Bill Stixrud - The Self-Driven Child

A T FIRST BLUSH, we are not obvious partners. Bill is a nationally recognized clinical neuropsychologist who has been helping kids cope with anxiety, learning disabilities, and behavioral problems for thirty years. People often remark on his calm temperament, most likely a result of the decades he has spent practicing Transcendental Meditation. Ned founded PrepMatters, one of the most successful tutoring companies in the country. Hes an energetic Gen Xer, raising young teens, whose students often say he has the enthusiasm of three people.

We met a few years ago as guest speakers at the same event. When we started talking, we discovered something interesting. Despite our differing backgrounds, disciplines, and client bases, we were trying to help kids overcome similar problems in surprisingly complementary ways. Bill approaches them from the perspective of brain development; Ned through the art and science of performance. As we talked, we found our knowledge and experiences fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. And while Neds client might struggle with the panic that she might not get into Stanford, and Bills might struggle to get to school at all, we each begin with the same baseline questions: How can we help this kid gain a sense of control over his life? How can we help him find his own inner drive and make the most of his potential?

We came to a sense of control through research on stress and studies of motivation, which we follow because so much of our work involves helping kids minimize the extent to which stress undermines their performance and mental health. We try to steer them to a healthy level of self-motivation, somewhere between perfectionist overdrive and let me get back to my video game. When we discovered that a low sense of control is enormously stressful and that autonomy is key to developing motivation, we thought we were onto something important. This impression was confirmed when we started to probe deeper and found that a healthy sense of control is related to virtually everything we want for our children, including physical and mental health, academic success, and happiness.

From 1960 until 2002, high school and college students have steadily reported lower and lower levels of internal locus of control (the belief that they can control their own destiny) and higher levels of external locus of control (the belief that their destiny is determined by external forces). This change has been associated with an increased vulnerability to anxiety and depression. In fact, adolescents and young adults today are five to eight times more likely to experience the symptoms of an anxiety disorder than young people were at earlier times, including during the Great Depression, World War II, and the cold war. Are things really harder now than they were during the Depression? Or are we doing something that is dampening their natural coping mechanisms?

Without a healthy sense of control, kids feel powerless and overwhelmed and will often become passive or resigned. When they are denied the ability to make meaningful choices, they are at high risk of becoming anxious, struggling to manage anger, becoming self-destructive, or self-medicating. Despite the many resources and opportunities their parents offer them, they will often fail to thrive. Without a sense of control, regardless of their background, inner turmoil will take its toll.

We all do better when we feel like we can impact the world around us. Thats why we continue to push the button to close the elevator door even though most of them dont work. It is also why the kid who decides on his own to do his homework (or not) will be happier, less stressed, and ultimately more capable of navigating life.

We want our kids to be able to participate in a competitive global economy, to be relevant, to feel they can hack it. We love them and want them to be happy and to thrive long after were gone. All worthy goals. But to achieve them, many of us have bought into some false assumptions:

False Assumption 1: There is a narrow path to success and God forbid our child should fall off it. The stakes are thus too high to let them make decisions for themselves. This argument hinges on an assumption of scarcity, one that says that for young people to be successful, they must be competitive at all timeswhatever the price.

False Assumption 2: It is critical to do well in school if you want to do well in life. There will be some winners and many losers. It is Yale or McDonalds. As a result, too many kids are either driven manically or have given up trying.

False Assumption 3: Pushing more will lead our children to becoming more accomplished and more successful adults. Our sixth graders arent scoring as well as sixth graders in China? Okay, lets teach them ninth grade math. College admission is getting tougher than ever? Yikes, lets pack our kids schedules so theyll learn and do more.

False Assumption 4: The world is more dangerous than ever before. We have to supervise our kids constantly to make sure they dont get hurt or make bad decisions.

Now many parents instinctively understand that these assumptions are untrue (and we will spend some time in this book debunking them). But that perspective dissipates when they feel pressuredby peers, by schools, or by other parentsto ensure their child isnt falling behind. The pressure is rooted deeply in fear, and fear almost always leads to bad decisions.

We really cant control our kidsand doing so shouldnt be our goal. Our role is to teach them to think and act independently, so that they will have the judgment to succeed in school and, most important, in life. Rather than pushing them to do things they resist, we should seek to help them find things they love and develop their inner motivation. Our aim is to move away from a model that depends on parental pressure to one that nurtures a childs own drive. That is what we mean by the self-driven child.