No matter your age, you can probably think back to a time when your younger self disregarded some sage advice from an older person. You probably thought some version of, “Nah, I got this.” Or, “What do you know?”
Of course, time and experience taught us the true lesson – perhaps, as they say, the hard way.
Getting through to young people has been an age-old challenge. But there’s new research to help.
David Yeager has helped to spearhead this work. He’s a psychology professor at UT-Austin, and he’s compiled the findings in a new book, “10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.”
Yeager talked with Texas Standard about the book. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Ten to 25 seems like quite a range, and it starts even younger than many people consider the “tween” years. What happens to human brains around age ten?
David Yeager: Yeah, so around ten is typically the start of pubertal maturation. The axis of puberty we call gonadarche. And you see a surge in hormones like testosterone, estradiol in both boys and girls. And that has interesting effects on the brain.
We now understand it sensitizes the brain to not just reward and punishment, but to really social feelings, like the feeling of humiliation never feels as bad as it feels in the start of puberty. And also the feeling of pride never feels as good; the idea that you impress someone whose opinion you care about. And so scientists think about that as a period of social reawakening, and that makes you really sensitive to whether you’re being respected by others.
On the other side, 25 is about the time when people take on an adult-like role in our culture and therefore are granted a certain measure of respect and authority in our society. And look, I mean, that happens at different ages for different people in different industries. So these are not hard and fast rules.
But 10 to 25 gives us a window to say, you know, brains are surprisingly similar across this period. And once you realize that, then it unlocks interesting insights about how lessons from parenting, teaching, managing, etc. can apply across the whole age range.
I want to dive into your title a little bit because there are so many important conversations parents, teachers, adults of all kinds want to have with young people. Why is motivating them the important first step?
Yeah, the biggest complaint I hear from adults is, “Kids these days. They don’t want to work. They want everything handed to them on a silver platter. They’re entitled.”
So from employers, I hear things like, “Well, there were a hundred applicants for this job. You got it. And then the first thing you do is ask for more time off or flexible work arrangement. That’s unbelievable.” Or parents, you know, are hearing more from kids like, “I don’t want to take this hard class. I want to drop all my activities. This is too stressful for me.” And we see the same kind of thing happening in classrooms as well.
So that stuff is frustrating for us as adults. We spend so much of our time trying to invest in the next generation, and if it feels like our efforts are wasted, then it almost causes an existential crisis for us as the adults. So the way a lot of people frame that is like young people aren’t motivated, they’re not engaged.
And what I want to argue is that it is true that young people can be disengaged, but it’s not a fundamental biological fact of their age. It’s more a response to how we’re treating them in the environments we create. And that’s good news because it means we can fix it and do something about it.
David, one thing you write about is stress. And of course, we’ve seen a lot of headlines about mental health struggles that students are going through, and that’s no joke. But you also say that stress is normal and maybe some stress isn’t even all that bad.
Yeah. So we conducted a series of experiments where we looked at the idea popular in our culture that stress is always debilitating and crushes our performance and ruins our mental health. And what we find is that the more that you believe that, the more true it is.
But there’s an alternative view. And the alternative view is that stress is the natural consequence of doing something ambitious, important, something that requires striving.
For example, if you’re a young employee presenting for your boss’s boss. Well, is that a bad stressor? Because you could fail and then be outed as an imposter that should be fired. Or is it a good stressor, because it’s the chance to show that you’re actually ready for a promotion and you’ve impressed someone who could advocate for you at the company?
And what we find is that when your heart is racing and your palms are sweaty and you’re breathing heavy, you don’t have to interpret that as a sign that you’re going to fail. You can also interpret that alternatively as a sign that your body is mobilizing resources to optimize your performance. For example, the reason why you’re breathing heavily is to give more oxygen to your blood. The reason why your heart is racing is to get that blood to your brain cells so they can be as smart as possible and then do as well as possible.
And so the societal narrative that stress is always bad, leads us to suppress or run away from stress. And you can see this if you Google image search “stress memes” and you see things like take a bubble bath, drink chamomile tea, go do yoga, go for a walk in the park, take a nap. But it’s like, if I’m about to present to my boss’s boss, that’s not the time to take a nap.
And so what we find is that when you believe the stress is debilitating belief, you yourself perform worse. If you’re a leader, you respond to a young person’s distress by removing their demands. “You’re doing too much. You should quit that. Like, let me do this for you.” And a lot of helicopter parenting or micromanaging as bosses or low expectations as teachers comes apart from this flawed belief about stress.
So we think it’s important to not say stress is inherently good, but it’s often a sign that you’re doing something that’s healthy for development and you can embrace that stress response to optimize your performance.
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You have an interesting personal career path. You were a middle school teacher and a basketball coach before transitioning fully into this work. Can you talk about an experience in that stage of your life that influenced what you do now?
Yeah. I mean, look, for any teachers out there, your life is so hard. And for any parents, just thank your teachers.
I remember spending so much time creating a lesson plan. So we would always read “The Outsiders” when I was a seventh grade English teacher or “Once and Future King” when I was an eighth grade teacher. And there are sections of the book that are pretty hard or you have to think deeply about. And getting the entire class to take that seriously, to do a great final project, write an excellent essay, learn all your vocab words… That was a challenge.
And as a teacher, you go into that field because you want to inspire young minds. You want to be like Robin Williams, carried on peoples’ shoulders at the end of “Dead Poets Society,” right? And that’s not the reality for most teachers most of the time. And so I left the classroom in part because I felt like I could learn how to do something better.
