Guidance counselor creates book club for community adults

Book club flyer.

At a recent Friday Family Time, a monthly meeting with parents and principal Greg Louie, guidance counselor Alinna Satake heard questions about student stress and the right way to raise teens in today’s world. Those questions inspired her to start a book club with the theme of parenting in a way that helps teens become healthy adults. 

The first book reading is “How to Raise an Adult” by Julie Lythcott-Hains, with meetings starting Nov. 29 with subsequent meetings spaced 1-2 months apart. 

In her book, Lythcott-Haims, the former dean of freshman students at Stanford, takes issue with common parenting practices that fail to foster teen independence as they head into adulthood.

“How do you make space to give your children agency to do things on their own?” Satake said. “Why is it important to make sure that your kids know how to do laundry? Why is it important for them to have other responsibilities besides doing school?”

As a first-generation American, Satake also hopes to use the book to help reconcile the community’s different cultural ideas with the American identity. 

“A lot of our parents in this community were not raised here, come with different cultural ideas about the best way to raise kids and are struggling to parent cross-culturally the way my parents struggled as immigrants,” she said. “But raising children who are primarily American — how do you bridge these things? Sometimes it’s nice just to talk about it together and realize that ‘Hey, you’re not alone.’”

The book club meetings will take place primarily over Zoom. Topics will be structured around discussion questions provided for the book. Although there are benefits to in-person meetings, Satake ultimately decided to use Zoom for better accessibility. 

Although Satake hadn’t initially planned on having students attend as well, she said she is open to trying it out if students are interested, possibly with Lythcott-Haims’s “How to Be an Adult,” a sequel to “How to Raise an Adult” geared instead at children and young adults, as the topics are centered around the children and what is important for them growing up.

Since this is the first iteration of the book club, Satake doesn’t have plans for following book club sessions.

“I’ve never done anything like this before. So I think part of it is just trying it and seeing how it goes,” she said.