YouSaid · the spoken record

Jessica Lahey

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116
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2021-12-09
most recent
2021-12-09
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1
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  1. “Guest bedroom and he put us, he sat on the floor, put his elbows on the bed. My husband was out running. And he said, I know what an alcoholic looks like, and you're an alcoholic, and you need help. And at that point, I was so ready, I was so exhausted that I just said, you're right. And that night I went to my first recovery meeting. But I think the fact that it was my dad, my dad, who had been one of the people who had told us, no, no, no, what you're seeing is not what you're seeing, that kind of stuff. And he is so conflict avoidant and he adores me so much. And the fact that he hates fighting with me, he came up to that room. He sucked up his, you know, just swallowed down his enabling. He swallowed down his avoidance of conflict and what he led with was his love for me, even though he was scared to death to say those words he did. And that was it for me. So my sobriety date is June 7th, 2013.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Think it was somewhere between 11 and 14. I'm going to get the number wrong so it's somewhere in there editors were in a round robin auction for my first book, The Gift of Failure, because of this viral article that was in the Atlantic called Why Parents Need to Let their Children Fail. Huge pivotal moment in my life and books sold in like May and then June 7th, I went to my parents' house for my mom's birthday party and tons of people were there that had known me my whole life, including my oldest friend that I've known since I was three. And I got so drunk. I have no idea what happened. I mean, I think that's a blessing and a curse that I can't remember anything that happened. But what happened the next, I was just, oh, I was so drunk. And the next morning, my dad, who had been a really great enabler his whole life because he'd been raised by an alcoholic and taught by his mother who was an incredible enabler for alcoholism, he came up to the”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “I had known that I was an alcoholic for a pretty good long time. I really was scared to death of alcohol because of what I saw. I was raised by an alcoholic. One of my parents was raised by alcoholic and so on and so on. And so, you know, I did everything I could to escape it. And it just stuck up on me in my 40s. I met someone the other day actually who had almost exact same story I did, sort of went to the sober end of the spectrum, became one of those holier than thou really annoying high school and college students who was always, I was always the designated driver. I was always the good girl and so slowly in my 40s it got worse and worse and by 2013 I was on a bit of a role professionally. I was teaching full-time and I had just started writing on the national level like this was huge for me. My first article at the Atlantic went viral and it led to this massive auction.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Or I can't deal with what's happening in my world, so I'm just going to escape from it. And, you know, more and more, I began to understand that what escape really was being drunk, that whatever it was that was happening in the real world was too difficult. And so therefore you drink to escape it.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And that's a massive, that's a really horrible thing to do to kids. You know, if a kid comes to you and says, here's something I'm perceiving, telling them that that's not what they're perceiving or that they're wrong to perceive it that way is a problem is really tough for kids.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “I hate euphemisms, is that it makes it really easy to gaslight kids when they figure out what's really going on and yet the language of adults is not matching their experience of what they really truly are starting to understand. And there is nothing worse coming back to middle school and ninth grade and all that stuff. There is nothing worse than taking a kid who is just figuring the world out and then telling them at every turn that their perceptions are inaccurate, that what they're seeing is not really what they're seeing or what they're perceiving and what it does is it slowly erodes a kid's feeling of, well, sanity. I mean, gaslighting is really problematic that way, but also their feelings of self-efficacy, a feeling like if I can just nail this down, then maybe I can do something to change it. You can't even get to the place of nailing something down because the grown-ups in your life are telling you that what you're seeing is not really what you're seeing.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Taking a nap meant either that you just needed a break from life because there was some stuff in my family growing up that was really challenging for the grown-ups, well, for everybody to deal with. And so taking a nap meant just, I need some space. But, you know, I came to learn later on that napping wasn't just about napping. It was about being drunk. And the problem”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “In middle school has so much incredible potential, but at the same time there's so much potential to screw it up in a major way. Like to take the radio lab approach and say in that one interview anyway and say, well, those are throwaway couple of years because they suck. But, you know, I think there's a ton of potential.