtitle of this book sees success and its development in a different light, one based not on anxiety, but on scientific research, clinical experience, and a sprinkling of common sense. This version of success knows that every child is a work in progress. It recognizes that children must have the time and energy to become truly engaged in learning, explore and develop their interests, beef up their coping skills, and craft a sense of self that feels real, enthusiastic, and capable. Authentic success certainly can include traditional measures of success such as grades and top-tier schools, but it broadens the concept to include those things that we intuitively know are critical components of a satisfying life.
While we all hope our children will do well in school, we hope with even greater fervor that they will do well in life. Our job is to help them to know and appreciate themselves deeply; to approach the world with zest; to find work that is exciting and satisfying, friends and spouses who are loving and loyal; and to hold a deep belief that they have something meaningful to contribute to society. This is what it means to teach our children well.”
Cannot agree more with that!
Authentic success is one of the key topics of the book. Parents often have a traditional (and very narrow) measure of success in mind: top grades, the best universities and a well-paid, secure job.
But if our goal is to give our kids the best shot at having a happy and productive life, we need to look at success from a broader perspective. In the book, Dr Levine draws on modern scientific research to prove that authentic success goes far beyond academic achievements.
While thinking about authentic success, Martin Seligman’s PERMA model of well-being came to mind. He suggested that our well-being depends on 5 elements: Positive emotion (of which happiness and life satisfaction are all aspects), Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement. People report a high level of well-being (they feel happy and successful) when they manage to find balance in all those five areas of life.
In his groundbreaking books, Sir Ken Robinson also challenged the definition of success and argued that intelligence is very diverse. To succeed in our modern and complex world, we need to teach kids skills beyond what traditional schools teach them.
Question for you – what is YOUR vision of success for your kids?
The book is packed with real-life examples and practical suggestions on how we can help our kids achieve authentic success – let’s look at our favourite ideas.
Every developmental stage brings new challenges – be agile
“…parenting isn’t a job, it’s multiple new jobs every couple of years. You’re the parent of an infant, a toddler, a child, a preteen, a teen, a young adult, and an adult.”
Life is all about change. So we must be agile and adjust our parenting approach to every stage of our child’s development. That is especially important to remember when you have multiple kids at different stages.
In the book, Dr Levine walks us through the key stages of child development so we can have a broad idea about what’s going on and the most important issues and skills to tackle at every stage. Grab the book for more! Our kids are still little, but I’ve got eye twitching after reading about what to expect when they become teenagers. LOL ☺
Anyway, here is Dr Levine’s view of good parenting (which resonates a lot with wise parenting):
“…if you can see your child clearly, love that child unconditionally, set limits when necessary, and hold fast to a core set of good values, then your boat is sturdy enough to withstand the inevitable squalls of parenthood.”
Involved fathers matter (a lot)
“Having an involved father is a strong predictor of a child’s eventual level of empathy. Optimally this involvement should begin when children are starting elementary school. Moving from preschool to elementary school is a big transition for kids. Dads, who often take the lead on making the outside world enticing, appear to grease the wheels and make this transition easier. This effect is equally marked for young girls and boys alike. Kids who are less preoccupied with the transition may have more energy to relate to and empathize with other children. This makes them desirable friends.”
Yep, dads make a big difference. Kids with engaged fathers are more likely to have a higher emotional intelligence…and EI correlates with success in life.
P.S.: I immediately thought about Jordan Peterson’s wisdom about the importance of having a father in this thought-provoking video:
Extracurricular activities balance
“David Elkind, the godfather (well, actually the maven) of healthy child development, says that children of this age should, at most, have three extracurricular activities—one social (Scouting, church or synagogue youth program), one physical (Little League, dance), and one artistic (piano lessons, drawing).”
I love this simple framework – it helps children discover their interests without overscheduling. And that means more time for the important stuff: free play and sound, restful sleep.
