Rebecca Winthrop & Jenny Anderson on Disengaged Teens

Debbie:

Hey Jenny and Rebecca, welcome to the podcast.

Jenny Anderson:

Thanks for having us.

Rebecca Winthrop:

It’s great to be here.

Debbie:

Yes, happy to have you both here from different parts of the world. I love it when we get together for conversations like this. And I’ve already read your formal bios, but I love to start my show by asking my guests to talk a little bit about themselves in relation to their personal why. And since this is a collaboration, I’d also like it if you could share a little bit about the impetus or kind of what brought you together to work on this project. So whoever wants to start, you guys just jump in.

Rebecca Winthrop:

I am happy to start. It’s Rebecca. I, first of all, have worked in education for many years. I keep saying 25, but it’s getting closer to 30 as the years go on and I have always focused on the question of making sure every single kid, no matter where they are or which family they’re born into, gets the best quality education. And one of the things that really drove this collaboration is that during COVID, I realized despite my education background, I did not correctly assess which of my kids were deeply engaged in their own learning at school. So my oldest child was bringing home straight grades, straight A’s, good grades. He was in fifth grade at the time, sixth grade at the time. And I thought, he’ll be fine. I don’t have to worry about him. And in reality, what happened is the minute we stayed home in the US and went past fail, he lost all motivation. And he told me, mom, if it’s not counted, it doesn’t matter. And I realized he was not at all engaged in the learning, the process of learning and skill development. He was engaged in collecting gold stars. And then my younger kid, this will be very relevant for your listeners and you, was in third grade and was convinced he was very stupid because he had just pre-COVID been diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD and was struggling deeply, had been struggling, had internalized this vision of himself that he wasn’t capable and had basically stopped trying altogether, wouldn’t try. And I thought, my gosh, I am going to have to lean in heavily. He’s totally disengaged, he’s not motivated. 

Totally wrong. The minute he was freed from having to keep up with his peers, he blossomed. He caught up two grade levels, we got him dyslexia interventions that helped him. And he was completely motivated. And I realized, my gosh, he loves learning. He’s totally engaged. He just needed a different context. And knowing how powerful families are, I’d been doing research at the Brookings Institution for seven years and knew that families are kind of the missing piece in education reform and often overlooked and when partnering with schools can have tremendous power in supporting kids’ engagement and learning and flourishing. I wanted to do something. If I couldn’t tell how engaged my kids are, how are other folks who don’t have an education background going to do it? And Jenny was my favorite education journalist. She has a really broad global view. And I went on bended knee to her and said, please, please come write this book with me. And it took a couple tries, but she eventually said yes. So Jenny, over to you. Why did you say yes?

Jenny Anderson:

So I had been a finance reporter for a really long time. I almost did, I think my math is wrong. I keep saying 15 and I think it was closer to 20. So I think we keep rounding down Rebecca unaware of how much we’ve done. But I really loved finance. I was at the New York Times. I had a great group of extremely sophisticated, smart, kind of fast paced colleagues and we were really well resourced desk. And then I had my kids and I really just, my interests changed completely. I was super interested in learning and development. And I wanted to dig into those issues or reporter sort of a passport to go learn about the topic you’re covering. I thought, this is great. I can go learn about this stuff that I’m so interested in. And there really wasn’t a desk that did that. There was education. And so I joined the education desk and was kind of disappointed, outraged, looking for the right word at how little attention and resource and experience we put on those desks in journalism and how narrowly we covered it. It was very much about sort of charter schools or not charter schools and is Teach for America a good model or a bad model. Like it just all felt very binary and it wasn’t really about the humans inside the system, the teachers, the students, the parents, listen about any of that and how kids develop and flourish as human beings. So I got very interested in that and started working on that and I quit the New York Times and joined courts, which allowed me to do that in a different way. I was able to kind of create my own beats. One was the science of learning. One was the future of schools. One was neuroscience of infancy. And I just got interested in these topics. 

