The Self-Driven Child

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

• We came to a sense of control through research on stress and studies of motivation, which we follow because so much of our work involves helping kids minimize the extent to which stress undermines their performance and mental health. We try to steer them to a healthy level of self-motivation, somewhere between perfectionist overdrive and “let me get back to my video game.”
  • Stress isn’t always bad
• From 1960 until 2002, high school and college students have șteadily reported lower and lower levels of internal locus of control (the belief that they can control their own destiny) and higher levels of external locus of control (the belief that their destiny is determined by external forces).
• Despite the many resources and opportunities their parents offer them, they will often fail to thrive. Without a sense of control, regardless of their background, inner turmoil will take its toll. We all do better when we feel like we can impact the world around us. That’s why we continue to push the button to close the elevator door even though most of them don’t work.” It’s why, in a landmark study conducted in the 1970s, nursing home residents who were told and shown that they had responsibility over their lives lived longer than those who were told that the nursing staff pr was in charge. It is also why the kid who decides on his own to do his homework (or not) will be happier, less stressed, and ultimately more capable of navigating life.
• We really can’t control our kids-and doing so shouldn’t be our goal. Our role is to teach them to think and act independently, so that they will have the judgment to succeed in school and, most important, in life. Rather than pushing them to do things they resist, we should seek to help them find things they love and develop their inner motivation. Our aim is to move away from a model that depends on parental pressure to one that nurtures a child’s own drive. That is what we mean by the self-driven child.
• The trick is to give them enough freedom and respect to let them figure things out for themselves. Even if it were possible to control our kids and mold them into who or what we want them to be, we might be less stressed, but they would be more controlled than self-controlled.
• We hope to convince you that you should think of yourself as a consultant to your kids rather than their boss or manager.
• Depression is now the number one cause of disability worldwide. We think of chronic stress in children and teenagers as the societal equivalent of climate change-a problem that has been building over generations and will take considerable effort and a change of habits to overcome.
• Centre for Studies on Human Stress has a handy acronym for what makes life stressful-N.U.T.S.
• NOVELTY Something you have not experienced before UNPREDICTABILITY Something you had no way of knowing would occur THREAT TO THE EGO Your safety or competence as a person is called into question SENSE OF CONTROL You feel you have little or no control over the situation5
  • We yell at our kids to try and get leverage to regain some control. Control = driven by our ego.
• My friend’s mom will say, Let’s play this game for a while and then let’s bake cookies.’ And that’s great and all, but it 11 would make me nuts to always be told ‘Here’s the plan’ instead of asking me what I want.”
• These are exactly the circumstances most kids experience every day. Lest you doubt how little control children and adolescents like Kara actually have, think of what their days are like: they have to sit still in classes they didn’t choose, taught by teachers randomly assigned to them, alongside whatever child happens to be assigned to their class. They have to stand in neat lines, eat on a schedule, and rely on the whims of their teachers for permission to go to the bathroom. And think of how we measure them: not by the effort they put into practicing or how much they improve, but by whether another kid at the meet happened to swim or run faster last Saturday. We don’t measure their understanding of the periodic table, but how they score on a random selection of associated facts.
  • Treat kids like adults and expect them to act like kids. Not vice versa. (Armchair Expert.)
• Our role as adults is not to force them to follow the track we’ve laid out for them; it’s to help them develop the skills to figure out the track that’s right for them. They will need to find their own wayand to make independent course corrections-for the rest of their lives.
  • Trust them - connect to Joseph Smith “let them govern themselves”
• The researchers referred to them as “California laid-back rats,” as they were difficult to stress as adults. This is probably because in situations like these the brain becomes conditioned to cope, and this conditioning lays the foundation for resilience.
  • Sleep training is tolerable stress that carries over to other stress in their life.
• Toxic stress does not prepare kids for the real world. It damages their ability to thrive. To return to rat studies for a moment, when rat pups were taken from their mothers not for fifteen minutes but for three hours a day, the experience was so stressful that when they were returned to their mothers, the rat pups didn’t interact with them. They remained easily stressed for the rest of their lives.
  • This is what parents are afraid of
• Kids need a supportive adult around, they need time to recover from the stressful event, and they need to have a sense of control over their lives.
• In moments of great self-doubt, understanding the brain will help kids grasp that much of their behavior is chemical, not character.
  • Nature vs Nurture; connect to Yuval Noah Harare about self will in homo deus
• But around the turn of the twenty-first century, scientists started looking at what happens when we’re just sitting with our own thoughts. What they discovered was that there is a complex and highly integrated network in the brain that only activates when we are “doing nothing.” This is known as the default mode network.
  • Doing nothing is the most important something
• Our understanding of its functioning is still new, but we know it must be very important, as it uses 60 to 80 percent of the brain’s energy. When you’re sitting in a waiting room or unwinding after dinner, if you’re not reading, watching television, or on your phone, your default mode network is projecting the future and sorting out the past. It’s processing your life. It activates when we daydream, during certain kinds of meditation, and when we lie in bed before going to sleep. This is the system for self-reflection, and reflection about others, the area of the brain that is highly active when we are not focused on a task. It is the part of us that goes “off-line.” A 18 healthy default mode network is necessary for the human brain to rejuvenate, store information in more permanent locations, gain perspective, process complicated ideas, and be truly creative. It has also been linked in young people to the development of a strong sense of identity and a capacity for empathy.19 Not surprisingly, stress impairs the default mode network’s ability to work its magic. Scientists are concerned that because of technology’s ubiquity, young people have too few opportunities to activate their default mode network and, as a result, too few opportunities for self-reflection.
• Children between the ages of twelve and eighteen show more brain development than at any time in life other than the first few years.
• Adolescents also demonstrate a higher stress response than other groups when speaking publicly.
  • #[[Public Speaking]]
• We have a tendency in our society to think that “with enough hard work, anything is possible.” Well if you didn’t make it, the dangerous corollary goes, you must not have worked hard enough. There are enormous differences in people’s natural aptitudes and in how their brains work. (Different people will have different processing speeds, memory, and tolerance for stress.) And you can work hard and still not get what you want. The real question is, what do you make of that setback? Do you take it as a verdict on your worth? Do you decide to come up with a different strategy? Or do you take the hit and try for a different goal?
  • Decouple outcomes from success
• Make a list of the things your child has control over. Is there anything you can add to that list? Ask your child if there are things he feels he’d like to be in charge of that he currently isn’t.
• Research suggests that treating anxiety early significantly lowers the risk of recurring problems.
• Jonah’s parents meant well, but out of the cacophony of voices around him, one message was coming across loud and clear: We know what’s right for you, and you don’t. Imagine if you had a conversation with your spouse in which he or she said something like: “How was work today? Did you get a good report on your project? You understand how important it is for you to take your work seriously, right? I mean, I know it isn’t always easy or fun, but you really should see if you can get a promotion so you’ll have more options in the future. It just seems like maybe you aren’t doing your best all the time. Like maybe you could work a little harder.”
• This is the way a lot of loving parents think. But we’re going to ask you to let go of that way of thinking. To begin with, it doesn’t work. Despite extreme efforts on the part of adults to protect Jonah Irom himself, he continued to waste his time and theirs because he was not getting the message from his environment that “this is your work, this is your life, and you’re going to get out of it what you put into it.” He needed his parents to offer help, but also to let him know they understood that no one could make him work. Over the years, Bill has seen many kids like Jonah go on to be very successful, but this has only happened when their parents and teachers gave up trying to make them be successful and the kids were given a chance to figure it out on their own.
  • Accountability
• As Eckhart Tolle wrote, “They come into this world through you, but they are not ‘yours.”
• Third, and this is perhaps the most critical point, you can’t force a kid to do something he’s dead set against. Buying into the idea that you should and must try will just end up frustrating you when it doesn’t work.
• “I’m acting like I can make my child do this, and I actually can’t.”
• Authoritative parents want their kids to cooperate because they like and respect them, and want kids to learn from their own experiences.
• Kids need responsibility more than they deserve it.
• For most adolescents, and even for younger kids, waiting until they are mature enough to get all their homework done and to turn it in on time before giving up the enforcer role means you’ve waited too long.
• One thing only parents can do: love their kids unconditionally and provide them with a safe base at home. For children who are stressed at school or in other parts of their lives, home should be a safę haven, a place to rest and recover. When kids feel that they are deeply loved even when they’re struggling, it builds resilience. Battling your child about due dates and lost work sheets invites school stress to take root at home.
• “I love you too much to fight with you about your homework”
• The girl accurately saw her homework as her responsibility and willingly did it, further strengthening her sense of mastery and autonomy.
• “Doing well in school is the most important thing for a successful future.” We disagree. We think that developing a clear sense of who’s responsible for what is more important than always doing well. That is the key to raising a self-driven child.
  • Accountability != outcomes
• We recognize that there comes a point when a child no longer needs help getting dressed or putting on her shoes, and we also need to recognize the point when that child no longer needs our help managing her homework.
