Child Psych Podcast Episode #106

Dr. William Stixrud Introduction

[Tania Johnson] Hello and welcome back to another summit masterclass. Our next master class is going to be with somebody who we admire so much at the Institute and whose work is deeply incorporated into nearly everything that we do now. Dr. William Stixrud is a clinical neuropsychologist and a founder of The Stixrud Group, a faculty member at Children’s National Medical Center, and an assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine. He is the co-author, with Ned Johnson, of the national bestselling book, The Self-Driven Child, which we have here and is amazing. It has been published in 19 countries and 18 different languages. He and Mr. Johnson have also co-authored a critically acclaimed second book What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home. Welcome Dr. Stixrud. 

[Dr. Stixrud] Nice to see you again, Tanya.

[Tania Johnson] So lovely to see you too. And I didn’t include it in the bio because we were making the bios a little bit shorter. I saw that you’re also part of a rock band. 

[Dr. Stixrud] I am. It’s certainly one of the most fun things in my life. Like many people of my generation, I started playing in a band when I was 14, when The Beatles came out. Then I took a little break from playing in bands, but I started again when I was 44 and I played for the last 30 years. I just love playing rock and roll. 

[Tania Johnson] I should maybe start your bio off with that next time. It’s so cool.

[Dr. Stixrud] It’s certainly a cool part of my life, yeah.

[Tania Johnson] Dr. Stixrud, your book The Self-Driven Child. It’s deeply influenced not only my work at the Institute, but also my parenting. It’s absolutely beautiful. Can you tell me what motivated a book like this? Because there’s not really another book like this, it’s very unique.

NUTS: Novelty, Unpredictability, Threat, low Sense of control

[Dr. Stixrud] So, I first started reading about what stress does to the brain, including the developing brain in 1998. And what I read, I knew a lot about stress and cardiovascular stuff, but I didn’t know about the brain. When I read it, I went holy moly, because it’s not pretty. And I thought about how stressed kids were. This was 25 years ago and then I started to learn about it, that one of the key factors in stress and what makes you stressed is the low sense of control. I heard a lecture in 2008 by a woman, a neuroscientist, who said “I defy you to think of anything that makes life stressful, that doesn’t include the acronym NUTS“: Novelty or new situations; unpredictability; threat (i.e., perceived threat, physical threat, psychological or emotional threat); and a low sense of control. And it’s that low sense of control that is the most stressful thing you experience because you can be in a new situation, an unpredictable one, even a threatening one. And you can still say “I can handle this. It’s not that stressful.” I also started to study, I saw so many kids who had disordered motivation, meaning they just didn’t seem to be that motivated, didn’t work very hard, and let other people get on them all the time to try to make them work. On the other end I see a lot of kids who are obsessively driven, will sacrifice anything for achievement in a way that’s not sustainable nor healthy for their brain. It also decreases their chances they are actually going to enjoy their success. 

As I studied motivation, I discovered that the key to self-motivation is autonomy and a sense of control to make your own decisions. Then I thought that we clearly have this epidemic of mental health, the Surgeon General of the United States said, “the defining public health crisis of our lifetime now is the status of adolescent mental health.” The people at Harvard last year studied American teenagers all over the country, young adults 18–25-year-olds, and said it’s twice as bad for young adults. So, we have this crisis of stress related mental health problems, a low sense of control is the most stressful thing you’d experience. I also see that all these kids who have unhealthy motivation, and a sense of control is the key to healthy motivation. I thought this must be a really big deal. and I started working with my colleague Ned Johnson. We have very different professions, but we’ve had similar experiences, and our ideas really meshed. And so, we wanted to write a book about “how do you raise a kid who has that sense of control over zone one from the time they’re little.” The evidence when you do that is so compelling in terms of how beautiful kids turn out, how much easier it’s for parents not to be fighting with them all the time, and for parents not to feel that they’re responsible for making them turn out a certain way. That’s a long-winded way of explaining why we wrote this up. It’s really those two things, stress related mental health issues and motivational issues, both connected by a low sense control, and both corrected by increasing a sense of control.

[Tania Johnson] And Dr. Stixrud, it makes so much sense, because when I think about myself in situations where I feel as if I don’t have control over what’s going to happen, it’s awful. It’s absolutely awful.

[Dr. Stixrud] You think about, I mean any kind of emotional issue that a kid has or that we have, think about anxiety. You’d like to stop worrying, but you can’t. Your thinking is out of control. You’re depressed. You have substance use problems. I mean, life is completely chaotic. You have no control. You realize “I have no control over this.” There’s a lot of emerging evidence that the reason that cognitive behavioral therapy, the most popular evidence-based approach to therapy for children and adolescents. The reason it works is it increases their sense of control over their own thinking, of their own feelings, and that confidence in mastering them like “I can handle my feelings.” It’s a very powerful idea. I’m just reading now about how it appears to be this biological necessity with humans. I read about 4-month-old babies, about how you teach them to do something, and they get a reward for it. Once they learn it and then they’re routinely getting the reward, if you start giving them the reward without them earning it, they get mad, they want to earn it themselves. We also see it in rodents about how important that sense of control is. It’s a big deal and that’s why we wrote our first book. That’s why we wrote a second book. That’s why we wrote our third book.

