In this episode, Elizabeth and Vicki are joined by education experts Ned Johnson and Bill Stixrud, authors of the book The Self-Driven Child and of the new workbook for parents, 7 Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child for a thought-provoking discussion on how to empower your child to become self-driven, allowing them to navigate their own educational journey with confidence and independence. We tackled the intricate dynamics of parenting children as they transition to college and the overarching message was clear: encouraging self-management and resilience is vital for students facing the pressures of academic life. Join us as we dissect these ideas and outline practical steps that parents can take to ensure their students thrive – in college and beyond.
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We covered so much ground in this episode with Ned Johnson and Bill Stixrud that it’s difficult to summarize. As you’ll hear, we also had a lot of fun.
We heard about Ned and Bill’s new book 7 Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child and why they chose to write this one as a workbook that parents can use to put some of the principles from their book The Self Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives into practice. They’ve pulled out some foundational principles for parents to put into practice.
We learned about an acronym that Ned and Bill often use to explain a concept related to stress – NUTS – Novelty, Unpredictability, Perceived Threat and a Low Sense of Control. Their examples and stories helped us understand how these concepts apply to the college admission process, one of the most stressful situations for students. 
So much of the work that Bill and Ned do is “to try to make children and parents simply feel that it’s safe not to worry all of the time.” What relief! We continued to talk more about values, the myth of the good parent, how hard it is to watch your kids struggle, the difference between being a consultant rather than a manager, the importance of autonomy, – so many topics every parent needs to hear.
As we have heard from so many of the people we’ve talked to, Bill talked about the importance of sleep for reducing stress. A tall order for college students, but SO important for happiness! And in addition to sleep, we talked about not doing things for student that they can do for themselves. A tall order for parents!
In talking about the importance of sleep, we all mentioned the wonderful book The Sleep-Deprived Teen: Why Our Teenagers Are So Tired and How Parents and Schools Can Help Them Thrive by Lisa L. Lewis. A must-read for parents of teenagers.
One of the wonderful things about talking with Ned and Bill was hearing all of their stories. We heard about students who struggled and students who found their way – sometimes when parents step back. As you listen to these stories, you’ll likely see your own student in there.
If you want to hear more from Ned and Bill, be sure to check out Ned’s podcast – The Self Driven Child, and you can find more information at their website, theselfdrivenchild.com.
Be sure to check out 7 Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child by Ned Johnson and Bill Stixrud. You’ll want your own copy to help you put all of this into practice.
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Transcript:
Announcer: 0:10
Welcome to the College Parent Central podcast. Whether your child is just beginning the college admission process or is already in college, this podcast is for you. You’ll find food for thought and information about college and about navigating that delicate balance of guidance, involvement and knowing when to get out of the way. Join your hosts as they share support and a celebration of the amazing experience of having a child in college.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 0:51
Welcome to the College Parents Central podcast. I am your co-host, I guess, Elizabeth Hamlet. I am the author of Seven Steps to College Success: A Pathway for Students with Disabilities, and I am so excited about this interview. I have been a big fan of Ned Johnson and Bill Stixrud’s for a long time. I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Ned myself. I probably reference their books, I don’t know once a week minimum, and so it’s just such an honor to get to talk to them today about their new book.
I’m going to hold up for those watching on Facebook. The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child, a new workbook. They just keep giving us so many generous gifts, so we are just delighted to have you here, and let me just turn the mic over for a moment to my co-host, Vicki Nelson.
Vicki Nelson: 1:37
Well, I am Vicki Nelson and I am one of the co-hosts of the College Parent Central podcast. We talk about everything that has to do with being a college parent, being the parent of someone headed to college, and sometimes we touch on afterward too, and the college preparation seems to start earlier and earlier all the time, and I join Elizabeth in being so excited about the guests that we have with us today, because they have so much that they can share with us about that preparation and when you have a child in college. So I think we’re going to jump right in and ask them to introduce themselves and then we will pepper them with questions. So, Ned, do you want to start?
Ned Johnson: 2:25
Sure, my name is Ned Johnson. Apart from being partner-inscribed with Bill Stixrud, I run a company called Prep Matters which helps kids in high school and college academics in school and then college examinations of SAT, act, and then all the well, we talk about the self-driven child, the SAT, act and other four-letter words. So I spend my time one-on-one with kids, helping them through this small but seemingly important part of their college application journey.
Vicki Nelson: 2:56
Thanks, and Bill?
Bill Stixrud: 2:57
So I’m a clinical neuropsychologist. For the last 40 years I’ve made a living testing children and teenagers and young adults who are struggling in some way whether it’s with learning or attention or social or emotional and trying to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong and try to help them, and I never get tired of doing it. I still love doing it and I enjoyed writing these three books with my buddy, Ned. I practiced meditation for 51 years. I play in a rock and roll band.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 3:27
Is that all?
Bill Stixrud: 3:29
Yes, I have two adult children, one of whom with her family just moved in with me today, so there’s a lot going on.
Vicki Nelson: 3:36
Life will be interesting.
Bill Stixrud: 3:38
We’re just moving a new refrigerator right now as we speak.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 3:42
Life goes on as we’re doing all this stuff. It’s all good, yes.
Vicki Nelson: 3:46
Well, I often when I’m working with parents who are about to send their students off to college and they’re feeling all of that nostalgia and they’re sad that they’re sending their student away, and we always say to them just wait four years, they’ll be back. And sometimes they come back with family, or one of mine came back with a husband and a dog. So you never know.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 4:08
And in fact, you and Lynn have an episode on just that thing, don’t you?
Vicki Nelson: 4:11
Vicki, yes, our lives are on a lot of those episodes, but I want to ask about this book. So Lynn has or Lynn Elizabeth has already mentioned that your new book, the Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child, is a workbook, and I’m curious about what brought about the idea to produce a workbook and what that does for parents rather than just another book. I’ll let either one of you jump in with that.
Bill Stixrud: 4:47
Yeah, do you want to start? Do you want me to, or?
Ned Johnson: 4:49
Oh, you can go first. And for people who are on Facebook, we have a little bill for people on the podcast. You cannot tell this, but we have a Bill Stixrud sock puppet that has joined me when I’ve recorded the audio books for a for a couple of what we’ve done.
Vicki Nelson: 5:04
So and Bill’s camera is not working, which is why the puppet needs to stand in. t doesn’t matter for the podcast, so we’ll listen carefully.
Bill Stixrud: 5:14
We gave a talk together on Friday and, unbeknownst to me, ned brought the sock puppet as dressed exactly like the sock puppet.
Bill Stixrud: 5:25
I think that hardly anybody argues with the idea that kids need to have control over their own life before they leave home. They need to be able to run their own life before they leave home, and so they like the premise of our books. They like a lot of the strategies. But it’s hard, because if you give your kids control over something you’ve been controlling for them, what happens is and you have to sit, sit in your hands and zip your lips. It’s the most stressful thing you can experience. It’s like it’s like what you know why watching your kid drive the car over the cliff. And so the workbook format was was designed to be shorter. There’s not a lot of new science. We already laid out the science in the other books.
It’s to be shorter, based on seven pretty easy to understand principles that you can ground yourself in. Make sure that this feels safe and right, and then exercises to work through. How do I apply these principles? What keeps me from doing it? What keeps me from just going back to the way I’ve always done it? What keeps me from telling my kids a million times, instead of finding another way to connect with them. What keeps me from trying to change my kid as opposed to focus on what I’m doing in a way that I can help my kid find his own reasons for change?
Vicki Nelson: 6:36
And how did you decide on the seven principles that you were going to include in this?
Ned Johnson: 6:44
Magic eight ball and we just dropped one.
Vicki Nelson:
Okay, that often works.
Ned Johnson:
You know, I think a lot of it came out of when we were writing in our second book. What Do you Say with the first chapter? And there’s about the importance of connection and for a whole bunch of different reasons, most of which people already know, around a psychological perspective, but principally, a close connection is the closest thing you get to a silver bullet in protecting young brains against the effects of stress as those brains develop. But also as parents or as educators or grandparents or friends or whatever. You can’t help people unless you are close enough to them for them to share with you their problems.
Ned Johnson: 7:28
And so we started, we thought about you know that we have a chapter in the first book called I Love you Too Much to Fight With, about your homework, about being a consultant rather than a manager, and as we’re doing this, we kind of have a whole list of points that we think are important, but really tried to work on ones that were more kind of foundational thoughts or philosophies rather than just, you know, rather than just something really tactical, and also how these things interplay with one another. You know, it’s hard to be a consultant if you’re anxious, because if you’re anxious, you want to have more control and if you’re controlling, you’re managing rather than consulting. Right, if you’re going to be effective consulting you need to put connection first to elicit, you know, the right feedback from folks. You know, when we talk.
There’s our favorite chapter from what he say about how do you motivate kids without trying to change them, because so often parents say how do I get my kid to? What they’re really saying is how do I, how do I get them to change? And so these are things that these seven principles we think really they stand each on their stand on their own, stand on their own really well, but they also are reinforcing. So every chapter will end with you know or cause to also visit chapter three and also visit chapter six, and we also wanted to keep it at seven. not 17,
Because you know working memory, you can only hold so many thoughts, so many thoughts in your head, but when we get anxious and we start doing things that we know haven’t worked in the past, maybe this time it’ll work to be able to go back to core principles as a way to ground ourselves in what we know, what works, but also ground ourselves in eternal truths and also values that we hold closely, is a way to help us make the right words, have the right action in this or that moment, because it can be hard. You know, what exactly should I say? What exactly should I do? Well, if you focus on this principle, what does this principle lead you to do? Or lead you to say, or lead you to not say?
Elizabeth Hamblet: 9:37
These are good questions and it’s hard. It’s hard not to say the things you really want to say.
Ned Johnson:
You too?
Elizabeth Hamblet:
No, I was a perfect parent. You can ask my young adult children. I’m sure they’d have a lot to say yeah.
Ned Johnson:
As we always observe whenever we give talks to school groups and parents groups, all the perfect parents that we know are people who you know don’t have children yet but for the rest of us, you know
Elizabeth Hamblet:
Well, I mean, this is a book that I, you know, all of these books I wish I had found sooner in my children’s life, and perhaps so did they. So you know, the theme that goes through and it really does strike me as a conundrum is that you know, and I love this quote studies show us that a healthy sense of control is crucial for developing self-motivation that we want in nurturing kids, and yet the more we sit on our hands or zip our lips and support the autonomy, the less control, the more stress we experience. We are a college-focused podcast and obviously you know things have gotten really stressful about the college experience.
It always was a stressful experience and it just seems to be on steroids now, and so admission rates at particular colleges are falling and students’ mental health is declining. And students’ mental health is declining and there’s all sorts of factors here, but it’s not hard to draw a line to me between this scarcity mentality and smarter people than I have done this, obviously around college admissions and this drive for students to achieve more. Jenny Wallace’s Never Enough is a good example of this. So this is all my long way of getting around to this point. All of your books discuss NUTS, um, and so I think this is a really important concept and it feels really relevant to the college experience, and so could you explain nuts for probably the thousandth time in an interview, but you know, for people for whom it’s new.
Bill Stixrud: 12:12
I said I was at a conference on stress and stress in the brain in 2008 and there was a neuroscientist by the name of Sonia Lupin who said told the audience I defy you to think of anything that makes life stressful that you can’t summarize with the acronym NUTS. It’s novelty, unpredictability, perceived threat, and a low sense of control.
And she and other stress. Scientists say it’s that low sense of control, this most stressful thing you’ve experienced, because you can be in a new situation or even an unpredictable, even a threatening situation. But if you feel I can handle this, I got this. It’s not stressful. It’s stressful when something’s challenging to you or to your family or to your kid and nobody knows what to do. You don’t know what to do. You feel kind of helpless or overwhelmed. That’s the most stressful thing you can experience. And I think in terms of the college search kids, certainly the whole college search process, talk about a low sense of control. Geez, and we’re talking to kids. I mean I tested this girl when she was in second grade a few years ago and I asked her if there’s anything she worries about. She said I worry about my grades because I know that they’re important for college. Now it wasn’t as bad as I thought because she said I want to go to a good college, like American University, because they have an Elevation Burger and I love their fries.
Bill Stixrud: 13:35
But truly, Ned worked with somebody recently who said my mother’s been planning my college narrative since I was five years old and this idea. Somebody just recently told Ned that basically everything I do, this is a high school kid. Everything I do I’m thinking about how is this going to read to a college admissions person?
Ned Johnson: 13:55
No that was a whole high school class and all 35 of them were nodding their heads Everything we think about. Will this help or hurt my chance of admission at rejected U?
Bill Stixrud: 14:08
Yeah, these colleges, the most selective colleges. Of course it’s a complete crapshoot where you have no control over it. And it feels very threatening because the narrative that if I don’t get into elite college, I’m going to end up working at McDonald’s. It’s completely unpredictable and the experience is something that most kids, by definition, they’ve never gone through before we got through before.
Ned Johnson: 14:39
So yeah, and so if I jump into that, I mean one point parents will often see their kids, you know, really torturing themselves, thinking I have to get in this college, but I’ll never get in right. And then parents naturally say, well, it’s not true, you don’t have to go and you know there’s so many other places, which is true. And then kids will fight us on them and they’ll cling to it more. And so two quick thoughts on that.
Ned Johnson: 15:00
One is that most mental health is changing, thinking from I have to to I want to. And so I tell kids of course, of course you want to go to Princeton. You look great in orange, four years of orange, fantastic, right, who wouldn’t want to go there? But you know, if you want, if you’re asking me to believe that in order to have a successful life that you have to go there, well, I just see, I see it differently and I’m not going to try to talk you out of it, but I see it. I see it really differently and if you’re interested, I’ll share with you some why I feel that way and some of the statistics that I know, but we don’t try to talk kids out of it because then they cling to it more, more desperately. But just from my perspective, being non-anxious about this and saying, of course you want to go there, but I just, you know, my experience is that you don’t need to go there to build the kind of and live the kind of life that you want, and I just, and it’s and you know, we talk about this in our second book What Do You Say, and these are principles rooted in nonviolent resistance, where it’s simply saying I see it differently and if you want me to share that with you, I’m happy to share that with you.
Ned Johnson: 16:05
But it is hard because we have that the word scarcity is exactly the right one And if you’ve read that book Melanthian and anyway I can’t remember dig up full names on them about you know how, what happens when we perceive there to be scarcity and you just get really, really bad short-term thinking out of it and it’s fear-based thinking. And you know, I wish that. I mean we interviewed Jeff Selingo and asked him. You know he’s got a new book coming out in the fall called Dream School, which is really lovely, and I’d interviewed him and asked him when you look at the rates of mental health, you know, and college campus particularly highly? I don’t like highly selective, I like highly rejective as a term.
Ned Johnson: 16:51
Universities and then colleges are probably spending more money on trying to treat mental health than they are in almost anything else. You know, they can’t love having these kids who are stressed out of their minds, because it’s hard for everyone, both the students and the administrators. I said but do they realize if we changed our process, if we didn’t try to solicit, you know, another 100,000 people so we could say no to them, that they could, they could bend the arc on this. And he said colleges, they absolve themselves of all responsibility. They absolve themselves of all responsibility. And so it remains the fact that, I don’t know, there may be 100 colleges in the country that select less than 30% of their college. I mean, they’re just, there, aren’t that many? But of course, that’s where that’s where our attention goes and I probably can’t talk a kid or a parent, you know, or any of us out of wanting to go to those places. Right, but I can, but we all can say you know that it just it can’t be the case.
Ned Johnson: 17:48
I’ll pick on Jess Leahy. Right, who is, who is just? I mean she’s. I mean she is one of the wisest, most brilliant people I know and, if I understand correctly, she went to UMass, Amherst. Does anyone credibly think that she would be better if she went to Amherst College with a 12% acceptance rate rather than Amherst with a with a 30% acceptance rate? Give me a break. Give me a break, and particularly if you were Herbert Marsh in the Big Fish, small Pond. I have no idea what Jess did when she was in college and what opportunities she had at UMass that she might not have had in Amherst. Right, when you have to elbow everyone out of the way, it’s impossible to know. But so much of the work that we do is trying to make parents and children simply feel that it’s safe not to worry all the time. It just doesn’t help and it’s not rooted in truth, other than that, carry on.
Vicki Nelson: 18:42
That’s so helpful. And I’d like to follow that up a little bit, because you know, yes to everything you’re talking about in terms of admissions in the college search. I’m seeing students on the other side of that college search. So now they’ve come to college and they’re still stressed and talking about their anxiety. And now they’re in, they’re supposed to be able to relax a little bit about that, and so they’re carrying it somehow with them and I’m wondering whether, on that side of the admissions process, there’s anything that, as parents or as educators, or as just people who are around kids, that we can do to help them. Is it? Well, I guess my question is is it?
Vicki Nelson: 19:35
related to lack of control, and what can we do to help them feel more in control at that point?
Ned Johnson: 19:41
Yeah, I’ll let Bill jump in first. There’s a lot here. It’s a really good question,
Elizabeth Hamblet: 19:43
oh and we will have video, so do hold up.
Bill Stixrud: 19:47
Okay keep talking bill, yeah, yeah. So, uh, after we wrote the first book, we, we, we lectured about the first book all over the country, all over the world really for a couple years and it just occurred to us that really we can think about this sense of control in two dimensions. One is that subjective sense of autonomy or agency you know that I can direct my life, I’m not helpless, I can handle things but the second is the brain state that supports it, because you can have all the agency or autonomy in the world but if you’re exhausted or you’re highly stressed, you’re going to have no sense of control and so we talked about what can we do to facilitate that brain state that supports a sense of control, which is really where the prefrontal cortex is activated, is connected really well connected to and is downregulating the stress response. So really, when you’re in your right mind, your kids are in their right mind, the college students are in their right mind, meaning that they’re focused, they’re alert, they’re engaged, they’re in the present, they aren’t unduly worried or stressed or exhausted.
The prefrontal cortex is regulating the rest of the brain. There’s this most recently evolved part of the brain that’s regulating these more basic systems, especially the stress response systems, including the amygdala, and what happens is that college students start brains, start college being profoundly sleep-deprived, often with a lot of chemical use and years of high stress weakening the connections between the free frontal cortex and the amygdala. The part of the reason that I’m such a big fan of gap years is giving kids a friggin break from this high school lifestyles that require them. If they’re going to go to elite college, you require them to be chronically tired and chronically stressed, which is terrible for developing brain. So with college students, the most important thing they can simply simply do is arrange their schedule so that they get enough sleep. Certainly they. They can do the things that keep the brain, because so many parents say to us well, it must get better in college when kids have more control over their own lives.
Bill Stixrud: 22:04
Well, it could, but not if they’re chronically exhausted and chronically stressed and I think that when Laurie Santos at Yale was living in the dormitories with undergraduates, was struck by the fact that these kids got themselves into arguably the most prestigious college in the world. And they’re miserable. They’re so stressed and so exhausted that they don’t enjoy anything about being at Yale.
Bill Stixrud: 22:34
Yeah, I tested two kids this May who, um, who had just gotten into very, very elite colleges, and as part of my interview I said are there times when you feel really happy? And they both said I felt happy the day I got into college. It didn’t last, it didn’t. It didn’t last a week, it wasn’t, it wasn’t. I felt really relieved and happy. Now that I’ve gotten in, everything’s fine. It lasted one day. This is the brain they’re taking into college and to heal. You can’t heal anything if you’re chronically tired and stressed. So what we advise college students to do is to make sleep your top priority and to minimize the extent to which using drugs and alcohol, which is, will screw up your sleep and screw up your stress response. Learn to meditate and exercise.
Ned Johnson: 23:19
Yeah, and if I could add to that, I mean in that same vein of happiness, Bill, when and this is in our second book when Bill was lecturing Dallas, he asked these bunch of you know 10th grade student government leaders, of you know, kind of, how many of you want to be happy as adults? And they all sort of raised their hands like trick question here. And he asked so what do you understand is necessary to be happy as an adult? And this kid says well, I think I speak for all of us when we believe we understand that if you get into a good enough college that everything else will fall into place and both of them get. Oh my God, I mean, don’t they know?
Ned Johnson: 23:58
You know, at Yale, the class that Laura Santos taught on happiness was the most overly subscribed class in the history of the university, and these are children who’ve achieved everything at the highest level you can possibly imagine and they’re miserably unhappy. So we do a deep dive on this in our work. About what do we know that actually supports happiness? And achievement is part of it, but it’s only 20% of it. And kids are on this really hedonic treadmill, thinking well, the next achievement will last, the next achievement will last, the next achievement will last, and kids then get into college and they fall into the same oftentimes not always, but the same kind of scarcity mindset about well, I’ve got to get the right internship, I’ve got to get the right job, I’ve got to get the right leadership and sacrificing things sleep and relationships that we know matter more.
Ned Johnson: 24:46
So there’s an exercise in our, in our, in seven principles, where we ask parents to go through a list of values and say what do they matter? What do you really value for your child? Right, prestige, power, wealth. You know relationships, you know contributions to the world, you know all the and then things that are much more about how do I show up in the world, how do I contribute? And you know being, being kind, being, being, being being thoughtful and, of course, as you can imagine, parents click all these things about. I want my kid to be honest, I want her to be engaged. You know all those things.
