William R. Stixrud, PhD, is a licensed psychologist, a clinical neuropsychologist, and the founder of The Stixrud Group. In addition to conducting comprehensive evaluations, he has co-authored two books with Ned Johnson: The Self-Driven Child (Viking Books, 2018), which has been published in 18 countries and 17 languages, and What Do You Say? Talking with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home (Viking Books, 2021). They are currently finishing a third book that will be published by Viking in February 2025.

Olga

Hello and welcome to the Caring Instinct podcast. Our guest today is Doctor William Stixrud, a clinical neuropsychologist, the founder of the Stixrud group, and the co-author of an absolutely unique book, The Self Driven Child, known in the UK as the Thriving Child, as well as, What Do You Say? Talking with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance and a Happy Home. As I'm going through this episode, I just want to turn every minute into a clip and just share, share, share and just let people hear it. I absolutely love this episode.

Joe

He's such a nice guy as well, isn't he?

Olga

Yes. He's such a lovely presence as well. The non-anxious presence.

Joe

Yeah, my favorite, I don't know if you've done this clip, but if I can request it: the homework.

Olga

The homework, 100 years of research.

Joe

100 years of research on homework and it either comes out as doesn't do anything or it makes things worse in terms of learning. A hundred years.

Olga

This and many other discoveries await you in the podcast.

Joe

Enjoy.

Olga

Welcome, Doctor Stixrud, we're so excited to have you here. I heard you speak at this summit about helping children manage screen time, and I ordered The Self Driven Child. And what happened in my house was my husband saw it and squirreled it away into his office. And for the first week he was emerging from his office, reading me bits from the book out loud, but not letting me read it by myself. He was just so blown away by this message.

Olga

This was so important to him. And then he was sitting down our eight year old and asking him, so what would you say are the most stressful bits in your life? So thank you so much for this book. It's just such an important message.

William

You're welcome and thank you.

Olga

And as we've just found out, it is better known in the UK as The Thriving Child. So if our UK listeners go searching for The Self Driven Child, it's easier to find The Thriving Child, which is the name of the UK edition, is that right?

William

Yeah, it's the same book as far as I can tell. Yeah, the same book.

Olga

It's a book for parents of all older children, teenagers. Is that fair to say?

William

No, I think that certainly a lot of it applies, some of it, particularly at the end of the book, applies primarily to teenagers. But the idea that a sense of control is enormously important for mental health, for motivation, for well being, and we can start to nurture it in little kids. In fact, I gave a lecture about The Self Driven Child a few years ago and this guy came up to me and said, I just finished my doctoral dissertation on promoting autonomy in two year olds. So I think that we can start early to use some of these tools for building that internal sense of control in kids that is such, it's so powerful for helping them go through life in a confident, not overly stressed, anxious way. That's my angle.

Olga

Yes. Yeah. I've got a two year old as well, and he will take control if you don't give it to him. So I love it.

Joe

I was going to say my thinking, my son as well, he's four now, but when he was, you could see this. It really showed up for him. Just little things, like trying to climb on the sofa. If I tried to get involved, I'd be growled at. You know, this is my, I'm doing this.

William

And you think about at least the United States. You know, one of the first things that when the kids start to put more than one to two words together, they say, you aren't the boss of me.

Joe

Yeah.

William

Yeah. And I think that very early on my parenting career, I mean, I had to make peace with the fact that you really can't make a kid do anything against their will. If they're little and they don't want to get in the car to go to grandma's, you can pick them up and put them in the car, but they aren't getting in the car and just making peace with the fact that you can't make somebody do something, which means, as parents, we are supposed to be able to make our kids turn out a certain way or do certain things. And so focusing on building in a responsible way, building a sense of control, is really powerful.

Joe

That's a hard lesson to learn for parents, isn't it?

William

It is important. I will say that The Self Driven child has been out for six years now, and we've lectured to thousands of people about it all over the world, really. And almost nobody questions the basic premise because the science is so strong supporting this idea. But it's hard in part because if you're something, you've been controlling, helicoptering parents and you want to step back, you have less of a sense of control. And a low sense of control is the most stressful thing you can experience.

William

So it's stressful. It can be frightening for parents to trust their kid, that they can figure it out. The title of the second chapter of The Self Driven Child is, "I love you too much to fight with you about your schoolwork," your homework. And so many, many parents find that they'll step away. Okay, you're on your own.

William

Or I'll help you, but I'm not going to fight with you about it. And after two days, the kid not doing his homework, they say, well, this didn't work, and it does work, but you have to have the courage and you have to be able to tolerate that stress of not knowing when it's going to happen.

Olga

The uncertainty. Yes, and I find there's an interesting combination in parenting today. We combine an often premature push for independence in things like sleep, we want our babies, yet alone toddlers to sleep on their own, in things like manners, we want them to share, to say their pleases and thank yous, to be the sort of civilized members of society way before children are developmentally ready for it.

Olga

And at the same time, we completely micromanage and helicopter parent all spheres that in our heads are connected to career, education. When stakes become too high, we think children just can't do it by themselves.

William

Yeah. And, you know, it's a really interesting point. I think that, I think somebody told me this decades ago, but it said, don't do for a kid what the kid can do for himself, you know, and I think generally that, I mean, certainly  if a kid's sick or  just tired, you do something for him that he could do for himself fine. But I think that on the whole, I think it's good for kids if they're capable of doing things for themselves, that we, we encourage them to do it and don't do it for them. On the other hand, I think in America, this push to have kids grow up faster and faster is on steroids.