Parent Question

[Tania Johnson] I love it, it’s so important. Okay, I have one of our members who sent in a question. I’m going to read it to you and then I’m hoping that we can use some of your work to figure out how to help this member, just to give an overview. Here we go,

“My daughter Haley is 14 years old, and everything is a struggle. She spends all night on her phone, she’s constantly tired and I feel like she’s basically just coasting through school. She tells me she’s stressed out all the time, but honestly, I don’t know what she’s stressed about. Homework is a nightmare with her, she just doesn’t hand in her assignments. Every few days we have a massive blow up and I take away her phone. We’ve tried everything. I just wish she would realize that she’s screwing up her life. Her dad and I think she is university material, but at this rate she’s not even going to finish high school. I worry about her all the time. Any suggestions on what to do to get my little girl back on track would be great.”

The Principles of Raising a Self-Driven Child

First Principle: Put Your Connection with Your Child First

[Dr. Stixrud] Well, I think that the principles that we’re going to talk about will be life-changing if you can apply them. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just do the best you can. It’ll be life changing for you and for this mother and her daughter. And the first thing that comes to mind is that first sentence, “everything’s a struggle.”  We know that this is a 14-year-old and the closest thing to a silver bullet, for protecting the kids against emotional problems, is a close relationship with their parents. We want to minimize where we’re struggling with our teenagers and maximize the time with which we’re enjoying time with them. In our second book, coming out in March, we have the seven principles of raising a self-driven child and the first one is to put connection first. To prioritize your relationship with your kid over your kid’s homework or achievement or whatever they’re doing. So, I think that ideally, home feels like a safe base and I’ll come back and talk more about this than any other principle. But ideally, home is a pretty low stress place, right? The world is stressful outside the house.  We want home to feel like a safe place. To help our kids, the primary thing we can do is to let them know that they’re deeply loved and try to understand them before we judge them. When this mother, understandably so, says, “I don’t know what she’s stressed about?”  Well, let’s try to find out. The two most powerful tools for building that emotional closeness with kids is expressing empathy, even if they don’t necessarily agree with their interpretation or anything else, I’m just trying to understand you as a person and I respect you as a person and validate them. 

Have Empathy for Your Child

[Dr. Stixrud] Next is empathy. Empathy is when we use reflective listening to understand. For example, being really upset that my daughter is the only third grader that didn’t get invited to a birthday party. You know, I’d say “what I’m understanding is that that you’re really upset because you’re afraid that you’re concerned about the effects of your daughter of being left out of this invitation?” I’m just trying to understand. I’m not trying to judge. The validation is letting kids know that for most people, your feelings are normal, and so you say that I think I’d feel like that. It’s so interesting because I was giving a lecture in New York few years ago, and I was talking about this idea and this woman in the front row who read about the subject stood and turned and faced the rest of the audience, she said that this idea changed my relationship with my kid. She’s in boarding school, she is 15 years old and she would call me several times a week and she’d bring up some problem and I’d say well, you need to do this or this or this or this and she’d fight me on it and they would devolve into an argument and hang up. She started telling me this problem and I said help me understand that a little bit better, and I just kind of listened and then she asked if I could help. I wasn’t trying to force the kids, and I wasn’t trying to change the kid. I think what I’ll talk about a little bit later is that there’s a principle in our new book called motivate your kids without trying to change them. Because when we try to change people without their asking for help with change, all we get is conflict and resistance. It’s a little counterintuitive, the first thing I’m saying is that we want to understand what’s going on. Then ideally you can start normalizing this feeling. Of being understood. Just by doing that the kids start to feel safe sharing their feelings with you and it’s really the way you feel closest to people is when you’re experiencing hard things together, there’s something you know like that. 

I’ll just mention too when we were writing the second book we interviewed a whole bunch of teenagers, dozens of teenagers, and we asked them one of the questions we asked them “who do you feel closest to in this world?’ And some of them said my mom or my mom or my dad. A lot of them also said my uncle, an aunt, an older sister or brother, a cousin, or a teacher. Then we asked, “what is it about this person that makes you feel so close to them?” And almost invariably they said something like “they listen to me without judging me, and they don’t tell me what to do.” The point I’m making here is that having a close relationship with your parents as an adolescent is the best possible way to protect them, not only from anxiety and depression, but also from the harmful effects of social media. We do that by listening to them without judging, trying to understand and not telling them what to do. 

[Tania Johnson] That’s so beautifully simple, isn’t it Dr. Stixrud? Just be there. Listen. Feel with them. 

