Harvard Psychologist: College Students Have Always Struggled. So What Has Changed? | Alexis Redding – EP 838

Harvard developmental psychologist Alexis Redding explores what decades-old student interviews reveal about college mental health, the enduring need for belonging, and how we can better support young adults through life’s transitions.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John R. Miles?

  Coming up next on Passion Struck. What if the struggles we blame on today's generation have been with us for decades? Harvard researcher Alexis Redding uncovered recordings that reveal a surprising connection between young people then and now. Listen to what she discovered.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  We thought that what we would hear is how different young people today were from the students in our classrooms, in our advising groups on our campus. And then we pressed play and what we heard was this deeply resonant story that echoes exactly what our students talk about today.

• 0:41John R. Miles?

  Hey, it's your friend John and welcome to Passion Struck. I'm so glad you're here. Whether you're a longtime listener or someone who just discovered the show, thank you for pressing play today. Maybe you've built the life you were supposed to want, but you've quietly wondered why it still doesn't feel like enough. If that's you, you're in the right place. Every week, I sit down with the world's top scientists, researchers, and thinkers to uncover what it actually takes to build an intentional life that matters. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into it.

• 1:22John R. Miles?

  Hey friends, welcome to episode 838 of Passion Struck. We're continuing our series, The Architecture of Agency, exploring the forces that shape how we see ourselves make choices and build our lives. Last week, Stanford professor Nir Hellevy and I explored how competition status and workplace hierarchies influence the way people treat one another. Then Heather Monahan joined me to discuss confidence, self doubt, and how our environments can shape the way we see ourselves. These conversations raised a bigger question. How much of who we become is shaped by the environments we grew up in? And what happens when those environments make it harder to feel that we belong?

• 2:04John R. Miles?

  That question has been at the heart of a broader conversation I've been exploring on Passion Struck. In my interview with psychologist Peter Gray, we examined his challenge to the prevailing explanation for the youth mental health crisis, that smartphones and social media are the primary causes. That perspective sits in sharp contrast with Jonathan Haidt's argument about the harms of phone-centered childhoods. It's a debate worth having. Technology matters and understanding its effects matters. But what if we also need to look further back to understand the challenges young people have faced across generations and the social conditions that shape their ability to thrive?

• 2:48John R. Miles?

  My guest today is Alexis Redding, author, developmental psychologist, and Harvard researcher who studies college student development and belonging. Alexis made a remarkable discovery when she discovered archival recordings of college students from the 1970s. She and her research colleague expected to hear how different those students were from the young people that they work with today. Instead, they heard stories of loneliness, uncertainty, academic pressure, family expectations, and anxiety about the future that sounded strikingly familiar. Her findings invite us to reconsider the familiar narrative that today's young people are fundamentally different from generations past.

• 3:32John R. Miles?

  The intensity of their challenges may have changed, but many of the underlying emotions have been with us for decades. Alexis and I explore what that tells us about the transition to adulthood, why belonging can influence everything from academic performance to a student's willingness to ask for help, and why young people need adults who are willing to share the uncertain in perfect parts of their own stories. We also discuss four essential elements of belonging: feeling seen, heard, valued, and encouraged. These experiences can give young people the confidence to take risks, recover from setbacks, and find their own direction. And that's where this conversation connects directly to the architecture of agency.

• 4:14John R. Miles?

  If we want young people to become capable of shaping their own lives, we have to look at the environments we're creating around them and whether those environments give them the support and freedom to grow. Here's my conversation with Alexis Redding. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your hosting god on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:42John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Alexis Redding to Passion Struck. Alexis, how are you today?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  I am wonderful and I'm so thrilled to join you, John.

• 4:51John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely thrilled to have you on. And I always like to give the audience a little bit of background on the guest because I think it makes the interviews richer. And I understand you grew up in a very interesting environment. You had a father who spent decades, as I understand it, excavating the workers' village at Giza. He was an archaeologist, but what really struck me, if I understand the story correctly, is he was not really focused as much on the pharaohs as he was uncovering the lives of the ordinary people that history has really forgotten.

• 5:30John R. Miles?

  How did that background match the kind of researcher that you've become?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  I love that we're starting the conversation here because it is indeed such a powerful origin story for how I do my work. But I'll admit that I didn't realize or make the connection that I was channeling my father and his way of thinking about research until after he passed and I began editing his memoir posthumously. And I finally saw very clearly these amazing points of connection between what he did, unearthing these stories and artifacts of the past, and bringing them together to tell a very human-centered story about how people navigated the world. And that is indeed what I do today. The point of connection you're making is the archival research that I do, surfacing

• 6:21Speaker 01

  stories that go all the way back to the 1940s of the college experience and how young people were navigating this powerful transformational moment that they were living. And the core of the work that I do focuses, sorry, let me say that again. The core of the work that I do focuses on student interviews from the 1970s. And these are interviews that were actually lost to posterity when the original research team abandoned them in 1979. In 2016, I discovered a clue that suggested that these interviews not only existed, but there might be recordings of young people telling the story of their daily lives.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  And I spent literally a year channeling my father excavating here at the university to find those tapes. And when I did and had them digitized, what we were able to do for the first time is really look in a very new way about connections across generations in a way that most of us don't think about the world. We tend to tell stories about what's different across generations. We tend to start a lot of stories with kids these days. And it turns out, if you listen to the interviews of young people from the past, there's far more in common than we often tend to assume.