Ned Johnson: 25:22
And then you ask, and then the exercise is to ask your child what messages do they feel that they’re getting from us as parents about what we believe matters for them? And seeing how much those things overlap, right and oftentimes, as you can imagine, they don’t right that. We think we just we want our kids to be happy and to be good citizens and contribute to the world. And kids have got this message and they may be attributing to us they may have got it from school that it’s about power and academic success and blah, blah, blah. And so then, when there’s a disconnect, well, tell me more. How does it make you feel, if you feel, that I really care more about your achievement than these other things? Where do you think that came from? How can we and you know, we hope that people are doing this work more in high school as an animating force of how do I spend my time as I develop, you know, in high school and in college, but even if it’s when your kids are 27, it’s not too late to have those conversations.
Ned Johnson: 26:22
I mean, Bill, in one of our lectures, was saying that you know he spent the first 14 years of his life, of his professional career, rather also doing therapy in addition to evaluations, and you talk with people who are 40 and saying, well, how can I help? And so I spent the last 25 years of my life trying to meet other people’s expectations for me. Now, now I’m trying to figure out what I really want out of life. And we have these kids, all these young people who think I have to achieve, achieve, achieve and nothing wrong with achievement, but, goodness, if it’s devoid of what my actual values are, that’s a pretty terrible way. I mean, Bill and I.
Ned Johnson: 26:58
I mean, and both of you, in the work that you do. I mean I’m wildly overpaid as a test prep geek. I that you do. I mean I’m wildly overpaid as a test prep geek. I get it right, but I really get to spend my time, as does Bill, working with young people, trying to understand them and trying to help them understand themselves and figure out what matters to them and say what kind of help or support do you need to go after that, holy smokes. I mean, if I won the lottery tomorrow, I’d still be doing this work because I love talking with teens. Right, and not that everyone will get to perfectly align every part of their value with what pays the rent. I get it, but goodness knows we could have some overlap right. And talking about value seems like a really effective way for any parent and for any young person to reflect on how do I use my time and energy in this four years or, depending on the kids, six years of college.
Vicki Nelson: 27:48
Right. So I want to follow up a little more on that promise. Elizabeth, I’ll give you a chance, but I’m going to roll here.
Vicki Nelson: 27:55
And you’re touching on this and talking, I think, about values and I wanted to take there’s a question in your book that you ask and it has specifically to do with autonomy but I think it could be related to any of these conversations about values, and I wanted to turn it back to you. And the question you ask is, “So why don’t parents operate in ways that encourage their child’s autonomy?” I mean, most of us know that there are certain things we should do that are helpful and there are certain things that are less helpful. We know that it would be good for our kids. Why don’t we do what we know we should do? And I think it relates maybe if you could talk a little bit about what you talk about in the book about the myth of the good parent? Why don’t we do it?
Bill Stixrud: 28:54
Well, starting from the time that they’re three years old, it’s quicker if you dress them, you tie their shoes, it’s easier, it’s more efficient. So we kind of start out that way where it’s just easier to do it ourselves than to teach them to do it. And yet, from the time kids are little, once they learn something “I do it myself” they don’t want you to do it for them, and so that’s part of it. And as they get older, one of the things that we think that often parents often confuse is, at least in our view, is that the priority is help them. They need to do well versus they need to learn who’s responsible for what.
Bill Stixrud: 29:34
Because I work with underachievers for my whole career. Very early on I was struck by underachievers. They didn’t seem to be bothered. Everybody else was. I asked them if you don’t turn in an assignment, who’s most upset? Invariably they’d say my mom, then my dad, then my teacher, then my tutor, then my therapist. They were never on the list, because all the focus is constantly trying to get them to do the work, as opposed to respecting them and saying I’ll support you. I’d be happy to be your homework consultant, but I’m not going to act like somehow I could make you do it, or it’s so much my responsibility.
Bill Stixrud: 30:14
So part of it, Vicki, is this confusing thinking that the most important thing is they always do well. As they get old, they get to high school. Often what we hear from parents is well, this is too important, I couldn’t let him make these decisions. These are too important. They involve college and it’s all life and so and Ned often says when they say this, but when’s it going to be less important, which is just a wonderful question.
Bill Stixrud: 30:40
And I was giving a lecture in Houston about the self-driven child a few years ago before the pandemic, and I happened to mention the most elite high school in Washington DC, and I don’t know why, but afterwards a woman came up to me and said I’m a psychotherapist at the Menenger Clinic here in Houston, a really good mental health facility in Houston.
Bill Stixrud: 31:00
So we know this independent school in DC really well because so many of the graduates get into the top colleges in the country. But as soon as they get a B, as soon as they realize that everybody’s here as smart as I am, or they don’t really stand out the way they did in high school, or they reach out to go out with a girl and she ghosts them, they crumble emotionally and they take a medical leave of absence and they come here for therapy. And she said to a one. They don’t have enough experience running their own life, solving their own problems, making their own decisions, setting their own priorities. So I think there’s a lot of reasons why parents don’t, starting from the fact that it’s easier if we do it. Also, it’s much less stressful if we’re trying to manage it. And this confusion of placing the value on they’re doing well versus that they’re learning to be autonomous and take responsibility for themselves.
Ned Johnson: 31:54
And you add to that. I mean it’s hard to watch your kids be disappointed, it’s hard to watch them struggle, it’s hard to watch them suffer. I mean I went through this with my son, who just graduated college and he applied to early decision to the college my wife and I both went to, got deferred, eventually got denied, you know, and did everything between those two things to really turn things up in all the ways that he thought would make a difference. He’s like what else? And he was just in tears, like what else am I supposed to do? And I’m like I don’t know, kiddo, I don’t know. And I could shake my fist at the sky and gnash and make up a bunch of things. It’s like sometimes we just don’t know. And it’s really hard, really hard. I mean all the parents listen. You really hard, really hard Because you I mean all the parents listening you love your kids as much as I love my kids. And it’s hard when they struggle.
Ned Johnson: 32:49
But, as a friend of mine said, short-term or long-term problems, right, you know. To that, to Bill’s point of you know, do I want to solve things for them now or do I want to let them have the opportunity of solving things for themselves, even if it’s just learning to tolerate an outcome that you don’t like. You know, and my son, to his everlasting credit, is like the most glass half full kid. And then they got a brain tumor and he and he said I’m so grateful that I got this brain tumor, I wouldn’t be on the path that I’m on, and I’m like you. You, you could have done this in a way that’s a little less dramatic, right? But you know, and obviously I don’t want to make light of this because my son had a very good enough outcome, and there’s certainly children who don’t. You know where things really and I’m not talking about things that are life shattering protecting kids, you know, letting kids to suffer that but there’s so many things that we think are going to be life shattering. And how do we know? How do we really know? You know my I was talking with a friend about this who’s in the middle of going through some kind of hard life changes and I told her the you know, the parable of the Chinese farmer, right, you know, we don’t really know when is a good thing, when it’s a bad thing.
Ned Johnson: 34:03
You know, and I’ve shared this with you, Elizabeth, I spent at a complicated family and a bunch of stuff going on, and father would probably drink or drank himself to death. My mother was in institutions and I spent three months of seventh grade in a pediatric psychiatric hospital and you know, I don’t think that at the time people would have laid a marker on me as a guy who is likely to have a really successful life. I am quite happy with the life that I have and I think I’ve done some really. I’ve had the opportunity to do some really cool things and a wife who just is the best person I’ve ever met, and kids who are wonderful in all their complicated ways. And I sit there and think would I be where I am now if I hadn’t had that misadventure for years of my life, right? Starting with the fact that I took time off from school because I was struggling and because I took time off, it wasn’t completely inappropriate for me to hit on this adorable freshman who, had I been older, would have been like no, really dude, that’s a little you know, and I wouldn’t be married to Vanessa. So I don’t know, you know.
Ned Johnson: 35:04
And so so Bill has asked this question of when. When do we measure whether it was a good thing or bad thing. You know, a day later, a week later, a month later, a year later, a decade later, it’s hard to know. I mean, my major I was most people major went into world of finance, right, and I didn’t know that and I was not from a sophisticated family and I didn’t know how to interview. So I went to an interview and like, tell me why I want this job. I’m like, well, what’s this job about? Really sophisticated right. So obviously I didn’t land a job at Goldman or whatever. And so maybe I would have gotten those jobs and I’d have, you know, millions more dollars in my bank account, maybe. But then I also tell myself, maybe I would have gotten those multimillion dollar jobs and I would have been one of those towers that got hit on 9-11.
Ned Johnson: 35:50
Who can say? Who can say? And so I go back to the college thing of, of course, as parents, you want your kids to have the sun and the moon and the world to be the oyster, of course, because you know how wonderfully capable and talented they are. But I just I really do everything I can with the kids, with the students with whom I work, to not buy into this idea that you have to go to a place like that. You have to go to a place with a 3% acceptance rate to have a successful life. There’s no, there’s no evidence for that, and part of our work, again, is helping young people and their loving parents feel that it’s safe not to worry all the time, because we usually don’t make the best decisions when they’re born out of fear. That’s been my experience, anyway.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 36:36
Well, as usual, all of the ideas from your books kind of swirl around in my head.
Ned Johnson: 36:41
Mine too.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 36:43
Oh, and Bill is back. So you know, know, there’s so much in this book that I love and this story really struck me, so I apologize for people who haven’t read it. You know, I promise not to tell you everything
Ned Johnson:
That’s a preview spoiler alert spoiler alert
Elizabeth Hamblet:
But you told this story, hey, and we get to see Bill and hopefully this video comes out.
Bill Stixrud: 37:04
I got dropped off the meeting.
Ned Johnson: 37:09
Anyone watching this, pretty good, right, pretty good, okay, very accurate yes, pretty good puppet see the Bill puppet.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 37:15
So, um, you were at this meeting with high school counselors and you, um, they agreed that if students weren’t running their own college search, then they weren’t ready for college.
And, Ned, you and I had a conversation a few years ago with my friend Ellen Braaten, Bright Kids who Couldn’t Care Less about, you know all this energy around the college search and applications and this ties in with consultants versus managers, and I love, on page 45, 46, 45 and 46, this energy equation, so it really kind of puts it in very concrete terms like what is the problem? Who’s putting more energy into it? And it’s kind of eye opening,
Ned Johnson: 38:04
I can let Bill answer this, but I want to frame it up by there’s a lecture that Bill gave for years. As a neuropsychologist he’s often invited to particularly schools where kids have learning differences or learning disabilities, and he had a lecture that he gave for years called Who’s Ready for College, and this is one of the last chapters of the Self-Driven Child. But because it was our magnum opus, it’s 340 pages. But because it’s 340 pages. A lot of people times people don’t get to this, um, but so, so Bill really gets credit for for thinking around these things in this, in this energy equation. Do you want to take a take on the energy equation Bill?
Bill Stixrud: 38:36
Yeah, well, I mean, I think that, um, there are a couple really wise things that I learned years ago. One of my friends was a psychotherapist. He got trained in certain kinds of psychotherapy and was taught don’t work harder to help your clients solve their problems than they do, because you’re going to weaken them. They’re going to think that somehow the solutions to their problems are within you, not within them. Also, I did this work with a parent educator 20 years ago with parents.
Bill Stixrud: 39:04
What she says is, when kids have a problem, ask yourself, whose problem is it? Because we’re so wired to solve their problems and I think that so often what I see is kids who are especially kids, who have ADHD or learning disabilities. They do a lot of avoidance and stuff due to anxiety is we work harder than they do to try to make life right and I think, unless they’re suicidal, unless they have an eating disorder, we just have to do a power play. We want to take this respectful, consulting how can I help? Kind of role.
Bill Stixrud: 39:37
I want to support you any way I can, but I don’t want to weaken you by putting more energy in this than you do and also, I don’t know what’s right for you.
I don’t know what kind of life you’re going to want. I don’t know who you want to be. Also, I don’t know if you make some decision that doesn’t seem great, maybe it leads to something really good. I want you to figure this out and that’s why I felt my whole career that I think the best message you can give a teenager and young adult is I have confidence in your ability to make decisions about your own life and to learn from your mistakes and what I tell, and I want you to have a ton of experience doing that before you leave home and certainly before you leave college you know, and I think that Ned and I had a piece in the New York times in 2019 based on college kids who are home by Thanksgiving, because by November 1st, when we wrote the piece, we knew seven kids between the two of us who had started college and were already home.
Bill Stixrud: 40:34
They were already overwhelmed. And to the one, if you look, they didn’t show any of the signs of being ready to go to college, to be able to manage their own academic life, their own personal life, their own self-care, their own self-management independently. And that’s why we place such a huge premium not only on supporting that sense of autonomy and control, helping kids learn to run on their own life, but also encouraging parents to tell your kid I can’t in good conscience send you to college if I don’t think you’re ready. And we offer some guidelines in the Self-Driven Child about how can you tell. What kind of stuff does the kid have to be able to do to know that you’re ready?
Ned Johnson: 41:14
And to answer that and to fill in the last part of this energy equation, that typically when parents are spending particularly the kid who’s 80 or what have you spending 80 units of energy, kid tends to spend 20. And when they get more stressed and I go to 90 to try to amp up because we need more the kid goes to 10. And it doesn’t change until the energy changes and it starts with us and you have to say listen, this is your responsibility, this is your problem. Not, this is your problem, buddy, but respectfully, this is yours. And if I spend more energy on this than you do, you’re going to think that someone other than you is responsible for your own success and you’re responsible for this.
Ned Johnson: 41:56
And I can’t do that to you, right? And when we make peace with the fact that we can’t make our kids do anything, we can make it so unpleasant that they finally give in. But then they’re ultimately choosing to do it themselves. And so I’ll pick on my delightful daughter, Katie if you’re listening to this in her second year of college. I mean, she is an incredible human, has at least 20 IQ points on her dad, but also has all this anxiety, turns out age 19, diagnosed with autism. We didn’t know that, nobody knew, including her, and then other neuropsychologists. Oh well, but you know, I could tell by the time she was four that I was never going to win an argument with this kid, never, never. I mean one, she’s brighter, even age four. And two, she was rigid enough, wasn’t going to give in. So I, so I just I’m like I’m not going to have a fight, I can’t win.
