How to Think Like a Child (with David Yeager)

Why do kids do disruptive, annoying or maddening things? Usually when children behave badly, the first thing adults do is yell at them, tell them they're bad and dole out punishments. Developmental psychologist David Yeager https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/psychology/faculty/yeagerds says that's the wrong approach. Instead parents need work out why their child made bad decisions in the first place. David is the author of the book 10 to 25 https://www.amazon.com/10-Motivating-Groundbreaking-Generation-Educators/dp/1668023881 and argues that we should work out what's at the root of bad behaviour in young people. Maybe they want to gain status with their peers, or crave more outlets to be social. Once adults work out these motivations, they can encourage their kids to find better ways to reach their goals without breaking the rules. This series on parenting coincides with Dr Laurie's new free online class, The Science of Wellbeing for Parents which is available now at Coursera.org https://www.coursera.org/. You can sign up at drlauriesantos.com/parents http://drlauriesantos.com/parents. Get ad-free episodes to The Happiness Lab by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm https://www.pushkin.fm/join-pushkin. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin http://apple.co/pushkin Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus https://www.pushkin.fm/join-pushkin See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:16Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 1:23Laurie Santos?

  Growing up is weird. One moment, you're a kid. You feel certain that you know what you need to be happy. But there's often a very frustrating obstacle in your way: adults. Those authority figures, often your very own parents, who insist that just because they've been around longer, they know what's best for you. It can feel maddening. You swear that when you have kids, things will be different. You will understand. And then, in what seems like an instant, you're the grown up. You've got your own kids. It's your turn to be in charge. And somehow, along the way, you've forgotten that promise that you made to yourself. You find yourself caught up in that same intergenerational tension that you once swore to avoid. In this episode in our series on happier parenting, I'm talking with someone who's trying to break that cycle

• 2:08Laurie Santos?

  by changing the way adults and kids communicate.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm David Jaeger. I'm a developmental psychologist and the author of the book 10 to 25.

• 2:16Laurie Santos?

  David's book explores the science of how to motivate young people effectively. And his effective strategy begins with understanding the kids in our life, which admittedly is hard, not only because we've forgotten what it's like to be a child, but also because it can feel like kids today are speaking an entirely different language.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  We have four kids and two teenagers and, you know, a lot of skibitty toilet risler.

• 2:37Laurie Santos?

  Yep.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Ghiots in our house.

• 2:40Laurie Santos?

  The slang can be funny and sometimes completely indecipherable. But the true parent-child communication breakdown often goes much deeper than vocabulary.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  There's this equivocation. When adults say, "Listen to me," what they mean is, "Do exactly what I say right now without any argument." And when kids say, "You didn't listen to me," what they mean is, "You didn't make me feel hurt. You didn't understand my perspective and where I'm coming from." A lot of times, kids have a reason for why they don't want to do something. And we were uncurious about that. And so because of that equivocation, we get into this conflict where we say one thing and then they hear another. And then there's this fight over our misinterpretations. And I think a lot of times what we need to think about is not necessarily having our goal be the conventional,

• 3:32Speaker 03

  maybe 1950s parents' version of listening or respect. It doesn't mean that they subjugate their entire will to everything we say immediately. But instead, we want them to be able to be proactive and make great choices that are good for their long-term health that may or may not align with the immediate thing we need them to do right now.

• 3:50Laurie Santos?

  And part of what we go wrong when we're trying to motivate kids is, as you've argued, is that we kind of have this incorrect model of how young people work. So what's the usual model that we bring to how the young brain works?

• 4:01Speaker 03

  The conventional model is something I call the neurobiological incompetence model. And it's the idea that young people just lack a prefrontal cortex. They can't think about the future, they can't plan or reason logically. And because of that, we need to make all the decisions for them. That is, if young people lack the planning part of the brain, then there are risks to themselves and to society at all times. And once we adopt that view, then our communication approach turns into something that I call groan-splaining, which is where we just explain our thoughts and our plans for them and expect them to willingly do whatever we say. And although that makes sense to us because we think we're more logical in a lot of ways,

• 4:43Speaker 03

  it doesn't work well because young people don't want to be communicated to in that way. Comes across as disrespectful and it ends up thwarting our goals because young people reject what we say, not because of the information, but because of the way in which it was delivered.

