William Stixrud PhD - What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home

Bill got a call from the parent of Sarah, a seventh grader with a reading disability whom hed recently tested. He expected the call to be a pleasant one; after all, Sarahs latest scores now showed her reading at grade level, a feat that had seemed beyond her reach just six months earlier. But the conversation quickly turned to something else entirely.

We have a rule that the kids have to finish their homework before they can have screen time for the night, Sarahs mom told Bill. Sarahs friends were all playing a game together online, but she hadnt finished her homework yet. She knows the rules, but she absolutely lost it when I told her I wouldnt let her log on until she was done. The rest of the night and the next morning she wouldnt speak to meacted like I wasnt even there.

Sarahs mom understood that she couldnt make Sarah do her homework or make her want to do her homework. What frustrated her was that sometimeslike when enforcing a reasonable, longtime family rule turned into an all-out battleher best attempts to communicate with her daughter went nowhere, or made things even worse.

I hate being the bad guy, Sarahs mom said, but she knows the rules. She gets why homework comes first. I just cant figure out what I said that made this blow up.

If youre a parent, youve had a momentmaybe many of themwhen youve thought, How did that conversation with my kid go so badly? What did I say, or how could I have said something differently to get my kid to open up more? Maybe the conflict started with a simple request to eat their dinner or make their bed in the morning. Maybe it started with their plea to go to a concert on a school night. However seemingly benign or innocent the beginning, the encounter ended with an I hate you that still echoes in your mind hours later. Or maybe the impasse was triggered by something as simple as How was school? No matter how welcome and open-ended the question, youre met with grunts and one-word answers.

Youre a reasonable parent. Your underlying interests are all about wanting your kids to be safe, to be healthy, and to be able to engage with things other than screensnot just now, but for the rest of their lives. So why, then, are you still fighting with your kids? Just as important, why do you think theyre fighting with you?

Communication in general is hard. Communication between kids and parents is even harder. At some point after the sixth grade, the same kid who would not stop asking why? at age four suddenly stops talking freely and willingly to you. The conversation you wish you could have easily with your child suddenly feels as complicated as trying to extract your car keys from a gutter grate.

If parent-child relations seem more complicated than when you were growing up, youre not wrong. We wrote a good part of this book during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the relationship between parents and kids reached new levels of physical closeness and boundary blurring, and stress reached new heights. Dependence on screensa lifeline for education, social connection, and entertainmentnevertheless caused consternation about tech addiction and more than a few arguments, as parents pleaded with their kids to just shut it off for a while. Parents also became de facto teachers, whether the dynamic with their kid was suitable for the role or not. And behavior problems increased as kids had few outlets for their frustrations, or for anything else. During one video talk we gave, a mom explained how she was fighting with her first-grade daughter every day to stay focused on her distance learning. She then explained that her little girl had just drawn a picture of a meteor hitting Mommy. The mom wanted to know, How much do I need to worry about this?

Even before COVID-19, we worried about mental health in kids. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for ten- to twenty-four-year-olds, and the rates have increased every year since 2007.

We wrote our first book, The Self-Driven Child, in part as a response to these alarming statistics. Though we come at issues facing kids from different angles (Bill as a neuropsychologist, Ned as a test prep guru), we see a similar problem: kids increasingly feel a lack of control over their lives. From a brain science perspective, there is little that is more stressful than feeling you do not have agency. Think about it: some of the most stressful moments we experience are when were stuck in traffic, when were waiting on someone else to make a decision that affects us, when our kid is sick but its not clear why, or when were in any number of unpleasant scenarios and theres nothing we can do about it.

Many of our kids feel like this all the time. Theyre constantly told where to stand and what they need to learn, theyre told when they can go out or not, or theyre put in situations where someone else is making a decision that will impact their future. We wrote our first book to explain why we need to change our approach with kidsto help adults understand and meet their childrens need to gain a sense of control over their own lives. Now were here to elaborate on