Grown and Flown author Lisa Heffernan.

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vanderkam. I'm a mother of four, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode one hundred and ten that is first airing on September ten, twenty nineteen. Today we're going to be interviewing Lisa Heffernan, who's the co author of the book Grown and Flown, which is all about raising teenage children and emerging adults. So we're very excited to talk with her learn more about her Facebook community for Grown and Flown, which has one hundred thousand plus members and is a great resource for any of our listeners who have of adolescent children. Also really recommend you check out the book as well because it is out today, so that's always exciting and when we get authors on their release date, and also just because it's really helpful. I felt, as a parent of a you know, twelve year old almost ten year old, we're getting into this stage and so I've really learned a lot, and there's not a whole lot of resources out there for parents of teens that are helpful. So I would highly recommend that. I'm always fascinated by what's up ahead, Yeah, exactly what's the future look like? And I also feel like her Facebook group is like, I don't know, the modern day baby center for the next generation, that probably didn't have that when they were baby center because it was like two two or a long time ago exactly when these adolescent children were babies. But one of the funny things that she talks about in her book and talks about in the interview as well, is that you know a lot of us have a tendency to sort of bring our own high school and college experiences to bear on our parenting of our own adolescent children, which makes total sense because it's our experience, but in fact, so much is different that a lot of this is not necessarily relevant. That she makes a point that people who grew up when we did had sort of a level of expected independence as we became emerging adults. That maybe was an aberration in human history. If you think about that, you know that certainly in the past people would not have moved far away from their parents at age eighteen and had, you know, ten minutes of phone conversation once a week, which is about what I did. How about you, Sarah, I think it was more than ten minutes, but I do think it was once a week. It was like Sunday, you call Sunday. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you know, since we our experiences aren't really relevant, we thought, well, hey, in the intro, why don't we talk about them? And then everyone else can take their own trip down memory lane to take their own trip down memory lane. So Sarah and I both you know high school in the mid late nineties, right, And well, yes, I started high school. Yeah, I graduated high school nineteen ninety eight. You graduated in ninety seven, ninety seven. Yeah, we overlapped by a lot. And yeah, were your college apps mostly on paper or were they? I think I feel like I was like Wright on the Cusp or like a lot of people. You couldn't really submit them online, but you could like do them kind of online and then print them out and the words would appear, and it was kind of modern. And then other people were using these like old school board processors to like type directly on the forms, which I thought was stupid. I'm like, I'm just gonna write on the I had a typewriter. I mean, we used an electronic typewriter. I did some of some of my essays with those oh oh yeah for essays, but no, like there'd be like demographic forms and people would type it instead of write it, which was pain in the butt because you had to like line up the spacing. I mean, oh my god, we sounds super super old. Well that's the scale children these days don't learn. It was a very boring and annoying. And I did get help on my essay, Like I wrote my essays, and then my father in particular would kind of go through with a fine tooth comb looking at grammar, saying, oh, this paragraph kind of goes on for a while. And so I did have guidance there, and I I don't remember who did most of the management of all the kind of deadlines and things. Do you me it was? It was one hundred percent me, which it was good because of my personality. I was already away at school at the point. I went to a residential high school for my latter two years, and so I was off on my own. I was going to be the one doing them anyway. So I did all the applications myself and manage the deadlines, and in fact even wrote the checks for the application fees on my own checking account, and my parents put money in the account for me to do that way. It was very impressive. But I think Josh describes a similar story where he just kind of did it himself. I think I had more help. I don't know, but I applied to like seven places. I feel like kids apply to more than the thing is. I mean, I think when we did it, you had to do all of them right. Like now, I think there's enough place to use that common application where it's slightly easier to just like you know, cut and paste and send to a lot of places because that helps the number that people. Then by the time I got to the medical school application process, there was common apps, and meds school is also more competitive than just getting into college, so I had that experience of like just clicking on sixteen places or something and then you know, you had to write a couple of supplements. But that was it. So, Laura, you went to Princeton. I got rejected from Princeton. So to anybody else listening who's in that fun club, it's possible to still move on. Can I tell you a really really quick, funny story about this. So we were having a conversation. We were over at my parents' house recently with my kids and Michael, and then my parents were there and one of the kids asked something about college and about you know, well, what percent get into Princeton because we're in Princeton. My parents live in Princeton now, and you know, I said