• 4:57Laurie Santos?

  And you've talked about two consequences of this sort of mode of thinking about young people, that we either become kind of too authoritarian or too permissive. What do you mean there?

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Classic research going back 80 years suggests that for a lot of parents, there's a kind of nice and nasty dance, you could call it, where either we start out saying, look, here's the law. Here's what we need to do. This is very important. You gotta listen to me. And when young people don't immediately acquiesce, then we increase threats. We increase punishment. Maybe we try a little bit of bribery or distraction or sleight of hand.

• 5:35Laurie Santos?

  I think all parents listening right now get this mode. Yep.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  So that's like the nasty part. And then we feel guilty. We've fallen off the wagon. We haven't been intentional parents. We didn't do what the Instagram video that your spouse sent you told you that you're supposed to do. And you just feel ashamed about yourself. And so we go back into nice mode and we become permissive. And we say, they need a little time with no rules to just do what they want. But eventually, of course, kids being kids get out of control and we have to put the nasty hat back on. And so it feels like there's this dilemma that we can either be tough authoritarians that lay down the law, or we can be kind and friendly and caring, but then be pushovers. And what I argue is that there's valid parts of both of those. You can do a version of both.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  You can have very tough standards and be unrelenting on what's important to do, but you can be very flexible and caring and concerned about how young people live up to those standards. So that way they can actually reach it without all of the fighting and threats and blame.

• 6:37Laurie Santos?

  And an easier way to do that, you've argued, is to come up with a kind of better, maybe more accurate theory of what the adolescent brain is trying to maximize. So evolutionarily, how should we think about the young people brain? It's not this idea that it's incompetent. What else is it trying to do? What's its mission?

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Of course, the brain develops, and so there are different levels of ability and maturity. But what we tend to focus on is in the 10 to 25 range, and even maybe a little earlier, there's a shift in motivational priorities. And those motivational priorities can influence what young people choose to pay attention to. That is, where do they deploy their considerable intellectual powers? And once you think of it as a motivation problem and not solely an ability problem, then you realize, well, maybe I'm not tapping into the right source of motivation. And it's like our conventional view is that kids are motivated primarily by the desire to please their parents, or at least not piss off their parents. And we get offended.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  We're like, don't you know how angry you're making me like right now? And that feels like they're trying to intentionally get our goat for something. But they've got a different set of priorities that often it's, especially in the peer group, to look and appear like a respect worthy person who deserves status and has a good reputation. That is, someone who's viewed as socially valuable. And that's a good thing, that in our evolutionary past helped young people learn how to be contributors to our culture and to our society. But we often fail to tap into that source of motivation, and therefore we end up at loggerheads with them. But there are examples of great parents, leaders, coaches, teachers, who do know how to tap in to that drive for status and respect.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  And they do end up with well deployed prefrontal cortices where young people can plan ahead and be proactive and do what we think is right.

• 8:25Laurie Santos?

  You've talked in the book about some of these cases of both individual people that have done this well, but also kind of programs that have done this well. One of my favorite examples that you talk about in the book are these so-called effective anti-tobacco programs. How did the tobacco programs sort of harness this idea that young people really want to be independent and be respected and so on?

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Very briefly, the bad programs used a tagline to attack teen smoking. This is in the late 1990s, early 2000s, and their tagline was "Think, Don't Smoke." Now, think about that. If I tell you to think, the grammatical implication is that you're not thinking. Like, if I told you to smile right now, you'd be like, "That's a weird thing to say, David, because I'm smiling."

