May 26, 2025 • 35 mins
Why do kids do disruptive, annoying or maddening things? Usually when children behave badly, the first thing adults do is yell at them, tell them they're bad and dole out punishments. Developmental psychologist David Yeager says that's the wrong approach. Instead parents need work out why their child made bad decisions in the first place.
David is the author of the book 10 to 25 and argues that we should work out what's at the root of bad behaviour in young people. Maybe they want to gain status with their peers, or crave more outlets to be social. Once adults work out these motivations, they can encourage their kids to find better ways to reach their goals without breaking the rules.
This series on parenting coincides with Dr Laurie's new free online class, The Science of Wellbeing for Parents which is available now at Coursera.org. You can sign up at drlauriesantos.com/parents.
Get ad-free episodes to The Happiness Lab by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows.
Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin
Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Growing up is weird. One moment you're a kid,
you feel certain that you know what you need to
be happy, but there's often a very frustrating obstacle in
your way.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Adults.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Those authority figures, often your very own parents, who insist
that just because they've been around longer, they know it's
best for you. It can feel maddening. You swear that
when you have kids, things will be different, you will understand,
and then, in what seems like an instant, you're the
grown up. You've got your own kids. It's your turn
to be in charge, and somehow along the way, you've
(00:53):
forgotten that promise that you made to yourself. You find
yourself caught up in that same intergenerational tension that you
once swore to avoid. In this episode in our series
on Happier Parenting, I'm talking with someone who's trying to
break that cycle by changing the way adults and kids communicate.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Hi. I'm David Yaeger. I'm a developmental psychologist and the
author of the book ten to twenty five.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
David's book explores the science of how to motivate young
people effectively, and his effective strategy begins with understanding the
kids in our life, which admittedly is hard, not only
because we've forgotten what it's like to be a child,
but also because it can feel like kids today are
speaking an entirely different language.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
We have four kids and two teenagers, and you know
a lot of skibbety toilet rizzler g oughts in our house.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
The slang can be funny and sometimes completely indecipherable, but
the true parent child communication breakdown often goes much deeper
than vocabulary.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
There's this equivocation. When adults say listen to me, what
they mean is do exactly what I say right now,
without any argument. And when kids say you didn't listen
to me, what they mean is you didn't make me
feel hurt. You didn't understand my perspective. And where I'm
coming from, a lot of times kids have a reason
(02:10):
for why they don't want to do something, and we
were uncurious about that. And so because of that equivocation,
we get into this conflict where we say one thing
and then they hear another, and then there's this fight
over our misinterpretations. And I think a lot of times
what we need to think about is not necessarily having
our goal be the conventional. Maybe nineteen fifties parents' version
(02:34):
of listening or respect. It doesn't mean that they subjugate
their entire will to everything we say immediately, but instead
we want them to be able to be proactive and
make great choices that are good for their long term
health that may or may not align with the immediate
thing we need them to do right now.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
And part of what we go wrong when we're trying
to motivate kids, as you've argued, is that we kind
of have this incorrect model of how young people work.
So it's the usual model that we bring to how
the young brain works.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
The conventional model is something I call the neurobiological incompetence model,
and it's the idea of that young people just lack
a prefrontal cortex. They can't think about the future, they
can't plan or reason logically, and because of that, we
need to make all the decisions for them. That is,
if young people lack the planning part of the brain,
then there are risks to themselves into society at all times.
(03:22):
And once we adopt that view, then our communication approach
turns into something that I call grown explaining, which is
where we just explain our thoughts and our plans for
them and expect them to willingly do whatever we say.
And although that makes sense to us because we think
we're more logical in a lot of ways, it doesn't
(03:43):
work well because young people don't want to be communicated
to in that way, comes across as disrespectful, and it
ends up thwarting our goals because young people reject what
we say, not because of the information, but because of
the way in which it was delivered.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
And you've talked about two consequences of this sort of
mode of thinking about young people that we either become
kind of too authoritarian or too permissive. What do you
mean there?
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Classic research going back eighty years suggests that for a
lot of parents there's a kind of nice and nasty dance,
you could call it, where either we start out saying, look,
here's the law, here's what we need to do. This
is very important. You've got to listen to me. And
when young people don't immediately acquiesced, then we increase threats,
(04:28):
we increase punishment, maybe we try a little bit of
bribery or distraction or sleight of hand.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
I think all parents listening right now get this mode. Yep.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
So that's like the nasty part, and then we feel guilty.
We've fallen off the wagon. We haven't been intentional parents.
We didn't do what the Instagram video that your spouse
since you told you that you're supposed to do, and
you just feel ashamed about yourself. And so we go
back into nice mode and we become permissive and we
say they need a little time with no rules to
(04:58):
just do what they want. But eventually, of course, kids
being kids, get out of control and we have to
put the nasty hat back on. And so it feels
like there's this dilemma that we can either be tough
authoritarians that lay down the law, or we can be
kind and friendly and caring but then be pushovers. And
what I argue is that there's valid parts of both
(05:19):
of those. You can do a version of both. You
can have very tough standards and be unrelenting on what's
important to do, but you can be very flexible and
caring and concern about how young people live up to
those standards so that way they can actually reach it
without all of the fighting and threats and blame.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
And an easier way to do that, you've argued, is
to come up with a kind of better, maybe more
accurate theory of what the adolescent brain is trying to maximize.
So evolutionarily, how should we think about the young people brain.
It's not this idea that it's incompetent. What else is
it trying to do? What's its mission?
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Of course, the brain develops, and so there are different
levels of ability and maturity, but what we try to
focus on is in the ten to twenty five range
and even maybe a little earlier, there's a shift in
motivational priorities, and those motivational priorities can influence what young
people choose to pay attention to. That is, where do
they deploy their considerable intellectual powers. And once you think
(06:16):
of it as a motivation problem and not solely an
ability problem, then you realize, well, maybe I'm not tapping
into the right source of motivation. And it's like, our
conventional view is that kids are motivated primarily by the
desire to please their parents or at least not piss
off their parents. And we get offended. We're like, don't
you know how angry you're making me like right now?
(06:37):
And it feels like they're trying to intentionally get our
goat for something. But they've got a different set of
priorities that often it's especially in the peer group, to
look in appear like a respect worthy person who deserves
status and has a good reputation. That is, someone who's
viewed as socially valuable. And that's a good thing that
in our evolutionary past helped young people learn how to
(07:00):
be contributors to our culture and to our society. But
we often fail to tap into that source of motivation
and therefore we end up at loggerheads with them. But
there are examples of great parents, leaders, coaches, teachers who
do know how to tap in to that drive for
status and respect, and they do end up with well
deployed prefrontal cortices where young people can plan ahead and
(07:22):
be proactive and do what we think is right.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
You've talked in the book about some of these cases
of both individual people that have done this well, but
also kind of programs that have done this well. One
of my favorite examples that you talk about in the
book are these so called effective anti tobacco programs. How
did the tobacco program sort of harness this idea that
young people really want to be independent and be respected
and so on?
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Briefly, the bad programs use a tagline to attack teen smoking.
This is in the late nineteen nineties early two thousands,
and their tagline was think don't smoke. Now, think about that.