William

There's a book written in 1981 in the United States called The Hurried Child, and somebody was observing this American preoccupation with making kids, trying to make kids develop faster and faster and faster. You know Jean Piaget, the developmental psychologist?

Joe

Yeah.

William

He used to call it "the American question," which, as Piaget said, children develop according to these natural sequences. And the American question was, how do we make them go faster? How do we speed it up?

Olga

Wow, that was so many years ago.

William

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been like that for, and I'd love to know in your country, but one of the ways it manifests in this country is trying to teach kids who are five what we used to teach seven year olds, that kind of thing, with mistaken idea that if they learn it early, they'll be better when they're older, and they just aren't. And most of what we see in education is not at all informed by an understanding of the brain and brain development. It's hard for parents because  in the United States, I can't think of a school that really places healthy brain development as the highest goal.

William

And so parents have to adapt to it with the fear and competition and the pressure and the pushing. And when we don't know their ways, we try to maintain our own sense of control by micromanaging. So I think you're exactly right. And certainly one of the things that Ned and I focus on, my co-author and I focus on, is the idea that this is based on some research on a sense of control, where Steve Mayer at the University of Colorado for years studying rats. He had two rats in plexiglass cage, rat A and rat B. And there's tails outside the cage with electrode on the tail, and rat A would get,

William

the tail would get a little shock, and there's a wheel inside the cage. And he discovered if he turns the wheel, the shock stops. Rat B turns the wheel, and nothing happens. Rat A has that experience a few times of turning the wheel and being able to control a stressful situation. And when he's turning the wheel, his prefrontal cortex activates to go into coping mode and dampens down the stress response.

William

So he's turning the wheel, and even when you disconnect the wheel, he's still getting a shot. He's just turning that wheel. He's not very stressed because he's coping. We want kids to be able, as much as possible, to solve their own problems when they can, because that conditions the brain when something stressful happens to activate the prefrontal cortex and go into coping mode, as opposed to trying to avoid or panicking or freaking out. So, on the one hand, I want kids to be as independent as they can.

William

They love that, too. On the other hand, I think that solving their own problems, making their own decisions, is an important part of developing that self driven child. On the other hand, kids need structure. They need limits. If you try to make them be more independent than they are, it just makes them more anxious.

William

They need adult-provided structure and direction to feel safe.

Olga

Exactly. And we just forget the caring that we sometimes offer to each other, the grown ups, the spouses, the partners. I can perfectly make my own cup of tea, but sometimes I just want my husband to make a cup of tea for me, you know?

William

Right, right, right.

Olga

And I really hope he won't be thinking, I won't do anything for you that you can do by yourself. But we sometimes forget to extend the same grace to our kids.

William

Right, right. And that's why I think that, as a general principle, I think that it works. But, God, kid's tired, kids sick. Just once in a while, it's his birthday. Just once in a while, do something nice for him.

William

You get the day off, buddy.

Joe

I mean, it's a very intuitive process to do that dance, isn't it, of going through the day and this is the time. This is not the time.

William

Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think that the closer relationship you have with a kid, the easier it is to figure out, what does this kid need right now? What do I need right now?

Joe

Yeah.

William

What's the best way to balance things out?

Joe

One of my concerns about finding this time for this self directedness to come about is, like you mentioned in school, same thing happens here. The idea is we'll just get everything, we'll get them to do it a few years earlier, and then if they can do it, then that means things are going well. And obviously that takes more time, takes up more space. It's much harder to find the self directedness. For instance, I think about the classic, like, the academic stuff, like maybe reading.

Joe

Child starts school reading. You know, they're told to read all the time. We get told, okay, they go home. It's homework to read. It's.

Joe

It's much harder to find that time to find your own space for reading, if you see what I mean.

William

I do. The national Public Radio in America interviewed me and my daughter after The Self Driven child came out, because it says, The Self Driven child, that when my daughter was in high school, she came to one of my lectures on the adolescent brain, and I'd said that, great grades, you can flunk all your high school classes, and you can go to a community college class, at least in the United States. And then you go to most of the universities in the country, and they don't want to see your high school transcript. So I tell her, because I don't really care about your grades. And my daughter, on the way home from the lecture, said, I bet you don't really believe that.

William

I offered her $100 for a C and just to prove this, it's not that big a deal. And she never took me up on it, but the guy from National Public Radio kind of liked that idea. So I interviewed her, and she said one of the things she remembered was that when she was, like in second grade, that the teacher said the assignment was to read for 20 minutes at home. The next morning, I said respectfully, I'm not going to ruin reading for her by making it an assignment. And so she's not going to do it.

William

And she's got a PhD in economics reasonably well, especially when we think that there's no evidence that the homework contributes to learning in elementary school. After 100 years of research, that.

Joe

100 years?

William

Yeah. I did a literature review of the relationship between homework and learning in 1986, and I was stunned to learn what I just said. Nobody had shown that homework contributes to learning in elementary school. And some studies actually found that the more homework kids had, the less they learned because they got, turned them off to school 40 years later. The most recent research I see is about 2010.

William

Still the same thing.

Joe

Yeah.

William

And you know the name Peter Gray?

Joe

Yeah.

William

Yeah. I love the work of Peter Gray,  who's at Boston University. He studies play  from an evolutionary point of view. And his motto is kids need less school, more play. And I think he's exactly right.

William

You think about all the hours kids spend in school, bored, what are they learning? Not very much. There's so much wasted time. And especially if we try to teach them at younger and younger ages, because if you wait till a kid's seven, they'll learn to read in a couple months. You start at five.

William

You know, it'll take two years.

Joe

And that's time wasted from the other angle, wasted in play, completely. One of the things I was gonna ask about play, because play is where the self drivenness is just, it's just there. If you're playing, it's there, isn't it? Is that right?