• 9:03Laurie Santos?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  The implication is that if I tell you to do it with a command, that you're not doing it. And so, "Think" is already an insult. But then "Don't Smoke," not only does that threaten your autonomy as a young person, and one of the main things you want to do in your teenage years is have a sense of grown-up autonomy and independence, but also, it's implying, "I think I'm the kind of person who gets to tell you what to do." So, again, it was very serious insults in three words. It's kind of evil genius situation where it turns out that a desire to smoke increased the more that the "Think, Don't Smoke" ads were played in those neighborhoods. The alternative was something called the Truth Campaign, and this was developed by an ad firm called Crispin Porter Plus Bogusky. There's a guy named Alex Bogusky, who kind

• 9:48Speaker 03

  of understood intuitively what motivated young people. And the Truth Campaign sought to portray teenagers as flooding the streets, fighting back against the tobacco executives, telling them to stop killing teenagers and getting them addicted. In a famous ad, there's body bags they throw on the ground, and someone holds up a sign outside of a large, high-rise building purportedly filled with tobacco executives, and the sign says, "Smoking kills 12,000 people a day. Have you ever thought of taking a day off?" So there, there's no groan-splaining about the value of non-smoking for preventing cancer. It's not like a health class situation. It's you're joining your peers to stand up for yourselves and what's right.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  And fight against injustice and that every time you smoke and do the unhealthy thing, you're giving money to people who think they can manipulate you and control you and harm others. And so that taps into an adolescent value that people already have adolescent desire for independence, autonomy, and a concern for social justice. My colleague, Chris Bryant, a brilliant psychologist, likes to say it's often far more effective to change behavior by getting people to see the behavior as aligned with a value you already have, rather than getting you to care about a different value, such as long-term health. And we've used that insight in a bunch of different ways. For instance, getting teenagers to eat healthy, like buy fruits and vegetables and drink water rather than soda and eat ice cream, by saying to food companies, the reason why

• 11:16Speaker 03

  they create a bunch of cartoons is to get children addicted in poor neighborhoods and exploit them. And so kids stand up against the companies by eating healthy food in the lunchroom.

• 11:25Laurie Santos?

  And this also seems to be getting at something else that this sort of incompetence hypothesis doesn't really allow kids to do, which is like, these new ads are kind of saying, hey, kids, you're competent. When you actually see what these companies are doing, you will choose yourself not to smoke. It's sort of assuming that they have autonomy, competence, like kind of giving them respect.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it also, it's not like giving them a skill. It's not like these commercials are how to say no to your friends kind of thing. And that's what the public health establishment thinks, is you need to give kids a script for how to say no to drugs or whatever. But they underappreciate the fact that if you look at Dare, where they're going in classrooms and doing skits on how to say no to your friends, almost always in those skits, the coolest kid is the kid offering drugs. And it's the nerd who's saying no. So now you've just shown a whole group of like 12-year-olds that dorks say no to drugs and cool kids are the ones offering everybody drugs. And the truth campaign, they're not just teaching a rote skill, they're framing the behavior in a different way, and then assuming that young people's creativity and their agency and ability is allowing

• 12:28Speaker 03

  them to figure out how to say no and how to not smoke.

• 12:31Laurie Santos?

  It's striking how much adults still misunderstand young people, especially since we were all young once. But children and adolescents just want independence and respect, like all people do. And when we learn to tap into that desire with care, life can improve for everyone, regardless of age. But how can you be considerate about your child's need for respect when it feels like they're the ones who aren't respecting you? After the break, I'll talk with David about the kinds of questions we need to ask to build mutual understanding, even in those cases where your child seems to be acting completely irrationally. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

• 13:09Laurie Santos?

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• 15:38Laurie Santos?

  Acclaimed developmental psychologist David Jaeger is the author of the new book, 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. And surprise, surprise, what motivates kids isn't all that different than what drives adults. So if we want healthy, happy, engaged children, we need to take a closer look at the strategies we use to motivate our kids. And David has found that even well-intentioned parents often use strategies that, at their core, are pretty ineffective. And perhaps the most common ineffective strategy is the age-old habit of nagging.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  There's a beautiful study by Jennifer Silk. She did a broader study of maternal depression, moms and teenage daughters. And as a part of that study, they brought the teenage daughters into the lab and put them in the FMRI machine, so there's a huge magnet wearing around their heads. And while the teenage girls are preparing for the experiment, they listen to their moms nagging them. So their moms are completing the sentence, "What bothers me about you is..." And what they find is that zero percent of teenage daughters are like, you know, mom, you have a point. I'm really glad you raised all these concerns with my behavior. Good chat. I've got a list and I'll get back to you. Like, that doesn't happen. Instead, what you see is a dramatic increase in the teenage girl's regions of the brain

