A sense of purpose is essential for achieving happiness and satisfaction in life.

— Julie Lythcott-Haims

But we should open our eyes to the many ways in which hypervigilance keeps them penned in from the more liberated life they deserve to live and that in turn would prepare them for adulthood.

— Julie Lythcott-Haims

Happiness and self-confidence can be the by-products of other things, but they cannot really be goals unto themselves.

— Julie Lythcott-Haims

Resilience is built from real hardship and cannot be bought or manufactured.

— Julie Lythcott-Haims

Sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do, but you suck it up and do it anyway, and that's what teaches you humility, work ethic, responsibility, and follow-through.

— Julie Lythcott-Haims

The best predictor of success is a sense of resiliency, grit, capacity to fail and get up. If you're prevented from feeling discomfort of failure, you have no sense of how to handle those things at all.

— Julie Lythcott-Haims

There is something that's a great deal more important than parental approval: learning to do without it. That's what it means to become an adult.

— Julie Lythcott-Haims

We're [as parents] striving for an unattainable, inauthentic shell, and ignoring the real nut, the gooey inside: love, laughter, and fulfillment from simple things.

— Julie Lythcott-Haims

We’re depriving our kids of the chance to do the work of life for themselves.

— Julie Lythcott-Haims

What is shaping the way we dream? Yes we dream of our selves, of what we will become, but it's the environment that tells us what is possible. I don't think our dreams are limitless; they are bounded by the society we live in and its conception of what is respectable and good.

— Julie Lythcott-Haims