Ned Johnson Part 1: The Science and Sense Behind the Self-Driven Child

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Imagine the youth in your life feeling motivated and excited to learn and grow. They contribute to the home, engage actively in their learning, and consider ways they can find a sense of belonging and significance in their community. Hello, I am Terry Novichek, and this is Element is Everything, where we discuss topics associated with finding your element, that place where interests and talents collide to bring good things to yourself and others. The book The Self-Driven Child, in my opinion, should be required reading for every parent and educator. If we could only read one book as a society, this would be the one solving all of society's ills. Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it really is a life-changing book. Dr. Sticksrude, one of the authors, has become a friend of our organization, having served as a keynote speaker, he's facilitated a parent workshop, he's joined us as a guest on our podcast, and he's even attended our book club. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Ned Johnson, the other author of the book, to hear the latest research behind motivation and agency. It's great to meet you. In some ways, I feel like I know you just through Bill and through reading the book. Yeah, so it's it's very exciting to now get um your perspective on things. And it's been three years now since we interviewed Bill about the book. And I understand he has another book coming out. Are you working with him on that?

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yeah. So we and we he and I had a second book that came out called What Do You Say? How to Talk for Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home. Actually, we like that book a lot. It uh like a lot of things that dropped during COVID, uh, it got a disappeared a little bit. And we just finished, uh, we just handed in to our um publisher or our editor, I should say, um, a third book that's kind of a workbook. Um, trying to uh based sort of self, the seven based on seven principles from the self-driven child and uh kind of reflections and work that parents can do if they try to kind of more deeply um inhabit uh the principles of the of uh the self-driven child and and their role as parents.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

That's great. And when does that one expect it to come out?

SPEAKER_01 2:43

That'll come out February of 25.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Okay, great. Well, I look forward to seeing that one. And um, I haven't done, I have not read the what do you say, so I'll be ordering that one today.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

Oh, yeah. Well, it was you know, it was mostly based on um kind of people really like some of the language in the self-driven child. You know, I love you too much to fight you the batcher homework. Yeah. It's your decision makers, this kind of thing. But invariably people would say, this all makes complete sense. But in this particular moment, what do I tell me what to say? And so we worked up um kind of the scenarios that any of us as parents will often find ourselves setting, what we might reflectly say, kind of why that might sometimes miss the mark and what we might say instead. Um, so that was really neat. Um, and then there are a couple things in there, things we hadn't realized before we wrote The Self-Driven Child. Um, one of there's a chapter called The Language and Silence of Change. And the idea behind it is that a lot of times when when when parents are saying, How do I motivate my kid? What they're really saying is, How do I change my kid? And of course, we can't change people against their will. We can make it so painful that they will give in, but then that's a different energy. Uh, and so we look, we kind of do a deep dive on Ellie Leibwitz's the space program and um something called motivational interviewing, which is a really, you may know this, a really effective way, first created by a couple of psychologists working with problem drinkers in the 80s of how do you how do you help people when they're when they when they're when they're kind of stuck? Um, meaning that you know a kid who's not doing well in school has reasons to work harder, but ambivalently may have reasons to not work harder. Um, and and what do we do to to effectively help kids get unstuck? For me, that's been the most interesting set of tools that I've I've tried to understand better and employ um when I'm working with uh with young people, including my own.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

Yeah, well, and and that's what I was hoping to talk to you about today. Our schools are charter schools, so they're schools of choice, you know, kind of an alternative. And um, for a while I thought maybe this was unique to us that uh parents were bringing unmotivated kids because they weren't doing well in the regular schools. And now I'm realizing that it's it's everywhere and article after article after article, and study after study after study, the anxiety, the depression, the lack of motivation. I mean, I I don't think it's one thing, and I, you know, my intent is not to finger point, but I definitely would like to get your perspective on what is this perfect storm? What are all these things that are playing into this? And, you know, what can we do about it?

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Yeah, you know, I mean, a lot of people write about this. I mean, Jenny Wallace has the book out um Never Enough about helping kids feel like they matter. Um, Jonathan Haid's um new book, the title of which, The Anxious Generation, I believe is the title. I don't think you've read this, it's you know, the um I've only read, I've not read the book itself yet. There's a beautiful article in the Atlantic about this. Um, and the basic gist of it is he blames um the cell phone and not social media generally, but the smartphone, um, and really looks at it from a developmental perspective. Um, and I'll walk through it as I understand his argument, which I think is a pretty credible one, and then kind of add my own flavor to this. Um, and he says, when you look at how do children historically develop, men, how do children develop? And principally, it's through play, it's through one-on-one time with peers and siblings and parents and grandparents. Um, it's through meaningful challenges and then enough, you know, and then enough sleep to recover from that. And when you think about what the cell phone has done of, you know, so much of what should be unstructured play. And by play, we should just define that for a moment, you know, following the work of Peter Gray, play by definition, is not adult directed. But almost to every young person who's grown up in the last 15 years, their experience of play has been adult directed. I was talking with a school out your way, where it's an entire school. And the irony of this is just breathtaking. It's a school-based curricula all the way up through into middle school. And they are hiring people, parents can hire play consultants to teach kids how to play. Oh, wow. Oh my. Oh my, right? Yeah. One of the things a lot of adult direction directed, but also the problem with um self, with cell phones, and when you mean we pick on video games, is that is is rhythm kids exploring on their own, it sort of pulls kids along. You know, and it's and it's very, it's not, it's not free play, it's it's within the confines of the game or the phone or the app or whatever it happens to be. You know, self time on screens obviously replaces, you know, time outside, you know, time in nature, time face-to-face. And it's not just kids on phones, it's parents on phones as well, you know, and it messes with sleep and just all kinds of things. So I think there's a, I think his argument is a very, I mean, he is a social psychologist, very well argued. If you add to it, what I think Bill and I would add to this is the brain development that goes along with that. So when you think about motivation, right, we want kids not to be motivated externally by someone trying to pull them along or push them along, but rather by their own interest in doing things. Um, I had a great interview, if you know Lenore Scanese, she of the uh free range parent. Um, and she's she is with Jonathan Haidt and Peter Gray, part of the letgrow.org, I think is their website. And so she had a piece in the New York Times at the start of this school year about maybe this is a secret to um childhood anxiety. And it was simply this to let kids take on things that they want to do where they're intrinsically motivated, even as we as parents go, oh gosh, this could go really sideways. Kids may not appreciate the ways that this could be stressful. But if they're naturally driven to do something and they experience stress along the way, they have a motivate motivation or a motivator to tangle with the parts that are hard that are stressful in order to get the outcome that they want. So she said, you know, if a kid family lives on Long Island and they want to take a train all the way to the city, parents are imagining my kid will get mugged, they'll get, you know, everything that could possibly go wrong. But the kid is putting him or herself in stressful, novel situations, right? And so what I pointed out to Lenore in this, and what I, and I, and I've not read Jonathan Hyde's book yet, is that from a brain perspective, when we have a motivation to do something and there's an obstacle or a natural stressor, we have a reason to do this. And it's by dealing with something that's hard, that's stressful, that's novel, that whatever, that you know, we're wiring a brain to be able to cope with things that are hard. And so when I think about what's going on with kids all across the world, really. I mean, our book sold in our book sold in China. We had to write a new preface for it because different culture. Someone over there, a guy, and I think his name is Fon Dang, if I have that right, who's sort of like the Oprah, the Chinese equivalent of Oprah, he wrote a uh, he did a review of this and did uh like a one-hour talk based on the principles. As of October of last year, about a year into this, been viewed 39 million times, and they'd sold something close to a million books in China. And so China's a pretty different, it's not exactly the US or Canada, right? Um see the same problems with young people who are struggling with motivation to get themselves out of, you know, to out of bed and work hard on building their lives, or who are so anxious that they want to kind of stay at home with their, you know, on their phone, probably with their head, you know, under the covers as well. Um, and so our take on this is there are there are macro forces. There, I mean, it's it's it's not the straw that breaks the camel's back, right? It's all of these things collectively. And so for me, I think about this is what is the sum total of inflows of stress into a nervous system, into a family unit, into a school, into a community? What are the healthy outflows of stress? And if those things aren't in balance, we get some pretty bad outcomes. And the whole while knowing that young people are developing that are wiring the brains that they'll carry into adulthood. Um, and for some reason, we're not doing a good enough job. You know, we were working on a lecture called Brainless Education. Uh, and it made the point that when you look at what goes on in most schools, certainly public schools, and even most independent schools, it seems that they don't realize all the insights that have made about how, you know, the last 40 years of what we've learned about how brains develop, either that or they or they don't care, because all the effort seems to be what do we cram into kids' heads and how do we do the cramming, not developing the brain into which, you know, the repository for all this knowledge. So um I'm loath to blame schools, I'm loath to blame teachers, I'm loath to blame parents. Um, I'm not that unreserved in my concern or condemnation of what's going, you know, being pumped out of Silicon Valley. Um, but we like you, I think talk with parents and talk with schools because um from my perspective, I want to focus on what I can do as a parent or as an educator. Um, because if I wait for, you know, Meta to straighten out its act, you know, it's another, it's another decade worth of kids. Uh so we so it's an it's a both, right? We need to focus on that, you know, legislation, all kinds of things. But in the meantime, how do we as parents employ tools? How do we help our kids have tools to navigate this world, including technology, um, in a way that's more healthy than we're currently doing? So that was a long answer to a short question.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

No, it was that was great. You know, you mentioned Silicon Valley, and it makes me think of what I've read that the folks that work there, their children do not have devices.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Oh yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, I mean, there was a, we have this in our second book, that there were 300 psychologists who petitioned the American Psychological Association asking that they formally censure, censure, excuse me, the psychologists who were employed by uh Silicon Valley to knowingly make these apps and devices and technologies as addictive as they possibly could, knowing what they know about intermittent reinforcement and how brains develop and dopamine and receptors and on and on it goes, that it was it was a violation of the Hippocratic Oath because they were doing it harm. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

You know, I was just talking to somebody the other day, and I I came out of a meeting that, you know, included a student and a parent, and it's just one more of these similar meetings. And I was telling this colleague, you know, I said, what happened to us as humans that we have lost the natural skill to parent our young? Like the giraffes can still do it, the hippopotamus can still do it, even the domesticated dogs and cats still do it. But what you're saying here is, you know, all of this technology, well, that's the difference. You know, the dogs and the cats are not yet, you know, they aren't using those devices.

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Excellent point. And and there's one other thing. There's a wonderful book about Robert Sapolsky, if you don't know his work yet, why zebras don't get ulcers. Oh, that's funny. So the basic idea is if if you were were you a zebra, what does your day consist of? Oh, hey, there's some grass. Let's go over and eat that grass. Maybe let's go get some water. Let's hope, hope, hope we don't get taken out by an alligator to get water. There's some more grass, and it's all fine. You're just eating breakfast. And it's just that occasionally some other animal might be looking for breakfast that that includes you. And so a lime runs after you and you run as a pack up of zebras, and ideally or herd, whatever it is, and get away from them. And most of the time you'll get away. And I'm sure it's a little terrifying, probably exhilarating, but as soon as you are, as soon as your breathing comes back to normal, you're sort of like, hey, is that grass? Because other animals mostly lack the kind of prefrontal cortex that we have that allows us to project ourselves in the future, you know, sharpen some pointy sticks and fend off, you know, lions, you know, and fast forward a few million years. Now we all have cell phones, right? We have the ability to ruminate on the past. It allows us to learn, but also to make ourselves depressed, to project ourselves in the future, which allows us to plant, but also allows us to stress. And so, you know, we're the only animal that can literally make ourselves sick just by our just by our own thoughts, right? Yeah. So, so one of the things that's hard, you know, as parents, you know, we we understandably think a lot about our kids and where they're gonna end up and what they're gonna be and do and everything else. And when we start to make ourselves crazy, we'll make our kids crazy because we we start to wanting to control things because we're worried about this or that outcome. But when we exert a greater sense of control, by definition, there's less sense of control for our for our kids. Um, and so it's it's hard, particularly in a world that feels stressful for parents to be less anxious. But this is why Bill and I talk talk talk about and take really seriously this idea of being a non-anxious presence. You know, and as Bill pointed out, try to soothe an infant when you're worked up. You know, try to help your spouse or your son or your daughter, you know, if you're as upset as they are, it can't be done. There's a story in our second book, my twin brother is a paramedic. Um, and this is a hack that a lot of a lot of people in emergency medicine use. So he was on scene, and you know, some people don't call an ambulance when things are going well, right? So whatever it was was not going well. And the the the family of these poor uh the poor family of this this person were were just super stressed out. And my brother was not, in part because this wasn't new to him and he had a sense of control because he has the tools for this. But he turned to them and as warmly as he could, he said, he said, I can see how worried you are for what it's worth. I'm not I'm not worried because I think we've got this under control. If it'll help you, if it would help you, I can let you know when you really should panic, right? And that of course changes the energy quite dramatically. Um but we're in a place right now where kids are stressed, which makes parents stressed, and then teachers are stressed, and and we we we keep kind of infecting one another. And we don't have enough people, in my view, who kind of serve that role of saying, I get that you're upset and you're pretty pissed off about E, B, C, and D. You know, for what it's worth, I see it pretty differently. And and I and I don't think I need to be as upset about this as some other people might. And that alone can help, you know. My my my son, I was this is a delightful, I was recording the uh the audiobook for what he say. And my our son, who's now 22, um, was a camp counselor. I come out of the studio, I called my wife to let her know how this had gone. He said, Hey, did you got Matthew? How's Matthew doing? Because he he'd been starting to have what look like migraines. And we get him on the phone and we're talking. I mean, how much ibuprofen is too much? You get enough water, how's your sleep? And he drops a word. Interesting, talks a few more sentences, drops another word. A few sentences later, total gibberish. I think he's having a stroke. I'm a little worried. Call my wife, said, Hey, sweetheart, please call me on the line. Don't hang up because we're connected to you with you. Matthew, I'll be right back. She goes off, calls 911, gets the camp director. Fast forward brain tumor. He's fine now, he's great now, but holy smokes.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