[Dr. Stixrud] It is. When we were lecturing about this in California a few years ago. This woman, the next morning, emailed the woman who would ask us to come to California to lecture and said I just heard these guys talk last night and when I got home my 7th grade son was in tears. She asked what’s wrong? He said I’m the weakest kid in 7th grade and he started crying. Ordinarily I would have said, “well, honey, that can’t be right,” or, you know, well, “you’re good at other things” or “everybody in our family is a late bloomer.” I would have tried to talk him out of it, try to reassure them. What I did is I just said “that sucks.” I said “if I wanted to be the strongest kid, I would feel upset too. Is there a way that I could help?” At least I don’t know. And Mom said, why do we sleep on it? Talk about in the morning? And in the morning, this kid came up with a written plan to show his mother about how he could get stronger. Involved was her taking him to this park where he could do chin ups or something like that. But he’d written his own plan, he solved the problem himself. It didn’t take his mom telling him what to do or trying to talk him out of his feelings. Which we tend to do because we love our kids, we don’t want them to suffer. But we help them most by getting closest to them, by trying to understand them, listening without judging, not telling them what they do, and prioritizing and enjoying them as they are.

I consulted with this kid probably 35 years ago who had really screwed up in high school, had a lot of problems as a young adult. He was probably 21 when I saw him. And I asked him “is there something your parents could have done when you were in high school that would have made this better,” and he said, “I think it would have helped if they’ve been happy to see me sometimes.” When my kids are really screwing up, it’s hard not to be constantly disapproving of them and letting them know that they’re screwing up their life. However, that’s the opposite of what we want to do. And so, I’ll talk more about that. The first idea I want to share is this idea of putting your connection first. So many parents of young adults tell me, “When I looked back, I wish I’d spent more time enjoying my kid instead of fighting with them about stuff.”

[Tania Johnson] Yeah. Huge. Huge, huge, huge.

[Dr. Stixrud] Do you want me to keep going?

[Tania Johnson] Yes keep going. So, what we want is a safe base for our child where they go “I am deeply accepted and loved.” So, then they can rest.

[Dr. Stixrud] Yeah exactly. My co-author who works mainly with high school juniors and seniors gets this a lot. He works with these affluent families and very high achievement schools. And, where the kids says, “I got a C, don’t tell my parents. They’ll kill me.” Ideally, we’re people that are our kids can come to when they’re having fun as opposed to that, but we get there by letting them know I can handle your problems, I can handle your feelings, even your hard feelings, without getting upset. If I do get upset, that’s on me. We thought about the stuff we’ve been lecturing about for 15 years and writing about for the last seven or half years. It’s really the first thing is just putting connection with your kids first.

[Tania Johnson] Beautiful. I love it.

Second Principle: Be a Consultant to Your Child

[Dr. Stixrud] The second thing, the second principle is to be a consultant to your kids rather than trying to be their boss or their manager. But I got this idea in part because very early in my career. I’m a neuropsychologist and I test kids who are having problems. And I saw a lot of kids who have learning problems, had ADHD. And the parents would say, “trying to get them to do homework is like World War 3.”

I talked to these kids and I’d ask, “if you don’t turn in an assignment, who’s most upset?” And invariably they said, “my mom.”

I used the family therapy technique, 

“who’s next most upset?” I asked

“Well, my dad,” they said.

“who’s next most?” 

“My teacher.” 

“Who’s next most?” 

“My tutor.”

Then my therapist, then my dog. You know, they were never on the list and I noticed that. If adults were spending 80 units of energy trying to make a kid do his work, the kid would spend 20, and if adults got more anxious and ratcheted up to 90 units, the kid could spend 10. And I realize it doesn’t change until the energy changes, and so what I wrote in 1986, I wrote an article in Mccall’s Magazine, a women’s magazine, and it simply it’s called “how to not fight with your kid about homework.” And the first thing I suggested was just tell your kid “I love you too much to fight with you about your homework.” And the implication is you’re much more important to me than your achievement is. And then you say “I‘m willing to do anything I can to help you. I’m willing to be your homework consultant. I’m willing to if you want. If it’ll help you, I’ll meet with you every night. I’ll go with your son. I’ll do any. But within my limits, I’ll help in any way I can. And if I can’t help you, I’ll try to find somebody who can help you. But I don’t want to fight with you. You’re the most precious thing in the universe to me, and I don’t want to fight with you over something like this. I don’t want to act like somehow, I’m supposed to be able to make you do your homework. I couldn’t make you do it. All you’d have to flop on the floor or close your eyes or start screaming or do something. I couldn’t make you do it.” Certainly, one of the most empowering things for parents in general is when you make peace with the fact that “I really couldn’t make my kid do anything against their will.” And you stop trying and you find other ways to influence your kids as opposed to control them. It’s really powerful and so second idea that comes to mind, the three questions that I suggest reflecting on in this kind of situation, if your kids are really struggling. If everything they’re doing is wrong and they worry they’re screwing up their life, this will follow them the rest of their life, they won’t have a future. 

[Tania Johnson] Dr. Stixrud, which is exactly Haley’s mom’s inquiry. It’s amazing, as you say that, I’m like, that’s exactly it with this child. What’s going to happen to her?

