364. The psychology of autonomy and growth: Building stress tolerance, confidence, and motivation with Dr. William Stixrud and Ned Johnson

Ned (00:00):

One thing just to note in case folks aren’t clear on this play, children’s play by definition is not adult directed, right? We’ve taken almost every childhood activity from sports to music, to art, to Legos, and we’ve professionalized it, weaponized it. This will get you into college and monetized it.

Dr. Sarah (00:32):

Hi, welcome back. I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist mom of two and the host of the Securely Attached podcast. If you’ve been listening for a while, you know that my goal here is to take what we know from psychology, science and child development and translate it into practical and effective strategies that strengthen connection not just between parents and kids, but across the entire family system. And one of the themes that comes up again and again, both in research and in real life, is the power of having a sense of control, not control over your child, but a grounded sense of control within yourself in a world that can feel chaotic and overwhelming. A true belief for our kids and for ourselves that we can handle hard things. And that belief is central to how people manage stress, build confidence, and develop real resilience.

(01:24):

And that is why I am so excited for Dr. William Stixrud to be back on the podcast. And this time he’s joined by Ned Johnson. They are co-authors of the book, The Self-Driven Child, and they’re longtime experts in the neuroscience of stress, motivation, and autonomy. Bill brings decades of experience as a clinical neuropsychologist and Ned’s work with teens and families give him such a grounded real world perspective together they have such a unique ability to explain why giving kids space to struggle, rest, and grow and play is all key for optimal development. So whether you are parenting a toddler or a teen, this episode is going to offer some really practical research back tools for helping your child feel both safe and capable in an often overwhelming world.

(02:22):

Hello, Dr. Stixrud, Ned Johnson, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dr. William (02:28):

Great to see you again.

Ned (02:28):

I’m so happy to be part of the party.

Dr. Sarah (02:31):

Yes. Well, you’re joining because Dr. Stixrud, or Bill, you were here previously and we just had the best time and then we were like, we have to get both of you on because you guys wrote all the books that you guys have written together. So you come the package and I just It’s true here, you both. And in our last conversation, bill, which I’ll link in the show notes so that people can go back and listen to it, we really talked a lot about how having a sense of control and agency and how we support kids in feeling that sense of control is so important and people definitely should go back and listen to that episode. But just briefly, just to start us off, I was hoping you could explain what happens in the brain when a child is feeling in control versus feeling powerless or helpless.

Dr. William (03:26):

Yeah. Well one of the really interesting things for me is that it is looking like this sense, this need for a sense of control is this very basic biological and psychological need that you see in infants. You can see in four month infants basically before they can talk, there’s this experiment that shows that they want to do it themselves. Once they can do something, they don’t want you to reward them for not doing, they want to do it themselves. I’ve tested probably three or four kids whose first words were no way the little kids that say, do it myself. You aren’t the boss of me.

Dr. Sarah (04:05):

No, I do it.

Ned (04:07):

I do it. Their first full sentence.

Dr. William (04:09):

I do it. Yeah, it’s just that basic. It’s a basic need. And when you experience a sense of control, your prefrontal cortex, which can think logically and can go into the past and future and put things in perspective, regulates the rest of your brain, including the stress circuit, the amygdala which senses and reacts to the threat and the rest of the stress circuitry in the brain. So when you have a sense of control, you feel confident I can handle stuff. And you also have that sense of agency, you don’t feel, what’s the point, you don’t feel resigned. And the main thing brain-wise is that you have this prefrontal cortex which is regulating the rest of the brain so that you aren’t letting little things throw you off and you can stay focused. And when you’re intrinsically motivated in something, which it takes a sense of control or autonomy to be intrinsically motivated, you have this really nice spike in dopamine, the neurotransmitter for not only for pleasure but also for motivation and drive. When kids have a low sense of control, it’s the most stressful thing to experience. So the brain basically lights up, the stress circuitry lights up and the stress hormones go nuts in the brain when you experience a low sense of control because you can be in new situations or even unpredictable or even threatening situations, but if you have a sense, I can handle it. It’s not that stressful. It’s when something’s happening and you just don’t know what to do and nobody seems to know what to do. That’s the most stressful thing to experience.

Dr. Sarah (05:37):

No, right. And I would obviously like that experience of feeling in control or having someone reflect back to you that they think you can handle what’s happening in the environment. That’s a learned. We have to eventually over time internalize that doesn’t start out necessarily internally like new, the world is big. And what’s a realistic expectation of the evolution of that sense of, oh, I’ve done this. I haven’t done maybe this thing before, but I’ve done something hard before and I know that I could handle that. So I feel comfortable.

Ned (06:19):

It’s interesting, some of the research that we lean into most is a guy named Steve Mayer who was probably most well known for coining the term of learned helplessness where these animals were in a situation and they basically just sit there and endure shock and not make any efforts to try to escape the situation. There’s a foundational paper called Learned Helplessness at 50, which I really encourage everyone to read and kind of what we got right and what we got wrong. And he said, the thing that we got wrong was this. These animals didn’t learn to be helpless. They failed to ever learn a sense of control. He said, the default setting of brains is this is in really stressful, painful situation. The default setting is assuming there’s nothing that I can do about this. So it needs to be wide. We need to have experiences where it’s an adverse experience, something that’s hard, that’s challenging, but there’s something you can do.