William

That's the thing that this Peter Gray. I saw a really interesting paper while we were working on The Self Driven child. He pointed out there's a researcher in California who studies generational differences, and she's been pointing out for decades that kids are getting more and more anxious, more and more depressed, and also having an increasingly low sense of control over their own lives. And he said the thing that links these two is play. Because as you're saying, Joe, when kids go off and play on their own, decades ago, kids just go off and play in the neighborhood on their own.

William

And on the weekends, they come back at dinnertime. Parents had no idea what they were doing. They were creating their own worlds, their own games. It was completely self directed. And he said that kind of self directed play that contributes to that healthy sense of control that makes you almost invulnerable to anxiety and depression.

Olga

Invulnerable. Wow.

William

This guy who studies the rat A and rat B, he says that a sense of control inoculates you from the harmful effects of stress. I can talk about that more, but it really does seem to be true, and play seems to be a huge part of that.

Olga

Wow. We just need the ministry for education to finally read The Self Driven Child. Your work, the works of Peter Gray, to finally see this solid research, as you've said, 100 years of research and homework. Because I believe teachers, experienced teachers, understand it. I used to be a teacher, and we all knew that what would take a five year old three months to learn, a seven year old will learn in two weeks.

William

Yeah, yeah. No, there's research in multiple languages. At age seven is the best time to teach them to read because they learn so efficiently. And when I was in graduate school, you can tell a long time ago, when I was in graduate school, people studied readiness. People in child development studied readiness, meaning when's the best time to teach kids something?

William

And if you're going to teach a kid to ride a bike, I mean, you could start when they're four in preschool and teach them, here's the wheels, here's the handlebars, and by the time they're six, they'll be riding a bike. Or you could wait till they're six. Two weeks, they'd be riding a bike. People in education now either don't know about or don't care about readiness. If you looked at most schools, at least in the United States, you'd never have any idea that there's been 40 years of neuroscience and 40 years of attempting to apply neuroscience education.

William

Schools have so much power, and families have so much power to turn this around. If we start to recognize the importance of the sense of control, what contributes to healthy brain development and making that healthy brain development our highest priority. Most of the kids that I work with here have the idea that the highest priority, their whole childhood and adolescencem is where they go to college. That's the most important thing. And from my point of view, the most important thing is sculpting a brain that's healthy, that is goal directed, that can enjoy its own success.

William

I see so many kids who are very successful, but they're completely miserable, and so many of their parents are highly successful, very wealthy, and very miserable. That's what I focus on, is that sculpting that healthy brain and sense control is really a powerful part of that.

Olga

And in terms of that, probably my favorite bit in the book is where you talk about how our brains get sculpted in play, in what parents might see as a completely useless hobby, but this is when that brain is getting built. And your example was of playing the guitar in your band?

William

Yeah. I read some years ago there's a guy by the name of Reed Larsen who is a social scientist in the United States who studies adolescents. And for a while, he was studying how do children turn into self motivated adolescents and adults. When he concluded it wasn't dutifully doing their homework every night, it was what he called the passionate pursuit of pastimes. And the point he made is, if a three year old is building something with Legos and, do you have Legos?

William

And he's really focused on it, and he's really trying to build a high tower, that what's happening to brain is a combination of high focus, high determination, high effort, and low stress. And he said that that's the kind of brain state  that we ideally, we live most of our life in a state of full attention, full engagement, low stress. When I read that, what I thought about that.  When I was a teenager, I was in high school, I was an average student, and I never turned anything on time. I just cut corners constantly. I never got past page 25 in a book.

William

But I was passionate about rock and roll. And at that time, I played organ in a band. And I'd come from high school and I'd tell myself, okay, I'll work on music for an hour, and then I'll do homework. And I'd come out of this room where I had an organ and a record player 3 hours later, have no idea what time it was. Having been so absorbed in the music, trying to learn new songs or teach myself chord structure or something.

William

My father was diagnosed with cancer in my senior year in high school and died at the end of the year. And it kind of woke me up. I think it matured me to realize I better take this more seriously. I started college as a straight A student. It wasn't that I got smarter over the summer.

William

I really think I sculpted a brain that initially through sports and particularly through rock and roll, that when school became important to me, I could go pedal to the metal. I could go into that brain state of high focus, high determination, high energy, low stress. And so I think it makes complete sense to me.

Olga

Yes, I think Gordon Neufeld says, "We used to think school built brains. We now realize play builds the brain that school later on uses.

William

That's really well put. The crazy thing is, all the young mammals, all mammals, they play. That's how they learn to be an adult. I have a ten year old and eight year old granddaughter who really still have had very little exposure  to screens. They've watched some movies, but they don't have an iPad.

William

They don't have games, electronic games. And all they do is play. All they do is make up their own games. They're buying dolls and creating, making this story and this story. And it's so beautiful to watch.

William

And I think that we're depriving kids of something so important from an evolutionary point of view that human mammals of the young have always played. They play, they make up games, they play adult roles. They work out their own problems. They engage in rough and tumble to kind of test limits. These boys do.

William

And this is how they learned kind of, to be an adult. Yeah. I think that we do two things to help kids. We allow them to sleep more and play more, in my opinion.

Joe

It's just so, the frustrating thing for me is trying to sell that to a school or an organ. You know, why doesn't it sink in to a lot of people? Do you have a sense?

William

Well, I think that. I think we're going to see it turn around. I really do think,turn around. There's a big movement in the United States towards self directed learning and school programs that really focus on student autonomy. And they're really starting to focus on the brain.

