Seven Principles For Raising A Self-Driven Child

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1:04:39

Seven Principles For Raising A Self-Driven Child

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In this episode of The Wise Effort Show, Dr. Diana Hill explores the seven principles for raising a self-driven child with experts Ned Johnson and Dr. William Stixrud. They delve into effective parenting strategies, discussing how to balance guidance with autonomy, the importance of non-anxious presence, and ways to foster a healthy parent-child connection. The conversation includes practical advice and personal anecdotes, offering valuable insights for parents looking to support their children's growth and self-motivation.

Parenting Self Motivation Anxiety Management Motivation Parenting Strategies Parenting Challenges

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Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Meet your Teacher

Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Transcript

How can we raise self-driven children? That's what we're going to explore today on the Wise Effort Show with Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson. Welcome back. I'm Dr. Diana Hill. This show is about wise effort and one of the places where we could get a little bit more wiser with our efforts, How we're using our energy is in our parenting. Are you doing 90% of the work as a parent? Well, Guess what? That means your kid is doing 10%. It's an energy balance. And when we start to understand that energy balance, How to back off, Give space, And offer support in a more effective way, Then our children have more room to take the lead. The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child is written by William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, And this is the third time that I have interviewed them. If you've been on my show three times, It means I really like you. And their principles have been really foundational in my own parenting. William Stixrud is a clinical neuropsychologist and founder of the Stixrud Group. He holds a faculty appointment as assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the George Washington School of Medicine. And Ned Johnson is founder of PrepMatters, An educational company providing academic tutoring, Educational planning, And standardized test preparation. And today we're talking about the Seven Principles of Raising a Self-Driven Child. Number one, Put connection first. Number two, Be a consultant, Not a boss or manager. Number three, Communicate healthy expectations. Number four, Teach your kids an accurate model of reality. Number five, Motivate your kids without trying to change them. Number six, Be a non-anxious presence in your family. And number seven, Encourage radical downtime. We'll talk about strategies, Examples, Ways that I've been successful and not so successful at some of them, As well as things you can do at whatever stage you are at in parenting to support your kids in becoming self-driven children. I want to read a little bit about what Ned and Bill say about this. They say that you can't force an infant to stop crying, A defiant child to do school work, Or a teenager to break up with a boyfriend she insists she loves, Which means that you really can't control them. And the fact that we can't actually make them bend to our wishes, Even if we're just trying to protect them from failure or pain, Means that it couldn't be our responsibility to make sure our kids always behave well in public, Do their homework every night, Do their best every time, Make decisions that we agree with or turn out a certain way. Coming to terms with our lack of control is the first step towards feeling that it's safe and right to give up what doesn't work and to find more successful ways of motivating, Encouraging, And persuading our kids. Put connection first. Empower kids to make and take responsibility for their own choices. Instill motivation and embrace radical downtime with them. That is what we're going to explore today on the Y's Effort Show. I think you're going to find this conversation very useful. Enjoy. All right, Welcome, William Sixred and Med Johnson. And I was just looking back at my old interviews, And I first interviewed the two of you for The Self-Driven Child in 2018. I had a five-year-old and an eight-year-old. And we were talking about, And I was struggling with things like, Do I let my five-year-old go to school in his bathrobe? That's like a superhero costume. Yeah, Yeah. And then fast forward, The next interview we did is What Do You Say? And at that point in time, I had, I think, An 11-year-old and an eight-year-old. And that period of time, It was like, What TV shows or can I let them watch video games and what should I do, Right? And now, Here we are, Third book, And I have a 15-year-old that's backing my car out of my driveway. One of our favorite observations. When any of us as a parent have children who are learning to drive, And we basically shift from three feet from our left to our right, But holy smokes, What a grander change in perspective. Yeah. Great. And how lucky am I that I've had the self-driven child principles throughout this whole process of being a parent. They have been so central to my parenting, And they're really central to how I communicate with my clients about parenting. And I will say, I have two very self-driven children, And it hasn't been easy, But they're so, They're just doing it. They're doing all the things that you would hope they do. And they make the teenage years so much easier for me, Because I was doing it all along from five till now. So thank you, The two of you. Well, You're welcome. I have to ask though, Does your son wear his bathrobe while driving, While backing the car out? No, Different son, But the one that was wearing it at five, First thing he does when he gets home from school is puts on his bathrobe. Oh my gosh. And makes himself a snack, Right? So he's just that kind of guy. He's already ready for being 21, Really. That's really, He's prepared for college, Which is really what this book is about, Is how do we help our kids have autonomy in the context of a very loving, Supportive relationship with their parents, But them to chart their own path and create the life that they want to live. And you have, In this book, You're walking through it, You're doing the work, You're answering the questions. So we're going to go through it, But before we get started, Dr. Stixer, Can you tell us just a little bit about why this book now? What inspired the two of you to write it? In the introduction, We mentioned that, You know, We gave a lot of lectures in the Washington, D. C. Area where we live, When The Self-Driven Child came out, And the mother of three or four kids that I tested and followed for years came to like four of our lectures. I just noticed she was there, And at the fourth one, I went up to her and started talking to her. I said, Why do you keep coming? And she said that when I come to hear you guys talk, I feel so calm, I feel centered, And I feel okay about my kid, Even though he's not doing great, But he'll be okay. And then he'll screw something up, Or I'll talk to a neighbor whose kid's doing much better than my kid, And I get really anxious, And I want to come back and help you, Help me put things in perspective again. We're like her calm button. And that's basically what we're trying to do in this workbook, Because our major theme is that the most important things we can do for our kids are to help them feel that they're deeply and unconditionally loved, And as they get older, Develop a strong sense of control over their own lives. And giving them more control of their lives is hard as parents, Because we have to sit in our hands and zip our lips, And there's nothing more stressful than trusting your kid to do something you've never seen him do before. You don't know if he can actually do it well. And I talked to a parent educator last week, Parent educator, Who's on top of her 15-year-old son because he's not doing that well in school, He's not turning it in, He's lying, And she just has to learn to change the energy, But it's hard. So the workbook is to try to make it easier, There's scenarios, There's exercises to figure out what are my values, Which I really want for my