Teach Your Children Well: Why Values and Coping Skills Matter More Than Grades, Trophies, or "Fat Envelopes"

“Madeline Levine masterfully empowers parents to nurture each child’s unique gifts and to look beyond a narrow, short-sighted definition of success and instead to keep our eyes on the real goal of parenting - building young people who will do well now and throughout adult life. For the sake of the adults of tomorrow, I hope that Teach Your Children Well becomes a must-read and must-discuss book for parents today.”  — Kenneth R. Ginsburg MD, MS Ed, author of Letting Go with Love and Confidence and Building Resilience in Children and Teens

Psychologist Madeline Levine brings together cutting-edge research and thirty years of clinical experience to explode once and for all the myth that good grades, high test scores, and college acceptances should define the parenting endgame.

Parents, educators, and the media wring their hands about the escalating rates of emotional problems and lack of real engagement with learning found so frequently among America’s children and teens. Yet there are ways to reverse these disheartening trends. Until we are clearer about our core values and the parenting choices that are most likely to lead to authentic, and not superficial, success, we will continue to raise exhausted, externally driven, and emotionally impaired children who believe they are only as good as their last performance.

Confronting the real issues behind why we push some of our kids to the breaking point while dismissing the talents and interests of many others, Levine shows us how to shift our focus from the excesses of hyperparenting and the unhealthy reliance on our children for status and meaning to a parenting style that concentrates on both enabling academic success and developing a sense of purpose, well-being, and connection in our children’s lives.

Madeline Levine, PhD, is a psychologist, consultant, and educator; the author of the New York Times bestsellers Teach Your Children Well and The Price of Privilege; and a cofounder of Challenge Success, a project of the Stanford School of Education that addresses education reform, student well-being, and parent education. She is also a consultant to BDT & Company, a merchant bank that advises and invests in founder- and family-led companies. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and is the proud mother of three adult sons and a newly minted granddaughter.