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Rachel, hello and welcome to teenagers untangled the audio hug for parents going through the teenage years. I'm Rachel Richards, parenting coach, journalist, mother of two teenagers and two bonus daughters. Now, if you've been listening to my podcast for some time, you'll know that I'm on a journey, and that journey is an attempt to better understand my kids myself and the world in which I'm trying to raise decent human beings. One of the most popular episodes so far is how to motivate a teenager. Now, knowing how much we all care about the topic, I have a massive treat for us today, but before I introduce our guest, I'm going to engage you in a little exercise to help you figure out where your mindset is right now. Now, I have two questions for you. Do you think that young people lack the ability to reason, plan and think about the future in a logical way? That was question number one. Secondly, when you parent, do you think that immature and defiant young people need accountability, discipline and standards, and those need to be enforced to get the best out of them. Or do you think it's unfair to expect too much of them when they're not developed? We should care more about the person than their performance.
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You can pause here to give yourself time to think.
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Now hopefully you're clear about your position. I know that in the past, I have felt protective of my dyslexic daughter and found it difficult to know how to motivate her and how much leeway I should give. Today, I'll be talking with David Yeager, author of 10 to 25 the science of motivating young people. Now I've read the book cover to cover, and I cannot begin to tell you how brilliant it is. David is an acclaimed developmental psychologist who constantly rubs shoulders with the giants of this area, people whose names come up all the time, like Carol Dweck, who's done so much work on developing a growth mindset, and Angela Duckworth, who's best known for her TED talk on grit and its connection to success. David is on a mission to explain why the neurobiological incompetence model is wrong. So I started by asking him what that means.
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Yeah, the incompetence model is my term for this general belief in our society that young people are just like literally, short sighted, selfish, incapable of thinking about their long term future in a wise way. And that, because of that, if we care about young people, then we need to kind of make the decisions for them as much as possible, and withhold interesting kind of autonomy and agency and authority.
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And that, you know, that's it's not an unreasonable thing for for people to think the model doesn't come from nowhere. It's got its its origins in ancient Greek philosophy, where the passions that are ignited by the onset of puberty, which they didn't call it then, but just aging and maturation, those passions then have to be learned, controlled and harnessed by the logical reasoning brain. And that ancient Greek idea carried over into modern neuroscience, as neuroscientists started looking at how the prefrontal cortex, the regions of the brain related to judgment, decision making and planning, seem to be less activated than the emotional regions of the brain and certain tasks, and so that that's given us the idea that we can't expect young people to make wise decisions, because their brains are hijacked by their emotions and their prefrontal cortices are not fully developed. Now it is, of course, the case that the brain continues to develop, but if you start from this position of that their brains are so incompetent that they can't be trusted, that it makes us as adults do a lot of weird stuff that ends up being pretty ineffective. Yeah, and I love what you're talking about with the you know, if you look at what teenagers are going after, that will give you an idea of what they're sort of geared up for. And
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a real a light bulb went on when I was reading your book, because I've done sort of episodes on, you know, how to motivate a teenager who isn't interested in school. And this, I did this primarily because I had a teenager like that, and and I noticed the missing link, and the missing link was in your book, which is that what they really are driven towards, is this respect, isn't it? Can you talk a bit more about what it like the prime drivers of a young brain, sort of 10 to 25 which is what your book's about? What are they?
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What are they driven by? Yeah, well, and first of all, just thank you for reading it. It's thrilling to hear that you've spent the ideas in the book,
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you know you just as an author. You write it in a cave, and have no idea if anyone's going to spend their free time reading it. So it's great for you to say that the I'd say that the I'm in the book, I'm summarizing a consensus from a large group of scientists focus on Adelaide.
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Sense, and I'm one advisor among many for something called the Center on the Developing adolescent. And there, the group has tried to reframe the period of adolescence in terms of normal developmental needs, rather than kind of pathologizing the teenage years as a time of impending doom and disaster that we need to where we'd be better off just locking them in a closet until their brains are ready to think, which, you know Shakespeare writes about that you know, whether they're no age between 10 and 20.
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And so the this consensus I learned primarily through my colleagues, Ron Dahl and Adriana Galvan who are entrenched in this neuroscience world. And what they argue is that the studies that seem to show that teenagers emotions hijack their logical reasoning, and therefore it makes them incompetent, could be made to show different results, if you realize that young people are really trying to meet a set of goals that they have, that the prefrontal cortex is about goal directed behavior, and it's you know, you're not just logically reasoning about an ideal world like we're disembodied minds, like Descartes, right? We are embodied minds who are trying to trying to achieve goals that matter to us. And goals at their most fundamental level are positive ways we want to feel more or negative ways we want to feel less and the and so the you can think of the prefrontal cortex is like learning in that in that age group, how to maximize the positive feelings and reduce the negative feelings. And it's not just hedonic feelings like the pleasure of drinking something sweet, right, or sex or whatever it is. It's also social feelings. So the feeling of pride never feels as good as it does in the midst of puberty and the pain of in humiliation, of shame never feels as bad or of righteous indignation is never like dominating our attention as much as it is in this age group.