• 16:53Speaker 03

  related to anger and a decrease in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, regions related to planning, reasoning, thinking ahead, but also a decrease in regions related to social cognition, the temporoparietal junction. And that's the basic idea that a lot of times when a parent is making a request of a kid, we're doing it indirectly. And so the kid needs to infer something about the mom's state of mind or the dad's state of mind. An example is when my kid was really young, I used to walk by a huge pile of Legos. There was a mess in the middle of the room. They'd be like, do you want to clean up those Legos? And you would be like, no, I don't want to clean up those Legos. I want to keep playing with the Legos. But clearly, I was, in my mind, saying, clean up the Legos. And that's just a micro example of so much of what happens is we think we've been clear what we want

• 17:37Speaker 03

  them to do. They feel nagged, so their TPJ is shut off. They're not giving us a charitable interpretation. And then we're more angry at them for rejecting us and for disobeying us. And then the kid's like, why is this lunatic yelling at me? And so there's got to be an alternative communication strategy that's not nagging, that can instead enliven the prefrontal cortex and get them to think about how they can change and behave differently.

• 18:01Laurie Santos?

  It seems like there's two problems with it. One is that they're kind of not getting necessarily what we want them to do. But it seems like they are reading between the lines in terms of something else. There's another unsaid part of the nagging that really hurts them. So what's that?

• 18:14Speaker 03

  The other unsaid part is that I, the adult, think you're incompetent, and that's why I'm telling you something so obvious, and/or that's why I'm trying to control what feels like a personal choice to you. When a mom says, don't forget your coat, in our heart of hearts, we're saying, I love you so dearly that I want you to not die of hypothermia. And what the child hears is, my mom thinks I'm so incompetent that I can't even remember to bring a coat, or something like that. And because of that, you need to be way more transparent about your intentions than you think you need to be. You can't just leave the unsaid part unsaid because young people are in this precarious disparity of status relative to us, and they're likely to read between the lines in a negative

• 18:58Speaker 03

  way because they're used to the nagging, the yelling, telling, and shaming and blaming. That's their default, and they'll assume that new communication is yet more of that unless we're transparent, that it's something different.

• 19:09Laurie Santos?

  And this gets to the idea that you've talked about of being a warm demander. How do you define a warm demander, and how does it play into exactly the kind of solution you were just mentioning?

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, a warm demander, and I also call it a mentor mindset in my book. But warm demand is a nice frame because you're demanding, so you're tough, but you're also caring and warm. Actually, interestingly, that term came out of studies of Black educators in predominantly Black classrooms in Atlanta in like the late 90s, early 2000s. And you kind of had like a grandma-type teacher who was unrelentingly demanding in her standards and didn't put up with any nonsense, but no kid questioned whether she loved them. Members of any group can have this kind of relationship, and I call it a mentor mindset because it's your approach is to be, of course, tough, demanding, and critical so that the young person can make wiser choices, grow, improve, et cetera.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Well, at the same time, providing enough support so that way they can meet those higher standards. And I do want to be clear, for a long time, people couldn't distinguish between these warm-demanding slash mentor mindset leaders and the authoritarian ones because they're like, these kids are crying all the time. Like, if the kid's crying, it's clearly bad parenting. And it turns out that in a good home, kids cry all the time, but they're not crying because the parents are yelling at them and shaming them. They're crying just because the standard is like inconsistent with what they want. They don't really want to be doing the important, good thing, but they do move on and they figure out how to self-regulate in a way that in an authoritarian home, all you get is just you have to bend your will to the parent and then you have no agency and autonomy.

• 20:47Laurie Santos?

  And it seems like sort of paying attention to this agency and autonomy is really kind of Giving the kid a sense that you kind of are feeling some compassion for the situation that they're in, you're kind of honoring their status as maybe an adolescent or a 10 to 25 year old that's kind of figuring out their way in life. But one way we need to do this is to honor a kid's status by not telling them stuff, maybe not groansplaining. You need to show what you want to understand. What are some good tips that parents can use to do that better?