If I tell you to think, the grammatical implication is
that you're not thinking, like if I told you to
smile right now, that's a weird thing to say, David,
because I'm smiling. Yeah. The implication is that if I
(08:04):
tell you to do it with a command, that you're
not doing it, and so think already an insult. But
then don't smoke. Not only does that threaten your autonomy
as a young person, and one of the main things
you want to do in your teenage years is have
a sense of grown up autonomy and independence, but also
it's implying I think I'm the kind of person who
gets to tell you what to do. So again, it
(08:26):
was very serious insults. In three words, it's kind of
evil genius situation where it turns out that a desire
to smoke increased the more that to think don't smoke
ads were played in those neighborhoods. The alternative was something
called the truth campaign, and this was developed by an
adver called Crispin Porter plus Boguski's a guy named Alex
(08:46):
Boguski who kind of understood intuitively what motivated young people,
and the truth campaign sought to portray teenagers as flooding
the streets, fighting back against the tobacco executives, telling them
to stop killing teenagers and getting them addicted. In a
famous ad, there's body bags they throw on the ground,
and someone holds up a sign outside of a large
(09:09):
high rise building purportedly filled with tobacco executives, and the
science says smoking kills twelve thousand people a day. Have
you ever thought of taking a day off? So there's
no grown explaining about the value of non smoking for
preventing cancer. It's not like a health class situation. It's
you're joining your peers to stand up for yourselves and
what's right and fight against injustice, and that every time
(09:34):
you smoke and do the unhealthy thing, you're giving money
to people who think they can manipulate you and control
you and harm others. And so that taps into an
adolescent value that people already have adolescent desire for independence, autonomy,
and a concern for social justice. My colleague Chris Brian
a brilliant psychologist likes to say it's often far more
effective to change behavior by getting people to see the
(09:56):
behavior as aligned with the value already have, rather than
getting you to care about a different value, such as
long term health. And we've used that insight in a
bunch of different ways, for instance, getting teenagers to eat
healthy buy fruits and vegetables, and drink water rather than
soda and eat ice cream by saying that to food companies,
the reason why they create a bunch of cartoons is
(10:17):
to get children addicted in poor neighborhoods and exploit them.
And so kids stand up against the companies by eating
healthy food and the luncher.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
And this also seems to be getting at something else
that this sort of incompetence hypothesis doesn't it really allow
kids to do, which is like these new ads are
kind of saying, hey, kids, you're competent. When you actually
see what these companies are doing, you will choose yourself
not to smoke. It's sort of assuming that they have
autonomy competence, like kind of giving them respect.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah, And it also it's not like giving them a skill.
It's not like these commercials are how to say, no
to your friends kind of thing. And that's what the
public health establishment thinks is you need to give kids
a script for how to say no to drugs or whatever.
But they appreciate the fact that if you look at
dare where they're going in classrooms and doing skits on
how to say no to your friends. Almost always in
(11:03):
those skits, the coolest kid is the kid offering drugs,
and it's the nerd you're saying no. So now you've
just shown, oh, a whole group of like twelve year
olds that dork say no to drugs, and cool kids
are the ones offering everybody drugs. And the truth campaign
they're not just teaching a road skill, they're framing the
behavior in a different way and then assuming that young
(11:23):
people's creativity and their agency and ability is allowing them
to figure out how to say no and how to
not smoke.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
It's striking how much adults still misunderstand young people, especially
since we were all young ones. But children and adolescents
just want independence and respect like all people do. And
when we learn to tap into that desire with care,
life can improve for everyone, regardless of age. But how
can you be considerate about your child's need for respect
when it feels like they're the ones who aren't respecting you.
(11:54):
After the break, I'll talk with David about the kinds
of questions we need to ask to build mutual understanding.
Even in those cases where your child seems to be
acting completely irrationally, the Happiness Lab will be right back.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
A claim.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Developmental psychologist David Yaeger is the author of the new
book ten to twenty five, The Science of Motivating Young
People and surprise, surprise, what motivates kids isn't all that
different than what drives adults. So if we want healthy, happy,
engaged children, we need to take a closer look at
the strategies we use to motivate our kids. And David
has found that even well intentioned parents often use strategies
(12:38):
that at their core are pretty ineffective. And perhaps the
most common ineffective strategy is the age old habit of nagging.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
There's a beautiful study by Jennifer Silk. She did a
broader study of maternal depression of moms and teenage daughters,
and as a part of that study, they brought the
teenage daughters into the lab and put them in the
fMRI machine. So there's a huge magnet wearing around their heads.
And while the teenage girls are preparing for the experiment,
they listen to their moms nagging them so that moms
(13:06):
are completing the sentence what bothers me about you is,
And what they find is that zero percent of teenage
daughters are like, you know, mom, you have a point.
I'm really glad you raised all these concerns with my behavior.
Good chat, I've got a list and i'll get back
to you. Like that doesn't happen. Instead, what you see
is a dramatic increase in the teenage girls regions of
(13:28):
the brain related to anger, and a decrease in the
dorslateral prefrontal cortex regions related to planning, reasoning, thinking ahead,
but also a decrease in regions related to social cognition,
the temporo pridal junction. And that's the basic idea that
a lot of times when a parent is making a
request of a kid, we're doing it indirectly, and so
the kid needs to infer something about the mom's state
(13:50):
of mind or the dad's state of mind. An example
is when my kid was really young, I used to
walk by a huge pile of legos that was a
mess in the middle of the Room'd be like, do
you want to clean up those legos? And you would
be like, no, I don't want to clean up those legos.
I want to keep playing with the legos. But clearly
I was in my mind saying clean up the legos.
And this is the micro example of so much of
what happens is we think we've been clear what we
(14:12):
want them to do. They feel nagged, so their TPJ
is shut off. They're not giving us a charitable interpretation,
and then we're more angry at them for rejecting us
and for disobeying us, and then the kids like, why
is this lunatic yelling at me? And so there's got
to be an alternative communication strategy that's not nagging, that
can instead enliven the prefrontal cortex and get them to
(14:34):
think about how they can change and behave differently.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
It seems like there's two problems with it. One is
that they're kind of not getting necessarily what we want
them to do, but it seems like they are reading
between the lines in terms of something else. There's another
unsaid part of the nagging that really hurts them.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
So what's that. The other unsaid part is that I,
the adult, think you're incompetent and that's why I'm telling
you something so obvious, and or that's why I'm trying
to control what feels like a personal choice to you.
When a mom says don't forget your coat, in our
heart of hearts, we're saying I love you so dearly
that I want you to not die of ypothermia. And
(15:10):
what the child hears is my mom thinks I'm so
incompetent that I can't even remember to bring a coat
or something like that. And because of that, you need
to be way more transparent about your intentions than you
think you need to be. You can't just leave the
unset part unsaid because young people are in this precarious
disparity of status relative to us, and they're likely to
(15:32):
read between the lines in a negative way because they're
used to the nagging and the yelling, telling and shaming
and blaming. That's their default, and they'll assume that new
communication is get more of that, unless we're transparent that
it's something different.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
And this gets the idea that you've talked about of
being a warm demander. How do you define a warm
demander and how does it play into exactly the kind
of solution you're just mentioning.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, warm demander and I also call it a mentor
mindset in my book. But warm demand is a nice
frame because you're demanding, so you're tough, but you're also
caring and warm. Actually, interestingly, that term came out of
studies of black educator in predominantly black classrooms in Atlanta
and like the late nineties, early two thousands, and you
(16:14):
kind of had like a grandma type teacher who was
unrelentingly demanding in her standards and didn't put up with
any nonsense, but no kid questioned whether she loved them.
Members of any group can have this kind of relationship,
And I call it a mentor mindset because it's your
approach is to be of course tough, demanding and critical
(16:34):
so that the young person can make wise your choices,
grow and prove, etc. Well at the same time providing
enough support so that way they can meet those higher standards.
And I do want to be clear, for a long time,
people couldn't distinguish between these warm, demanding slash mental mindset
leaders and the authoritarian ones because they're like these kids
(16:54):
are crying all the time, Like, if the kids crying,
it's clearly bad parenting. And it turns out in a
good home, kids cry all the time, but they're not
crying because the parents are yelling at them and shaming them.
