Giving Children More Control. A Conversation with Bill Stixrud.

Can giving your child more autonomy lead to a happier, more successful future? Kaity and Adriane explore this transformative idea with Dr. William R. Stixrud, a renowned clinical neuropsychologist and co-author of The Self-Driven Child.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• The power of shifting from fear-driven parenting to fostering a calm, supportive atmosphere that allows children to flourish.
• The transition from protective to consultative parenting, and how it supports children's autonomy in education.
• Practical strategies for managing parental anxieties through therapy, exercise, and meditation, ultimately benefiting children by reducing control tendencies.
• A fresh perspective on the contentious issue of homework, advocating for a respectful, supportive approach that honors children's individuality and promotes student empowerment.
• The crucial relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, and how understanding these brain structures can help in recognizing the biochemical factors influencing child behavior.

Join us as we delve into how emotional regulation skills, social and emotional development, and self-paced learning can create nurturing environments where children feel valued and empowered to take charge of their lives.

ABOUT THE GUEST:

Dr. William (Bill) R. Stixrud is a clinical neuropsychologist, founder of The Stixrud Group, a member of the teaching faculty at Children's National Medical Center, and an assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine. He is the author, with Ned Johnson, of the bestseller, The Self-Driven Child. He is also a frequent lecturer on adolescent brain development, stress & more.

Relevant links:

• “Giving Children More Control. A Conversation with Bill Stixrud” on KindlED
• “Building Healthy Brains. A Conversation with Ned Johnson” on KindlED 
• The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives by William Stixrud PhD and Ned Johnson
• The Self-Driven Child website
• “The Case for the Self-Driven Child” by Gareth Cook for Scientific American
• Steven Maier bio
• Dr. Sonia Lupien bio
• “The Self-Driven Child with Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson” on Tilt Parenting
• “How to Talk with Kids with Ned Johnson and Dr. William R. Stixrud” on Front Row Dads
• What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home by William Stixrud PhD and Ned Johnson

Transcript

Hi, it's me, Kaity, and me, Adriane, and you're listening to KindlED, a podcast where we dig into the science behind building relationships and environments that help kids unlock their full potential. Together, we'll discover evidence-based tools and methods that will empower you to kindle the curiosity, motivation, and well-being of the young people in your life.

Welcome to KindlED. Kaity, who are we talking to today?

Oh my gosh, I’m so excited about this interview today. It’s going to blow your mind. We are talking to Dr. Bill Stixrud. Dr. William R. Stixrud is a clinical neuropsychologist and founder of the Stixrud Group, as well as a faculty member at Children's National Medical Center and an assistant professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the George Washington University School of Medicine. He’s also the co-author, with Ned Johnson, of the national best-selling book, The Self-Driven Child, which is published in 14 countries and 12 languages and has sold more than 2 million copies in China alone. He and Mr. Johnson have also co-authored a critically acclaimed second book, What Do You Say? Talking with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home. Dr. Stixrud's work has been featured in media outlets such as NPR, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London, The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, Time Magazine, Scientific American, Businessweek—the list goes on and on. This guy is amazing. He’s a longtime practitioner of Transcendental Meditation and he plays in the rock band Close Enough.

I did not know that about him!

I did not know that either! I’m so excited to interview Dr. Stixrud today.

Dr. Stixrud, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re so excited to learn from you.

Delighted to be here.

I don’t know if you will meet two bigger fans of your work. Honestly, when I told Adriane we got this interview, we were freaking out. We are very big into the research and everything. We started Prenda microschools in 2018, and I didn’t read The Self-Driven Child until 2020.

When did it come out?

2018, right when we were having our pilot semester. You were publishing this, and I didn’t find it until later. I emailed our founder after I read it and said, “Someone just wrote an entire book that completely substantiates everything we’ve been doing.”

That’s wonderful.