• 7:42John R. Miles?

  So as I've heard the backstory, it reminds me of Indiana Jones, like it reminds me of one of these movies where you are like crawling on the floor and opening boxes and going in attics and blowing off dust and almost getting down to the last box, thinking all this work has been in vain and then finding treasure right at the very end. Is that kind of a way to think about it?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  That is a very accurate description. The story begins in the attic of an old campus building. And during my search, throughout the entire year that I was trying to put this archive back together, there was no guarantee that any of these materials still existed anywhere. And so I was in the basement and prying open these rusty file cabinets and trying to find materials. And ultimately, we have an incredible university archives here at Harvard, and they helped me call up hundreds of boxes from cold storage, like in that final scene of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark where he's walking and you see the box going into cold storage. There were hundreds of boxes that could have contained these materials, but somebody needed to open every last one and figure it out.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  And so that's what they helped me to do, is box by box, filter through all of these papers. And ultimately, I was able to put the entire archive back together again, which includes not only the recordings, but the essays the students wrote when they were admitted to college, the notes of the research team, fundraising letters, and importantly, the consent forms, which allows us to do the work and continue to do this study today.

• 9:24John R. Miles?

  Alexis, many of the listeners may have never heard of William Perry. Can you explain what the importance of his research was and why finding these unpublished records were so important?

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Dr. William Perry is the founder of the field that I study and teach today. The field is called college student development. So he was, like I am, a developmental psychologist who was curious about how people grow and change across the arc of their lives. And like everyone who studies developmental psychology, we all focus on one window of time. Because if we're lucky, the lifespan is very long. He was the first to say, not only is there something to study in this window of time of, for him, 18 to 25 years old, but also there's something about the context that when you are growing up and you have the opportunity to be embedded in a college or university context, something unique happens.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  And so I today not only work in his archive, but I actually teach our course in college student development, which he founded in the 50s. So I literally walk in his footsteps today.

• 10:36John R. Miles?

  As you approach these recordings, I'm interested in hearing, how did you think about it from the students that you hear on an everyday basis, like the kids these days mindset versus what you expected to hear in the 1970s? What was the gap that you expected and what did you hear instead?

• 10:57Speaker 01

  So I'm fortunate enough to do this work with my colleague, Dr. Nancy Hill. And so we both went into the process of listening to these recordings independently so we could come back and reflect together. And when we went off to listen, we both had one clear sense, an expectation. We thought that what we would hear is how different young people today were from the students in our classrooms, in our advising groups on our campus. And then we pressed play. And what we heard was this deeply resonant story that echoes exactly what our students talk about today. Now, there are differences. The students on those recordings were smoking while they were in the campus buildings and they were talking about their feelings about President Richard Nixon, and that was contemporary.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  But for the most part, the substance of what they were saying, they were talking about feeling lonely in the transition to college. They were talking about feeling pressured to live up to the expectations of college, to make it count, to fulfill their parents' dreams along the way, while they were asking and answering these big questions like, who am I? Who do I want to be? How am I going to get there? And every last one of them was feeling incredibly stressed by the job market, which felt entirely uncertain. And so Nancy and I came back together after listening and we were just baffled by all of these points of connection because it was not at all what we expect. It's not at all the popular narrative about generational difference.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  And it really shifted the way both of us began to think, not only about the research, but our own work with students today. Once you hear that connection, you can't unhear it. I spent almost a year then analyzing all of the recordings, all of these transcripts to document difference. And what I came up with again and again was similarity. So it came down to this one moment, this real test of trying to figure out how we were wrong. And so I brought in a group of undergraduate students and I told them exactly what I was doing. This wasn't one of those psyche experiments where there's a hidden motive. I was, here's what we're doing today. I've got these transcripts. They are from the 1970s. The people on these transcripts are your grandparents' age.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  And what I have found is that there's similarity. I need your help to identify difference. And I gave them two different colors of highlighters. So the green highlighters were things that felt contemporary and familiar, and the pink highlighter was difference. And I watched them, student after student, just fill these pages with green because what they saw was the same connection that Nancy and I had found. And so at the end of each of these little research groups that I had, they all asked me, what was the real test? They couldn't believe that there wasn't a trick to it because even for them, the idea that their grandparent had a lived experience that was so similar to their own was just, it boggled their minds. How could that be true? And yet, that's what we found.

• 13:57John R. Miles?

  It is so interesting. I have two children. One is a senior at University of Florida and my son just got his second degree and graduated earlier this summer. But I hear the same things from them that I remember myself thinking as I was graduating college, like, how am I ever going to have a house like my parents? How am I ever going to afford the standard of living? What do I actually want to do? For me, it was a little bit easier because I was coming out of the Naval Academy and I knew I was going to be an officer. But I still thought about what do I want to do longer term with my life? What was it like watching today's students recognize themselves in conversations that happened 50 years earlier?

• 14:42John R. Miles?