They're crying just because the standard is like inconsistent with
what they want. I don't really want to be doing
the important good thing. But they do move on and
they figure out how to self regulate in a way
(17:15):
that in an authoritarian home all you get is just
you have to bend your will to the parent and
you have no agency in autonomy.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
And it seems like sort of paying attention to this
agency and autonomy is really kind of giving the kid
a sense that you kind of are feeling some compassion
for the situation that they're in. You're kind of honoring
their status as maybe an adolescent or a ten to
twenty five year old that's kind of figuring out their
way in life. But one way we need to do
this is to honors kids' status by not telling them stuff,
(17:44):
maybe not grow explaining. You need to show what you
want to understand. What are some good tips that parents
can use to do that better.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
There's this wonderful parenting coach that I write about in
my book named Loraina Sidella, and she echoes something that
has shown up a lot in the different research literatures,
and it's this idea of questioning is often more powerful
than telling. Before I explain it, I do want to
acknowledge that most normal parents think this is crazy advice
because when like the macaroni burning on the stove, and
the repairman's at the door, and you're late for soccer
(18:12):
practice and like everything's going wrong, that doesn't feel like
the time to have a Socratic dialogue, right, And I
get it, But if you don't treat every single crisis
as a chance to build a skill, then you've missed
out on tons and tons of opportunities for the kid
to learn to proactively manage the conflicts that they have,
whether it's their internal conflicts, their emotions, or conflicts with
(18:33):
other adults. So so Lorena has this never waste a
crisis mentality that I've tried to live that even if
it's like I'm trying to get three kids out the
door in the morning so I'm not late for an appointment,
I've had to learn to stop and pause and be
curious about why. From their perspective, it's very hard for
them to get in the car and not wear a
spider Man costing.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Which bracketed is why we were fifteen minutes late to
at our conversation.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Today, I get photographic evidence to prove this. So the
idea is ask questions. Okay, so what kind of questions?
Now there's bad questions. A bad question would be what
are you thinking? Or why are you ruining my life?
Those would not be good questions to ask a kid.
Better questions are things like, you seom really upset? Tell
me what does it mean to you when I'm saying
no to the toy? Or what does it mean to
(19:19):
you when I said this to you? And then they
usually say something outrageous like it means you don't love me,
it means you're a bad parent, it means you hate me,
or I'm a bad kid. The next question is like
what else could it mean? And sometimes they'll say a
couple other negative things like this will never get better,
you know, going to be sad forever. And then the
next question is, okay, if it meant that, would that
(19:40):
serve your purposes? Like does that's meet your goals? And
that's a surprising question for a lot of kids, and
they're like, huh, no, it doesn't serve my goals to
think my mom hates me, and then she's a bad parent.
It's like, all right, well, then what else could it mean?
And then eventually you can involve them in generating a
different and better appraisal of the conflict, and then once
(20:02):
they have that better appraisal, then you can say things like,
all right, well, if this better thing was true, would
that meet your goals? And then often they're like, yeah, so.
Very brief example is conflict with my now eight year
old when he was six, We're leaving the park. I
played with him all day. He asked for a toy.
I was like, no, there's no toy, and he screamed
at the top of his lung publicly in front of
(20:23):
all the other parents, I want a toy. And then
I had to ask him, you know, how does it
make you feel that I'm saying no and just felt
ridiculous to say, of course, and then he said, yell
at the top of his lungs, You're the worst father.
And then I went through this question, doesn't serve your purposes?
That caught him off guard. No, it makes me feel sad.
What else could it be? And then he made up
(20:44):
something good, like it means my dad doesn't want us
to buy a toy that I'm going to throw away
and break, because then I'm going to be sad later.
And then if it's a plastic toy, there's going to
be more plastic in the landfill and that's going to
hurt the earth. And maybe my dad doesn't want to
destroy the earth. And I was like, how would that
make you feel if that was true? And he was like, well,
it made you feel like my dad cares about the
future of the environment and doesn't want me to grow
(21:05):
up in a trashkeep and also wants me to learn
how to be responsible. And I was like, would that
serve your purposes? He's like, yeah, it'd make me feel
like my dad loved me. I was like, can we
go with that? And he's like yeah, and then I
bought them.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
I screen what's incredible is like, if we kind of
lead with curiosity not judgment, we do two things. One
is like, we learned that our kids are capable and
they are competent and coming up with these good interpretations
and things. But I think it also trains them to
get a little bit more curious about their own emotions
and think, well, my first impression of this situation might
look differently, or maybe my parent has a different intention.
So it's kind of like we're learning to renavigate their
(21:36):
feelings on this at the same time we're teaching them
to learn to navigate our new intentions on these things, too, right,
I mean, the.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Big thing is it's such a pain as a parent
when your kids fight two rooms over and you have
to leave whatever you're doing and go over there and say,
how many times have I told you guys, don't be
mean and to your brother stop fighting? We're always the
referee in that situation. We are the only one doing
the problem solving, And so of course they don't learn. Yeah,
it's because we never asked them to even try to
do it. If they've never had to piece it together
(22:05):
in their minds, and if the only time we ask
questions is when we're trying to make them look like
haven't I told you this before? The only answer is yes.
But the implication is we think they're dumb. So if
that's all we've ever done, then of course we're gonna
have to keep stepping in as the referee. But if
we're just tired of doing that, you have to start
giving them the coach in the head that they can
(22:25):
carry with them. And I'll tell you what I've seen
Lorna sidell this parenting coach. I've seen families she's worked with,
and they do this questioning routine a lot with their kids.
It's tedious, but eventually the kids know the questions and
so she can just yell from across the room, what
did it mean when your sister did that? And then
they do the whole thing in their head and they're like, Okay, fine, mom,
(22:45):
I know my sister loves me. We won't fight anymore.
And so if you want to have the kind of
house not with no fighting or no crying, but where
conflicts get resolved in a way where you end up
feeling excited for them to go off into the world
and to deal with conflict, and they're going to be
prepared to live with someone and not get in fights
all the time and not be alone. You know, in
their twenties and thirties, these are the times right now
(23:08):
to teach those lessons. And it's a little bit of
extra time, but you save yourself a house.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
In the long run, it might seem silly to ask
a six year old whether something serves their purpose, but
that's an important first step to helping that child develop
a key emotional skill that psychologists call cognitive reappraisal. If
you can reframe your thoughts about a situation, you can
shift your feelings too, and helping kids practice this skill
during small moments of crisis will allow them to learn
(23:33):
to handle the bigger challenges that will come later on.
After the break, we'll talk with David about other ways
parents can guide kids towards happier behaviors with a mentor mindset,
from coaching your middle school or through a math class meltdown,
to helping your teenager make better choices after a night
of bad decisions. The Happiness Lab will be back in
a moment. Psychologist David Yeger has devoted his career to
(24:03):
understanding why young people think and behave the way they do,
and how parents and mentors can help guide kids towards
becoming their best selves. David has found that many of
the interventions adults regularly use aren't very effective, in part
because they're interventions. In fact, David thinks most caregivers need
to intervene way less than they think. Take homework for example.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
So my daughter is algebra two and she came home
and they were doing some kind of factoring. I think
it's like finding the square. And my temptation was to
go and like figure out the trick and be like, okay,
just do this. But I'd seen these great tutors in
these great mentors, and I was like, all right, well,
the first thing they almost always do is ask what
if you tried so far, and why do you think
it's not working? Then immediately you know what the kid knows.
(24:47):
And it's hard to ask that because if they're frustrated
and they're like banging their head against the wall, your
temptation is to prevent them from having to revisit those
times where they weren't getting it. And so that's what
I did with Scarlett. I was like, all right, show
me what your teacher told you so far. And then
she said stuff that I completely forgot because I last
learned it when I was fourteen. And then I was like, well,
(25:08):
I see you're stuck here, Well what happened if you
do that? Then she explained, well, this won't weren't because
of that, and then I could just be there as
a guide and I just was curious. I asked her
to basically tinker with it, but she was always the agent.
She was always doing the problem solving. And then all
of a sudden she remembered something the teacher had said
two weeks before, and then she's like, oh, this is
(25:29):
where I'm supposed to do it. Now I understand the pattern.
So I didn't tell her anything about algebra two. I
didn't actually go read the textbook. I just worked with her. Now.
