370. Is America’s achievement culture fueling a mental health crisis in our kids? With Dr. Doug Bolton

Dr. Doug (00:00):

I think a lot of times we look back and we say, oh, it was COVID that did this. And I think also we think, oh, it’s technology that did this. I think it’s more complex in either of those, and I think the seeds of this mental health crisis were really born in the late nineties and early two thousands, and we’re just now beginning to really understand the impact of that. And then it’s hard. How do we reverse some of the things we’ve been doing?

Dr. Sarah (00:34):

We are living in a moment where kids are more anxious, more overwhelmed, and more burnt out than ever before. School avoidance is rising, perfectionism is increasing, and even students who look like they’re thriving are privately struggling. And as parents, it can feel heartbreaking to watch our kids buckle under this pressure. Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two who specializes in child development, emotion regulation and attachment science. I’m joined this week by Dr. Doug Bolton, a clinical psychologist, longtime educational leader and author of the book, Untethered: Creating Connected Families, Schools and Communities to Raise a Resilient Generation. In our conversation, Doug and I explore how shifts in our educational systems have created levels of pressure that many developing brains simply aren’t built for and why even high achieving students are experiencing anxiety, burnout and school avoidance, and what is really driving the rise in perfectionism and overwhelm. We talk about the realistic manageable changes that parents can make at home to buffer their children from these pressures, support healthy development, and restore some much needed balance.

(01:46):

And as you’re listening, if you find yourself recognizing the overwhelm or burnout that we are describing, I want you to know you don’t have to navigate this alone. My group practice, Upshur Bren Psychology Group offers both virtual and in-person services designed to support the entire family’s mental health. We work with kids who are overwhelmed by school demands, struggling with executive functioning, dealing with anxiety, or just feeling the weight of our fast-paced world, and we support parents right alongside them so you don’t have to carry that mental load by yourself. You can get a link to Upshur Bren Psychology Group’s website by going to the episode description wherever you’re streaming, or go to upshurbren.com to learn more about the services we offer. Okay, now here is my conversation with Dr. Doug Bolton.

(02:34):

Hello everyone. Hello, Doug. Welcome to Securely Attached. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Dr. Doug (02:46):

Thank you for having me. I’m really excited for the conversation.

Dr. Sarah (02:49):

Me too. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit because you are a very good person to talk to about this because this really big sense of among kids right now, a lot of anxiety, a lot of school avoidance, perfectionism, burnout, and your book untethered really speaks directly to this crisis in such a compassionate and clear-eyed way. So I’m very excited about this conversation. I think it’s going to help a lot of families and a lot of schools rethink what kids actually need in order to thrive. To start, I would just love for you to talk a bit about what made you realize that this was a topic that parents and educators urgently needed to be paying attention to?

Dr. Doug (03:36):

Well, I first started realizing that I was the principal of a therapeutic school, and I was there for about 14 years. And for the first five years, people were saying, we’ve got to bump up the academics and here’s how we can help you. And for the next nine years people were, as the mental health crisis really began to kick in kids, people started coming to us and saying, can you help us rethink what’s happening in our schools so that we can support kids the way you are supporting kids? And we have got a long I think, arc of things that I think we’ve been getting wrong as a society. We’ve been getting wrong as educators, we’ve been getting wrong as parents, it’s gone against what research has been telling us all along. And so as I was doing this work, what I realized was as we were trying to figure out how to best support some of the kids who struggled the most in schools, we were learning a lot about how to support all kids. And we started doing research and we started diving in, we started trying to do things differently and we learned a lot.

(04:54):

And as I moved from being a principal to doing more consulting and more speaking, people really seemed, this seemed to be the question they were asking is why are our kids struggling so much now and what can we do about it? And so that’s why I wrote the book and that’s why I’m here today because I’m a big believer that there are some simple things that we can do to really support kids, but we need to really change our lens on some of the things that are, I think pushing us to put more pressure on kids as we try and help and support them. I think we are doing a lot that undermines their development. And so that’s why I wrote the book and that’s why I love being out there in conversations with parents and educators.

Dr. Sarah (05:46):

Yeah. You’ve been doing this for a long time. Have you seen changes when you were working at a therapeutic school? Are the reasons why kids are coming in the first place changing or is the acuity changing?

Dr. Doug (06:00):

Yeah, I think that the challenge I would say, I think we’ve been seeing kids used to come to therapeutic schools primarily for more of what they call externalizing behaviors oftentimes. And what we found was if we can create a healthy community that feels safe for everybody, there’s really no distinction between externalizing and internalizing that really we’re just working with kids who are struggling to cope. And it’s how they cope with that is different as it is for all of us. But the keys to supporting them in their coping were all the same. Whether they tended to become anxious and withdraw or whether they became angry and disrespectful, we were all dealing with the same thing, which is struggling to be regulated in a way that’s effective in response to their stress. I think what’s happened is the overall stress of schools has gone up in the last 25 years.

