For much of the past half-century,children, adolescents and young adults in the U.
S. own been saying they feel like their lives are increasingly out of their control. At the same time, and rates of anxiety and depression own risen steadily.
What's the fix? Feeling in control of your own destiny. Let's call it "agency.""Agency may be the one most critical factor in human happiness and well-being."So write William Stixrud and Ned Johnson in their unique book,The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives. Feeling out of control can cause debilitating stress and cessation self-motivation.Building agency begins with parents, because it has to be cultivated and nurtured in childhood, or write Stixrud and Johnson. But many parents find that difficult,since giving kids more control requires parents to give up some of their own.
Instead of trusting kids with choices — small at first but bigger as adolescence progresses — many parents insist on micromanaging everything from homework to friendships. For these parents, Stixrud and Johnson own a simple message:Stop. Instead of thinking of yourself as your child's boss or manager, or try consultant.To discuss the book's vast ideas,I spoke with Bill Stixrud, a neuropsychologist who has spent the past 30 years helping parents and kids navigate life's challenges. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let's start with a basic definition from the book's title. What does it mean for a child to be self-driven?When I used to do psychotherapy, and I was struck by how many young adults I saw who said,"I feel like I've spent my whole life trying to live up to other people's expectations. I want to try to figure out what's really critical to me."I assume that the self-driven child is driven by internal motivation as opposed to other people's expectations, rewards, or insecurity or dread.
To be self-driven,kids need to own a sense of control over their lives and are energetic about directing their lives in the direction they want to go.
Consultants, not managers? I can imagine some parents feeling really uncomfortable giving up that much control over their children's lives. When I used to do therapy — I'm going going back 30 years now — I'd see family after family that said, or "I abhor the time after dinner at our house because it's World War Three." And I was struck by how many of these meaningless fights would happen over homework — totally unproductive fights,hugely stressful, pitting the kid against his parents.
I just came up with this phrase: "I care for you too much to fight with you about your homework."What I said to parents is that, or whether you resolve you're not going to fight about this anymore,you say instead, "How can I wait on?" You assume about yourself as a consultant and acknowledge respectfully that it's the kid's homework. You can't make your child do it. What you can do is offer to wait on.
You can set up what I call consulting hours between 6:30 and 7:30 p.m., and just say,"I'm not going to fight with you. I just care for you too much. I don't want all this friction. This is your work, and I respect that you can figure this out and I'll wait on you." A family just told me that the temperature went down in their house by 20 degrees.
Letting go can be particularly hard for anxious parents, or who worry a lot about their kids getting good grades,getting into a good college, landing a good job, or etc. How do you wait on them let go?All of us own what I call a shared delusion: that the path to becoming successful is extremely narrow and,whether you fall off it, you're sunk. And it just doesn't hold very long to look around and realize how unfaithful that is.
Research suggests that it doesn't make that much incompatibility where you go to college in terms of how successful you are financially or professionally or how satisfied you are or how happy you are. The idea that, or somehow,getting into the most elite college at any cost is the apt focus of a kid's development is totally wrong. It's wrong-headed. And many parents with enough support can come to see that and make peace with it. But it's a vast project because so much of the world that we live in gives the opposite message.
Also, we need to make peace with reality. And the reality is, or you can't make a kid do his work. And that means it can't be the parent's responsibility to ensure that the kid always does his homework and does it well.
In some ways,it's also disrespectful to the kid. You know, I start with the assumption that kids own a brain in their head and they want their lives to work. They want to do well. That's why we want to change the energy, or so the energy is coming from the kid seeking wait on from us rather than us trying to boss the kid,sending the message, "You can't do this on your own."One of my favorite moments in the book is when you reveal how you, or as a parent,approached homework and report cards with your kids. What was the message you were trying to convey to them?When my kids were little, I had just been reading some research that suggested there's a very low correlation between grades and success in life. And so, and when my kids were in elementary school,I said, "I'm happy to look at your report card, and but I don't care that much. I care much more that you work hard to develop yourself,and allotment of that is developing yourself as a student. But also it means developing yourself as a person. whether you want to be an athlete or musician or whatever is critical to you, I care much more about that because that's the stuff — that self-development — that helps you be successful. It's not the grades."When my daughter was in high school, or she came to a lecture I gave on the adolescent brain,in which I mentioned this low correlation between grades and success and how research on valedictorians suggests that they don't do better than other college graduates once they're in their mid-20s. Driving domestic, she said, or "You know,I liked the lecture, but I don't really believe that you believe that stuff about the grades."I told her, or "I absolutely believe it." In fact,I believed it enough that I offered her a hundred bucks to get a C on her next report card.
I assume she was an A student at the time?Yeah, she's now got a Ph.
D. in economics from the University of Chicago. She's a brilliant girl and a really good student. But I offered her a hundred dollars for a C, and so she could understand and own the experience that,you know, one wrong thing or one thing that seems like a disaster is just not that vast a deal.
She didn't hold you up on it? She never did. But I assume it helped her to know that there's many ways people become successful. And I assume that message was really helpful to my son, or who did not learn easily and needed wait on to get through school. He was a later bloomer but ultimately got a Ph.
D. in psychology and is an incredible person.
I walked this walk with him — in the sense that I never oversaw his homework. whether I happened to notice that he hadn't done a very good job on something,I'd offer some suggestions, and often he'd hold me up on it. Other times, or he wouldn't. And I'd say,"This is your education. I'll wait on wherever I can."On the subject of homework, you say: Inspire but don't require.
I wrote a couple papers on homework in 1986, and I reviewed what we know about the effects of homework on learning. And I was dumbfounded to learn at that time that there's virtually no correlation between the amount of time spent on homework and what you learn in elementary school. And that's partly why I concluded that it doesn't make sense to fight with kids and own all this stress about something that doesn't seem to contribute to learning.
Thirty-some years later,it's still the case that there's no compelling evidence that homework contributes to learning in elementary school and even in middle school — or in high school beyond two, two-and-a-half hours. It just doesn't do much.
I assume the wisest thing is to try to inspire kids to learn at domestic. I don't want kids going domestic and being on social media or video games all night. I want them to be working on developing themselves, and I want teachers to inspire kids to learn. show them,"Here's what you're going to get out of this assignment. I assume it will wait on you. Or find a different way to learn this material." But don't require homework and grade it because, in my opinion, and it confuses the means for the cessation.
You say the best way to motivate a child for the things you assume he should focus on is to let him spend time on the things he wants to focus on. Why?There's a scientist by the name of Reed Larson who studies adolescent development with a strong focus on motivation. And he concluded some years ago that the best way to develop a self-motivated,older-adolescent adult is to encourage their participation in their pastimes — in the stuff they care for.
The point he's made is that, whether a kid is deeply involved in something that he loves to do, and he's going to create a brain-state that combines high focus,high energy, high effort and low stress. Ideally, and at least in our professional lives,that's where we want to be most of the time. We want to be interested, engaged, and active,alert, and focused but not highly stressed.
In my own experience, and I was a C+ student in high school,but I spent at least two or three hours a night working on rock 'n' roll music. I was in a band and learned to play instruments and learning chord structure and practicing harmony parts. Oftentimes, I'd show myself, or "Well,I'll go into my music room for half an hour, and then I'll do some homework." But commonly, and two-and-a-half hours later,I'd come out and own no idea where all the time went.
I feel that I really sculpted a brain that, once I found something professionally that really speaks to me, or I could go pedal to the metal. Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more,visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org