And when Rebecca came along, I said no originally, not because of Rebecca, who is brilliant and I knew it would be great to work with. But I had written a book and I thought it would be really remembered that it was really hard. But she was very convincing and persuasive. And also, I think there’s just a huge hole in the market around how we support our kids as learners. There’s a lot of books about supporting teens emotionally and they’re great. And we relied on many of those for our own research. But I felt like this specifically how you support them as learners was a little bit of an untapped area. And if we could kind of synthesize all the different research, right, from neurodivergence to sort of science of learning to parenting literature, psychology literature, neuroscience literature, pedagogy, like all of those, they sit in very different places. And so part of our task was to try to bring that together in such a way that it would be useful to a parent with whatever kind of learner they had and the development point of development they were, which was kind of a crazy tall task. But it was totally worth it.

Debbie:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it is a new conversation. It felt that way to me. And you certainly reference people that we’ve had on the show and that I, you know, I’ve read their work throughout the book, but this idea of disengagement, I found very interesting and compelling. And I also like that it kind of stemmed from COVID because we’re just having the chance to observe your kids because we know that a lot of parents that was when they first discovered their child’s neurodivergence or really had that kind of maybe too close of a look at what’s going on with their kids, but to never have considered before. And I love that it was so unexpected from what you presumed was happening at school. So can we just define this idea of disengagement? Is it the same as unmotivated? How do you define it?

Rebecca Winthrop:

So engagement is what you do with your motivation. So I can be very motivated to learn to cook Thai food. And it’s until I start taking a Thai food cooking class, I’m not engaged. engagement is really how kids think when they’re in school, how they feel when they’re in school, and what they do and what they initiate around school. So in academic terms, people talk about cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and agentic engagement. These are the different dimensions, but that’s really it. And it’s a combination of all of those, which is really important because they all affect each other. How you feel at school, you’ve talked about this a lot on your podcast, Debbie, about identity, belonging, how you feel. And this is really true and important if you’re trying to have an inclusive education, sort of classroom or school, how kids feel about school affects how they think and it affects what they do and how they think affects what they do. And it also affects how proactive and what initiation, what they initiate around their learning. So that’s what engagement is. It’s all those dimensions working together and you need to look at all of it.

Jenny Anderson:

Just to lean in on the neurodivergence point. I think one of the really interesting things to me about disengagement is I have one child who shows up for her learning in the collecting the gold stars way, primarily. That’s her primary way of engagement, engaging in school. And I think I also didn’t worry about her. And then I have one child who presented much differently and we ended up having to look much more closely at her. And she did end up having ADHD and she had a couple other sort of health related issues. But as we unpack those, I felt like I was better able to support her as a learner because the neurodivergence and the health issues required me to pay much closer attention and to dig in and to really examine this question of how do you learn? And it was at that moment that I looked over at my other daughter and thought, I’ve been ignoring this question for you because you’re collecting the gold stars, but you need this just as much. And so I don’t want to take anything away from listeners on this podcast, which I know can have a neurodivergent bent. But what’s so interesting about learning is this set of emotions and cognition and behaviors. It’s important for everyone. It’s so important for neurodivergent kids. we’re often asked to, invited to solve the problems there, and yet we’re not in other places as well. So it is sort of deceptive in a way, right?

Debbie:

I had a guest recently say that, you know, she thinks of the neurodivergent kids as like the canaries in the coal mine because often what is good for neurodivergent students is good for all learners, right? But our kids don’t let us take a pass. They demand that we really show up for them and do that work and get curious. And it is one of the, I think, the gifts of raising these kids also can be a challenge if you’re not prepared for that. But yeah, I appreciate what you just said about that. just also I’m thinking about the teen mental health crisis, which you kind of bring in the very beginning of your book. This idea that teens have always hated school. You say we’re clearly in the midst of a teen mental health crisis. Many blame smartphones. There are all these things that people are blaming. But I’m wondering what you see is the connection between whether that technology use, and you have a whole chapter on screens, the technology use, the mental health crisis and disengagement. Like, do you see them all kind of working together to keep each other going? Or what is it? What’s the interaction there?

