The Science of Motivation: How to Engage Tweens, Teens and Young Adults

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence, and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Lianne Castelino.

What are the keys to motivating young people today? Is it a question of nature, nurture, both, or something else? Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Leanne Castellino.

Our guest today is a leading developmental psychologist, ranked in the top point 1% among his peers worldwide over the past 10 years. Dr.

David Yeager is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and co founder of the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. His research focuses on adolescent development in relation to engagement, motivation, and mental health. Dr.

Yeager is a former grade school teacher, an author, and a father of four. His latest book is called 10 to 25 the Science of Motivating Young People.

A groundbreaking approach to leading the next generation and making your own life easier. Dr. Yeager joins us today from Austin, Texas. Thank you so much for being here.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

I'm interested to start by asking you what led you from being a middle school teacher to then becoming a global thought leader in developmental psychology as it relates to adolescence?

Yeah, I really started out with a set of puzzles and questions that baffled me as a teacher.

I mean, anyone who's worked with young people will tell you that they have this feeling of having something perfectly planned out in your mind of how this interaction is going to go, or a lesson plan or a practice if you're a coach and it just doesn't go the way you imagined it. And I felt the sense that nobody was, like, surprised that it was challenging for me as a teacher and a coach and so on.

Instead, they kind of just pat you on the back and say, oh, you know, teenagers are the worst, and I'm really sorry, but you, there's nothing you can do about it. And that always just felt weird to me. Like, why are we giving up on an entire age group?

I mean, you don't see someone who has a baby and you're like, oh, man, babies are terrible. Like, you know, you goo and gah and you ogle and you, you know, squeeze and hug and kiss the baby and. But the minute puberty strikes, we give up.

And so I left the classroom ultimately because I felt like we needed a science with a different perspective, a perspective in which we think about maybe what's right with young people rather than what's wrong with them and what we adults can do differently. And that's what I've dedicated my life to.

Ever since then, you've authored many, many publications and papers, but 10 to 25 is your first book.

So understanding sort of the context that you just provided and how you went from the classroom to this area of research, what then was the impetus for writing this book?

Yeah, so the we.

Once I decided to become a researcher, I ended up conducting these large scale experiments and my goal was to try to give advice to people in schools so that way they felt like there's something real and practical that they could implement. And so I kind of aimed the tools of rigorous social science at these perennial puzzles.

Things like how do you give critical feedback to somebody so that they don't get offended, but instead get motivated? Or how do you prevent the onset of depression or anxiety that often accompanies a hard time like the transition to high school?

Or even how do you get kids to eat healthy or stop cheating or whatever it is?

And we had these findings and often what would happen is they get covered by the media and it be nice and people would hear about it, but there's no way for someone who could consume that media to know what to do. You know, like what should they say differently if they're a parent or a manager or a teacher or a coach.

And so I ultimately wanted to have a, a more practical guide that takes the findings from our research, but also pairs it with real stories of people who have kind of figured it out and have figured out how to interact with young people so that they're motivated. And I, I kind of went on a journey of learning for several years and stopped a lot of my conventional academic research.

So that way I could find these people who I call mentors or mentor mindset leaders who have figured out how to engage young people in ways that stop them from having to pull their hair out that things aren't going well, and instead leave themselves feeling inspired and motivated to change the world.

So during the time that you spent doing this research, was there a particular finding that gave you pause?

Yeah, I mean, very early on I was struck by a puzzle which is that many of our well intentioned efforts to try to influence adolescents don't work. So dare, for instance, people may know about that that's an anti drug program that's in a huge proportion of schools in America.

When for me in the 80s we had DARE and it's everywhere and it doesn't work. Not only does it not work, it potentially increases substance use among kids and teenagers just say no.

Another anti drug campaign had the same kind of effect. The average effect of an anti obesity program for youth is that they gain more weight after being in the program compared to a control group.

So it's not just ineffective, it's like backfiring. Same thing with anti bullying in high school.

That's where we're often worried about bullying because it leads to things like school shootings and suicide and all those other policy concerns. The average effect of an anti bullying program for high school is to increase bullying.

And you know, in all these domains the supposed experts are developing the programs. The people with the most PhDs and publications and credentials and like, how can like our supposedly smartest people be like so bad at their jobs?

And I don't think it's a problem of not caring or like an ethical problem. I think ultimately we have this the fully wrong view of young people.

And because it's the wrong view, then whenever we get around to designing a program for them, we design programs that aren't going to work because it's like, it's like we got the wrong model of what's going to work with kids. And so that was like surprising to me that it's like, it's not like there were lots of pockets of success or areas where we get it right.

It's kind of like as a society we're terrible at interacting with young people and it's showing up in the data. But no one had sat down and said wait a second, how come all of these things fail?

It's not like one program, one time is like all of our ideas are bad as a society. So that I think leads us to question our mental model of young people.

So when you say that we have the wrong view of young people, could we unpack that a little bit in terms of what is the widely held view of young people currently and what should it be in your view based on your research?

Yeah, so I think that the most contemporary view that is slightly based in science and also in intuition is that teenagers brains are underdeveloped. They lack what's called the prefrontal cortex.

So they're unable to plan for the future or think ahead or make rational decisions or have a smart trade off decision in their minds. Because of that, then their judgment and decision making can't be trusted.

And therefore if we're worried about them, then we the adults should make all the decisions for them. And our goal should be to try to control young people as best we can. Or a related view is that society has been too tough for young people.

It's been very stressful and traumatic and they've been through Covid and their brains are addicted to screens and social media and turn to mush and all these other things. And because of that, then all we can do is like protect them until they turn into adults.

You know, better if we could lock them in a closet until they're 25.

And the contemporary reason why people think this is because of neuroscience suggesting that the kind of emotion reward regions of the brain start becoming hyperactive during puberty. And the more planful, logical, goal directed regions of the brain, like the prefrontal regions are slower to develop.

And so you've got this all gas, no brakes metaphor. And like I understand why people say that, but that's like an ancient idea.

I mean, Plato is writing about that same idea in the Theodrus in his dialogue. And you know, Shakespeare in the Winter's Tale is saying, you know, like, I wish we could just lock these kids in a closet until their mid-20s.

And so it's an ancient idea that's been dressed up in a lot of modern neuroscience and it's not really accurate at a neuroscientific level. The, what we now understand is that the prefrontal regions of the brain are for goal directed behavior.

And teenagers are great at goal directed behavior. It's just not the goals adults want them to be directing their attention to.

Like if you, if you ask a teenager to factor a lot of worksheets of trinomials, a lot of them are like, no thanks, I prefer to not do that. But if you ask them to sneak out of the house and go to a party, like who they can plan weeks in advance, like, who do I have to lie to?

Like how, where's the map of the sewers? You know, and so this idea that, that their cognitive abilities are just more tethered to what motivates them, that's the first idea.

It's, it's not that they can't ever think, it's that they're, they deploy their thinking strategically in response to motivation. And second of all, what motivates them is a slightly different set of things than a lot of adults.

And it's this kind of really strong concern with status and respect in the eyes of peers and also authority figures. Once you understand that, then you can realize that like most programs or most efforts to influence teenagers behavior are like very disrespectful.

Like they imply that they come from this old model that the teenage brain is broken and therefore the smart adult brain needs to do all the thinking. Whereas, well, that's a very insulting implication to say to like a 14 year old. And they pick up on that immediately.

And then they don't comply with what we ask them to do because they feel insulted and disrespected. And then we say, well, that must be because your brain is too dumb.

And it's like we blame them for something that was really our communication problem that's growing out of our incorrect mental model of young people. And I just, I see that again and again. I mean, just even take, just say no. Right?

Just say no implies that I, the smart adult, know what you should say yes and no to. And if only you would listen to my smart adult brain, then you would be healthy.

And teenagers are like, you're not a credible authority on what makes me happy, so I'm not going to listen to you.

So taking all of that into account and the context there is really quite powerful what you've provided. What fundamentally then do you suggest parents need to understand in order to understand the science behind motivating a young person?

Yeah.

Once you realize that the problem is not just that, you know, Gen Z is broken or that society these days has ruined everything, and you instead realize that there's a perennial conflict between adults who think they know what's better than better for young people and young people who may not agree.

And, and furthermore, once you realize that what, what looks like incompetence in the teenage brain can often be just a response to how we've communicated as adults, then I share this with a lot of parents and a lot of parents like, oh my God, like I'm creating the very behavior I'm complaining about and people don't want to admit that they prefer to say, no, my kid screwed up, it's not me.