But there was one moment as a teacher that really stuck with me. I had assigned a short story assignment, and my students had to write a short story and bring it in. And I got all their first drafts and I spent all day Sunday grading their drafts of their stories. And in my mind, I’m thinking, “man, this is going to be… They’re going to get my feedback and then they’re going to like publish it in the local newspaper. They’re going to send it to a literary magazine that’s going to be these amazing eighth graders. They’re going to make a movie about me.”
And it’s like, that’s the lie you tell yourself as a teacher. And what happened when the students got my feedback on Monday? They’re like, “Why did you hate my essay? Yeah, like you’re such a monster that you spend your free time on the weekend trashing the essay of a 12-year-old.”
And so there’s a disconnect between what you are trying to do when you’re giving critical feedback and pushing them and how they’re perceiving it.
Your anecdotes are important and a really helpful part of this book, but you also use research. Can you talk about how you’ve really drawn these connections in what’s going on in their brains?
Yeah. So take this example of giving critical feedback that doesn’t land. We call that the “mentor’s dilemma.” And the reason why it’s a dilemma is the idea that, on the one hand, it feels like you can be mean and brutally honest and the collateral damage is that young people’s feelings are hurt. But ultimately in your mind, it’s “well, they’re better off because they got my feedback.” But it’s not a perfect option because you could crush their spirit.
The alternative is to lower standards, withhold feedback, lie to them, say it’s great, give them a pat on the back and tell yourself, “well, at least they know I care for them.” And neither of those feel good. That’s why it’s a dilemma.
And what we tested in our experiment was a third way, which was to continue to maintain very high standards, but accompany it with enough support so that the young person could meet that standard. And in one well-known study, I connected with Geoff Cohen, who’s a mentor of mine at Stanford, where we did this research. We had seventh graders write essays in real classrooms – teachers, the real teachers critique those essays.
Before kids got them, the teachers had handwritten Post-it notes, basically that we, the researchers, appended to those essays. And in a treatment group, the note said, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high standards and I know you can meet them.” In a control group, it just said, “I’m giving this to you so you have feedback.” So it conveyed no information.
And what we found is that students were twice as likely to turn in a revised essay a week later when they got that first note. It’s something we call “wise feedback,” and it appeals first to the very high standard I have. And second, assures you that I’m giving you this feedback because I believe you can meet that standard.
And I think about that a lot, not just in education settings, but in parenting, too. I have four kids, and if there were twice as many of my kids who did what I asked them to do, then at least two out of my four kids would have pants on before school.
In some ways it seems it comes down to treating young people a little differently than many of us remember being treated. Is it that simple?
Well, I think that everyone wants to be treated with respect. And if you have a lot of status and you can kind of take your social standing for granted, you’re not as offended when you’re not afforded all the respect that you think you deserve, because in general, you’re getting it from your environment.
But think about the predicament a young person is in, right? They’re transitioning from being a child where everything is done for them to all of a sudden being expected to be adult, like as a contributor to our culture, our society. But there’s a mismatch between the rights and responsibilities they want to have and what we give them.
A good example is this classic study from the late ’90s where they asked kids about a series of rights and privileges that they thought they should have. And then they asked the adults, “At what age do you think the kids should have them?”
So an example is being able to write a letter that’s critical of the principal’s decision-making. And kids on average thought by seventh grade, “I should be able to publish that in the school newspaper.” And adults thought it was by 10th grade. So you’ve got a two-and-a-half to three-year period where young people in general are saying, “I’m ready for this right and privilege and responsibility,” and adults are like, “You’re not ready.”
And so a lot of times, just like assuaging that tension and communicating very clearly to a young person that “I’m taking you seriously, this is how I’m respecting you,” etc. … That alone can resolve some of that tension that causes a lot of the most frustrating “kids these days” behavior.
Is it because that we’ve just gotten it wrong in our heads? It’s not that “kids these days” are really all that different than we were when we were kids. It’s just that we’ve sort of forgotten and moved on and our brains have changed and so we’ve got to remember how to communicate with them.
Yeah, I mean, look, my mom’s a baby boomer. She went to UT. If you asked her about her days at UT, she would tell, like, stories about irresponsible, fun party things that they did, and they would look back and laugh. But a lot of people in her generation now look at Gen Zers and young people today like, “Society’s going to hell in a handbasket,” right? “Kids these days are immoral, unethical, and they’re fundamentally flawed.”
And in general, what research has found is that every older generation tends to think that the next generation is in moral decline. So the Harvard social psychologist, Dan Gilbert, calls it the “illusion of moral decline.” And it’s the result, in part, of the mental gymnastics we do as we age, where we reframe our own poor decisions as a funny, youthful learning experience, but we think of the decisions young people make now as the tip of the iceberg, revealing some fundamentally flawed socialization or moral compass.
And my philosophy is we need to stop doing that, because you could look at what Aristotle wrote about young people in “The Rhetoric,” and it reads like a Wall Street Journal op-ed from yesterday. And so those complaints have been around forever.
And as a developmental psychologist, I also think this is absurd because you don’t look at a parent of a baby, who is 6 to 9 months old, and then they start fussing a little bit and be like, “I really feel really sorry for you that you have a baby,” right? You’re just like, “Feed the baby or give the baby a nap and then the baby will be fine.”And then it’s adorable and everyone’s happy for you.
But if you tell someone, “I’m a parent of a teenager,” they’re like, “You’re doing the Lord’s work,” right? It’s like they’re very sympathetic. And so I think that it’s time to stop treating an entire developmental period like it’s only awful and we can’t understand it.
People used to not understand infants. And then we have the theory of attachment. We understand toxic stress. We understand how to soothe the baby. Then once you figure that out, babies are adorable, and it’s fun to watch them grow.
Let’s figure out the fundamental needs that young people need, address those and then start admiring their contributions and how they grow and the cool and fun stuff that they come up with.
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