(07:08):

And as a result, we’re seeing kids who would typically not be on radar screens of mental health professionals all of a sudden on the radar screen of health professionals. And then you’ve also got kids who are on the edge who are really struggling in more profound ways.

(07:24):

And we began to see that really in the decade, the previous decade, right around in the decade before COVID. I think a lot of times we look back and we say, oh, it was COVID that did this. And I think also we think, oh, it’s technology that did this. I think it’s more complex in either of those, and I think the seeds of this mental health crisis were really born in the late nineties and early two thousands, and we’re just now beginning to really understand the impact of that. And then it’s hard. How do we reverse some of the things we’ve been doing?

Dr. Sarah (08:05):

And yes, obviously COVID was a big issue, but this was happening well before COVID happened. Obviously phones and the tech world is not helping, but what are some of the things that you are seeing that turned the dial up on the heat in the nineties and early two thousands? Because that’s also before phones.

Dr. Doug (08:29):

Yeah. Yeah. I think that there are a couple of things that begin to happen. The one for me is an educator that feels most profound is the No Child Left Behind Act, which was signed into law in 2002. And really what that did, and I think it was well-meaning, so don’t get me wrong, and I think we’ve also realized that it didn’t work. And so there’s been a lot of criticism of that. But the main TESS of it, we haven’t changed, and that is that we want to increase academic rigor. And the way we’re going to do that is by increasing, we’re going to measure it through achievement test scores. And there’s a Goodheart’s law that says once you make a measure at Target, it ceases to be a good measure.

(09:23):

And so all of a sudden our work was to try and get test scores up. Well, test scores are a reflection, ideally our reflection of engagement in a healthy learning community, not the goal in and of itself, but when we make it a goal in and of itself, then all of a sudden our teaching changes, we start teaching Belle to Bell the other thing, which means that there’s no break, there’s no time to connect with one another, there’s no time to catch your breath between classes and middle schools have two to three minute passing periods these days. And so you’ve got people who are just in the grind of an educational system that is continuing to push people beyond what our brains are normally meant to do, which is we’re supposed to fully engage, but then we need a break about 10 minutes every hour. We need a break to quiet what’s happening, and then we reengage and then we get a break. But when we’re teaching Bell to Bell, because we’ve got to hit all these learning standards so we can hit our achievement test goals, we aren’t giving people the time to connect or the time to regulate. And with Bruce Perry, remarkable neuroscientists and psychologists and trauma expert says, we need to be emotionally regulated and connected in relationship in order to access our best brains.

Dr. Sarah (10:52):

Yeah. Totally.

Dr. Doug (10:54):

And we’ve taken those two things out of our school system and we don’t have time to connect anymore. We don’t have time to regulate. And so you’ve got teachers who are more stressed than ever before. And the other thing that NCLB No Child Left Behind did was they created these accountability standards so everybody feels accountable. Teachers, students, parents, administrators, school boards, all feel accountable and tied into these test scores. And so all of a sudden when you’ve got that kind of pressure and you’ve got school environments that are not, you’re going to have

Dr. Sarah (11:38):

Stress. So basically the No Child Left Behind Act reorganized the North Star, it oriented everybody towards a very specific and narrow marker with which then stressed out the system, it stressed out the teachers, it stressed out the administrators and the parents and the students. And so the system is under stress from all these different places, and there’s no respite from the stress. So recess is getting shortened. Extracurriculars are getting shortened arts, liberal arts, music class, art class these time to linger in the hallways all lunch. I have kids that I work with in my practice who don’t have a lunch like they’re in high school and…

Dr. Doug (12:34):

Because they work right through it because they need to get that extra AP class in.

Dr. Sarah (12:38):

It’s not even they work through it, they’re scheduled through it. They had to trade in a lunch for a class. And I’m just like, how are you learning if you haven’t eaten since 8:00 AM? Like what are we doing with these kids? And then we are wondering why they’re really anxious.

Dr. Doug (13:01):

Absolutely. And it’s not just students that are anxious. We’ve got a teacher shortage. There are 40% fewer teachers entering the profession now than we had 15 years ago. Teachers are now, Gallup Poll found that K 12 teachers are the most stressed, stressed profession in America. And you’ve got parents who are stressed, you’ve got parents. So the Surgeon General, they had an advisory about being a parent who would ever create a system where all of the stakeholders are this stressed.

Dr. Sarah (13:43):

And the irony, which is a sad irony, which you already mentioned, but I really want to highlight is the neuroscience of learning is directly incompatible with the setting in which we are describing because not only do kids need to have time and space and rest to be able to take in what they’re learning, they also need a calm co-regulatory adult in the room who can pause and be flexible and pivot from the lesson plan to explain something in a different way or offer an alternative way of thinking about something or take a beat and help a kid who’s having a really hard time just take a beat. But if the teachers are burnt out and the teachers are stressed and the teachers are time stretched, they can’t be flexible and attuned to the kids in the room either. I mean, by all means, I really want to be very clear. I’m sure the teachers are trying to and want to, but it’s like are they the opportunity and the space and the support to it doesn’t sound like it’s happening as much.