But once you, once we realize, okay, well, we're not doing some things right, then the hopeful part is that there are ways of tailoring our communication styles so that way they attend to the status and respect that young people want and need. And a lot of these things are not that hard to do.

And so an example coming out of the scientific experiments that we've conducted is something we call wise feedback. This is developed initially by Jeff Cohen, a Stanford social psychologist. So I want to credit his innovation.

And the basic idea is that when you criticize somebody's work, we think we're being helpful as like a leader. Right. So if you're a journalist and you're critiquing somebody's story, you're like, oh, great, I'm helping you become a better journalist.

The person from their perspective though, might view it as, oh, this powerful person who has a lot of status views me as incompetent. And because they think I'm incompetent, then I feel terrible actually getting this feedback and I'd prefer to not get it at all.

And so what we've found is that simply clarifying that the feedback was coming from a good place, specifically that I'm holding you to really high standards because I believe that you can meet those standards if you implement the support I've given you.

That turns what felt like an insult if you're not good enough and turns it into a compliment, like, I'm taking you so seriously that I, because I believe in you, that I'm now giving you this feedback. And this feedback is a sign of the respect I'm showing you and your potential and that small shift in frame.

And our randomized experiment doubled the rate at which teenagers complied with what adults had asked them to change. In our case, it was revising an essay in their social studies class.

That thing suggests that once we realize the language of communication is often done wrong, or at least in a way that is a mismatch with young people's desire for status and respect, then we can start looking for better ways of communicating.

And if you do that more consistently, then not only do you get compliance, but you actually end up with more agentic, independent young people who go out of their way to do the right thing because it is something that they want to do, not because something they're forced to do.

In the book, you also talk about, and you mentioned it earlier, you alluded to it earlier, the mentor mindset. Why is that important? What is it? And what do parents need to know about it?

Yeah, so the mentor mindset is just, it grew out of the realization that we had these experiments, like the wise feedback experiment I just explained.

And we're like, well, why is it the case that in a world in which it seems so impossible to influence young people, something so small as a post it note, we put on somebody's essay that says, I have high standards and I believe in your potential, that that could work.

And we started wondering if maybe there's a communication style that some adults have figured out for whatever reason that is allowing them to kind of chronically communicate that high standards and high support message. And we, we ended up calling that style a mentor mindset. And so why do we call it a Mindset rather than the mentor leadership style.

Because we realized that you would only go out of your way to clarify your high expectations, your belief in their potential. If you fundamentally thought that they had potential, you wouldn't do it.

If you thought teenagers brains were idiotic and about to make terrible decisions, you wouldn't relinquish any authority. It's like a teacher who thinks the kids are about to get so unruly that they ruin the lesson plan at any minute and so they rule with an iron fist.

But then of course, the second the teacher leaves the room or lets down their guard, then, you know, all hell breaks loose and kids are swinging from the rafters.

And so there are, there are adults who figured out that if you first change our beliefs, our own mindsets about young people and view them as, but having the potential to do impressive things when we set the right conditions, when we create a relationship of respect and status and autonomy, et cetera, then all of a sudden it's like, all right, well it makes sense for me to have this mentor mindset and the, the other alternative, besides the kind of they're short sighted and they need to be controlled is, is this alternative I call a protector mindset. And this is the idea that young people are, as I alluded to earlier, broken, stressed, anxious, etc.

And therefore we, we need to just protect them from harm and discomfort. And that's our job. Because they can't handle any higher standards. And if they, if we did maintain high standards, they would, they would crumble.

You know, they're brittle like a house of cards. And so again, like your beliefs about young people shape the style and the approach you take.

If you think they're unruly, then you adopt what I call in the enforcer mindset. If you think they're like broken and traumatized, you adopt the protector mindset, think they have great potential under the right conditions.

Then you adopt this mentor mindset style and it ends up being turning out that lots of research over 80 years has discovered that that combination of high standards and high support has a kind of magical quality. And no one had really pulled it together into one framework the way I did across management, parenting, et cetera.

But it's a, it's an idea that has had its day in many different fields and therefore it's something you could build on. It's not like a fad psychological finding.

It's something that's been around for a long time and therefore we can trust as a style that's going to work ultimately with Our young people along those lines.

In many families and with many parents, there can be a struggle with balancing high expectations of that young person with providing them support. So how can parents go about trying to get that balance optimally correct?