Honestly, your book is why I’m here too at Prenda. I read it when my kids were struggling in school, and the whole part about asking them where they want to go—we did that, and they started in Prenda. I loved it so much and saw the similarities, and here we are today. Your book played a big role in why I’m here.

That couldn’t make me happier to know that. I don’t know where I started thinking like this, but I raised my own kids walking this walk, and they turned out great. I just know it’s possible to raise successful kids without worrying about them all the time and being on them all the time. That’s my mission: to help people feel that it’s safe to do that.

There’s so much pressure as a parent to make sure your kids are on track, hitting all these metrics, and are the same as their peers. It’s really hard to hold on to that message. Something that reading The Self-Driven Child really did for me was help me feel like there was a little bit of authority behind what my intuition was already telling me.

Tell us a little bit about who you are, your work, and why you’re so passionate about what you do. What’s your big “why”?

For the last 40 years, I’ve been a clinical neuropsychologist. My day job is testing kids who have learning problems, attention problems, emotional problems, or social problems. I try to figure out where their strengths are, what’s going wrong, and how to help them. I never get tired of it. I love the work. Ned Johnson and I have written these two books, The Self-Driven Child and What Do You Say?, mainly out of concern for the mental health crisis affecting young people and what we consider an unusual solution to the crisis: giving kids more control over their own lives. We wrote The Self-Driven Child about how important it is for young people to have a sense of control over their own lives for a variety of reasons. We wrote the follow-up book with a lot of language to make it easier for parents to communicate in a way that supports that sense of control. My mission in life is to help reduce suffering, and I think this approach can help with that a lot.

I love that. I’ve also read What Do You Say?. It’s full of practical advice, and I love it. I have a similar “why” because I see the mental health crisis, and I talk to parents all the time about the same concept. It’s amazing that you’re able to see it in the clinical setting, and I’m seeing it more on the playground in the social setting. I really thank you for this work and for writing these books to get them out to as many people as possible because I really do think it’s going to help with this crisis.

I hope you’re right.

Dr. Stixrud, can you give us a little more information about what that mental health crisis looks like? Some statistics, if you have them on hand, to help our listeners understand that we do have a problem?

I was just talking with a scientist who went into three suburban Ohio school districts—these are high-achieving school districts—and 76% of the kids reported symptoms of an anxiety disorder, major depression, or both. They asked the kids to rate the sources of stress and pressure in their lives. The top 12 did not include social media, global warming, income inequality, or a shrinking job market. All 12 related to school performance, academic achievement, and getting into college. The rate of completed suicides, even in young children ages 5 to 11, has increased significantly, even before the pandemic. Everything worsened during the pandemic. Since then, it’s almost impossible to find a therapist who has an opening or a psychiatrist who can prescribe medication. It’s really at a crisis level. If a child or teenager develops an anxiety disorder or becomes depressed, it changes the brain in a way that doesn’t doom them, but it increases the likelihood that they’ll have recurrent anxiety or bouts of depression well into adulthood. They’re sculpting a brain, and we don’t want kids, especially teenagers, to be sculpting a brain that’s used to being exhausted, unhappy, and anxious. We want to prevent mental health problems and treat the ones that already exist. I think focusing on giving kids more control is one of the most powerful ways we can do this.

Absolutely. In your book, you and Ned outline four false assumptions that we commonly hold as adults, which make it hard for us to give kids what they need. We’d like to look at each one of these and have you flesh them out a bit. The first one is that there is a narrow path to success. The stakes are too high. We think it’s too high to let kids make decisions for themselves. Can you talk a little more about that?

It’s based on a scarcity assumption that only a few people will be successful. It’s based on the insane idea that only top students develop meaningful, successful lives. It’s also based on the idea that if you ever fall off this narrow path, you’re screwed. I was just talking with a friend whose kid graduated with a 1.67 GPA from a high-achieving suburban school district in Northern Virginia. He thought he had no educational options, so he joined the Navy. He actually qualified for the SEALs program, but they discovered a medical condition, so he couldn’t be in the SEALs. They put him on a boat, and he’s smart. Outside of school, he loves taking on responsibility. They taught him a lot of skills, and he learned quickly. He took on as much responsibility as they gave him, and the Admiral loved him. After two years on the boat, he decided he wanted to go to college. He took the SAT, got a letter from the Admiral, and now he’s a fourth-year student at Harvard. He graduated from high school with a 1.67 GPA. In The Self-Driven Child, the last chapter, "Alternate Routes," is all about the people I know personally who either flunked out of school, didn’t finish college, or took a circuitous route to developing a successful, meaningful life. The thing is, when you tell kids how broad the possibilities are—especially in America where you have a lot of chances to recreate yourself—it motivates them. It doesn’t make them slack off; it motivates them.

I think there’s something to be said for the scarcity mindset that you mentioned. We come to parenting or educating from that place where a lot of our behaviors are driven by fear. That affects our nervous system. We’ll talk a little later about being a non-anxious presence, but it really starts here, doesn’t it?

Yeah, it does. In our new book, we wrote a chapter called “Communicating a Non-Anxious Presence,” and we start with the idea that kids must be getting the message to be very afraid. Why is that? So much of it is just not based on reality. My mission is to show the science of why it’s safe not to worry about your kid all the time and not to feel like you have to control them all the time. That assumption is simply incorrect. When you give kids a more accurate model of reality—I just tested a kid who flunked all her classes in 10th grade, first semester. Before I tested her, I told her mother to tell her that she could flunk all her classes for the next two years, and if she decided that was a bad idea, she could go to community college for 30 credits and then apply to most colleges in this country without her high school transcript. She was so overwhelmed, thinking she had screwed up her whole life, and didn’t see the point of trying. When her mother explained this to her, she started working hard the next day. Kids need to see that there’s a path for them, a way to get from where they are to a better place. That’s part of my job, helping them see that path. But if the communication is that you’ve always got to do extremely well and never fall off the path, no wonder kids are so afraid—whether they’re high-achieving or lower-achieving and wondering what the point of trying is.

The way kids maximize their potential is not by constantly pushing them. Constant stress and pressure are terrible for the developing brain. Excessive pressure to excel is the fourth leading cause of unwellness in adolescence, after poverty, trauma, and discrimination.

Wow. What I see, too, is that we’re not meeting them where they are developmentally. That’s kind of what you’re getting at, right?

Absolutely. It turns out that most people in most parts of the world are living in the safest place and time in human history. If a child gets abducted, we hear all about it, so we think it happens much more than it did when we were growing up. It doesn’t. If a child gets abducted, the most likely culprit is a divorced spouse. Certainly, there are dangers in the world, but the idea that this is an increasingly dangerous world is just not accurate. There’s a story in the second book about Mr. Rogers. When he was a kid, he was walking on a high wall, and his grandma told him to get down because he could fall. His grandfather said, “Let him walk. If he falls, he can handle it.” Mr. Rogers concluded that was one of the formative experiences of his life. He had confidence that he could handle things himself. We know that the way kids become resilient and emotionally strong and able to handle situations is by handling stressful situations with support when necessary. But when you cope with a stressful situation, it changes your brain in a way that makes it more likely that when something stressful happens again, you’ll go into coping mode instead of freaking out or avoiding it.

That’s part of the human experience, but we try to protect them from being human. We all are going to fail, but we need to learn how to overcome those failures.

I was in Houston before the pandemic, and we had dinner with a bunch of parents who had brought us to their school there. One person mentioned Life360, the tracking program, and asked what I thought about it. I said I thought it was a terrible idea. They asked, “Should I delete it from my phone right now?” I said, “If you can watch your kid and they say, ‘Mom, I feel safer if you do,’ okay, but what does it communicate to Joey’s kid? ‘I’m so anxious I can’t go five seconds without knowing where you are. I don’t trust you to keep yourself safe.’ Kids are much more likely to be safe if they know they’re ultimately responsible. You could be tracking them and get a false sense of safety, but your kid could still get hit by a bus. The best message for kids as they get older is, ‘I can’t keep you safe, but I have tons of confidence in your ability to keep yourself safe.’”