kid, And why is this hard for me? That's different from when I was raised, But is it right? To help people figure out that it's right and that it's safe to trust your kids more and worry about them less. Well, You have these seven steps, And the first step is about putting connection first, Which is what you're alluding to. And really, You're encouraging parents to explore for themselves, Like what makes a strong connection? You have these journal questions where you start with the parent asking themselves, When you think of other people in your life who you're not able to be close with, What's preventing you from having a strong connection? And then you can flip that, What's preventing my child from having a strong connection with me? So how do we, Why is this foundation of, I mean, My listeners all know this. So we all know it, We know relationships are important. It's really hard in that moment as a parent to prioritize that, Because we think getting our kid out the door or preventing him from backing into the tree is really what's important. But why is this relationship come first? Oh, There are a bunch of reasons. I mean, To begin with, The strength of a connection that a child or a young person has with an adult or another caregiver, A parent or another caregiver, Is the single strongest protective factor against stress on developing young brains. And if we really think of ourselves in the business of helping our young people develop the brains they're carrying to adulthood, We kind of want to take that seriously. You know, That a child is better off growing up with a loving parent in a war zone than growing up in a lovely neighborhood, Warring with their parents. It's just so injurious to relationships and to healthy brains when we don't have a close connection. I mean, You take the most extreme examples, You know, The children remaining in orphanages, If they never had a secure attachment at the beginning, They're really toast throughout their lives. Most of us are not going to have children who ever experienced that, But it certainly is in the case where your kid's about to crash the car or did crash the car, Crash the grades or crashed whatever, That we get stressed just the way that Bill described. But when we don't prioritize connection, We prioritize correcting, Then children tend not to feel safe bringing problems to us and we kind of can't help them solve problems we don't know about. And when we can prioritize the connection and lower their stress, Kids are better placed in a brain state where they're able to oftentimes solve those problems for themselves. And that's where we really would like to get out of the problem solving. The job is being parent as a problem solver to one who facilitates our kids developing within themselves the ability to soothe themselves and to solve problems, To straighten out situations. And it's just not intuitive to any of us that when our kids are struggling with the most helpful things we can do is prioritize that connection and not jump in to start fixing or correcting, You know, As a first step. Mm-hmm. Just that simple task of checking yourself, How many times a day are you interacting with your child for connection, Fun versus fixing and problem solving, You know? And if that ratio is off, Your kids will brace themselves. You can see it when you walk into their room, They know that you're coming in not for fun or connection, But you're coming in to fix them or potentially solve a problem for them, Which then they can just be total lax and let you do it because that whole energy change. Have you read Michaeline de Clef's Hunt, Gather, Parent? No. So she's an NPR science correspondent and she had followed a bunch of primitive cultures, You know, Of Inuit culture and Amazonian and so on and so forth. But when she looked at these cultures, She found that the typical adult would offer instructions to a child three, Four, Maybe five times an hour. When she followed families in San Francisco where she resided at the time, It was like 70 times an hour. And so she resolved, I will not give her, In this case, Her daughter Rosie's about five, I won't give her more than five instructions, You know, In an hour because I really just I want to prioritize my connection. And she said, So she started this at two o'clock and by 2. 06, She's like, Oh gosh, Right. She had already hit five, Right? Yeah. And you think, What does it feel like to be, You know, No, Watch what you're doing, Just all the time. It's not, Nobody wants to be told what to do all the time. And I'm also thinking that in our second book, What do you say, We talk about this research that shows that negative words and interactions have a much stronger impact on us and on our kids than positive ones. And we go with kind of John Gottman's recommendation regarding relationships in general, Is we want to try to have five positive interactions with our kids for every negative one, Because the negative ones are more powerful. And so our motto is to seek first to understand, When kids are screwing up, First thing we want to try to do is check our, As much as we can, And take a break if we need to, But check our own anger and judgment and try to find out, Well, Tell me what's going on. How did this happen in a nonjudgmental way, Which brings closeness. And as you're saying, Ned and Diana, This allows kids to solve their own problems. Yeah. Give them space to solve their own problems. The other day we were watching a basketball, March Madness, With our kids. And we were trying to, We were calling my son in to come in and watch, You know, There was like a play that was happening, We thought it would be really great. And we couldn't find him anywhere. The kid had gotten on his bike and just left and biked to the gym and was working out. And we finally got ahold of him and he was just on his way back. And there was a part of me that just wanted to scream at him, Right? But this is the self-driven child gone wrong or gone right, I don't know. He's going to the gym, He's figured out how to get there. It's a couple miles away, All these things. But my instinct was not to praise and then have some conversations about, Oh, We were wondering where you were. It would help us if you. Help us understand where you're going before you leave. My instinct was just to yell at him because I was scared. So sometimes that writing reflex, The motivational interviewing, Actually interviewed Stefan Rolnick and he talked about the writing reflex with his own son, Putting on his shoes in the morning. And I was like, This is so great. Motivational interviewing guy struggles with this too. But the writing reflex comes from our own emotional avoidance. It comes from, As parents, It's really uncomfortable to sit with not fixing it. And then we have to change our own minds to look for the positive and enter into that relationship, Which really is part of this second part, Which is to be a consultant, Not a manager. And the second step around that, Which for me is the, Like that was the foundational skill that I learned back when my children were, You know, A number of years ago in 2018 from you, That has been the thread that's been the most important thread for me. I mean, I get the relationship part when the therapist, But the consultant part's been a little harder. Well, You know, I, Ned and I had an article in the New York Times, I think in 2019, Because it came out around Thanksgiving. Because by November 1st, Between the two of us, We knew seven kids who had started college and were already home. And two of one, I mean, We knew these kids and they just, They just have any, There wasn't any evidence that they were ready to go to college, That they could actually manage their own life. And again, We think kind of in terms of reverse engineering, The goal is for kids to be able to manage their own life, To run their own life successfully before they leave home. So they don't run into the ground, You know, And our job is to help kids, In our opinion, Is to help kids figure out who they want to be and what kind of life they want and how to create it. And we don't know, One of the coolest things that anybody ever said to me, This is some, Maybe 25 years ago, Some father said, One of the things I love about raising adolescents is every day when they come home from school, You get to see who they're