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And the argument that the neuroscientists make, that I find compelling, is that one key task of adolescents is to figure out how to be a social self that brings something to the table and and that's that, and that that contribution is perceived by others who have influence in the social group. And the historical evolutionary argument is that as humans were, I don't know, roving the Savannah. They if you're a child, then a child can just be take for granted that their parents are going to take care of them. Because a four year old, four year old doesn't have to go kill a wooly mammoth for to be a good four year old. You're like, okay, we're taking care of you. No one questions that. But at some point as a teenager, you can't just sit there like a like a lump on a log. Expect everyone to bring you meat and protect you from the attacking tribe.
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And you know, just like cater to every desire you got to show that you you that the calories they're spending on you are calories well spent, is one way to think about it. And so the brain goes into alert mode of, oh, wow, I better show the rest of this group that I've got something of value to in this social group. And so you can think of pride as the emotional byproduct of having demonstrated your social value in shame or humiliation as the emotional byproduct of having failed to do so in a very public way. It's just a long way of saying the drive for status and respect is not, in my opinion, this like frivolous search. I
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love that. I think it's so important. And I've talked about this with with one of my daughters, and she said, this is 100% how it feels.
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And what I thought was really interesting is when you talked about the adolescent predicament, which is this, and predicament, which is this mismatch between, you know, the neuro biological needs for status and respect, and then the level of status respect that they get from their current circumstances. You know, it's really, really stressful for them that they can't, they can't. They've got nothing to show for it. Yeah,
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there's a study I I'm not sure if I cite it, but I I teach it when I teach a graduate course and an undergraduate course on these, on these ideas, and it's from the late 1990s and it's on what's called self determination needs. So self self determination theory is a famous theory in psychology which says people want autonomy, competence and relatedness, and the idea is that You especially want that as you come to feel like a social self who gets to be in charge of my future. And that's one way to define adolescents, is like I I want the rights afforded to an adult, basically, to be viewed as a competent, related, worthwhile person. And the study is very simple. You. It asks kids about certain rights that they think they should have.
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Instead, at what age do they think, yes, I should definitely have this right. And then they ask the adults, at what age should kids get that right? So an example is being able to write a critical letter about the principal's decision making and publishing it in the school newspaper. And so adults think maybe like 10th or 11th grade, so 1617, they should be able to do that. And kids are like seventh or eighth grade, right?
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So there's a multi year gap between the right and to be respected and have your voice respected that a kid desires, and when it's afforded by the adults in their society. And that's one example among many in those studies to say that there's this adolescent predicament that if, if their bodies and brains are screaming, I want the right to self determine, and in our culture is not affording that, then it could cause a lot of the most frustrating kids these days behaviors, not because they're they're idiots, but because we haven't crafted environments that take advantage of their their neurobiological drive for status and respect,
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and that's and we will get on to that, because that's what we parents are trying to like. We're trying to do. How do I do this? What do I was the best thing that I can do, and what I was, what I was interested in was, when you were talking about the predict this predicament. And you said, when adults force young people to choose between social survival, and, you know, social harm, which is what we get worried about, then you're, you're, you're, you're not going to win.
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I mean, your kids are going to be really frustrated and scared and angry. And so what we have to do is try and lean into this, presumably. And I saw that there was some research about being nagged by a parent and that, and I'd love you to talk about what, like, what happens in the brain when we nag, because that's another thing that people are really interested in.
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So there's this great study that I love to talk about by Jennifer silk, who is a neuroscientist at Pittsburgh at the time, and she as a part of a larger study of moms and their daughters, brought daughters in and had them listen to audio recordings of their moms completing the sentence. What bothers me about you is so the daughters are in the FMRI magnet that's whirring around their brains detecting blood flow in order to detect neural activity in one region or another. But on their earphones, they're listening to their moms say things like, what bothers me about you is that you now. I tell you to stop fighting with your sisters, and you never stop. I tell you to bring your shoes downstairs, and you don't do it. I walk past your room and say, it needs a little sweeping and dusting and needs to be cleaned, and then you never clean it. You just need to calm that down, stuff like that. And so what? Yeah, it is like, I get it. I mean, I have four kids, and so I understand what it's like to feel like no one listens to you. And at the same time, what is the daughter thinking when she's hearing that? Is she thinking, you know, Mom, you have a point. I'm really glad you raised these issues, but I thought I was doing good, but now that you've given me this checklist, I've got some work to do. And so good chat, and I look forward to completing all of your requests. So like, no, that's not what happens.