  What was the most startling things you saw?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  I think that for us as the research team and for the students, it is paradigm shifting to recognize points of connection, ways in which we all have this shared human experience and the emotion of uncertainty and how that actually connects us all. Even more powerful than that moment with the highlighters and our contemporary students is the fact that we actually were able to get permission to reopen the archival study and to contact the people who graduated in 1975. And so they were able to listen to the recordings of themselves and they were interviewed four times at the end of each academic year.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  And then they were able to make meaning of it. And that was just amazing to see them make the same connection as the kids in their grandchildren's era were doing. One of the things that they all said when they came back after listening to the recordings is that they wished they had heard these voices from the past, these sort of perfect little journals of their lives before. Because what they told us is it would have changed the way that they parented, that they grandparented, that they taught, because they recognized for the first time that there wasn't as much difference. And I think when we start a conversation from what connects us, we get to a very different place. And I love being able to share the work

• 16:15Speaker 01

  because I think that it can be paradigm shifting for all of us.

• 16:21John R. Miles?

  I think everyone now agrees that we're facing a youth mental health crisis. And the numbers are pretty staggering when you start looking at them. But I think that there's a lot of different debate on where it's coming from, which I want to get into a little bit later. From the time you wrote your first book and did this study, you've now created a new book called Mental Health in College. What do you think has been some of the largest misunderstanding about the problem itself?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  I think the largest misunderstanding, well, there are a couple. One of the largest misunderstandings is that it is a crisis. And I think that it's really important for us to recognize a crisis suggests that it is a short-term thing, that there's one lever that we can begin to change and that there's something new about it. And what we know from the archival recordings that do go all the way back to the 40s is that there has been persistent challenge around moments of transition for young people that we see surface between this age group of 18 to 25. And so that's the first thing, is that we want to think of this as an ongoing challenge that young people have always faced.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  And that way, we come up with solutions that recognize the fact that, well, the intensity of what is going on might be new. The core emotion isn't. And that is a big difference.

• 17:46John R. Miles?

  As I think about this, perhaps we've been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking what's wrong with kids today, maybe we should be asking what's changed around them? Is that a fair way to think about it?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  I think so. I think any conversation that is a what's wrong or kids these days are, whenever we start a conversation there, it feels less solution oriented and more blame focused. So that doesn't feel like the best way to go about this work. And so I agree with you that thinking about, how can we center in our conversation the reality that it's always been hard to grow up? But we all know that something feels different in this moment. So what is that thing? And indeed, it's not one single thing. We make a mistake when we assume that there is one lever that we can pull and then everything will shift. I think what's important to recognize is there are a lot of things that have changed.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  There are a lot of things going on. We can't unring the bell. We can't change the way the world is for young people today in a lot of the ways that we might want to. So we need to have a conversation that starts with them, not about them. I think one of the things that I've seen that has been transformational is work that's being done here at Harvard out of the Center for Digital Thriving. Dr. Emily Weinstein and Dr. Carrie James have done really powerful work that centers youth voice. So not only are they studying young people and capturing meaningful stories, they bring a team of youth researchers into the work with them who help make meaning of the data. And I love that shift, that idea, that we can't tell the story about what's going on for young adults

• 19:29Speaker 01

  without having young adults in the room.

• 19:31John R. Miles?

  Let me pause here for a moment. If this conversation is making you think differently about the young people in your life or about your own experiences navigating uncertainty and belonging, I hope you'll share this episode with someone who might benefit from it. That could be a parent, an educator, college student, or anyone helping young people find their way. And if you're enjoying Passion Struck, please subscribe or follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen or watch. Leaving a rating or review on your podcast platform also helps people discover these conversations. Thank you for being part of this community and for helping us spread ideas that can make a meaningful difference. Now, a quick break for our sponsors.

• 20:19John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's get back to my conversation with Alexis Redding. I think that's extremely important. My background in many ways comes from large institutional businesses, so Fortune 500 environments. And what I ended up thinking during my time there is we would often think that performance issues were individual in nature. And what I learned from having to turn around many of these is that it's often a cultural problem. And as I was reading the book, I came to realize that in many ways, that's what the research is saying as well.

• 21:01John R. Miles?

  It's fundamentally not a counseling problem or an individual student problem. It's the culture around them. If that is true, what does a campus look like where every student leaves each day instead of thinking about how they're measured, or how they need to perform, or how they need to be perfect? How does it change when they start thinking, wow, someone noticed me, or someone cared that I was here, someone felt like I mattered? How does that change things for them?