[Dr. Stixrud] I’ll just say parenthetically, all our worries about our kids, it’s about the future. Because if I had a crystal ball and I can say I know your kids are really struggling right now, by the time she’s 21, she’s going to be incredible you won’t believe it. You wouldn’t worry so much. It’s all about the future. One of the principles we’ll talk about a little bit later is this idea of becoming a non-anxious presence in your family. And one of the ways we can do that is to take a long view and I’ll talk more about that in a few minutes. Is that okay?

[Tania Johnson] That’s perfect.

[Dr. Stixrud] The three questions I suggest asking are:

1. Whose life is it? 
2. Whose responsibility is it? 
3. Whose problem is it? 

One of the best things we can do from the time our kids are really little is to have the idea that this is their life. And when you communicate to kids when they’re little, you want to do it this way or this way. Let them know that I recognize they’re an individual person. You don’t have to like everything that I like. You can see things your own way. It’s incredibly powerful in creating this sense of control. I think that that once we recognize that it’s a kids life. Then what we want to do is to help our kids learn to run their own life over time. You know, you don’t let a 5-year-old decide to cross a busy street without holding your hand. But over time, whether the goal is by the time kids leave home, they can run their own life. And I say that because, at least in the United States, there is a huge percentage of kids that go off to college and without experience running their own life and they just run into the ground, they’re home by November, they’ve already failed. Even really high achieving kids. I was lecturing in Houston right before the pandemic. And I happen to mention that probably the most elite high school in Washington, DC and this woman said “I’m a psychotherapist here at the Menninger Clinic in Houston. We know the school in DC well because so many of the graduates get into the top colleges in the country. But as soon as they get a B, as soon as they realize that everybody here is as smart as them, as soon as they realize that as they got ghosted by a girl they want to go out with, that they can’t handle it. Can’t handle it emotionally so they take a leave of absence and they come here for treatment. Because they don’t have experience running their own life.”

Three Components of Being a Consultant

[Dr. Stixrud] What I suggested the three implications of this idea of as your kids get older, thinking about them more as consultants than their boss or their manager is:

#1 Don’t Force Kids

[Dr. Stixrud] Offer help and advice, but don’t try to force it down their throat. Is there a way that I could help? or, you know, in the second book we talk about the language of the parent consultant which, which includes the language of getting buy in like “I wonder what would happen if you. I’ve got an idea about that. Can I run it by you? What you want to do is just say I’ve got an idea about that, can I run it by you? Do you want to hear my suggestion? Is there a way that I could help? I wonder what would happen if you tried it this way?” It’s tentative. The thing that I say a lot with kids and adults is, “for whatever it’s worth.” And then I’ll share my perspective about something and I’m trying to I want to make it. I wanted to generally to feel I’m not trying to lay this idea on you like you need to accept it. I’m not trying to force it to get you to see it my way, but for whatever it’s worth, here’s how I see it.

[Tania Johnson] Beautiful. It just allows so much space. It’s like you see them.

#2 Empower Kids to Make Their Own Decisions

[Dr. Stixrud] It does. Try to get their buy-in first. Try to see if they’re interested as opposed to just blathering on or having them get used to turning you off because they are like “here we go. This is lecture #33.” One of the other ways that language of the parent consultant works is the language of no force. And I just think that it’s so empowering when you simply acknowledge “I know I couldn’t make you do that. And I’m not trying to force you to do it.” Sometimes I feel like I have a superpower with kids, because parents will call me and try to get a kid to do something for a year or six years or something. And they say, would you talk them into doing it? Maybe they’ll buy it from you. And I say, well, “I don’t believe in talking kids into stuff, but I’ll talk to them about it.” A mother called, whose kid had been diagnosed with ADHD in second grade and had refused medication for ADHD every year for six years. He was the 8th grade, applying out to private high schools in a Catholic school. And was getting low C’s in every subject, and he refused to take medicine, told his pediatrician make me and the pediatrician right again to do it earlier. I sat down with him, and he expected me to lecture about medications. I just said, the first thing, I want to tell you is that I don’t want anybody to try to make you take this medicine. You said that you’re smart enough to figure out whether it helps you or not. I don’t want you to take it if it doesn’t help you. I don’t want you to take it if it has terrible side effects. But I do think it may be in your best interest to try it and see what it does and then decide where you want to use it though, because for some people it’s like turning on a light switch. After that, he wanted to start it, he couldn’t get it for two or three days, but he wanted to start that day, once the energy changed. It’s going to be your call. Nobody’s going to force you. He’s been fighting for six years. Same thing with another kid, this Jewish kid who refused to do his Bar- mitzvah for year and a half. I simply advise the mom, tell him, obviously we couldn’t make you do it, we couldn’t make you learn the proportion of the Bible you need to learn and get up on the on the stage. You couldn’t move your lips. We couldn’t make you do things. But, at the same time, It’s important to us. It’s important to your grandparents, your aunt, your friends and your uncle. We all want to welcome you into the Jewish community. And we hope you can find a way to do it. Two days later, the kid comes back and says, OK, I’ll do it. And then he negotiated. Didn’t want to do it in front of the whole community, the whole synagogue. But he did it after a year and a half from the system. And so, the first thing is we offer help and advice.