William

There's not a lot of, in most of the school programs, as I said, you never have any idea that people know about or care about the brain. But I think things are such, at least in the United States, the state of mental health. The Surgeon General of the United States last year called the mental health status of adolescence the defining public health crisis of our lifetime. And it turns out that young adults in the United States are even more unhappy, even more anxious than adolescents. And so I think that we're seeing, what we're doing now is not working.

William

And I think we have a lot of good alternatives. I've seen schools where, I've done studies in schools where kids practice transcendental meditation, and it completely, it's life changing for the teachers and for the kids in the school. I think there's many good things. There's schools where they implement a lot of physical exercise as opposed to just general P.E., where it's aerobic kind of exercise, and things get so much better. We have so many tools to do this, and I think we're going to hit a tipping point here before too long where we realize what we're doing is not working.

William

And the problem for the United States is that much of the educational policy is made by educators, is made by legislators who don't have any knowledge of education and so have none about the brain. People going to realize that we don't want a population where more than half the kids are anxious and depressed, more than half the adults are anxious and depressed. It's not going to work out very well. You're going to have to focus on doing things differently when they're young, so they're sculpting healthy brains. I think that I'm pretty optimistic about turning this ship around because people see their own kids suffering so much.

Joe

Yeah. Are you familiar with Sudbury schools?

William

I am, yeah. Yeah.

Joe

I worked for a Sudbury home education school here in the first one here. But we have some alternative education practices starting to sprout more and more, but they're really hard to get off the ground and stay alive.

William

No, it's completely true. And I just, I consulted with somebody earlier this week who has a school that was based on Neill's Summerhill.

Joe

Yeah.

William

The same kind of thing. And where kids have so much independence and he's got 50 kids in his school. And what I'm telling him is that I've been involved with a group of educators in the United States who are really focused on student autonomy, student well being, self directed learning. And I've seen, you know, I've seen teachers in traditional classrooms who just start to say things like, here's what I think. Here's what I'd like you to do tonight.

William

Here's an assignment. I think it'll help you. Here's why I want you to do it. And I want you to know if it helps. Let me know if it helps you, and let me know how long it takes.

William

If it doesn't help you, I don't want to be assigning stuff that's not helpful to you, so you start treating respectfully, and I'm not going to grade it. Let me know if this is helpful. I've seen schools where teachers are starting to do that. I've seen schools where kids have their major academics in the morning, in the afternoon, they're working on their own projects. And I've seen, I went to a rural part of Virginia, and some kids were working on kind of computer modeling, and some kids were trying to build a state of the art chicken coop, very different things.

William

But these kids were so absorbed in their own projects, researching everything they needed to learn to do them. And I've seen schools where high school, I saw a high school where it's all student, but adults are consultants, guides to the kids, and I interview the kids and they're much less stressed. They get to sleep more, they're learning more. And the teachers love it because they get to be kind of guides or mentors to the kids. And they really feel like I'm really influencing these kids' life, which is why I became a teacher anyway, the first place.

William

So I think there's models developing that. I think Sudbury maybe a little, I told this guy that Sudbury idea. I think this idea of kids decide, kids don't need to decide everything. They just have a sense of control. It doesn't mean that we can't say, here's some structure.

William

Here's what I want you to do. Here's the requirement here, - doesn't mean we can't do that. It doesn't mean we say, I want you to work on this for a while, but it just means that as much as we can, they have some choice. They're treated respectfully. I said, if you want to build in school, keep that love for independence and autonomy and respect for the kid.

William

But also, I'm trying to make it more appealing to more people by showing how this can affect achievement and their development over time.

Olga

And this can be such minimal effort as a teacher. I used to work at a Montessori school, and then I went to a very, very sort of traditional classroom, and I taught English as a foreign language. So I had this class of seven year olds, but with my Montessori background, all I did was I took a module from the English textbook, and the module is, it's very simply a grammar point, some new vocabulary, and then exercises, various exercises. And I copied the pages and I cut it up and I created stations and children could go and they could come and learn a grammar point with me, and then they could find the exercise and they could do exercises in different orders and they could choose who they would like to work with. This was exactly the same hour and a half of a lesson.

Olga

This was exactly the same textbook. But the engagement, the empowerment in these kids, it was just, it was a miracle, honestly. So they went from being told, okay, open to page 72, exercise one, to being able to choose. They did the same work, but much faster and much happier because they could start with exercise five and then go to exercise two, and they could come to me and ask questions at any point. Just this control and freedom and choice.

William

It's so beautiful, Olga. And for me, just hearing that story, it just strengthens my optimism that we can turn this around. There's models that work. I mean, there's hundreds of studies on promoting autonomy in kids and the benefit that they get educationally and promoting autonomy in teachers as well. There's, we know all kinds of things that can help kids and just a matter of having the will to do it.

Olga

Exactly.

Joe

Something that comes up for me going back to learning, trying to get everything learned earlier and when you talked about the bike. So I noticed that there's an anxiety for me there with the bike for some reason. I want her to learn early so she can. But it comes from a place of anxiety and I'm curious about that generally, you know, with education everywhere, how do we shine a light on that? Where do we go with that?

William

Yeah. And certainly some kids are ready to ride a bike by four, just that most aren't, you know, and all this pressure to get kids to do things at younger and younger ages just based on fear that other kids are going to get ahead of my kid. And I know what you're talking about, Joe. I mean, when my daughter was in kindergarten, she was really young for grade and they didn't teach, they didn't actually, they taught the Alphabet. They didn't really teach reading at kindergarten, pretty progressive school.