• 21:34Speaker 01

  So what we know is a sense of belonging for a student in college drives every positive outcome that we want for them. Not only does that mean that they feel better connected, obviously, that they are happier, but they do better academically, they're more likely to get help and support, especially in moments of crisis, they're more likely to stay in college, and they're more likely to graduate. And that is a powerful thing to recognize. It's also really important as we think about how do we create the kind of caring community that we talk about in the book, that exactly in the moment when young people need it most, if we're talking about 18 to 25 year olds who are transitioning to college,

• 22:17Speaker 01

  they are least likely to feel the sense of belonging. Because in moments of transition, we lose the comfort of the people who see us and know us best, being part of our daily life, and that is deeply unsettling.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Excuse me. We need to think very strategically about how we create an environment in which, sorry, one second.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  That cold that forced us to reschedule is rearing its head.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Sorry to the editor, apologies for that. We need to think very strategically about how we signal to students that they matter. And one of the things that I found in my research, which has followed young people in college during the first year, is that what happens in those first 10 days might be what matters most. Those are the opportunities to really help forge a point of connection. One of the ways we do that is literally by saying the words, you belong here, you were chosen to be part of this community. It's been amazing to see at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where I teach, we welcome a group of online students to our campus every year for one week before they start this two-year online program.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  And our dean said to them in their ceremony when they came, those exact words, you belong here, you were chosen. And then I watched my LinkedIn feed just be flooded with people saying how much that one sentence or those two sentences mattered to them. Sometimes saying something explicitly is exactly what people need to hear. And then we back that up with making sure that we're delivering on that sense that we care about you as a human being, we're glad that you are here, you in particular, that you are here. I was just with that group a couple of days ago, and one of them, a young woman started introducing herself to me. And I realized that I remembered her because I read her application.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  And so I said that, I said, oh, I remember, you're the one who? And she started to cry. And I didn't mean to elicit tears, but they were tears of meaning, of feeling seen, that she had mattered to me in the process that I had remembered her. And that was certainly not the intention, it just came out of my mouth because I was excited in that moment of recognition. But I realized after, oh, she felt validated in that I had cared and that I had held on to that piece of information. And that's a meaningful reminder, I think, for all of us.

• 24:46John R. Miles?

  When I think about this, and I again liken it to a corporate environment. So imagine you're the president or the provost of one of these major universities. And if I look at your work correctly, a student's mental health is influenced by the entire campus ecosystem that's surrounding them. So every department shares responsibility in that. How does someone like that bring forth what you are saying is a culture of care, instead of what's happening today, which is a crisis response model that really starts when kids

• 25:27John R. Miles?

  are in elementary school, and then carries forward and throughout their entire institutional journey?

• 25:35Speaker 01

  I think there are a couple of things that we can do. And one of them is something that every single person has the opportunity to do, which is be incredibly authentic and vulnerable in telling our own stories about how things have been hard and about the obstacles we have overcome. What we forget later in life is how hard some of those moments were, and how much we don't center them in our own stories. We tell a story of our lives where all the dots connect, where one thing makes sense going to the next, the rejection makes sense because you needed that to happen, so you pivoted over to this direction. And so we tell this tidy story to young people.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  And what they actually need to hear from us is not the tidy story, and it's not, it'll be okay, it will all work out. What they need is something that's in the middle of that. And it is, here's what it felt like when I was uncertain, here's this failure that I had and how I pivoted. So that they can see that they don't have to be perfect, that the story doesn't have to be completely planned out. And we inadvertently forget to do that and humanize the complexity of what it is to grow and change. One of the things that I do with my students always is I tell them the moments where things went really wrong for me that are relevant to them.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  So my first round of applying to doctoral programs, I didn't get in. And when I look back now, I wasn't ready. I hadn't yet articulated what was the core work that I wanted to do. And I submitted an application that was what I thought they wanted. And so I'm so glad I didn't get in because I took a year to reflect. And when I submitted my next application, it was me on the page. Here's what I care about, here's what I want to do, take it or leave it. And they took it. And so when my students are applying to grad school, that's the story I want them to know, because I want them to know to lean into the authenticity and indeed put that on the page for the admissions committee.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  But I also think it's important for them to know that I survived that failure, that rejection. It felt terrible. I thought that was the end of my academic journey, and it wasn't. And it's important for them to know that.

• 27:57John R. Miles?

  As I got into chapter one, and the way this book is presented is you're the editor, and there are other authors that contribute to the different chapters. Before I ask my question, maybe you can explain how this book is different than a lot of books that I've seen come across this podcast?

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Sure. I was fortunate to convene 20 people to be part of this book project. And that is the full range from college students themselves telling their own stories, and people who do medical and clinical work. So we have the medical director of the JED Foundation, for example. We also have a lot of practitioners who work with college students, faculty, student affairs folks. The idea in convening these 20 people is I wanted to have a conversation that was entirely different about mental health across all of the silos that we come from. So the idea was, what if a whole group of people who are not attending the same conferences,

• 28:59Speaker 01

  who are not writing in the same journals, who are not scrolling the same Instagram feed, but who all care deeply about youth mental health, were in a single conversation? And so I originally convened all of these folks as part of the faculty for a professional development course that I teach. And then I realized that this needed to be a broader and more accessible book. And I'm excited that now it is.

• 29:21John R. Miles?

  Using that as background, what I liked about chapter one was that it intentionally began with student voices instead of leaning into expert opinions. So you were really listening to the students describe their experiences. And what I heard repeatedly was something that echoed in a discussion I had last year with Lori Santos, something that on Yale she describes as duck syndrome. They repeatedly describe feeling that their worth depends on performance. And what's surprising is it's not just performance about good grades. A lot of them, especially in these higher institutions, really questioned whether they belong.

• 30:02John R. Miles?