The reason why this is important is because when we
swoop in and say, okay, here's how you factor the problem,
here's how you find the square. Just do this, now
try it, then it makes them feel like we think
(25:53):
that they can't figure it out and that they are incompetent,
which is not what you want because there there are
a thousand lessons like that throughout the school year in
just one subject, and then you've got seven subjects. So
you want them to have the skill of being able
to figure it out. But what's is when they're totally
on their own and they feel overwhelmed and they're like,
I can't do this. So weirdly, non informative questions where
(26:16):
you're not really telling them answers, makes them feel supportive
enough to go troubleshoot. It makes them feel like if
they're stuck, they could ask you. But ultimately they own
the thinking at the end. And Mark Lepper in the
nineteen ninety is, the famous social psychologist, did this study
of the greatest tutors in the Bay Area, and he
found that ninety percent, roughly of what they said was
(26:38):
a question, it was not. They were great at explaining physics.
And I think that lesson still holds today.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
I think it's so important because as an adult, I
know what it feels like when somebody tells me what
to do. Right, it's kind of demeaning, and I get
more pissed off and I get more frustrated. But I
think we forget that's what's happening with our kids. We
kind of tell them what to do. I think another
thing about the questions, and you just illustrated this in
your algebra story, is that sometimes our kids have answers
that we don't expect. Right when you asked her, well,
what did she already know? She actually had some techniques
(27:06):
that like you're like, oh yeah, I forgot about that,
And so there are these cases is where our kids
kind of know stuff that we don't know, or at
least know things about the situation that we might not
know that unless we get curious and ask questions, we'd
never see that, and that affects our ability to help
them problem solve.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
And I think a big puzzle I had going into
my book ten to twenty five was why doesn't everybody
do this? I mean, there's the time issue. You're like,
you're in a hurry, but like, aside from that, why
does everybody do it? And I think it goes back
to the neurobiological and confidence model. If you think that
the reason why your kid is stuck is because when
it was explained very clearly by the teacher, the kid
(27:41):
was screwing around and goofing off and not paying attention,
and then they came home and they weren't being a
serious student and they don't care about their future. Then
you're not curious why they're stuck on factoring the trinomial.
You're like, this is a character issue. Yeah, this is
not an intellectual issue. And so it feels like we
need to have a response to the character issue by
(28:02):
giving them a lecture about how they should have paid attention.
You need to be responsible, you need to take good notes,
you should go review. Your teacher already gave this to you.
And that sounds harsh, but like in our studies, fifty
percent of American teachers take that approach. Yeah, they take
a shame and blame approach to a mistake, not collaborative troubleshooting.
And I think that's a real challenge because parents want
to prepare their kids for a tough future, like a
(28:24):
complex world where everyone's unforgiving. And the reality is if
you just presume most of the time that kids are
acting in good faith, and if you're seeing all this
other like reluctance behavior, deviance behavior, sometimes that's a cover
for the underlying thing, which is it's just actually hard
work and they haven't figured it out. So you always
treat it like you're a serious student who wants to
(28:45):
do it right, and you're gonna get it and I'm
gonna ask you questions just so I understand. Then they
feel respected and valued, and sometimes that safety is what
they need to get out of their heads and stop
the panic and then start embracing the challenge.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
And this kind of collaborative troubleshooting is true not just
in the academic domain, but maybe if other domains where
they like really screw up, right, how can collaborative troubleshooting
how But a case where your kid has kind of
messed up, maybe in the social domain or even in
the moral domain.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
I heard from a ton of parents, far more than
I even wrote about in the book. But I wrote
about a couple where their kids either snuck to a
party or went to a party but snuck booze to
the party and they came home drunk. And the best
parents I talked to were like, I've been waiting for
this for years. This is the best moment of my
parenting life. I was like, really, I'm just so worried
about that moment and that no, because we got to
(29:36):
be honest and the wrong approach, and they told me
was the yell, tell, blame, shame, the enforcer, authoritarian kind
of approach, And to be honest, a lot of that approach,
the yelling and telling comes from our insecurity as parents
that we feel like, how could I possibly be the
kind of parent where kids have so little respect for
(29:58):
my house rules that they would break this So blatantly.
It's more like we're insulted and offended more than it
is are concerned with their actual safety. And so the
collaborative troubleshooting parent and didn't take that offensive approach. Instead,
they were legitimately curious about how the kid ended up
having drunk too much, or in the case of the
speaking out, why did they feel like that was the
(30:21):
most important thing in the world and more important than
maintaining the family rules. And usually it went back to
status and respect. So in the case of a kid
who snuck out, the kid was just a hypersocial kid
and was worried that everyone would have this epic night
and there'd be some memory like they found it golf
(30:42):
card and got to do donuts on the golf course,
or they ran away from the cops, or something that
they would never forget and would talk about until their
high school reunion or to their funeral. Think about it, like,
I definitely have stories of hour and a half events
in high school, Like I f one hundred percent vividly
remember some of the most fun times, and I remember
who was there.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
I wouldn't want to miss out on that, right. There's
a cost benefit, Yep.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
You don't want to be the person who missed out
on this epic unforgettable night. So his mom started with
us like, look, I know you're social. Let's find other
ways for you to have epic unforgettable knights that don't
involve lying and cheating. But it wasn't don't be social.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
In the drinking case, there was one kid who normally
would just sneak like two wine coolers in his pockets,
but this one day brought it backpack because he was
trying to be a good friend to a lot of
other people who asked for boots, and then he ended
up drinking up most of it and so he got
super drunk. But again it came from this desire to
be social to help others, And so the punishment was
(31:41):
to talk about his drinking and his plan every night
before he went out. And it was an agonizing forty
five minute conversation about his plan before he could go
to a party, and that was a worse punishment than grounding.
But in the end they started understanding his logic and
his plans and they could subtly suggest things. And when
that kid went to college, he didn't have any trouble
with alcohol and he had the skill, So it's a
(32:04):
kind of never waste a crisis situation and questioning really
helps to build that mental muscle in the kid.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
I love these scenarios because they really show that you're
parenting for the future, right, Like in both of these cases,
you're talking not about how you solve for this incident,
but how you solve for future incidents, maybe incidents that
are going to happen when these kids go off to
college and you're not going to be there to kind
of see them out the door and that sort of thing.
Kind of curious how you brought this into your own life,
both collaborative troubleshooting and questions and all the stuff we've
been talking about.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
I obsess over parenting for the future in specific moments
that I know because of my sociology friends and colleagues
set kids up for a lifetime. But I think there
are a lot of moments in our kids' lives. Trying
out for a certain sport or activity, definitely taking into
a class, like applying for a summer job. There are
these moments where they're going to be freaked out because
(32:50):
it does have a big impact on their future, or
they're not taking it seriously and they need to. And
those are moments where you do have to be tough
in demanding and unrelenting, but also supportive so that way
they see a reasonable path and their fears have to
be legitimate to you. You have to be legitimately curious
about why they're worried. But there, you know, there's lots
(33:10):
of crying in my house in those moments where it's like,
you need to do this thing. But what I will
focus on is like, how do I be honestly curious
why you're being reluctant and troubleshoot with you and find
a solution that works for you. I'm not going to
lower the standard, but it does matter to me that
you're on board and that it feels good for you.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
So the next time you're struggling with your kid's behavior,
try to tap into what studies show is really motivating
that sense of mastery. Everyone wants to experience agency and independence,
regardless of their age. So remember that the old neurobiological
and competence model of childhood is out. The science shows
that what's in or respect and understanding? How can you
(33:50):
respect your kids better? Well, stop grow explaining and instead
get curious and ask questions. Guide your child toward the
habit of cognitive reappraisal so that they learn to manage
their difficult feelings as they get older. You can also
strive to be a warm demander, have high standards for
your child, but still be loving and supporting to understand
your child's perspective rather than yelling, telling, blaming, or shaming.
(34:14):
And finally, use those small moments of crises as opportunities
for collaborative troubleshooting. It may be a little inconvenient, and
you might even end up fifteen minutes late for a
very important podcast interview, but remember that taking the time
to help your child learn in these small moments can
make a huge difference. Next time on the Happiness Lab,
we'll wrap up our series on Happier Parenting with a
(34:36):
look at how technology is affecting kids happiness. We'll dig
into the impact of screens and social media on self image, attention,
and mental health, and we'll share tips for building a
plan that fits your family. And if you've found these
discussions helpful, you'll likely enjoy my free online course The
Science of All Being For parents. To learn more, just
(34:56):
head to doctor Lauri Santo's dot com slash parents. That's
Dr Laurisanto's dot com slash parents until next time. This
has been The Happiness Lab's special series on Happier Parenting
with me Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin. Growing up is weird. One moment you're a kid,
you feel certain that you know what you need to
be happy, but there's often a very frustrating obstacle in
your way.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Adults.