William

And, but some kids were reading at kindergarten and it made me a little anxious. I don't want my kid to fall behind in this and that. But I just said, okay, I know that the best time to teach a kid to read is age seven, so I'm going to wait until by the time she is in first grade, she's an excellent reader. But I know that we all have that fear that other kids are going to get our kids if we don't push them. My neighbor's kid has 2 hours of homework and my kid only has a half hour.

William

That kid's going to get ahead of mine. And then we remember, oh, you don't need to do 2 hours of homework to learn. In fact, if you do hours of homework, you might learn less. And I just think we need to support each other in remembering what's true, what we know about what kids need and not, and just kind of going against these fearful, delusional ideas that somehow if we just get them to, they're better at it earlier, they'll be better at later. Or the way they develop their potential is by being pushed all the time.

William

That's how you maximize, the way you maximize potential is by creating a life you're happy with, in my opinion. Because I see so many people who, I see a lot of bright kids who feel, I know I'm bright, I'm expected to achieve an extremely high level and they're just miserable. And I just tell them that you maximize your potential by creating a life that you're happy with.

Olga

And of course, this incredible message in your book that invites parents to separate our anxiety about our children's future from our actual children. Our anxiety belongs to us, and it's not our child's job to resolve it for us.

William

That's true. Yeah. We have a chapter in the book called a non anxious presence. And I didn't make that term. I wish I did, but I didn't make that term up.

William

I got it from someone named Edwin Friedman, who studied systems, including family systems organization, churches, synagogues, schools, corporations. And he concluded that organizations work best if the people in charge are not highly anxious and emotionally reactive. When you think about it as a parent, if you got an infant who's crying, it's much easier to help them and soothe them if you stay calm. If you've got a three year old in the store who has a tantrum, it's much easier to deal with it. If you stay calm.

William

You got a 15 year old who just got suspended for a day from school. It's much easier to really be helpful if you can stay calm and not overreact. And we know in our second book particularly, we talk about this idea, there's something called emotional contagion, where virtually all emotions are contagious. We know, for example, if a kid is sitting in, a fifth grade kid who's sitting in class with a teacher who's really burned out, that the kids stress levels are much higher, the stress hormone levels are much higher than kids who have an engaged teacher. And also the same is true for calm is contagious.

William

And the United States Navy SeALs, this elite group of people in the Navy, that their motto is calm is contagious because they're sent into these high conflict places to try to bring order and peace. And remember, the calm is contagious. We ask parents to think about moving in this direction of being a non anxious presence in your family. Making a home that feels like a safe place. The world is stressful enough.

William

Ideally, when we come home, it's a really safe base where you can recover from stress. And one of the things that we recommend in terms of moving in that direction of non existent presence is really realizing that all our fear, all our anxiety about our kids is about the future. Because if your kid is struggling in some way now, and I said to you, I have a crystal ball and I've seen your kid is going to turn out great, you wouldn't worry about what's happening right now, because, you know, it's just part of their path. It's kind of a rough patch. They'll get through it.

William

I've been saying in my last couple of lectures that because I've been a neuropsychologist for 40 years, I've tested thousands of kids, and I've seen hundreds, if not thousands of kids who were really miserable, really hot mess, really struggling at various points of development, who've turned out great. And I wish I could, I wish I could implant in everybody's brain the circuits of my brain that just know, that have all that experience and see, that know all those kids are just kids going through a hard time, I don't go to, oh, my God, they'll end up living in the basement or end up in jail. I don't go there because I've just seen. So I just talked to the kid recently. For all four years of high school, he was in a therapeutic boarding program.

William

He had serious emotional problems. He just started his own practice as a neuropsychologist. And he's incredible. And anybody who knew him, even in high school, said there's no way. And I've seen that so much.

William

But I think we're just taking this long view, and if kids are struggling, resisting the temptation to think, oh, my God, this will screw up their whole life, to think, okay, this is part of their path, and making peace with it, and then supporting them, helping them, making peace with the fact that, okay, this is where they are now, this must be part of their path.

Olga

Oh, this is so good. Being the non-anxious presence.

Joe

I'm thinking of autobiographies or podcasts. You hear people's lives. How many times do you hear the troubles and strife younger and when you see where they are, it's so hard to keep that in mind.

William

I know, but so many of us have had the experience. The first time I went to graduate school, I flunked out. I was so anxious and insecure. I went for 20 weeks without turning in a single assignment. And so I flunked out.

William

And for a while, I felt like my whole life gone up in smoke. I had no idea what I was going to do. I was very discouraged. And it took me probably six weeks to realize it was the best possible thing that could have happened to me, because I always felt like an imposter. As English literature, I was an imposter.

William

I wasn't really a literary type. And honest to God, this one professor gave me an F, everybody else said, I'll give you an incomplete. You make up the word. This one guy flunked me, so I couldn't continue, and I was really mad at him. Six weeks later, I started to say, I hope at some point I run into this guy and I can thank him for flunking me.

William

And in fact, about a year and a half later, I went back to graduate school in education, and then eventually psychology. And I saw him on the campus of a different university. At the university I was going to, he'd come up from his university for a conference. I was able to go up and thank him for flunking me, but it didn't feel like that. I'm sure my parents were concerned about what's going to happen here.

William

Almost all of us have experiences where something hard happened, and it turned out to be fine. My co author, Ned Johnson, who's one of the most inspiring people to be around, he was in a psychiatric hospital for three months of 7th grade, and I just know hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of stories. The most useful thing that I've ever learned about brain development is how slow the prefrontal cortex develops. We know that the cognitive functions aren't mature until 25 plus minus three. The emotional regulation functions aren't mature till 30, 32 plus minus three.