Wow. I’d love for you to go into that a little deeper—the idea that kids are actually safer and make better choices when we trust them. Can you talk about that effect?

I’ve felt my whole career that the best message you can give a teenager is, “I have confidence in your ability to make decisions about your own life and learn from your mistakes. I want you to have a ton of experience doing that before you leave home.” With younger kids, I want to say, “You’re the expert on you. Nobody knows you better than you. I want you to practice making decisions because ultimately, many kids do dangerous things out of a false sense that their parents will rescue them.” I think they’re really safer if we care about them, express concern, but trust them. We say, “If you ever need me, I’m always there for you, but I trust you to manage your own life.” That’s what we want to do; we want to entrust them.

I gave a lecture at a prestigious high school in Washington, D.C., and a woman came up to me afterward and said, “I’m a therapist here at the Menninger Clinic in Houston, and we know this school in D.C. well because so many of its graduates get into the most elite colleges. But as soon as they get a B, realize everybody here is as smart as they are, or a girl won’t go out with them, they can’t handle it emotionally. They take a medical leave of absence and come here for treatment. They just don’t have enough experience growing up, running their own lives, making their own decisions, and solving their own problems.”

In the book, you talk about how we can’t really control our kids. I wanted to hear your take on that and your experience helping parents and educators understand that what looks like control to them—whether with rewards, punishments, or pushing—isn’t actually control. How do parents and educators typically respond to that? Because we like control.

I like control. Everyone likes to be in control. It’s part of mental health to feel like you have autonomy.

Yes, and I can’t tell you how, since we wrote the book, I’ve continued to follow the research on a sense of control. Not surprisingly, a low sense of control is hugely related to every form of anxiety disorder, depression, and substance use disorder. If you’re anxious, your thinking is out of control. You’d like to stop your worry, but you can’t. All mental health is really about that sense of life being manageable: “I’m not in charge here. I can’t get myself to do what I need to do. I can’t manage my thinking.” A recent study suggests that the reason certain kinds of therapy, exercise, and meditation help is because they increase your sense of control. It’s really a powerful idea.

It’s not easy for adults, though. We aren’t wired to do that. We’re wired to protect and soothe our young. As mammals, that’s what we’re wired to do. Making that transition from protecting and soothing an infant to progressively pulling back and trusting kids to make their own decisions is challenging for us because we experience less control, which is distressing. Much of this work is on ourselves and managing our own anxiety. We try to help other people understand that it’s natural to feel that need to control. But it’s also obvious that you really can’t make somebody do something against their will. I did years of psychotherapy with kids and teenagers, and I realized that when parents didn’t like their friends or interests, the more they tried to talk them out of it, the harder the kids would hold on to it. You can’t make somebody want what they don’t want, and you can’t make them not want what they want. Just making peace with that... as a parent, trying to make a two-year-old eat or a four-year-old get into the car, you can carry them to the car, but they’re not doing it themselves. You can’t make a kid do something. Making peace with that implies that it couldn’t be my responsibility to make my kids turn out a certain way. It couldn’t be my responsibility to motivate my kids so they always work hard. That’s not my responsibility. My responsibility is to love my kid and support them in any way I can and to play that consultant role over time, helping them learn who they want to be and develop the kind of life they want.

Can you dive more into the consultant role? What does that actually mean, and how can parents apply that? Can we apply that role as teachers, coaches, or other adults in a child’s life?