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Instead, what you see is an increase in anger regions of the brain or regions that are related to affect, and also a decrease in regions related to planning ahead, so the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and also a decrease in social cognition regions, which are the regions related to mind reading so inferring what the mom is saying. So take the example of the mom saying, I walk past your room, I'll say it needs a little sweeping and dusting. Right now we hear that we're like, oh, the mom has clearly asked the kid to clean the room, but that's not literally what the mom said. The mom said, it needs sweeping and dusting. And so a kid who's not engaging in social cognition, because that part of their brain is shut off, could say, Yeah, you're right. It needs sweeping and dusting. I wonder who's going to do it right? Because that's the literal response, yeah. That's not the implied response. And so it says, Though nagging is, is, is causing this?
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Like, I don't know, nagging induced frontal lobotomy, where there's a temporary loss of ability to to to plan ahead and to listen to what someone else wants you to be doing. And it's not really the fault of the kid, it's their brain reacting to this threat to status and respect that's coming from both the tone and the words, and that causes a frustrating situation, because the mom's like, I told you very clearly to clean your room, and the kids like, Who is this lunatic yelling at me for something they didn't tell me to do? And there's like, they say one thing. There's a misinterpretation, and then they fight over that misinterpretation. And what I've argued in the book is like, what if we just didn't have to have that problem anymore? Let's just solve that and move on with our lives and be happier and feel more confident instead.
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Yeah, and we again, we're going to get on to this. This how we do this as parents. But one thing that really struck me, which I wanted to share. I don't have sons, but I noticed that in what I think is the Vegemite study, where actually the people who had low testosterone before they did this test on them and then were given testosterone, the ones with the highest testosterone correct me if I'm wrong, actually were more likely to follow the rules and be compliant and do the right thing. Because we always think, oh, testosterone, you know, it's that they're going to become much, you know, less likely to do what we say. But actually, it looks from that study like they're actually just more, they're more driven by that social recognition. Is that right? Is that what that says?
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Yeah.
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So we did a study to experimentally test what happens if you switch from the nagging version to a more respectful version, a version that honors status and respect needs. And the way we did that is we we had participants in a study be asked to take a medicine that we knew they wouldn't like, and we told them it was medicine. In fact, it was a spoonful of Vegemite, which is an Australian food supplement.
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And that to Australians, it tastes good, but to non Australians, it's pretty gross.
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And it's like basically the after you brewed a barrel of beer and just took all the yeast at the bottom and then turn that into a spread for toast. And so people don't like it, but we had a cover story in which they were told this could be good for their health and also good for science. And in one condition, we spoke very disrespectfully, so we threatened their self determination needs by saying, You should listen to me. I'm the expert. Things like, if there's an unpleasant taste, just try to ignore that. Thank you in advance for your cooperation, basically not granting any agency or autonomy. And in the respectful condition, we said things like, you might consider taking this medicine. Implied, hey, you're smart, so we're going to explain the real reason why you need to take this or why we're asking you to we would say, think of the unpleasant taste as you doing your part to help science and thank you for considering this request. So very respectful. Granting agency embedded compliments to try to say we think a lot of your thinking abilities. And we found is that in some analyzes, participants were almost twice as likely to take the Vegemite but that was especially true if they were high testosterone at baseline, or if at at baseline they were low testosterone. But we gave them a nasal inhaler to make them high testosterone so we could, like, temporarily induce the hormones of being a teenager, and then that caused them to really distinguish between the way the request was framed, if it came with respectful language or not. And you're right that that challenges our theories of testosterone, instead of thinking of it as it's making our brains like just chase sex or fight everybody, or, you know, just be impulsive. It's instead causing us to be hypersensitive to the social status rewards and punishments in a situation, and therefore reading between the lines, if we're if, if, if someone, when a high testosterone is being asked disrespectfully. And that matters, because for most of the teenage years, on any given day we're talking to them, that's the day on which they have the most testosterone they've ever had in their entire lives, and then the next day, when you talk to them and see them again, now, that will be the day in which they have the most testosterone they've ever had in their entire lives. And that's affecting we think, how they process information, how they deal with a request, and therefore, whether or not they do what we ask, and if we ignore that, then that's this, like powerful biological source of motivation that we're fighting against rather than harnessing amazing
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I mean, to me, this is just so interesting. And so let's move on to there are a couple of things I really want to sort of delve into. One of them is the growth mindset. And one of in them is these mindsets to do with the way that we parent, because I think they, you know, from what I understand, they're interlinked.
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And I think maybe let's start with the parenting. Because I'm sure a lot of parents are saying, well, it's get onto the parenting. Get onto that. So when we look at the three mindset frameworks that you talk about in your book, you talk about enforcer, protector and mentor mindsets. Can you give me a kind of explanation of what these different ways of looking at being a parent are, or even a boss at work? Because it's really good for people who are having to mentor people in a workplace. What are we talking about?
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Yeah. So what we realize is. You start with this neurobiological incompetence model, that teenagers brains are deficient, short sighted, etc.