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Those authority figures, often your very own parents, who insist
that just because they've been around longer, they know it's
best for you. It can feel maddening. You swear that
when you have kids, things will be different, you will understand,
and then, in what seems like an instant, you're the
grown up. You've got your own kids. It's your turn
to be in charge, and somehow along the way, you've
(00:53):
forgotten that promise that you made to yourself. You find
yourself caught up in that same intergenerational tension that you
once swore to avoid. In this episode in our series
on Happier Parenting, I'm talking with someone who's trying to
break that cycle by changing the way adults and kids communicate.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
Hi. I'm David Yaeger. I'm a developmental psychologist and the
author of the book ten to twenty five.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
David's book explores the science of how to motivate young
people effectively, and his effective strategy begins with understanding the
kids in our life, which admittedly is hard, not only
because we've forgotten what it's like to be a child,
but also because it can feel like kids today are
speaking an entirely different language.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
We have four kids and two teenagers, and you know
a lot of skibbety toilet rizzler g oughts in our house.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
The slang can be funny and sometimes completely indecipherable, but
the true parent child communication breakdown often goes much deeper
than vocabulary.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
There's this equivocation. When adults say listen to me, what
they mean is do exactly what I say right now,
without any argument. And when kids say you didn't listen
to me, what they mean is you didn't make me
feel hurt. You didn't understand my perspective. And where I'm
coming from, a lot of times kids have a reason
(02:10):
for why they don't want to do something, and we
were uncurious about that. And so because of that equivocation,
we get into this conflict where we say one thing
and then they hear another, and then there's this fight
over our misinterpretations. And I think a lot of times
what we need to think about is not necessarily having
our goal be the conventional. Maybe nineteen fifties parents' version
(02:34):
of listening or respect. It doesn't mean that they subjugate
their entire will to everything we say immediately, but instead
we want them to be able to be proactive and
make great choices that are good for their long term
health that may or may not align with the immediate
thing we need them to do right now.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
And part of what we go wrong when we're trying
to motivate kids, as you've argued, is that we kind
of have this incorrect model of how young people work.
So it's the usual model that we bring to how
the young brain works.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
The conventional model is something I call the neurobiological incompetence model,
and it's the idea of that young people just lack
a prefrontal cortex. They can't think about the future, they
can't plan or reason logically, and because of that, we
need to make all the decisions for them. That is,
if young people lack the planning part of the brain,
then there are risks to themselves into society at all times.
(03:22):
And once we adopt that view, then our communication approach
turns into something that I call grown explaining, which is
where we just explain our thoughts and our plans for
them and expect them to willingly do whatever we say.
And although that makes sense to us because we think
we're more logical in a lot of ways, it doesn't
(03:43):
work well because young people don't want to be communicated
to in that way, comes across as disrespectful, and it
ends up thwarting our goals because young people reject what
we say, not because of the information, but because of
the way in which it was delivered.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
And you've talked about two consequences of this sort of
mode of thinking about young people that we either become
kind of too authoritarian or too permissive. What do you
mean there?
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Classic research going back eighty years suggests that for a
lot of parents there's a kind of nice and nasty dance,
you could call it, where either we start out saying, look,
here's the law, here's what we need to do. This
is very important. You've got to listen to me. And
when young people don't immediately acquiesced, then we increase threats,
(04:28):
we increase punishment, maybe we try a little bit of
bribery or distraction or sleight of hand.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
I think all parents listening right now get this mode. Yep.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
So that's like the nasty part, and then we feel guilty.
We've fallen off the wagon. We haven't been intentional parents.
We didn't do what the Instagram video that your spouse
since you told you that you're supposed to do, and
you just feel ashamed about yourself. And so we go
back into nice mode and we become permissive and we
say they need a little time with no rules to
(04:58):
just do what they want. But eventually, of course, kids
being kids, get out of control and we have to
put the nasty hat back on. And so it feels
like there's this dilemma that we can either be tough
authoritarians that lay down the law, or we can be
kind and friendly and caring but then be pushovers. And
what I argue is that there's valid parts of both
(05:19):
of those. You can do a version of both. You
can have very tough standards and be unrelenting on what's
important to do, but you can be very flexible and
caring and concern about how young people live up to
those standards so that way they can actually reach it
without all of the fighting and threats and blame.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
And an easier way to do that, you've argued, is
to come up with a kind of better, maybe more
accurate theory of what the adolescent brain is trying to maximize.
So evolutionarily, how should we think about the young people brain.
It's not this idea that it's incompetent. What else is
it trying to do? What's its mission?
Speaker 2 (05:52):
Of course, the brain develops, and so there are different
levels of ability and maturity, but what we try to
focus on is in the ten to twenty five range
and even maybe a little earlier, there's a shift in
motivational priorities, and those motivational priorities can influence what young
people choose to pay attention to. That is, where do
they deploy their considerable intellectual powers. And once you think
(06:16):
of it as a motivation problem and not solely an
ability problem, then you realize, well, maybe I'm not tapping
into the right source of motivation. And it's like, our
conventional view is that kids are motivated primarily by the
desire to please their parents or at least not piss
off their parents. And we get offended. We're like, don't
you know how angry you're making me like right now?
(06:37):
And it feels like they're trying to intentionally get our
goat for something. But they've got a different set of
priorities that often it's especially in the peer group, to
look in appear like a respect worthy person who deserves
status and has a good reputation. That is, someone who's
viewed as socially valuable. And that's a good thing that
in our evolutionary past helped young people learn how to
(07:00):
be contributors to our culture and to our society. But
we often fail to tap into that source of motivation
and therefore we end up at loggerheads with them. But
there are examples of great parents, leaders, coaches, teachers who
do know how to tap in to that drive for
status and respect, and they do end up with well
deployed prefrontal cortices where young people can plan ahead and
(07:22):
be proactive and do what we think is right.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
You've talked in the book about some of these cases
of both individual people that have done this well, but
also kind of programs that have done this well. One
of my favorite examples that you talk about in the
book are these so called effective anti tobacco programs. How
did the tobacco program sort of harness this idea that
young people really want to be independent and be respected
and so on?
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Briefly, the bad programs use a tagline to attack teen smoking.
This is in the late nineteen nineties early two thousands,
and their tagline was think don't smoke. Now, think about that.
If I tell you to think, the grammatical implication is
that you're not thinking, like if I told you to
smile right now, that's a weird thing to say, David,
because I'm smiling. Yeah. The implication is that if I
(08:04):
tell you to do it with a command, that you're
not doing it, and so think already an insult. But
then don't smoke. Not only does that threaten your autonomy
as a young person, and one of the main things
you want to do in your teenage years is have
a sense of grown up autonomy and independence, but also
it's implying I think I'm the kind of person who
gets to tell you what to do. So again, it
(08:26):
was very serious insults. In three words, it's kind of
evil genius situation where it turns out that a desire
to smoke increased the more that to think don't smoke
ads were played in those neighborhoods. The alternative was something
called the truth campaign, and this was developed by an
adver called Crispin Porter plus Boguski's a guy named Alex
(08:46):
Boguski who kind of understood intuitively what motivated young people,
and the truth campaign sought to portray teenagers as flooding
the streets, fighting back against the tobacco executives, telling them
to stop killing teenagers and getting them addicted. In a
famous ad, there's body bags they throw on the ground,
and someone holds up a sign outside of a large
(09:09):
high rise building purportedly filled with tobacco executives, and the
science says smoking kills twelve thousand people a day. Have
you ever thought of taking a day off? So there's
no grown explaining about the value of non smoking for
preventing cancer. It's not like a health class situation. It's
you're joining your peers to stand up for yourselves and
what's right and fight against injustice, and that every time
(09:34):
you smoke and do the unhealthy thing, you're giving money
to people who think they can manipulate you and control
you and harm others. And so that taps into an
adolescent value that people already have adolescent desire for independence, autonomy,
and a concern for social justice. My colleague Chris Brian
a brilliant psychologist likes to say it's often far more
effective to change behavior by getting people to see the
(09:56):
behavior as aligned with the value already have, rather than
getting you to care about a different value, such as
long term health. And we've used that insight in a
bunch of different ways, for instance, getting teenagers to eat
healthy buy fruits and vegetables, and drink water rather than
soda and eat ice cream by saying that to food companies,
the reason why they create a bunch of cartoons is
(10:17):
to get children addicted in poor neighborhoods and exploit them.