deciding to be. And I just love that perspective. We were trying to help them figure out who do you want to be? How can I help you? And we can set limits, We can have guidelines, We can work out understanding with kids. But the goal, From our point of view, Is not that kids always do well. The goal is that they learn that this is my life and I'm going to get out of it what I put into it. We support them to work hard to develop themselves. You have these skills, It's like a, It's a table that you need to work through about skills that a competent young adult needs. And they're in these categories. So health and hygiene, Things like clipping your nails. I wanted to add to it, How to deal with something like having your period on a camping trip. These are like life skills. We didn't think of that one, Diane. I know, You need to consult a doctor. We should have consulted some double X chromosomes. Yeah, Transportation, Work, Post-secondary education, Financial stuff. And then the specifics are under each one of those. And we don't always think about this until the kid is about to leave for college or the kid is coming back from college. It's a great checklist. And you could even sit down with your kid around it, Like, Which ones of these do you know? Which ones do you not know? And then how can we start shifting some of that energy to them to take more responsibility? So one of the things that I think people are afraid of with becoming a consultant is that their child is just going to hang out on the couch all day and do nothing because they're self-driven. That's what they want to do is just play video games. So how do you respond to parents that are concerned about that? One part of that exercise was to, On that list of tasks, A list of skills, Is also to reflect at what age did you learn or develop this skill and from whom? Because there's a real concern that if we haven't stuffed all these things into their heads by age 18, That they're toast, Right? But of course, The reality is we learn things from roommates and professors and our resident advisor and our employers, Our boyfriend, Girlfriend, All kinds of people. And so if we feel that it must be learned and it must be learned now, Of course it's crazy making. And the more we then try to force it on kids, The more they naturally resist it. It doesn't mean that we abet them. I'm not going to be like my kids, You know, Maid and the kind of room service, Can I bring you something while you sit here and play Xbox for the 1700th hour? We're not talking about that. But a lot of the urgency that we feel is really born out of an inaccurate model of how we ourself acquired these things. I mean, For goodness sakes, There's also this thing called TikTok. You might've heard about it. It's very trendy, Right? My kid learned to cook by some TikTok trend and he's sitting over there watching the video over and over. And I'm like, Well, That's awesome. You know? Yeah. And certainly our, Our, Our premise is that you can't make kids want what they don't want and you can't make them do anything really against their will. You can't force them. And you, And also the kids want their life to work. I mean, Nobody really wants to be a slacker in their life. Our experience is that kids want to do well and they do well when they can. And so I, I think that if certainly kids are spending too much time on the couch or playing video games, You know, We, We, We have meetings with them. We would do collaborative problem solving to kind of, This isn't working for me. I mean, It makes me too nervous to spend this much time. So we got to negotiate something. But I think that I, I've been thinking like this and recommending this stuff for 40 years. I've never seen it go wrong. Just, Just not too long ago, One of our, A woman who has four kids and I did neuropsychological testing on her four kids and Ned did test prep with the four kids. And she's, She's the most organized on top of things mother I've ever met, Person I've ever met. She's incredibly competent, But she's very micromanaging and it wasn't working with her youngest son. He was, He was really screwing up at age 15 and she, She, She loves Ned and me and she cut it, She trusted us enough to read the subject of the child and, And just, Just bit the bullet and backed off, Trusted the kid, Supported him where he wanted support. We got these letters from his teachers when he was a senior in high school, Three years later and they're just incredible about what an incredible person he'd become. And it just, I'm just saying it works. It's hard, But it works. So it works and this is part of the adjustment of the goal of the parents because what is the success? I guess, Cause you're talking about these teachers saying what an incredible person he's become. And I sent out this question this morning, I had this group of women that I meet with on a regular basis and we've been, You know, We talk about our kids and successes and struggles and all that. And they're pretty psychologically sophisticated women. And so I sent them, Like, Wait, What do you want to ask these guys? Like, What do you want to know? And a number of them said, We have been doing sort of this self-different approach and our kids love hanging out with us. They're super chill and they aren't super motivated to move out. And they, They, And then one of them said, I kind of wonder if I should have been more of a tiger mom because, You know, This like ambitious striving thing, We were so anti the ambitious striving. They were rebellious parents. They were going, You know, Zigging when everyone was zagging. And these kids are leading rock climbing trips and they're, You know, Surfing and they're working at Trader Joe's. I mean, They're doing all these great things, Right? Right on track. Yeah. When, When, When I talk to kids who are not working hard in school, The first question I ask them is, Is there something you work hard at? You care about to get better and better and better video games, Except it. And if it's virtually anything, If they say, I really love my, I have a part-time job. I'm really responsible. I really work hard. I'm really getting good at it. I don't worry about you because I know that you're sculpting a brain. You're wiring a brain that knows how to be really focused. Lots of effort, Lots of determination, Lots of energy and low stress. And that's, That's what, And I, So I assume that at some point that school is going to become more important to you than is now, Be a higher priority or do it, Or you're building a career, But I'm not worried about you. And when I tell that to kids, It motivates them and motivates them to work hard in school. But the message is that, That the most important thing is you're developing a brain that when you, When something becomes important to you, You can, You can really go for it. Right. Which is connected to this third one, Which is about communicating healthy expectations, Right? You say excessive pressure to excel is now believed to be the fourth leading cause of adolescent unwellness behind only poverty, Trauma, And discrimination. And these healthy expectations, The balance between developing an excellent seeker versus a perfectionist, Right? And that it's not that we're saying we don't want you to seek excellence or Seligman's PERMA model, Which has an achievement in it. Like achievement is built into positive psychology, But it's a different, The reason behind that achievement is that there's a human yearning to develop competence and grow and get stronger at things. And we want to ignite that yearning in our kids as opposed to just the yearning to be perfect or to get to the top, Which can make us very stressed. And I'll talk about sort of underperformers first and then Bill jump in with perfectionists. One of the challenges I think we often, Toxic expectations are really rather than, Healthy ones are confidence that if this is something that matters to you, When it matters to you, Or if you really want to put your mind to it, I'm confident that you can do well and achieve a level that's meaningful to you. Toxic ones are, I'm going to withhold my approval from you unless you meet this level or struggle or suffer enough that I think you've given your absolute best, Whatever that actually means. And it just means that my approval, My love for you is contingent upon something where I get to say. And the challenge with that, Of course, Is that we think that we're setting this expectation that this is what's going to make kids work harder and finally step up, But it's a fear based model and it doesn't work very well because you have to keep upping the model. We also know that the major manifestation of anxiety is avoidance. So when kids feel like they have to, But they may feel like they can't, Sometimes they just peace out altogether. My daughter who struggled, It was a long story, But probably talked about this in our first call where she was full school refusal for all of eighth grade and was anxious and she was depressed. Finally, At age 19, A diagnosis of autism, Which explained a lot. But the therapist with whom she was working in high school, She said, It will be interesting to see what Katie Johnson does with that remarkable mind of hers when she figures out what it is she wants to do. And so she started college, Her first semester of college. She got more A's than I probably got in four years of college. And the end of the first semester said, I know my tuition only pays for this number of credits, But I really want to take this class as well. Would you and mom be willing to pay for me to take another class? And I just fell out of my chair. And this is a kid who she probably, I'm not going to say she missed more school than she attended school, But it wasn't far off from that. Just high school was a disaster. But we never said, You gotta, You gotta, You gotta, You gotta, You gotta. Because for her, Getting out the door most days was kind of an achievement. And so we knew that that potential was always there. And we would talk about the strength we saw in her, But there was no, No, Nothing was contingent on you were doing this amount of work or getting this grade. And when she got to college and as Bill pointed, Figured out what mattered to her, She just went from zero to 60 in, In six weeks. It was just stunning to watch. And I think that that was always born of, As Bill said, She wants her life to work because it's her darn life. And consistently we kept saying, We know we can see these skills in you. We know you have these abilities and we're willing to wait. Yeah. Yeah. But I, When we started researching this, This expectations, Cause we knew that parental expectations are really powerful. We were really surprised to read that the guy who's done the most research in this area says, As Ned said, Said that the best kinds of, The most effective expectations are conveyed through I believe in you, Through I have confidence in you. You can figure this out as opposed to you, You, You must, I was really struck by that. And as a neuropsychologist, I write reports on, On, On children and teenagers. And in my conclusion, I, I, Most, Almost every day I see, I'm able to express confidence in them that I'm, I'm, I'm optimistic about this. And some of my clients years later say that how much it helped them that knowing that, That after I did a comprehensive evaluation, I had confidence that they could figure it out even though they were screwing up, They weren't doing well when I saw them. So it's, It's a powerful message. And I think Ned and I both work with a lot of professionals and, And it's certainly, It's a hard way to be wiring. And so we, We, We did some research on, On, On this topic as we were, We were writing this chapter on expectations and, You know, Discovered this research on, On what you mentioned Diana, Which is this, The difference between excellent seekers and perfectionists. Where excellent seekers are people who really are motivated to do, Do, Do a good job. If they screw something up, They want to learn from it. As opposed to perfectionists where they don't, I don't want to make a mistake, If I make a mistake, I don't want anybody to know, I don't want to know. And how more adaptive that excellent seeker is than a perfectionist. And it's a different, It's a more adaptive way to be wired. And I think that we're, We can, My sense is that we can help people, Young people change that wiring more by saying, Consider the possibility of seeing yourself more as an excellent seeker. I don't want you to be a slacker. I love the fact, I love how hard you work. I love how determined you are to do well, But, But there's, You, You could be an excellent seeker and not be a perfectionist, Just means changing your relationship with mistakes and changing your way you talk to yourself. So if you screw something up or you get a 95 or you're the third best in your class, You aren't a loser. So I haven't done therapy for many years, But I do work with a lot of perfectionists and my experience is that this idea of just shifting a little bit from a perfectionist to an excellent seeker really helps. And part of that for us as parents is paying attention to what we're praising. Are we praising perfection versus are we praising excellence seeking? And one of my favorite forms of praise with that I do with my husband quite a bit is we'll be washing dishes in the kitchen and the kids will be sort of in the other room. That's when we praise our kids. We do this intentional praise and we start talking about them. Oh my gosh, Did you see, Did you see him putting the legs on that Ikea furniture today? He just like kept at it and it was so frustrating and I was losing my marbles and he was still there doing it and, And like this kind of like intentional parental praise that they're listening in on. Like that's the best. Yeah. And the top of the staircase talks, Right? Yeah, Yeah, Exactly. And I don't know, Maybe I learned that from you. I probably did. You probably suggested at some point, But that's been a thing that we've continued throughout really paying attention to what are you verbalizing praise around? But then also what are like, What are you telling stories about when you, When you retell stories about your kids and their successes, Are you telling these sort of growth mindset stories about them as kids? You know, The one with the bathrobe who he was, Uh, By the time he was still into the bathroom, I still want a picture of this, A glue gun because he wanted, He wanted to listen to stories while he was walking around the house, Like had to clean his room and things like that. So he got out a glue gun and he made a little pouch for the back of the bathrobe to put his iPad in so that he could listen to stories while he was cleaning his room. I mean, These are, These are sophisticated, Uh, You know, Excellent seekers, Right? So I do think we have to think behaviorally as parents as well. What are we shaping? What are reinforcing and being intentional with that? And that just falling into the trap of always praising perfectionism and that's everything from how your kid is unloading the dishwasher. Are you pointing out how they did it wrong or are you praising the process? Right? It's kind of goes back to number one. Excellent point. Okay, So we've talked about, I'm just kind of orienting people to the book because the way that it's set up is you go through these principles, Put connection first, Be a consultant, Not a boss or manager, Communicate healthy expectations. Principle number four, Teach your kids an accurate model of reality. What does that mean? Well, There's a story in one of our books, Um, About a time where I was in Houston talking about a self-driven child and I met with, With, I talked to parents in the evening and educators in the morning and at lunchtime I had dinner with student government kids in this, In this, In this high school. And at one point I asked them, How many of you want to be happy as an, As an adult? And they all kind of raised their, Duh, You know, They raised their hand. And I said, What do you understand it takes to be happy as an adult? And this one kid said, I think I speak for all of us that we think that if we get into a good enough college, Everything is set. And I was so struck by how delusional their thinking was about what creates happiness in adult life. And what's it, And certainly all the high achieving kids that we see now, Not all of it, But the majority, The vast majority, I think the most important outcome of their whole adolescence and childhood is where they go to college. Many of them have the, I am my grades, My grades will follow me the rest of my life. My grades are the most important thing. And it's just doesn't have any relationship with reality in the sense that we want kids to understand that the path to being successful, Having a successful and a fulfilling life isn't necessarily all filled with successes and that the top students aren't necessarily more happy and fulfilled and successful than, Than lesser students. And I think that there's so many myths about what it takes to be successful. The kids grow up believing that we take our efforts should be spent on helping them, Ground them more in the reality that how many people who, Who were not good students and become incredibly successful, How many wonderful people are there who, Um, Who, And, And, And contribute tremendously to the world who screwed up a lot, Uh, Before they kind of found their way or were very late bloomers. Uh, Ned, Will you jump in? Oh, I'm just, The start of that book talks about the, The Marvel origin story, Um, That Bill flunked out of graduate school, Got fired from his first job, Um, But is flourishing from my perspective, More than any human being I know on this planet. And a story that I may have shared when we were first back, I spent three months of seventh grade in a pediatric psychiatric hospital with my parents were a bunch of stuff going on. It was just all hard. But the idea that, That, That, That our paths are linear, Right? This is very narrow path to success that it's all about academic achievement and highly selective, Highly rejected universities that lead to, You know, The job and finance above on those, The people who have based in the world. I mean, Two things. One, If that were the case, Then you wouldn't probably have 60% of kids at places like Yale be anxious and depressed because they've achieved everything, Right? And this idea that it's such a narrow path leads kids and their loving parents to very narrow thinking about, We need to have the things we need to sacrifice in order to stand this very narrow path to get them to be successful, Though, So that they happy, You know, Whether I make them crazy or not. And there's a, There's a story in the book I was working with this family who announced to me, This is daughter had just finished her sophomore year of high school, How they were intending for her to go to this Ivy league school. I won't name which one. And they'd already made a sizable seven figure contribution to this university. That's in the millions in case you're doing the math really fast folks. Um, And, And the plan was all there. She just needed the scores. Okay. All right, Fine. No pressure there, Buddy. No pressure there. Um, Oh, But, But, And then this quick aside, But all she wants to do is play soccer and hang out with her friends. I mean like, What's the point? It's not like she's going to be a recruited athlete and I'm not the psychologist that you guys are, But I'm thinking, Hmm, Maybe those are the only two parts of her life that are keeping her sane. And of course, You know, We think about academic achievement as being all the great things in life that will lead from that. But so many of the ways that people develop themselves are, Are, You know, People who become really good therapists or really good salespeople are really good. HR people are really good. CEOs tend to spend more of their time focusing on people than they do focusing on things, Right? Cause those, The skills that you develop, You know, As an effective leader. And so we just want parents to, To, To recognize even for their own lives, The ways that the past they've taken to success and to, And to try to talk back against all the myths that just are out there. And we unintentionally reinforce for our children because among other things, The Sonya Luke and she of the Nazi, If you remember this from the self-driven child of novelty, Unpredictability, Perceived threat, And a low sense of control. She said, The single most effective cognitive reframing to lower stress is plan B thinking. And most of us have lived lives where it wasn't plan A, Plan A, Plan A was we fell off the path. We found plan B. We pivoted in the Silicon Valley, You know, Parlance. And that for us is, Is part of the accurate model. We want to give to all kids so that they aren't driven by fear. They're working hard and as Bill said, To develop themselves, But they know if this doesn't work out, There's something else. If that doesn't work out, There's something else because there's, There's always a something else. So an accurate model of reality, Teaching our kids an accurate model of reality. You talk about happiness in there. And when I think about my kids and happiness, That's actually not always my goal. I love the work of Oishi and Westgate and they talk about a well-lived life and this research on a well-lived life of, Of yes, Happiness is one thing. Pleasure, Pleasure and meaning are both important, But they also talk about psychological richness and so much of those twists and turns of life. You know, Someone, As someone who's dropped, I always tell my kids I've dropped out of every school that I've had post elementary school. I had to withdraw from every school that I attended when I was in school for a long time. I got my PhD. So that developed a lot of psychological richness. Psychological richness comes from studying abroad. Psychological richness comes from withdrawing from a school cause it's not right for you. And then finding another path and taking that gap year and like, You know, Working here and doing that and the, The capacity to design your own life and no one's life is straight is a rich life. It's a much richer life than I knew what I was going to be when I was four and I stayed on that train track until I'm 54. And I'm like, What am I doing with my life? And certainly when we talk about happiness and we do in both in our last two books, We talk about the difference between happiness and pleasure. And we are talking about, You know, Kind of giddy, Giggling kind of happiness, But we're talking about that, That wellbeing, It's just a fulfillment or meaning that you're talking about. And, And, And it takes time. And I just, And part of the reason that I feel so strongly about this area is that because I've, I've, I've done this work so long for 40 years, I, I've, I've seen kids just at least a thousand kids. I'm sure who were completely disaster at one point in the development who turned out incredible. I just, I just talked not too long ago with a guy who I tested him, Tested him the first time when he was 11. Sam began when he was 17. And he was in a therapeutic boarding school, All four years of high school. And he, And he was, He was 17, Almost 18. When I saw him as a senior, He said in two months, I turned 18 and I can get, I can leave this place. I can smoke pot all day. I was not particularly optimistic. He's going to turn these things around soon. He just started his own practice in Seattle, Washington as a neuropsychologist. And I just, I just seen thousands of these kinds of things. So I just know that the process isn't always easy. And so many people were where it was just a straight kind of vertical climb. They aren't happy with their lives. It takes time to figure this out. It takes relationships. It takes, It takes setbacks to figure out who you want to be and what's important to you. And also to develop the confidence that I can handle setbacks. And I think about, Can, Can one think of any movie, Any, You know, Pixar movie or Marvel movie or whatever, Where the heroine or hero doesn't face some big setbacks, Some big defeat midway through. I mean, It just, It just doesn't, It just doesn't happen. And to your point, Dan, Of, Of the, Of the psychological richness, I'm, I'm really not sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that I was in a psychiatric hospital for three months in seventh grade. You know, My, My, Um, Probably like you, My true North is how can I help? And my second is, You know, Like, Can I get paid for that? Cause that would be, That'd be cool too. And my 23 year old who just graduated college, He's home now before he heads up to graduate school in the fall. He said, Dad, I've been thinking about love languages. First of all, I'm impressed by any 20 year old love languages are. And he says, It seems to me that your love languages is helping. And I just looked at him like, Tell me more. I mean, And so for