Latest news with #TheFamilyDynamic:AJourneyIntotheMysteryofSiblingSuccess
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Parents of ultra-successful kids do these things
EDITOR'S NOTE: Kara Alaimo is an associate professor of communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her book 'Over the Influence: Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Take It Back' was published in 2024 by Alcove Press. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Bluesky. When Jerry Groff's 14-year-old daughter Sarah told him she wanted to swim across a 9-mile lake one Sunday morning, he could have responded in several ways: This idea is crazy — and even dangerous. You should practice swimming more first. We already have other plans. Instead, Jerry and his son boated next to Sarah as she swam. And Jerry's wife, brother and sister-in-law drove along the lake in case Sarah needed a ride home, Susan Dominus wrote in her just-released book, 'The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success.' Sarah ended up swimming the whole lake and setting a town record that day. Today, Sarah True is a two-time Olympian and professional athlete. Her brother, Adam Groff, is a successful entrepreneur. And her sister, Lauren Groff, is an acclaimed novelist. Having parents who fostered their independence was a common theme among people who have grown up to make outsize achievements, according to Dominus, a New York Times Magazine staff writer who interviewed six families for the book. These parents 'were not afraid to let their kids fail at something that seemed really hard,' she said. 'They let their kids make their choices, even if they knew those choices would be difficult.' It's just one of the lessons parents and guardians can take from her research into raising successful kids. While the parents Dominus profiled generally supported their kids' dreams, they didn't micromanage their children's progress. 'In not one of these families were the parents overly involved in their kids' educational lives,' she said. 'They were paying attention, they were supportive, they were there.' But when they showed up for their kids' games, they didn't try to tell the coaches how to do their jobs. Instead, Dominus said, parents focused largely on providing warm, supportive homes and let people like teachers, coaches and other mentors handle the instruction and discipline of their children. In part, adults didn't 'overparent' because they themselves were busy serving as powerful examples, working hard and contributing to their communities. Generally, whether they worked outside or inside the home, they 'were in roles that they felt were meaningful,' Dominus said. While she was raising her children in Florida in the 1950s, another parent, Millicent Holifield, persuaded the state to create a nursing school for Black women. One of her children, Marilyn Holifield, chose to be one of the first students to desegregate her high school in the early '60s and went on to become a local civic leader and the first Black woman partner at a major law firm in Florida. As a Harvard Law School student, Millicent's son Bishop fought for changes to promote racial equity at the school and later convinced the state of Florida to reopen the Florida A&M University law school so more Black lawyers could be trained. Another son, Ed, became a cardiologist and public health advocate. These driven parents imparted the belief that their kids could conquer the world, too. 'There was a tremendous optimism among so many of these families,' Dominus said. 'It's one thing just to say that. But your kids know if you feel it or if you don't, and their own lives had given them reason for optimism.' That's because many of those parents had overcome difficult things 'or surprised themselves or surprised even societal expectations.' Another common theme was valuing education and being curious and open to new experiences, like travel, art and music. To have those experiences, the parents of ultra-successful siblings needed to find the right places and people. They tended to have supportive villages — literally and figuratively. 'They didn't just live in neighborhoods that offered a lot of enrichment,' Dominus said. 'They took great advantage of it.' The Holifields lived near a university in Tallahassee and made the most of it by taking their kids to local cultural events and enrolling them in art lessons, a children's theater and a journalism workshop. Other parents worked to connect their kids to successful people who could teach them skills. Ying Chen immigrated to the United States from China, worked seven days a week in her family's restaurant and wasn't fluent in English, but she cultivated relationships with accomplished local musicians she met so her children could learn to play instruments. Her son Yi became the fifth employee at Toast, a restaurant management business that went public with the biggest IPO in Boston's history. Chen's son Gang joined another notable startup, Speak, which uses AI to help people learn languages. Her daughter, Elizabeth, became a physician. And her son Devon went on to work for Amazon. Of course, we don't all need to raise CEOs or Olympic athletes. People who pour so much energy into one pursuit often have less time to invest in other aspects of their lives, Dominus found in her research for the book. 