something like, oh yeah, it's like, you know, one in ten or whatever, and to get me, Sam, my nine year old, here's the thing is, but wait, mom, how did you get in? Then I was like, that's so funny. Thanks Sam. I'm glad that there is no part of your mind that comprehends that mommy might be one in ten on anything. Oh man, ouch ouch, No, I'm sure I got rejected because I didn't have the perfect grades. I was sort of I had great essayt scores and was sort of selling myself on music, and I got into a lot of good places, and I went to Williams and yes, I don't think Williams is and it was a slacker school. No, it wasn't a slacker not most people's safety choice. And I was deciding between there and Penn and decided I wanted to be significantly farther from home because you up in the Philadelphia area, so that would have had a different And how did you pick Princeton? I picked Williams because I visited and was like bathed in a warm, fuzzy glow of happiness because it's like pretty and small collegy like looking right, It's beautiful and everyone was nice, and I just felt really good about it. Yeah, yeah, that's good. You know, Penn campus is fine, but you are in the heart of Philadelphia with all that all that entails, the Septa buses going through and exactly, yeah, you know a little little less of that. And did you visit Princeton before you ended up going? Yeah, so my actually, my my brother was a graduate student there, which is then the one thing of my my sort of independent streak, which is kind of funny, and that my parents actually didn't come out with me when I moved in to Princeton. But but the reason that worked is that my brother could pick me up at the airport right like it was. It was fine, so I brought my bags. I feel like that's the airport cooler, like, oh, my older brother, my older brother is gonna, you know, bring me to bring me to school. But it's sort of you know, this is one of these funny things like I'm not sure how many parents don't go for that. But I'd already moved into high school like two years before. We'd had that experience, like you know, and my brother was there, so there was there was no real point to But it's interesting to hear Lisa say that that sort of independent streak is sort of less part normal of how people grow up, because I think it's become so much more complicated, as we're about to hear. Well, now that we got our lovely stories out of the way, Memory Lane, Memory Lane Late Nineties, we're so excited to welcome Lisa. Sarah and I are excited to welcome Lisa Heffernan to the podcast today. Lisa is one of the co found of the Grown and Flown community, which focuses on children and parents in the high school, college and beyond age group. So Lisa, why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here today. I co founded a site which has become an online community called Grown and Flown because my co founder, Marydale Harrington, and I thought there wasn't enough attention being paid to this very complicated, very consequential stage of parenting. There was a lot of wonderful advice and lots of websites out there for the earlier years, which of course are important, but then when we get to the teen years, which actually research has shown is the time we feel the least secure in our parenting, there wasn't a lot out there. So we were looking for to establish something where we could offer expert advice, not us experts, and community. So that's what we are and it's really grown quite a bit, right, I mean, there's many, many thousands of people involved in it. Yeah. Our Facebook group, which is sort of the heart of our community, has about one hundred and twenty five thousand people in it at the moment, and it goes up a couple of thousand a week. So I think it's not so much that we have the most wonderful community, though obviously I think we do. It's that there aren't a lot of resources out there, so people are finding us. Yeah, and there's a great new book out today, as we mentioned earlier, about Grown and Flown, So everyone's going to go check that out, particularly our listeners with older children, but people who are also entering that stage as well. So, you know, Lisa, we have a general sense that many of our listeners do have younger children, but they keep getting older as we all do. How should we think about parenting evolving as children turn into teenagers? You know, I thought of parenting with my own I have three twenty somethings now as sort of one long handoff from the first day until this day, because although they're in their twenties, were very much involved as parents in their lives of each time, giving them more and more control, more and more autonomy, each day, each week, each school year for their lives, so there isn't a particular milestone. I take a lot of issue with these posts that say by sixteen year kids should do this or by eighteen year kids should do this, because they're all on very very different timelines that worked for us. When you kids should walk at a certain age and they do sit up at a certain age and they do. You know, early milestones are easier to clock, but these later milestones are not easy to clock. Forward, practice is what we're looking for. More and more autonomy. More and more they're taking control, us taking less control and moving into that mentor role with them. Yeah. And one of the points you make in the Ground and Flow in book is that adolescents and the college years are all quite different now than when most of us were growing up, and even those of us who may have had children in our twenties, so we're not that much older than them, but there's still enough of a gap that some of the things we thought of as critical and our advice and our experiences may be less helpful to them. Can you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, there's a lot of amazing research which we put into the book about how the relationship between teens and their parents and young adults and college students and