And so I asked him, we asked him, he uh over the Christmas vacation, what did he remember about this? Because he he's a music major, he'd written some music about it, and he talked about the life flight helicopter and this and that. And I said, Do you remember talking to Mod and me, you know, when your language started getting a little, you know, wonky? And he said, I I I do. And I said, What do you remember? And he said, How freakishly calm you were.

SPEAKER_00 19:27

Oh.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

Right? Yeah. Because when things are going poorly, but if you went in your dark, like, oh my god. I mean, yeah, not gonna help you. We're like, yeah, this is okay, this is pretty serious. We've got a plan for this, and here's what we're gonna do. Um but I feel like right now, a lot of people, um it's just not intuitive for enough people that when things aren't going well with someone that they care about, the one of the most helpful things that they can do is to be less anxious, even when it's a disaster, and to say, I'm confident. I never say I know. I'm confident there's a way that we can make this better. Whatever that is. Whatever that is. Um and uh I don't feel like we I don't feel like I see enough of that um as much as what I'd like to see, you know, from leadership, whether it's school or you know, political level or whatever. But it strikes me that currently it's it seems to be a fashion that we think the people who are the loudest are the ones who are the strongest. Um, and I see that differently.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Yeah, yeah, a good point. Well, it's funny, you know, you you see people wearing the hats and the t-shirts that all say be calm and carry on and all that kind of stuff. And and um Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

There's something to it.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

It yeah. And so that's the way to break that that chain. So somebody listening to this, whether you're a teacher or a parent, um, or or even you know, a teenage student, what are three things that you feel? I mean, you just mentioned one, as basically you're saying um your anxiousness is not going to make it any better. Um, so maybe that's just some words that you say to yourself, but but what are some three things that you that people can do to break this chain?

SPEAKER_01 21:14

Yeah. So one of the things really quickly about the idea but a non-anxious presence is that, and I want to be really gentle because if you're a parent and things are really going bad for your kid, of course you're worried. You're wired to protect your kids, you're wired to soothe your kid. If you go into education, you go into education, obviously, for the enormous stock options, right? And the corporate jet. No, you go into this because you care about kids. And so when things aren't going well, you it's, it's, it makes all the sense in the world that you become anxious about the path that this kid is on as well. But we should focus on it's really the path that we're worried about because when we're when we worry about a child, it typically isn't about what's going on today that you know, their best friend brought Broke up with them, or they, you know, got cut from the soccer team, or they've got they've failing all their classes. It's not really typically so much where they are, but where we think that they'll end up, that they'll never have friends, that they'll never feel successful, that they'll never find their thing, that they'll never get on an academic path, that they'll never find a way to contribute in the world. And the challenge is when we buy into that kind of fear-based thinking in the moment, it makes it harder for kids to get themselves unstuck. Because if you could say credibly to any child to work out, this sucks right now. I get how upset you're. I understand how hard this is. And I'm confident that you're gonna end up in a good place. I don't know when and I'm not sure how, but we're gonna work on this. But everything that I can see is you already have the stuff within your head to live the kind of life that you want. We just gotta, we just gotta work hard at this. Because when we get anxious, when we get anxious, it makes the other person, in this case a kid, more anxious. And this is important. The major manifestation of anxiety is avoidance. Anxiety also scrambles all of our executive functions. So our ability to plan, to problem solve, to get ourselves out of the situation that we're occurring again. From a mental health perspective, cognitive flexibility, emotional flexibility, how can I find a way to cat to reframe this and to look at this in a different light? So, yes, it sucks, and or and this it sucks, but I'm gonna get to a different place. And curiously, when we can be like, you know, someone's grandmother's like there, there, there, sweetheart, sure, this is gonna work out, right? So that that alone brings kids' pre-frontal cortexes back online. It makes it easier for them to be flexible in their thinking, easier for them to find a solution to their own problems. So it's a really big deal. The second thing that I would say is a lot of times when a lot of the angst that I see with parents and with educators is about kids not engaging in school. And how do I get them to work harder? How do I understand how serious it is? How do I get them to be motivated? And they're almost always saying, how do I again be motivated for this thing he may not give a rat's patoue about? From my perspective, I go back to, I go back to brain development, go back to brain development, go back to brain development. And you may recall in the self-driven child, we have a whole chapter there on motivation. And one of the things that I love most in there is uh a researcher named Reed Larson who who examined in the 90s how is it that adolescents become intrinsically motivated. So rather than, you know, they'll respond to threats and to rewards, right? Carrots and sticks, how do they not just work hard, but want to work hard and all the way along develop a brain system that's prepared to work hard, to set meaningful goals and work hard to pursue them. And he described it as not dutifully doing their homework, but the passionate pursuit of pastimes. And most kids do homework because, well, I'll give you this great story. Kid was asking me about using uh AI to do his homework. And what did I think about that? And I said, Well, what do you think about homework? He said, What do you mean? I said, What do you get out of homework? Well, I guess I get points if I completing. Okay, great. Any other reason this or this in this case math, this homework helps you. I guess I do better on my tests. Great. Any other reason you do math homework? And he looked at me like blankly, and I said, Does doing math homework help you get better at math? He said, Oh, I guess so.