Jenny Anderson:

So kids have been disengaged from school much longer than sort of technology and phones have been a problem. I think Rebecca and I strongly are in favor of say banning phones from classrooms so that kids can really pay attention to learning. Learning is really hard. It requires a lot of effort and a lot of bravery, a lot of things, but mostly attention. so phones make that hard. So, but taking phones away only gets you halfway there. You know, we constantly say that technology exacerbates the problem of disengagement. It doesn’t create the problem. Kids were disengaged and phones are a 24 seven distraction machine and they make it much easier. There’s a better alternative. But I’m worried personally that if we spend all of our attention focusing on, okay, let’s just get rid of the phones or this is all because of COVID, which also clearly exacerbated a lot of different things and did create, you know, some significant learning loss. But if we focus on that, we’re literally missing the fact that they were disengaged before. They’re deeply disengaged now. And if we fix those two problems, i.e. let’s do more of the same thing we did before to make up for the learning gains and let’s take away the phones, even though we’re in favor of that in classrooms, you don’t solve the disengagement problem. 

So we need to be paying attention to the quality of learning experiences and really thinking about some of the school design questions as well as you what we as parents and educators can do, which is a lot. But the technology piece, think we feel that, and Rebecca, feel free to correct me, but that we really don’t, we want kids to build agency with, but we want kids to have agency in all things, especially in their learning, but also with their phones, which means not taking them away from them at all times, but helping them learning to manage their use of it, including their emotional regulation of their use of it and what’s happening to themselves. So a lot of sort of metacognitive exercises around that which we talk about. taking them away in classrooms is a little bit different from parents taking them away all the time. I think that’s going to be a harder endeavor, certainly for anyone who has a teenager. luck with that project. But you we definitely, I spend a lot of time in my house and we talk a lot in the book about strategies and ways to help kids manage their use and understand what the technology is doing to them, how it’s making them feel and how they can take control of some of their sort of emotions and behaviors around the phone.

Rebecca Winthrop:

The only thing I would add, Debbie, on your question around engagement, phones, what’s happening, is that for a long time, kids have been disengaged, as Jenny said. But the costs of disengagement today are much, much higher than they were a couple of decades ago when you could coast through school, get basic sets of skills, get access to perhaps college and employers you know, we’re happy to hire you. But today, employers are looking for a whole other set of competencies. So in addition to academic rigor, kids need things like collaborative problem solving, creative thinking, empathy and interpersonal self-regulation, metacognition, learning agility, all of those things you cannot develop if you’re just coasting through life and through school. So this is why today we think that the disengagement crisis merits a lot of attention.

Debbie:

Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. I want to take a break because I keep thinking of more questions and I need to take a pause here. But when we come back, I’d love it if you could walk through the four modes of learning that you describe in the book. And one of them coasting along, I recognized immediately as the passenger, which is something I’m very familiar with in my household. Okay, so in the book you introduce these four modes of learning in which teens show up in school. You have the passenger, the resistor, the achiever, and the explorer. I’m not sure if there’s a particular order they should be laid out in, but would you take a few minutes and walk us through what those are?

Rebecca Winthrop:

Sure, Jenny, you want me to do it or you want to go? So the four modes of engagement are how kids learn, which is equally as important as what they learn. And they are passengers where kids are doing the bare minimum, coasting along, looking for shortcuts. They might be happy to go to school to see their friend, but they are behaviorally engaged. They show up, but they’ve dropped out of learning. The achiever mode is when kids are trying to jump through every hoop that is set in front of them and get the gold star on the other end. And they’re putting in a lot of effort and often they’re developing a lot of good skills, organizational skills, goal setting skills, but it can tip into unhappy achiever mode. And we can come back to that where they really do get burned out. And this is where a lot of mental health problems come in and they end up being quite fragile learners. And then you have resister mode which is what everybody dubs as the problem child When really they are using their behavior their voice their actions to communicate to us not always in an appropriate way But to communicate to us Adults in their lives whether it’s teachers or parents or what-have-you that things are not working this context doesn’t work This doesn’t work for me and they have they’re disengaged on all fronts, but they do have one thing going for them Which is they’ve got some to say, hey, this isn’t working. And they have agency. It’s just pointed away from their learning. And often you can, if you really figure out the root cause of what’s happening and address it, you can help those kids move to explorer mode, which is where we want most kids to spend their time. Or I would rather say all kids to spend most of their time, as much time as possible in explorer mode. And explorer mode is when kids are engaged on all fronts. They’re showing up. They’re interested and curious. They are making connections between what they’re learning in the real world or between what they’re learning in one class and another class. And they’re being proactive. So these are the kids who raise their hand, not just like the achiever kids who raise their hand and say, how do I get it right? What do I need to do to get an A? Which is a useful skill. These are kids who raise their hand and ask questions about things they’re curious about. It’s the kid who has a science class on extreme weather and gets excited about tornadoes and comes home. And when you say, Hey, how was your day? They don’t say fine or okay or good or boring. They just start talking to you about tornadoes and they go and, and, you know, go on a YouTube deep dive on learning all about tornadoes. They’re being actively, they have agency over their learning. They’re being quite proactive and those skills when kids are in explorer mode in school, it’s the trifecta. They get better grades, they’re happier and they’re preparing themselves for a world of generative AI.

Debbie:

Would you say that, because I recognize, you know, my child who’s now 20, but in every one of these, I can see, you know, phases of their life when that was the predominant mode, like are these fluid? I know that, you know, and I want to get into the resistor because that’s also a profile I think many listeners here are going to relate to. And you talk about how to help your kid kind of shift out of that. But how do kids relate typically to these different modes that you identified?

Jenny Anderson:

We’re really clear that these are not identities. These are not labels. These aren’t ways to pigeonhole kids at all. They’re very dynamic, fluid states. What you’ve seen in your kids, Debbie, is what we see all the time. And we have a character in the book who turns up in a different mode in a different chapter, in different classes. kids are reacting to the environment around them, how they’re feeling that day. There’s a whole host of things that are going to affect how they show up. The challenge is when they get stuck in a mode. And part of the reason we wanted to develop these was to help parents better understand the thoughts and feelings and behaviors and agency that underpin these behaviors so that they can help them not get stuck. Engagement is a continuum. And so, you know, what starts as being a class clown can, you know, ultimately sort of four years later, look a lot more serious.

And which is not to say obviously kids shouldn’t laugh and have a good time in class, but you know, for seeing persistent behavior. So these are dynamic fluid states. What we hope is that when kids do get stuck, when you see a kid who is coasting and continues to coast and is really only exhibiting that coasting behavior, that’s a sort of call to action to help that kid get unstuck and get them moving among the modes because what you want to be able to do is parent the kid you have in the mode they are in the moment you have in front of you, which sounds like a lot, but they’re pretty straightforward modes and you know your kids really well and you’ll start to see it. It’ll be kind of like you can’t unsee it once you see it and then it’s a bunch of tips and tools for those particular modes. As you say, a resistor can be a pretty tricky one.

Debbie:

Yes, yeah, and as a former class, I was voted class clown in my senior poll in high school, so I did eventually become an explorer, but it took me a number of years, I’ll just say. But let’s talk about passenger mode for a few minutes, because to me, you said when kids coast along, they consistently do the bare minimum and complain that classes are pointless, they need help connecting school to their skills, interests, or learning needs. You also say that it’s everywhere that this is kind of the most predominant, the most common mode of engagement you said. I know, so many listeners of this show are raising gifted kids, twice exceptional kids. And this to me really jumped out as being something a lot of those kids get stuck in with that maybe a more fixed mindset and, and what a wake up call it can be for these kids who’ve been coasting along. then suddenly they can’t and the rubber meets the road. Do you talk about that and how parents can help their kids navigate that?