their parents is fundamentally changing. We are much closer to them than we were to our own parents. We communicate with them more, they value our opinion more, they're more likely to ask us about their romantic life. They're more likely to ask us about money, jobs, their college experience. They're more likely to talk about with us the most important things in their lives, where we may have talked to our peers who frankly knew no more than we did about any of these subjects. So I see this as a good thing as long as, as I mentioned, we're in that mentoring role, not in that telling them what to do. Role. Yeah, because telling people what to do has through human history never worked all that well well. And as you said, as we're trying to foster independence, if you kind of stick to the same pattern you need when a child is very young and you're and they expect to be told what to do, then you know, when does that end? So I think that's so interesting and definitely consistent with what I have observed in my medical practice with my adolescent patience. The research is showing we're all much closer as families. Some of this is you just maybe the way we've evolved. We cite the research of a woman named Karen Fingerman, who's professor at University of Texas, who talks about the fact that it may have been that the period from the sort of the mid twentieth century to the end of the twenty century was more of an aberration that the notion that an eighteen year old would go off and run their own life and call you once a week for fifteen minutes. Maybe that wasn't such a great idea. And when you look at the data, those of us who found independence in those years, we weren't such a well behaved generation. The young adult teenagers and young adults now have lower drug use, less drinking, less binge drinking. Really critically, they have less sexual activity at younger ages. They have fewer sexual partners, they have more protected sex, which all, when you add those things up, you get less unwanted pregnancy. So all in all, we are raising a better behaved generation than we were. And some of that I think is because of our involvement in their lives as a positive force. Yeah, fascinating. You don't think it's because they're just on their phone instead. There is that theory. There is that theory. Yes, Now, when you can communicate with people via phone, you who don't have to be there in person, and teenagers do all sorts of things when they're they're in person, with each other. We cited a study in the book where they found that freshmen drank less alcohol on days when they spoke to their parents. Whether or not alcohol was a subject in the conversation, just the presence of parents and reminding, jogging their memories of the things that we have set up as a values which have not been drinking impacted their behavior. Yeah, well, that's very heartening to hear. In particularly is my children approach adolescence. So it's great to hear that so much is going well. But I'm sure there are plenty of mistakes that are made. To what are the biggest mistakes parents make kids start entering the teen years. The biggest mistake we make, I think, is bringing our preconceived notions of our own adolescents and the world we grew up in and the people we became to their lives. So much of what they are going to experience is so completely foreign to us. Part of ASCAZA social media. Part of it is because of their relationship with us changing. Part of it is just because of the technology and the phone in their hand. So it's very easy to think to yourself something like I read every night when I went to bed, my kids should read every night when they go to bed. That's a laudable goal. That would be grid. I would have loved that, But they're in a different world. I did not have a phone in my hand, and frankly, had I had a phone in my hand, I would have been on that every night. So it's super important for us not to bring our world into their world and not to say the words I hear people parents saying that really trouble me. Are you know you shouldn't have to do this. It shouldn't be like this. It is like this. They're in the world that they're in, and we need to parent for today, not for the nineteen nineties or the nineteen eighties when we were teenagers. Excellent advice. We're going to pause for just one minute to have a word from our sponsors, and we'll be back with Lisa. I've been intrigued with Lola for quite some time. I love their modern approach to feminine care. Lola is a female founded company offering a line of organic cotton tampons, pads, and other feminine care products. They're really big on natural ingredients, with the idea that we shouldn't have to accept a long list of chemicals. When it comes to things we put in our body. Lola offers pads, liners, and both BPA free plastic applicator or environmentally friendly non applicator tampons. 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It's secure, convenient, professional. Of course, anything you say is completely confidential. Best of all, Betterhelp is a truly affordable option. Best of both worlds podcast listeners will get ten percent off their first month with discount code Best of that's b E stof so. If you've been thinking about speaking with someone about your mental health, why not get started today. Go to betterhelp dot com slash best of You'll simply fill out a questionnaire to help them assess your needs and get you matched with a counselor. You'll love. That's betterhelp dot com slash best of all. Right, Lisa, part of adolescence, even if you know, kids and parents are a lot closer to each other these days than they were. I mean, part of adolescents growing up is that they are going to separate themselves from their parents emotionally, physically, doing things from themselves. So naturally there's going to be some conflict as they exert more of their own desires. And one of the parts I loved about your book, and I'm hearing from you that other