(07:07):

And that wires that brain bill was in before the prefrontal cortex will engage or dampen down the stress response and repeated experiences of not something that’s overwhelming, but something that’s hard that you can handle wires the brain, and I won’t go through all the experiments, but one of the mayor had this experiment with rats and they shock them. And if they learned that they could spin a wheel and stop the shock, it then was trans situational. So once they developed a coping brain, they could put them in other situations that were scary to rats and they didn’t freak out. You saw the same neural activity of a coping brain. And so we don’t have to design really anything in life. Life tends to throw enough challenges to every kid. You didn’t get picked for kickball, you fell off the swing, you were making art and you screwed it up, or you’re doing Lego and your little brother knocked the whole thing down.

(07:56):

All kinds of things. But then if kids can feel, if they’re given the opportunity to solve things well enough, we’re wiring that brain in the same way. And when we’re talking with Dr. Mayer about this, he said, it appears that a single episode of feeling a sense of control in adolescents, at least for adolescent rats seems to inoculate the brain against the effects of stress for the entire life. So we looked at him, I said, so with that all in mind and knowing how bad anxiety is for teenagers and young adults, should we be considering administering model electric shocks to teenagers? And he leaned back and he said, that’s a very good question.

Dr. William (08:34):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (08:41):

Having a hard time getting that across like the review board.

Ned (08:46):

Yeah, I don’t think we’re, we just filed that one away.

Dr. William (08:51):

You actually said that that wouldn’t be a bad idea, but just what you said, Sarah, your point that so much for years, so much of what we tried to do to help anxious little kids was to protect them from things that made them anxious.

(09:06):

And then we discovered some years ago that when we make those kind of accommodations to try to prevent kids from experiencing things that makes ’em anxious, it actually makes them more anxious because the more you avoid stuff that makes you anxious, the more anxious you get about it. And so I was talking, I was lecturing someplace and a woman came up to me a couple months ago and said, I’m a pediatric dentist. And said, when I started 20 years ago, I’d go out the waiting room and bring the kids back and work with them. The parents would stay in the waiting room. So many of the parents are so anxious that they come to the waiting room with us. And I think that that message that you mentioned that I have confidence you can handle this. I know this is really scary, but you can handle it is a really powerful message. And we want kids as mammals, we’re wired to soothe and protect our young and much of that we try to protect them. We don’t want them to suffer understandably, and we don’t want them to have unnecessary suffering, but also we don’t want to prevent them from having the opportunity to deal with something hard, to deal with something stressful and basically train the brain to go into the coping mode as opposed to freaking out or calling for help immediately.

Dr. Sarah (10:26):

So I am a hundred percent in agreement with you, and I think hopefully parents that are listening to this episode have listened to this podcast, are familiar with these ideas of not rescuing kids, helping them build this sense of scaffolding it so we don’t jump throw ’em in the deep end, but we build skills slowly over time and we stretch that capacity to endure something challenging, whether we cross the finish line or we don’t, and we don’t always have to help our kids cross the finish line if we’re doing all these things right. Let’s just say go back and listen to the previous episode that I had with Bill about helping kids build this sense of confidence in their ability to cope with stressors and challenges and build that intrinsic sense of control. And let’s say we following that, we’re reading your books and we’re following this idea, I feel like as parents we can only control so much support, so much even in use in well done way of supporting it, just enough so that our kids learning to feel confident, but then they go out into this world and for example, you were just talking bill about the dentist, and it made me think about how when my kids go to the dentist now, and I love my kid’s dentist.

(12:06):

But when they go to the dentist, I love him because he talks to them. He will actually have a conversation with them. But only because I had to set that tone at the beginning of please don’t turn on this massive TV you have right above their face that newfangled dentist offices have where it’s like they walk in and it’s like, what do you want to watch? They want to just…

Ned (12:30):

Distract.

Dr. Sarah (12:31):

Distract them. Which I get. I get the dentist is really tricky. But from the beginning when my kids were just going into the dentist and we weren’t doing anything stressful at all other than a new environment, I was really explicit. I was like, please don’t turn the TV on. Let’s be at the dentist together and have them talk to you and see what it’s like and tell them what you’re doing. And he was totally gave her that and that was great. But that one example of the TV screen at the dentist chair for kids is like, there’s so many things now in our world where it’s a quick change the channel, flip the switch, turn it off, distract, distract, distract that. Even in our, I do think as parents, if we’re doing a lot of the work, it matters more. We get offset the dentist tv and I don’t mean the screens, it’s just the distracting from the not participating in something difficult, being present for life. There’s so much of that. What do you guys think about what parents might be up against in terms of what the environment is offering kids in terms of quick distraction, don’t feel it, turn it off.

Dr. William (13:52):

I personally think there’s a lot of things that we do with younger children, particularly that parents of younger children to lower level anxiety that actually just makes us more anxious. For example, the preschools now are sending out videos every day so you can see what your kid’s doing and basically they’re saying your kid’s okay. And I think that the more we depend on that, the more anxious we get, the more anxious we get. What if we don’t get a video? And the same way as older kids, the way when we monitor them with Life 360 and we do all that stuff, that it actually makes people more anxious. And I’m just thinking about my two oldest grandchildren are just when they’re little, all they do in their free time is play that they’re really good players. They go to the dentist and it’s stressful and when they come home and they’ll play dentist for an hour or two, that’s the way children evolve to deal with stressful things is through play. They play it out. And so I think that what you did, Sarah was saying, let’s not turn on the tv, let’s not try to make it. Certainly, I’m not saying that we should try to maximize the child’s pain at the dentist, but I’m saying that we want to minimize pain, but it can be a little uncomfortable and being able to experience that and deal with it and then play it out later, they just get stronger.

Ned (15:24):

A hundred percent around the play. And one thing just to note in case folks aren’t clear on this play, children’s play by definition is not adult directed. We’ve taken almost every childhood activity from sports to music to art to Legos, and we’ve professionalized it, weaponized it. This will get you into college and monetized it. I was given a talk at a school I won’t name out in the Allen, California that’s a play-based school. And a friend of mine sent me an email that had come home from the play-based school about how folks could engage with hire professional tutors who would teach their kids how to play.

Dr. Sarah (16:15):

Whoa. That to me is like, what a racket.

Ned (16:20):

And I think about even with my own kids, well, we set up play dates and this is not novel, but certainly to you all, but we have all these activities where there’s an adult, some person with a clip Gordon and Whistle who’s organizing. So all the time is structured. So working on our skills, what a soccer, whatever happens to be. When as a kid, the neighborhood kids would get together and we’d spend half the time arguing about what was the fair team, what were the rules, blah, blah, blah, on and on and on. And adults watching, it’s like, oh my cripes, would you kids just play already? Not recognizing that, all of that stuff. The villain can’t put together team with all the people who are as athletic as he is and sort of just run rough shot over people who are as athletic as I am. Because we’d be like, yeah, I’m out of here. Bill and learning to negotiate, those are the things that matter, but when it’s adult directed, we deprive kids of the opportunity to be upset, to squabble, to fight, to walk home, come home, but then I can remember this, someone says, screw it, I’m leaving. And then two of us would go as emissaries and walk over to the kid’s house and say, Hey, I’m really sorry, what would we have to do to get you to come back and play, right? Now parents do all of that, and there’s an entire army of professional people who will charge you gladly charge you $150 an hour to play with your kids.

Dr. Sarah (17:48):

Yeah.

Ned (17:50):

Oops.

Dr. Sarah (17:50):

Yeah. But this is so important because I have so many thoughts on this. Oh my god, I got to organize my thinking for a second. So one are taking and grownups, we are good at this. We take a grownup perspective to something and grownups, we’ve learned, we’ve trained our, we’ve been trained, we’ve trained ourselves. The world has trained us to be outcome oriented. If we’re trying to play a baseball game, the goal is to play the game and probably to win the game. I have seen fights break out at my kids’ little league from the parents because they fist fight hired me to yelling. Really? I was like, oh my goodness. Okay, the grownups…

Ned (18:38):

Hashtag modeling.

Dr. Sarah (18:39):

Yes, but I get it. We are so hardwired at this point and it’s unfortunate, but it’s the reality that we are focused on the outcome. And what we don’t always remember is we didn’t start that way. And kids don’t start that way. They are focused to your description that on this process and actually when they do all of this pre-work, all of this planning, preparing, negotiating, the starting point before the doing that is incredibly valuable. In fact, I’ve spent a lot of time as a clinical psychologist in therapy with kids in play therapy, trying to stretch kids stay in that readiness, planning, preparing about before they run into the doing that stretching and the readiness is actually clinical intervention that I think is incredibly useful to most kids because, so it’s like we want to remember as parents, one, don’t break. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it and back up and let them do, but don’t just, I think we forget that there’s functionality in these processes, whether it’s the preparing for the play, whether it’s the messing up the play and having to figure it out, or it’s just like using the play as a tool to process other stuff like the dentist appointment, right? These kids, this is one thing kids can teach us. We do not need to teach them anything about this. We have to get out of their way.

Dr. William (20:25):

It’s so interesting. About 15 years ago, I gave a lecture to, I can’t remember, Einstein didn’t use flashcards or something like that, but in any case, the importance of play for development and this group of preschool teachers from this one school said, we can dress kids up now the preschool kids, but they don’t know what to do. I think that the two things that interfere Moses play are the kind starting kids on teams when time of their three or four adult led stuff and iPads and stuff that allow kids to reduce the world to a screen. And I think as much as we can, just remembering that mammals learn to become adults by playing. That’s the way they practice adult roles, the kind of interpersonal stuff. Even with dramatic play, you got to be the daddy last few times. I want to be the dad this time. They negotiate that kind of stuff as well, and it’s the playing stuff out. So I just think that for younger children and my grandchildren, the oldest ones are nine and 12, they still play all the time. They play, they’ll play a Harry Potter theme or some school thing still at this age. So this is the way that mammals become adults and we want to make sure that we don’t, it’s too early. Start them on technology or teams and not let them do just what they evolve to do. Okay.

Dr. Sarah (22:02):

Yeah, I think, oh man, it’s so hard. So many. I don’t want parents to feel bad about giving their kids opportunities to participate in sports or extracurriculars. Right? And I know you don’t either.

Dr. William (22:17):

No.

Dr. Sarah (22:18):

But I do think we have to give parents permission to have more white space for their kids because if we fill it all up with stuff.

Ned (22:28):

That’s right. That’s right.