In 1986, I reviewed the literature on homework and its relationship to learning. I was stunned that, at that time, after 60 years of research, nobody had demonstrated that homework contributes to learning. In fact, several studies found negative correlations between the amount of homework and learning because it turned kids off to school. Even after 90 years, there’s still no evidence that homework is necessary for learning in elementary school. But I also had so many clients who said things like, “I dread dinner time because after dinner it’s like World War III, fighting about homework.” So many homework-related problems cause so much stress. I wrote an article in McCall’s Magazine that just said, “Tell your kid, ‘I love you too much to fight with you about your homework, but I’m willing to be your homework consultant. I’m willing to sit with you from 6:30 to 7:30 every night, or if I can tutor you a little bit, I’m willing to do that. But you’re the most precious thing in the universe to me, and I’m not willing to fight with you all the time about it. I’m not willing to act like somehow I’m supposed to be able to make you do it. I couldn’t make you do it—all you have to do is close your eyes and flop to the floor. I couldn’t make you do it. And if I take responsibility for something that’s yours, I’m going to weaken you.’”

The educators I’m working with who are focused on student-directed learning and autonomy say, “We’re guides. We’re not the sage on the stage in education; we’re guides to help kids learn.” I think this metaphor applies to both parenting and education. The three implications that Ned and I talk about are, number one, we offer help and advice that’s our wisdom, but we don’t try to force it down kids’ throats. The worst way for kids to use their energy is to resist help that’s being offered to them repeatedly, because it drives them deeper into denial that they have any problems. So it’s offering help, offering advice, and encouraging kids to make their own decisions. With little kids, like a guy who just finished his doctoral dissertation on promoting autonomy in two-year-olds, you want to ask, “Do you want to do it this way or that way? What outfit do you want to wear?” You give them a basic, limited range of choices because it communicates respect. It communicates, “I know you’re different than I am. What’s important to you or what you like may be different from me, and I love the fact that you’re your own human being.” With teenagers, I want to require older teenagers to make important decisions about their own lives after discussion. They should make informed decisions with people who know more than they do. When you say to a kid, “I have confidence in your ability to make decisions about your life, and I’ll support you, but I want you to practice making them because that’s how you become a good decision maker,” I’ve never experienced anything that matures kids more than that. You see kids who are resisting everything you throw at them, and then they say, “Wait, wait, it’s my call.” They want their lives to work, so their whole energy changes.

Yes, and they become more joyful too. I have a 13-year-old, and because of reading your book, we allowed him to leave traditional school in fourth grade. The path was a little rocky as we tried to figure out the best fit for him, but now he’s been out of school, and he loves it. It’s incredible to see how much joy he has and how many more good decisions he makes. It clears up all the cloudiness he was living in from not being able to make his own choices and being told what to do all day long, and from being told he wasn’t a good kid because he had big behavioral problems due to his ADHD. Now he’s in an environment where he’s celebrated, and they’re able to see all these big behaviors as strengths. It’s incredible to see how it’s cascading into every area of his life.

I love hearing that, Adriane. When we wrote our second book, Ned and I interviewed dozens of middle school and high school students. One of the questions we asked was, “Who do you feel closest to in this world?” Some said their mom or dad, but a lot of them said their older brother, an older cousin, an uncle, a teacher, or a coach. We asked, “What is it about this person that makes you feel so close to them?” Invariably, they said something like, “They listen to me without judging me, and they don’t tell me what to do.” I think there are times when, as parents, we need to say, “Come on, you need to get with the program; we’re trying to get out of the house,” but for the most part, most adults don’t like being told what to do all the time. I think kids are no different. Being consulted doesn’t mean the five-year-old is the boss of the family. It just means they have a sense of control. It doesn’t mean they get to control everything; it just means they’re not helpless, hopeless, stuck, chronically anxious, or tired. They can make decisions and feel respected.

Beautiful. I’d love to take a few minutes and dig into the brain if that’s okay. Adriane and I are neuroscience junkies. In the book, you go through some of the main structures of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. Can you take us on a tour of the brain and describe what happens to the brain with autonomy and without autonomy?

