Madeline Levine

Madeline Levine, Ph.D., is a psychologist with close to 30 years of experience as a clinician, consultant, and educator. Her New York Times bestseller, The Price of Privilege, explores the reasons why teenagers from affluent families are experiencing epidemic rates of emotional problems. Her new book, Teach Your Children Well, outlines how our current narrow definition of success unnecessarily stresses academically talented kids and marginalizes many more whose talents and interests are less amenable to measurement. The development of skills needed to be successful in the 21st century—creativity, collaboration, innovation—are not easily developed in our competitive, fast-paced, high pressure world. Teach Your Children Well gives practical, research-based solutions to help parents return their families to healthier and saner versions of themselves.

Dr. Levine is also a co-founder of Challenge Success, a project born at the Stanford School of Education. Challenge Success believes that our increasingly competitive world has led to tremendous anxiety about our children’s futures and has resulted in a high pressure, myopic focus on grades, test scores, and performance. This kind of pressure and narrow focus isn’t helping our kids become the resilient, capable, meaningful contributors we need in the 21st century. Challenge Success provides families and schools with the practical research-based tools they need to raise healthy, motivated kids, capable of reaching their full potential and be successful—with success measured over the course of a lifetime, not at the end of the grading period.

Dr. Levine began her career as an elementary and junior high school teacher in the South Bronx of New York before moving to California and earning her degrees in psychology. She has had a large clinical practice with an emphasis on child and adolescent problems and parenting issues. Currently however, she spends most of her time crisscrossing the country speaking to parents, educators, students, and business leaders. Dr. Levine has taught child development classes to graduate students at the University of California Medical Center, San Francisco. For many years, Dr. Madeline Levine has been a consultant to various schools, from preschool through high school, public as well as private, throughout the country. She has been featured on television programs from The Early Show to The Lehrer Report and on NPR stations (such as Diane Rehm’s in Washington), and has been positively reviewed in publications from Scientific American to The Washington Post. She is sought out both nationally and internationally as an expert and keynote speaker.