Dr. Sarah (22:29):

We will displace the play thinking we’re, the intentions are so good. Right?

(22:42):

We’ve been talking about the power of giving kids space to explore, struggle and play on their own. And that is such an important part of healthy development. But there are also moments when coming together through simple connection based games can be incredibly powerful. And while fostering a strong connection is an amazing part of children’s development, these shared games offer something extra too. They give you a unique opportunity to do double duty, to build real skills while you are strengthening that relationship. And that’s why I created a free guide filled with my favorite connection based games for supporting emotion regulation. Because being intentional about the games you choose can turn everyday play into meaningful practice. These activities help kids learn how to calm their bodies, stay flexible and manage big feelings all through fun playful moments together. The games are organized by age, so you’ll find something that meets your child exactly where they are developmentally. And I also explain why each game works so you can adapt them in ways that feel natural for your family while still getting all the benefits. You can download the free guide using the link in the episode description or head to drsarahbren.com/games and I’ll send it straight to your inbox. That’s drsarahbren.com/games. Okay, now back to the episode.

Ned (24:09):

There’s research in the self-driven child about what’s called the default mode network. And for folks who dunno, it’s the entire network and brain that engages and uses 70% of the brain’s energy engages when we’re not involved actively in a task either physical or cognitive and basically, and so you get this activation when you’re daydreaming, when you’re mind wandering, when you’re spending time in nature, when you’re not face-to-face with a technology or a task. And what happens there is we reflect on the past. We project ourselves in the future in what’s called autobiographical planning, trying to figure out who am I and how do I want to present? We reflect on relationships, it’s how we develop a sense of identity and how we develop a sense of empathy. And the paradigm paper, this woman named Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, it’s great, is Rest is Not Idleness. And we live in spaces, particularly major cities and highly academic and affluent places where we need to be productive all the time thinking that that’s really what builds healthy brains and builds successful lives. And without this reflection, we can have all the trinkets of success, but we end up with brains that are, I mean, they’re like hot house tomatoes, right? I mean they look great, but at their core we want brains to develop slowly, not quickly.

Dr. Sarah (25:39):

Oh wait, can you talk more about that? Because that I feel like we want brains to develop slowly, not quickly. That feels so counterintuitive to the way we’re…

Ned (25:49):

Oh my goodness. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (25:50):

parenting right now where Baby Einstein hyperstimulation of all infant play gadgets are about stimulating them. I subscribed to a parenting philosophy called RIE, which is Resources for Infant Educarers.

(26:11):

It’s in very kind of unique thing. It’s not as popular in the east coast, but very popular West coast. Magda Gerber developed it, and Janet Lansbury is like a very famous rye associate. But the play materials that you give your infant in this way of approaching infants, it’s like first three years. It’s like Burt’s Toy is a peak napkin. They can manipulate it and they can turn their head towards it and away from it so it’s not over their head. And once they get overstimulated, they’re stuck underneath it and can’t exit their gaze. And this is a total tangent, but just we have been indoctrinated from day one of parenthood that we are not doing right by our kid unless we are providing constant stimulation. And that to me feels like the antithesis to what you just said.

Ned (27:10):

As a neuropsychologist take lead on that and then I’ll pepper in with my own foolishness.

Dr. William (27:14):

I’m just think as an adult you got to play with all this cool stuff. My first toy is a crappy napkin.

Dr. Sarah (27:19):

My kids loved it. I promise the kids are happy.

Dr. William (27:25):

But, no I think that Jean Piaget, the famous developmental psychologist who basically, he was a household name in the 1960s and seventies, and he basically laid out, his idea was that children develop through this invariant sequence of stages that’s programmed in nature. And when he lectured around the world, and Peter called it the American question, American question, you talk about the way that nature programs children develop in these stages. And the American question was how do we make it go faster? And you see it. I personally think the biggest mistake in American education in probably my lifetime, is based on the idea that if we get kids to read at a younger age or do algebra in seventh grade rather than eighth grade or ninth grade, they’ll be better at it as adults.

(28:24):

There’s so much, we talk about this in the self-driven child, but around the world in multiple languages, the best time for a kid to learn to read is actually a seven. That’s when it’s most efficient. And we see kids now who are writing in preschool and before the age of six or seven, they don’t have mature enough connections between the brain and the small muscles and the finger to hold a pencil properly so they develop. I never see a kid or rarely see a kid now has a typical really healthy pencil grip. They grab it like this or they like this.

(28:56):

It’s stressful and it’s inefficient. And I think that if we remember that we evolve over millions of years and that if you are constantly stressed and pressured, it doesn’t optimize brain development. It leads to burnout. And I think that your point, Ned, about that we want brains to develop slowly. The book, I think it was Sternberg wrote called Age of Opportunity about adolescence. And the reason that we evolved the humans evolved Neanderthals died out was that we developed slowly, Neanderthals were fully developed by age 10. The brains were fully developed by age 10. Our brains aren’t fully developed until early to mid thirties. And it’s that long slow, protracted development based on experience that’s given human that really allows humans to do things well, to survive and to thrive and to flourish. And we know if we think that we got to go faster, faster, faster, it just makes kids stressed.