people have been seizing on this too, is you had a list of ten things to do with your team when they are barely speaking to you, can you talk about those ideas and how we can manage conflict with our adolescence in general? Yeah, you know, sometimes they're not speaking to you because they're just angry that you even exist. Sometimes they're not speaking to you because of disappointments in their own life and they just don't want to talk. I have three sons. Sometimes they weren't speaking to me because they were simply monosyllabic and whatever was happening on their phone was a lot more interesting than I am. So the thing that we had a list of ten things that you can do, and they kind of they can all be boiled down to one thing, which is do something, get an activity going, and particularly something that brings you back to that place where things were a lot better. So go out first, or make one of their favorite foods, whether it's you know, pulling them into the kitchen with you, or going out to that favorite you know, burger joint that always they always loved when they were that age. Go get something to eat. Food is a great way to reconnect. Watch a movie. I know that they may not talk, but once you find particularly I used to make my kids watch movies from the eighties and the nineties which they hadn't seen, so it was like, you've got to like them. They did, They did. Yeah, yeah, we had to get through all the Robert Redford movies. At one point they're like, Mom, he's so old. No, no, you have to watch He wasn't always old exactly. So you know, put up a movie they've never seen, make them sit down on the couch with you. Slowly, the conversation may evolve music, same thing. Put on some music that you can connect over. Kids love eighties musics. Now who knows what, but they love eighties music. Probably by the time we have kids, the love early os and music. Like there's this this woman known as Britney Spearit shoes. You ever hear of her mom? Run an errand. You know, every kid needs new socks, new underwear, new you know some errand in your life that needs to be done. Get in the car, get them moving. You know. The tendency is to want to sulk in their bedroom and not speak to you. Just say, look, you need X, Y and Z. I know we can order it on Amazon. We're running to the shop and picking it up, grocery shopping, that sort of thing. So it's a lot about getting them moving, getting them distracted, getting them reconnected to you on something that they used to connect with you, on something that your family loved and something that had meaning to you. So that was that's where the list came from. And did you find this out on your own through trial and error. I'm very curious how this parenting technique came to you. I did. I did. With teenagers, it's all about distraction. It's all about getting them off of that thing that they're that annoying, horrible thing that happened at school today that's really bringing them down. And I don't mean to belittle it, because it's important, it matters and it impacts them. Just getting their mind off of it and getting them to reconnect with you around one of these other things and then making it Sometimes you know, things just need to pass in their lives. Well, this too shall pass is probably a good phrase for parenting in general. And that's one of the things that teenagers don't always know of course, right is that whatever is bothering them right now is not eternal and probably won't even remember XYZ's person name in like two years. But you know, with these emotional challenges romantic friend wise or getting cut from a team, not getting into a certain program, not getting into a certain college. You also had a list in the book of things to say to a kid whose heart is breaking, and I thought this was really a wise list as well. What are some good calming things parents can say if children in our seeking sort of advice reassurance with one of these conflicts that they're experiencing with their peers or in their situation. You know, sometimes that does appointment can be, as you said, like a romantic heartbreak, and these things, as we all remember from being that age, can be devastating, I mean really excruciating the moment. But sometimes that disappointment is losing a friend that you know, a non romantic friend, or as you say, getting cut from a team or something. So I think the place to start is to remind them that you do understand and that you want to listen. Some kids will go into that monoslabic state that we were just talking about. Some literally just want to pour it out to you. Lisa de Moore calls this taking the emotional trash out or dumping their emotional trash on you. Sometimes the biggest function you can serve is to allow them to literally dump it all on you. You're the adult. You can put it in perspective, You understand that this is a moment in time, and then that frees them up to move forward. Just just that simple act of being able to dump that on the person who will take anything from you your parent allows them to move on. But other things we can remind them of is that this won't last forever. It's very hard for a teenager to understand and remember that. I remember being a teenager and thinking that was so hard. Asking them whether they want to try something again? So, is this a relationship you never want to go back to, or is it something you might try again? Do you want to try out for the jv team? If the varsity team didn't work out, so do you want to go back into those waters and make another attempt. You could also ask them whether this is something they want to try something else, so you know, if the team didn't work out and it was heartbreaking, that's what they had their sight set on, maybe there's something else that they want to try. Maybe there's something that would be good for them at the moment. It's really important not to bad mouth whatever they did, because we all remember that boyfriend that we were going to hate