We encourage kids to make decisions about their life, but with little two-year-olds you simply want their opinion about things, and as they get older, we encourage them to make their own decisions. By the time they’re teenagers, I suggest we require them. And we can help them, we can give them advice or let them talk to other people who know more about stuff than them. The best message for a fourteen-year-old is to let them know that I have confidence in your ability to make decisions about your own life and to learn from your mistakes. I want you to have a ton of experience at doing things before you leave home. Because that’s how people, that’s how kids, become good decision makers. And so, it’s offering help and advice, not trying to force it down their throats, but finding a skillful way to communicate what you think is the right thing. Second, is encouraging kids to make their own decisions and expressing confidence in their ability to do so. I just got an e-mail from a mom. I never tested her kids, I’ve met them once, but I never tested them. But She worked for me. The mother worked for me briefly, and she reminds me, remembers me telling her this idea about trusting kids, encouraging them, let them make their own decisions. And she said that her 35-year-old son who is getting married, and he’s the happiest person that I know. And she said, he didn’t choose a future that I would have chosen for him, he didn’t want to go to college, he’s a rock’n’roll musician, he does these service jobs to make extra money, but he’s the happiest person that I know. And his fiancé said he’s the most competent person I ever met. He trusts his own decisions.

[Tania Johnson] Huge.

#3 Let Kids Solve Their Own Problems

[Dr. Stixrud] The third thing is the way that kids develop high stress tolerance and ability to handle life is by solving their own problems. One of the things that we recommend, the first question we asked ourselves is “whose problem is it?” because we’re wired as mammals to protect and to soothe our young. It’s hard for us not to try and solve our kids’ problems, to intervene in some way. With the experience of something stressful happening, and you’re trying to figure out how to solve it. That changes the brain in a way that, over time that as stressful things happen, you go into the coping mode.  I’ll explain why, but you go into coping mode as opposed to freaking out, giving up or trying to get away. And so,  what happens in the brain is that when you’re trying to solve a problem, you’re actively engaged your prefrontal cortex, which is trying to figure out what to do, dampens down your stress response, so you aren’t as stressed and you can begin solving the problem and that creates connections in your brain. After you have some of those experiences, you just know that I can handle things. It makes it so hard to stress kids because they have handled this.  We want kids to have experience solving their own problems because that’s how they develop the confidence that they can. We can help them, we can offer support, but ideally, we want to let them solve their own problems. So those are the three components of being a consultant, to a kid. I was suggesting this mother. This mom saying, “you know, I love you too much to fight about this stuff. You know, you’re the most precious thing for me. And is there a way that I could? And like that and just or just, you know, I was wondering if you might want to try. This like. That with the and I’ll just say as a I just want to say as a neuropsychologist, with the kids struggling in school. That, this kid may have a learning problem may have ADHD, detention problems, and I think they are trying to understand that part better. To rule out there’s something really that’s making this really hard for her that we don’t know about yet.  It is incredibly powerful, it can be a life changing tool.

[Tania Johnson] Dr. Stixrud, what I love about this is that I think so often we’ve been led to believe that competency is making sure that as parents were good parents. If our child is doing their homework and learning their spelling words and every day we’re sitting down with them. But really, I’m hearing such a different message from you today that we build confidence and competency through repeated experiences of trying, making mistakes, trying again, and leading your own world, which is so different from what the mainstream has taught us.

[Dr. Stixrud] Right. You know, I discovered this initially years ago. I was reading about a neuroscientist in Colorado, by the name of Steve Mayer, who has studied rats. Rats have brains that are organized a lot like human brains and there’s a lot we can learn from them. It’s a classic study. There’s rat A and rat B in separate plexiglass cages. There is a wheel in each cage and their tails are outside the cage, there’s an electrode on their tail. What happens is rat A has its tail shocked, it’s not painful, but it’s annoying, they want it to stop. He discovers if he turns the wheel, the shock stops. And he has several experiences of that. They get shocked and he just turns the wheel and the shock stops. With rat B, it gets shocked, turns the wheel and nothing happens. His shock only stops when rat A turns the wheel. Rat A has this experience. And again, when rat is turning the wheel, his prefrontal cortex is activating, dampening down the stress response. So, he’s in coping mode. He’s not as highly stressed as he’s doing something about. Eventually, you can disconnect the wheel from the shocking apparatus, so you get shocked and he’s turning that wheel, and the wheel is not stopping the shock, but he’s not stressed. He’s just coping. Rather rat B who didn’t have the experience of being able to control a stressful situation becomes a nervous wreck very easily. This kind of thing has been replicated with both children and adults as well. When you experience, “I can handle this,” that’s what builds confidence. So, it’s those three things. 