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Ninth grade. Yeah. And there, especially it's all mashed together. But, you know, middle school is a really problematic area simply because we throw more at these kids than they're cognitively able to do. You know, the last part of the brain to hook up is the frontal lobe. That doesn't happen until we're in early to mid 20s. Middle school, we say here is lockers, changing schedules, different languages. I used to teach Latin class right after French class, and there's the same word in both languages pronounced completely differently. There's hormones. There's all the different things that middle school kids are asked to do without the capacity in their frontal lobes to juggle it all. So the fun part of being a middle school teacher is sitting back and watching that unfold and having patience with that and waiting for those learning moments when everything is just like a kid is ready to hear it and you're ready to teach it to them and you have a meeting of the minds.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “In terms of the cognitive development, their physical development get to be leaders for just that one extra year. And the pressure of high school doesn't quite land squarely on their shoulders quite yet. So then they get to do that 10th, 11th, and 12th. I love that model. And I think that there's potential in that model.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “A ton of potential because I think in general, schools tend to overlook ninth grade as so transitional that not a lot of effort is put into the curriculum or into connecting with the students. So in a lot of schools, especially in schools where I've taught there's no effort to sort of do differentiated learning. They don't sort of know who these kids are yet. So they just sort of slap a lot of intro level blah, blah, blah without making it very interesting. And schools that do freshman year right are really setting kids up to do great things. The other thing I love, and I have to shout out there's a hoity-toity, wonderful, but hoidy toity private school outside of Boston called Belmont Hill School for Boys. It's Belmont Hill School is, there's some teachers there. I just adore. They do the coolest thing. Middle school is seventh, eighth, and ninth grade. So ninth graders who are at this really important moment in their development.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “Oh no, absolutely. And there was this one quote I hated. It was actually, you know, it was, I'm pretty sure it was Radio Lab. Yeah, it was Radio Lab. And a middle school teacher was talking about the fact that you should just stick middle school students like away somewhere and then bring them back when they're out of that middle school age and ready to be educated. And the problem with thinking that way is that number one is just wrong. Number two, I think there are people that gravitate towards certain age groups. When I speak to other middle school teachers, I mean, middle school is my jam. That's my, I love them if I was to go back to teaching tomorrow, it would be middle school. I adore them. But of course, there are lots of people who are like, oh my God, what is your problem? That sounds horrible. But I look at kindergarten teachers and I'm like, I do not know how you do that all day long. There are people who just think ninth grade is an incredible year. And the reason it's an incredible year is.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Most difficult to teach mainly because it's difficult for them to be who they are, I think. And that's ninth grade for easy. I mean, like, so I love sixth grade is interesting because that's usually a new year in middle school. Seventh and eighth grade, I adore. I love, love, love 10th and 11th grade. Seniors can be tough because they've got one foot out the door. Freshmen are just dear in headlights. They're scared and they're freaked and they're, it's too much and their frontal lobes are not fully developed and it's just, it's so hard. Yeah, I think freshmen, or if I had to sort of black out one. And it's not that I don't adore freshmen. It's just it's hard to teach them. There's too much else going on for them to be able to cope with the world and learn stuff. It's just a problematic year.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Doing HIV work. And I've just always loved that quote because it's, you know, people say a lot of crap. People are out there talking about how great they are on Twitter and the things they're doing on Twitter and being really loud about their intentions. But I just think it's easier to make your life your argument and just do, you know, as a teacher, I have to model things for kids. I'm a mom. I work as a recovery coach. So a big part of what I do is stay sober. You know, I mean, I think it's a lot simpler if we just shut up for a little while and make our life our argument.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “So, Albert Schweitzer, there's some problematic stuff with all white guys from Europe who feel like they're going to go out and save people in Africa, which is essentially what he tried to do. There's a hospital, the Albert Schweitzer Hospital is in Africa, and he, you know, he had been a composer. He'd done some really cool stuff. And then he went to medical school late in life and established this hospital in Africa where he essentially was just trying to do good for the rest of his life. Again. Some problematic elements there. But when my husband was in med school and I was in law school, we actually both became Albert Schweitzer Fellows. And the idea there was that you don't need to go to Africa and save these people across the planet. His hospital was in a place called Lembranet. You can find your own Lambran ⁇. And for me, that was working with kids in juvenile court and with my husband that was working with underserved populations.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “I just had flashbacks to doing the audio recordings for my audiobooks and getting into those tongue twister moments when it's just a lot of stuff. It's a lot of stuff.”

    2021-12-09 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #553: Jessica Lahey on Parenting, Desirable Difficulties, The Gift of Failure, Self-Efficacy, and The Addiction Inoculation · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT