The Self-Driven Child

This week’s article summary is The Key to Raising a Happy Child, an interview with the author of the recent book The Self-Driven Child.

I particularly liked the article’s advice to parents to metaphorically move from being the boss/manager of their child to being a consultant: available to help, support, and provide advice while making sure that ultimate responsibility and decision-making rest with the child.

The premise of The Self-Driven Child is that kids today are more stressed and depressed because as they grow up they really don’t have the opportunity to develop agency—a strong sense of self, belief in oneself, self-confidence in dealing with adversity. To the author, one solution to this problem is for parents to be less controlling of their kids.

The article’s comments on ‘homework wars’ reminded me of battles I fought and won with my parents but lost with my kids.

I also liked the author’s advice that parents need to support their children in pursuing extracurricular interests even when they interfere with school work as those hobbies develop brain circuitry, e.g., the ability to focus for an extended period time, which will eventually be used for ‘adult’ realities, like jobs. Too often we as parents want our kids to concentrate on ‘serious matters’ like school work when passionately pursuing a hobby develops those same habits, skills, and brain synapses we esteem and need as adults. I used to nag one of my kids because he spent more time self-learning how to play the guitar than on his homework. I thought he was wasting his time when in fact he was developing the ability to focus, persevere, and learn by doing.

Joe

For much of the past half-century, children, adolescents, and young adults in the U.S. have been saying they feel like their lives are increasingly out of their control. At the same time, rates of anxiety and depression have risen steadily.

What's the fix? Feeling in control of your own destiny.

"Agency may be the one most important factor in human happiness and well-being." So writes William Stixrud in his new book, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives. Feeling out of control can cause debilitating stress and destroy self-motivation.

Building agency begins with parents, because it has to be cultivated and nurtured in childhood.

But many parents find that difficult, since giving kids more control requires parents to give up some of their own.

Instead of trusting kids with choices — small at first but bigger as adolescence progresses — many parents insist on micromanaging everything from homework to friendships.

The author’s advice to parents is to stop thinking of yourself as your child's boss or manager, but rather try consultant.

I spoke with Bill Stixrud, a neuropsychologist who has spent the past 30 years helping parents and kids navigate life's challenges.

Let's start with a basic definition from the book's title. What does it mean for a child to be self-driven? When I used to do psychotherapy, I was struck by how many young adults who said, "I feel like I've spent my whole life trying to live up to other people's expectations. I want to try to figure out what's really important to me." I think that the self-driven child is driven by internal motivation as opposed to other people's expectations, rewards, insecurity or fear. To be self-driven, kids need to have a sense of control over their lives and are energetic about directing their lives in the direction they want to go.

Consultants, not managers? I can imagine some parents feeling really uncomfortable giving up that much control over their children's lives. I’ve heard from family after family saying, "I hate the time after dinner at our house because it's World War Three." And I was struck by how many of these meaningless fights would happen over homework — completely unproductive fights, hugely stressful, pitting the kid against his parents. If you decide you're not going to fight about this anymore, say instead, "How can I help?" You think about yourself as a consultant and acknowledge respectfully that it's the kid's homework. You can't make your child do it. What you can do is offer to help. You can set up what I call consulting hours between 6:30 and 7:30 p.m., and just say, "This is your work, and I respect that you can figure this out and I'll help you."

Letting go can be especially hard for anxious parents, who worry a lot about their kids getting good grades, getting into a good college, landing a good job, etc. How do you help them let go? All of us have what I call a shared delusion: that the path to becoming successful is extremely narrow and, if you fall off it, you're sunk. And it just doesn't take very long to look around and realize how untrue that is. Research suggests that it doesn't make that much difference where you go to college in terms of how successful you are financially or professionally or how satisfied you are or how happy you are. The idea that getting into the most elite college at any cost is the right focus of a kid's development is completely wrong. And many parents with enough support can come to see that and make peace with it. But it's a big project because so much of the world that we live in gives the opposite message. Also, we need to make peace with reality. And the reality is, you can't make a kid do his work. And that means it can't be the parent's responsibility to ensure that the kid always does his homework and does it well. In some ways, it's also disrespectful to the kid. I start with the assumption that kids have a brain in their head and they want their lives to work. They want to do well. That's why we want to change the energy, so the energy is coming from the kid seeking help from us rather than us trying to boss the kid, sending the message, "You can't do this on your own."

One of my favorite moments in the book is when you reveal how you, as a parent, approached homework and report cards with your kids. What was the message you were trying to convey to them? When my kids were little, I had just been reading some research that suggested there's a very low correlation between grades and success in life. And so, when my kids were in elementary school, I said, "I'm happy to look at your report card, but I don't care that much. I care much more that you work hard to develop yourself, and part of that is developing yourself as a student. But also it means developing yourself as a person. If you want to be an athlete or musician or whatever is important to you, I care much more about that because that's the stuff — that self-development — that helps you be successful. It's not the grades."

On the subject of homework, you say: Inspire but don't require. A number of years ago I wrote a couple papers on homework and I was dumbfounded to learn that there's virtually no correlation between the amount of time spent on homework and what you learn in elementary school. Research today still finds no compelling evidence that homework contributes to learning in elementary school and even in middle school — or in high school beyond two, two-and-a-half hours. I think the wisest thing is to try to inspire kids to learn at home. I don't want kids going home and being on social media or video games all night. I want them to be working on developing themselves, and I want teachers to inspire kids to learn. Tell them, "Here's what you're going to get out of this assignment. I think it will help you. Or find a different way to learn this material." But don't require homework and grade it because, in my opinion, it confuses the means for the end.

You say the best way to motivate a child for the things you think he should focus on is to let him spend time on the things he wants to focus on. Why? Reed Larson studies adolescent development with a strong focus on motivation. He concluded that the best way to develop a self-motivated, older-adolescent adult is to encourage their participation in their pastimes — in the stuff they love. The point he's made is that, if a kid is deeply involved in something that he loves to do, he's going to create a brain-state that combines high focus, high energy, high effort and low stress. Ideally, at least in our professional lives, that's where we want to be most of the time. We want to be interested, engaged, active, alert, and focused but not highly stressed. In my own experience, I was a C+ student in high school, but I spent at least two or three hours a night working on rock 'n' roll music. I was in a band and learned to play instruments and learning chord structure and practicing harmony parts. I feel that I really sculpted a brain that, once I found something professionally that really speaks to me, I could go pedal to the metal.