• Kids won’t reach their potential by constantly being driven. In fact, the opposite is true; they will do what is necessary to get you off their back, but they won’t do more, People go the extra mile when it matters to them, not when it matters to you.
  • Intrinsic motivation
• As it turned out, though Matthew had botched the test, he was fascinated by the material it covered (the biological principles of life). The whole family went hiking the weekend after the test, and as they walked, Ned asked Matthew more about what he’d learned. Matthew went on and on enthusiastically about the subject of the test. He revealed that he’d spent quite a bit of time independently researching the topic since the test. Top grade? No. Real curiosity and learning? Yes!
  • What are you optimizing for?
• Express confidence in your child’s ability to figure things out.
  • If you don’t no one will
• Start with the basics, by adopting the following three precepts when it comes to your kids:
• 1. “You are the expert on you.’
• 2. “You have a brain in your head.”
• 3. “You want your life to work.”
• When you buy into these three things, it’s much easier to tell your kid, “It’s your call. I have confidence in your ability to make informed decisions about your own life and to learn from your mistakes.” The trick is, you can’t just tell them this-you have to follow through. Sometimes you won’t like their decisions, but unless they’re outrageous, we suggest that you let them go with them anyway.
  • Compare to my experience with Mick Moylan
• Bill suggested that he let his daughter decide where it made the most sense for her to go, Greg practically laughed and expressed the common view that important decisions by definition are too important for young people to make themselves.
  • Compare to John Adams
• This is true. But when we say we want children and teens to make their own decisions as much as possible, what we really want is for them to make informed decisions. It’s our responsibility as parents to give the information and the perspective that we have-and that they lack-in order to enable them to make the best possible choices. Once properly informed, kids usually do make good deciSions for themselves-and their decisions are almost always as good as or better than our own.
  • Information disparity vs. lack of capability
• We need to set clear ground rules, while keeping in mind that our ultimate goal is not to produce compliant children as much as children who understand how to act and interact successfully in this world.
• So what does “It’s your call’” mean? Most simply: When it comes to making decisions about your kids’ lives, you should not be deciding things that they are capable of deciding for themselves.
  • Not just what’s easiest but what they’re capable of
• This means that by encouraging our kids-and requiring our adolescents-to make their own decisions, we are giving them invaluable experience in assessing their own needs honestly, paying attention to their feelings and motivations, weighing pros and cons, and trying to make the best possible decision for themselves. We help them develop a brain that’s used to making hard choices and owning them. This is huge and will pay big future dividends.
  • Teach to collaborate on decisions rather than obey commands. Building a muscle, not checking a box. Neuroscience.
• Therapist and writer Lori Gottlieb wrote an article for the Atlantic questioning why so many of her twentysomething patients were unaccountably depressed, even though they had great parents and on the surface great lives. This category of patients stumped her until she discovered the right questions to ask. “Back in graduate school,” she wrote, “the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?”
  • Look it up
• Suffering, though painful to watch, is essential for the development of resilience. Does it hurt them too much to see their child suffer? Or do they need to feel needed?
  • Let them suffer to learn
• “My parents aren’t writing the essays, I am. There is no ‘we’ here, and it drives me crazy when they talk that way. It’s my life and it’s my work, and it’s my stupid essay that I have to write.”
  • Individuality.
• Agency takes practice.
  • Connect to “we’re not earning heaven, we’re LEARNING heave.”
• Most of us work too much, eat too much, sleep too little, make bad investments, and find ourselves in careers that do not go as planned. Remember to be humble. Sometimes you just don’t know what’s right.
  • Who they become is more important than “doing things right.”
• Over thirty years ago, a fascinating study looked at the decisionmaking abilities of kids from ages nine to twenty-one. The study asked the participants how they would handle a really sensitive situation:
• Overall, the fourteen-, eighteen-, and twenty-one-year-olds got virtually identical scores on decision making, and the nine-year-olds’ scores were only slightly lower. we think this shows not only that nine-year-olds are capable decision makers, but also that when they come up short it’s because of lace of knowledge, not necessarily judgment.
  • John Quincy Adams
• Diane Dumas, he developed a “test of adultness,” which asks questions about love, leadership, interpersonal skills,
  • Look it up
• Epstein argues that here in America we infantilize adolescents, in part by acting as if they aren’t capable of making responsible decisions. While we can’t entirely stop teenagers from making impulsive choices, we can entrust them to make informed decisions about things that are important to them. Research has found that by the time kids are fourteen or fifteen, they generally have adult-level ability to make rational decisions. In fact, most cognitive processes reach adult levels by midadolescence.
  • John Quincy Adams
• Elementary schoolers: As children get older, you can start to offer them more choices about what activities to participate in, what foods to eat to stay healthy, and what schedule would work for enough sleep. “It’s your call” starts to make more sense to them. You might say something like, “I understand you really want to go to the movie opening tonight, and so do I. I will let you make the decision but first let’s think through the pros and cons. Because it’s opening night, it’s likely that the line will be very long, so we’ll have to get there early and wait. It’s cold outside, so you might be really cold while we wait. But to see the movie on its opening night with everyone else who is really excited about it would be fun.” Let’s say that the child decides to go to see the movie. Then you might say, “Great. Let’s also think about a Plan B in case it doesn’t work out the way we want it to. If you get tired in line or if there are no good seats available, how do you think we should handle that?”
  • Visualize your activities; connect to Chris Hadfield in The Profile
• Teenagers are the closest to legal age, and they are the ones who most need to hear this message: “I have confidence in your ability to make informed decisions about your own life and to learn from your mistakes.” That doesn’t mean they won’t make mistakes-they will. But with every mistake, they’ll develop better instincts and self-awareness, especially if you help them process what went wrong without blaming or saying, “I told you so.”
  • Approach adulthood with caution
• If a thirty-year-old came into Bill’s office and said that his life had been wasted because he’d made a bad decision in the eighth grade, or in high school, and had closed off all his options, Bill would say, “Buddy, get over it. You still have plenty of opportunities to shape your life.” Bill shares this hypothetical with kids who are panicked by a seemingly insurmountable setback, and also with their icked parents.
• Most development of children’s brains happens just by getting older. Letting them get stuck every once in a while, while you’re available to help them get out of the ditch, can actually help them grow.
• “What about kids who won’t do anything or go anywhere unless they’re forced? Or teenagers who want to stay home and play video games all summer?”
• Stephen Covey famously said (paraphrasing the well-known prayer of St. Francis), “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Ask your child questions in an effort to understand what’s behind her resistance.
  • Connect to dads letter - start where they are
• To improve your legitimacy, you have to show your child that he is being heard. So give him credit for making good arguments, by sometimes changing your position so that he knows that a well-thought-out argument is in fact a worthwhile pursuit.
• Ask your child whether something in his life isn’t working for him (his homework routine, bedtime, management of electronics) and if he has any ideas about how to make it work better.
  • Self reflection requires “self”
• Barry Glasser, a top sociologist and author of The Culture of Fear, concludes that “most Americans are living in the safest place at the safest time in human history,” but it doesn’t feel that way because 24/7 news and social media inundate us with scary story after scary story about kidnappings, drug overdoses, and freak occurrences that, in their ubiquity, muddy our perspective.’ This, combined with an increasingly litigious culture, has dramatically changed the way we think of “danger.” Let your six-year-old climb a tree and you’re considered careless. Let your eight-year-old walk to school on her own and you’re positively neglectful.
• Our anxiety is seeping into our kids. Children don’t need perfect parents, but they do benefit greatly from parents who can serve as a nonanxious presence.
• Bad news first: anxiety tends to run in families. Up to 50 percent of children of anxious parents develop anxiety disorders themselves.
• Epigenetics refers to the ways that experience affects genes by turning the function of specific genes on or off. So while children may be born with some genetic predisposition, it takes experiences to “turn on” the specific genes that ignite depression or anxiety.
• Who hasn’t worked in an infected office and felt the debilitating effects of just one permanently stressed-out person?
• A mother recently told us that she comes to all our lectures because every time she hears the message that it’s right (and safe) for her not to continually worry about her children or be on their case, she is able to “hold” the calmness and confidence, at least for some time.
  • Like sleep training; your job is not to constantly indulge them
• When Ned is there they feel calm, they remember the confidence he’s expressed in them, and the things he’s taught them come easily to mind. When he leaves, they’re on their own, and their own negative thoughts have freer rein. They do worse. And when you add in other kids, other anxious presences, the stress attacks like the plague, jumping from kid to kid and escalating each time.
• When it was Rosa’s turn, she talked about how her mom was very loving and affectionate, which she appreciated, but she always took the ups and downs of Rosa’s life too hard, so that Rosa learned to keep things from her to protect her. Rosa’s mom would still be upset about something long after Rosa was over it, which effectively eliminated her as a source of support. As an example, Rosa talked about the time she came home from preschool and told her mom no other kids would play with her, after which her mom burst into tears. Of course, parents can swing too far the other way, too. Another new mom sitting next to Rosa laughed and said, “Our moms should have met because maybe they would have balanced each other out. My mom would have said, I don’t send you to preschool to make friends-I send you to learn!”
