Marymount of Santa Barbara welcomed New York Times best selling author Jessica Lahey for its annual Speaker Series recenty. Marymount brings parenting experts and educators to enlighten its greater community on recent trends.
Past speakers have included Michael Thompson, Paul Tough, Wendy Mogel and Devorah Heitner.
Lahey, author of The Gift of Failure, and a regular contributor to The New York Times, Atlantic and Vermont Public Radio, engaged three different audiences: parents, students in fifth-through-eighth grades, and faculty and staff.
Her message was consistent, fostering intrinsic motivation and resilience in kids. To the parent community, Lahey unpacked the problems associated with rewarding kids for grades rather than the process of learning, reinforcing Carol Dweck’s concept of growth mindset.
Lahey peppered her talk with statistics of children countrywide, with a staggering 80 percent of middle- and high-school students feeling their parents love them more when they have good grades.
Lahey urged the audience to love the children they have, not the children they wished they had.
When she asks students what they would most want their parents to know, they consistently ask her to remind their parents to stop comparing them to their siblings.
In the faculty session, Lahey stressed the importance of the connection between teachers and their students and the profound effect that connection can have on a child, long-term.
Lahey encouraged audiences to review her bibliography on her website www.jessicalahey.com, to see all the experts she quoted.
Marymount of Santa Barbara is an independent school for children from ages 4 through eighth grade. For more, email info@marymountsb.org or call 805-569-1811 ext. 131.
— Molly Seguel for Marymount of Santa Barbara.