And so kids stand up against the companies by eating
healthy food and the luncher.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
And this also seems to be getting at something else
that this sort of incompetence hypothesis doesn't it really allow
kids to do, which is like these new ads are
kind of saying, hey, kids, you're competent. When you actually
see what these companies are doing, you will choose yourself
not to smoke. It's sort of assuming that they have
autonomy competence, like kind of giving them respect.
Speaker 2 (10:42):
Yeah, And it also it's not like giving them a skill.
It's not like these commercials are how to say, no
to your friends kind of thing. And that's what the
public health establishment thinks is you need to give kids
a script for how to say no to drugs or whatever.
But they appreciate the fact that if you look at
dare where they're going in classrooms and doing skits on
how to say no to your friends. Almost always in
(11:03):
those skits, the coolest kid is the kid offering drugs,
and it's the nerd you're saying no. So now you've
just shown, oh, a whole group of like twelve year
olds that dork say no to drugs, and cool kids
are the ones offering everybody drugs. And the truth campaign
they're not just teaching a road skill, they're framing the
behavior in a different way and then assuming that young
(11:23):
people's creativity and their agency and ability is allowing them
to figure out how to say no and how to
not smoke.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
It's striking how much adults still misunderstand young people, especially
since we were all young ones. But children and adolescents
just want independence and respect like all people do. And
when we learn to tap into that desire with care,
life can improve for everyone, regardless of age. But how
can you be considerate about your child's need for respect
when it feels like they're the ones who aren't respecting you.
(11:54):
After the break, I'll talk with David about the kinds
of questions we need to ask to build mutual understanding.
Even in those cases where your child seems to be
acting completely irrationally, the Happiness Lab will be right back.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
A claim.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Developmental psychologist David Yaeger is the author of the new
book ten to twenty five, The Science of Motivating Young
People and surprise, surprise, what motivates kids isn't all that
different than what drives adults. So if we want healthy, happy,
engaged children, we need to take a closer look at
the strategies we use to motivate our kids. And David
has found that even well intentioned parents often use strategies
(12:38):
that at their core are pretty ineffective. And perhaps the
most common ineffective strategy is the age old habit of nagging.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
There's a beautiful study by Jennifer Silk. She did a
broader study of maternal depression of moms and teenage daughters,
and as a part of that study, they brought the
teenage daughters into the lab and put them in the
fMRI machine. So there's a huge magnet wearing around their heads.
And while the teenage girls are preparing for the experiment,
they listen to their moms nagging them so that moms
(13:06):
are completing the sentence what bothers me about you is,
And what they find is that zero percent of teenage
daughters are like, you know, mom, you have a point.
I'm really glad you raised all these concerns with my behavior.
Good chat, I've got a list and i'll get back
to you. Like that doesn't happen. Instead, what you see
is a dramatic increase in the teenage girls regions of
(13:28):
the brain related to anger, and a decrease in the
dorslateral prefrontal cortex regions related to planning, reasoning, thinking ahead,
but also a decrease in regions related to social cognition,
the temporo pridal junction. And that's the basic idea that
a lot of times when a parent is making a
request of a kid, we're doing it indirectly, and so
the kid needs to infer something about the mom's state
(13:50):
of mind or the dad's state of mind. An example
is when my kid was really young, I used to
walk by a huge pile of legos that was a
mess in the middle of the Room'd be like, do
you want to clean up those legos? And you would
be like, no, I don't want to clean up those legos.
I want to keep playing with the legos. But clearly
I was in my mind saying clean up the legos.
And this is the micro example of so much of
what happens is we think we've been clear what we
(14:12):
want them to do. They feel nagged, so their TPJ
is shut off. They're not giving us a charitable interpretation,
and then we're more angry at them for rejecting us
and for disobeying us, and then the kids like, why
is this lunatic yelling at me? And so there's got
to be an alternative communication strategy that's not nagging, that
can instead enliven the prefrontal cortex and get them to
(14:34):
think about how they can change and behave differently.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
It seems like there's two problems with it. One is
that they're kind of not getting necessarily what we want
them to do, but it seems like they are reading
between the lines in terms of something else. There's another
unsaid part of the nagging that really hurts them.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
So what's that. The other unsaid part is that I,
the adult, think you're incompetent and that's why I'm telling
you something so obvious, and or that's why I'm trying
to control what feels like a personal choice to you.
When a mom says don't forget your coat, in our
heart of hearts, we're saying I love you so dearly
that I want you to not die of ypothermia. And
(15:10):
what the child hears is my mom thinks I'm so
incompetent that I can't even remember to bring a coat
or something like that. And because of that, you need
to be way more transparent about your intentions than you
think you need to be. You can't just leave the
unset part unsaid because young people are in this precarious
disparity of status relative to us, and they're likely to
(15:32):
read between the lines in a negative way because they're
used to the nagging and the yelling, telling and shaming
and blaming. That's their default, and they'll assume that new
communication is get more of that, unless we're transparent that
it's something different.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
And this gets the idea that you've talked about of
being a warm demander. How do you define a warm
demander and how does it play into exactly the kind
of solution you're just mentioning.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
Yeah, warm demander and I also call it a mentor
mindset in my book. But warm demand is a nice
frame because you're demanding, so you're tough, but you're also
caring and warm. Actually, interestingly, that term came out of
studies of black educator in predominantly black classrooms in Atlanta
and like the late nineties, early two thousands, and you
(16:14):
kind of had like a grandma type teacher who was
unrelentingly demanding in her standards and didn't put up with
any nonsense, but no kid questioned whether she loved them.
Members of any group can have this kind of relationship,
And I call it a mentor mindset because it's your
approach is to be of course tough, demanding and critical
(16:34):
so that the young person can make wise your choices,
grow and prove, etc. Well at the same time providing
enough support so that way they can meet those higher standards.
And I do want to be clear, for a long time,
people couldn't distinguish between these warm, demanding slash mental mindset
leaders and the authoritarian ones because they're like these kids
(16:54):
are crying all the time, Like, if the kids crying,
it's clearly bad parenting. And it turns out in a
good home, kids cry all the time, but they're not
crying because the parents are yelling at them and shaming them.
They're crying just because the standard is like inconsistent with
what they want. I don't really want to be doing
the important good thing. But they do move on and
they figure out how to self regulate in a way
(17:15):
that in an authoritarian home all you get is just
you have to bend your will to the parent and
you have no agency in autonomy.
Speaker 1 (17:23):
And it seems like sort of paying attention to this
agency and autonomy is really kind of giving the kid
a sense that you kind of are feeling some compassion
for the situation that they're in. You're kind of honoring
their status as maybe an adolescent or a ten to
twenty five year old that's kind of figuring out their
way in life. But one way we need to do
this is to honors kids' status by not telling them stuff,
(17:44):
maybe not grow explaining. You need to show what you
want to understand. What are some good tips that parents
can use to do that better.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
There's this wonderful parenting coach that I write about in
my book named Loraina Sidella, and she echoes something that
has shown up a lot in the different research literatures,
and it's this idea of questioning is often more powerful
than telling. Before I explain it, I do want to
acknowledge that most normal parents think this is crazy advice
because when like the macaroni burning on the stove, and
the repairman's at the door, and you're late for soccer
(18:12):
practice and like everything's going wrong, that doesn't feel like
the time to have a Socratic dialogue, right, And I
get it, But if you don't treat every single crisis
as a chance to build a skill, then you've missed
out on tons and tons of opportunities for the kid
to learn to proactively manage the conflicts that they have,
whether it's their internal conflicts, their emotions, or conflicts with
(18:33):
other adults. So so Lorena has this never waste a
crisis mentality that I've tried to live that even if
it's like I'm trying to get three kids out the
door in the morning so I'm not late for an appointment,
I've had to learn to stop and pause and be
curious about why. From their perspective, it's very hard for
them to get in the car and not wear a
spider Man costing.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Which bracketed is why we were fifteen minutes late to
at our conversation.