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Then there's a Next there's the next question, which is, they're incompetent, but do I want to be nice or tough? And if you think you need to be tough, then you end up in something I call the Enforcer mindset, where I'm enforcing the rules at very high standards. I'm not going to support you to meet them, because it's up to you, but in order, but for your own good or and or for the good of society, I need to uphold these tough standards. And it makes you feel bad about yourself. If you cry yourself to sleep at night, if you question your you know, competence or whatever, that's just the side effect of what a necessary evil, which is me upholding the standards. And you can see how, again, people could put their heads on their pillows at night and feel good about themselves, because at least they are the last bastion of sanity between this, you know, weak generation of Gen Z, who's trying to take society to hell in a hand basket, and if you instead answer the question of they're incompetent, but I want to be nice and friendly, and the most important thing to me is that when I put my head on my pillow at night, that young people knew I cared for them and I was on their side, then you end up in what I call the protector mindset. And that's very low standards, but very high support. And that's the idea that maybe young people have been through so much, they've got toxic stress, they've been through one crisis after another. I can't possibly expect too much of them. And so what I'm going to do is try to build up their confidence with really low standard stuff, that bit by bit, they feel a little bit more success until they're competent. And that makes sense.
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Again. You understand why people think that, but young people kind of know what you're doing, and they end up being offended by the low standards, or terrified, because it makes them think that adults think so poorly of them that they're not going to then be prepared for the real world.
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I interviewed that as well. They start to believe that, and then they'd
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start to depend even more on adults doing things for them, and we create the very problem of the supposedly weak Gen Z generation, in part because of our low estimation of their abilities. The I see this a lot in low income urban schools. Kids call it the pobrecito mentality, like the poor little ones, where the teacher takes pity on the children in poverty by having the easiest possible class, right giving you the review for the exam the day before. They all used to do is memorize the bullet points and then you can ace the exam, but everyone knows the kids are going to forget the information the second the exam is over. So you're not actually prepared for your future as a student at all. You are just jumping through some low standards hoops to get a fake a and students will be like, yeah, sure, I like that, because it's not in any work, but it terrifies them about their future. And the third way, though, kind of takes the best of both of those, and it's that's what I call the mentor mindset, and that's the idea of, I'm going to have very high standards, and this is going to be hard. It might even cause some discomfort. There might be some crying involved, because it's tough, but I'm going to be very supportive. So that way, if I'm a parent, my kid can meet that high standard. If I'm a boss, my direct reports can meet that standard. If I'm a teacher, they can learn that content, right? And so it's another term for this. Is inclusive excellence. You set a standard for excellence, but you create an environment in which you include everyone in meeting that standard. And that's different from exclusive Excellence, which is what you get in the Enforcer.
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It's like, Yeah, super high standard, but only two or three people are going to meet it, or inclusive non Excellence, which is, like, we're nice and friendly, but no one's going to be pushed to do something
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well, knowing you actually had a really good story about, I mean, you go through lots of really good details about how you can do this, you know, lots of examples. So if you're sitting there going, how exactly does this work? It's in the book. But yeah,
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we were obsessed with practical strategies, and we there's 75 pages or so at the end of the book. That's just scripts where, if you're a parent, you want to apply the different techniques. We've already dry run it, we've tested it out, and we've got techniques for people to apply right away.
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Yeah.
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And so my daughter's dyslexic. Some people who have autistic kids, and one of the examples you gave was, you know, when you're dealing with somebody who's autistic, and it's an inclusive environment where you still expect high things, you know, good standards from them, but given that they react to too much noise in a in a meeting room, then you make sure that they can be included, but you still expect them to perform very well, yeah? So sort of thing you're talking about, right? Yeah? Chapter.
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10 of the book I'm reporting on just a legendary guy named Kayvon Stassen who is a real champion for inclusive excellence in his field of physics, astrophysics, specifically. And for a long time, he was the leading person at increasing diversity on the basis of race, ethnicity and SES in physics, and he switched his focus in recent years to focus on autism, part because his son is rather severely autistic, and it compromises a lot of his educational pathways. And he wanted to have the kind of world where his son could pursue professional physics if he wanted to. And that's not true now, because the world of mentoring in physics is very much about publishing your next paper, so you hire the smartest and best trained people, where it's the least amount of work for the mentor, and the mentor is able to delegate, and then the student or postdoc can just produce tons of papers as quickly as possible. And so that ends up sorting on the kind of people who don't need any accommodations, because accommodations just take a little bit of mental effort. And he's like, that's not going to work for my son. My son's going to need more support than that, but his son, as a son of a world famous astrophysicist, probably would have interesting ideas that could he could bring to the table. So he started out including autistic students, postdocs, you know, staff, etc, in his lab, and figured out that there are things that get in the way of an autistic scholar for making a contribution that have nothing to do with their intelligence or their ability to do physics, and there are things like you tend to have a lab meeting in the actual physical lab, which is a room by steel tables and equipment, and it's very echoey because it's all metal equipment and nothing to absorb the sound and there's stuff happening in the background is very distracting, and it was triggering for autistic employees or scientists in his lab. And so he this is before COVID allowed students to zoom in to live meetings, which sounds obvious, but the time, well, that was a weird thing to do, and it allowed them to control their environment, the lighting, the sound. They could turn the volume up and down.