  • Source of comfort
• The prefrontal cortex continues to develop rapidly in adolescence and into early adulthood, which is why Mark Twain said, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I couldn’t stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
  • You don’t have to fix your kids; you need to help them develop
• If you’re highly anxious, do something about it. Treating anxiety is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your family. Consider participating in cognitive behavioral therapy: you can learn very effective strategies for identifying and “talking back to” the distorted and unproductive thoughts that contribute to high anxiety. Learn to meditate. Take a yoga class. Be very regular in your exercise routine. Spend time in nature. Get more sleep. Socialize more with friends if it helps you feel calm.
  • Build your toolkit
• Get out a piece of paper and draw a vertical line in the middle. In the left-hand column, write statements such as the following: “It’s okay for Jeremy to have a learning disability,” “It’s okay that Sarah doesn’t have any friends right now,” “It’s okay for Ben to be depressed right now.” In the right-hand column, write down the automatic thoughts that come to your mind in response (likely rebuttal) to these statements. Then question these automatic thoughts. Ask questions such as, “Can I be absolutely sure that this thought is true?” “Who would I be if I didn’t believe this?” This kind of self-questioning exercise, developed by author and speaker Byron Katie and others, can serve as a useful tool for discovering the thoughts that trap you into negative judgements.”
  • We dwell more on negativity than positivity. Even about ourselves. “You are not necessarily who you think you are.” - connect to “The Happiness Trap” about “observing self” and learning to observe your negative thoughts.
• Don’t make yourself available to your kids at the expense of your own wellbeing. Wall off some “me” time.
  • Don’t lose your identity in your role as a parent
• Model self-acceptance and tell your kids what you’re doing.
  • Connect to patriarchal blessing about letting people see into your reason for doing what you’re doing. Life is not about being good at things as much as it I’d learning the master the psychology behind being good at things.
• The work of the renowned psychologist Carol Dweck tion and mindsets may be familiar to you, as it’s gotten a lot of on motivatention across fields over the years. She posits that when studci have a “fixed mindset,” they see their mistakes as coming Iro lack of ability, something they’re powerless to change. In con ir 66 when students have a “growth mindset,” they focus instead on then own effort as a means to become more successful
• To encourage a growth mindset, Dweck recommends praising effort and the various strategies kids use to solve problems, rather than their built-in ability. Say things like, “Your curiosity is really fun for me to see” over “You’re so smart”; or “I’m really impressed with how hard you worked on that test” instead of “Fantastic grade!” In Dweck’s words, “a focus on inner effort can help resolve helplessness and engender success.” A growth mindset is the MVP of the self-motivated child.
  • Be able to detach your value from your environment. Not just talking less about outcomes; you need to be less focused on outcomes to be genuine.
• Deci and Ryan have developed one of the bestsupported theories in psychology, known as self-determination theory (SDT), which holds that humans have three basic needs:
• A sense of autonomy A sense of competence A sense of relatedness
  • 1 - enable choices, 2 - “I can handle this”, 3 - I WANT to succeed for them
• Hundreds of studies of schools, families, and businesses have found that explaining the reasons why a task is important and then allowing as much personal foe dom as possible in carrying out the task will stimulate much m motivation than rewards or punishments. We now know that T teachers foster autonomy in their students, they will catalyze internal motivation and a desire for challenge, and that if parents promote autonomy and mastery, their kids will be more likely to explore their interests and extend themselves. The very best thing you can do to help your children develop self-motivation is to give them as much control over their choices as possible, including ask ing them what it is they want to be competent at and in charge of.
  • 1 - “whatever you are be a good one.”
• These parents focus so much on the performative aspects of competence that, through their nagging and plan making, they actually compromise the fulfillment of the other two needs, autonomy and relatedness. Think of selfdetermination theory as a three-legged stool. One extremely tall leg won’t make you sit higher, it will topple the whole thing over. But competence is important, too. None of us want to do something we feel like we constantly stink at. Yet as Dweck revealed, competence is more about our feeling that we can handle a situation than it is about being really great at something. It’s about feeling consciously competent, not about having an “I’m the Best!” trophy on a shelf. It’s an internal rather than external barometer of accomplishment. Supporting our kids in developing competence is our job as parents. “You worked really hard on that science test and I’m proud of you even if you didn’t the grade you wanted. I get imagine it’s clear to us both that you are getting better and are getting nearer to reaching your goal.” Remember that you can’t develop competence for them, and any attempt to do so will just undermine their own motivation.
  • Connect to Battle hymn of the Tiger mom - no autonomy. Doesn’t matter if it’s easier to do it yourself.
• Finally, relatedness refers to the feeling of being connected to others, of being cared about. When your child feels connected to his teacher, he’ll want to work hard for that teacher.
  • 3 - Coatue vs. Index - Adam Grant re: Steve Jobs on Armchair Expert
• Offering ice cream may help in the short term, but you can’t do it every night. Besides, we’ve said that rewards are counterproductive to intrinsic motivation. So how do you help a child develop a healthy dopamine system? The answer is surprisingly simple: encourage them to work hard at what they love.
  • Rewards vs intrinsic motivation
• It’s relatively new knowledge that we’re capable of forging new neural pathways, and that how and where we focus our attention makes a measurable difference in the way in which our brain develops.
  • Growth mindset
• When kids work hard at something they love and find challenging, they enter a state of what’s come to be called “flow,” where time passes quickly and their attention is completely engaged, but they’re not stressed. When you’re in flow, levels of certain neurochemicals in your brain-including dopamine-spike. These neurochemicals are like performance-enhancing drugs for the brain. You think better in flow, and you process information faster.
  • #Flow
• Just as frequent exposure to high levels of stress can sculpt a young brain in ways that are unhealthy, frequent exposure to states of flow can sculpt a young brain to be motivated and focused.
  • Track your “flow” time. Deliberate knowledge work practice - is there a glucose monitor that can track flow?
• Reed W. Larson and Natalie Rusk, “Intrinsic Motivation and Positive Development,” Advances in Child Development and Behavior 41, Positive Youth Development (2011). Richard M. Learner et al. (eds), Advances in Child Development and Behavior, Vol. 1, Burlington: Academic Press (2011): 89-130.
  • Look it up
• The best way to motivate him for the things you think he should focus on is to let him spend time on the things he wants to focus on.
• What he later realized is that, as a teenager, he was sculpting a brain that was very familiar with a flow state and that would eventually be able to put “the pedal to the metal when he found an academic discipline-and later a career-that turned him on.
  • “I am capable of doing this” -> “I love this”
• Finally, it can be helpful to remember that what motivates one child will not necessarily motivate another. Some kids are motivated largely by a desire to have close personal relationships or to help people, while others are energized by the desire to achieve at a high level or by a love of learning new things and gaining new skills.
  • Different kids = different strategies
• When parents pay attention to these differences, they can heb their kids understand what motivates them-and what’s truly important to them. This knowledge can also help parents understand why their kids will sometimes make decisions that seem to be ill-advised
  • #Self-reflection
• Not surprisingly, kids often find that telling themselves “I want to do it” is more motivating than telling themselves otherwise.
  • And if they don’t want to do it that’s a deeper question. “We have to want the consequences of what we want.”
• Research has also shown that kids often learn better from other kids than they do from adults, and that when a homework coach is an older kid, the one being tutored has a dopamine spike,” Another argument for outsourcing: if you have a tendency to be controlling, or even if you aren’t but your child perceives that you are, his saboteur instincts will kick in.
• What he says to the parents of these kids is that so long as they are working hard at something they really enjoy doing, he’s not worried, because he knows they’re shaping a brain that will eventually enable them to be successful.
  • Working hard is more important than what you’re working towards
• Ken Robinson is one of the leading thinkers in the area of finding your passion, and his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything emphasizes the importance of looking for that intersection of passion and skill. While it’s not a book that will necessarily capture the imagination of your average seventh grader, parents can share its stories-from that of Simpson’s creator Matt Groening, who had little interest in school but was always fanatical about drawing, to famous choreographer Gillian Lynne, who could never sit still in class as a child but thrived in a dance school. Stories like these can provoke a healthy discussion about what it means to want something and how to connect the dots to get there.6
  • #books-to-read #Self-reflection
• If supporting kids in the pursuit of their nonacademic interests is a good move, then withholding those interests as a punishment is quite obviously a bad one.
• You can also emphasize the importance of self-awareness. It’s astonishing to us how many kids have never asked themselves what it is they want, or have never had someone ask it of them. They’re too busy either trying to please others, or rebelling against others’ control. But they need to think for themselves about themselves. They need to consider their special talents and life purpose. They chould ask, “What do I want? What do I love to do?” You can help them ask these questions, even if you can’t supply the answers. Hard as it may be to accept this, it’s your responsibility to find interests and motivation in life.