Rebecca Winthrop:

We definitely do. As Jenny referenced, the whole second half of the book is the engagement toolkit for parents, as well as for teachers. Teachers can use it too, but primarily for parents. And for passenger mode, we found that there could be many, many reasons that kids get in any mode. But for passenger mode, we found that there were two predominant reasons that often showed up in our research. One is that kids are outside their zone of proximal development. It could be because they’re neurodivergent or have learning differences, it could be that they miss something in class and they have a gap in their knowledge, or that they already know all this stuff, got it really quickly and they’re bored to tears. So for listeners, zone proximal development is just the speaking way of saying, this is a sweet spot for how kids learn, the zone where kids learn the best where they’re challenged, you can’t learn without stretch and challenge. So they’re challenged and they can get there with support. So if kids are outside the zone, it’s either too easy or too hard. And both reasons are heavily why kids just sort of end up checking out. The other reason that ended up being very predominant for us was lack of what we would call relevance in education, which is what I’m learning in school seems to have no real life applicability to anything I will do in the real world or anything anybody else will do in the real world, even though, of course, it does likely have something to do. But they don’t see the connection and they feel deeply uninterested and interested when kids are interested in something. All sorts of amazing things happen. Increased attention span, increased learning outcomes, actually emotional states, increased self-regulation, all sorts of things. so that connecting kids to their interests is certainly something we talk about in Jenny’s show. I pass to you to talk about some of the things that we can do as parents for passenger mode.

Jenny Anderson:

Yeah, mean, three very quick kind of tools to address some of the challenges Rebecca saw. One is definitely trying to be the bridge for your kid, be the bridge between the content that they’re learning in school and what’s happening in the real world. And you can use the internet for this. You can use chat GPT for this. the point isn’t to sort of drum more knowledge into their heads. The point is to try to figure out, I was doing some physics revision with my daughter last night and was just blown away by the way. It was kind of going through some of the questions, like all of this stuff. We did a whole section on sort of gamma rays and I had a family member who had cancer and I was like, God, this was all really relevant for sort of, you know, how we got to look at scans and CT scans and like, this is cool. This is like, this has real life. And that was my message. My message wasn’t you better get this right. It was, my God, this stuff literally shows up in the real world in very important ways. And the other thing I was doing in that moment is modeling the thrill of learning. I’m really showing her that this stuff is cool. Like, aren’t you lucky to be able to do this? Kids work really hard in school. Neurodivergent kids in particular are expending so much energy to show up and try to behave and try to stay on task.

And we need to show them that it’s worth their while, right? Not just like you behaved well, but wow, like you, you learn stuff today. That’s really, really cool. And I guess the final tip is less nagging and more nudging. And that’s really hard. And it can be particularly hard with neurodivergent kids. But nagging just doesn’t work. We have a great brain study in the book where, you know, when you stick a teenager in a brain scanner and you hear a the voice of their mother criticizing them, the problem solving part of their brain sort of shuts down. And so we know it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work in marriage. doesn’t work in sort of, you know, it doesn’t work at work. It doesn’t work with kids. And yet it is like our go-to. Less nagging, a little bit more nudging, trying to help them make a plan as best they can. Some kids need more support for that than others, but helping them to make a plan versus make the plan for them, tell them to make a plan or yell at them to make a plan or nag them to make a plan, help them, you know, be there as part of the plan making and then help them with the metacognitive exercise of like, that, you know, when they’re not stressed and when they’re not tired, hey, did that plan work? Like, what should we do next time when we are facing a similar challenge? Let’s make a plan now and then we don’t have to negotiate it at the moment. Like when you’re really bummed about having to do your homework. So those are three strategies for passengers who are dealing with both the lack of relevance or the lack of ZPD or in the wrong time, there’s an approximate development.

Debbie:

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Thank you. Thanks for walking us through that. And yeah, that’s so in alignment with conversations we’ve had about scaffolding. And of course, I mention Ned Johnson and Bill Stixrud’s book, The Self-Driven Child, probably every five episodes or something. But I’ve learned so much about that through hard-won experience about the benefits of showing up as a coach or a consultant and not the nag, which was probably my more natural role. Let’s take one more quick break and then I would love to spend a little time talking about the Okay, so the other mode that really jumped out of me, let me say that again. The other mode of learning that jumped out of me in the book as being especially relevant for this community is the resistor. You wrote, when kids resist, they struggle silently with profound feelings of inadequacy or invisibility, which they communicate by ignoring homework, playing sick, skipping class or acting out. We know there’s a lot of school refusal and you write about that in the book as well. And I just found this profile so interesting. And you also talk a lot about belonging uncertainty as being an aspect of that. So would you spend maybe just a few minutes talking us through the biggest things that you see in the resistor profile that would be relevant for neurodivergent kids?