'To achieve really great things requires sacrifice — and that can be in love. It can be in quality of relationships. It can be in peace of mind, it can be in downtime, it can be in reflection,' she said. If kids set hugely ambitious goals for themselves, it's a good idea to 'remind them that there are costs associated with it.' Parents or guardians often worry about whether they're making the right decisions about things like whether to co-sleep or punish kids, but Dominus said 'these variations, it turns out, have less effect on things like personality and other kinds of outcomes than we really imagined that they do.' Instead, focus on having strong relationships with your children and, most important, Dominus said, 'don't demotivate your kid by being overly involved.' The parents Dominus profiled were the kind who didn't tell their kids they had to swim a lake but let them give it a shot when they wanted to — and were there to love and support them regardless of whether they failed or set a record. Get inspired by a weekly roundup on living well, made simple. Sign up for CNN's Life, But Better newsletter for information and tools designed to improve your well-being.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How do parents raise all their kids to be successful? New book by Yale professor, ‘The Family Dynamic,' uncovers clues
Ann Wojcicki was on top of the world a decade ago. At about the same time, writer Susan Dominus began working on a book about successful siblings—including, of course, the 23andMe founder and her high achieving sisters Susan and Janet. This week, Dominus will see the publication of her book, The Family Dynamic: A Journey Into the Mystery of Sibling Success. It comes just a couple of months after Ann Wojcicki resigned as the CEO of 23andMe, which declared bankruptcy. 'I think one of the takeaways of the book is that success kind of is a moment in time,' Dominus tells Fortune. 'The fact that people have ups and downs does not detract from the accomplishments of their ups. But it's also a recognition that success is a very fleeting thing to some degree.' Dominus, 54, is of course no stranger to success herself, as a Yale University journalism professor and New York Times Magazine staff writer who created buzz most recently with her award-winning story about how women have been misled about menopause. Still, it's the success of others—especially multiple-success families like that of the Wojcickis—that has intrigued the writer since her childhood. That's when, as she describes in her book's introduction, she began noticing in earnest the differences in how families operate behind closed doors. 'I saw in the home of childhood friends that the family culture was very much about enrichment and discussion and thinking on your feet and testing your wits,' she recalls, referring to a friend's family whose father posed intricate questions of math and logic at the dinner table (while the only rule at her family's table was to 'clean our plate and chew with our mouths closed.') MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA - DECEMBER 03: CEOs and sisters Anne Wojcicki (L) and Susan Wojcicki (R) pose backstage during the 2018 Breakthrough Prize at NASA Ames Research Center on December 3, 2017 in Mountain View, California. (Photo by C Flanigan/FilmMagic) 'I think that it just made me curious,' she says. 'Would I be better at math if this was part of our family culture? …Would I just be smarter, better prepared, more confident, if I had grown up in that kind of environment?' Those questions are at the heart of The Family Dynamic, which deep dives into the early family lives of high achievers including, among others, the Brontë sisters, the legendary lawyer-activist Holifield clan, the judge-and-activist sisters Mary and Janet Murguía, the Groffs (family of novelist Lauren Groff and her successful siblings), and the Wojcickis. Though she labored over the book for 10 years—in between working full-time and raising her twin boys, now 18—her research began, informally, years earlier, as she devoured books about the early lives of families including the Kennedys and the Wright brothers. 'I just wanted to know what they were like as kids, and what their parents' interaction was with them, and how they got along,' she said of the first-in-flight siblings. Below, 4 lessons Dominus learned about success and its origins. Success often brings distress In addition to being fleeting, success can come with a heavy toll. As she writes about novelist Lauren Groff, 'Lauren's ambition fuels her, but it also nibbles away at her peace of mind. It costs to care that much. There are nights when her anxiety runs away with her sense of self, when she lies awake, miserable, her heart pounding, sleep impossible, as she wrestles with the fear that her work is only mediocre…' 'It's demanding. It can be self-absorbing. You can lose touch with the things you care about,' Dominus says of highly successful individuals. 'Very many people get depressed the minute they've accomplished a goal that they've been fighting for their whole lives.' According to happiness research, she adds, 'we're not really good at judging what will make us happy—like we think we just have to have this one success, and then we'll be happy.' But really, happiness tends to come from good relationships. 'And if you sacrifice the relationships to accomplish that one goal—like being a best seller or whatever it is—then you're going to be disappointed and less happy than you think.' By the end of her research, Dominus says, 'I felt more keenly aware that success is fraught.' Standard metrics of success don't tell the whole story Dominus writes about one pair of sisters in which one—the 'energetic doer,' always striving for more—is forever frustrated with the other, who was 'dreamy' It took until adulthood for the doer to recognize that her daydreaming sister—eventually a successful creative in the theater world—had her own kind of grit. It's because our 'capitalist society' tends to only recognize 'certain metrics of success,' she says, such as being affiliated with a prestigious institution, or having 'three important syllables in front of your name,' like 'CEO.' 'There are so many people who I consider to be so successful who don't have those classic credentials,' says Dominus. Recently asked to name the most successful person she knows, she said it was her child's kindergarten teacher. circa 1834: English writers Anne, Emily and Charlotte Bronte. Original Artwork: Painting by their brother, Patrick Branwell Bronte. (Photo) 'She is, in some ways, the most admired person in town,' the writer says. 'She's the person who did so much for so many kids and made school a joy… Everyone would, like, sell their left arm to have her for their child's kindergarten teacher. And I just think, wow—that's somebody who has to go through life knowing her life has purpose.' Parents can share platitudes—but must believe in them first Dominus did find some common ground among those she interviewed—including a 'tremendous spirit of optimism in every one of these families.' That optimism was at the foundation of family mottos used to motivate the children. Marilyn Holifield used to say, for example, 'All things possible.' The mother of the Murgías sisters would say, 'With God's help, all things are possible.' But the trick, she realized, is that 'they had to believe it for their children to internalize it.' And these parents—resilient and successful themselves, often in spite of very difficult circumstances—really did believe that all things were possible. 'Patrick Brontë grew up in an extremely poor family in Ireland,' Dominus says. He attended Cambridge on scholarship, dealt with racism against the Irish at that time, and thrived. 'His entire life experience was 'all things possible.' So why wouldn't his daughters think: That's right… We're going to write some groundbreaking literature and blow everyone's mind.' Dominus adds that the 'all things possible' motto is very different from what she heard in her own childhood. 'I always joke that the only thing I remember my father saying was, 'If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.' Of course, here I am a journalist, extremely skeptical,' she says with a laugh. 'But I think if my father had said things like, 'Sky's the limit,' 'All things possible,' I might not have believed it.' Because he wouldn't have, either. It's nature and nurture—and one more thing Dominus tried a little of everything when it came to raising her twin boys—having them both play instruments, getting the New York Times actual newspaper delivered in order to leave it around for them to pick up, doing family readings of Julius Caesar aloud during the pandemic, for example. But she also made sure to get out of their way. 'To be honest, I can't even make my boys make their bed in the morning,' she says. 'I think it was more about what we put in front of them.' Now, she says, the two boys could not be more different: One is the social chair of his fraternity at the huge University of Wisconsin, while his other attends a school of 400 where 'they basically study ancient Greek and read Aristotle.' And, she adds, 'we'll never know: Were they reacting to each other, or did they just come out that way, and all the parenting in the world wasn't going to make them more similar?' That experience, coupled with all she learned from the families interviewed for her book, has led Dominus to a conclusion to the never-ending question: Is it nature or nature that has the most influence? 'I think two things,' she says. Nature—or talent—is important. But you must also have 'an environment that encourages or recognizes that,' she says. In other words, one needs to also be nurtured. 'We know that there's so much talent in this world that goes unrecognized because of where people live and what their opportunities are,' she says. 'And if nature is going for you and nurture is going for you, then you have a much greater shot of making it big.' But that's not everything, she says. It also has a lot to do with luck. 'I think we also have to acknowledge that luck really does play a tremendous role in people's lives. And there are some people who make their own luck, it's true. But also there are people who do happen to be in the right place at the right time,' says Dominus. 'I think people under-appreciate the role of luck in their lives.' More on parenting: This story was originally featured on