forever and then we got back together again with. So you don't want to be that parent who weighed in and a really negative way from whatever whatever was breaking their heart. Well that and it would just minimize their pain, right because if you're like oh good. It's like, well, then you haven't connected with their emotions at all, and it's not good for them at all, and they're suffering so exactly exactly, you know, asking them whether they really just completely want to move on from something, and then working out and listening with them for a plan to do that. Sometimes the moment is so emotional they can't think literally into you know, sort of next steps, and you can be that voice of reason to talk about, well, where are you going to go from here? What are we going to do now? And then just reminding them that you love them. If this leaves your feelings and your family unaltered and undiminished, sometimes, you know, kids can feel when you're rejected by in a romantic interest, you can feel so diminished, and parents can help counteract some of that feelings. No, that's wonderful. We talked a little bit about a month ago with your community on time management for teens. But I know this is a topic that a lot of parents are thinking about. You know, you sort of manage your children's time more when they're little, but as they get to be older, they need to learn these skills themselves. What are some of the things you recommend for parents helping out with children learning these skills. So I am the mom of a kid who had deeply impaired time management skills. So everything I know about this subject I've learned from reading your books, Laura, and from my own experiences with a teenager and then young adult who really struggled with managing his time. So I think the most important thing here is to find a tool that works. So we tried small pieces of paper folded up into his pocket. Now, strangely I watched a lot of those. We tried apps on his phone that also didn't work because he would deliberately not look at the app, or he would put his phone in his pocket and he just wouldn't. Oh, that surprises me. But if that Google calendar was going to be the answer, Okay, I know what worked. It didn't work so well for him. But the thing that actually ended up working for this particularly boy was a large whiteboard hung over his desk at our house with every single thing he had to do and every single day things were due because he had a strong ability to lie to himself about how much time he had left and how much time something would take. The point here isn't to get a whiteboard, because that will not work. The point is to find the thing that works for your kid, because it will be different for every kid. Some kids seem to have just an innate ability to manage their responsibilities. Some kids had deeply impaired abilities that really don't come into the fore until college. So you need to help them find the thing that will help compensate for their inability. You're not going to mean the temptation for me was to become that thing, for me to become Google Calendar, for me to become the reminder. And I would lie if I that I never did that, because I certainly did do that. But the solution is to find the technique that works for them and then make them stick with it, or remind them to stick with it. I know you said the whiteboard wouldn't work for everyone, but I actually bet it would work for a significant chunk. So it's a great idea. Well, the whiteboard had the because it's in your face. It was in his face, which was great, but it was also something I could see. So when he said I have nothing, no, no, mom, I have nothing I have to do, which was almost a daily event in our house, I would be like, have you looked at that. That is not nothing. Do you see those projects that are doing two weeks? So it helped me not have to say, what do you have to do? What do you have to do? Do you have work? Do you have work? It took away some of the nagging, which is ideal. Totally cool, Laura, Should we take a segue into college admissions land? I know we maybe avoiding that, but I'm sure our listeners are quite interested in what can be said about Yeah, Lisa, I mean, obviously this is a huge concern for the people in this demographic, parents with high schoolers and possibly parents with middle schoolers too, and we're all hearing the ridiculousness in the news these day about college admissions. So when should we start thinking about this and how much should parents be driving this versus kids. Let's just give give our listeners your expert advice on how we should think about this. So I want to qualify this by saying the book is full of expert advice from people who are experts. I am not, but I will give you one mom's one mom's view from having watched a community of tens and even hundreds of thousands of people go through this parents can start thinking about this quite early because this is an enormous financial commitment for all of our families. So if you, as a parent with an eighth grader or a ninth grader, want to start looking at financial aid merit aid money that's available, figuring out how your family is going to make this work financially, that is not a bad thing. That is a very good thing because this is going to involve some planning on every family's part on how you're going to pay for one or even two or three children to go to college. That should not involve your child when they're seventeen. You can talk to them about the money aspect of it. A fourteen year old has no way of putting that into context, while a family does need to plan for that. My strong view, and this is again one mom's opinion, is that kids shouldn't start thinking about college seriously until eleventh grade. You should be telling them you need to worry about your grades. You need to involve yourself in your activities and whatever you do with your time that is part of your life and will be part of your college application. You need to