Ned (30:08):

Yeah. There was a study about Ian Gottlieb out of Stanford was studying, taking scans of brains of adolescents and then got this brilliant experiment to see what stress does to brains COVID and found that during the first nine months or year of COVID brains aged, the brain maturation was three years of maturation because of the stress. And that’s not a good thing. And they said that the level, that level of maturation is what we tend to see with kids who have high HS scores, really poverty, trauma, all these kind of things. And brains develop quickly because they have to. But one of the best things that we can do for children, going back to what Bill shared with about his grandchildren, is give them as much space as possible where they can play and they’re not hurried and they’re not rushed. But when we live in these highly academic, highly affluent cities, perceived scarcity, we got to go faster. We got to get, if your kid’s ahead of my kid, oh my God, we got to get them extra Kuma, we’ve got to get another soccer coach, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And on the surface it looks great because oh, they’re three years ahead. But again, it’s like one of my favorite things in them.

Dr. Sarah (31:15):

Ahead of what?

Ned (31:16):

Say again.

Dr. Sarah (31:17):

It’s like, but whose metrics like a head in what that progression in one area is displacing a progression in other maybe more invisible areas that we don’t notice are being atrophied, that are critical for development?

Ned (31:32):

One of my favorite things in Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation, is he talks about the biodome in Arizona and they had that long extended period of trying to prepare for life on Mars and they shut the whole thing down. One because of personal discord, but also they had all these different zones and they found that the trees, when they reached a certain height, they all fell over. They just fell over. And it’s like what that and what was going on? Well, because it was under a dome, there wasn’t wind and they hadn’t engineered for it. And the way that the roots grew and trees grow is they get blown and the roots get stronger on the leeward side or the windward side, and then they get blown the other way and then they grow. And so you get these really broad roots so you can get buffet in any direction, say, I can handle this, but if you blow too hard as a young south, it’ll fall over. Just crack the stem, the trunk, it’ll be dead. But if there’s no wind at all, you want these things that grow tall and at the first site of adversity, they crash and burn.

Dr. Sarah (32:35):

What an interesting natural metaphor.

Ned (32:37):

Isn’t it lovely.

Dr. Sarah (32:38):

Yeah.

Ned (32:40):

And just to put a point on that, his work has had a profound impact on getting phones out of schools. Fantastic. But his four things were no phones until eighth grade or whatever it is. No social media until 16 and no phones in schools. Fantastic. But the fourth one was return play to childhood. And apparently number four didn’t make the podium right.

Dr. Sarah (33:06):

Yeah.

Ned (33:07):

And I don’t hear anybody talking about how do we restructure school and life for children to give childhood, to give childhood back to children. Nobody’s talking about, they’re all talking about the phones.

Dr. Sarah (33:21):

Yeah. I think there is some. I wish there was more. I agree with you, but I think it’s not enough. But I feel like there are schools that are trying.

Ned (33:35):

A hundred percent, but you don’t see legislation. I mean, you don’t see big picture social conversations about this the way that you do entire states passing state of New York with cell phones, right.

Dr. Sarah (33:45):

Right. I wonder it’s like that. Again, we’re very product oriented, outcome oriented. It’s a lot easier to say, get rid of this thing.

Ned (33:54):

Sure.

Dr. Sarah (33:56):

Than to say add in white space.

Ned (34:00):

But the test scores are low. We need to get rid of recess to put in more instructional time.

Dr. Sarah (34:04):

Yes.

Ned (34:05):

That’s based on what science?

Dr. Sarah (34:09):

No signs the opposite of science.

Dr. William (34:11):

Yeah. We think a lot that many of the kids that we work with have the idea, and I think many of their parents do too. And the parents are lovely people and very well intentioned, and they have the idea that the most important outcome of a’s childhood and adolescence is where they go to college. Then I think that what we think is that the most important outcome is developing a healthy brain, a brain that’s not used to being chronically exhausted and stressed all the time. And I think for us, that’s the priority.

(34:47):

Which is why we focus so much on a sense of control. Because again, the sense of control is the most, it is really the key to mental health. If you’re anxious, your thinking is out of control. You’d like to stop worrying, but you can’t if you’re depressed, forget it. And so supporting kids that develop, and when we talk about sense of control, it doesn’t mean that your 4-year-old gets to run the house. The 6-year-old makes all his own decisions. It just means that they don’t feel helpless. They don’t feel hopeless. They feel that they can make decisions, some of the decisions that they can make important decisions that are respected, not all of them, but they’re respected. But then that they have enough experience in life that they can handle stuff, that they don’t enter situations feeling easily overwhelmed.

(35:36):

I that’s where our focus is. And we know that. I still think it’s true that 10 years ago at least, the best neurological marker of emotional resilience was the strength of the connections between the prefrontal cortex the most, that most recently of all part of their brain that does executive functions and the amygdala, that very primitive part of their brain that just senses and reacts to threats. And we know that what builds strong connections is sleep, is play, is experiences of deep rest, the experiences of being of mastery, and we just want to favor those, the things that foster that healthy brain development and minimize the things that don’t.