Yeah, I mean, look, you know, I'm a parent of four, and there's plenty of mediocre parenting happening at my house, so I'm not going to act like this is all easy. I mean, you know, I write a lot of my book about the realities of implementing mentor mindset practices.

And, and my goal was not to write a book that was like one of those diet books that says, oh, the way to lose weight is to never eat any of the food that you enjoy. Like, that's an impractical line of, you know, recommendations.

And similarly, I don't think for parenting, the idea is to think of it in an all or nothing way. You're not like, always an enforcer or always a protector. We can always become more of a mentor.

And so the way I like to think about it is that people tend to come to an interaction with a young person with one or the other either the standards or the support that we. We think of them first as maybe kind of incompetent. But we say, the one thing I'm going to not compromise on is, is my tough standards.

Like, I'm not going to relent. You're going to learn that the world is a, you know, a tough place and I'm going to be firm.

Or people say I'm going to prioritize care, like, I'm going to rest my head on my pillow every night and know at least that they know that I love them.

And if we acknowledge that many people already instinctually, instinctually end up in one of those two protector or enforcer, then rather than think of ourselves as though I'm a one version of a bad parent, it's more like, all right, how do I add the other side of it? I tend to be an enforcer. Got high standards. Great. Add the support.

Make sure that your young person has the, like, logistical flexibility that's necessary to meet your high standards. Right. Instead of yelling at them for not meeting the standard, teach them how to meet the standard.

Connect them with others, mentors, et cetera, so that way they can live up to your expectations. Collaborate with them on your expectations. You know, those are all things you can do to increase the support.

So that way you go from enforcer to mentor, where you've got both on the protector side, you're prioritizing care, you're really supportive, but you're a pushover. You've got low standards. Okay, add the standards, continue supporting, but start expecting more. And what does that mean?

It doesn't mean expecting young people to do everything completely on their own overnight, but it does mean gradually transferring independence and responsibility to young people and expecting them to do things that are, that are above and beyond what we would expect previously. And so I think that the first approach is to address our own mindsets, like do we have these enforcer or protector beliefs?

Second, whatever our instinct is, add the other one. And third, probably the most important thing is to give ourselves a little bit of leeway and realize that we're not going to get it right every time.

And that's okay because we can get do overs. This is something I learned from a parenting coach I write about in my book, Lorena Seidel, who I love and deeply admire.

And the finding is that you can have some interaction with a young person where you fall into an enforcer. You know, you yell at your kid or you're overly harsh. You can go back to them and say, you know, I didn't live up to my family values there.

I still need you to do what I was asking you to do, but I should have been more curious about why it was hard for you. So can you explain to me what was holding you back? So that way we can troubleshoot together so you can get a do over.

And then kids often remember the do over far more than they remember the initial blow up.

So what would you then say to a parent who takes everything that you've just described and says, you know what, that makes a world of sense, but my child really has a lot of self doubt and low self esteem. Where can that parent and what can that parent do next to get on the right path and hopefully adopt some of what you're talking about?

Yeah, I mean, and you know, we've got, I've got two neurodiverse kids and so we have lots of challenges and then, and there's no easy formula. What works for one kid doesn't work for another.

But I would say so I, I thought you were going to say, what do you do with a kid who is so impulsive that there's impossible to get them to follow a high standard? You know, and that's what I worry about in my house.

But I actually think that the problem of kids lacking confidence is it, it's conceptually an easier problem. I mean, it's hard to pull off because the people, the thing people Misunderstand about self esteem is.

It's not just like a story you tell yourself about how much you like yourself. So it's not, it's not very stable if it's founded on lies or what other people told you, like told you, you're great.

It, it's founded on an authentic sense that other people view you as a person of worth and competence and value. And the evolutionary stories is interesting.

It's like, you know, if you've got teenagers who are roaming the Savannah, you know, and they're a bunch of teenage boys trying to hunt or protect the tribe, you know, from another tribe.

Like, if they're sitting there like a lump on a log, not doing anything, at some point the other people in the tribe are going to stop bringing the meat and stop protecting them from the warring tribe, right? They're like, you're out of here, right? And so the, the concept of ostracism, right, has this very ancient and deep root.