keep your behavior as good as it can possibly be, because bad behavior gets noted on a college application. But you do not need to worry about college if you do all of those things. And there's some standardized tests sometimes that tenth graders will encounter, certainly the PSAT and sometimes they take some of the other tests early. If you worry about those things, tests, your activities, your academics, you're doing your job as a kid. In eleventh grade, you can start looking at colleges with kids. And the reason I say this so emphatically is first, once your family starts talking about college, it will be in the conversation. It comes into your house, it doesn't leave again. Second of all, I feel really, really strongly that high school has to be about high school. We only walk that road once. It's an important part of all of our lives. We all remember high school. It looms larger than it should. But it's knowing that we need to make the high school experience about high school, not the high school experience being about college. But the third thing is it's changed so much so I always hear people taking their fifteen year olds on college visits and to see colleges and they say, oh, we just want to start now. Your fifteen year old has no idea, what they want to do, they're going to change three times. You will have wasted your time, You will have wasted their time, and they should have just been enjoying high school. Your sixteen year old, your seventeen year old has got a better idea and needs to start getting a clearer picture. So I'm kind of emphatic about it. Eleventh grade is the time for the kids to jump in. The parents should jump in earlier around the money question, and if you have multiple kids that are close in age, you recommend only taking one in a time drag the fifteen year old on the seventeen year olds tours what you're saying. So I have that my older kids are very close knit when you're partner age. I only did that when it involved an airplane flight a couple of times, just because I thought I'm not doing this again. But yes, in general, yes, because by and large, most kids are going to be looking at different schools, and you really don't want that second child's opinion of a school to be colored by their older siblings. Feel of it. When you're the older sibling says oh, look at this, look at that, and the younger sibling might have otherwise thought, Wow, this place is incredible. You don't want that older siblings way way too large and their younger siblings' lives already. Yeah, that can definitely be the case. So Sarah had some questions about work. Yeah, I know, you know, as everyone is so admissions focused, and I know what certain parents try to get, you know, these I don't know, sort of paid experiences on their kids resume, like hop pre college programs or even perhaps sometimes I see service trips, which actually is kind of cool, But then sometimes when you dig deeper, it's like you wonder how much service actually went on during these trips, And I feel like fewer and fewer of my patients are actually taking jobs for pay, when in some ways that might be seen as something that would really build character and maturity and independence, not to mention start like their own mini maybe college expenses fund or something like that. Do you see a trend away from that? Do you feel like that can if someone finds a job that they're passionate about, maybe they're working at a camp and I love working with kids, can that actually help them long term in terms of college admissions. Yes, I think You've got this exactly right. So I've interviewed a lot of directors of admissions. I work also as a freelance journalist and have written a bunch of pieces around this topic. And one of the things you do hear them say over and over again is they don't care about paid experiences. It doesn't enhance anything. The fact that your parents could send you on an expensive trip to Central America is not in any way impressive to an admissions officer. The fact that you help in your own community amongst people who live near you and come into your daily life. Mostly, I think they find that more impressive. Getting a job. They all say getting a job is exactly what they're looking for teenagers to do. You know, it used to be that teenagers could pay for college or summer jobs. That's virtually impossible now. But the fact that you are working towards that, saving money towards college, you write that down. That's why I worked. I'm helping my parents pay for this matters much more to college admissions advisors. Sorry, officers. Yeah, and I do love the idea of a kid. Obviously, the tuition itself is not going to be doable, but perhaps they could pay for some of their spending money. I want to make the experience feel earned and precious to my kids. I don't want them to take it for granted. I don't know if that was true for me when I pretty much had everything paid for. And I just think that a nice way to do that would be to put them in charge of some very small but meaningful responsibility. I think that's exactly right. And if there is something that they're super interested in, so I'll give you an example. One of my sons is very interested in a specific kind of art, and one summer he got an apprenticeship working for an artist, doing something repetitive over and over again, day in day out. But I think that's the kind of thing that college admissions people want to say, here's a kid who has an interest, here's a kid who found somebody who does that begged him to take him on. And even though the job was repetitive day in and day out and there was nothing glamorous at all about what he was doing, it gave him exposure to something that he had a demonstrated interest in. Totally cool. Yeah, maybe if you're that kid who just won three million dollars on the Fortnite World Championship, then you can pay for your tuition if he even bothers to go. At this point, Sarah and Sarah had one final question about the