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They could turn off video if they wanted to, and then they could make contributions to the conversation and so on. Another example is a student who a master student who was a brilliant programmer, but because of his autistic differences, would really get frustrated and start slamming the laptop on the ground whenever he ran into an impasse and just kept crashing laptops, and at some point, a normal advisor would have said, you can't be in the lab anymore.
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You've broken 1000s of dollars worth of equipment and but Kayvon didn't do that in part because autistic autism causes certain differences that that could be inconvenient for a team, but it also causes certain strengths, like a lot of autistic scientists, are able to hyper focus for long periods of time and visualize data in new ways, and this young scientist named Daniel was coming up with an amazing new data visualization software. And so Kayvon wanted to build on those strengths, and so he just bought one of those construction site laptops that you could drop, like from four stories up and wouldn't break. And so anytime Daniel would get frustrated, he would crash the laptop, but it was totally fine because it was surrounded in like this tough plastic casing. And then he finished the software, and then it got used at NASA to, like, find planets around the world.
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It was published in a Nature paper, which is the pinnacle of scientific contribution in the world and is now licensed to NASA. And it's a it's not the biggest contribution in the history of physics, but it was a contribution that would not have existed if not for that autistic young scientist. And so Kevin's whole thing is like, why are we artificially limiting the pool of people who can contribute at a high level? Because we lower expectations for them, or we refuse to accommodate their different needs. And so Kayvon is, like, the Enforcer would have just gotten rid of Daniel.
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The protector would have been like, oh, just do this easy thing. But then it wouldn't change the future of science, right? And then it wouldn't.
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NASA wouldn't want to pay for it, because it wouldn't. It'd be, it's not up to standard. So it's high standards, high support. And then everybody wins. Daniel has a career in science, the lab has this big contribution. Society in general has the contribution, but also you've got inclusiveness.
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I love that.
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It's such a really important message. Because I think sometimes we we're not quite sure how that we slot the inclusiveness in without just being nice, right,
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or lowering standards. And I think people legitimately are critical of certain efforts that promote diversity or inclusion because they think you're just abandoning the standards. And I think Kayvon, who, by the way, just won the MacArthur Genius Award a couple weeks ago for this work that I write about, is recognized in part because this is like an alternative route to the lowering standards version of inclusion. This is, like, no super high standards, but just add the supports.
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Yes, and I'd like to, there are a number of mental mindset practices which I'd like to go into. But underpinning all of this mental mindset is the idea that we can grow the growth mindset. Can you talk a bit about how you've worked with or the you know, the science has worked with kids, and realize the massive difference that we can make with our kids if we can just instill this in and how we do it.
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Yeah, so my long term collaborator and PhD mentor was Carol Dweck, who was at Stanford and developed the concept of growth mindset initially, and then my role was to take the early interventions and try to test them at a broader scale to understand how and where growth mindset could come to life. So as a reminder, growth mindset is simply the belief that abilities can be changed and developed, that you're not stuck being all one thing or all another thing throughout life, that there's the possibility for change with the right support and under the right conditions. And it turns out that that message is really beneficial for people who are encountering some kind of struggle, which many people should be in educational settings, because you should be learning stuff you don't already know in school. If you're, if you're learning stuff you've already mastered, that's kind of a waste of time. But if you're, if you're using school to its fullest, then you should feel challenged, and then it becomes really useful to have a growth mindset, because the alternative is you say, Oh, the reason why this is challenging is because I'm not smart enough, I'm no good, and this will never get better. And if that's your conclusion, then it's hard to motivate yourself to try to switch up your strategies, to ask for help, etc. And in fact, asking for help makes you feel even worse, because you think if I was really smart and talented, I wouldn't be the kind of person who had to ask for help or advice. And so there's a there's a need in a fixed mindset to conceal any failure or frustration or difficulty, because that can be viewed as confirmatory evidence that you are less than in some way. And so growth mindset, we found, emboldens young people to take on a challenge because they view it not as a sign that they lack a fixed trait, but instead as a root for developing some characteristic like their ability in that domain. And so we've done lots of experiments where we shift people from fixed to growth mindset, and we found we can do it kind of quickly, sometimes in 25 minutes. And the way we can do that is we first say a little bit about the brain and how it works. We're like, All right, well, the the brain is not static. The brain is learning from its environment, and that's its task. And so if you're challenged and you learn, then that is changing your brain. You're forming new and better connections that's helping you get smarter. So if you struggle, it doesn't mean you're dumb. It actually means you're becoming smarter. Is the first point. And then they read stories from upperclassmen who have heard this idea in the past. So a ninth grader would learn from a 10th or 11th grader who's like, I used to feel dumb if I struggled, and I thought people were looking down on me, and then I realized that actually, you can't put me in a box. I'm not either smart or dumb. I'm actually improving.