  • Have higher expectations for your kids (John Quincy Adams) #Self-Reflection
• Bill knew better than to be surprised. A situation that may seem hopeless will often change because life changes. Opportunities come out of nowhere.
  • Natural selection of time
• Many Eeyores are homebodies who resist doing anything new or different and have a narrowly defined comfort zone. They often prefer to read or play solo or do video games rather than engage in more active tasks, and they are commonly reluctant to put themselves in unfamiliar social situations. Many parents say that if they didn’t nag their Eeyores continuously they’d never get out of the house.
  • Dax
• Julie Lythcott-Haims, former Stanford dean and author of How to Raise an Adult.”
  • #look-it-up
• What these studies suggest is that if you’re bright and motivated, it doesn’t much matter where you go to school. For some kids, knowing this makes it a bit easier to pay attention to what’s really important to them.
  • Understand what is and isn’t high stakes
• You can also share the big-fish-little-pond theory with your Hermione. This idea, developed by Herbert Marsh,” holds that you see yourself in a more positive light if you perform well in relation to your peer group. So, being a standout at a lesser-known school is often better in the long run than getting lost in the crowd at a more competitive school. In his book David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell told the story of a high-achieving student determined to go into science at Brown. She found the environment at Brown demoralizing, and let go of her science focus. At another, less competitive school, she may have given her natural interest more of a chance to bloom. Gladwell wrote, “Rarely do we stop whether the most prestigious of institutions is aland consider ways in our best interest.” Ask your child to think about whether it may be good for her to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond.
  • Optimize your environment for yourself, not yourself for your environment (sabbath made for man)
• When Bill’s kids were in elementary school, he made a point of telling them that there was a low correlation between grades in school and success in life. He said that while he would look at their report cards if they wanted him to, he was much more concerned about their development as students and as people.
• Ned tells every Hermione he encounters (and he comes across a lot of them) that the most important thing she can do is develop the brain she wants for the rest of her life. Does she want a brain that’s so stressed and tired that she is easily anxious and depressed thereafter? Does she want a workaholic brain? Or does she want a brain that is powerful, but also happy and resilient?
  • What is your strategy for the brain you want to develop?
• It’s hard to argue that our balance of rest and activity is optimal. Our culture does not settle down easily. A recent series of studies found that 64 percent of young men and 15 percent of young women chose to self-administer a mild electric shock rather than sit quietly with their own thoughts for six minutes.’ We do not know how to be without doing. Teens, adults, and increasingly even young children don’t sleep enough and don’t spend enough time on self-reflection, contributing to their feelings of being overloaded and overwhelmed. Parents will describe themselves as “crazy busy,” and a high percentage of the kids we see feel stressed, pressured, and tired.
  • “Be up and doing” - “doing nothing is the most important something”
• There are many forms of downtime. Anything that is relaxing or rejuvenating, like gardening or reading, we’re all for. Yet as the pace of life goes faster, we need to radicalize our downtime. Radical downtime does not mean playing video games, watching TV, surfing YouTube videos, texting with a friend, or participating in organized sports or activities. It means doing nothing purposeful, nothing that requires highly focused thought. This is one of the most powerful things we can do for our brains. It is enormously important as an antidote to the mind-scattering and mind-numbing effects of 24/7 technology and multitasking.
  • Define your downtime
• When we replay scenarios excessively, or when doing so is painful and we engage in negative thought loops, that’s not mind wandering, it’s ruminating. This is an important distinction. You really need unstressed periods of downtime every day.
  • Daydreaming: a skill worth practicing
• But here’s the thing about the DMN: it cannot activate when you’re focused on a task. Researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang describes two alternating brain systems: 1) a task-positive or “looking out” system that’s activated when we’re engaged in goal-directed tasks, and 2) a task-negative or resting system that is for “looking in. When we’re focused on external tasks that require concentration, ranging from finding an address to studying for an exam, we shut off our daydreaming, “looking in” part of the brain. And when we daydream, our ability to “look out” and to do an explicit task evaporates.
  • When I’m driving
• Daniel J. Levitin emphasizes that insights are far more likely to come when you are in the mind-wandering mode than in the task-focused mode,
  • [[Roam Research]] - mental wandering
• As Carlo Rovelli pointed out in Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Einstein’s breakthrough on relativity came shortly after a year spent in Italy “loafing aimlessly” and attending occasional lectures.)
  • When can we do that?
• People with an efficient DMN do better on tests of cognitive ability, including measures of memory, flexibility of thought, and reading comprehension. People who are efficient at toggling their DMN on and off also have better mental health.
  • Default Mode Network (DMN)
• We live in a world where “boredom” is a dirty word, and people often compete to see who’s busier, as if their sense of self-worth could be measured by how little time they have. This hyperproductivity trickles down to our kids. Think of your typical American family driving somewhere in the car: the kids want to listen to something, watch something, or play a game. They’ve forgotten how to look out the window, chitchat, or daydream, Psychologist Adam Cox noted that whereas fifty years ago kids might be bored alter a couple of hours with nothing to do, nowadays kids become bored after thirty seconds, while most adults feel the need to check their phones in the four seconds it takes to slow down and stop at a stop sign.° Boredom is unsettling for hyperstimulated teens, whereas the “chaos of constant connection is soothingly familiar.”
  • Connect to Buffett quote about a mans ability to sit quietly in a room
• What if you just sat there for a couple of minutes instead? When you’re driving, or walking or running for exercise, are you listening to Spotify or to a podcast? What if you listened to your own thoughts instead? What would you think about? We need to be more intentional about downtime now that stimulation is everywhere. Whereas hiking or camping was once a respite, soon there will be nowhere to go where you can’t be connected. We need to actively choose to not take our phones with us, or to turn them off.
  • What do you think about when you don’t have to think?
• If there is one thing we hope you will do differently after reading this, it is let your kids do nothing.
• We schedule them in activity after activity so that they can keep up with other kids and never be “wasting time.” But that free time to daydream is actually essential. Child psychologist Lyn Fry recommends that parents sit down with their kids at the outset of a summer break and have them make a list of all the things they’d like to do on their own during their free time. If they complain of boredom, they can refer to their list.”
  • Don’t overschedule them, especially early on
• Learning to tolerate solitude-to be comfortable with yourself-is one of the most important skills one acquires in childhood.
  • Are you comfortable with yourself?
• The goal is to focus on the moment-to-moment experience, without judging or reacting. You monitor the content of your thoughts and your reactions to them. Other mindfulness practices include scanning the body for areas of stress, and mindful eating and walking. Some mindfulness practices encourage the development of ethical values such as patience, trust, acceptance, kindness, compassion, and gratitude.
  • Observant self - The Happiness Trap
• Research on the impact of mindfulness on children is still in the early stages, but studies have shown that in the school years these practices can lower levels of stress, aggression, and social anxiety, improve executive functions such as inhibition and working memory, and contribute to stronger performance in math.” Studies on adults also show changes in brain activation and even in gene expression-the turning on and off of specific genes.
  • Train your kids to observe their mental state #Self-reflection
• When Bill first explored meditation, he was told that it would allow him to do less and accomplish more because a deeply rested brain can work so much more efficiently than a tired and stressed brain.
  • Many are called, few are chosen. Better with a chosen few than the unqualified many
• Consider learning to meditate yourself. The University of Massachusetts Medical School has a Center for Mindfulness with great resources (umassmed.edu/cfm), as does the University of California, San Diego (health.ucsd.edu/specialties/mindfulness/Pages/default.aspx), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (centerhealthyminds.org). You can also visit the main TM Web site (tm.org).
  • Do this intentionally, not haphazard
• In the early years of the twentieth century, adults in America slept nine hours a night or more. The spread of electricity and technology changed everything. Now we sleep on average two hours less. Sleep experts say that if you’re tired during the day or need caffeine to keep you going, you’re not getting enough sleep. And if you need an alarm clock to wake you up, you also need more sleep. By those measures, many of us are seriously sleep deprived.
  • Is sleep deprivation a health crisis?
• Our bad habits are exacerbated by insufficient sleep.
• There is no difference in performance on cognitive tasks between older adolescents who sleep four to six hours per night for six weeks and those who get no sleep at all for three days.
• Sleep deprivation has physical implications. It impairs blood sugar regulation and contributes to obesity. Studies of children in Japan, Canada, and Australia found that kids who get less than eight hours of sleep per night have a 300 percent higher obesity rate than kids who sleep ten hours.” In Houston, a study of teens showed that the chance of obesity increased 80 percent for each hour of lost sleep.” If teens are sleep deprived, they’re also likely to get sick a lot more, as sleep deprivation immune function. Sleep loss also leads to a significant decrease in cancer-killing cells, enough for the American Cancer Society to classify nightshift work as a probable carcinogen.