Arguably, the most useful thing I’ve ever learned about the brain is how slow the prefrontal cortex develops. The prefrontal cortex is the most recently evolved part of your brain, right behind your forehead. It does the executive functions: planning, organizing, working memory, flexibility, and putting things in perspective. It’s extremely slow to develop. The cognitive functions of the prefrontal cortex aren’t mature until about 25, plus or minus three years. The emotional regulation function isn’t mature until about 32, plus or minus three years. The reason this has been the most useful thing I’ve learned is that so many of the kids I see who are struggling—I can assure the parents they’re going to have a completely different brain in three years. I get messages from parents all the time saying, “You told me my kid would turn out right, and you were right.” The prefrontal cortex is a marker of mental health. The strength of the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala is crucial. The amygdala is a primitive part of the brain in the middle of your head that senses and reacts; it doesn’t think. You can think of the amygdala as a threat detector. Some kids come out of the womb with a really sensitive, reactive amygdala, while others come out with a more laid-back one. Anxiety disorders are associated with an overreactive amygdala and overactivity in the stress regulation circuits. Mental health involves strong connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. If you start to get stressed, you activate your prefrontal cortex, which sends inhibiting messages to the amygdala and the stress response so you can calm yourself down. If something happens and you start to get upset, you can put it in perspective. You want those strong connections to be able to do that. If you don’t sleep well, it weakens the connections. So many kids are chronically sleep-deprived. If you’re highly stressed, it weakens the connections between your prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. If you’re stressed for a long time, your prefrontal cortex actually gets smaller, and your amygdala gets bigger and more reactive. This is part of why we want to prevent stress-related mental health problems.

Can we look at what causes stress? I love the acronym you use, N.U.T.S.

Sure. There’s a neuroscientist in Montreal named Sonia Lupien, who I heard lecture in 2008. She said, “I defy you to think of anything that makes you stressed that you can’t summarize with the acronym N.U.T.S.,” which stands for Novelty, Unpredictability, Threat, and low Sense of control. The stress scientists say that low sense of control is the most stressful thing. You can be in a new situation—some people like new situations, like when they travel, even though it’s unpredictable. Even something that’s threatening, if you say, “I can handle this; I’ve been in this situation before; I’m not scared of this,” it’s not really stressful. What’s stressful is when something challenging happens, and you don’t know what to do about it. You’ve got a sick kid, and nobody knows what to do. You’re in a traffic jam, late for work, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That sense of control is so stressful. It’s hard to think of stressful situations that don’t involve at least one of these: novelty, unpredictability, threat, or low sense of control.

That was very helpful for me. You also break down positive stress, tolerable stress, and toxic stress. Does it build upon itself, or does it depend on the situation and how much control we have?

That’s a really good question. I think current scientific thinking is that you can divide stress into these three categories: positive stress, tolerable stress, and toxic stress. Positive stress is the kind of stress you feel before you have to perform—before you take a test, perform musically, or play sports. If you’re lackadaisical, you’re not going to perform well. You need an optimal level of stress hormones to perform well. If you’re a really good basketball player, you play best against someone who’s as good as you, when you really have to give it your all. That’s positive stress that activates the brain in a way that optimizes performance. Tolerable stress includes things like the death of a parent or a parent’s divorce, which are really difficult things, but tolerable stress doesn’t go on forever, and you experience it with support. Toxic stress is unrelenting, and there’s no support—you’re dealing with it on your own.

One of the branches of research we paid a lot of attention to in writing the book was the research of Steve Maier at the University of Colorado, who studies rats. Rat brains are organized a lot like ours, and we can learn a lot from them. His basic paradigm was rat A and rat B in Plexiglas cages with their tails outside the cage with little electrodes on them. Inside the cage is a wheel. Rat A gets shocked—not painfully, but annoyingly—and he wants it to stop. He discovers that if he turns the wheel, the shock stops. Rat B gets shocked, turns the wheel, and nothing happens. His shock only stops when rat A turns the wheel, so rat A rescues rat B. After several experiences of being able to control a stressful situation, rat A becomes almost impossible to stress. Rat B, who doesn’t develop that sense of “I can manage stressful situations,” becomes a nervous wreck. When they’re turning the wheel, the prefrontal cortex activates, and when the prefrontal cortex activates, it dampens down the stress system. If you’re in an emergency and coping with it, it’s not that stressful. It’s when you’re in an emergency and don’t know what to do that it becomes really stressful. We want kids to condition their brains so that when something stressful happens, they go into coping mode rather than panicking, freaking out, or avoiding the situation.