unknown 25:35

Right?

SPEAKER_01 25:36

It wasn't anywhere on his radar, and the same day a boy came and his parents are wanting to talk to me about tutoring him in math. And I said, What's your interest? Because he had another math tutor and they're looking to make a change. I said, What's your interest in having a math tutor? He said, I want to understand this math better because my teacher just doesn't teach for it, it doesn't teach in a way that I'm learning it very well. I said, Golly, I said, You're like the first person to say that in years. It's a fantastic motivation. I said, Is that why your parents wanted you to be here? He said, No, they want me to get A's in math. So when I think about this, when we think about this idea of a passionate pursuit of pastimes, it's that many kids, far too many kids, and you of course know this from the, you know, the kids who leave, you know, a traditional public school and and move to charter schools, because they want to have a different experience. That most kids do homework because they're checking a box and they're trying to get some adult, their parents or their teacher, off their back or be less stressed or just to leave them alone, but they're not really deeply engaged in it. And one of the reasons this matters so much to me is you can look at the brain system involved when people are intrinsically motivated versus extrinsically motivated. And the most interesting one to me is how do to what degree do people pay attention to how they're doing, to what degree they pay attention to their mistakes? So, simple example. If you have a kid who's learning, who's playing piano or guitar or whatever and taking lessons, what's a typical thing that happens in America, right? You've got to practice a half an hour a day, otherwise, mom or whatever. So if the kid doesn't really want to practice piano, but is being dragged to lessons and has been told he has to practice half an hour a day, what is he doing while he's practicing the piano? Only 28 minutes to go. Right. Can the freaking clock move faster? He's looking at the clock the whole time, barely the music or his hands, or whatever you're supposed to do when you learn to play piano. As opposed to if you're in a rock and roll band or if he was, you know, she was going to play a solo at the school talent show, and there's some person who she thinks is really cute and really wants to impress this person, she practices, plays a note wrong, oops, goes back and corrects it, plays it, gets the tempo wrong, corrects it because she really wants to do her best. It's sounding like friggin' Taylor Swift. So whoever this hottie is thinks that this girl is all that. Now we're talking about a different motivational system. So I say this because if you have a kid who seems to not give a fig about school, it's hard not to worry. And from our experience, as long as they're working hard to get better and better at something that really matters to them, I don't think we have to worry. Because at least in public schools, children will forget within three months 90% of what they've been taught. So it's really not the learning that matters, it's the brain development, the executive functions that matter. And we can get those just as credibly by practicing hard for user for the talent show as we can from completing some worksheet to make all the anxious adults be less anxious.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Play is our natural way to learn. And when we do not allow our children or even ourselves the time to engage in unstructured play, we deprive our brains the opportunity to build those synapses that develop our creativity and our sense of self, as well as building skills and emotional regulation, problem solving, and social interactions. Why should we care? Because this is about quality of life and our existence as a society. We have the power to shape our brains in a way that brings us a sense of belonging and significance. So let's do it. Here's your element challenge. Keep a log of how much of your recreational time your child and you spend on a device and how much of that recreational time you engage in something requiring more whole body engagement and interaction with others. Each day, try to move the needle so that more time is spent in the simple pleasures of play and interacting with others each day. With each minute of play you add, you just may find yourself moving closer to your element.