• 21:14Speaker 03

  There's this wonderful parenting coach that I write about in my book named Lorena Seidel, and she echoes something that has shown up a lot in the different research literatures, and it's this idea of questioning is often more powerful than telling. Before I explain it, I do want to acknowledge that most normal parents think this is crazy advice, because when like the macaroni is burning on the stove and the repairman's at the door and you're late for soccer practice and like everything's going wrong, that doesn't feel like the time to have a Socratic dialogue. Right? And I get it, but if you don't treat every single crisis as a chance to build a skill, then you've missed out on tons and tons of opportunities for the kid to learn to proactively manage the conflicts that they have, whether it's their internal conflicts, their emotions, or conflicts with other adults.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  So Lorena has this never waste a crisis mentality that I've tried to live, that even if it's like I'm trying to get three kids out the door in the morning so I'm not late for an appointment, I've had to learn to stop and pause and be curious about why from their perspective it's very hard for them to get in the car and not wear a Spider-Man costume.

• 22:18Laurie Santos?

  Which bracketed is why we were 15 minutes late to start our conversation today.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  Now I have photographic evidence to prove this. So the idea is ask questions. Okay, so what kind of questions? Now, there's bad questions. A bad question would be, what are you thinking?

• 22:32Laurie Santos?

  Yeah.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  Or why are you ruining my life?

• 22:34Laurie Santos?

  Right.

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Those would not be good questions to ask a kid. Better questions are things like, if you seem really upset, tell me what does it mean to you when I'm saying no to the toy? Or what does it mean to you when I said this to you? And then they usually say something outrageous, like it means you don't love me, it means you're a bad parent, it means you hate me, or I'm a bad kid. The next question is like, what else could it mean? And sometimes they'll say a couple of other negative things like this will never get better. You know, gonna be sad forever. And then the next question is, okay, if it meant that, would that serve your purposes? Like, does that meet your goals? And that's a surprising question for a lot of kids. And they're like, huh? No, that it doesn't serve my goals to think my mom hates me and then she's a bad parent. It's like, all right, well, then what else could it mean?

• 23:19Speaker 03

  And then eventually you can involve them in generating a different and better appraisal of the conflict. And then, once they have that better appraisal, then you can say things like, all right, well, if this better thing was true, would that meet your goals? And then often they're like, yeah. So a very brief example is conflict with my now eight year old. When he was six, we were leaving the park. I played with him all day. He asked for a toy. I was like, no, there's no toy. And he screamed at the top of his lung publicly in front of all the other parents. I want a toy. And then I had to ask him, you know, how does it make you feel that I'm saying no? And just felt ridiculous to say, of course. And then he said, yelled at the top of his lungs, you're the worst father. And then I went through this question. Does it serve your purposes?

• 24:04Speaker 03

  That caught him off guard. No, it makes me feel sad. What else could it be? And then he made up something good, like it means my dad doesn't want us to buy a toy that I'm gonna throw away and break, because then I'm gonna be sad later. And then if it's a plastic toy, there's gonna be more plastic in the landfill and that's gonna hurt the earth. And maybe my dad doesn't want to destroy the earth. And I was like, how would that make you feel if that was true? And he was like, well, maybe you feel like my dad cares about the future of the environment and doesn't want me to grow up in a trash heap and also wants me to learn how to be responsible. And I was like, would that serve your purposes? He's like, yeah, it'd make me feel like my dad loved me. I was like, can we go with that? And he was like, yeah. And then I bought him ice cream.

• 24:40Laurie Santos?