It’s very helpful for adults to understand that there’s a lot going on in the brain. A statement in the book that was so profound and transformative for me was about how a lot of kids’ behavior is actually chemical, not character. My boys are neurodivergent, so I used to find myself saying it’s like they are three different people. Reading that, I thought, “Oh my gosh, that’s what it is—it’s the biochemicals, the stress, and all these things compounding that make it so they can’t access their social engagement system.”

Yeah, and for kids with social challenges, the social engagement system—when they’re calm—activates circuits involving eye contact and reciprocal interaction. But if they’re stressed, those circuits don’t activate well. I remember seeing brain scans of people with ADHD. The researcher concluded that the harder they tried to focus, the worse it got. The more they focused, the less their brain activated, presumably because it was stressful. I realized they can’t pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. We’ve learned that ADHD is partly due to low levels of dopamine, the neurotransmitter of drive. It’s also associated with pleasure and addiction, but it has an important role in drive or motivation. Kids with ADHD tend to have lower baseline levels of dopamine. The medications for ADHD increase the availability of dopamine in the prefrontal cortex so kids can actually focus and get stuff done. Recognizing that you can scold them all you want, but if they don’t have higher levels of dopamine, it’s not going to work. The chemical part is really important.

So sometimes we need to change the environment and not be so focused on changing the child.

One of the most useful assumptions we can make is that we’re all doing the best we can. If a kid had more dopamine, he’d be more focused. If he had different circuitry for social processing, he’d find the social part of life easier. But for where he is right now, he’s doing the best he can.

That information is so freeing to me as a parent because I don’t have to make my child’s behavior mean something. Now it’s just, “Oh, he didn’t have enough dopamine. This is just biology. It’s not disrespect; it’s not laziness,” which are all things that are very triggering to me because I can’t have a lazy or disrespectful kid. That makes me bring the opposite of a non-anxious presence to parenting. So that understanding is very helpful.

That’s what we want. I test kids for a living, and so many parents feel terrible when they learn their kid has trouble understanding directions. It’s not that they’re being disrespectful or not minding; they just don’t understand. There’s something in their left hemisphere that’s not allowing them to understand it, so we’ll work on that. One of our mottos is to seek to understand before we judge. So often, we judge without really understanding, and we do kids a disservice when we do that.

One more thing about N.U.T.S.—the “T” in there, Threat. I’ve read that it’s most commonly a threat to the ego, not like a mountain lion.

Oh yeah. Think about a kid sitting in class who’s embarrassed about being called on. It can be something physically threatening, but it can also be something that’s going to make you embarrassed or worried about potential harm to yourself financially or otherwise. It’s all kinds of things that make us fearful or worried that have nothing to do with physical safety.

You’re absolutely right. Look at a child’s life—they’re constantly being compared to other kids, judged, and all those judgments come back at them relationally. If I don’t do well on this test, there’s a threat to my ego. I’m already stressed, so I’m detached from my prefrontal cortex, less focused, and less able to think of answers. It decreases the likelihood that I’m going to perform well. And I know that if I don’t, I’m going to be grounded or lose soccer privileges, or in some environments, I’m going to be yelled at, screamed at, or hit. What’s happening in the brain there is so far from setting the child up for success. The average teacher or parent doesn’t understand that the environment we’re creating and what we’re asking of these kids is creating neurotoxicity in their brains, making them almost incapable of meeting those expectations.