all the words that I live rain down and both of my poor, Unsuspecting children, The fact that he's actually, Cause that's not something that I've talked about, But it's something that he's watched. I'm like, Yeah, That's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. He's a neat kid. So we want our kids to be self-driven. We want to, Um, You know, Be emotionally connected to them. We want them to chart their own path. And part of charting their own path is sitting on your hands. William Stixred, You taught me that. Sit on your hands sometimes and let them figure this out, Not pushing for them to change and helping them find their own inner motivation to change. So principle number five, Motivate your kids without trying to change them. And I have a example of this that maybe you can help me with. It's spring. We're looking at summer. I have a 15 year old. It's about time to, To maybe start to think about internships last job. Like he's in that kind of range where he can't really get a job yet, But he can't really, Sorry, You're not in camp anymore. So we're figuring this out. And we were in a surf shop. We were getting a surf board and the guy at the surf shop said, Oh, You should come be a assistant counselor at our, At our, For our surf school, Which is like the raddest summer thing you could ever do. And I, Let's call you back. What's, You know, I was like wheeling and dealing. Like all of a sudden I was, Was his agent to try and get him this position. And I noticed that the more and more and more excited that I got about this, The more and more and more he backed off. And then he got into like analysis paralysis about the resume that I'm building up that he needs to have this perfect CV. So, Uh, Help us out here. We really know something so good for our kids. It's so, It's perfect for him. But the more that we push the less they get involved. And we don't really know that that's the thing because ultimately we didn't, They don't know, They don't know, Necessarily know either. You know, That's the thing that they get to figure it out and they get to learn from it. Um, You know, I, I just, At least my age, I'm very humble about what my ability to know what's right for, For anybody else really. Because as Ned said, It means that would we have, If, If we could choose, Would we have Ned not been in a pediatric psychiatric hospital for three months and said, Yeah, We would have chosen a different path for him. But he sees one of the most incredible people I've ever met. And I wouldn't change anything about it. And I think that for most of us who've had, Who've had setbacks, Things have been very embarrassing or took us a long time to figure out. It's not like other people can tell us, I know what's right for you. I, I, I, I, I was in a PhD, PhD program in English literature. Um, Unfortunately, And I just, I didn't last long, But it's because people said, You're good at this. I think, I think this would be right for you. And it turned out that it wasn't, It turned out that it wasn't right for me. Thank goodness. Well, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This is a really good correction. I don't know that that's the right summer thing for him to do. That's like the first step. Check yourself. Well, Yeah. Check yourself. Wow. Okay. And I think that certainly I don't want kids when they're in high school, Spend all summer, Spending all summer just fooling around. I love them. I think that working is really good for kids and having internships is really good for kids. Um, Uh, But, But I think that, Um, It means certainly at age 30, If you said, What would, If you said, Well, You know, My life would have gone better if my mother hadn't been so excited about that, That, That served job, You know, That, That it's just absurd. It's just not that big a deal. Um, And, And, And we respectfully, You know, Just, Just support him in doing it. So coach me a little bit. What would be the, What would be the conversation to have there? Right, Right, Right now at this point. So for anybody that maybe they're wanting to have a conversation with their kid about something they, They, I mean, Here's the bigger picture. Your kid seems like they're blocked around doing something. You can't get them to do it. And you want to do, You want to have a different type of conversation around it than you should do it. Or have you done the resume yet? Or have you done the college application or have you cleaned your room, Whatever that is, Whatever the block is. So you know, With things like this, I mean, We want to remember that our goal is not to motivate our kids. It's not to give them the reason why they do the thing, But help them to find within themselves the reason to do the thing. And if there isn't a reason within them to work at a surf shop, Well, We'll good luck with that. Right. But you noted at the beginning the ambivalence, Right? That there are reasons why he might want to do this. There may be reasons why he doesn't want to do this. There may be reasons why he wants to do something else. Instead, Most decisions are really complex, Right? Because it's trading this job versus all other possibilities or hanging out with his lovely mom on the couch, Right? And play an expo. I mean, There, There are a lot of different ways. And the challenge is if he's ambivalent about this, He can see why it would be the raddest summer thing ever. Right. But he actually knows someone who works there that hasn't told you about. And that guy's kind of a doofus. He doesn't really want to hang out with him. Right. Or he, He worries that, You know, He'd rather be making money. I'm just making up, You know, Reasons. Then when we argue one side of it, He's likely, At least even his own head to argue the other side of it. So the exercise that's in this book is to think about a summer internship or a kid's doing engaging in school more or whatever, And try to grab a piece of paper, Use the workbook, Write down all the reasons. You imagine your son already knows for why it'd be really good to have that internship. It looked good for college. My mom would be happy. You know, I'll get, You know, A discount on, On a surfboard, Whatever, Bunch of reasons, But then sit down and write on the flip side, All the feelings why he might not want to do it. Right. It's too early in the morning, Right? He worries he'll get stuck in that. You know, Because his mom told him to, I mean, They're, They're, They're feelings, Right? And when we, When we can see both sides of that equation, It's easier for us to step back and, And stop trying to pound on the reasons why to say, So if you did do this, And it's sort of Bill's textualism, Take force off the table. If you did take this internship, What, What, What would be some of the reasons why you'd want to submit that application? If you did get this internship, What are some of the good things you hope would come out of it? If you did take this, What do you, What do you worry might might happen and then make it not be so successful? And then you get to start having this to your as much some more psychologically rich conversation about reasons for and against, And you're not putting your thumb on the scale one way or the other, Because what you're trying to do, We're all trying to do is to help young people and ourselves for that matter, Articulate for ourselves, The reasons to do something that might be in our own best interest. But if you, If you feel like, Or he feels like you're pushing too hard on something, Even though it's a really good reason, It effectively becomes tainted. Right. And he doesn't want, I can't use that as a reason because it was shoved down my throat. Well, I used to be a clinical director of a treatment center for eating disorders. And one guarantee to get somebody more stuck in the eating disorder is to tell them all the reasons why they need to eat, You know, Guaranteed. You're going to get that person. And they've never thought of those reasons themselves. Right? Exactly. No one's ever told them that before. But, But really the, The way that my, The way I'd win them over every time is like, Tell me why you love your eating disorder so much. Like what's so great about it? You know, The thing that their parent would be so afraid to tell, You know, To ask. I love it. I think, I think all three of us are fans of motivational