  What's incredible is like, if we kind of lead with curiosity, not judgment, we do two things. One is like, we learn that our kids are capable and they are competent at coming up with these good interpretations and things. But I think it also trains them to get a little bit more curious about their own emotions and think, well, my first impression of this situation might look differently, or maybe my parent has a different intention. So it's kind of like, we're learning to re-navigate their feelings on this. At the same time, we're teaching them to learn to navigate our new intentions on these things, too.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, the, the big thing is it's such a pain as a parent when your kids fight two rooms over and you have to leave whatever you're doing and go over there and say, how many times have I told you guys, don't be mean to your brother, stop fighting? We're always the referee in that situation. We are the only one doing the problem solving. And so of course they don't learn. Yep. It's because we've never asked them to even try to do it. If they've never had to piece it together in their minds, and if the only time we ask questions is when we're trying to make them look dumb, like, haven't I told you this before? Mm-hmm. The only answer is yes, but the implication is we think they're dumb. So if that's all we've ever done, then of course we're gonna have to keep stepping in as the referee. But if we're just tired of doing that, you have to start giving them the coach in the

• 25:48Speaker 03

  head that they can carry with them. And I'll tell you what, I've, I've seen Lorraine Sidell, this parenting coach, I've seen families she's worked with, and they do this questioning routine a lot with their kids. It's tedious, but eventually the kids know the questions. And so she can just yell from across the room, what did it mean when your sister did that? And then they do the whole thing in their head and they're like, okay, fine, Mom, I know my sister loves me, we won't fight anymore. And so if you want to have the kind of house, not with no fighting or no crying, but where conflicts get resolved in a way where you end up feeling excited for them to go off into the world and to deal with conflict and they're gonna be prepared to live with someone and not get in fights all the time and not be alone, you know, in their twenties and thirties, these are the times

• 26:32Speaker 03

  right now to teach those lessons. And it's a little bit of extra time, but you save yourself a hassle in the long run.

• 26:38Laurie Santos?

  It might seem silly to ask a six-year-old whether something serves their purpose, but that's an important first step to helping that child develop a key emotional skill that psychologists call cognitive reappraisal. If you can reframe your thoughts about a situation, you can shift your feelings too. And helping kids practice this skill during small moments of crisis will allow them to learn to handle the bigger challenges that will come later on. After the break, we'll talk with David about other ways parents can guide kids towards happier behaviors with a mentor mindset. From coaching your middle schooler through a math class meltdown to helping your teenager make better choices after a night of bad decisions. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment.

• 27:20Speaker 01

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• 28:27Laurie Santos?

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• 29:31Laurie Santos?

  Psychologist David Jaeger has devoted his career to understanding why young people think and behave the way they do, and how parents and mentors can help guide kids towards becoming their best selves. David has found that many of the interventions adults regularly use aren't very effective, in part because they're interventions. In fact, David thinks most caregivers need to intervene way less than they think. Take homework, for example.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  So my daughter's in Algebra II, and she came home and they were doing some kind of factoring. I think it's like finding the square. And my temptation was to go and like figure out the trick and be like, okay, just do this. But I'd seen these great tutors and these great mentors, and I was like, all right, well, the first thing they almost always do is ask, what have you tried so far and why do you think it's not working? Then immediately you know what the kid knows. And it's hard to ask that because if they're frustrated and they're like banging their head against the wall, your temptation is to prevent them from having to revisit those times where they weren't getting it. And so that's what I did with Scarlett. I was like, all right, show me what your teacher told you so far. And then she said stuff that I completely forgot because I last learned it when I was 14.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  And then I was like, well, I see you're stuck here. Well, what happened if you do that? Then she explained, well, this won't work because of that. And then I could just be there as a guide. And I just was curious. I asked her to basically tinker with it. But she was always the agent. She was always doing the problem solving. And then all of a sudden, she remembered something the teacher had said two weeks before, and then she's like, oh, this is where I'm supposed to do it. Now I understand the pattern. So I didn't tell her anything about Algebra II. I didn't actually go read the textbook. I just worked with her. Now, the reason why this is important is because when we swoop in and say, okay, here's how you factor the problem, here's how you find the square, just do this, now try it.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  Then it makes them feel like we think that they can't figure it out and that they are incompetent, which is not what you want because there are a thousand lessons like that throughout the school year in just one subject and then you've got seven subjects. So you want them to have the skill of being able to figure it out. But what's hard is when they're totally on their own and they feel overwhelmed and they're like, I can't do this. So weirdly, non-informative questions where you're not really telling them answers makes them feel supported enough to go troubleshoot. It makes them feel like if they're stuck, they could ask you, but ultimately they own the thinking at the end. And Mark Lepper in the 1990s, a famous social psychologist, did this study of the greatest

• 32:05Speaker 03

  tutors in the Bay Area. And he found that 90% roughly of what they said was a question. It was not, they were great at explaining physics. And I think that lesson still holds today.