You’re exactly right, Kaity. I’ve been following people’s attempts to apply brain research to education for almost 40 years now. Very early on, people were saying the ideal internal state for learning is relaxed alertness. If you’re sleepy or bored, you’re not going to learn very well, and if you’re too stressed, you’re not going to learn very well. A biologist at Yale said the prefrontal cortex is the Goldilocks of the brain, meaning it functions on this delicate balance of dopamine and norepinephrine. Stress hormones jack up the levels of dopamine and norepinephrine so much that the prefrontal cortex can’t function and regulate the rest of the brain as it’s supposed to. The worst possible thing for learning is for kids to be highly stressed for a long time. Again, relaxed alertness is ideal, and the optimal learning environment is high challenge, low threat. Give me some of this challenge, or it’ll be boring, but don’t make me feel threatened. Make it safe for me to not get it right away so I can keep working on it. Help me feel safe so my brain will work, both from a learning point of view and a social engagement point of view, as you’re saying.

That really feels possible but challenging. If we go back to self-determination theory that you guys talk about, that would mean the competence level, and then we have autonomy, we have all of this. It’s your call, we trust you, and then we have this support, which is the relatedness. We’ve created the perfect working environment for the brain to learn and succeed.

We’re almost out of time, so we have one last wrap-up question. This is a question we ask all of our guests: Who has been the greatest kindling influence in your life? Who is someone who has inspired your curiosity, passion, and motivation? Who has been that person for you?

The first person that comes to mind is an English teacher I had in my senior year of high school. I graduated from high school with a 2.8 GPA. I didn’t do homework, didn’t turn in assignments, and never started anything on time. I didn’t read much and did as little as possible. I flunked English in the second quarter of my senior year, and got a 2.0. My father was dying of cancer, and I realized I didn’t want to do this badly. I went to talk with this English teacher, who was non-judgmental and said, “If you want to do better, I can give you some extra reading and work.” I finished a bunch of books and actually became an English major. She expressed confidence in me and knew about my father too. I didn’t have any intellectual curiosity until I was almost 19, but she really helped spark that development. She gave me stuff to read that I found interesting, and I felt compelled to read it because I didn’t want to flunk English again. So I would say she comes to mind as somebody who, in a subtle and gentle way, encouraged me and gave me interesting stuff to read that I was interested in.

She was able to help you tap into that intrinsic motivation, which is really what we’re talking about here. It’s huge.

I couldn’t say enough about it. It really is.

We thank you so much. Would you like to share with our listeners where they can find you and your books?

Sure, The Self-Driven Child website is selfdrivenchild.com. Start there.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. We’ve learned so much from you, and we hope everyone listening has enjoyed this interview with Dr. Bill Stixrud, author of The Self-Driven Child.

I really had a fun time talking with you. Thank you so much.

That’s it for today, everyone. We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of KindlED. In the next episode, Adriane and I will be doing a deep dive into rewards and punishments. It’s going to be really interesting. Don’t forget to subscribe to KindlED wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, rate us, or share your favorite episode on social media. Don’t forget to tag @PrendaLearn. For more KindlED content, head over to prenda.com/kindled and subscribe to the KindlED newsletter. Don’t forget to submit your questions, challenges, or anything you’re struggling with as a parent, educator, or microschool guide. Submit those questions and concerns to podcast@prenda.com. In every episode, we’ll pick one submission and work through it live with you. Also, don’t forget that you can nominate an adult who is doing an awesome job kindling curiosity, love of learning, and motivation in the lives of young people around them by emailing us at podcast@prenda.com. If they’re selected, they’ll be inducted into an amazing organization and Hall of Fame that we’re calling the Spark Squad. If they’re nominated as a professional Kindler and are a part of the Spark Squad, we’ll feature them on our social media and in our newsletter. That’s a little fancy, don’t you think, Adriane?

Very fancy!

Thanks for listening, and remember to keep kindling!