Thinking about the girl we talked about earlier, just to summarize what we’ve talked about so far, is to feel loved and accepted for who she is. We also wanted the parents to not spend unnecessary energy trying to force you to do stuff and fighting with her and treating her respectfully because she wants her life to work. Part of the reason we encourage kids to make their own decisions is they don’t want to screw up. They don’t want to be failures, they want to be successful, and that’s the energy we want to side with. And that’s why we don’t let them make their decisions about stuff they know nothing about, we want them to make informed decisions, meaning, a lot of kids are deciding what the parents are deciding, should my kid go to private school or to public school? And you know, once there. I’ll see you at 1st and 2nd grade, but you know safely certainly. But by the time they’re in 5th or 6th grade, I say I want this to be their call. What you do is think with them all the pros and cons. You ask them to talk to other people who know the schools or whatever better and then you make a list of the pros and cons of public versus private. And let the kid decide. In my experience, kids can make as good a decision for themselves as I can make for them, right? I don’t know their parent. We don’t always know this, right? So, that idea is expressing confidence. This is your life. And it’s not like this is your life, buddy. It’s not like that. This is a beautiful thing. This is your life, and you get to create it. And I’m confident you can and that’s it. 

[Tania Johnson] And as you say, Dr. Stixrud, it’s just a shift in energy. It’s such a huge shift.

[Dr. Stixrud] When we were working on our second book, we thought about that a lot that we kept coming up with this idea just changing the energy because that’s what it is. You know, it takes two to fight. I’m not going to. I just care too much about it. It’s just not wrong. Yeah, it doesn’t seem to help you.

[Tania Johnson] Know absolutely. Yeah, I love it.

Third Principle: Communicating Healthy Expectations

[Dr. Stixrud] One other thing that I’ll just mention briefly, is the third principle is called communicating healthy expectations. This is really interesting and pretty helpful. Just to summarize it very briefly. The research on expectations of parents and expectations for kids is very powerful. The most powerful way to communicate high expectations to kids is to express confidence in their ability to perform at a high level and to accomplish their own goals. I think that if it’s important you work hard “I’m confident you can get there,” as opposed to saying “I expect you to do this, I’ll be disappointed if you don’t, there will be consequences if you don’t.” It’s actually more effective to express confidence. I know you can. I’ll be surprised if you can’t work hard at it. I’ll support you to do it. 

Fourth Principle: Teach Kids an Accurate Model of Reality

[Dr. Stixrud] The next one is called teaching kids an accurate model of reality. I don’t live in Canada, never lived in Canada. I love visiting Canada. You tell me kindly how much this applies. As we talked about earlier, this mom’s major worry is she’s screwing up her whole life. Now what I tell kids who are in this kind of situation, if I sat down with this woman’s daughter. I would say “the first thing I want you to understand is that I know things are hard right now, but you haven’t screwed up your whole life. In fact, you could flunk every single one of your classes for the next 4 years. If you decided that was a bad idea, you could, at least in United States, go to Community College.” And which is open enrollment, they don’t care about the transcript. Then you don’t have to have a high school degree, and you can get about 30 credits, which is 2 semesters, you can apply to virtually every college in the country. And they don’t want to see your high school transcripts. So, when I tell kids that sometimes parents say don’t tell my kid that, but what I found is that it invariably motivates them because like this, daughters feel like, what’s the point of trying? This girl. I believe it’s quite likely this girl has had the experience of actually trying to work hard to do better, and it didn’t make that much difference. That’s why I’m wondering, if there may be some kind of learning issue here or an attention issue, or whether she’s just so anxious that she can’t make it. The major manifestation of anxiety is that we avoid stuff. 

I went to a meeting at a Catholic school of an 8th grader who was really struggling and the principal, who’s a great principal, and said “I’ve already had two meetings with this kid, he’s got to understand this is very important, this is a four-year decision where he goes to high school.” And this kid would do no work unless somebody was on him about it. Like this girl. I said, “respectfully, I think it’s not lost on this kid that if he did better, he’d have more options for high school. I also think it’s almost inconceivable that he hasn’t at times tried to do better but found that even if he really tries, he didn’t do that that much better because he’s got some learning issues. And thirdly, the major manifestation of anxiety is that we avoid stuff. Right now, schoolwork makes him very anxious that he can’t focus on it and avoids getting into it.” And so, teaching kids an accurate model of reality means teaching them that there are all kinds of ways to become successful in this world. If you’re screwing up at age 14, don’t worry about it, nobody’s going to care what you’re like when you’re 14. You know when you’re 25 or 30, no cares. In some countries you can’t get a higher education if you aren’t a good student when you’re 14. Is that true in Canada?

[Tania Johnson] Not necessarily. I think that there’s ways for people to come back later. Just like you’re saying and do it in an alternative way.