• Sleep is critical to learning. There’s almost nothing more important to learning than being well rested. Simply put, it is lar more effective to teach someone for four hours after they’ve slept for eight than to teach them for eight hours after they’ve slept for four. It doesn’t take much sleep deprivation to impact thinking and cognitive performance.
• Sleep expert Matthew Walker likens it to hitting the “save” button. Electrical waves travel from one part of the brain to another in what Walker calls a “slow synchronized chant,” helping to connect pieces of information in different parts of the brain, relate them to one another, and build a tapestry framework of understanding.”
  • #[[Roam Research]]
• Now it’s possible that these kids are just more efficient and learn more easily, so that they can complete their work and get to bed at sensible hours. But it’s more likely that they’re more efficient and learn with greater ease precisely because they’re well rested
• We see a lot of kids who hate school. Not coincidentally, a student’s sense of control lowers with every year they attend.
• From preschool through to college, we want kids to have a school experience that is engaging, and inventive. School should provide a mixture of stimulation and downtime. It should encourage kids’ natural curiosity and allow them to be in a state of flow for long periods of the day. In an ideal school, teachers have autonomy pund kids have choices. This type of school environment provides a nearly perfect model of an internal locus of control. Unfortunately, whether you go public or private, this isn’t the direction schools are going.
  • #Flow
• As early as first or second grade, kids are bogged down by homework. By high school, they feel defined by: 1) their grades, 2) their standardized test scores, and 3) their college admissions-all of which depend on external validation. Some adult somewhere to whom they can rarely make an appeal is sorting them.
  • #[[Intrinsic Motivation]]
• Educational leaders and policy makers aren’t asking, “What do children need for healthy brain development?” “How do they learn best?” or “When’s the optimal time to teach him or her to read or do algebra?” Rather, they seem to be asking, “What do we need this child to be able to do in order to meet our school, local, or national standards?”
• Even some top students take what Ned calls a “station-to-station” attitude, refusing to do anything that doesn’t contribute to a grade.? We’re not raising curious learners who are motivated to develop their own minds. We’re raising kids who are overly focused on metrics and outcomes.
  • #[[Intrinsic Motivation]]
• It also helps to offer more than one way to demonstrate mastery of material, seek student feedback, encourage them to explore strategies that work for them, and more generally explain why they’re being asked to do things and what you hope they will gain from them.
  • Connect to patriarchal blessing
• But perhaps the most effective thing you can do is to emphasize to your child that he is responsible for his own education. It’s not his teacher’s job, it’s not his principal’s job, and it’s not your
  • Wendy Mogel - resilience learned by having a bad teacher
• We need a certain level of arousal-from curiosity, excitement, or mild stress-to reach our optimal level of mental acuity. But when we’re too stressed, we can’t think straight. Our brains become inefficient.
• What this means is that optimal levels of stress for girls often isn’t enough to motivate boys, and optimal stress for boys can be overwhelming for many girls. (Remember, these are averages-every kid is different. Some girls are more boylike and vice versa.) As a parent, it is worth remembering that what works to motivate you may not work for your kid, and what seems like no big deal to you may be really overwhelming for your child.
  • #Self-reflection
• you consider the Yerkes-Dodson curve in relation to school, you may see a third of kids in the optimal state of learning, called “relaxed alertness,” a third overstressed, and a third bored to sedation.
  • What does the optimal learning environment look like?
• Students learn and perform best in an environment that offers high challenge and low threat—when they’re given difficult material in a learning environment in which it is safe to explore, make mistakes, and take the time they need to learn and produce good work.
  • We don’t have a system that allows for failure
• Many of the kids we see aren’t learning in this environment. They’re learning in a brain-toxic environment, where their days consist of stress and fatigue, often accompanied by high levels of boredom. You know that classical description of war as “interminable boredom punctuated by moments of terror”? Many schools have become pastel versions of this. As a result, many students aren’t learning well and are suffering from stress-related symptoms.
• Working memory is probably the most crucial of all the executive functions when it comes to learning. It’s what allows you to hold information in mind while manipulating or updating it. Working memory allows you to relate the present to the and future, enables you to make connections, and is key to creativity. You could say that working memory is learning. Some experts say past that working memory will become the new IQ-because it predicts academic success and life outcomes better than IQ.’ When kids are stressed and their working memory is impaired, it’s hard for them to integrate information and to grasp and retain the thread ofa narrative. Think of the brain like the RAM memory in a computer that lets programs run (rather than storage on the hard drive). A large cognitive load-too many things on your mind-is like having too many browsers open. At some point, the computer starts to slow down or to crash. Too many stresses, and so does the brain.
  • Consumerized neuroscience #Memory - How do we build towards optimal working memory development?
• Survival will always trump learning. Although we want schools to challenge our kids, they should do so in an environment that feels accepting and encouraging. What this looks like will vary depending on the circumstances, but the questions are the same: Do our kids feel safe in school, physically and emotionally? Do they have a sense of control over what they’re doing in the classroom? Is it safe for them to make mistakes?
  • Get your kids out of survival mode. Is a safe environment easier in home school?
• Tonight I failed you, and I would like to ask your forgiveness. I know my actions cannot be justified, but I would like to explain what happened. This afternoon I saw one of your classmates’ moms, and she questioned me about your performance on the math test yesterday. I shrugged and said that I did not know about a math test. When she shook her head disapprovingly at me, I felt the shame of a negligent mom. My ego got tangled up and confused. When I came home, I fired questions at you about test prep and results. I told you I wanted to check your homework and see your grades. Incredulous, you stared at me with tears in your eyes. You have always been an intellectually curious and creative child. You are helpful and inclusive, diligent but noncompetitive. I allowed a mom who was trying to ascertain if her child had better results than my child get in the way of my relationship with my child. I promise that I will never again ask how you scored on a test, never check your homework or grades online, and never even look at your report card unless you choose to show me that. You are not a number or a letter to me; you are my dear gift who deserves my respect. I hope I can re-earn your trust and respect. I love you. Mom
  • Your relationship with your child is not a performance for someone else. Warren Buffet story “would you rather be known as the worlds greatest lover?”
• These teams can focus on ways of increasing student and teacher autonomy, creating more opportunities for downtime during the school day, and modifying homework policy (like removing homework requirements during vacations).
  • Easier during home school?
• Why are young kids piled up with homework when, despite ninety years of research, there is no compelling evidence that homework contributes significantly to learning in the elementary school years? And why are high schoolers expected to put in so many hours when research shows that homework’s efficacy is limited at best? Small amounts of homework (one to two hours a night) can contribute to academic achievement for middle and high school kids, but any more than that backfires when it comes to actual learning.
• Our motto is “Inspire-but don’t require.” We want teachers to inspire kids to want to learn outside the classroom. Several studies have shown that when kids have some control over the topics they study, they’re more likely to be engaged in the work and to complete it, a compelling reason for most homework to be vole tary and ungraded.
  • #[[Sora School]]
• Finnish students-who have among the highest educational outcomes in the world-have the lightest homework requirement, rarely receiving more than a half hour per day. The most prominent spokesman for Finnish education, Pasi Sahlberg, reports that many primary and lower school students finish most of their homework before leaving school and that fifteen-year-old students in Finland do not use private tutors or take additional lessons outside of school. He points out that this makes the performance of Finnish students even more astonishing, as students in many Asian countries who perform comparably in reading, math, and science spend much of their time outside of school being tutored and taking additional classes.
  • Connect to Smartest Kids in the world
• Schools like to say they use evidence-based policies, so ask your principal for the evidence behind the school’s homework policy. Try using one of our favorite lines from Sara Bennett and Nancy Kalish’s book The Case Against Homework: “It’s not working for my child.” You’d be surprised by how willing teachers are to make adjustments if homework has really become a problem.
• We now teach reading to five year-olds even though evidence shows it’s more efficient to teach them to read at age seven, and that any advantage gained by kids who learn to read early washes out later in childhood.”
• When kids fail again and again, they internalize failure.
• Relax and take a long view, even if no one else around you is. Most kids who learn to read at five aren’t better readers at nine than those who learn to read at six or seven.
• Neuroscientists are fond of saying “neurons that fire together, wire together.” What we do repeatedly with deliberate effort more readily becomes etched in our brains. Henry Roediger, a University of Washington psychologist who is an expert on testing, thinks that while the word “test” has a very negative connotation, it’s still one of the most powerful learning tools available. As he observed, when you struggle to recall a fact or concept, the act of doing so strengthens your memory of it, unlike simply reviewing notes. “Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he said.
  • Connect to Chapter 11 in How to Take Smart Notes
• Also consider testing from the teachers’ point of view. It forces them to teach to the test, giving them little autonomy. It makes them fear for their job, as their contract often depends on the test scores of their students (over which they have little direct control).