  And then after belonging, it really then goes into the other things of life they're concerned about, financial insecurity, political instability, their own personal identity concerns, family expectations, career expectations. So how many of those things did you keep hearing again and again as you were doing your research and approaching this book?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Those are exactly the things we hear again and again. What we hear is the uncertainty of transition and feeling disconnected from where you're seen and heard and valued and encouraged, all of those really important touchpoints for us. And we know that it is unsettling. And so whether it's duck syndrome, which is the idea that sort of everybody seems like they're gliding seamlessly across the pond and yet they're paddling furiously underneath, or the term that they use at Duke, which I think is just as powerful, it's called effortless perfection. There's this idea that nobody can show that they're struggling. And what we are trying to do in this book and in my work more broadly is poke a hole

• 31:12Speaker 01

  in those narratives and to show that where we learn and grow is in the struggle with support. And so the challenge for all of us, when we care about young adults and we're trying to create communities in which they can thrive, is to find that balance between the right level of support so that they feel safe to take risks, to challenge themselves and to grow, but not overdoing the support either, which both signals to them that we don't trust them, but it also makes them fear failure. And so making changes to the way we do things in any way that compares that narrative is so profound.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  I think about Swarthmore College, so a highly selective college in Pennsylvania, has a standing practice for all entering students. And that is your first semester, you don't get grades automatically. You don't opt into it. Automatically, as a first semester student, all of your classes are pass/fail. And that means that all of these students that have been hyper-focused on grades and SAT scores and all of those metrics that we can wrap our head around during this very stressful process are suddenly freed of that external judgment mark, that grade. And what happens? Those students push themselves not to take a class in a topic that's familiar to them,

• 32:37Speaker 01

  but to actually take a class in something that they are deeply curious about because there's a safe space to do it. And not every school can reinvent the wheel in that way. And indeed, there can be a problem in pass/fail grades not transferring to another school so you would lose credit. So we wouldn't want to do that at every school, but we can encourage students to choose one course every semester and take that one pass/fail. Have that be your risk-taking course. And what our students see at the ed school, where I advise my own students to do that, is they often really do well in those courses because they're lit up by the learning as opposed to what the outcome is.

• 33:14John R. Miles?

  Be interesting, and I'm sure someone has done it, to study a school like Brown, who, as I understand it, still doesn't use grades versus the schools that do and the difference. I can't remember who I was just talking to. It might have been Jay Van Bavel from NYU. And we were talking about how at, I think it was NYU, there was a professor there who felt too many of the students were using AI to do their coursework. And so he purposely set up a test where it was more application of what they had learned, and it was an in-person test where they were not allowed to use anything else. And students, like 95% of them, had been getting As.

• 33:57John R. Miles?

  All of a sudden, the vast majority of the grades were Cs and Ds. And it's interesting how that might differ in an ecosystem that values the learning versus the preference on grades. What do you think about that?

• 34:12Speaker 01

  It's fascinating. I think you're talking about that he was maybe an econ professor at Brown who just did that test, and there was a really powerful graphic around it.

• 34:20John R. Miles?

  Well, there is that, but there was also something at NYU that happened that was very similar, but didn't get the reporting on it that Brown one did.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  I'll have to look that up. It's not surprising that we're going to see that in a lot of schools that are highly selective, where students have been very focused on grades getting in. I think that our puzzle is, or maybe our opportunity is, as educators in this moment, is to think about how do we create assignments that do spark real learning for young people in our classrooms that are not just about checking boxes? And the other puzzle around that is making sure that we are not just blaming young people for feeling that this is a transactional process. They are picking up on what we've been putting down. They have been navigating the highly selective admissions process that told them that here is what matters most.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  And so we need to start changing the conversation. And indeed, in the book, I was privileged to have the CEO of the National Association of College Admissions Counseling write a chapter about the achievement pressure that's coming during the admissions process. These are not solutions that we can only find in colleges and universities. We have to think about them in high schools and elementary and grade schools as well.

• 35:39John R. Miles?

  We absolutely do. One of my children really wanted to go to an Ivy League school, and they got into them. They got into Swarthmore too and ended up making the decision not to go in that direction. But what I saw was such an enormous amount of self-pressure to try to do everything right to enable them to do the things they thought they needed to do to get in. That pressure, which was self-inflicted, has just tremendous negative impacts that not only impact them in high school, but then it gets carried forward into the university environment as well.

• 36:24John R. Miles?

  And I've got to imagine you're seeing that happen time and time again.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  We are not only seeing it happen contemporaneously, we're seeing it in the 40s and the 70s as well. And there's a developmental explanation for some of this. So when we are pre-25, 30 years old, and our brain is in a particular moment of development, we are very much black and white thinkers. It's very hard for us to think about things in the gray area. And so a 16, 17, 18-year-old student who's thinking about applying to college is an all-or-nothing, black-and-white thinker. It's harder, because of literally where your brain is developmentally, to embrace the nuance of it. And so it is natural for them to gravitate towards a, okay, I have gone on this website