And so she struggled a long way. Middle school was a disaster. She was full school refusal. High school she kind of did nothing through school, bright enough that she got grades that were something. And this friend of ours, who’s now a pastor, who’s a psychologist, said it will be amazing to see what happens when Katie Johnson figures out what she wants to do with that remarkable brain of hers. And I just and it was such a great thing for me to hear because I just sat and just, okay, I’m not going to push her more. I’ll give her all the help in the world that she wants, but I’m not going to push her. And so I watched her spend way more time doing things that seemed unconstructive than things that seemed constructive. But I think in her own way she was figuring herself out of what she wanted to do.
Ned Johnson: 43:25
She finished her first semester of college with the highest possible grades you can get and she said, I know, and she had merit money. I said I know my tuition only pays for this many credits, but I want to also take this class. Would you guys be willing to pay for me to take another class? And when I pulled myself off the floor I’m like what you know and she applied for five different jobs. She kept getting denied but applied and applied, applied.
Ned Johnson: 43:48
She was so avoidant, so avoidant for five, six years of her life. But my wife and I never pushed her on this and when she finally realized this I mean, she’s in college and she recognized this is my life and I’m going to get out of it what I put into it not what my mom and dad put into it, but what I put into it I mean it’s the change between how little she tried to put and how much energy she puts into her building her own life in college now.. It’s just, it’s stunning and parents may be thinking but how do I know that that’ll happen? And I say I don’t know that that’ll happen, happen. And I say I don’t know that that’ll happen. But what we do know is, so long as I am crowding the channel, you know, and I’m giving the 90 to 9% of energy, there’s no space for it to be hers and I have to step back.
Ned Johnson: 44:35
And we did. We gave her all the space in the world and left this, this vacuum there and she stepped when she was ready and she became ready when she was ready there. And she stepped when she was ready she stepped and filled it with, you know, 98% of her energy and and I want people to feel confident that this happens, because your kids have brains in their heads and they want their lives to work out. And so long as we follow up on Bill’s point of help them understand that they’re that this is their life and they’re responsible for it, kids tend to step up because they want their life to be successful.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 45:10
Well, and in this example that you give when we were talking about, you know, when the parents are pushing the kids to meet those deadlines, et cetera, that’s really yeah. So it feels like what I hear you saying, if I may phrase this, that when you’re seeing that, that’s your signal. So what is the worst thing? That happens? Right, your student doesn’t meet the deadlines. You know what happens, but parents are afraid of that.
Bill Stixrud: 45:36
It’s funny somebody my age who I don’t think hardly any of my friends, my parents didn’t go to college. Hardly any of my friends’ parents did either. Somehow we figured it out. Somehow I figured out how to get a PhD and I think that we really, in many ways and out of our best intentions it’s not malicious, but out of our best intentions in many ways treat kids kind of like they don’t have a brain in their head, they couldn’t figure this out on their own. And I still see kids who have lovely parents but they’re making appointments for their graduate school when you’re testing. The kids are not doing it themselves and still doing a lot of managing and I think it’s probably wrongheaded.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 46:29
Um, yeah, so I mean, one of the things that you cite in here is that roughly 30 percent of freshmen don’t return to college for sophomore year. Um, and you talk about how much self-management they have to do and you bring in the brain science. You know, with the prefrontal, prefrontal cortex, which you guys have already discussed, you know, but it’s such a long time before we get them to college, and so you know, as you said, it’s easier when you do things for students and it feels more comfortable and parents feel like they’re being good and supportive parents. So you know what’s developmentally appropriate. You know, if we back it up for them to start working on, so that by the time you know, so that, by the time you know, senior year of high school rolls around, these are kids who are ready to make their own decisions.
Ned Johnson: 47:11
You know we don’t want to do things for kids that they can, that they can do for themselves, even if it’s sub-optimal.
Ned Johnson: 47:16
Because brains develop in the ways that they’re used anything from making decisions to to to doing homework, to college search, search to making messes and figuring out how to solve those messes right. And I think I can credibly say this as a guy for 30 years who’s helped kids prepare for a college admissions test that the most important outcome of high school and adolescence cannot, is not, must not be, where kids go to college and again, it’s my job. I help kids get better scores, better choices, blah, blah, blah. The most important outcome has to be developing the brains that they’re going to carry into adulthood and college. Because you can, you can, you can transfer colleges, you can take time off, you can go, but you don’t get to redo your brain development you know this is, this is the brain that you got, and, yeah, and you make.
Ned Johnson: 48:03
There’s things you can do, even at later years in life. But, my goodness, what could I mean? To go to a school that’s number seven on the list rather than 17 on the list? That that’s going to make a bigger difference as opposed to. Are you motivated in intrinsic ways? Are you less anxious rather than more anxious? Right, do you avoid an eating disorder? Do you avoid a substance use disorder?
Bill Stixrud: 48:24
One thing we point out and I want to have a couple thoughts about this developmental piece that you’re asking about is that one thing we mention in our book is that male physicians are 40% more likely to commit suicide than the general population, and female physicians are 130% more likely to commit suicide.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 48:45
Oh my gosh.
Bill Stixrud: 48:46
And the point is that these are really highly educated people. But if you look at most high schools around the country and most colleges, you’d never know that anybody in charge of these institutions know anything about the brain, that anybody who knows anything about the brain and anybody anybody who knows anything about the brain and cares about the brain, the developing brain that’s not mature until fully mature, until the early mid-30s right we would, would not have had placed so much stress and pressure and and sleep deprivation on kids, we wouldn’t do it.
Bill Stixrud: 49:20
We, we we said I’d much rather educate, teach a kid for for four hours who slept for eight than teach them for eight hours who slept for four. And I think that the concern is that what happens. I think we think that what happens, the reason kids start medical school so many of them suicide is that what they do is their brains try to get in. And so I think back to your question. I talked to a guy recently. He came up to me after a lecture and said I just finished my doctoral dissertation on promoting autonomy in two-year-olds. Well, from the time your kids are very little, do you want to do it this way or this way? Just treat them respectfully, recognizing that we don’t know when they’re hungry, we don’t know when they’re full, and letting them know that they’re kind of the expert on them and certainly that we’ve got to be developmentally sensitive. But the basic principles of a parent consultant apply virtually any age, which is number one offer help, but don’t try to force it, because you can’t really make a kid do anything and you have a much better chance of getting buy-in if we offer them. And second is that we encourage kids to make their own decisions as much as they probably do. Do you want to do it this way? What do you think would be best, with our help and our guidance as possible?
Bill Stixrud: 50:37
But from the time I started this may sound crazy, but early in my career it was much more common for kids in public schools to repeat a grade, particularly kindergarten, first grade, than it is now. The school district would say, well, give them the benefit of time. And I’d see these kids who are 19, and I’d say where are you in school now? I’m a senior in high school. I should be a freshman in college, but my parents made me repeat the first grade. They’re still pissed about it 12 years later.