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And so they hear that it's a useful idea. And then last, they do something we call self persuasion, where participants in our study try to write a letter to a future student who might be struggling, explaining how these growth mindset ideas could help motivate them. And what we find that's called, we call it a saying, is believing effect. And this is the idea that to the extent that I try to make an argument to convince you of something, I'm actually convincing myself of that idea.
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Yeah. And so these are things any parent can do, but notice what I didn't say is that you should like fire hose kids with what they're supposed to believe and tell Don't you know you should have a growth mindset, and don't you know that your brain. So we very much are respectful in how we communicate. So it's like the respectful condition in the Vegemite study where we say this is hidden information you might not already know, other people like you already believe it. How could you apply it? So we ask them to generate the information, and that's why we can change our attitudes in such a short amount of time. Is because we're drawing on the psychology of status and respect and embedding that into how we frame our. Mindset interventions.
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I love that.
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And we're coming back to that status and respect and how important that is and and respecting that they will have their own opinions, rather than telling them this is what you're supposed to think. And I loved this bit where we're talking about the way that you actually implement some of this mental mindset. And you mentioned Lorena Seidel, I think her name is a parenting coach. And one of the things that really made me smile was where you were talking about this imaginary jury of our peers. Oh, you know, I've got to prove to these people who might be listening to me, who aren't actually, they don't exist, that I'm a good parent. And so we feel like these, these, this jury is actually watching us to make sure that we parent well.
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And Lorena says the problem is never the problem. It's what we think of the problem. So one of the things we're talking about is being is questioning what we're what are we? What are we making of this situation, rather than jumping in with a mindset, you know, either the, you know, the Enforcer or the protector.
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How do, how do we, you know, what do you do when you're in those moments where it's really stressful because you're a dad?
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Yeah, yeah. How do you how'd you do that?
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Yeah? I mean, yesterday, same stuff. Yeah. So there's this great parenting coach i i followed for a while.
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Her name is Lorena Seidel, and I've interviewed her and a bunch of her clients, and she's truly fabulous. It's kind of like if, if you want to have a house with no like, yelling and everything's on fire, and you feel like a bad parent every day, like she's and you can get her time, then she's who you call. And you know, if you're wondering if I interviewed her more than I needed to for the book, the answer is yes, because I personally found the advice exactly like very useful. And anyway, I highly recommend talking or working with her if you can. Can get can do that.
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But one of the things she says is that any crisis with a kid, whether it's an argument or a fight, or the kids are fighting with each other, or they're not listening to you. From from the parents perspective, we want that to end as quickly as possible, because we're trying to minimize the number of people who are judging us for being a garbage parent. And part of that is, if it's in public, like, Oh my God, all these people think I'm the worst parent. So there's this jury of peers that are evaluating us, but even if it's in private, we're like, why am I the kind of person whose kids don't listen to them? I do everything for these kids. I love them, I care for them, and and the fact that I'm having to ask three times to put on your pants must mean that I'm not a good parent, and I can't stand in good faith in front of another parent and act like I'm good at parenting, but knowing deep down that my own kids won't listen to me, and so often, what she says is that parents overreact and go into enforcer mode and yell and tell and blame and shame, not because of what the kid's actually doing, And not because of the stakes for the kids future, but because of what it means about us in our minds, or in the minds of our imagined jury of peers about what kind of parent we are. And a great example of what we should do, instead of yelling, telling, blaming and shaming, is asking questions. So she her argument is, when there's a crisis, don't waste that crisis.