Dr. Sarah (36:24):

Yeah, I would throw into that category. I’m curious. Tell me if you got that category connection and co-regulation because I think a mentor of mine, he’s a somatic therapist, his name’s Ali Duarte, he’s been on the podcast, he’s amazing. But he talks a lot about this idea of this tribal of bond build and balance and that kids are always kind of moving from one to the other. And these are core basic needs they have. And if they’re not met, then they get sort of stuck. But if they’re met, they can move very fluidly through all of them. And they’re never supposed to stay in one all the time. They just kind of cycle through it. But it’s this natural cycle of when I feel like I, it’s like secure base, right? The bond, I can go soothing that. When I feel that sense of safety with you, then I can go and build. And when something gets kind of frustrating, I can either go back to you to bond or I can make my own balance. Or once I’ve finished building, I can rest. And that’s balance too. And it’s this nice cycle between being with creating and playing and constructing and then resting.

Ned (37:46):

Right?

Dr. Sarah (37:49):

Those categories.

Ned (37:49):

A hundred percent the chapter in the self-driven child, we talk about that being a non-anxious presence of being that warm, nurturing, not overly reactive, not overly emotional parent or caregiver. So that home feels like a safe base. And just the way that you described and some of the more interesting research on this is a guy named Michael Meany who actually studies epigenetics. So how stress gets expressed and passed on generation to generation and a bunch of experiments with rats, and of course they use rats because they’re very smart brain similar to humans. And we can ethically do things to baby rats we can’t do to human babies. So they take these rat pups and from the moment that they’re born, they whisk them away from mom and then these lab techs sit there and hold them in latex cloud for 20 minutes or something. It’s super stressful to them.

(38:35):

But if they give them back to mom, and mom is a high licking and grooming rat, which is the rat equivalent of hugs and kisses there and all the stress RNs, they were like, oh, they just flow right out of them and they do this day after day going from, oh my goodness, to oh, thank goodness. And the mother rats, they’re not going to extricate their kids. They’re not hiring a tutor. They’re not fine. All they’re doing is just, they’re there, there. And when these rats reach these pups reach maturity and they look at their brains, it’s that connection. The bill was talking about this incredible connection between prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, the neurological marker of coping. And these rats then are, nothing can stress them. They’re the most resilient rats that’ve ever seen. To the point that meanie grad students gave them the nickname of California laid back rats, right?

(39:34):

They were just, you couldn’t stress them because their experience was things are bad. It works out okay, things are bad, it works out okay, things are bad and works out. And that’s to your point, Sarah, when children have that secure attachment, and no matter what happens, mom or dad, well golly, that was a bummer. Hey, let’s play a game. Have cookies. Do you want to a hug? And nobody, we’re going to get more Kumon on for you. No offense to Kuma, but people do Kumon. But it’s like we give help. We give kids the help that they want, not simply the help that we think that they need.

Dr. Sarah (40:08):

And often that help is just being with.

Dr. William (40:11):

Correct. And your point in our third book, The Seven Principles for Raising Self-Driven Child, which is a workbook, the first principle is putting connection first in part because of the importance of a secure attachment, which you’re all about. And also we read recently that even for teenagers, a close relationship with the parent is the most emotionally protective thing. There is even more protective than family income or even the safety of your neighborhood. If you live in a dangerous neighborhood, you’re going to do better emotionally. If you have a secure relationship with your parents, you’re tight with your parents, you don’t word they’re going to dump on you when you get home or judge you when you get home that they’re supportive. They can be firm, but they’re supportive and warm and loving. You do better emotionally than if you do it in a safe neighborhood where parents are less supportive, you’re less close. It’s a really big deal.

Dr. Sarah (41:13):

I don’t want to imply that it’s easy. It takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth and our own emotional labor to take care of our own stuff so that we can be there for our kids. But it is possible. You can’t always control how safe your neighborhood is. You can’t always control if your kids’ recess is being cut so that they can get 10 extra minutes of some computer time. You can’t always control if they’re constantly being inundated by the world’s distraction so that they don’t well, but we can control, like you said, it’s hard sometimes you can’t always be a non-anxious presence. But we can, the big picture in the aggregate, we have so much more control over putting our energy into being a non-anxious presence, a secure base.

Ned (42:08):

In some ways. We always, as parents, we always have this inclination to want to help our kids do better and be better. And it’s not intuitive that we can help them do better and be better. By your point, Sarah, working on ourselves and then that carry that, it helps our kids in this way. When our second book, what Do You Say came out the book, the Bill’s, talking about where the first chapter is about connection. I was lecturing at a local school and a mom came up to the book signing, this will matter in a moment. So this is 2021, and she said last year, so I’ve got a 14-year-old boy and I’m always sort of on it, got to do this, you got to do that, and dah dah. And it wasn’t great for either of us. And she said, I read The Self-Driven Child during the summer of 2020, so this is the height of COVID.

(42:55):

And she said, the time when it felt like America was hunting children who looked like my son. And she said, I mean the hardest time of my life and certainly his life too. And she said, I read that chapter and I dedicated myself to the idea of I would make home feel like a safe base. And she said it completely changed my relationship with my son in ways that to echo Bill’s point, just incredibly protective because in your point, what could she do about what was going on outside of her household? Really nothing. But she could make home feel safe as a refuge against all of that.

Dr. William (43:39):

And I think that in our first book, we didn’t make up this idea as parents moving the direction of being a non-Asian presence. We didn’t make up that term. We got it from a guy named Edwin Friedman. But I love the term because it turns out that any kind of organization ranging from a family to a corporation, they work best if the people in charge are not highly anxious and emotionally reactive. And you think about how much easier it is as a parent if you’ve got an infant crying to soo them. If you can stay calm or if your 3-year-old is really upset about some of your third grade daughter comes home and she’s the only kid in your friend group who didn’t get invited to a party.