• 32:14Laurie Santos?

  I think it's so important because as an adult, I know what it feels like when somebody tells me what to do, right? It's kind of demeaning and I get more pissed off and I get more frustrated. But I think we forget that's what's happening with our kids when we kind of tell them what to do. I think another thing about the questions, and you just illustrated this in your algebra stories, that sometimes our kids have answers that we don't expect, right? When you asked her, well, what did she already know? She actually had some techniques that like, you're like, oh yeah, I forgot about that. And so there are these cases where our kids kind of know stuff that we don't know, or at least know things about the situation that we might not know, that unless we get curious and ask questions, we'd never see that. And that affects our ability to help them problem solve.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  And I think a big puzzle I had going into my book, 10 to 25, was why doesn't everybody do this? I mean, there's the time issue, you're like in a hurry. But like, aside from that, why doesn't everybody do it? And I think it goes back to the neurobiological incompetence model. If you think that the reason why your kid is stuck is because when it was explained very clearly by the teacher, the kid was screwing around and goofing off and not paying attention. And then they came home and they weren't being a serious student and they don't care about their future, then you're not curious why they're stuck on factoring the trinomial. You're like, this is a character issue.

• 33:26Laurie Santos?

  Yeah.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  This is not an intellectual issue. And so it feels like we need To have a response to the character issue by giving them a lecture about how they should have paid attention. You need to be responsible. You need to take good notes. You should go review. Your teacher already gave this to you. And that sounds harsh, but like in our studies, 50% of American teachers take that approach.

• 33:45Laurie Santos?

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 03

  They take a shame and blame approach to a mistake, not collaborative troubleshooting. And I think that's a real challenge because parents want to prepare their kids for a tough future, like a complex world where everyone's unforgiving. And the reality is if you just presume most of the time that kids are acting in good faith. And if you're seeing all this other like reluctance behavior, deviance behavior, sometimes that's a cover for the underlying thing, which is it's just actually hard work and they haven't figured it out. So you always treat it like you're a serious student who wants to do right. And you're going to get it and I'm going to ask you questions just until I understand. Then they feel respected and valued. And sometimes that safety is what they need to get out of their heads and stop the panic and then start embracing the challenge.

• 34:31Laurie Santos?

  And this kind of collaborative troubleshooting is true, not just in the academic domain, but maybe in other domains where they like really screw up.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:38Laurie Santos?

  How can collaborative troubleshooting help in a case where your kid has kind of messed up, maybe in the social domain or even the moral domain?

• 34:45Speaker 03

  I heard from a ton of parents, far more than I even wrote about in the book, but I wrote about a couple where their kids either snuck to a party or went to a party, but snuck booze to the party and then came home drunk. And the best parents I talked to were like, I've been waiting for this for years. This is the best moment of my parenting life. And I was like, really? I'm just so worried about that moment. And they're like, no, because we got to be honest. And the wrong approach, and they told me, was the yell, tell, blame, shame, the enforcer authoritarian kind of approach. And to be honest, a lot of that approach, the yelling, telling comes from our insecurity as parents that we feel like,

• 35:25Speaker 03

  how could I possibly be the kind of parent where kids have so little respect for my house rules that they would break this so blatantly? It's more like we're insulted and offended more than it is our concern with their actual safety. And so the collaborative troubleshooting parents. Didn't take that offensive approach. Instead, they were legitimately curious about how the kid ended up having drunk too much. Or in the case of the sneaking out, why did they feel like that was the most important thing in the world and more important than maintaining the family rules? And usually it went back to status and respect. So in the case of a kid who snuck out, the kid was just a hyper social kid and was worried that everyone would have this epic night.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  And there'd be some memory, like they found a golf cart and got to do donuts on the golf course. Or they ran away from the cops or something that they would never forget. And would talk about until their high school reunion or to their funeral. Think about it, like I definitely have stories of hour and a half events in high school. Like I've a hundred percent vividly remember some of the most fun times. And I remember who was there.