  • #Incentives
• In sum, schools should focus more on nurturing healthy brain development and less on test scores. They should be exploring how to make the school experience less stressful, to promote selfunderstanding and self-regulation in students, to maximize selfmotivation by promoting autonomy, and to maximize engagement by incorporating the arts into all aspects of teaching. Bill recently coauthored a chapter in an excellent book on the integration of the arts in instruction: William Stixrud and Bruce A. Marlowe, “School Reform with a Brain: The Neuropsychological Foundation for Arts Integration,” in Arts Integration in Education, ed. Gail Humphries Mardirosian and Yvonne Pelletier Lewis (Bristol, UK: Intellect Ltd., 2016).
• The approach to your child’s education that we’re advocating won’t always be embraced. In some regions of the country (and, indeed, of the world), the ultracompetitive school, the multiple AP classes, and the race to the finish feel as inevitable as the Starbucks on every street corner. In their conversations with Bill over the years, many driven teenagers who are taking medication for depression have implied (as have their parents) that if they managed to get into an elite college, it would be worth everything they had done (i.e., compromised) to achieve that end. It’s not. As Robert Sapolsky has said, depression is the cruelest disease. For kids to become depressed because they’re too tired and stressed and have heen driven for too long is too high a price to pay for that admissions letter. Getting in is only one piece of the college experience. The most crucial question, which we will turn to later, is what happens when you get there.
  • What is the true cost? Important to think about the whole child. Not just the academic.
• Remind your child of the big picture, that grades matter less than the ways he or she develops as a student and person.
  • Whatever you are, be a good one.
• By the time they’re seven, most American kids have spent the equivalent of one full year 24/7 in front of a screen. While only 35 percent of them socialize in person after school, and almost as few speak on the phone to one another, 63 percent exchange text messages daily.
• Technology is an incredible tool with the great power to enrich lives, but the things it displaces-family time, face-to-face interaction with friends, study time, physical activity, and sleep-are invaluable, and the way technology trains the brain to expect constant stimulation is deeply troubling. In Adam Alter’s book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, he makes the condemning point that many of those who work in technology and best understand its power don’t want their kids using it. Many of them send their kids to Waldorf schools, which ban technology from the classroom and make a point of actively discouraging it at home up until the age of twelve. The king of tech himself, Steve Jobs, was careful to limit his kids’ technology use and wouldn’t get iPads for his own kids. Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired, told Nick Bilton of the New York Times: “My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”
• But it also represents a great opportunity. Think of it as a beast that, when tamed, can bring joy and possibility into your child’s life. Learning to tame the beast is a powerful skill-one that will stay with them for years to come. The key is to teach your kids how to stay in charge.
  • Two wolves - “the one I feed.”
• Game designer, speaker, and writer Jane McGonigal, an unabashed advocate, argues that people who game extensively develop four useful characteristics: ) urgent optimism-the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, accompanied by the conviction that they can be successful; 2) enhanced sociability-research suggests that we like people better after we play a game with them, even if they’ve won, because playing a game together builds trust; 3) blissful productivity-we’re happier working hard to win than we are relaxing or goofing around; and 4) epic meaning-gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions. These four superpowers, says McGonigal, result in “superempowered hopeful individuals.” Just imagine what we could accomplish if we could channel this energy for the good of the planet.
  • Good things. But better? Best?
• Reading used to be linear-there were no distractions, it was just line after line, page after page after page. Now anyone who spends significant time on a computer reads differently. They look for keywords, for links. They skim. Maryanne Wolf, a scientist whose book Proust and the Squid is one of the best books written about reading and the brain, has seen these changed patterns in her own brain. After a day of computer work, she tried to read a lengthy and complicated novel. “I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed,” she said. This change of reading style is affecting everyone, but children-who are growing up with iPads instead of books, with Wikipedia instead of the encyclopedia-are most impacted.
  • #Reading #[[Deep Work]] - How often do you sit and ponder the words?
• We do more of something if it’s easier, whether it’s e-mailing rather than sending a letter, or texting rather than trying to reach someone on the phone. Technological breakthroughs almost by definition must make life more stressful, because they quicken the pace and raise the bar of what can be accomplished. George Beard was on to this even before the greatest technological breakthrough in history: the use of electric light, which enabled us to live outside of nature’s rhythms.
  • Maybe it’s worth doing some things the hard way?
• A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at the stress responses of people who had direct exposure to the Boston Marathon bombing, and those who were exposed to six hours-plus of media about the bombing. Believe it or not, it was the latter reported the higher levels of stress.
  • Why?
• Social media turns our attention from our own experience (Did I enjoy my sandwich? Or the people I actually had lunch with?) to what other people think of our experience. Adolescents are already inclined to care deeply about what their - think of them. By making more of their lives public, they give up peers the few parts that belong solely to them.
  • Is your experience less valuable if it doesn’t generate as much attention?
• Technology keeps kids from getting the things that we know they need for healthy development: sleep (at least 84 percent of teen cell phone users have slept right beside their phone, and teens send an average of thirty-four texts per night after going to bed),” exercise, radical downtime, unstructured child-led play, and the real-life, face-to-face social interaction with friends and parents that is such a powerful antidote to stress.
  • Explore “radical downtime”
• Staring at a screen instead of a person is having a measurable effect on our kids’ levels of empathy. There’s been a 40 percent drop over the last thirty years in levels of empathy reported by college students, most of which has occurred in the last ten years. This can easily be connected to a decrease in face-to-face communication. Think about it: if someone is cruel online, he doesn’t have to deal with seeing the object of that cruelty in the flesh.
  • Dehumanization of our peers. Connect to the story of senators not having to live in DC anymore and socialize
• When it comes to video games, we hear so many parents say things like, “He’s wasting his life away playing video games.” The conversations theyre having with their kids take on a disrespectful tone. Instead, play video games with your kid. Try to understand whats appealing about it. You might be surprised. Acknowledge that you “get” it, that it’s fun, and that you know it’s important to them, but also that it’s important not to become dependent. Showing an interest and being knowledgeable will help you to effectively negotiate limits and intervene if problems arise. We’re much better able to influence our kids when they feel respected and emotionally close to us. Learn about their interests for these reasons, but most important, because doing so matters to them.
  • #Empathy
• Studies show that kids feel and perform better after they’ve been immersed in nature-or even after they’ve looked at nature posters.” The Japanese have a term for this: shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.” Walking in nature “cleans” the prefrontal cortex of its clutter, calming us, centering us, and allowing us to perform better on tasks or tests that demand working memory. Another study showed that after five days in tech-free summer camps, kids demonstrated improvement in empathy. We’ve personally known dozens of technology-sick kids who went to summer camp and said that after the first week, they didn’t even miss their phones or games.
  • #[[The Luna Landing]]
• Without taking anything away from Ms. Hofmann, we suggest that you take the contract idea a step further and create one with your children. If they are a part of the decision making around technology use, they will gain practice thinking critically about the need to selfregulate, and will be much more apt to stick to the agreement.
  • Look up her letter to her 13-year old son; connect to “Better screens” from Camden
• Don’t try to work toward a solution in the midst of an argument, or when you’re asking your child to shut their technology down. As with any such conversation, find a time when no one’s back is up and no action is required immediately.
• And while playing video games for hours on end does seem to make you a better multitasker, you still perform much more poorly than if you were to do one task at a time. You can’t do two things at once if they require conscious thought, so multitasking is really a misnomer. If you try to focus on two or more things at once, what you’re actually doing is rapidly shifting between tasks. Multitasking compromises the quality of learning and performance. It’s highly inefficient, as people make many more errors and in the end perform much more slowly. Multitasking also limits opportunities for deep thought and abstraction and for creativity and invention. This may be why adolescents in what has been called the “app generation” shy away from questions that don’t have direct, simple, and quick solutions.” Most concerning, multitasking has been shown to elevate cortisol levels, meaning that it puts more stress on the nervous system. One of the main reasons that meditation and mindfulness are so popular is that they are a strong antidote to multitasking: being in the present as opposed to doing three things at once.
  • #Multi-tasking #[[Deep Work]] - connect to Hugh Nibley story about red and blue glasses
• What we ultimately want is resilient, brain-healthy kids who will be on a strong footing when it comes to life’s many obstacles, both big (like not getting into the school of their dreams) and small (like coping with a rejection at a school dance). We want to help our kids develop a brain that’s capable of thinking skillfully and of taking hits from all directions. Though we wish them the best at every turn, we don’t want our kids to be afraid of taking risks or to unravel when things don’t turn out as they’d hoped.
  • Resilience. Grit.
• There is a vast literature on the power of visualizing the accomplishment of goals. The idea is that the brain can’t really differentiate between an actual experience and an experience that is vividly imagined (that’s why we get scared watching scary movies, even though we know they aren’t true).
  • Learn to daydream
• It’s not that competition is bad per se-your kid needs to learn how to go for it when she really wants to win-but it is far more effective when the person she is competing with is herself. She may not have control over how much someone else practices or how good they are, but she has total control over how much she practices to beat her prior time or score. Seeing yourself get better at something is enormously rewarding. The truth is, you’re never too young to set a personal best goal, or too old.