interviewing, This approach to just asking these open-ended questions to try to understand and reflect back. I'm trying to understand what you're saying. And then ideally that they, They voice their own reason for change. And I, I, I think then neither Ned and I are formally trained in motivational interviewing, But it's, It's not, It's a, It's a, It's a sophisticated process, But it's not real complicated. And, And I, I've had, I've had parents use it with great success. And we talk about it. What do you say? This was one kid I tested in the summer during the pandemic and he was 15 years old, Starting 10th grade. And he wanted to make the varsity basketball team. He's a really good basketball player, But he's smoking pot a lot in the summer. And then the family found his stash a couple of times and got rid of it. And he kept replacing it. And I said, I sent the mother a copy of the chapter that we were working on motivating kids about changing them. And, And the mom read the chapter and she sat down and said, Tell me what, What, What you love about pot. The same thing you used to suggest that you do with eating disorder. Tell me what way you get out of it. And the kid waxed rhapsodic about how relaxed he is and how he doesn't worry about so much stuff. He's more fun to be with. And then at one point he said, But the problem is that I can't push myself enough in basketball to make a varsity. I'm worried that I'm not going to make the varsity. And she said, Is that something you'd like any ideas about how to change that or what you might do? And within about, Within a month, He'd stopped smoking pot. And I think that it's counterintuitive to think that's starting to understand, Seek first to understand what your sense of this, As opposed to lecturing or judging. It's just so powerful. Well, Most behaviors have some degree of ambivalence. And what you're doing there is you're letting the ambivalence in your child, Have a voice. You're giving enough space for them to get to that place. And then when you hear it, You kind of massage it, You support the change talk. But one thing I want to add about motivational interviewing, Because sometimes we get so focused on that part of it. And I think especially with children, When I'm thinking about my kid in the surf shop, The other aspect of it is do they have the skills necessary to make the change? And it's not just motivation. Motivational interviewing has both. It's like, How important is it to you to make this change? And do you have the skills necessary? Do you need some scaffolding from your parents? And there's a difference between scaffolding from parents versus I'm stealing it from you. Like it may mean, It may be that the black lock to some kid is that they don't know how to write a resume. No one's shown them this. It's like, Everything they're doing is new. Well, It's such a great point. And that's where it circles back to the consultant, Right? You know, Is there, You know, Is there a way that I can help? Right. Or if you can, You know, You can watch your kid go, That'd be fun. And then you can see his like a shadow come across his face and say, What, What, You know, What's what's in your head right now? It looks like you're excited, But now it looks like you've got, You know, A kind of concern. Can you tell me what, What are some of the concerns that you have? Right. And then, You know, I, I don't know how to raise resume. I don't know how to surf. I don't know how to do whatever, You know, Is that something you'd like help with? Is that something you'd like to do better? Um, And so I think a lot of times when people read the self-driven child, They can mistake it to mean that we're thinking like, You know, Total lazy fair. You just let your, Let your kid, You know, Good luck with all that kind of thing. And it's, It's a hundred percent, Not that it's just, It's offering kids, Particularly kids who need tons of scaffold and all the support that they want. Right. Not all the support that we think they need. Right. We're not trying to, We cause you don't force help on people that they don't want, But you offer all the help that you think that they need. And, And, And, And I, And ask them if it's something that they want. Yeah. I said to my son, I tell them, Use me up for years with me. That's great. Use me app all you want. It's available. I'm here. My boys are both interested in girls. So I'll say like, You know, Like I got, I know a lot about girls. Use me up, Ask me all the questions. Do you think a girl with the, You know, All the things. And, Um, And I'm not pushing. Okay. So we have two more principles. I want to make sure we just tap on both of them. So people get a sense of what they're going to get in this book. And in the book you go through each principle, You have assignments for the parent to do writing, But you also provide education. So it's like this combination, This beautiful combination of the two, Probably the most important principle underlying all of this. Well, Connection is one of them, But is to be a non-anxious presence in your family. And I want to bring this up in the context of sometimes really hard things happen to families. Someone gets sick. We're going to get a divorce. Um, We need to move. Parent lost their job, Right? Like these big things that are really hard for the parent. To navigate and they have to have conversations with their kids about heart, The heart, The hardships of life. Can we talk about the presence of the parent and the non-anxious presence and why that is so important and how you, How you cultivate that? So we didn't make this term up of Edwin Friedman, Who was a social worker and a rabbi family therapist, Um, Who, Who, Who studied systems from families to corporations. And he concluded that systems work, Systems work best if the people in charge are not overly anxious and emotionally reactive. And we just reasoned that as parents, It's so much easier to deal with kids and to help kids from, From, From the time they're infants that they're done, They leave home. Actually as adults, As adults, I have adult children, Of course. And, Uh, Uh, It's much easier if we stay calm and, And it's, It's, There are people who are not wired that way. It didn't necessarily be laid back people, But who can move in the direction of being a non-anxious presence. It doesn't mean that you're never anxious. You're never nervous. You don't, You never talk about how to stop. What it means is that we want to communicate as much as we can courage as opposed to fear and confidence that the people can handle stuff. And we want to work on our, Our, And we talk about kind of emergency medicine regarding when we are anxious, How we deal with it. When it also more preventative practice that we've got, You talked about contemplative contemplative practices before we got on the show and we were big fans of meditation and practices that can help people calm down their stress response and be less emotionally reactive and move in that direction of being a non-anxious presence in their family. One thing that keeps running through my head is, Uh, When I had, When my kids were, Um, Little kids, I mean, When we go to the ER for the, You know, You know, Split lip or, You know, Need to get a nebulizer and, And you know, My kid had a brain tumor that was more of an adventure. And for any parent who shows up with a kid in an ER or your spouse or somebody, It's, It's one of the worst days of your life, Right? And one of their young life. But for the people who work there, It's just Tuesday, Right? And it's another, It's another day of work, Of work in that problem. And I think the reality is probably for most people who are parents, They've already faced hard things. I mean, The very few people get to be my age who haven't had, You know, Something really pretty challenging going on. But most of us learn from that, Got through it. You know, Most of us have post traumatic growth. And so one of the things is just as Bill was saying that we can face hard things with courage. We're not looking forward to it, But would say I've, I've confidence this is going to work out well enough. And I, You know, Certainly with my daughter, When she was really struggling, I would say, Just, I never said, I know, I never, Ever say no, Because, You know, The universe has a way of humbling people who say, I know, But I could