Dr. Doug (15:00):

Yeah, I think most teachers, well, that’s what the Gallup poll would say, is that teachers are feeling as a whole more stress than ever before because the things that they went into school for to become teachers isn’t necessarily what they’re doing. They are communicators of content as opposed to, I think what we’ve done in schools is instead of developing young people, we are developing data first because that’s how we’re measured is based on that data. And I think that we show up differently. Now, the amazing thing about what the research would say is that we’ve got it all backwards.

(15:44):

That if we take the time to connect kids to one another, if we take the time to regulate and pause that their brains are going to be more engaged, that they are going to be able to access more academic rigor. But instead what we’re seeing is that for many kids, the stresses of school are undermining their ability to access their best brains that allow them to fully access the rigor. It’s interesting, one of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and I think that kids now are expected to do the same kind of organizational, the same kind of multi-step processes with their work in eighth and ninth grade that I had to do when I was in a junior or senior. We’re asking kids to do more. We’re stressing their executive functioning more because this is what we think of as rigor. Now the tricky part is that just because we move the goalposts doesn’t mean the kids develop any faster.

Dr. Sarah (17:03):

Yes, there is this sort of pressure, especially in America and I’m sure in other countries too, but for sure it’s just very American of us in the American education model is like, okay, you could do this by 10. Well, can we do it fast? Can we do it by 8?

Dr. Doug (17:18):

Exactly.

Dr. Sarah (17:19):

Faster is better quicker. That’s right. Get there faster, do more quicker. But that’s not how the brain develops, right? We can’t rush that.

Dr. Doug (17:29):

No, and that’s the challenge. And with physical development, we think we see two kids walking down the hallway in middle school and one of ’em starting to grow facial hair and has full adult body odor and the other kid is three years away from puberty. But you’d never say, oh, we’ve got to put that smaller kid on a behavior plan to grow facial hair. Right? We’d never say that there are some kids who can handle the rigor because there executive functioning skills were more developed sooner, but the kids, when we move the line of what we’re expecting, we’re going to have more and more kids who can’t reach that.

Dr. Sarah (18:23):

Yeah. I’m seeing this. I probably work with fewer middle schoolers and high schoolers than you do, but I work with a lot of elementary school aged kids. And I see the exact impact of this on the amount of kids who are coming to my practice because kindergarten and first grade expectations are just not developmentally in alignment with what a lot of these kids are capable of. And it’s not actually as a result of the child’s delay or deficit at all. It’s that the environment is putting demands on kids to sit in a desk at five years old or do worksheets at five years old, six years old, and to your point, engage in executive function skills and inhibition of impulse and reading skills don’t universally are not going to be all. There certainly are some five and six year olds that can do this very well, and they’re probably not the middle of the bell curve actually.

Dr. Doug (19:32):

Right. It is interesting. If you take a look at, Google does this thing where they take a look at how many times words are used in language, and if you take a look at executive functioning, it’s very, very low. But right around the year 2000, it skyrockets.

Dr. Sarah (19:56):

What made it a buzzword in 2000?

Dr. Doug (19:58):

All of a sudden we’re expecting more of kids to be able to sit and focus on numbers instead of play. Kindergarten is meant for play. I remember. And naps, I’m even sure they do naps in kindergarten anymore.

Dr. Sarah (20:12):

My god. God, I definitely napped in kindergarten.

Dr. Doug (20:14):

That was the thing that we would do. I had a friend of mine who’s a board member, and he said that his preschool has videos of kids during the day and they kept sending him videos of children at their desk doing paperwork, working on their letters or numbers or shapes or whatever, and he’s like, I don’t think that they realize that that’s not what should be happening in kindergarten, and that’s not making me happy. The fact that my child is compliant and sitting still in a chair, what they need to be doing is moving and playing and exploring, and that’s just not happening. It’s a little bit, if you take a look now they’ve got these rims when they’re teaching younger kids how to play basketball.

Dr. Sarah (21:07):

Mhmm.

Dr. Doug (21:07):

You’ve got these rims that’ll go down to six feet and they teach kids how to shoot at a six foot basket. So you’ve got these five and six year olds, seven, eight, and then as they get older, it goes up to eight feet. And then when they’ve got the physical maturity to be able to really shoot a basketball at a regulation room, they wait for that. But what happens is it’s a little bit like when we increase academic rigor without increasing other supports. It’s like taking these five and six year olds and saying, now we expect you to shoot at a 10 foot rim and then they aren’t going to make as many. And then we say, oh, they’ve got a shooting problem. It’s not a shooting problem. It’s a problem of what demands. We’re placing too many demands on those brains. And as a result, not only do they not learn as much, but they melt down. And the other challenge is there are kids who, my daughter who I think was their prefrontal cortex was fully developed in the womb. She came out everything. She just got it because she was lucky enough to develop early. But then those kids, all of a sudden they begin to define themselves based on what they achieve, based on their ability to get into all these AP classes based on their ability to ace the ACT and SAT. But what happens is then you find these kids who have what they call achievement addiction, which is there’s always more to achieve. And if I define myself based on what I achieve, if I define myself at always being in the top 10 percentile, then what happens? I need to be perfect. And so perfectionism has doubled in the last decade or so, and so we’re beginning to see that this isn’t working for the kids who struggle to keep up because it’s so stressful for them and it’s not working for the kids who seem to be acing it.

Dr. Sarah (23:16):

Yeah, it’s a very good point, and I see that a lot. I probably have more perfectionistic, high achieving kids in therapy with me than I do in high school than I do. The kids that are struggling to keep up.

Dr. Doug (23:35):

They’re the ones who everybody thinks, oh, they’ve got this all figured out. They’re killing it in the system. And then all of a sudden you realize, oh, they’re an impartial hospital program. They’re anxious and depressed in ways that are really debilitating or they want to check out and they stop going to school because it’s just too much.

Dr. Sarah (23:54):

So what do we do with all this? Because I mean, some of it is systemic and I don’t want parents to feel like it’s their responsibility to change the systems. I don’t want ’em to feel helpless when they can’t change a system. But what can parents do? What can schools do? What can mental health, I’m asking you way too many questions like, please help us fix that. What do we do? But where do we start?

Dr. Doug (24:21):

Yeah. Well, I think we start by just challenging some of our assumptions. I think that at some level, this begins with this idea that in order to be happy, we need to have a lot of money to be happy. And in order to do that, we need to be really successful in a high profile job. In order to do that, I need to get into a selective school. In order to do that, I need to take all these AP classes and ace them, get fives on all the test scores. In order to do that, I’ve got an ACE Elementary school and it goes all the way back down to, I remember my kids were born around the turn of the century, and I remember we were doing baby Einstein with them. Everybody thought, oh, you’ve got to and playing classical music in the womb, right, because we’ve got to get their brains going so that they can fully achieve and it’s…

Dr. Sarah (25:15):

Do more faster.

Dr. Doug (25:17):

Exactly. Exactly. And so we put them on this treadmill that somehow if they only ace school and achieve in all these ways, then they’re going to be happy. And what we’re finding is that that’s really not true, that the key to happiness is actually our relationships, not our money. The other thing is that the data on going to a highly selective school, it’s not strongly correlated. In fact, they took a look at kids who got into highly high achieving schools but weren’t able to go and compared those to the kids who went to the highly selective schools. And what they found is that the kids who there was no difference in how much money they made, there was a difference in how happy they were because the people who went to the highly selective schools ended up feeling underpaid and were less happy in their work than people who went to a less selective school. Don’t learn more in a highly selective college and an elite school.

Dr. Sarah (26:31):

Do you also think that perhaps, I don’t know if this is supported by the research, but I would imagine that potentially being in a highly selective school is also a self-selecting population that may be more vulnerable to toxic achievement and achievement addiction, and there might be more toxicity in those environments potentially that could be a risk factor.

Dr. Doug (26:55):

Absolutely. And it is interesting, the psychologist, Sean aor, he was a Harvard professor and he taught freshmen psychology. And so he’d say to every freshman class he had, so half of you are in the bottom 50th percentile for the first time in your life. How are you feeling? So all of a sudden you can’t put everybody together and still always be at the very top of these classes. What they found really that demonstrates learning is how much time people study. It’s not about, in Illinois, it’s not about whether you go to northern Illinois or Northwestern, it’s about how much you study, how engaged you are, the relationships you have with your professors.

Dr. Sarah (27:42):

Yeah.

Dr. Doug (27:43):

So we put all of this pressure on ourselves that we’ve got and our kids that in order to be successful, we need to start curating their lives and we become curators of their lives in a way, and this is one of the reasons why I think parents are so stressed. We’re spending twice as much time with our kids now than we did when I was growing up, and our kids have more mental health problems. I’m not sure if that’s the correlation, but…

Dr. Sarah (28:13):

Well, I think it’s a quality in the function of that time. If that time is spent, to your point earlier, connecting, enjoying each other’s company playing, sharing our interests, and it’s feeling like good quality connection time, well then the more the better I would say. But if the time that we’re spending with our kids is rushing them to piano and driving them all to all of their extracurriculars, and it’s organizing and planning and orchestrating and doing all this labor.

Dr. Doug (28:47):

That’s right.

Dr. Sarah (28:48):

That’s different quality time.

Dr. Doug (28:50):

It’s very different. And there’s always this expectation that they’re going to be fully invested in all the different things we take them to. It’s interesting. I can remember going to dinner parties and people would always ask, well, what do your kids do? And it’s almost like, oh, they’re supposed to be gr. And then they say, well, our child is in the youth symphony orchestra and our kid is on this travel team. And my kids were really pretty remarkably moderately talented, so they weren’t making any travel teams and they weren’t that interested in spending all the time playing an instrument, but they loved hanging out with their grandparents. But there was some shame that I felt, right, that when you hear about all these things, and so I think a part of this is making sure that we are being thoughtful about the messages that we’re creating for our kids and is our time, are we just shuttling kids back and forth?

(30:00):

Do we have any time for dinner? Do we ever have dinners together? I think family dinners are an endangered species in a lot of families because we’re trying to get everybody’s dysregulated because parents are coming from work and having to get to all of these different, one kid does soccer practice, one kid to ballet, and of course another one to therapy, and then you’ve got to switch it all around for the next round. And so as parents, I think that we want to believe that we aren’t sending these messages to kids, but there’s some interesting research search. They ask parents, what do you care most about for your kids that they are high achieving or that they’re caring? And 90% of them said, it’s much more important that they’re caring. Then they ask their kids, what do your parents value more? 81% of those same kids said, my parents value achievement more than caring.

(31:03):

And so we can say, oh, we’re not that invested in, it’s okay. We just want you to be engaged in school. Whatever your grades are, that’s okay. But then what do we put on the refrigerator? We put the A on the refrigerator, right? It’s okay, you can go to any school you want to go to, that’s okay with me. But then when their cousin gets into an ivy, that’s all you’re talking about is how amazing it is that they got into Cornell and isn’t it great? All of these things. And they’re the captain of the soccer team. And so what is it that we’re valuing? I think that as much as we want to believe that we’re sending messages that it’s okay not to buy into this achievement culture. It’s really hard not to.

Dr. Sarah (31:49):

I hear in that kind of a call to parents to say, your intentions are really good, you’re there, but it might require us to slow down, take a look, double check and make sure that we’re just being a little bit more intentional about are my actions aligning with what I’m saying is what my attention is on aligning with what I’m communicating to my kid? And if it’s not, that’s okay and you can correct it. If you’re not doing family dinners, could you do one a week instead of, you don’t need to do five nights a week family dinner and cancel all the sports practices, but if you had one family dinner a week or even two A, you could have, I think there’s, I’m so cautious in making parents feel like we need to go in the equal and opposite direction.

Dr. Doug (32:50):

Yeah.

Dr. Sarah (32:50):

You can do so much impact with small tweaks. What do you see being very impactful when you work with parents, you work with families or you work with schools? What are the the little things we can do to start moving in this direction again?

Dr. Doug (33:05):

I think there are a couple of ’em. The first is, can we pause? We talked about how busy kids and teachers’ lives are in the school day and then they come home and then they’ve got to get homework done. And all of these places, and you’re right, it doesn’t have to be dinner, but can we have some time where when our child comes home that our first question is, what homework do you have and what’s our schedule today? Can we make sure that we are taking time to quiet that nervous system? Really when we think about trauma, the challenge with trauma is that it activates our nervous system so that our nervous system never gets a break. It’s always kind of in this fight, flight and freeze response. When we don’t put intentional breaks in, we’re also kids can experience the same kind of levels of toxic stress.

(34:07):

And so what I would say is making sure that after a long day of school, kids get plenty of time to not have to sit down and do homework to catch their breath, to play, to let their brains relax a little bit so they don’t have to be so hyper-focused. Or if it’s after practice, making sure that we’re taking care of our nervous system really by being able to put pauses in. I think that in that way, and can we connect with them authentically about something besides something they’re doing or something? Can we just be present with them? I think that that’s an important piece. I think another piece, I think the self-esteem research in the 1990s was really helpful, but I think in our effort to hack self-esteem as parents, we’ve translated that at some level to we don’t want our kids to experience distress.

(35:18):

But somehow if they’re distressed, then they don’t have self-esteem and we’ve got to protect them against that. And in many ways, I think that’s undermine kids’ resilience. So we’re spending more time with our kids, but also what that means is we’re supervising them more, which means that I think that they’re not learning how to be independent, young, independent people in the world in the way that benefits them. When we talk about attachment, if we are solving all their problems for them and we’re so involved and we take care of everything for them, but then developmentally, they’ve got to separate from us. But oftentimes I think now kids are separating without the skills they necessarily need to be independent and to deal with their own distress. And so I think there’s an addition to the fight flight freeze response, and that is as parents and as educators, it can be, we want to fix it. The F is we feel this urgency to fix. Our child is just stressed. I’m going to fix that. There’s something wrong. No, we all get distressed all the time. What we want them to do is be able to manage and learn how to independently manage their distress.

(36:43):

And I like what Lisa Damour says. She says, is it uncomfortable or is it unmanageable? I think when it’s unmanageable, it’s time for us to jump in and help them. But so many times I think when it’s uncomfortable, we still jump in. And that keeps them from learning how to navigate discomfort. And so I would say at some level, less is more. And being able to, I like the saying, don’t just do something stand there that we don’t have to fix it, but our presence can be helpful. But instead of saying, this is what we’ll do to solve this problem with your friend, we’ve got to figure, figure out how we can repair this friendship. Just to be present and to be able to be like, oh, you seem really upset about that friendship.

Dr. Sarah (37:35):

Right? Yeah, I think I love that quote you gave that Lisa Dior said it. My mind was like, is it uncomfortable or unmanageable or uncomfortable for you?