William

So we never give up on a kid. I've seen kids who are really struggling at 18 or 19 who are very together by the time they're 25.

Olga

We just see them as young adults rather than someone who's still very mature.

William

Right, right.

Olga

Which does not mean they can't make decisions. Quite the opposite.

William

Well, you know, I think that there's a chapter in The Self Driven Child on that, it's called "It's your call," and it's about the wisdom of encouraging kids to make their own decisions. It doesn't mean that a five year old gets to decide everything for the family, but the idea is that I think the best message you can give, particularly a teenager, is, I have confidence in your ability to make decisions about your own life and to learn from your mistakes. I want you to have a ton of experience doing that. And we know that kids are really fully capable if we help them understand a situation of making good decisions for themselves. And we also know that there's a neurologist by the name of Antonio Damasio who studied decision making.

William

And we used to think that we make our best decisions purely rationally, putting our feelings aside. And Damasio showed if you lesion the circuits, emotional circuits in it, people who really where the emotional circuits in the brain are not working. They can't decide what to have for breakfast because decisions are rooted in emotion. And we want kids turning in children and teenagers. What's important to me?

William

What do I want? If I make this decision, how it will affect my family, how it will affect my friends. We want them tuning into their own emotions and ultimately trusting themselves. I just talked to a mom who I've known for a long time. I never tested her kids, but I've known this mother for a long time.

William

I met her kids and she was telling me, she was saying, I've been preaching this gospel for a long time, the sense of control and respect for kids and decision making. And she said, I'm so grateful to you for teaching me about this, because my kid, he's 35 years old. He's the happiest person I know. And he didn't pursue a path that I thought. He's a rock and roll musician, and he does these service jobs part time to make enough money.

William

He's engaged to be married, and he's the happiest person I know. And his wife said, his fiancee says he's the most confident person I've ever known because he trusts his own decisions. So I think we can start from early on. Do you want to do it this way or that way? Little kids, do you want to wear this outfit or that?

William

We're encouraging to make decisions. And ultimately, by the time they were teenagers, by saying, I want you to make the important decisions in your own life, I'm going to help you. And I'll tell you what my opinion is, you can decide, but I want you to practice making these kinds of decisions, because that's how you become a good decision maker, just by trying something out, seeing how it goes and learning from it.

Olga

And this is, again, a beautiful invitation. We're creatures of attachment. And a lot of the time, especially when we're immature, we will make the decision that we feel our parents are looking for. And this is a beautiful invitation. I love you, whatever you decide.

Olga

So you try, you go for it.

William

It is, it is. The older I get, the more humble I get about knowing what's best for a kid. In part because when do you decide whether something was a good decision or bad decision? Is it the next day? Is it two years later?

William

Is it five years later? Because so many times it's a good decision, doesn't seem to go well and vice versa. And that's why none of us always makes good decisions. But I want kids to be able to trust their own gut to seek out help when they need it to make a decision. I want them to know how to think rationally as well as trusting their own gut.

William

And I think that they need to practice doing it and just expressing. When you say to a kid, I have confidence in your ability to make this decision for yourself, it just grows them up in such a beautiful way. It's a really wonderful expression of confidence in them as people who can make their own way in this world.

Olga

Indeed. Oh, I just love it so much. There's another one that the UK government has thought of in their eternal wisdom, or at least while they are consulting, they might go ahead with a vote on this. They've been advised to shorten summer holidays to four weeks. At the moment it's six weeks and they'd like to shorten it to four weeks.

Olga

Well, I think the main motivation is they're trying to improve the attendance by not spending any money because adding extra holiday time to February and November, the darkest, coldest months in the UK. But the main argument that they are presenting is of course, the dreaded loss of learning over the summer. How can we? Yes, you are laughing. I mean, there are countries where children have three months of holidays, the whole summer worth of holidays, but this, oh my God, these six weeks holiday, all the things that they forget, and then we have to spend time reteaching them in the autumn.

Olga

That's the main argument.

William

Right. So we're talking about shortening by two weeks. How much really could you forget in those two weeks? It seems to me that I really do feel that it's because the reason the kids forget so much is that they're so tired and they're so stressed, their brains don't work. And we try to cram so much more stuff in their heads that they can actually learn.

William

When I was in high school in the 1960s, biology textbook was 350 pages and now the online 1200 pages. It's the same semester. Same two semesters, yeah. We expect that the average high school kid now, at least in the United States and certainly many countries around the world, sleeps about 6 hours a night, where they need nine to ten not to feel tired. That's the main reason why kids lose learning, is that they don't learn it very well.

William

It doesn't stick in their memory very well because they don't sleep on it. And so I just think that the idea of even getting even more control, cramming more and more stuff into you taking two weeks, it's just so counterproductive. It's absurd. And the idea that kids can't benefit from six weeks of play or being with their family or working on the projects they're interested in or hanging out with their friends is beyond absurd.

Olga

It is. And it's, again, this linear thinking, the more the better. The earlier the better.

William

That's such a good point. And we know from research on homework in high school that after an hour and a half or 2 hours, it's counterproductive. And yet some of the kids in the high achieving schools spend three or 4 hours in homework a night. All it does, it increases the rate of forgetting. Don't really learn more because you can't cram.

William

There's a limit to how much you can cram in your brain. Remember, it just increases the rate of forgetting.

Joe

And the frustrating thing, very common here, is where I'm sure over there, when it doesn't work, then we say, oh, there must be a problem with the child.

William

Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm somebody who tests kids, and there are kids who have trouble. Some things are really hard for them. But I think that we make things even so much harder by not paying attention to really how their brains work.