whole push and full Well, I'm extrapolating back to my much younger children. My oldest is seven, and you know, college which is many years away. But sometimes when I see the mindset of some of my fellow's second grade parents, I wonder exactly what they're thinking, like, oh my god, if I don't like do my kids homework for them, then it's all gonna it's all over, no, sir, the second grade. So I guess I was just wondering if you had tips on when and when not to push and when to kind of step back and let them fail independently. Like I wouldn't want to let them fail to turn in their applications on time as a twelfth grader, right, that would probably be a bad time to let the chips fall where they may. Maybe someone with really radical views might feel differently, But you know, there are a lot of gray areas there, sore where what are your tips in that realm? This is the hardest question. I'm glad you saved it for last. So there are people who say, you know, my kid filled out all their college applications themselves. I didn't help them at all. It is a very complex process. If a kid is looking at lots of different schools, there's lots of different dates. Each school wants something different. I here's where I come out on this. Using something like that not as a way to let them fall on their face, but as a way to teach them how to manage a large, complex process with lots of different due dates and lots of different moving parts in their lives. When they do a job search or when they're some aspect of their job, they will have processes like this they've never done before. So I'm going to use this as an example. You have a seventeen year old who's never managed to process this complex. You can either say to them, it's on you, baby boy, you know, win or lose. Or you can say, let's talk about how you might organize this in such a way that you can do this. And that goes down to earlier kids. You while it's tempting to let them fail, and you know, let them learn from the consequences of their failure, and there are many times you should do that. So many of these things are teaching experiences, teaching opportunities. There are times that you can show them, you know what, you forgot to do your homework, Let's think about ways that you're going to remember. Let's think about things that you can do. So I'm not such an advocate of failure as using each of these challenges in their lives as a way to teach them yet another new skill. You would be hard pressed to teach a fourteen year old how to manage the admissions process. It's very complicated for a kid who's that age. For seventeen or eighteen year old, it's becoming manageable. And so I looked at each of these as not a chance to get my kids to fail, but as a chance to give them some life lesson that they were going to use further on. Well, that's a wonderful approach in general. So, Lisa, we always end our segments with a love of the week. So this is something that is really cool for us right now. Of course this is airing in the beginning of September. The book is just out today, I think, but we do a love of the week, so something that's exciting for us, and we can go first, so you could share yours after you've heard ours. It doesn't have to be related to anything else you've talked about today, Sarah, what do you have for us my love of the week as I am trying to find out on this page. Oh yes, so it is a school themed love of the week. We invested in one of the more expensive electric pencil sharpeners on Amazon a couple of years ago, and man, that thing is awesome. It never breaks, it takes every pencil, it's super fast, and it isn't heavy use. Because both my kids' homework often require colors these days, and we found colored pencils much less messy than crayons. I just love that thing. Yeah, that's I may need to look into that, because I would say all of my pencil sharpeners have been total crap. So I don't know why my shopping ability there is completely awful. But so I would say that my love of the week is having all my family because I know this is going to happen this week when this is airing, all my family goes to the dentist at the same time, and this has just been extraordinarily convenient. I have it on the calendar, but the four kids, my husband you know, everyone at the same time. They have enough hygienists to sort of you know, rotate you in so pretty quick. I you know, I kind of like to go on my own, separately from everyone. This is this is, this is in Michael's camp. But you know it's great. I may I may go out for breakfast while the rest of them are at the dentists. We'll see how this, how this plays out. But that's that's my love of the week. So I have two, but you can you can tell me I can only have one? Did okay? Good? So this is late August when we're speaking, and we have a few fruit trees at our house, and one of my kids bought a dehydrator, so lots of fruit falls on the ground and we're trying to like eat it as fast as we can and give it away as fast as we can, and suddenly we're dehydrating it and putting it into containers. So even if you don't have fruit trees, this is obviously the most amazing time of the year to buy fruit. All those things that we love are fresh right now, and all the amazing apples are about to come. If we live in the northeast, so all the amazing apples are about to come into the stores. So it turns out you can dehydrate them in your home. We bought this thing at Target. It wasn't very expensive. My second love of the week is I've been listening through jes Lahy and kJ de Antonia's am writing podcast hashtag I'm Writing. We love that podcast. Yeah, hej it's been a guest here, has she? Okay, I've been binge listening to jessin kJ and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Yeah, they've got a great chemistry. So those are both awesome love of the weeks. Well, Lisa, thank you so much for joining us, and just remind listeners about your book again. So a book is coming out this week. It's called