certainly say, You know, I'm confident this is going to work out, You know, Well enough in part, Because young people and all of us want things to work out well enough. And if we go back to point we made earlier, When, When in the presence of someone who's stressed, If you are less stressed, You kind of become a stress sponge and pulling stress out of their nervous system, Allow those executive functions to come back online, Which helps people solve for themselves. Even if it's just putting things into perspective, Solve things for themselves simply because you're there and you're, You're, You're making space and you're hanging with them when things are hard. When my favorite poets is John O'Donohue and he has this poem that I'll often read at the beginning of when I lead a workshop or retreat. And it says, Stay clear of those vexed in spirit, Learn to linger around someone of ease who feels they have all the time in the world and gradually you will return to yourself. Having learned a new respect for your heart and the joy that dwells far within slow time. And I think there's something about the non anxious presence of the parent and you're giving, There's just a lot of time for you. And that ease, Even in this, Especially in those moments that are the most stressful moments, Like at the airport when you're trying to make the flight or, You know, When you're going to see grandpa in the hospital, If you have that non anxious presence, You're teaching their nervous system how to be you know, Coming from this place of like a more sort of wise space. And it, And it links to our last principle, Which we'll just tap on because we're pretty much out of time, Which is the last principle, Which is encourage radical downtime. Radical downtime. Yeah. So the basic idea of this is that, Uh, Well, I read a book in 1881. I didn't read it in 1881. It's written, This is written in 1881. It's called The Causes of Increased Nervousness in Americans. And it was written by a physician in 1881. And the hypothesized causes were the railroad, The Western union, The pocket watch, Things that made the pace of life go faster. Made us more attentive to the small units of time. And you think about that on steroids now and just how fast paced life is. And the idea is that it used to be, You know, 60, 70 years ago, Maybe a hundred years ago, But that gardening or playing bridge could be a perfectly great pastime to kind of, To, To restore your, Your wellbeing. And right now we're arguing we need more radical downtime. And certainly young people, The three forms of radical downtime that we talk about in our books are, Are meditation, Sleep, And just periods of mind wandering or daydreaming. And it's, It gets harder and harder for people to have this experience of radical downtime. We're sleeping less than we used to. Many people, I've been practicing meditation for 51 years, Initially, Initially 40 minutes a day. And now about two hours a day and it's hard to have people who are young people who can find 15 minutes once a day to close their eyes and just be, Just be. Both my kids have little altars in their room. And my son has a sign on his, One of them says, Take care of your feelings. And then the other one has a sign that says doing nothing is something right. So we can, Well, We can teach our kids this. And my favorite form of radical downtime is just the old school, Everybody in the family bed. Let's read. And, Uh, And then talk, You know, We, We, We have the book there, But we do more talking than we do reading at the end of the day. And that's often when, Um, You know, Our kids, Especially as they become teenagers, They start to open up more, But all our kids, It's just radical downtime, Preserving those spaces, Having a ritual in your family at the time when you just have downtime, If it's your Sunday dinner or it's your reading time. And that radical downtime is such a big part of being a non-anxious presence. I mean that, That the, The antidote to stress is deep relaxation. You know, My son, I forget if I shared this story when we talked to you about, Um, What do you say? I was recording the audio book for this. Um, Um, Our son was at a camp counselor. I came out of the studio, Called my wife up, Say, You know, Telling her about the experience. He said, Oh, By the way, How's Matthew? She said, I just had him on the phone. Let me call him back up. And so that he, And he'd started having these migraines, But we thought were migraines, Kind of a family history for them. And so how much sleep you're getting, Ibuprofen, Blah, Blah, Blah. When we're sitting there, He drops a word. Huh? That's weird. A few sentences later drops another word. A few sentences later, Total gibberish. I think he's having a stroke. So I'm like, Vanessa, Do me a favor. Call me on the line. Don't hang up. We're connected through Matthew. I'll be right back. Sweetheart, You know, Call nine one one, Call the camp counselor, Get the director. Obviously something's not right. I go back to him again. He's lost his language because he's the effects of the tumors pressing down on language centers of his brain. Fast forward. He's fine now from case for those are freaking out about this. He's great now, But when we were about three weeks into this adventure had been life flighted, Had the emergency surgery, Came back to DC for chemotherapy and radiation. And my wife and I went out to dinner about three weeks into this adventure. And she said, I've had three people ask me, How are you so calm about this? And she said, Honestly, I think it's the meditation. And my wife is incredibly capable, Bright executive functions out her ears, But she's not from a family who are really not anxious there. Why was the term built? They're neurotic. They're neurotic. They're lovely people, But they're neurotic. Right. And she said, I really think that this was for me, Something allowed me to pull stress out of my nervous system to counteract the stress that's coming into my nervous system. So for all of us as educators, As parents, As young people, If you feel yourself all the time, More intense, Usually that's just there's more stress in your system than you want. And so one of the ways to move in the direction of being a non-anxious presence is just to have more radical downtime where to counteract too much stress have periods of really, Really low stress. And it just helps rewire your brain to stay in that middle space more readily. Well, We have lots of examples of that on this podcast of different ways through nature, Through meditation, Through connection, Through song, Through spirituality, All the, You know, Art, Creativity, Find your own way and and find your own path to parenting, Right? Just like you're supporting your child and finding their own path to parenting. And I think that this book, The seven principles for raising a self-driven child, A workbook by William Stixred and Ned Johnson is just a really fabulous tool. And I can attest by having used your work for a number of years now, Seven years, Seven years. We're so grateful. How useful and just even just having these foundational principles in the back pocket, You don't have to know all that every single step, Just some of these basic principles, How much it will change your experience as a parent. And it'll be so much more fun and connecting and all the things that you want. If you have enough fun, Don't read the book. No more fun. Thank you. If it's true that you can't make somebody do something against their will, Just making peace with that is, It's scary at first, The scary thing. I really can't make my kid do what I think he needs to do. After that it's liberating because you are, If you can't do it, Theoretically, It couldn't possibly be your responsibility to do it. And just getting your head around that is so liberating. It'll help you as a therapist and as a partner and all of the things as well. Help you at work, Help you in lots of places and with your dog. That's true too. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Good luck with everything. And thank you for taking this time with us today. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the wise effort podcast. Wise effort is about you taking your energy and putting it in the places that matter most to you. And when you do so, You'll get to savor the good of your life along the way.