How to Raise Successful Kids

Turns out the best parenting advice might be: Do a little less.

If every single person reading this newsletter right now preordered Everyone is Lying to You we would definitely hit the NYT bestseller list. Isn’t that wild? I think you should do it!

I used to think raising successful kids meant being everywhere, doing everything, and anticipating every possible situation and running out my battery until I collapsed. Now I’m starting to think maybe one of the secrets is in stepping back.

I mean there’s no real secret to raising successful kids and there’s no one definition of success either. But that won’t stop any of us from constantly wondering if we could be doing more, or less.

In her brilliant new book, The Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Susan Dominus explores how some families manage to raise not one, but multiple high-achieving kids—think Olympians, Silicon Valley CEOs, award-winning novelists, and federal judges—all under the same roof.

She spent nearly a decade talking to these families, while also parenting two kids of her own. What she found is both surprising and, frankly, kind of liberating: most of the successful families she profiled weren’t obsessively micromanaging their kids. They weren’t hovering over homework or engineering “grit” with chore charts. They modeled hard work, they gave their kids room to struggle—and they got out of the way.

In this week’s episode of Under the Influence, Susan and I talked about what really shapes our children: siblings, independence, failure, and yes—plenty of good old-fashioned luck. We also dive into why stepping back might be the best parenting move you ever make.

It’s one of my favorite conversations we've had on the podcast. If you’re currently spiraling about summer camp sign-ups, school placement, or whether your seven-year-old’s “attention span” is a personality defect (like my husband does), this one’s for you. Here is a bit of the interview. I put the whole video down below too.

Jo: My first question for you is, do my kids' siblings have more of an impact on them? More of an impact maybe on their future success than I could ever have?

Susan: I can't say definitively one way or the other. What I tend to say is that we overestimate the effects that parents have on our kids. The decisions they make—should we have a chore chart, should we not have a chore chart—we overestimate how much these little variations that loving parents agonize over make a difference in these outcomes. And I think we do underestimate the influence that siblings have on each other. That's what I found in the reporting from my book, Family Dynamic.

Jo: You've been reporting this book for the past eight years, right? Maybe even more.

Susan: I try not to think about it too much. If you think about it, you go into a death spiral.

Jo: You've been reporting it while raising two kids. How has reporting this impacted how you parent?

Susan: I would say the main thing is that, first of all, a lot of the parents in here were not aggressive over-parenters. You know, I think that we all know that over-parenting is demotivating for kids, but still, we always have the sense that we should be doing more. I think a lot of the parents in this book, they modeled incredibly hard work. They gave their kids tons of opportunities, but they really stepped back.

Jo: That messaging brought me so much joy. I think that there's a lot parents can learn from in this book about maybe taking a step back and it's more than okay. It could actually be great for these kids.

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