Grown and Flown. You can buy it everywhere where books are sold independent bookstores, Amazon, Barnes, and Noble, and it's really aimed at parents. The book sort of starts with fourteen fifteen year olds, but even if you have a thirteen year old, I think you'll find it interesting and goes up through the college years. Well that sounds wonderful. Well, thanks again for joining us. We appreciate it. Thank you. Well, that was a wonderful interview Lisa is Great. So now our Q and a segment. This question comes from a listener who says she listens to the podcast regularly. We love that she says, I have a question. My husband and I have one child, and we're thinking about expanding our family in the future. I really like the process of work and using my mind in an adult way. However, sometimes I find it difficult to get over the fact that much of my salary goes into paying for our son's daycare, and obviously we'll be more with multiple children. I know this isn't necessarily a helpful or productive way of thinking about things, but I constantly feel the push pull of maybe I should just stay home because it's more economical. I realized this is probably shortsighted, given that I need to think about my lifetime earning potential, not just the current cost. But I'd love to hear your advice as to how to get out of this mindset. Well, this is definitely a question that a lot of new parents come to, and particularly as you think about expanding your family from one to more children. But the first thing I mean I always want to say is that it's a shared expense, right, this is not why is it against one party's income. I don't understand that because your husband is probably not saying I mean, maybe he earns ten times what you do, and that's why you're not thinking about it with him, like he's the obvious one who'd be working. But usually that's not the case. Usually people are slightly more within the same range. And so in that case, like I don't think he's sitting there calculating, well, you know this daycare is this percentage of my income. So I don't know that you necessarily need to either that this is if you only look at half of it, it's a lot more reasonable. I totally agree. I mean, this is definitely a perennial question, and I think there's also some interesting financial angles to think of as well. For example, if you're able to invest even a little bit and you're working during that time, the longer things sit in an investment. And I don't know if this episode airs before or after our one. Financially episodes, people don't what else seeks preview, But the locker that your money has to sit in investment, the better it's going to do. So to give away these kind of earlier years is quite a shame kind of from a long term scenario. And that's even if your future income isn't really affected by the time off, which studies show that. Sadly, I mean, I wish it wasn't the case, but it's does appear that it does take an overall hit on average on career trajectory and kind of lifetime earnings. Daycare sometimes, in my mind, it helps to think of it as more of a lump sum five year expense rather than something that's forever, because while you will be paying for after care and that kind of you know, increase flexibility in summer camps, when your child goes to school, you really don't have that. You know, it's not as bad, it's not as much, it's not as relentless, and it's temporary. And you also may find that when it comes to after school activities and camps and things, you could say, well, you know, I might not have to pay for those if I was home, but you're going to want to send your seven and eight year old to those things. They're not going to want to sit home. They want to go to They're going to want to go to the gymnastics classes in the soccer classes and the all the things, and if you're working, you can pay for its exactly. If you're working, you can pay for them to have those opportunities, and you will have had five years of salary growth to hopefully be in a better place to support that. But I think one of the most important points to remember is that you, in the note said I really like the process of work and using my mind in an adult way. Adult or not, what you feel matters. You're a person, you are, your happiness is not just you know. It's important in your own sake, and it's important for the health of your family. And if you had written in this question that you know what my heart really isn't in my work. I don't like my job. I'd like to take a break, and I want to jump back in it, I would one hundred percent be supportive of that too. I think that is a perfectly reasonable choice to make in many conditions. But if what you wrote above is true, that you really do like your work and that's what you want to do, then I think I can't imagine that it wouldn't make sense to make that investment that comes from both of you. Yeah, Now, I mean if you love your work, then you should work. I mean, if you want to be home with your kids, then you should be home with your kids. I mean, it's not about what's better for the children. And unfortunately, I think this episode, this issue is always fame that way because the kids are going to be fine regardless of what you do, but they're going to be probably happier if you're here. So you should do what is satisfying for you. And you know, as long as you're not losing massive amounts of money on you working. I mean, hopefully that's not the case, but you know, even if it's it's break, even the salary growth and your happiness can touch, you know, nudge that over to that side. Well, this has been best of both worlds. We've been talking with Lisa Heffernan about being grown and flown adolescent children, how we can parent them. We'll be back next week with more on making work in life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore shoe Box on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds. Podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.