William

What's really good for them. There's a new article that just came out at the Atlantic about the idea that trying to turn around this phone based childhood and saying that the environment that kids are growing up in is simply toxic to their development, the more exposure they have to phones and electronics. I think that if we really focus on what's good for the brain, what's good for development and prioritize, that will do a lot better. I mean, as Ned and I say, if we are teachers, we'd much rather teach a kid for 4 hours who slept for eight than teach them for 8 hours if we slept for four. So it's so much more efficient.

Olga

You're hopeful about the future of education, and I wonder how much the rise of AI might change things. Suddenly the value of sitting there and writing a lone essay has gone out of the window because chat GPT can do it within seconds. What AI is not doing is the physical work, is caring after people and animals and the planet. What do you think the implications might be, first of all? Well, the obvious one.

Olga

Even more uncertainty, even more parental anxiety.

William

Yeah, I just think it's changing so fast. It's changing so fast that, I don't know, it's kind of beyond my pay grade. I haven't really studied the possible implications. I haven't read the futurist kind of speculation about this and what I focus on, because I'm a neuropsychologist, I've been asked probably 20 years ago to start the first time to lecture about how technology affects kids brains. And what I said is that there's things that we know about human development.

William

They haven't changed in the last 200,000 years. One is that you folks both are very knowledgeable about attachment. And this really interesting study in California where years ago, where they measured this security of attachment, toddlers security of attachment to their parents at 18 months, and it's a better predictor of whether they finished college than their SAT scores or their high school grades. So feeling safe in your own skin, feeling safe in the world, is usually important. And you see the level of anxiety now in this completely tech driven culture, that it's not making people feel safe.

William

So when I think about the idea just that, since the advent of electric light, adults sleep a couple hours less than we did 100 years ago, and kids sleep even less than they did 30 years ago, I kind of take a focus on what we all have. Human organisms, we're all human organisms, we're all mammals. What do we need? And so in terms of if AI, certainly there's AI programs working on doing neuropsychological evaluations. And I don't think anybody really knows what's going to happen if AI is able to take over most of the white collar jobs.

William

Your point is, it's not going to go and fix the toilet. So it may be that this preoccupation with everybody going to college now, maybe that's going to change where being a plumber, being an electrician, where AI is not going to do that, maybe a better thing, I don't know. But I do think that whatever, we want to keep a focus on the health of kids brains, I think about these four goals of emotional development related to the brain. One is we want kids to have a healthy stress response, meaning when something really stressful happens, your stress hormones jack up quickly, so you can deal with it instinctively. And as soon as it's over, the stress hormones go down quickly.

William

What we see a lot in anxious kids is that they have chronically high stress hormones. Something really stressful happens, they jack up a bit. It takes forever to go back down. So a healthy stress response. We want them to have what I call high stress tolerance or being able to function well in stressful situations, want them to be resilient, and we want them to be, increasingly have a sense of peace and connectedness in this world.

William

That's what I focus on. How do we promote that because that's going to make kids more adaptive. It's going to make them more able to adjust, to change or figure things out, to roll with the punches. So I don't know. There's people who thought about this a lot more than I have.

William

It's a wonderful question and I just don't know. But I do know that the kids are people who go to do best are the people who are the most flexible and the most adaptable.

Olga

I think even the people who have thought about it a lot don't know at the moment.

William

Well, that's the thing. Yeah. It's so unpredictable. And I think, like all technology, I mean, certainly when Facebook started out as something to connect people, and we have unprecedented levels of loneliness now and people who are connected all the time electronically and that, it didn't quite turn out that way. There's so many unintended consequences.

William

Who knows? So I just keep focusing on wanting healthy development for kids to be able to handle whatever happened.

Joe

Just something you notice as well. Generally with self drivenness when it's not there, it's almost become a thing that we try and teach children. You should be like this. And it's like, oh, now I've told you, that should be enough for it to start happening.

William

Yeah, yeah.

Joe

And yeah, we see, I see that happen all the time in school.

William

Give me an example, Joe.

Joe

You might see that this self drivenness is not in a child. They're forgetting things, they're not engaged. And so a teacher shows up or someone came from and says, I just need to tell them that it's about being self driven. You have to really want to do it. Or find this, find your love for this, or find your passion.

Joe

You'll be fine. It's almost like we try and teach these things rather than set up the environment, like play, like all the things you spoke for, for it to emerge on its own. We just try and say, oh, no, this is it, now go and do it.

William

Yeah, it's an interesting point, Joe. And you certainly, you can't implant this. Yeah. It really comes from your own experience and the way your brain codes your experience and, and these. I did this exercise years ago with the family educator and we're working with all the parents in this big school in DC, and we made up these scenarios like, you got a third grade girl who coming home crying because she's the only kid in her friend group who didn't get invited to a party where you got a 10th grade son who cuts from the basketball team or his girlfriend dumped him and he's really distraught.

William

The question that we ask parents to ask themselves is, whose problem is it? We try to inhibit that because we're mammals. We're wired to soothe and protect our young. And so it's so easy for us to go in. Well, you can do.

William

That's not so bad to soothe them or you need to do this or that. And if we don't do that and they have the experience of solving their own problems, it changes their brain in a way that has nothing to do with. You need to be like this. That's who they become. And so we want them to have those experiences in life that shape their development.

William

Shape their brain development in a way. They spontaneously feel a sense of control. It's not something they feel a sense of autonomy. They feel that this is my life. They feel that I'm competent in doing this.

William

They feel that I have agency because that's what I've experienced.

Olga

No one's become resilient because they've been told they should be resilient.

Joe

It'd be great if it did work that way.

William

Well, it's true. And I think that you folks have the growth mindset in England?