• 36:32Laurie Santos?

  I wouldn't want to miss out on that, right? There's a cost benefit. Yep.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  You don't want to be the person who missed out on this epic unforgettable night. So the mom started with, it's like, look, I know you're social. Let's find other ways for you to have epic unforgettable nights that don't involve lying and cheating. But it wasn't, don't be social.

• 36:50Laurie Santos?

  Right, right.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  In the drinking case, there was one kid who normally would just sneak like two wine coolers in his pockets. But this one day brought a backpack because he was trying to be a good friend to a lot of other people who asked for booze. And then he ended up drinking up most of it. And so he got super drunk. But again, it came from this desire to be social and to help others. And so the punishment was to talk about his drinking and his plan every night before he went out. And it was an agonizing forty five minute conversation about his plan before he could go to a party. And that was a worse punishment than grounding. But in the end, they started understanding his logic and his plans and they could subtly suggest things. And when that kid went to college, he didn't have any trouble with alcohol.

• 37:32Speaker 03

  And he had the skill. So it's a kind of never waste a crisis situation and questioning really helps to build that mental muscle in the kid.

• 37:40Laurie Santos?

  I love these scenarios because they really show that you're parenting for the future, right? Like in both of these cases, you're talking not about how you solve for this incident, but how you solve for future incidents. Maybe incidents that are going to happen when these kids go off to college and you're not going to be there to kind of, you know, see them out the door and that sort of thing. But I'm curious how you brought this into your own life, both collaborative troubleshooting and questions and all the stuff we've been talking about.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  I obsess over parenting for the future in specific moments that I know because of my sociology friends and colleagues set kids up for a lifetime. But I think there are a lot of moments in our kids' lives, trying out for a certain sport or activity, definitely taking a class, like applying for a summer job. There are these moments where they're going to be freaked out because it does have a big impact on their future, or they're not taking it seriously and they need to. And those are moments where you do have to be tough and demanding and unrelenting, but also supportive, so that way they see a reasonable path and their fears have to be legitimate to you. You have to be legitimately curious about why they're worried. But there, you know, there's lots of crying in my house in those moments where it's like you need to do this thing.

• 38:45Speaker 03

  But what I will focus on is like, how do I be honestly curious why you're being reluctant? And troubleshoot with you and find a solution that works for you. I'm not going to lower the standard, but it does matter to me that you're on board and that it feels good for you.

• 38:59Laurie Santos?

  So the next time you're struggling with your kid's behavior, try to tap into what studies show is really motivating, that sense of mastery. Everyone wants to experience agency and independence, regardless of their age. So remember that the old neurobiological incompetence model of childhood is out. The science shows that what's in are respect and understanding. How can you respect your kids better? Well, stop groansplaining and instead get curious and ask questions. Guide your child toward the habit of cognitive reappraisal so that they learn to manage their difficult feelings as they get older. You can also strive to be a warm demander, have high standards for your child, but still be loving and supporting. Try to understand your child's perspective rather than yelling, telling, blaming, or

• 39:44Laurie Santos?

  shaming. And finally, use those small moments of crises as opportunities for collaborative troubleshooting. It may be a little inconvenient and you might even end up 15 minutes late for a very important podcast interview. But remember that taking the time to help your child learn in these small moments can make a huge difference. Next time on the Happiness Lab, we'll wrap up our series on happier parenting with a look at how technology is affecting kids' happiness. We'll dig into the impact of screens and social media on self-image, attention, and mental health. And we'll share tips for building a plan that fits your family. And if you've found these discussions helpful, you'll likely enjoy my free online course, The Science of Well-Being for Parents.

• 40:26Laurie Santos?

  To learn more, just head to drlauriesantos.com/parents. That's D-R-Laurie Santos dot com slash parents. Until next time, this has been the Happiness Lab's special series on happier parenting. With me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 40:45Laurie Santos?

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