Bill Stixrud: 51:08
It seemed crazy, and so I started asking six and seven-year-old kids. Tell the kid this is going to be your call, nobody’s going to make you repeat a grade, but talk to people about it. We’ll talk to various people, we’ll make some pros and cons. I saw six and seven year old kids make decisions about their lives that are as good as I could have made for them, and so I think we can start young, and certainly by the time that they’re teenagers. The main thing, the message is, I want you to. The goal here, between now and the time you leave home, is for you to learn to run your life and make your own decisions, solve your own problems. We want you to sculpt a brain that, when something stressful happens, you don’t freak out, you cope with it, and that happens by solving your problems. You’re training your brain to do it.
So we can start pretty young.
Vicki Nelson: 51:54
I’m just trying to process all of this. I want to go back with a couple of questions. We could keep going and going and going. At a certain point I suppose we need to stop. But a couple of specific questions about your new workbook, and one of the things you have in there that really intrigued me is post-it notes, the idea of you know, here’s something to write on a post-it note and, um, you know, put up on the mirror or have somewhere that you’re going to look at it. And one of my favorites you’ve already talked about, um which was “it’s more important for a child to develop a clear sense of who’s responsible for what than for them to always do well.” So you’ve talked about that, but can you just talk about a little bit about, maybe, the mechanics of how you decided to put the idea of put this on a Post-it note up and how you picked what was going to go on the Post-it notes?
Bill Stixrud: 52:58
I think, Vicki, since the Self-Driven Child came out and people say that we love this, it’s just hard Emotionally, it’s hard to do. We’ve been trying to make it feel easier, feel safer, feel that it’s right, and when we’re writing this book, we’re trying to make this simple. It’s a much shorter book. It’s not packed with a lot of science. We got our way through Trying to make it simple. We talk about a principle or an idea.
Bill Stixrud: 53:28
This is try to make it simple and we’d say we’d talk about a principle or an idea. Is that, you know, this is really foundational. This would be a post-it note and it’s kind of stuff is we’re working on it together, the stuff that felt, yeah, this is stuff that’s something you could remember the rest of your life, or this, something that could really make a profound impact. Um, it’s just a way of kind of highlighting some of the points that we feel that if you can keep in your head that, it’s going to be able to really help you manage stressful situations with your kids, because what tends to happen once we’re stressed, we can’t think straight. But if we practice, if we have the post-it note, we keep reminding ourselves daily. This is right, my crazy thinking is crazy. It’s much easier to stay in your right mind when something stressful happens.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 54:10
Or you can do what that lady that you started talking about at the beginning of the book does and just keep showing up to every single one of your talks that’s a different way of doing it.
Ned Johnson: 54:18
That was interesting you’re saying, you know, and the thing that I mean, I think, if we reflect on it, all of us tend to have, you know, sort of aphorisms. You know something our grandmother said to us, our dad said to us we picked up on a book we heard on Oprah or whatever. I think that’s such an elegant way of saying that and for me, you know, I had been Bill and I were palling around for a while before we got to writing the Self-Driven Child and I spent hour after hour after hour with teens and I’d hear something that Bill would share. I’m like, oh, that’s really good. And then I kind of like any good comedian, right, I try to workshop it right and figure out how to deliver the line.
Ned Johnson: 54:58
And there were at least two years or three years or I don know it’s 14 years now, Bill where I’ve said my friend Bill says you know, my friend, you know my friend Bill says and, and those kind of things and they just, they just they percolate in my brain and I think it’s true for all of us, because we all we watch a Ted Talk, we watch youtube, we read a whole book, right, and you know, I mean we don’t remember. I mean, what was the was the Woody Allen thing, you know. But I took a speed reading course one summer. I read War and Peace in 40 minutes. It was about Russia.
Ned Johnson: 55:33
You know, we think there’s you know, I love seeing people when they’ll take like the Self-Driven Child and have like 14,000 post-it notes on there, right. But as brilliant as any book might be, we don’t remember everything that’s in there. But there are points that if we can make them really, these kind of aphorisms, these maxims, and you post it around, then those thoughts, if they’re useful to readers, those thoughts become their thoughts, right, and those thoughts become their words. And then those thoughts often become their words to become their children’s thoughts, right. And look, some of this stuff we invented and some of the stuff we just borrowed, right.
Ned Johnson: 56:07
When we talk about a non-anxious presence, well, we stumbled on this idea that all emotions are contagious. Well, there was a Navy SEAL who from his training, had learned and shared this idea that calm is contagious. Well, that’s a heck of a good line. That’s a heck of a good line. That’s a heck of a good line. And when you realize in the moment, when you’re stressed out and your kid’s freaking out, if you sit there and go, well, this is a lot. I’m not quite sure what the plan is here, but I’m confident we’re going to figure something out. Just watching someone else who, in the moment of something intense, is saying I think we’re going to figure this out. It’s signaling your amygdala like I don’t have to be freaked out because this person’s not freaked out, and just to know that, as an organizing principle is a pretty good one, right? You know, don’t just do something, sit there.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 56:56
Well, and you know, I have my mental post-it notes from you guys, as I started this interview by saying probably once a week at least, I talk to a parent. You know and, and, and talk about being a consultant and also the nothing’s more important than your relationship with your, with your student. So those, those are things I share all the time.
Vicki Nelson: 57:18
I want to ask one last question, and then I don’t know I, and then I don’t know if Elizabeth has a last question
Elizabeth Hamblet:
40 at least yeah,
Vicki Nelson:
I know. We have a whole bunch, but Principle number seven I found really intriguing, which was “encourage radical downtime.” Can you talk about that concept, because it sounds to me like something we all need to think about.
Bill Stixrud: 57:45
You know, when I was in graduate school, the first time before I flunked out, I was in the PhD program in English literature at Berkeley and I went 20 straight weeks without turning in assignments because I was so anxious and insecure that when I work with underachievers I say I went 20 weeks and I turned into nothing top that.
Bill Stixrud: 58:13
But while I was at Berkeley I read this book on the causes of increased nervousness in Americans. It was written by a physician in 1881. And the hypothesized causes were things like the railroad, Western Union, the pocket watch, technological interventions, innovations that made life go faster and made us more attentive to smaller commitments of time, and so when we were working on the Self-Driven Child, I was thinking that now, with the digital technology and there’s an ad for Verizon or something like that a few years ago where the punchline was oh, “that’s so 40 seconds ago” radical downtime than just gardening or knitting or playing uh, playing, uh, uh solitaire on the computer. Radical downtime means, for for us it means periods where it seems like we’re doing nothing, but what we’re really doing is restoring our brain and our well-being. So it’s it’s periods of just mental idling or daydreaming, where you’re activating the brain’s default mode network and having time to daydream. Just be in your own head, not have your earbuds in.
Ned Johnson: 59:35
Monotasking.
Bill Stixrud: 59:38
Yeah or non-tasking Right or non-tasking. You’re just thinking is highly related to creativity, it’s highly related to problem solving and for people who are still developing, it’s usually related to the development of empathy and identity. So it’s that period of just having some unplugged time during the day, just to be in your own head for a little bit.