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There's an argument like, don't, don't waste that argument. Turn that into a chance for your kid to build a skill so that way they can solve this problem on their own in the future, and anytime that they've stepped out of line or it's caused chaos for the family, that's a pretty good signal that they need to behave differently. So that's the time to troubleshoot. Like, don't, don't sit around waiting for some abstract moment where you're going to teach them the perfect way of dealing with a conflict with a sibling, like, use that crisis as a teaching moment. And if you do that enough, pretty soon they're going to start figuring out their own problems, at a minimum, because they don't want you to be asking them a million questions about how to solve it, like they're gonna be tired of that. And so she had this procedure of asking questions that I sometimes call collaborative troubleshooting, and she wants to know what their reason was for the behavior, and they she responds to what the kid actually said. Now, the wrong way to do this is ask questions like, What were you thinking? Because if you say, what were you thinking to your kid, they know we mean that we think they were not thinking that I'm it's a way of yelling, telling, blaming, shaming, so that's not an authentic question. You know, there's no curiosity there. But if you legitimately are curious about a kid's reasons for, I don't know, sneaking out of the house, coming home drunk from a party, fighting with their sibling, you know, having an anxiety attack about forgetting their baritone at school or whatever it is, if you're, like, really curious, you might learn something about them. Hmm, but you also might help them come to the realization of how they can solve it in the future. Now, I say it that way, and I've got scripts and routines that I learned from Lorena in the book, but the number one reaction is, yeah, but I don't have time for this mentor mindset stuff. When the macaroni is burning on the stove, the repair man is at the door. We're late for soccer practice, and I've got two kids fighting in the other room, so this is not the time for your touchy feely perfect world nonsense. And again, her argument is one, like, Yeah, but don't waste the crisis, because you save yourself more time in the future if you, if you take advantage of this crisis. Two, even if you screw up, you can get a do over. And her whole thing is like, you know, you can sometimes blow up and then later come back and say, I didn't uphold the standard for our family. I still need to do this thing, but I should have been more curious about why it's hard for you. So would you mind explaining to me what was going on, what was in your mind, so that way I know how to better support your needs while also making sure that this important thing for the family gets done and then they troubleshoot, yeah, and so often, what she argues is the kids will remember the do over more than the first blow up, and it's respect and the last, and it's totally respectful, because Tony bright is a famous sociologist, and he studies respect in organizational settings like bosses with employees. And when you ask employees to define respect, one of the number one things they say is that they feel listened to and listened to in the sense that what they say changes, that could change the mind of the other person. And if we signal right away we're closed minded, then they don't feel listened to. And that's like the definition of disrespect for a lot of young people. And the last thing I'll say about this is that, like, if you have the incompetence model, you would never ask questions and get curious, because you know why they're making the wrong choice. It's because they aren't thinking. And so you're not curious if you think that their brains are fundamentally flawed, but if instead you think, Oh, wait, they had a status and respect reason for their behavior, and therefore my task is to come up with the most charitable interpretation for why the bad behavior made sense from their perspective. Then you're troubleshooting so you can that's why I think it was important for us to start with the incompetence model. Here is that if you're stuck with the old incompetence model, you would never do the questioning.
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It would make no sense to you.
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And
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my last episode was on stress, and it was because the US Surgeon General, I think it's vivid, murti had talked about the enormous amounts of stress that parents are under at the moment. So we talked about, you know, the way that we think about stress. But I wanted to look at yours, because I love the whole section that you put together about stress, and one of the things you said was the last decade has ushered in a revolution in the science of stress, revealing that most of us take the wrong way of thinking and talking about it. So I think you mentioned psychologist Dr Alicia Crum. Could you please talk to us a bit more about what what is this that we're getting wrong about stress?
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Yeah, so I think that the the psychophysiologists, the people who study how the body and mind work together to have a stress response, like to emphasize that the stress response is designed to keep us alive, that it is not fundamentally bad, and that's not how a lot of people think about it. But people think about toxic stress as like slowly unraveling our telomeres and killing us day by day and but like, if you wandered into the street and then a car was zipping by and you jumped back on the sidewalk. That's your stress response, keeping you alive, and that's a good thing.
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But the other way to think of it is that the stress response is like mobilizing resources to help us achieve a goal, but the goal that it's helping us achieve depends on our minds.
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Like, our minds determine what we're trying to do in any given situation, and, like, whether we think we can do it, and the body responds to what the mind thinks. And that sounds obvious, but it's a lot of people think it's the opposite, that, like, the body just does stuff, and then the mind kind of follows along. And there are places, of course, where that happens, and psychologists have shown that.
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But where I think it's relevant is that in any high performance situation, like you have to give a presentation to your boss's boss, or you have to take a heart exam, or you have to have a difficult conversation with your teenager, or your teenager is trying to hold hands with someone. For the first time, or merge on the freeway for the first time, any like these scary situations where it could go really well, and it'd be amazing, or it could be a disaster. In those situations, what happens is that the body starts mobilizing resources. The heart is racing. You're breathing heavy, your palms are sweaty, etc, and but there's a critical moment where your mind gets to name that, that ongoing response as either a debilitating and crushing liability or as our body mobilizing resources to help us do better. And it turns out that the story you tell yourself about your stress physiology can powerfully influence your motivation and even the stress physiology you later experience.
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So an example is a study we conducted where we had ninth graders and freshmen in college and other young adults learn that when your heart is racing and your your lungs are going nuts, what you're really doing is getting more oxygenated blood to your body, and that oxygen is then going to your muscles to help them be stronger, into your brain to help those cells be smarter, and helping it's also circulating more hormones throughout your body to help your your kind of flight and fight or flight response to be optimal. And in those moments, if you name that stress physiology as a resource, then your mind actually thinks you have what it takes to meet that demand. And then we see differences in your body so lower cortisol, higher testosterone, even better performance. So giving your mind a different story about stress changes your actual stress response and then improve. That is
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amazing to me.
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Yeah, that is amazing because you so actually even the the way that the blood is used in the body is different,
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yeah. So within our study, we're like shooting an electrical signal across your chest cavity to time how long that takes, and that's a measure of how much blood is being held centrally in your chest cavity versus flowing to your extremities. And in general, a better stress response is your body is pushing oxygenated blood to your muscles, in your brain, your extremities. A bad stress response is you're storing it more centrally, in part, because what is your body's doing is it's expecting damage and defeat, like if you lost a fight to the bear, you're trying to not bleed, so that way you stay alive longer. And but if you want to win the fight against the bear, your muscles need to be as strong as possible.