(44:25):

It’s much easier to be helpful if we stay calm and don’t rush in to try to solve it. And we know that in our first book, we talked a lot about the research on stress contagion sitting, if you’re in a fifth grade kid in school and you got a burned out teacher, you’re going to have higher levels of stress hormones than the fifth grader sitting with a teacher who really enjoys their job is that stress is contagious. And our second way, we focus more on the idea that calm is contagious. And the idea, part of the advantage for kids when we can stay calm is that we can listen to them better. We can express more empathy. And also it is much easier to let kids, to make their own decisions, solve their own problems, to give them more control of their lives if we can stay calm. Because when we’re anxious we get more controlling. And there’s so many reasons why this idea of just would make sense for us, for parents of kids at any age to just set the goal of moving that direction, of being a non-anxious presence in the family so that home feels like a safe base. And what we could communicate to kids is courage rather than fear or the ability, even when stuff is scary, we can handle it.

Dr. Sarah (45:44):

Yeah, I love that. I think that one of my favorite things that I try to remind my kids is that being brave is doing something while you’re scared, not the absence of fear.

Ned (45:59):

Yeah. Well, and it goes back to our point earlier about play, right? There are all sorts of ways that that can introduce all kinds of things that are scary physically or emotionally. And as parents, were wired to try to protect our kids from those things, but when we do them, we deprive them of their hero or heroin’s journey. You don’t become courageous in the absence of fear. And so one of the things we can do is frankly give our kids more opportunity when there aren’t adults hovering all the time because as concerned, loving parents, caregivers, just concerned adults, we want to jump in. And so with all the hard feelings, but one of the things that kids need to do, they need the opportunity to learn to soothe their own hard feelings, to talk back against, to engage that prefrontal cortex. Otherwise they really are going to infantalize them in ways that it’s just not right.

Dr. Sarah (46:49):

Yeah.

Dr. William (46:51):

One of the chapters in our second book, we start out by telling a story about Mr. Rogers, Fred Rogers, and when he was 11 or something, he’s walking on this high wall and his mother’s grandmother are pleading with him to come down. It’s too dangerous. And his grandfather, he said, let the boy walk. And Mr. Rogers talked about just how that was, that imbued him with a sense of courage and confidence. And certainly we don’t want kids to be in life-threatening situations. This wasn’t a life-threatening, but we want them to some risks, the little dangers and kids are generally pretty good about knowing I can handle this, but I can’t handle this. And so I think much of good parenting, I think at almost any age is at times at least is sitting on our hands and zipping our lips. It’s hard to do because we…

Ned (47:51):

Tolerate our own fear.

Dr. William (47:54):

We feel a low sense of control, which is again, it’s the most stressful thing to experience. I know, which makes, so in all our books we talk about just various ways that parents can move, various things that parents can do to help ’em move in that direction of big no nation presence in their family and having home feel like a safe base.

Dr. Sarah (48:15):

Yeah, it’s funny. I feel like what that grandfather of Mr. Rogers did that moment of course was yes, lavin to walk, right, allow him to take the risk, but he also, he did it out loud. He protected. It was like a very act, let the boy walk. I am announcing to everyone around, but also to my grandson. I am protecting this space for him. And that I think is another layer that we can use as a tool, I am protecting this. So it’s not just the absence of controlling them, but it’s saying, you have my protection for this space.

Dr. William (49:07):

Go. It’s funny and rooted in my, I’m confident that you can handle it. And so I’m going to protect that space for you at some level. He’s also communicating. I am confident that you can handle even if you fall, that you can handle it.

Ned (49:24):

My son, who’s now in graduate school, ADHD. And so in middle school, even through high school, everything was always done at the last possible moment. And my mother-in-law was visiting, and she’s wired very differently. She’s very much on top of things, but she’s also really fretful. So here’s my son first thing in the morning on Tuesday morning, completing homework that’s due in 20 minutes. And she’s sitting, Matthew focus, Matthew focus, Matthew focus. And I’m thinking, where’s, well, first of all, where’s his attention right now? And her energy was so intense. My wife started getting, and both of them, and they were just worried about him. And I cut in, I said, I think Matthew’s got this. Let’s give him the space. Matthew, if you need help, I know your grandmother would love to help and your mom would help. And if neither of them is helpful, you can drag me into it. And of course he does everything last minute. He got it done at the last moment. It was nail biting for all the adults watching this through their fingers like a horror movie. But it’s like all about our fear.

Dr. Sarah (50:37):

It’s about our fear and the fear comes from love, but it’s, it’s still contagious. It’s pouring more in their system.

Dr. William (50:48):

I can’t remember Sarah before I mentioned this last time we spoke, but I’ve never been more panicked than it was when my daughter was just turning two and she started to stutter and it was really bad. It got so bad after a few days that she wasn’t talking. And I thought, how could this possibly get better? She won’t talk. And I just fantasize this life of just severe stutter and being teased and this stuff. And she started speaking normally again, two or three days. And what I realized that all our fears, parents, all our worry and concern, it’s about the future.