Speaker 2 (18:57):
Today, I get photographic evidence to prove this. So the
idea is ask questions. Okay, so what kind of questions?
Now there's bad questions. A bad question would be what
are you thinking? Or why are you ruining my life?
Those would not be good questions to ask a kid.
Better questions are things like, you seom really upset? Tell
me what does it mean to you when I'm saying
no to the toy? Or what does it mean to
(19:19):
you when I said this to you? And then they
usually say something outrageous like it means you don't love me,
it means you're a bad parent, it means you hate me,
or I'm a bad kid. The next question is like
what else could it mean? And sometimes they'll say a
couple other negative things like this will never get better,
you know, going to be sad forever. And then the
next question is, okay, if it meant that, would that
(19:40):
serve your purposes? Like does that's meet your goals? And
that's a surprising question for a lot of kids, and
they're like, huh, no, it doesn't serve my goals to
think my mom hates me, and then she's a bad parent.
It's like, all right, well, then what else could it mean?
And then eventually you can involve them in generating a
different and better appraisal of the conflict, and then once
(20:02):
they have that better appraisal, then you can say things like,
all right, well, if this better thing was true, would
that meet your goals? And then often they're like, yeah, so.
Very brief example is conflict with my now eight year
old when he was six, We're leaving the park. I
played with him all day. He asked for a toy.
I was like, no, there's no toy, and he screamed
at the top of his lung publicly in front of
(20:23):
all the other parents, I want a toy. And then
I had to ask him, you know, how does it
make you feel that I'm saying no and just felt
ridiculous to say, of course, and then he said, yell
at the top of his lungs, You're the worst father.
And then I went through this question, doesn't serve your purposes?
That caught him off guard. No, it makes me feel sad.
What else could it be? And then he made up
(20:44):
something good, like it means my dad doesn't want us
to buy a toy that I'm going to throw away
and break, because then I'm going to be sad later.
And then if it's a plastic toy, there's going to
be more plastic in the landfill and that's going to
hurt the earth. And maybe my dad doesn't want to
destroy the earth. And I was like, how would that
make you feel if that was true? And he was like, well,
it made you feel like my dad cares about the
future of the environment and doesn't want me to grow
(21:05):
up in a trashkeep and also wants me to learn
how to be responsible. And I was like, would that
serve your purposes? He's like, yeah, it'd make me feel
like my dad loved me. I was like, can we
go with that? And he's like yeah, and then I
bought them.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
I screen what's incredible is like, if we kind of
lead with curiosity not judgment, we do two things. One
is like, we learned that our kids are capable and
they are competent and coming up with these good interpretations
and things. But I think it also trains them to
get a little bit more curious about their own emotions
and think, well, my first impression of this situation might
look differently, or maybe my parent has a different intention.
So it's kind of like we're learning to renavigate their
(21:36):
feelings on this at the same time we're teaching them
to learn to navigate our new intentions on these things, too, right,
I mean, the.
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Big thing is it's such a pain as a parent
when your kids fight two rooms over and you have
to leave whatever you're doing and go over there and say,
how many times have I told you guys, don't be
mean and to your brother stop fighting? We're always the
referee in that situation. We are the only one doing
the problem solving, And so of course they don't learn. Yeah,
it's because we never asked them to even try to
do it. If they've never had to piece it together
(22:05):
in their minds, and if the only time we ask
questions is when we're trying to make them look like
haven't I told you this before? The only answer is yes.
But the implication is we think they're dumb. So if
that's all we've ever done, then of course we're gonna
have to keep stepping in as the referee. But if
we're just tired of doing that, you have to start
giving them the coach in the head that they can
(22:25):
carry with them. And I'll tell you what I've seen
Lorna sidell this parenting coach. I've seen families she's worked with,
and they do this questioning routine a lot with their kids.
It's tedious, but eventually the kids know the questions and
so she can just yell from across the room, what
did it mean when your sister did that? And then
they do the whole thing in their head and they're like, Okay, fine, mom,
(22:45):
I know my sister loves me. We won't fight anymore.
And so if you want to have the kind of
house not with no fighting or no crying, but where
conflicts get resolved in a way where you end up
feeling excited for them to go off into the world
and to deal with conflict, and they're going to be
prepared to live with someone and not get in fights
all the time and not be alone. You know, in
their twenties and thirties, these are the times right now
(23:08):
to teach those lessons. And it's a little bit of
extra time, but you save yourself a house.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
In the long run, it might seem silly to ask
a six year old whether something serves their purpose, but
that's an important first step to helping that child develop
a key emotional skill that psychologists call cognitive reappraisal. If
you can reframe your thoughts about a situation, you can
shift your feelings too, and helping kids practice this skill
during small moments of crisis will allow them to learn
(23:33):
to handle the bigger challenges that will come later on.
After the break, we'll talk with David about other ways
parents can guide kids towards happier behaviors with a mentor mindset,
from coaching your middle school or through a math class meltdown,
to helping your teenager make better choices after a night
of bad decisions. The Happiness Lab will be back in
a moment. Psychologist David Yeger has devoted his career to
(24:03):
understanding why young people think and behave the way they do,
and how parents and mentors can help guide kids towards
becoming their best selves. David has found that many of
the interventions adults regularly use aren't very effective, in part
because they're interventions. In fact, David thinks most caregivers need
to intervene way less than they think. Take homework for example.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
So my daughter is algebra two and she came home
and they were doing some kind of factoring. I think
it's like finding the square. And my temptation was to
go and like figure out the trick and be like, okay,
just do this. But I'd seen these great tutors in
these great mentors, and I was like, all right, well,
the first thing they almost always do is ask what
if you tried so far, and why do you think
it's not working? Then immediately you know what the kid knows.
(24:47):
And it's hard to ask that because if they're frustrated
and they're like banging their head against the wall, your
temptation is to prevent them from having to revisit those
times where they weren't getting it. And so that's what
I did with Scarlett. I was like, all right, show
me what your teacher told you so far. And then
she said stuff that I completely forgot because I last
learned it when I was fourteen. And then I was like, well,
(25:08):
I see you're stuck here, Well what happened if you
do that? Then she explained, well, this won't weren't because
of that, and then I could just be there as
a guide and I just was curious. I asked her
to basically tinker with it, but she was always the agent.
She was always doing the problem solving. And then all
of a sudden she remembered something the teacher had said
two weeks before, and then she's like, oh, this is
(25:29):
where I'm supposed to do it. Now I understand the pattern.
So I didn't tell her anything about algebra two. I
didn't actually go read the textbook. I just worked with her. Now.
The reason why this is important is because when we
swoop in and say, okay, here's how you factor the problem,
here's how you find the square. Just do this, now
try it, then it makes them feel like we think
(25:53):
that they can't figure it out and that they are incompetent,
which is not what you want because there there are
a thousand lessons like that throughout the school year in
just one subject, and then you've got seven subjects. So
you want them to have the skill of being able
to figure it out. But what's is when they're totally
on their own and they feel overwhelmed and they're like,
I can't do this. So weirdly, non informative questions where
(26:16):
you're not really telling them answers, makes them feel supportive
enough to go troubleshoot. It makes them feel like if
they're stuck, they could ask you. But ultimately they own
the thinking at the end. And Mark Lepper in the
nineteen ninety is, the famous social psychologist, did this study
of the greatest tutors in the Bay Area, and he
found that ninety percent, roughly of what they said was
(26:38):
a question, it was not. They were great at explaining physics.