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Therefore, you need the oxygenated blood to your to your extremities. And so we're measuring how much blood is in centrally versus peripherally as a function of the story we helped you tell yourself about whether your stress response is good or bad.
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So when you're talking to one of your kids about a stressful situation, let's say this. They're moving schools, or they've got a performance or something, how do you prepare them? Because this is, this is one of those things that so many parents go through where they've got this child who's really anxious or stressed about something, what? How would you, how would you sort of talk about that with them?
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Yeah, our our approach is, we call it synergistic mindsets, and we basically pair a growth mindset message with a stress can be enhancing message. So when a kid has butterflies in their stomach, for instance, and this is a real example, my daughter was like auditioning for first chair and cello. And don't ask me what first chair is. I don't know what it is, but she it was.
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She was nervous about it, and sounds good. She got in the car thinking basically that her her butterflies in her stomach were so bad that she didn't think she could go to school. And then the if I was the Enforcer mindset, I would be like, suck it up, you know, stop complaining. And if I was a protector mindset, I would call the school and say, she can't come to school today.
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She's feeling sick. But I was trying to be mentor mindset. And so I was like, All right, well, what do you think I'm gonna say?
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And she goes, well, well, you're gonna say that the fact that I have butterflies on my stomach means it's something that matters to me, and it's really hard, and so my I'm concerned about it, because I want to do well, and I'm doing something that's impressive, and the fact that my My heart is racing and I'm breathing heavy, just means that I'm getting oxygenated blood to my body so that way I can perform to the level of my preparation. And I was like, yes, Scarlett, that's exactly what I was going to say to you.
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It's amazing that you knew that.
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I was like, How did you know I was going to say that? And she told me that two years earlier, when she was about to go water skiing, she was floating in the water, and I was holding her two skis behind her to keep him straight, and Uncle Luke had the boat up there about to, like, rev the engine. And she said, Daddy, I have butterflies on my stomach. And I was like, oh, that's because you're worried about doing something that's going to be awesome, but terrifying, because on the one hand, you could fall face first.
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On the other hand, I. Uh, you might pop up and have the most fun of your life skiing. And so you're legitimately worried about something that's kind of hard, which is fine, but you're getting more oxygenated blood to your muscles so you can hold onto the rope really strong, and you're going to be stronger than you normally would be, and that's going to help you pop up. And once you do that, you're going to ski around and have the time of your life, and you're never going to remember a time when you couldn't ski. And so Uncle Luke hit it and pulled her right out.
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And she weighed like 80 pounds at this time, and so she just skied for 30 minutes in the lake while I just bobbed there, waiting watching her. And she remembered that two years later when it was time for the cello audition. And I think it's because there's this moment of undifferentiated arousal where they're just nervous and anxious and they don't yet know what to name that and the right mentor at the right time doesn't pull back from the fearful experience. It doesn't protect you from having the stress, and it also doesn't just leave it to your own devices. You let them still experience the stress, but you help them name it as something positive. The growth mindset positive of this is an ambitious challenge. You've chosen to do something cool, and it's hard, and you're going to learn from it. And the stress is enhancing message of and the way your body's going to deal with that is by getting oxygenated blood throughout your body so you could be smarter and be stronger, and by naming it that then it it became self reinforcing over time. And I didn't need to keep saying it to her, because it she already knew it to be true. And I think that's the kind of closing message, is that yes, with whether it's our kids or someone else's kids, if we're a coach for a boss, if we're, you know, a teacher, a professor, whatever it is, you never know when you're going to say something that they're going to remember for years and years and as much as possible. Let's try to not have that be the Enforcer stuff of yelling, telling, blaming, shaming, and let's also have it not be the protector stuff of you can't do this. Let me remove all the barriers in your life instead. Let's make it be things like, Yeah, this is super hard, and I think you're up for it, and when you do it, you're gonna feel great, and you're gonna remember that. And I want you to feel that confidence going forward, and more often than not, that that final mentor mindset version will help them.
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It comes across as a respectful thing to say, and so their ears are open to it, and I think it could help them cope going forward.
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David, what a beautiful message. It's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about in my blog. I've talked about how to set high expectations without piling on the pressure. I could talk to you all day. It's fascinating.
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Thank you so much. What an interesting book, and I will be reading it for years to come, I'm sure, because there are so many messages in there. Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks for having me. This is great. That was David Jaeger, professor of psychology at the University of Texas, and author of 10 to 25 the science of motivating young people. Please send this to at least one person if you found it useful, and you could give the podcast five stars in the review section. I put all of David's contact details in the podcast notes, and if you want to contact me with questions, suggestions or feedback, then write to me at teenagers untangled@gmail.com That's it For now. Wishing you a great week. Bye, bye. You.