(51:25):

Because if we had a crystal ball, we could say, look, I know your kid’s having a hard time right now, but I know by the time he’s 16 or 20 or 25, he’s going to be terrific. You wouldn’t worry so much. You’d think this is just part of his path. And I think it’s a great assumption if kids are in a hard place right now to assume that this isn’t wrong, this isn’t terrible, this is part of his path and still do everything we can to help him. But just knowing that all our worry about our kids, it’s about the future. And I’ve been saying when I lectured the last two or three years that I wish I could implant in parents’ brains, the circuits in my brain that know over probably a thousand kids at least, who were just a disaster at one point in their development, who turned out great. And I’ve been a neuropsychologist for 41 years and I see so many kids, just so many kids who are struggling when they’re little, when they’re teens or tweens, young adults, even young adults who are older adolescents who by the time they’re 25 or 26 are doing great. And little kids who are really struggling when they’re three or four who are nailing it when they’re 11.

Dr. Sarah (52:41):

But it’s like the positive side of a self-fulfilling prophecy if we were terrified. And then we allow that fear to drive a lot of our interactions and the way we approach our child’s life, we can create the self-fulfilling prophecy because we are interfering with stuff. But then the thing can be said on the flip side, if you can sit and manage the stress, manage the anxiety, it’s there, it’s real. And say, well, I trust this will be exactly what it needs to be and we’ll take it as it comes. We’ve got this. That also becomes a self liability prophecy because we also move in ways that confirm that possibility.

Ned (53:27):

My daughter, when she was in eighth grade was full school refusal for three months of eighth grade. There’s a lot of complicated stuff, more details than we’re sharing here. I’m a person whose day job is helping kids get into college, so what’s the art going through my head? And I’ve got this side hustle here as a alleged parenting expert. So what’s going through my head as well? And I have never been more committed to sleep, exercise, and meditation than I was right then because I knew that one of the things I could do is be a kind of a stress sponge for my daughter.

(54:02):

And I remember going out for a walk with her and everything was hard. She didn’t have friends, she wasn’t in school, she wasn’t, I mean, everything is hard. We went out for a walk and I said, listen kiddo. I said, you are creative as all get out. You’re smart as attack, you’re vicious and board games. I haven’t won since you were six. I said, you’re going to do really cool things in this world. You’re going to have really terrific friends. I’m confident this is going to work out. I never say, I know. I said, I’m confident. And she said, it sure doesn’t feel that way. And I said, I know it doesn’t. Everything is hard right now and I’m loathed to play that I’m older than you card, but I have been around the sun a few more times than you have. And quick reminder that when I was your age, actually a year younger, I spent three months of seventh grade in a pediatric psychiatric hospital. And look at me now. I got you. I got your brother, I got your mom. And so I don’t know, but I’m confident. And she’s of course now third year of college and she’s doing great to borrow Bill sticker is kids don’t tend to get stuck unless we get stuck.

(55:07):

Because they have brains in their heads and they want their lives to work out. But if you can hold to that, it’s so much easier not to be afraid in the moment and that energy to kids being stuck, but really rad energy to this will work out. And to your point, Sarah, being a part of that self-fulfilling prophecy for our kids.

Dr. Sarah (55:27):

Yeah. Well, that’s so great. I love this conversation. I so appreciate both of you coming on this podcast. Please come back.

Ned (55:38):

Anytime. You’re wonderful.

Dr. Sarah (55:41):

You have a podcast. So can you tell people about your podcast and of course, your amazing books? Where can they I connect with you guys?

Ned (55:49):

So the podcast is surprisingly The Self-Driven Child podcast. And so we talk with people in education and parenting experts and whatever sort of tickles my fancy, my ADHD son did not get it from his mother. So, it’s a little bit…

Dr. Sarah (56:06):

Interesting. I have ADHD too. Maybe there’s a thing about ADHD in podcasting.

Ned (56:10):

It’s fun.

Dr. William (56:11):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (56:12):

Amazing. And your books too?

Dr. William (56:14):

Yeah, our three books, the first one’s The Self-Driven Child, which is sold over a million copies worldwide now. And because people all over the world are saying life feels out of control, how do we get more control? At least that that feeling that, okay, the life is manageable. I am not helpless, I’m not hopeless, I’m not overwhelmed the time. So it’s The Self-Driven Child. The second one is called, What Do You Say?: How to Talk with Kids to Build Motivation, Stress Tolerance, and a Happy Home. Stress tolerance is the ability to function well in stressful situations. And it’s all about talk with kids. There’s a lot of dialogue and there’s a lot of examples kind of language that we use to talk with kids and have used over the years with kids. And the third one is called The Self-Driven Child, The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child: A Workbook. And the idea is that we want to help parents feel that it’s safe and that it’s right to trust their kids more and worry about them less. And it’s hard. It’s hard when we see control to kids, we have to zip our lips and center our heads. It’s really stressful for us. This workbook is an attempt to try to make it easier for parents to get on board to understand that it’s really right and it’s really safe to give their kids more control of their lives.

Dr. Sarah (57:38):

What a tremendous resource. I can’t recommend it more, guys. Everyone go to their website, theselfdrivenchild.com, right?

Ned (57:46):

Exactly right.

Dr. Sarah (57:47):

Okay. And I’ll link all this in the show notes so you guys can easily find it. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Ned (57:53):

What a joy.

Dr. William (57:54):

It was a pleasure being with you, Sarah,

Dr. Sarah (58:01):

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