[Dr. Stixrud] And that’s why I want to give kids examples of that. I saw this kid a few years ago, and he was going to a really high achieving high school, and he had low average grades. He’s like 16 years old, and he said, “I do no schoolwork. I just manipulate my teachers in my classes to pass me.” But he was passionate about his county Rescue Squad, that he volunteers at with the fire department. He was really good at it. I said, “am I the only one who thinks you ought to drop out of high school?” I’ve never met his parents and so I said “you are 16, you do not really need to be in high school. And you can just work toward Rescue Squad and then start taking college classes when you’re a little bit older.” I met with his parents the next week, who are both university professors, I didn’t know how this was going to go. I’m sure he had the conversation with the parents, and they said, “we can’t thank you enough.” Forgive my language but, he came home, and he said, “I haven’t f* up my own life. I can go to Community College and then I could transfer to the University of Maryland, they have a fire science program.” He looked a little bit more into it and he found out that he couldn’t continue with the Rescue Squad if he wasn’t in school. Then school became his thing. His mother called me 2 1/2 months later and said, “he’s got his grade point average up from like the 2.1 to a 3.6.”  She said, “I want you now to meet with this twin brother who’s always been really successful, but the twin brother is really concerned that unlike his brother, who’s turned his life around, he doesn’t have a passion.”

[Tania Johnson] Amazing.

[Dr. Stixrud]  Every time I tell underachieving kids who are really struggling, that I don’t care. This isn’t easy right now, but I’m not worried that you screwed up your whole life. I would say to get things together. Learn how to work hard. Be able to do stuff you haven’t figured out how to do yet. But I don’t want you to have this added burden of torturing yourself thinking I’ve already agreed screwed everything up. 

[Tania Johnson] So empowering.

Fifth Principle: Motivating Kids Without Trying to Change Them

[Dr. Stixrud] And just a couple of other things. Briefly, I mentioned earlier telling you this idea of motivating kids without trying to change them. This is so interesting because when parents say to me “How do I motivate my kid? How do I get him to care more about school?” One of my postulates of motivation is you can’t make somebody do something against their will. You can’t make them want what they don’t want. You can’t make them not want what they want, so, you try to work with what do they want. I realized that when parents say, “how do I motivate my child?” What they really say is “how do I change my child?” I studied the science of change and what I learned is that you can’t change somebody, if they’re not asking, “help me change,” then you’ll just get conflict and resistance. And I looked at something called the SPACE program at Yale.

[Tania Johnson] Yes, I know what you’re talking about. 

SPACE Program: Supporting Parenting of Anxious Childhood Emotions

[Dr. Stixrud]  We give two examples in this chapter of ways to help kids change that don’t involve trying to change them. One is the SPACE program. It stands for Supportive Parenting of Anxious Childhood Emotions. It’s a program for treating anxiety in children and it’s as effective as therapy for the kids themselves. And it only works with parents, and what the parents do is they express confidence…they use empathy and confidence. For example, “I know waiting alone at the bus stop is stressful and makes you anxious and I’m 100% confident that you can handle your feelings.” If you are the only parent waiting at the stop with your kid amongst all the other 6th grade kids or middle school kids, it might make him look like he can’t handle it. You’re thinking, will this make him less anxious? Well, over time. That kind of what they call accommodation actually makes kids more anxious. And so, the second thing the parents do, besides that empathy and expressing confidence. They just say “I used to think standing at the bus stop next to you was making you less anxious, but I realize now I’ve been doing it for months and it hasn’t been. In fact, you think you’re more anxious, so I’m not going to do it anymore.” There’s a very precise way you do this, but the idea is you let him deal with his own feelings and he learns that he can handle his own feelings. I love that idea. 

There’s another approach that we talk about that I won’t go into, it’s called Motivational Interviewing that was created by a psychologist who worked with problem drinkers. For years they tried to talk to them and give all the rational reasons they needed to stop drinking but it never worked. Then they started asking questions such as “tell me what alcohol does for you?” and people would say “I’m so much more relaxed. I don’t feel so stressed about work and I’m more fun to be with socially.” and eventually what they say is, “but it’s expensive. Also, I’m afraid that my wife’s going to leave me because I’m irritable at home when it’s starting to wear off.” They start to talk about the problems and start to voice their own reasons for change. Then the psychologists asked “Is there a way I could help? Is that what you’d like help with? How might you change that?” But that was the key, not trying to change them, and helping them find their own reasons for change.

[Tania Johnson] Beautiful. Intrinsic.

[Dr. Stixrud] As we we’re writing our second book, we talk about this. I tested a 15-year-old who is an athlete, a basketball player. He was smoking a ton of pot in the summer, his parents kept finding it and throwing it out. They would lecture him, scold him and ground him. I sent the mom one of our draft chapters. In that chapter we’re talking about what we call the language and silence of change. The mom then asked her son “what does pot do for you?”  And he said “I have much more fun. And I don’t worry about all the stuff I used to worry about. I feel happier.” And then he said, “but the problem is I can’t practice hard enough to make the varsity basketball team this year and I’m really worried about that.” And she asked, “is that something you would like to change?” By the end of this summer this kid wasn’t smoking pot anymore. She changed energy by no longer judging him, instead she tried to understand and asking if she can help. Now, there are kids with serious substance use problems, so this won’t work for everybody. But it’s an illustration of changing the energy and not trying to force someone to change against their will. Instead, we can help them find their own reasons for change and support those.