Joe

Yeah. Yeah.

William

For our second book, I like the idea in general. The second book, we interviewed this woman who's done several studies on attempts to train a growth mindset. Growth mindset. Meaning I know that I can get better at things through my own efforts as opposed to, well, I'm born with a certain amount of. Certain amount ability.

William

Not much I can do about it. And that growth mindset that, it turns out it's a good thing, but it also turns out a very hard thing to kind of train kids in. They don't spontaneously have it. Yeah.

Joe

And that's one of the things that made it through into the schools here. Most schools will know about it and they'll try and teach it. Yeah. So you should have a growth mindset. You know, try it out.

William

I think that there's ways. There's ways of encouraging kids to think like that, but I just try to teach them that way. Here's. You need to. You need to have a growth mindset.

William

It doesn't work so well. And in your email to me, you mentioned that you, your work on housework, you, your housework program is based in part on motivational theory. For Ned and myself, our north star, for thinking about motivation, this self determination thing that holds for kids to be intrinsically or internally motivated, they have to have three basic needs met for a sense of relatedness, connectedness for a sense of competency and for a sense of autonomy. And I think your focus on housework is really important. It's wonderful.

William

And certainly kids growing up having a sense that I'm competent. Interestingly, there's a question on one of the American intelligence tests where you simply ask kids, why is it important for children to do chores?

Olga

Oh, wow.

William

And they all know. And they all say it builds a sense of responsibility. Or you learn how to do things for yourself so you'll know how to do them when you're an adult. They all know. They all know that the value, and even apart from contributing to your family, kids know.

William

And I think that one of the questions you posed to me was, why do so few kids do housework now?

Olga

Only one in four now, compared to 86% of when we were children.

William

Yeah, I think part of that may be because so many parents don't do housework now because they hire somebody to do it. And I think also that because we become increasingly anxious and fearful thinking that the world is more and more competitive, the world is more dangerous and competitive than it is. We can't have a kid spend time cleaning the bathroom when they could be building a resume for college. A lot of that stuff, too.

Olga

That's why it's going the same way as play, because of this education. It's all about college.

William

I gave a lecture in Texas about The Self Driven Child a few years ago, and I happened to mention probably the most elite school in Washington, DC, where parents, where president's kids go. And I don't remember why I mentioned it, but after the lecture, this woman came up to me and said, I'm a therapist psychotherapist at the Meninger clinic here in Houston. And we know the school really well because so many of the graduates get into the top universities. But as soon as they get a B, as soon as they realize that everybody here is as smart as I am, or as soon as the girlfriend dumps them, they crumble and they have to take a medical leave of absence, and they come here for therapy. And she says to the one, they don't have enough experience making their own decisions, solving their own problems, running their own lives. The kids who do their own laundry, it's a pretty powerful prediction of who's going to make it in college.

William

Yeah. You know, and my kids used to complain when they were in high school. They're the only one. They're only ones in friend group who had to do their own laundry. And I just say, you couldn't make me more proud.

Olga

I love it. I just love it so much. It's almost like we are again. We're preparing children for the life that they won't have. No one will have just the life of their nose in the book and competing with their peers all the time.

Olga

Thankfully, no, the actual life involves quite a lot of housework.

William

It's true. Yeah, it's true.

Olga

Oh, thank you so much.

Joe

Thank you.

William

You're welcome. Yeah. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Olga

This is our traditional last question. What do you do for play, Doctor Stixrud?

William

Well, I'm still a rock and roll guy. I play in a rock and roll band and I play the band I'm in now. I've been in a couple bands in the last 30 some years. I play guitar and keyboards in sync.

Olga

Favorite Beatles song? Favorite album?

William

That's tough. I know. I would say my favorite Beatles song is. I'm embarrassed to say this. I love She Loves You. Going way, way back.

William

I love it. I mean, I love Let It Be too. I mean, I said, that's right, apparently.

Olga

Oh, yeah. Let It Be really goes with The Self Driven Child.

William

Yeah. Just non-anxious presence. Let it be. We talk in both our books about the idea of radical acceptance. Meaning that for all we know, whatever a kid's experiencing right now is what they're supposed to experience.

William

This is the right part of their path. Because I've never seen a plan for your kids that somehow this is way off course and making peace with where they are now. Okay, this must be where they're supposed to be because this is where they are right now makes us more flexible to help, more able to help without panicking and letting kids be. Because I remember testing. I worked with this kid who years ago had polio as a child.

William

He had a brace on his leg that didn't seem to bother him very much until he got into 8th grade. He was interested in girls. He couldn't play sports anymore. And his dad was so sad, first he said, this should be the happiest time in his life. And I said, obviously you skipped 8th grade because most 8th grade, it's not the happiest time in most people's life.

William

But then he said, he said, through tears, he said, I just want him to feel good about himself. And I said, I think we can much more convincingly help him feel good about himself if we aren't worried sick. So this idea of let it be, we don't have to worry about it constantly. Let it be. This is part of the path now.

William

And now let's say, how can we support him? How can we help him? But let's not catastrophize. Let's not create unnecessary anxiety. This is going to make it work.

William

It's going to make him even more afraid.

Olga

Oh, thank you so much.

William

Well, yes.

Joe

Thanks so much. I just love every minute of it. Yeah.

William

Yeah. Well, I really enjoyed being with the two of you. I like what you're doing. And thank you for having me.

Joe

Thank you.

Olga

Thank you.

Joe

Thanks for listening, everyone. Make sure you give us a follow, sign up on our website to find out about our next guest. Got some great guests coming. And, yeah, follow us on social media, too. And stay tuned because we've got more planned.