Dr. Doug (37:46):

That’s right. That’s right. It’s remarkably uncomfortable for us as adults to see our kids hurting and our response, our very healthy, good responses to swoop in and fix that. And I think that that’s one of the reasons why us being involved more, spending more time with our kids is actually maybe more problematic. Because when we weren’t being so supervised by our parents, we were figuring out our relationships on our own. We were scabbing our knee and figuring out washing it out on our own or our big sibling would help us with that, and then we’d get back in and play that. We weren’t, when we had a conflict with a teacher, we would navigate that ourselves and not have a parent send the email. And those are really important adaptive skills. And so then all of a sudden when we add the stress of school, but then we also haven’t given them the skills to manage distress in the way that they need to. That I think is a powerful combination for kids.

Dr. Sarah (38:50):

So I’m hearing, yes, school might be stressful and we might not be able to control that because the academic system, I want it to change so badly and it’s probably not changing in the next minute or two or longer, but we can offset the impact of that by how we center that in our home with our kids, in our approach, in our language and our behaviors where we put our attention. We can also offset that by counterbalancing the achievement pressure with rest and just downtime, playtime, screen free time. Listen, I’m very realistic. Kids are on screens and I don’t want parents to feel like they can’t have that. But one thing I think parents definitely don’t quite get with screens is they think that’s downtime. And you can have screens, but don’t count it as downtime because it’s a very stimulating time for your child’s brain and it’s actually not that restful.

Dr. Doug (39:52):

I agree. I agree.

Dr. Sarah (39:54):

Balance it all out with more like screens, but do some other stuff too. That’s not achievement stuff or productive stuff.

Dr. Doug (40:05):

And I think I would add to that, that it’s an interesting thing. I’ll talk to parents and they’ll say, well, they’re on three travel teams because they really want to be on three travel teams, right?

Dr. Sarah (40:19):

They also want to have 12 hot dogs until they can’t fit them all in their stomach.

Dr. Doug (40:23):

That’s exactly right. Or it’s not good for our family, so we’re going to choose how much of this we’re going to do and trust that the more, it’s also really healthy for us when we don’t have to be going to all these different places. It’s just as important for us to catch our breath as it is for kids. If the conversation begins with What homework do you have? Let’s get going on. And so we can get it done quicker than, and I’ve just come home from work and I’m cooking dinner and I’m trying to watch their homework before we rush off and I hop in the car to take them to this other place. My nervous system isn’t getting a break either, and it’s an unhealthy lifestyle for all of us. And so figuring out how can we be intentional about putting breaks in and knowing if we can put those in first and then figure out how do we work around that instead of trying to figure out how do we, okay, we’ve got all these things that we’re doing and want to do now let’s put in some breaks. Almost impossible to do that.

Dr. Sarah (41:34):

Yes, that makes me think about something. This is an intervention. I do a lot with kids, so I work with a couple kids who have, they’re very anxious about their time and are they going to get enough? Am I going to get to watch my show or am I going to get to play my video games or I’m not going to have enough time for this. I have too much to do. And I think all of that is a product of all the things we’ve just been talking about. But one of the things that I do with them is I get them to get a planner and I say, and I teach them and their parents to say, okay, well, what are your priorities? You want to make sure you have time for video games. You want to have time to hang out with your friend. Okay, write it down, put it in the planner. Now those rocks are set. And parents too.

Dr. Doug (42:25):

I love that, yes.

Dr. Sarah (42:25):

What do you want to make sure you have time for? I really want to have a walk with the family on a weekend, or I want to do one night of family dinner. Put those things in, schedule them in. Now let’s go and say, okay, well what homework do you have to do? How long does that take? Okay, let’s find out where you’re going to put that so that you still have time to do. I anchor their priorities first.

Dr. Doug (42:51):

I love it.

Dr. Sarah (42:53):

And the anxiety, it doesn’t go away, but again, that’s because there’s an ending flow of new things they have to do and these pressures on them. But I’m trying to help them understand how do you create space? And the reason why I use the calendar is I want to create something tangible to represent the physical. I also hate the, I don’t love how everything’s moved over to Google classroom and stuff, because I think kids, especially elementary school age kids and middle school age kids, the abstraction of the digital to do the digital assignments, it doesn’t really feel tangible to kids. And so everything feels amorphous. I remember one time I had a kid, he was really little, but he was already feeling this pressure and he was holding all these assignments in his head that he had to do. And so I got a big Lego board and I got a bunch of different colored legos, and I said, okay, the greens, all these Legos are 15 minutes.

(43:55):

The greens are math, the blues are science, the yellows are reading, whatever. And I was like, how much do you have to do this week? And he wrote it all out. And then I said, okay, so that’s this many Legos. You’re holding them all in your head right now, but do you need to do them all today? No. And I had him lay them out on the Lego board in the shape of the week so that he could see what, and I was like, when I cover up Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or whatever, does that feel different when you just look at Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? These things are very abstract now. I think a planner is one of the best things a kid can have because it actually gives them something physical to feel the felt sense of like, oh, my play date is on this day. My hangout with my friend is on this day. My show that I like to watch is on this day. I have this video game time scheduled. My needs are being met. And while we might not have the same priorities as our kids, letting them figure out their priorities and buying space for them is a huge piece of their territory. It helps them feel settled so that when you say, okay, now you’ve got to figure out where math is going to go or where your 20 minutes of reading is going to go, or where baseball practice is going to go, it’s less stressful for them to find a spot for it. They don’t feel like everything’s swallowing up their time.