Rebecca Winthrop:

Sure. The biggest things for kids who are in resistor mode and particularly who get stuck in resistor mode is one that you just mentioned, belonging uncertainty, which is this concept that’s been quite well established in research that when kids don’t know where they belong in school socially, they don’t know where they fit in. This is a huge issue for a range of kids, especially kids who are neurodivergent, but it could be black and brown kids in a majority white school. It could be a whole variety of things. It’s very anxiety producing. First of all, imagine, imagine you show up to a cocktail party and you don’t know a single person and you don’t know who to talk to. Like it is a little nerve wracking and it takes away from their ability to focus on the learning because you’re, you’re spending so much time thinking, are they looking at me? Should I, who do I talk to? You know, and interpreting signals that might be innocent as signs of you’re not you don’t belong here. So that is one we found was quite common and absolutely impeded kids’ learning. And then there was a range of other reasons why kids got stuck in resistor mode. So one is overwhelmed. Kids would miss some parts of learning and get behind in school, and then it would just pile up. They didn’t know how to ask for help. And eventually would say, that’s it. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. Their identity was like, I’m not a good student anymore. We talked to several kids who were like, well, I guess I won’t go to college. That’s all it’s I’m all, you know, I’m six, 15 years old. It’s all done for me now. When we’re like, no, you can catch up. You ask for help. You can, you know, go to your teacher or you can do makeup lessons. So overwhelmed for sure. 

The other one has to do. I mean, this is a lot of bull. There’s a lot of bullying happening in school. And I would say neurodivergent kids probably bear a large brunt of that. And that again is really hard to go to school and absorb your learning when you’re, being bullied in another is real, mental health problems and mental health and engagement go together. And it just depends which one starts which. So if you’re deeply disengaged, kids are much more likely to have poor mental health, but also if something happens outside of school and they can engage less, you get less engaged. So they kind of coexist. So those are some of the big reasons that we found kids got really stuck in resistor mode. And I should say resistor mode is a continuum. As you said, it can be kids who are sort of overwhelmed board, not seeing the relevance of starting as class clown. And then it slowly slips into not doing homework or starting to skip a class or then starting to skip school or then, you know, and then the things that I mentioned. And there’s a very high rate of chronic absenteeism in school quarter of kids and the latest data really don’t want to go to school. And they don’t just wake up one day and say, well, that’s it. I’m done with school. So there is a way to intervene if we can spot it sooner, which is why we have created these modes. So Jenny, I wonder if I pass to you to talk about what we might do as parents for resister mode kids.

Debbie:

Well, I do want to ask one question before we get to that. I also just found it interesting you wrote that resistance can become an identity. And we know that that’s like one of the primary jobs of an adolescent is to create and form their identity. And you say they’re at risk of costly coping. Maybe as part of your, know, Jenny, if you could talk with us about what we as parents can do to support kids who are stuck in resistor mode, incorporating that aspect of the identity, because that is something, especially kids who are very single-minded, right, or focused and they can dive deep into that identity.