• 37:13Speaker 01

  and it said if I get this GPA and this SAT range, then I will get in. Because that is the all-or-nothing thinking. And that is, of course, not the reality, because there are not enough spaces in these schools for all of the students who meet those benchmarks. And so it's really important for us to poke holes in that thinking wherever we see it. And also, in giving advice to young people, it's important to remember that because they are in this developmental moment, they are hearing everything that we say as a direction more than a suggestion. So when I say to somebody, let's say they were looking at colleges, and I said, oh, have you looked at Brown?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  And I'm thinking, I'm planting a seed for exploration. A young person is likely to hear, I should go to Brown. That is the answer. And so a simple edit we can make, just in the way that we talk to young people, is never to give one suggestion, but always to give two. And so if I were to talk to that same student in a way that met them developmentally, I would say, well, from what I'm hearing, Brown could be a really good fit, but also, and then I would name something that was totally different that could also be a fit for them. So maybe one of the UC schools that would have an entirely different context. And then I've given them a path towards exploration instead of a prescription of here's what I think you should do.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  And making a change like that really can be liberating for young people because it doesn't lean into the black-and-white thinking that is innate to their way of making meaning out of the world.

• 38:50John R. Miles?

  Yeah, thank you for sharing that. As I was prepping for this, Alexis, one of the things that kept coming to the top of my head is you have spent so much of your career studying this transition into adulthood. And it made me wonder, has college quietly become a place where we expect students to become adults without intentionally teaching adulthood to begin with?

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Oh, that's such a good question. I mean, it shouldn't be, because college is not everybody's natural step after they graduate from high school and does not need to be. So we can't have this be the one holding space where that happens. But I do think students who are in college have a specific kind of scaffolding that can help them in this transitional process. And there's a privilege in that. And it is up to us to think in a really intentional way about how do we create that community where that happens? And I think it goes back to exactly what you mentioned. Do they feel like they belong here?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Because when we feel like we belong or that we matter, we have a sense of safety to take risks, we are able to explore, and we are able to fall down and know that there are people who will help us get back up again. And that makes all the difference.

• 40:14John R. Miles?

  In some ways, I almost feel like college is, it becomes like a holding period before you experience the real world. And of course, I had a completely different experience of this going to the Naval Academy, but still, the ideal world that we were taught, we were going to walk into in the fleet, and what we actually walked into were two, it couldn't have been more black and white difference. And I think sometimes when you don't go to college and you spend some time having to work and just live your life without these other expectations hitting you, you kind of see the realities of the world a little bit differently than when you go straight into college in some aspect. Yet, I often

• 40:59John R. Miles?

  wonder if some of the courses we should be teaching kids are, how do you actually survive in the world? What are the most important skill sets that you're going to need to have to do well in the world that you're entering, like real life skills? Like for us, it was like, you're going to have to know how to navigate on a ship. You're going to have to do that. You're going to have to know what it's like to lead people your own age, but more importantly, people who are older than you and get them to adhere to the directives that you're giving them, even when they've got a lot more experience than you have. And those things, if you're not taught to experience that before you go into it, are

• 41:40John R. Miles?

  very hard lessons to learn in the real world, once you get there. You understand where I'm going?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  I do. And I think there's an interesting puzzle in all of the ways that students attend college. So for a residential college student who comes directly from high school, who has not been in the workforce yet, who does not have many of the responsibilities they'll ultimately have, that is an important thing for us to help them to learn. But they might also learn it from each other, because there are so many students who are entering college who have been working, who have been helping to raise their siblings or step up to help their family. And there are a lot of people attending college today who are commuting, who see themselves first as a worker who goes to college, as opposed to a college student

• 42:27Speaker 01

  who works. The folks who wrote the chapter in the book from the Trellis Strategies team out in Texas, really thought a lot about that complexity. And so, maybe some of the answer is leaning into what it is to be a college student today, and all of the ways we do that. It's not just 18 to 25. It's not just living in a residential campus. And so from one another, we can help to understand some of those responsibilities of adulthood as well.

• 42:55John R. Miles?

  I want to jump to something completely different than what we've been discussing. And I want to go back to the youth mental health crisis.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 43:04John R. Miles?

  I have been really fascinated by several conversations that have been happening recently. And one of these is Marty Seligman, father of positive psychology, for those who don't know his name, has a new book coming out titled Agency. And so I was interviewing Marty about this, and we somehow got into the youth mental health crisis. And he has been, I found this really surprising, maybe I shouldn't have, but he has been working six to eight hours a day, pumping thousands and thousands of documents across millennia

• 43:43John R. Miles?

  into L L M Ss, trying to understand what is the cause of the youth mental health crisis. And he was trying to understand, is it declining agency? Or is it the advent of smartphones and social media, as Jonathan Haidt has brought up, explaining rising levels of anxiety and depression? And what he ultimately found, primarily through AI giving him the answer, is that there's stronger support for Jonathan Haidt's social media hypothesis. And given what we have just talked about, from what you have discovered, how do you react to

• 44:25John R. Miles?

  that? Because what you're finding is that it's not social media at all. This is, the same thing is recurring.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  It's a good question. And I think that the answer is that it's never one thing. And any solution that tells us that there is one single thing, is unlikely to have the nuance to solve the problem. And so, for me, it's really important not to say, X researcher is wrong, but to take something from each of these bodies of research. And I'm excited to read the Seligman work. I haven't seen it and I don't know it yet. But I think that there is, there is just so much room for nuance and complexity in the human experience. And so I'm always going to lean towards an answer in the gray area, that allows us to