Dr. Doug (45:26):

I love it. Yeah. It’s a way that speaks to a different part of their brain to be able to see it organized that way and can quiet that nervous system that says, oh, there’s so many different things out there. I don’t know how to organize this. I don’t know how, when I’m going to get this, when I’ve got this. And so having that concrete way, I love the Lego intervention. That’s wonderful.

Dr. Sarah (45:53):

Yeah, thank you. And it was like, oh my gosh, you’re holding all this in your head and you’re nine. He was nine when I was doing this. He was so little. And I was like, why, he was so stressed. And I get some kids are more vulnerable to that stress than others, but I think it is a product of, you were talking about how we’re stressed as parents and it was like, oh, there’s such a parallel process here because the parents are feeling super stressed because we are overbooked and under-resourced and we are trying to do 50,000 things. And so when our kid comes home, we’re like, I’ve got 40 other things to do. I really can’t sit with you, so let’s get on there faster. But they just came from school where the teachers are under-resourced and overbooked, and so they’re also feeling this really intense pressure. And even if we’re trying so hard to mask that, to buffer our kids from that, and I’m sure their teachers are too, their nervous systems feel our stress, and so they’re just pong, ponging between stressed, adult to stressed, adult to stressed. I know you talk a lot about this.

Dr. Doug (47:02):

Yeah, absolutely. The interesting thing for me is that I talked about how our time with kids doubled. I think dad’s time with kids actually quadrupled in the last 30 years or so. The other thing that’s changed is the number of double income families went from 39% to 71%. So we’ve got twice as many people going back to work who are working now. And so everybody is trying to make ends meet, work home, putting all this intensity in. And I guess there’s a big piece of this, and a lot of it focuses, a lot of our focuses on grades. And if a student doesn’t get his homework in one day, it’s going to be okay. If we miss an assignment, it’s not going to be the end of the world. In fact, homework in middle school and elementary school is really not correlated with achievement. It gets as you get older and older, then it depends on the homework assignment, but this isn’t, the homework is not going to drive kids learning.

Dr. Sarah (48:13):

It might even derail it.

Dr. Doug (48:15):

Absolutely. Because they’re coming in after a stressed evening. If they could come in after a good night’s sleep and an open brain and not be anxious about having to do homework and three practices and therapy tonight, and then their brain is going to be more open for learning.

Dr. Sarah (48:32):

Also, and I think this is really important, and I think this is your point. When we are focused on the homework or someone is putting this messaging out, we have to focus on the homework or the test score or the grade or the college admission. That’s outcome. That’s not process. And learning is not actually outcome based learning is process learning is I have an idea or a question. I’m curious about something. I’m interested in something. I want to figure out how this works. I want to learn why this happened. I want to make this thing that I have in my mind be a real thing that’s actually learning, and we’re not protecting that as well as we should be.

Dr. Doug (49:24):

No

Dr. Sarah (49:24):

Schools do we protect that more?

Dr. Doug (49:26):

Yes, schools have really changed in their approach to that, number one. So you’re absolutely right. The other thing, so I was reading way back in 2013, the head of HR at Google, they do a ton of research on everything, and what they found is that students’, GPAs were not at all correlated with performance. So they stopped looking at GPAs in their interview process. There’s a guy who said, I can’t remember his name, but he said, I got a 2.4 in physics in college, and I thought I wasn’t meant for this work. He said, but today I just landed two vehicles on Mars. And he is like, it’s not about the grades, it’s about our engagement. It’s about being able to ask the questions and be curious. And I think our educational system has strayed away from that. And I think that at home, because we all see these grades as a litmus test for success, then we’ve put a ton of pressure on kids that end up actually making them less likely to be engaged and successful in the ways that we might hope, which is, I think most of us would hope that people would find intrinsic success in the intrinsic value in the work that they’re doing, and that they’re in a place where they feel supported by collaborative colleagues doing important work. And that has nothing to do with the grades or content that we teach in high school. It’s about how do we learn and how do we learn how to work together? How do we learn how to solve problems together? How do I scratch when I’m curious? How do I scratch that itch and how do I have people help me do that? And so when our worlds are so busy, one of the things that we lose is the curiosity that really drives the learning. When we are emotionally dysregulated, we can’t access the parts of our brain that allow us to be curious and moving from place to place without a break is dysregulating.

Dr. Sarah (51:50):

So really something as simple as taking breaks, like small moments of rest, even micro moments of rest, but also macro moments of rest could be enough to support curiosity, intrinsic motivation and love of learning. Is that possible?