Bill Stixrud: 59:59
And then it’s meditation. Both Ned and I have been practicing meditation for many, many years and it’s sleep. And we call sleep the most radical downtime because you’re completely out. And yet you know Laurie Santos, the psychologist at Yale who taught that happiness course. I was listening to a lecture of hers not too long ago. She said I consult the average students at Yale they sleep five to six hours a night. When I consult in the elite high schools around the country it’s the same thing. She said we can solve at least 90% of the mental health problems if we just let kids sleep enough not to be tired.
Bill Stixrud: 1:00:40
I think that we need that. We start out in The Self-Driven Child, that we start out in A Self-Driven Child. We start out with this notion in the Radical Down Time chapter, with this kind of notion from the Vedic tradition in India that rest is the basis of activity, that you do better when you’re well-rested. Life goes better when your brain works better. It puts things in perspective better. You solve problems better. You relate to people better when you’re well-rested. So that’s the idea. Does that make sense?
Vicki Nelson: 1:01:17
Well, I think that’s perfect. You know, I want to keep going, going, going, but I think we have to wrap it up and I think we need to allow people some radical downtime.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 1:01:29
Nice callback.
Vicki Nelson: 1:01:32
And I also had this vision, as you were talking of. When students glaze over in my class and I say are you with me? And somebody is going to come back and say I’m engaging in radical downtime,
Ned Johnson: 1:01:40
I will tell you, years ago I was invited to a local, really really good independent school here in the area to give a talk about sleep deprivation and I had my whole presentation and it was entire high school and all the faculty and students and maybe 15 minutes into it, high there’s in this kind of a front, you know, a section of front row of a section. They’re like three kids like like in their heads back um, and this was sort of before everyone had um cell phones with cameras, but it would have been like the best selfie ever, like they’re putting yourself right between two kids are catching flies like catching a picture, you know.
Vicki Nelson: 1:02:24
Their mouths wide open
Ned Johnson: 1:02:27
. They’re putting yourself right between two kids are catching flies. Like catching a picture, you know, but their mouth is wide open, they’re wide open. I’m not gonna. I’m not gonna interrupt that you know. And what I’ll add to everything the bill said I think is so wise is that you know, the way that I think about this is that the inflows of stress into a nervous system or a family system or a school system or a nation are not balanced by healthy outflows of stress. Everything in the world you can think of is going to happen you saw this during COVID of substance use and domestic violence and fights and truancy and murders, and on and on political discord and on and on it goes. Because at a neurochemical level, sleep deprivation causes the same stress hormones that the things that are stressful do. And we don’t think very well when we’re stressed, we don’t take tests very well when we’re stressed, we’re not cognitively flexible or emotionally flexible, we use bills, so we don’t put things into perspective, we don’t solve problems with any kind of creativity. And so if we have a world that’s more stressful and the challenge with things, with technology, it’s stimulating, but it can’t be stimulated without also introducing a certain measure of stress. And so it’s not that we’re ever going to peel cell phones out of our hands or our children’s hands, but we simply need to balance that with time, with radical downtime, and since I shared before about my time in a pediatric psychiatric hospital when I was there this was I’m a million years old, you can’t tell by radio, by podcast, but I was there as a young, as a 12-year-old, 13 or whatever, and break dancing was a thing and there’s a kid there who taught me to break dance. So I wasn’t quite ventilized, but it was anyway. But that popping thing, well, that for me became a tick and so, like people crack their knuckles, I would crack my wrist and I would do this like 10,000 times a day and I wasn’t, I wasn’t constantly doing, just became a tick. And I’m not sure what age I was I had children at this point and I learned to meditate thanks to Bill and a friend of his he connected me with and at some point I looked down at my wrist and I was like when did I stop that tick? When did that? Because I didn’t consciously do it. So when I stopped doing I had no, what was it yesterday? Was it last week? Was the last year? I have no idea. But I can say that at least for me, being well rested and exercise regularly, that I also practice meditation twice a day and I had years of my life with too much stress going into my nervous system and it led to some hard things right.
Ned Johnson: 1:04:57
And if we don’t all have healthy tools to balance the inputs of stress with the outflows of stress, how do kids ever get better tools to balance the inputs of stress with the outflows of stress? How do kids ever get better? How do adults ever get better? And so you know, not everyone in the world is going to practice TM. I think they should, but that’s okay. But you, golly, you got to have something. You have to have some kind of radical downtime and start with sleep. And exactly as Laurie Santos said and Bill reported, we’ve done a bunch of lectures and people say if there’s one thing that you could do, what would you give? One piece of advice, what would we give? And Bill said get enough sleep. And they said what about you? I said what he said get enough sleep, everything works better.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 1:05:36
And we have an interview with Lisa Lewis about-.
Vicki Nelson: 1:05:40
Oh, I love wonderful book Sleep Deprived Teen. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 1:05:45
We have a reading list for you folks. You better get cracking,
Vicki Nelson: 1:05:54
so as we finish up and we have to finish up. Would you just tell us again about your book and when it’s coming out and your podcast and how people can find you.
Ned Johnson: 1:06:06
So the book is the Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child: a Workbook, and we have a podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you, Vanna White. We have a podcast with a wildly inventive title of the Self-Driven Child podcast, where we’ve also had Lisa Lewis and a whole bunch of other wonderful folks as guests on that, and you can find us at the Self-Driven Child dot com or anything close to that.
Bill Stixrud: 1:06:39
And we just learned on Friday that you can find a reference to the Self-Driven Child in the new Bridget Jones movie.
Ned Johnson: 1:06:46
Oh, I’d forgotten that. This is adorable. There’s Bridget Jones and she’s a mum now a mum as they call it across the pond and this or that advice is she hires a nanny because she’s going back to work and the nanny says oh no, no, no, no, we mustn’t pressure children like that. We shouldn’t pigeonhole children like that. We don’t want to give them that much pressure. Haven’t you read How to Raise a Self-Driven Child? I’ll send you the screenshot of it.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 1:07:15
We’ve got to track down the folks.
Ned Johnson: 1:07:17
We’re like my gosh, we’re in the zeitgeist.
Vicki Nelson: 1:07:19
How fun is that? It’s amazing, and the podcast is wonderful, so I’ll put a link to that in the show notes and all the kinds of things that we talked about.
Ned Johnson: 1:07:29
If you can get people like Elizabeth to show up, you look like you know what you’re doing.
Vicki Nelson: 1:07:33
Well, we are really grateful to both of you for giving us so much time and so much to think about, and hopefully everybody is going to go out and get the Seven Principles uh and uh,
Ned Johnson: 1:07:53
oh yes, out on March 25th out on March 25th you can pre.
You can pre-order it now if you were, if you, if you were, inclined um to we are. We’re always grateful for pre-orders, because that’s what every author is trying to do is is to get as many right up front as we can. It’s many fewer words. It’s it’s, it’s. It’s not that expensive. At very very least it makes a wonderful coaster. It’s colorful, it’s pretty.
Vicki Nelson: 1:08:14
And it will whet the appetite to read the actual book.
Elizabeth Hamblet: 1:08:19
I agree.
Vicki Nelson: 1:08:20
Thank you so much for being with us.