[Tania Johnson] Beautiful. I absolutely love it. It’s so, so, so powerful Dr. Stixrud. It changes everything.

Sixth Principle: Becoming a Non-Anxious Presence 

[Dr. Stixrud] It does for me. The sixth Principle is becoming a non-anxious presence in your family. I didn’t make this phrase up. It was a rabbi and a family therapist who consulted with organizations ranging from families to corporations. We concluded that organizations work best if the people in charge are not highly anxious and emotionally reactive, and it is the same for families too. It’s easier to soothe a crying infant if the parent stays calm. It’s easier to deal with temper tantrums in toddlers when parents stay calm. Or you’ve got a15-year-old and find pot in their room, might it not be better to stay calm talk about it. Rather just getting mad. Being a non-anxious presence is the language that this man used and it’s so beautiful for thinking about what we want to be in our own family. In our first book, we talked about stress being contagious. In our second book, we talked about being calm as contagious because we pick up emotions from other people. So, if we’re calm at home then our kids feel it. If we’re stressed, they feel it. If they’re stressed, we feel. Which is why we work on ourselves to manage our own anxiety as much as we can so that we can be a non-anxious presence.

I’ve been a neuropsychologist for 40 years. I’ve seen thousands of kids, many who were a disaster at age 14 but turned out great. I get feedback from parents all the time about this. I wish I could implant in my brain the knowledge of these thousand kids. I wish I could impart those circuits in my brain and in the brains of all parents. Because all our worry about our kids is about their future. If we calm down and we stop thinking “I need to turn this around immediately,” then you start trusting the kid more. The kid wants to figure this out too. We wanted to build that close relationship. We want to listen without judging. We want to offer help and advice. We want to encourage kids to make their own decisions and solve their own problems. Overtime, things get so much easier and so much better for everybody.

[Tania Johnson] It’s so beautiful. What really stands out for me, as a mom myself, is in giving up control and worrying about the future, there’s this beautiful gift that I get to be with my child right now. 

[Dr. Stixrud] And the cool thing is you weren’t supposed to be able to control your child. I remember when I did my internship in clinical neuropsychology at the Children’s Hospital in Boston. There was a pediatrician there who’s the most famous pediatrician in the world, Berry Brazelton. I remember hearing about these failure to thrive infants who wouldn’t eat. Brazelton was on that ward, and even the greatest pediatrician in the world couldn’t get them to eat. And you think about, can you discipline a 1-year-old? Can you discipline a 2-year-old? If you have a child that you need to take to the doctor but they refuse to get into the car, you can carry them to the car, but if they do not want to go in, you cannot make them get into the car. 

[Tania Johnson] Yes.

[Dr. Stixrud] Once you make peace with that “I’m not supposed to.” That’s not part of my job description as a parent to make our kids do things they do not want to do or get them to do things I think they should do. My job as a parent is to love them unconditionally, express confidence in them, model the qualities I want them to be, teach them to where they’re open my suggestion. Set limits, kids need limits, but ideally, we work out what the limits are with them, so it makes sense to them, which also applies a lot to technology.  This woman’s kid was not sleeping because they were on their phone all night and that seems that’s something you wanted to negotiate with your kid. Rather than taking it away as a punishment, talk with the kid about it, say to them “tell me what you understand about the phone and sleep.” Most high school kids that I see I ask “how much sleep did you get? How much sleep do you think a kid your age needs not to feel tired?” They often say 7 or 8 hours of sleep, but it is actually 9 or 10 hours of sleep. In studies with American high school kids, they averaged that kids only get 6 hours of sleep. So, they are profoundly sleep deprived. It was bad before the cell phone but it’s worse now. But then you want to problem solve with your kid. You can say, “I feel like I’d be the worst mother in the world if I let you stay up on your phone all night and only get 4 hours of sleep. I can’t pay for your phone minutes unless we work out a reasonable plan.” You got to focus on what you have control over, where it doesn’t feel like negative punishment (i.e., a kid messed up so a parent takes away something they really like). The goal is to teach them and model for them how to manage the use of technology, which is not easy. It’s probably the hardest challenge. I’m fully on board with some of the American movements to try to prevent kids from having access to the internet until they are 16 years old and make it illegal for companies to let kids under 16-year-olds on. But, it is what it is right now.  And I think that the way we do this is not by trying to constantly police kids, but by negotiating with them and helping them work out limits that ideally work for both of you.

 [Tania Johnson] Absolutely. Like you said, that’s within our control. It’s not, “I’m taking it away.” It’s a different message, yeah.

[Dr. Stixrud] That’s right. Yeah.

[Tania Johnson] Dr. Stixrud, for everybody listening in, we will put links in the speakers notes to all of your books. I know your next one is coming out next year, so we won’t have that yet. But we are eagerly awaiting it. So when it does come out, we’re excited to hear more about it. Thank you so much for your work. Just incredible. Just so inspiring.

[Dr. Stixrud] What a pleasure and keep up the good work you folks are doing. 

[Tania Johnson] Thank you. Have a beautiful day.