And I think that lesson still holds today.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
I think it's so important because as an adult, I
know what it feels like when somebody tells me what
to do. Right, it's kind of demeaning, and I get
more pissed off and I get more frustrated. But I
think we forget that's what's happening with our kids. We
kind of tell them what to do. I think another
thing about the questions, and you just illustrated this in
your algebra story, is that sometimes our kids have answers
that we don't expect. Right when you asked her, well,
what did she already know? She actually had some techniques
(27:06):
that like you're like, oh yeah, I forgot about that,
And so there are these cases is where our kids
kind of know stuff that we don't know, or at
least know things about the situation that we might not
know that unless we get curious and ask questions, we'd
never see that, and that affects our ability to help
them problem solve.
Speaker 2 (27:21):
And I think a big puzzle I had going into
my book ten to twenty five was why doesn't everybody
do this? I mean, there's the time issue. You're like,
you're in a hurry, but like, aside from that, why
does everybody do it? And I think it goes back
to the neurobiological and confidence model. If you think that
the reason why your kid is stuck is because when
it was explained very clearly by the teacher, the kid
(27:41):
was screwing around and goofing off and not paying attention,
and then they came home and they weren't being a
serious student and they don't care about their future. Then
you're not curious why they're stuck on factoring the trinomial.
You're like, this is a character issue. Yeah, this is
not an intellectual issue. And so it feels like we
need to have a response to the character issue by
(28:02):
giving them a lecture about how they should have paid attention.
You need to be responsible, you need to take good notes,
you should go review. Your teacher already gave this to you.
And that sounds harsh, but like in our studies, fifty
percent of American teachers take that approach. Yeah, they take
a shame and blame approach to a mistake, not collaborative troubleshooting.
And I think that's a real challenge because parents want
to prepare their kids for a tough future, like a
(28:24):
complex world where everyone's unforgiving. And the reality is if
you just presume most of the time that kids are
acting in good faith, and if you're seeing all this
other like reluctance behavior, deviance behavior, sometimes that's a cover
for the underlying thing, which is it's just actually hard
work and they haven't figured it out. So you always
treat it like you're a serious student who wants to
(28:45):
do it right, and you're gonna get it and I'm
gonna ask you questions just so I understand. Then they
feel respected and valued, and sometimes that safety is what
they need to get out of their heads and stop
the panic and then start embracing the challenge.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
And this kind of collaborative troubleshooting is true not just
in the academic domain, but maybe if other domains where
they like really screw up, right, how can collaborative troubleshooting
how But a case where your kid has kind of
messed up, maybe in the social domain or even in
the moral domain.
Speaker 2 (29:14):
I heard from a ton of parents, far more than
I even wrote about in the book. But I wrote
about a couple where their kids either snuck to a
party or went to a party but snuck booze to
the party and they came home drunk. And the best
parents I talked to were like, I've been waiting for
this for years. This is the best moment of my
parenting life. I was like, really, I'm just so worried
about that moment and that no, because we got to
(29:36):
be honest and the wrong approach, and they told me
was the yell, tell, blame, shame, the enforcer, authoritarian kind
of approach, And to be honest, a lot of that approach,
the yelling and telling comes from our insecurity as parents
that we feel like, how could I possibly be the
kind of parent where kids have so little respect for
(29:58):
my house rules that they would break this So blatantly.
It's more like we're insulted and offended more than it
is are concerned with their actual safety. And so the
collaborative troubleshooting parent and didn't take that offensive approach. Instead,
they were legitimately curious about how the kid ended up
having drunk too much, or in the case of the
speaking out, why did they feel like that was the
(30:21):
most important thing in the world and more important than
maintaining the family rules. And usually it went back to
status and respect. So in the case of a kid
who snuck out, the kid was just a hypersocial kid
and was worried that everyone would have this epic night
and there'd be some memory like they found it golf
(30:42):
card and got to do donuts on the golf course,
or they ran away from the cops, or something that
they would never forget and would talk about until their
high school reunion or to their funeral. Think about it, like,
I definitely have stories of hour and a half events
in high school, Like I f one hundred percent vividly
remember some of the most fun times, and I remember
who was there.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
I wouldn't want to miss out on that, right. There's
a cost benefit, Yep.
Speaker 2 (31:04):
You don't want to be the person who missed out
on this epic unforgettable night. So his mom started with
us like, look, I know you're social. Let's find other
ways for you to have epic unforgettable knights that don't
involve lying and cheating. But it wasn't don't be social.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Right.
Speaker 2 (31:20):
In the drinking case, there was one kid who normally
would just sneak like two wine coolers in his pockets,
but this one day brought it backpack because he was
trying to be a good friend to a lot of
other people who asked for boots, and then he ended
up drinking up most of it and so he got
super drunk. But again it came from this desire to
be social to help others, And so the punishment was
(31:41):
to talk about his drinking and his plan every night
before he went out. And it was an agonizing forty
five minute conversation about his plan before he could go
to a party, and that was a worse punishment than grounding.
But in the end they started understanding his logic and
his plans and they could subtly suggest things. And when
that kid went to college, he didn't have any trouble
with alcohol and he had the skill, So it's a
(32:04):
kind of never waste a crisis situation and questioning really
helps to build that mental muscle in the kid.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
I love these scenarios because they really show that you're
parenting for the future, right, Like in both of these cases,
you're talking not about how you solve for this incident,
but how you solve for future incidents, maybe incidents that
are going to happen when these kids go off to
college and you're not going to be there to kind
of see them out the door and that sort of thing.
Kind of curious how you brought this into your own life,
both collaborative troubleshooting and questions and all the stuff we've
been talking about.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
I obsess over parenting for the future in specific moments
that I know because of my sociology friends and colleagues
set kids up for a lifetime. But I think there
are a lot of moments in our kids' lives. Trying
out for a certain sport or activity, definitely taking into
a class, like applying for a summer job. There are
these moments where they're going to be freaked out because
(32:50):
it does have a big impact on their future, or
they're not taking it seriously and they need to. And
those are moments where you do have to be tough
in demanding and unrelenting, but also supportive so that way
they see a reasonable path and their fears have to
be legitimate to you. You have to be legitimately curious
about why they're worried. But there, you know, there's lots
(33:10):
of crying in my house in those moments where it's like,
you need to do this thing. But what I will
focus on is like, how do I be honestly curious
why you're being reluctant and troubleshoot with you and find
a solution that works for you. I'm not going to
lower the standard, but it does matter to me that
you're on board and that it feels good for you.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
So the next time you're struggling with your kid's behavior,
try to tap into what studies show is really motivating
that sense of mastery. Everyone wants to experience agency and independence,
regardless of their age. So remember that the old neurobiological
and competence model of childhood is out. The science shows
that what's in or respect and understanding? How can you
(33:50):
respect your kids better? Well, stop grow explaining and instead
get curious and ask questions. Guide your child toward the
habit of cognitive reappraisal so that they learn to manage
their difficult feelings as they get older. You can also
strive to be a warm demander, have high standards for
your child, but still be loving and supporting to understand
your child's perspective rather than yelling, telling, blaming, or shaming.
(34:14):
And finally, use those small moments of crises as opportunities
for collaborative troubleshooting. It may be a little inconvenient, and
you might even end up fifteen minutes late for a
very important podcast interview, but remember that taking the time
to help your child learn in these small moments can
make a huge difference. Next time on the Happiness Lab,
we'll wrap up our series on Happier Parenting with a
(34:36):
look at how technology is affecting kids happiness. We'll dig
into the impact of screens and social media on self image, attention,
and mental health, and we'll share tips for building a
plan that fits your family. And if you've found these
discussions helpful, you'll likely enjoy my free online course The
Science of All Being For parents. To learn more, just
(34:56):
head to doctor Lauri Santo's dot com slash parents. That's
Dr Laurisanto's dot com slash parents until next time. This
has been The Happiness Lab's special series on Happier Parenting
with me Doctor Laurie Santos
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Amy Robach & T.J. Holmes present: Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial
Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.