Dr. Doug (52:10):

Absolutely. There’s Lisa Feldman Barrett who does research on emotions. I love her metaphor of, and I hope I don’t butcher what her theory is, but the way I hear it is that our brains, that emotions are really driven by the energy we have in our brains. And our brains use a lot of energy. It’s 2% of our body mass, but uses 20% of our energy. And that when we’re depleted, that’s when we are dysregulated and we struggle to show up in the way that we want to show up. And what she says is our brain, she calls it a brain bank. And that we’ve got to be thoughtful about maintaining a balance in our brain bank. So when we’ve got excess deposits in there, we’re in a good place. We can focus, we can be curious, we can be connected. When we are overdrawn is when we start to shut down, we start to become more anxious. We can’t function in the way that we’re to. And so the biggest deposits in our brain bank, sleep, diet and exercise. So that’s easy. And then there’s a lot of, the other thing is relationships. And so can we get as many doses of that being in class and going bell to bell from class to class? Those are all withdrawals. We are working hard, our energy is working hard. So taking these breaks, getting some pauses in loading it with the research on mindfulness is powerful, right?

(54:01):

And yet, how many times are we, even if it’s just for a minute, 90 seconds on our way to soccer practice, let’s just sit in the car and quiet our nervous system for a while and just notice our breathing for 90 seconds before you head off to your next activity. So these breaks are important, but also making sure that we’ve got enough positive things in our lives that are going to offset the number of stresses that we have. And that’s when you have to decide, are there too many withdrawals with all of these teams? We can’t do it as a family. It’s not good for my child. Or maybe it may be, yeah, if he’s going to play have all these practices, he’s not going to get his homework done before school tomorrow.

Dr. Sarah (54:51):

I like that so much. And I think that’s a really anchoring and grounding approach for parents. If there’s one takeaway I’m going to take away from this episode in this conversation, it’s that it’s not about good or bad. A withdrawal and a deposit is not a judgment, it’s math. It’s very basic. If you have too many withdrawals, even if the things that you are withdrawing energy for are fantastic and wonderful and bring tremendous value, if you have more withdrawals than you have deposits, you’re going to be running on a deficit and you’re going to be vulnerable. And it doesn’t mean you don’t do things that have importance to you or your kids. It just means you have to got to run the numbers. You got to just make sure that for every withdrawal, I’m at least offsetting it with a deposit of equal or greater value.

(55:40):

And that could just be rest. It could just be, okay, we’re going to turn off the music and we’re going to just put the windows down for 90 seconds on the drive and we’re just going to practice just some stillness, and that might be really uncomfortable and new for your family, and people might roll their eyes or be like doing this, but just hold it. Be like, I know, bear with me. I’m practicing nervous system regulation. We’re going to do some reps be funny about it, but it also takes the pressure off of us to decide what’s good or what’s bad. Right? Screens are neither good nor bad. They’re deposits. I mean, they’re a withdrawal. Okay. Budget for them, but they can’t put you in bankruptcy.

Dr. Doug (56:27):

That’s right. I love that because it’s the same thing. It’s exactly what you were talking about with the planner or with the Lego set, which is let’s plan in, let’s take a look at this and let’s make sure that we are planning in things that are going to be deposits. And we’ve got to make sure that those deposits are happening. Because if we’re overdrawn, if we’re constantly overdrawn, then we’re not going to be able to show up and we’re all going to be more vulnerable towards to stress mental health issues, melting down.

Dr. Sarah (56:57):

Grownups and kids.

Dr. Doug (56:58):

Exactly. All of us. All of us.

Dr. Sarah (57:02):

This is brilliant. Thank you so much for coming on.

Dr. Doug (57:05):

Enjoyed the convers conversation, Sarah.

Dr. Sarah (57:07):

I’m really excited to take some of this away, even just to my family.

Dr. Doug (57:11):

Well, thank you so much. I’ve loved this conversation, and when you talk to somebody who is so like-minded and so wise with the research, it’s kind of fun to see where these conversations go. And I love where we ended up.

Dr. Sarah (57:30):

Me too. It’s been absolutely so delightful. Your book, untethered and Your Work, tell people where they can connect with you, connect, get your book.

Dr. Doug (57:40):

Yeah, so you can get my book anywhere online, so Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or wherever you go for books online. You can also get it through my website and you can also learn more about me on my website. So it’s drdougbolton.com. That’s drdougbolton.com. And if you have any questions or reflections or responses to this, I’d love to engage with folks around it.

Dr. Sarah (58:10):

Yes, we’ll put links to all that in the show notes too, everyone. So if you need a reminder, go there and thank you. This was so, so fun.

Dr. Doug (58:20):

It’s wonderful. Thanks so much, Sarah.

Dr. Sarah (58:28):

If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, I want to hear from you, share your thoughts and your feedback with me by scrolling down to the ratings and review section on your Apple Podcasts app or whatever app you’re listening on. And let me know what you think of this episode or the show in general. Your support means the absolute world to me, and just a simple tap of five stars can make a real impact in how this show gets reached by parents everywhere. So thank you so much for listening and don’t be a stranger.