The seven essential coping skills
“More coping skills means greater resilience. It is important that we understand that resilience is not something our children have or don’t have. As Ken Ginsburg, one of the country’s leading experts on resilience, points out, “Resilience is not a character trait.” The same child can show great resilience under one set of circumstances (“My math grades are pretty bad, I’ll have to study a lot harder”) and limited resilience under another (“My friends didn’t invite me to go shopping today; my social life is over, I’m a complete loser”). Resilience fluctuates. It depends on temperament, support, and circumstances. We bolster our children’s resilience by protecting them from overwhelming risk and providing the support and the circumstances (this must include allowing our kids to struggle with manageable and age-appropriate challenge) that encourage the development of coping skills. […]
But I’d suggest that we serve our children best when we don’t just tell them what not to do, but help them figure out what to do. “Don’t do drugs” isn’t much help when you are wired to try out new and risky experiences. But by promoting self-control, modeling it ourselves, and noticing and applauding it in our children we increase the likelihood that they will be able to take care of themselves across the range of challenges and seductions that life will present.”
Ok, so that’s the most crucial part of the book to me. Kids need to be resilient to succeed in life. And resilience is not a character trait (although genes and circumstances do play a significant role) but a set of specific skills. Dr Levine calls them coping skills. Here they are:
Resourcefulness
Enthusiasm
Creativity
A good work ethics
Self-control
Self-esteem
Self-efficacy/agency
If you want to learn more about other skills that help kids thrive in life, check out our notes on How Children Succeed by Paul Tough and Mind in the Making by Ellen Galinsky.
Align your parenting principles with your values
Our goal as parents is to help our kids develop an internal compass that will guide their decisions in the future. For this, we need to articulate our core values and principles and make sure that all our parental decisions are deeply grounded in these values.
Stephen Covey, one of the most eminent self-development gurus, also highlighted the importance for every family to have “a destination, a flight plan, and a compass.” In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families, he encourages families to create a Family Mission statement (that’s habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind).
Here is the process suggested by Dr Levine:
1. Define your core values: “What is important to you? It’s something most of us know on a gut level but rarely formalize. It’s important to be genuine and clear on what matters most to you if you’re committed to the idea that authentic success always includes good values.” Pick a dozen (or more) and write them down.
2. Create a family value statement: review the list of values from the first step and choose 4-5 that seem most important to you.
3. Write down your guiding principles: “What exactly do these values mean to you? Having a set of guiding principles makes things easier when you are faced with the decisions, challenges, and compromises that are part of daily family life.”
4. Create a family action plan: translate the values and guiding principles into actions
Now put it in a visible place and live by it! And don’t forget to revisit your action plan once a year.
The trinity of change
“Parenting continually asks us to grow and develop. There are three things that stand out as being critical to our ability to adapt and grow along with our children. The first is self-reflection, that is, truly understanding our histories and ourselves. The next is the ability to tune in to another’s state of mind, or empathy. And finally, flexibility ensures that we have a repertoire of parenting skills so that we can bring our best game to the parenting table.”
Want to be a great parent? Never stop growing and developing.
Self-reflection + Empathy + Flexibility = Better Parenting
That also reminds me of Ellen Galinsky’s wisdom in Mind in the Making:
“My own study of parental development has shown that we – as parents – grow and change when we have an expectation of ourselves, of our children, of the world that doesn’t come true, that doesn’t fit with reality (such as “I am never going to yell at my kids – I am always going to be patient and kind”). Then either we stay stuck and get upset or angry or we grow – by changing our behaviour to live up to our expectations or by creating more realistic expectations. So in children and adults alike, a clash between what we expect and what actually happens can be a trigger for curiosity and learning.”
P.S.: Same as Julie Lythcott-Haims in How to Raise an Adult, Madeline Levine highlights that parents – especially mums – need to get a life themselves: discover their passion and purpose, prioritize their health and wellness, and make time for the most important relationships. Kids need a good example to follow!
Action steps for you:
1) Reflect on the authentic success concept – take a notebook and write down what type of success you want for your children. I would recommend the “Parenting With the End in Mind” exercise from Hal Runkel’s great book Screamfree Parenting.
2) Focus more attention on helping your child develop the seven essential coping skills (e.g. practice Strength-Based Parenting, teach them basic life skills, give them chores, provide opportunities for developing their interests, etc.)
3) Create your Family Value Statement and Family Action Plan.
Quotes from the book:
