1KHO 866: No One Wants To Grow Up To Be An Addict | Jessica Lahey, The Gift of Failure

**Ginny** (0:00)
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I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside. And I have read two phenomenal books that are about pretty different topics, but both relate to parenting, teenagers, and also just our lives in general. One of them is called The Gift of Failure, with a fantastically cool cover, made out of pencils, but one's broken and it's like a ladder. I love the cover, The Gift of Failure, how the best parents learn to let go.
So their children can succeed. And then a book about addiction, The Addiction Inoculation, Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence. And I mean, it really is a culture of dependence. There's a lot of things that we can be dependent on. And so what an honor. Author Jessica Lahey is here. Welcome, Jess.

**Jessica Lahey** (1:42)
Thank you so much for having me. This is going to be so much fun.

**Ginny** (1:45)
So much fun. Okay. So I would love to kick it off about the book about dependence. And I think it was, you know, this is an interesting topic where you talk about your own family tree. You're such a fantastic writer. The branches of my family tree hang heavy with substance abuse disorder. So you're talking about this is part of your family tree.
Also, they lie about it or cover it up. You know, so this is a part of the story here. And you are determined to not follow in those footsteps. So you say you want to be abstinent. You know, the drugs and alcohol threaten your identity as a perfectionist and an overachiever and a goody two shoes eldest daughter. So you're like, well, I'm not going to end up in this path. And then over time, like after college, you do end up following in those footsteps, including being really good at covering it up for a period of time.
And then, you know, you end up changing that you go to a 12-step meeting you talk about, and you're back to sobriety. And so you have this whole book about what can we really do to help our kids from falling into this substance use dependence. And really, there's a lot of things that we can be dependent on. So can you talk about at what point you decided to write a book about it?

**Jessica Lahey** (3:00)
So to be clear, so I got sober in 2013 I'm an alcoholic.
You know, I thought my story was just so off the wall, different from everybody else's. Turns out there are a lot of eldest daughter perfectionist alcoholics out there in the world. Lots of them. My story is not that unique. You know, most for most people, you know, addiction, substance use disorder is a pediatric onset disease. So for most people, we know the younger a kid starts drinking, the higher their lifelong risk of developing substance use disorder. My story was a little different, but it's not a rare story at all.
And after I was a teacher for 20 years and after I left full-time teaching, I went and taught in a rehab for adolescents. So I wrote my first book, it was successful and I'm thinking like, oh my gosh, sophomore effort. It's so scary, that second book, like especially, you know, I'm so grateful for that first success and having a New York Times bestseller. But then there's this like, oh my gosh, what do I do next? And how do I top that?