• 45:14Speaker 01

  think in a complex way, and to say, okay, if this thing is happening, what else is happening? That there's not a universal, here's the solution. I think one of the things that I've been thinking a lot about, is there was a meta-analysis that came out of the UK, by Dr. Callahan and Green, and a couple of other folks, whose names are escaping me right now. But it was about the rise of perfectionism. And to me, it feels like that might be an umbrella, where we can capture both of the things you're talking about, the sense of agency, the social media. And what they found, which is so important, is

• 45:54Speaker 01

  that it's not that the experience is so different, it's that there's an intensity of the experience. And so, rather than X thing being the cause of what's going on, we can think of that thing as something that is intensifying what is happening. And I think in some ways, we get at a closer answer, when we look through a lens like that.

• 46:19John R. Miles?

  What do you think about Peter Gray's work, then? You introduced this perfectionism, but what he is saying is that he thinks the deeper issue has to go back to how kids are developing in the first place, the lack of childhood autonomy, free play, the lack of them doing more problem solving as youth. What do you think about that perspective, and how it enters into it?

• 46:47Speaker 01

  I want to put that perspective with the other two, and have them each be a piece of the puzzle. I don't think the answer is in any one of these things. And part of why I say that, is because I have now spent 10 years, listening to or reading interviews of people going back to the 40s, who are saying things about their lived experience, about their stresses, about their mental health, that are so profoundly similar to what we are hearing today, that the answer can't just be that something has changed and the experience has changed, without recognizing that truth as well. And so, what I continue

• 47:32Speaker 01

  to puzzle through in my work, is how do we honor where we've come from, and what has always been true, about how hard it is to grow up, and figure out who you are, and chart your course to the future, and recognize that things have indeed changed around the edges, that are changing the day-to-day experience. And it is, indeed, what I'm trying to do in the book, bringing a bunch of people together, who all have a very strong take, because they all care deeply about finding a solution, and recognizing that in conversation, we might get at what actually changes things. But it's not going to be one single answer. It is always going to be multiple answers.

• 48:17John R. Miles?

  And I shared this with you before you came on, as I have been trying to get my arms around this over the past nine years, I have come down to a theory that I call systemic unmattering. And that is, really, over the past 200 years, we have created systems around us, that really started when the first factory whistle started to blow, that are valuing people less for their personhood, and more for their utility. And so, what I think we have is a signal problem, and that when all the ecosystems around you are sending you a signal, that you live in a market that requires you to perform, to feel like your personhood matters, then...

• 49:04John R. Miles?

  Eventually, it's going to wear on you that your sense of worth is being extracted by everything that is touching you instead of reinforcing it. And so to me, this kind of leads into why I think what Gray is talking about, or what Hight and Seligman are talking about, are accelerators of something that's been happening in the background for a very long time, as opposed to the main reason it's happening to begin with. So I think that this pattern has really been shaped, starting in the late 1700s, early

• 49:43John R. Miles?

  1800s, and it's just manifesting itself as a social immune lacking that we just are passing on, generation from generation, instead of it getting any better. How does that resonate with you?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  It absolutely resonates. I think the idea that we have to look historically at what has happened, that we have to interrogate the past to understand what's happening in the present, is deeply meaningful. And for someone who studies young people and the stories we tell across generations, this is exactly what we're trying to do, which is recognize that every generation has told its own version of a story about kids today. Starting with Aristotle, Aristotle is the first one to talk about these kids and why can't they just? Every generation has some version of that.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  No solution ever begins from a kids these days blame narrative. Every solution begins from a what connects us as human beings? How has our history shaped this moment? And what are we preparing for in the future? And I think your approach is exactly the right approach to interrogate what is more complex here? What is more nuanced here? So that we understand the moment. One of the things that I learned in studying college campuses is that these four factors matter most for students when they are looking to find a sense of belonging. And it's that they feel seen, heard, valued, and encouraged, which I think overlap in

• 51:22Speaker 01

  a really beautiful way with what is exactly in your framework. And I wrote a piece with Dory Clark in Harvard Business Review, where we thought about how do we take that exact framework and use it for the transition to the workforce? And the reason why that application works is because in moments of transition and change, we are least likely to feel all four of those things. And what I hear in your framework is exactly that idea of how do we create the grounding where someone feels that they have a sense of mattering when the world is changing, when their role is changing? And having a better understanding of how we do that is transformational in all of the

• 52:06Speaker 01

  ways that we want to be transformational.

• 52:08John R. Miles?

  Yeah, I think you've hit on something that is the core of it. To me, when you're going to college, that's exactly what this whole experience should be preparing you for is graduation, going out in the real world, and preparing you to experience what we all know you're going to walk into, which isn't anything, I think, what most college kids expect it to be, which is why I always encourage my kids to do more and more, go into different fields so you can see what it's like during your summer breaks, as opposed to not getting those experiences. Because that, to me, is what college is about. It's that preparing you mature, your maturity to be able to hit the ground running.

• 52:50John R. Miles?