Jenny Anderson:

Yes, and that can be very scary. So costly coping, that’s a term that we got from Lisa DeMore, who wrote The Emotional Lives of Teens. She’s a psychologist. And what it means is you find costly ways to your well-being to cope with the set of feelings that you have. So that could be drinking, that could be drugs, that could be withdrawing from school completely, but you’re doing something to try to make, to manage the set of emotions, which are very unpleasant that you have. And so obviously we want to avoid that. And I think you’re right to point out that, Resistor identity for kids who are very focused and can be very single-minded can be particularly challenging. and so I guess there’s so many great, there’s like three or four things I really want to talk about. So one option is to talk super fast and the other is I’ll tell you all four and you can cut out whichever one gets too long. But there’s a woman named Daphna Oyserman who does research about something called future possible selves. And she’s done research on a variety of demographics, extremely rigorous research and showed that when you can help kids see another path for themselves and not just sort of aspire and hope for it, but kind of make a plan as to how they get there, anticipate some of the obstacles that they’re gonna meet along the way, think about some of the ways that they’re gonna meet those obstacles. That is a really effective way of helping break that tunnel vision about I’m just a bad kid or in their mind like I’m a rebel. Like I love being a rebel. I’m a great rebel. This is fantastic. You are helping them identify a goal and this is not going to be I want to be an astronaut in 20 years. This is I want to be on the varsity basketball team or I want my friends to look up to me or they’re identifying a future possible self and you’re helping them close the gap between what that goal is and how to get there. And that’s the scaffolding that you talk about, right? That’s really trying to get to your kid and their level and their interests and who they are and help them get to that future possible self. So that was one of the things we talked about. Another is, and I really love this one a lot, is this concept of getting in the trenches with them when kids are really stuck, really misbehaving, very inappropriate behaviors and really tricky for parents, right? This is, and your listeners will be very familiar with this. Like you’re getting judged by the whole world. You’re being judged by other parents. You’re being judged by teachers. You’re being told over and over again that your kid is just not doing the thing that every other kid in the world seems to be doing. You need to be doing it instead of trying to push your kid or make them do the thing that you need them to do. You need to get in the trenches with them. You just need to be side by side with them and kind of see the world from where they’re seeing.

And there was this language I can’t quite remember who used it, but like they literally can’t take one step forward. And so you need to get there next to them and figure, help them figure out how to take a half a step like that. The goal, the goal gets small, you know, smaller and you’re there to try to take one step. The last thing I would talk about with resistor mode is emotion coaching, which is very, very well established that a lot of parents from a place of true love think of big emotions as dangerous and scary and something to be shut down because they’re scary. And they think it’s in the interest of their kid to clamp down on those emotions and sort of keep them inside. And that really what we need to be doing is coaching kids to, and I’m sure you, I know you’ve talked about this, I’ve listened to broadcast when you talk about this, coaching our kids to recognize their emotions and then manage them. And this comes out of some really interesting research around parents who were divorcing and the parents who talked about the divorce and talked about the pain that the divorce was causing, but did talk about it. Those kids over time tended to fare a little bit better with their emotions, managing their emotions than those who said it’s going to be easier if none of us talk about this just because it’s so uncomfortable. So that idea is sort of really managing emotions, which is again, I think a very familiar topic. The final thing on resistors is there is hope because resisters do have agency, which when it’s not pointed towards learning and when it’s pointed away from everything you’re trying to get them to do is very hard and very painful. But when you get it pointed in the right direction, these kids have something that passenger mode kids and achiever mode kids lack, which is the ability to really shape, express what they’re interested in and try to shape their learning to what they’re interested in so they have the agency that some of the other modes are missing. So just a little bit of a silver lining for those who have kids in resistor mode because it is super hard.

Debbie:

Yeah, gosh, I so appreciate everything you’re sharing. I’m just thinking this is such a generous gift to my listeners that you’re talking about all the stuff with us. So thank you for that. And I want to be mindful of the time. And there’s so much that we haven’t gotten into. So what I would love as a way to just kind of wrap up, you do spend, you know, a lot of the book and the second part of the book talking about this explorer mode and how we can support our kids because that’s really the optimal mode. That’s where we want our kids to spend their time. Would you share one or two pieces of advice for parents for how we can lean into that and really start to foster explorer mode in our kids?