• Within the first few minutes of testing, Bill saw what they meant. While Ben was bright and articulate, he peppered his answers with sentences like, “I’m not going to be very good at this,” “I can’t do anything fast,” and “You’re gonna give me a bad grade, aren’t you?” When he got to the first hard item, he slammed his fist on the desk and said, “I can’t do this.” If Bill pressed him, Ben became so anxious and upset that he seemed to be on the verge of either crying or exploding.
  • The story we tell ourselves (e.g. “I’m a bad parent. I’m dumb.”) vs stopping to understand what’s going on inside your brain. Negative self-talk
• Using simple language and vivid imagery and explaining the science of emotions can be remarkably effective, as is taking the problem out of the realm of the personal and into the scientific.
  • Talk about everything more
• Bill and Carly concluded that every tutoring session with Ned should focus, in part, on what’s known as Plan B thinking. Carly needed to think about what she would do if she didn’t get into Columbia and, over time, to allow herself to feel okay and even positive about other options. Only by letting go of the fear that she might blow her entire life if she didn’t get into Columbia could she calm her stress response sufficiently to focus on answering test questions that she knew the answers to. Plan B thinking (“What are some other things you could do if it doesn’t work out as you hope?”) is key to maintaining a healthy approach to potential setbacks.
  • Prepare for the worst, and expect the best to come
• Plan B thinking helps you put things into perspective. By envisioning alternate futures and creating backup plans, kids (and their parents) learn that if Plan A doesn’t work, the world won’t come to an end. Plan B thìnking strengthens the prefrontal cortex’s ability to regulate the amygdala. It’s the prefrontal cortex’s job to formulate plans and goals-and having a clear sense of what you’ll do if your first option doesn’t work out nmakes it easier to stay calm and in control. Few things are more stressful to kids than the feeling that “I have to, but I can’t.” Plan B allows you to think more constructively. “If I can’t do this, then I could do that.” It also increases flexibility and adaptability. Over time, practicing Plan B thinking will give you confidence that you can handle stress and setbacks.
• “Im so stupid.” “I’m such an idiot.” “How could I be so dumb?!” We routinely hear these comments from kids, and many parents despair when they hear consistent self-deprecating comments. But don’t race to talk your child out of it. What you might say if your kid is caught in a circle of “I suck at everything” is something like, “That’s one way of seeing it. I see things differently. I’d be happy to share my view with you if you want to hear it.” If your child doesn’t want to hear it, keep it to yourself and hope for a better moment. Unwanted wisdom may make them grab tighter to their negative view of themselves because now it’s become a matter of control.
• Teach your kids to be as supportive of themselves as they are of their best friend-to say, “C`mon! You can do this, Heather.” Third-person self-talk is much more powerful than first-person selftalk. If your daughter refers to herself by name, she is more likely to take the more distanced, supportive-friend stance than to act as critic in chief.
  • Positive self-talk
• When you ask yourself what the most likely explanation is, it’s usually not disaster. There are certainly times when really bad things happen, but it doesn’t make sense to catastrophize every day of your life.
  • Pay attention to your bias based on statistical inaccuracies - connect to Mental Models (Hanlon’s Razor)
• One of the most common mental habits that makes us feel out of control is catastrophizing-otherwise known as making a mountain out of a molehill. A simple way to help kids avoid catastrophizing is to teach them to ask themselves, whenever they’re upset, “Is this a big problem or a little problem?” In cognitive behavioral therapy, kids are taught to distinguish between a disaster (like famine) and something that’s temporarily frustrating or embarrassing, between “I’ll die if this happens” and “I’ll be disappointed but I probably won’t die.” If it’s a little problem, the first line of defense is to use self-soothing mechanisms, like a cool-down spot, deep breathing, or Plan B thinking, to calm themselves down. For most problems, these tools will be enough. When problems feel too big, we want kids to seek help.
  • Better than “unless you’re bleeding…”
• The Latin root of the word emotion, emovere, means “to move.” Our bodies and minds are linked, and the part of the brain that tells the body to move is adjacent to the part that’s responsible for clearheaded thinking. There is a close overlap between our motor control functions and our mental control, or executive functions, which is one reason why exercise is so beneficial for developing selfregulation.
• Yoga, martial arts, horseback riding, fencing, drumming, and rock climbing all fall in a category of exercise in which you are using your mental and motor skills to develop your executive functions.
• In his book The Mismeasure of Man, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould pointed out that simply assigning a number to something doesn’t mean we’ve measured it. Or, to borrow the old adage, “Not everything that can be measured matters, and not everything that matters can be measured.” Our obsession with metrics has led to the testing-industrial complex-a multibilliondollar business that’s only getting bigger.
  • Fundamental misunderstanding of testing
• Where tests become problematic is when they are seen as Binet feared they would be-as a marker of intelligence. It’s true that you cannot do well on the SAT or ACT unless you know certain things (we’ll leave it to others to debate the merits of those things), but one can be smart and know plenty and still not do well. So folks who believe these tests confirm how smart they are and folks who believe the tests do not reflect just how smart they are are both right.
• Those sample tests that you hate taking are serving an important function. They improve your process and ingrain a focus on the process itself so that nothing on test day is new. As the aphorism goes. “Practice like you’ll play so you can play like you’ve practiced.”
  • Daydream
• The other way to counter the stress of unpredictability is through Plan B thinking. When you’re planning a party or wedding, you don’t know what the weather will be like on the big day So what do you do? The helpful wedding planner suggests that in UI the event of rain, there’s a $5,000 tent you can rent to ensure your guests won’t be soaked. This is called Plan B. (It’s also called extortion, because there’s no way a tent costs that much for any event other than your wedding.)
  • Plan for worst, expect the best
• Show them you trust them, advise them, and then let go.
• Given the brain-toxic lifestyles that many college students lead, it’s not surprising that they often don’t have much to show for their four or five years on campus. A recent book called Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa revealed that more than 45 percent of the 2300 undergraduates at twenty-four colleges who took the College Learning Assessment showed no significant improvement by the end of their sophomore year in critical thinking, writing skills, or complex reasoning. After four years, a full 36 percent failed to demonstrate significant improvement in these areas, despite the tremendous maturation in the prefrontal cortex that occurs during this period. Although Arum and Roksa attribute this striking lack of intellectual development to colleges valuing research over teaching, and students seeking easy courses and failing to study adequately, the fact that students’ brains tend to function at such a low level of efficiency is also highly relevant. Something is seriously wrong with this picture, and we think it has a lot to do with the lack of control kids have going into college, and the fact that their brains have not been allowed to mature effectively.
  • Do we measure this post-college?
• Many of them have had parents or guidance counselors who have essentially force-marched them down the straight path to college, reinforcing the idea that it’s more important to try to make kids do well than to help them truly understand that they are responsible for their own lives.
  • #[[Intrinsic Motivation]]
• Does she know what’s hard for her and how it affects her? Does she recognize that when she doesn’t get eight hours of sleep, she gets emotional? Does she know that when she gets stressed, it really helps her to go for a run? Does she understand when she works best and when she needs to rest? Does she know what she is likely to meed help with in college? Now you may say that one could ask these questions of many adults and find them wanting, but a basic level of self-understanding and a willingness to take care of oneself and to moderate or change behavior if necessary for one’s wellbeing is essential for your child to thrive in a college environment.
  • Self-understanding = [[Self-reflection]]. Being spiritual helps you pay attention to yourself more than you naturally would. (Gospel-backed trends go further in secular world e.g. family history, meditation). Help children identify their emotions. “Why are you frustrated?” Worldly renditions won’t lead to covenants. Christ offers on (April 2021) -> “covenant-adjacent lives”
• You won’t get a sense of control over your life by avoiding hard work or receiving unearned trophies. It comes from diligence and commitment, Most folks are proud of their scars. Few runners brag about their marathon times, but they will regale you about blisters cramps, and how they could barely move by the end…but still finished. We gain strength from what we invest in and accomplish.
  • People think hard = bad because they’re focused on right now. Not growth. What is accomplished is not the most important thing. It’s about what you become along the way. Stephen Fry video: “what’s that all about.” - previous paragraph 26 miles into a marathon.
• Joel had his eyes on the Ivy League school his whole family had attended. He was really good at math but struggled with vocabulary. Every week he would ask Ned, “Do you think I can get 700s?” Ned said, “Yeah, I do. You can get there. You just need to put in a few minutes of vocab each day, and bit by bit you’ll get there.”
• “Okay,” Joel said, “give me stuff to do.” The next lesson, he’d show up (as his dad predicted) having done no work and ask, “Do think I can get 700s?” It was like Groundhog Day. He made inno.
• cremental progress, mainly because his parents were propping him up with twice-weekly visits to Ned. But when he went to collegehe did make it into that Ivy League school-he was on his own, and he didn’t finish the first semester. Is it any wonder? So often parents carry their kids 26.1 miles of a marathon, then set them down when they’re within sight of the finish line. When they cross over that finish line, everyone hugs and congratulates them. But they haven’t really gotten there. They had very little to do with it-and they know it.
