Book review: The Self-Driven Child by William Stixrud & Ned Johnson

The seventeenth book I read in 2018 was The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives by William Stixrud, PhD, and Ned Johnson.  Stixrud, a neuropsychologist, and Johnson, a tutor, encourage parents to back off and let their kids take responsibility for their own choices in life.

It's a positive message, no doubt, but the book is crippled by the authors' blindness to the upper-middle-class bubble in which they live and move and have their being.  I'm sure the upwardly-mobile professionals of Washington, D.C. must find their advice helpful, but I can't be the only parent in flyover country who reads tips like "let your child call an Uber to get around" or "if he's not into team sports, suggest fencing lessons" and wonders what planet they're living on.  It's a planet where Duke is a second-tier school where you can be assured your child can get a perfectly fine education even if they aren't accepted at an Ivy, I'll tell you that much.

It's also not a planet where homeschooling exists.  Their emphatic advice to parents is never to mention school or homework and make the home a safe haven where academics don't intrude.  The clear message is that a child's education is a matter best left to the experts and upon which a parent shouldn't trespass.  They evenly approvingly quote a mom who wrote a letter to her daughter abjectly apologizing for asking what grade she got on a math test and promising to throw her report card away unopened because it's none of her business how her child is doing in school!  Even if I weren't homeschooling, I'd find that notion appalling.  The reason it's called a report card is to report a child's academic progress to his or her parents or guardians.

The overall impression with which I came away from this book was a feeling of extreme gratitude that I am not an upwardly-mobile professional in D.C.  They all sound miserable, stressing out about whether a poor grade or the fact he doesn't play sports or a musical instrument will mean their child will suffer the ignominy of having to attend a state school and, thus, being relegated to failure and shame for the rest of his life.  The authors repeatedly stress how unhealthy an atmosphere is cultivated in many schools, how bad it is for children and teenagers to be under constant pressure to succeed while simultaneously failing to get necessary sleep, and yet the one piece of advice that never seems to occur to them is to step off the treadmill.