Rebecca Winthrop:

Well, Jenny’s already talked about modeling the thrill of learning, just curiosity is contagious. So there’s a lot of evidence to say that we are, we as parents are really the model for how to be a learner for our kids. We are there, our child’s first learner in some ways versus our first, the first teacher. So that’s number one. Number two, balance, talking about what they did in school as in performance with what they learned about includes asking about what they’re learning, their content and have a discussion. And if you don’t remember a single thing, I seem to have managed to make it this far. And I remember basically nothing from high school as far as I can tell because I have kids in high school. And I say, well, teach me about that. What does that mean? And kids love teaching their parents because when you have less knowledge, they feel great. So you could try that. Jenny, what are the other one or two tips you would leave?

Jenny Anderson:

Yeah, I think and you mentioned the self-driven child and Bill and Ned who are brilliant and they have a book on this as well, conversation with adolescents is extremely powerful for their learning. Discussion is to adolescents what cuddles are for infants necessary for brain development. It is like the number one way we are going to help these networks of their brains connect to each other and help them make meaning of the world. And so I think there’s just two pieces of that. One is to stay emotionally connected to them. I was just listening to your podcast about girls and my gosh, was it so relevant to me? I said something to one of my daughters last weekend, which just was judgy and I thought I was protecting her and wow, I just severed the connection and there was no way she was going to come back to me for a while, right? She was just not going to do that. So keep the connection as much as you can and yeah, I do think this kind just really, really lean into the content of their learning. I really did not. I’ve tried to avoid being a helicopter parent my whole parenting career. And I think I thought that meant you stay away from digging into school because that feels very like surveilling and getting in their business about school. like, that’s not it. You know, that all you’re doing is letting them know that it’s really worth their while. 

So really high quality discussion, staying connected to them and discussing the things that they care about. My husband is away right now. And he said to me, he called last night. He said, so would you guys talk about dinner? I said, this is terrible. I’ll just say it’s true. It was like we gossiped about everybody for like all of their friends for the whole dinner. We were just like, oh, this girl is doing this and that girl is doing this. But like, love doing that. And I just got in there with them. I was like, tell me what is going on with the 14 year old set? Like, you know, who’s up, who’s down? You know, obviously they need to be kind and I’m not trying to model gossiping, but I’m also kind of trying to meet them where they are. This isn’t something we do a lot, but it was kind of fun. So those would be my tips.

Debbie:

That’s awesome. That’s great. Thank you so much for that. Yeah, and you have some great suggestions in the book of how to navigate those conversations and ways to kind of you talk about going deep instead of broad, which I really liked and how to, you know, just not ask like the Inquisition what happened, what happened on this, you know so I appreciate that and the reminder to stay deeply connected and just for listeners, the podcast that Jenny’s referring to, that was my conversation with Kathy Adams on her new book, is called restoring, restoring our girls. great book also. So, okay. So much more we could get into. I’m really just going to encourage listeners to go check out your book. The book is called The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better and Live Better. It’s just out. It’s getting a great response, which is really exciting to see. I do think it’s such an important book. Is there anywhere you would like listeners to connect with you to learn more about your work or engage?

Rebecca Winthrop:

Absolutely. If you guys want to stay connected, please follow Jenny on Instagram at @jennyandersonwrites and me at @drrebeccawinthrop. also both are linked in and would love to connect there. Jenny has a substack called How to Be Brave, which is beautiful. And I have a LinkedIn newsletter called Winthrop’s World of Education, which is less beautiful, but very informative. We also have a website, the disengagedteam.com where you can get a study guide and find various links to things related to the book.

Debbie:

That’s awesome. Yeah, Jenny, I spent some time on your, on your sub stack. I thought it was great as well. Rebecca, I have not checked out your LinkedIn newsletter, but I will. Well, I just want to thank you again. Congratulations on the book. It was such a pleasure to chat with you both today. And yeah, we’ll have to continue the conversation maybe with the follow-up book. that in the… I shouldn’t talk about that. It’s too soon.

Jenny Anderson:

Why don’t you just follow up on that? I think there’s more we can cover in the book without having to read another one.

Rebecca Winthrop:

We can do a follow-up conversation with you anytime, Debbie, without writing another book. But thank you for all you do and thank you for having us.

Debbie:

Perfect, sounds good.

Jenny Anderson:

Thank you for the talk. Yeah.