  • Connect to prior quote
• Ned sees a lot of exhausted kids who feel they are on a constant treadmill. His student Elaine told him, “When I think about how all I’ve done in high school is work to get grades and scores, I feel like I wasted four years of my life. I didn’t do anything fun.”
  • How will your kids measure their life? #[[Clayton Christensen]]
• Let’s say that your child is dead set on college, but you have misgivings. If he has a full scholarship or is paying his own tuition, it’s his call. But if you are providing some financial support for the college years, it’s reasonable for you to identify yourself as a stakeholder.
  • Treat it like a financial investment
• Begin to outline together the kinds of skills your child will need to develop over the next four years in order to demonstrate their readiness. Tell him you will want to see that he can basically run his own life for at least six months prior to going off to college.
• Do you know how stressful it is to work so hard in everything and know that there are always other people who are better, that you can never be the best? And, when you have parents who are super smart and super successful, and they went to Harvard and are successful attorneys and you’re wondering how you will ever be successful and be able to afford a house and have a family? And you’re thinking, “My parents are smart and I go to a great school, so why can’t I do the same thing they do?” And, “I wonder if I’ll be able to get into a good college, even one that isn’t nearly as good as where they went or as good as what they expect of me.
• This habit of all-or-nothing thinking can start early and persist well past college.
• The conversation sparked a question we love to ask kids: What job do you think has saved the most lives over the last hundreds of years? Though a healthy debate could be had, we think the likely answer is sanitation worker. But EMT would be near the top of that list. Think about it this way: In a crisis, who would you most want to show up to help: A) an investment banker, B) a lawyer, C) a neuropsychologist, D) an SAT tutor, or E) an EMT?
• One of the major challenges keeping young people from developing a healthy sense of control is their narrow and distorted views of the adult world and what it takes to be successful and have a satisfying life, which we’ve discussed earlier in the book. These views foster fear and competition. They affect high-achieving kids, for whom a rigid view of the path to success creates unnecessary stress, anxiety, and mental health problems, and low-achieving kids, many of whom conclude at a young age that they will never be successful, so why try at all. Many of these young people engage in one of the most debilitating forms of self-talk, telling themselves, “I have to do X, Y, and Z, but I can’t,” or, “I have to do X, Y, and Z, but I hate it.”
  • Whatever you are be a good one. “Interest discovery” early on
• The reality is that we become successful in this world by working hard at something that comes easily to us and that engages us. We need to tell our kids that the skill set required to be a successful student is, in many ways, very different from the skill set that will lead you to have a successful career and a good life. Being a straight-A student almost by definition requires a high level of conformity, which is not the route to a high level of success. A 4.0 GPA also points to an attempt to be equally good at everything, which doesn’t necessarily translate well in the real world. We need to assure kids that the majority of successful people were not straight-A students. It turns out, in fact, that high school valedictorians are no more successful than other college graduates by their late twenties.’ Ability is not a simple matter of grades.
  • What are you “training” for?
• We all want to believe that our child is above average, and ignore the simple fact that every parent thinks so and we can’t all be right.
  • Gordon B. Hinckleys dad quote
• Many adults who were top students and have forged successful careers are miserable.
• Following your passion is more energizing than doing what you feel you have to do.
  • “What gives you energy?” - Lily pads of your career
• “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. As developmental psychologist Howard Gardner pointed out, there are many different forms of intelligence: it can be musicalrhythmic, visual-spatial, verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. In other words, you can be a poor student and a brilliant dancer (or vice versa). You can be average in most things but exceptional at reading others’ emotions. The key is in finding your strength.
  • Measure your life - Chris Sacca on 20VC about A-Players, but it’s about finding where you can be an A-Player?
• Making it your goal to be “the best” means constantly comparing yourself to others. It could motivate you, but more often it will be demotivating. Part of growing up is knowing when to let go, and choosing what not to pursue. Bill frequently tells the older children and adolescents he is testing, “I hope I find things you suck at-because successful people are good at some things and not so good at others, but wisely make a living doing something they’re good at.”
  • Prioritization - “interest discovery”
• Ned suggested that part of his work as an adolescent was to explore not only what he liked but what he was better at than most people and to work hard at that. “But isn’t that wrong?” David asked. “Isn’t it cheating to just do what’s easy?”
  • Interest discovery
• Bill takes a different approach. He tells kids that you only have to be smart enough to do something interesting in this world-which they are.
• Bill once evaluated an eight-year-old boy whose mother told him that she would only pay for college if her son went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Brown. Bill laughed, assuming she was joking, but the mother curtly assured him she was not. Trying to sound as reasonable as he could, Bill said, “You realize that’s a little crazy, in the sense that the vast majority of successful people do not go to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Brown?” The mother was clearly infuriated and snapped, “That’s the I feel about it. That’s the way it’s going to be.” Many people hold beliefs that are simply not in touch with reallitv. We refer to this kind of unfounded belief system that many especially affluent-adults subscribe to as a “shared delusion.”
  • Charles Darwin - kill your beliefs
• We have found that simply telling kids the truth about the world-including the advantages of being a good studentincreases their flexibility and drive. It motivates unmotivated kids to shift the emphasis from “Here are the hoops I will have to jump through to be successful” to “Here are some of the many ways I can choose to develop myself in order to make an important contribution to this world.”
  • #[[Intrinsic Motivation]]
• The drudgery of menial work caught up with him, and Brian asked his parents if they would fund classes at a community college in Florida, which they agreed to do.
  • [[Intrinsic Motivation]] via experience
• Ben and his brother both followed their passions and were so successful that they’re now making far more money than either of their parents. As their dad says, “What I have learned from this is, if you see a spark in your kids, pour gasoline on it.”
  • Chris Bausch story about Kobe Bryant - “whatever you are be a good one.”
• Eventually he transitioned into television engineering work. Although he had little prior experience, he worked hard and figured things out on the fly. Through his interests, talents, and efforts, he met people who opened doors that helped him become successful.
• “You can be anything you want to be,” they told her. “If that’s a professor somewhere, great. Ifit’s a guitar player, great. Just make sure you’re doing something you enjoy and work at it to do it well.” It was a liberating message, and Melody benefited enormously from the confidence they had in her.
• Melody feels the freedom her parents gave her was invaluable, as was their belief that there was not just one narrow path to a good life. “They let me know, These aren’t permanent decisions. You can decide not to go to fifth grade, and if halfway through you decide you want to go, you can go. That’s fine. You’re not putting yourself on a path that can’t be reversed. You’re not making a decision that’s going to make or break vour entire life. You can always course correct.’
  • Be okay with learning by doing. School flexibility: being willing to let your kids take time off school and spend time with each kid 1x1
• Part of the reason is that it is very hard to completely separate your own ego from the question of what your child is doing.
  • A lot of stress associated with your child’s behavior or performance is a result of ego
• Actor, TV host, and provocateur Mike Rowe started a foundation committed to challenging the idea that success is only available to those with four-year degrees. On the foundation’s Web site, Profoundly Disconnected, he makes the argument in three simple bullets: (1) A trillion dollars in student loans, (2) Record high unemployment, (3) Three million good jobs that no one seems to want.
  • Thiel Fellowship; trade school
• He finds more security in knowing how to do something useful than in having a degree.
  • Focus on becoming useful. John Adams quote - “I must study…”
• The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, by Ken Robinson. Ken is a visionary education consultant who argues that the place where natural talent and personal passion converge is where the magic of life and work happens. In the end, the best way you can help your child maintain a sense of control and guide him (as a nonanxious consultant) into a satisfying life is to teach him to ask himself two questions: What do I truly love to do? And what can I do better than most people? It can be that simple.
  • Interest discovery. Whatever you are be a good one
• Ask your child, What contributions do you think you would like to make to the world around you? What steps might you take to get there? Encourage your child to find a mentor, someone whose life they admire and who can help guide them. Kids will often be more open to guidance from someone who is not their parent.
  • How do you become useful? The best thing you can do for your kids “interest discovery” is introduce them to people whose lives they can idolize and learn about
• Bill once worked with a child whose mother was a humorist. Sitting in Bill’s office one day, she remarked, “A lot of what we call raising children should really be referred to as lowering parents.” It’s a clever way to acknowledge that what we recommend isn’t easy. In fact, much is plain hard. It takes courage to trust a child to make decisions, to trust in a child’s brain development, to ignore the pressures that cause us to protect our kids from themselves, or to be overly involved in their lives. It takes courage to face our fears about the future. It also takes humility to accept that we don’t often know what’s in our kids’ best interest. It takes a change in mindset to focus on ourselves-our own emotions and attitudesas an extremely important element of our child-rearing.
  • #[[Spirit of Humility]]
• As has often been said, people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Think of how you want to make your child feel. Loved. Trusted. Supported. Capable. And above all else, let that be your guide.