  What is your hope, then, through these books that you've written and your research? What do you hope young people experience, not academically, but developmentally, as they're leaving their college experience and preparing to go out in the world?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  I hope that when young students are preparing for this transition out of college, that they feel prepared to fall down and to course correct and to pivot. That during the time that they were undergraduates, they had enough of an opportunity to really grow and push themselves and course correct and do the kind of exploration that you're mentioning, so that they know they can do it again. It is a false narrative to assume that somebody graduates from college today in 2026 and chooses a career and they will stay in that career for the rest of their lives. That is not how the world of work works anymore.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  And so what I want a young person who's graduating to know is that they are preparing for multiple jobs across their career, and that pivoting in that process is not only okay, but normal and expected. And in studying the graduates from the class of 1975, what we've seen is many of them had a mid-career pivot that was very dramatic. One in particular went from advertising to being a social worker. And I love to equip young people with the knowledge that at some point, something else might speak to you as you have grown and changed and your priorities have shifted, and that's okay. I think it takes some of the pressure off as well.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  If you don't have to choose your career for life, but your first career, and to recognize that the skills you build and the insights you gain and the things you fall in love with and the things you decide that are just not interesting to you can help push you towards career two and career three, it changes the conversation in a way that's really meaningful for young people.

• 54:56John R. Miles?

  If there's one thing I try to tell my kids is that the biggest skill you're going to have to get used to is reinventing yourself, because things are changing at such fast a pace, that if you're not constantly doing that, I'm not sure how you keep up. I know from my own career, I, going into the military, I thought my career was going to be a civil servant. I left the military to go to the FBI, and then the FBI canceled my class. So all of a sudden, I had to reinvent myself. I became a management consultant, then a, then went to Arthur Andersen, thinking that was going to be my track, only to see my whole company dissolve underneath my feet in a matter of weeks.

• 55:41John R. Miles?

  And then I had to reinvent myself again. And then I reinvented myself again. And I think that becomes a real skill, not only to do it, but to recognize in advance the precursors for doing it not in a panicked mode, but doing it in a gradual mode, so that you're not putting yourself into the thrust of the fire all at once, so to speak.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  That is so true. And I think the more we can tell exactly those stories of how we have pivoted and transitioned and reinvented ourselves, especially to young people who assume the path might be much more linear than it is, the more we empower them to know that's going to happen. And my wife wrote a wonderful book called Reinventing You, that captures these stories of how much transformation happens across the arc of our careers. And I tell those stories along with my own. I'm in my second career now, and I'm better at my job today because I had the first career. And I think that young people need to know that, that it really is okay, and that you can't control all the pieces. In the story you just told, there were things that were absolutely outside of your control

• 56:52Speaker 01

  that you had to respond to. And the more we equip a young person to be prepared to pivot, so that they can respond and they can reinvent, the better equipped they are for a modern workforce.

• 57:02John R. Miles?

  Alexis, it was such a joy to have you on the show today. If people want to learn more about you and your work, where's the best place for them to go?

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Best places would be to find me on LinkedIn, under my name, Alexis Redding. Instagram, I'm at DrAlexisRedding, or YouTube, I'm at Professor Redding.

• 57:20John R. Miles?

  Alexis, thank you so much for joining us today. It was such an honor to have you, and I love the work that you're doing.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Thank you. It was wonderful to be in conversation. I really appreciate it.

• 57:30John R. Miles?

  Alexis Redding's research reminds us that the challenges young people face today have deep roots. Across generations, young adults have wrestled with loneliness, uncertainty, expectations, and the question of who they want to become. And her work shows us how much it matters to feel seen, heard, valued, and encouraged as we navigate those transitions. When we create environments where people feel they belong, we give them greater freedom to explore, take risks, learn from setbacks, and find their own direction. That's an essential part of building agency. If this conversation made you think differently about the young people in your life, please share this episode with a parent, educator, mentor, or anyone who cares about helping the next generation thrive. And if you haven't already, subscribe to Passion Struck on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

• 58:15John R. Miles?

  YouTube, or wherever you watch or listen. Your support helps these conversations reach more people. And if you're looking to bring powerful conversations about human potential, purpose, and intentional living to your organization or event, you can learn more about Passion Struck speakers, our platform connecting audiences with thought leaders and expert voices who inspire meaningful change. You'll find more information in the show notes. In our next episode, we're continuing the architecture of agency with a conversation about why we sometimes struggle to act on the very things that matter most to us. My guest is bestselling author John Acuff, whose work explores procrastination, fear of perfectionism, and the stories we tell ourselves that keep us stuck.

• 58:57John R. Miles?

  We talk about how to give ourselves permission to begin, make progress, and close the gap between the person we want to become and the person we're living today. Because understanding what shapes us is one step. Taking action on what matters is another. I hope you'll join me.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  If you don't think what you do matters, why bother? I think one of the most destructive broken soundtracks is why bother? What's the point? If you feel like nothing you do has an impact, then you don't feel encouraged to do anything. And I think even a little bit of progress is wind in sails for most people, where they go, oh, I do matter, or my contribution does have an impact, or I can see this change.

• 59:37John R. Miles?

  Until next time, I'm John Miles. Stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion struck.