And of course, on the Savannah, without modern civilization, if you're alone, you die. And so the cost of lacking social value in the eyes of the group or the tribe is death. And it's not an exaggeration that is the consequence, right?

And the animal kingdom too. Like, if you're a teenage chimp and you're viewed as like, bringing no status to the table, you'll never mate and you just die alone.

And so the converse of that, though, is that nothing feels as good as authentically demonstrating your competence and value in the eyes of people whose opinions you care about. The anthropologists call this earned prestige. That you're, you're earning a reputation through your actions. And prestige is different than power.

Like, you can have power just by inheriting resources, right? Or being tall, right? Your parents can make you powerful with inheritance, but they cannot give you prestige.

Prestige is only earned through things that you do and that is, that are observed by other members of your group who, whose opinions count.

And so the long, this is a long way of saying authentic self esteem comes from kids doing things that are viewed as rare or hard or not everyone does them or valuable. And so usually those are. Those kinds of accomplishments are things where you have to deliberately practice.

And it's painful and difficult, whether it's practicing your scales for cello or rewriting your, your script for debate or practicing your baseball swing or, you know, running harder and longer than others or whatever the activity is, right? Like achieving some level of competence that not everyone would or could achieve is an authentic source of status and prestige.

And it's A direct contributor to self esteem. And so like I, I spend a lot of time as a parent like engineering ways for my kids to get good at things. And I honestly don't care what it is.

It's not like they have to be good at soccer or hockey or whatever. It's like whatever they show an interest in, be a good one.

Because eventually you get an authentic sense of esteem in the eyes of your peers when you're just not awful at everything. And so there's more I could say.

But I think that often what parents do is they're like, I need to protect your self esteem by having you not experience any failure because if you fail publicly in front of others, you're going to crumble.

But the only way to get authentic self esteem that lasts when our kids are not around us and we're not hugging them to death is that they have to do things that not everyone would do. And that's usually hard and usually involves failure.

So the best gift we can give them is not quote, failure, but skill that comes from failure ridden expertise development in whatever domain or field they get interested in.

Now you talk about peers and I'm curious as to what you think parents need to understand during the adolescent phase of development where a young person's social relationships tend to trump their relationships with their parents. Why is that important for parents to understand?

Well, the, the research is like really interesting on that point. Like it's not, it's not really the case that peers always trump parents. How do I explain?

So, so in the old days people would claim in the literature, like the minute puberty starts, kids only care about their peers and they just hang out with them.

And so you could look at time of the amount of time that they spend with their peers versus their parents and they're like a lot more for peers now it's a little different because often kids are communicating with their peers through devices, but they're around their parents and so we're there. But also it was never the case that kids stopped caring what parents cared about.

They instead change what they care about in terms of the parents opinions. So like, like my opinion of what my daughter should wear as a freshman in high school to school is not a valuable opinion.

Like she doesn't care like at all what I say and I don't say anything. I mean, I don't even say you look nice like, because then it's like, well what do you mean? Did I not look like yesterday?

Like it's, I'm not a credible authority on that, but we talk every day about like, what summer school classes she should take or like doing Khan Academy for PSAT or, you know, like, I'm a credible authority on that kind of stuff.

And similarly with my seventh grade, eighth grade son, like, he doesn't care my opinions about Skibidi, Rizzler, Sigma Ohio or all this other nonsense that they say all the time, right? Like, he's like, doesn't matter if I say it around my friends, they think it's funny. And so I'm going to say it no matter what.

But like, he really cares what I think about his baseball swing because, like, I know something about that, you know? And so, so there's.

So I think the first big insight is that it's kind of a problem that we think, oh, they're teenagers, therefore they don't care what we think. And then we don't have critical conversations with them. Like, you have to invest in those really hard conversations.

And furthermore, when we're silent on a whole bunch of important life decisions that they're making, this, the subtle thing we're communicating is we don't care about their important life decisions.

And so out of fear, parents are like, I'm not going to broach the topic of relationships, right, or your college aspirations or whatever it is, because they don't care what I think. And it's like, that's wrong. Like, they do care, but they also want to make up their own minds ultimately.

And so we can't mistake their desire to form their own opinion for a lack of concern about our opinion.

And I think the reason why parents make that mistake is because when kids are little, we have total control over them and all we're doing is manipulating them to inventing them to our will, right? I mean, from the moment a baby starts crying because they don't have a toy, we hide the toy.

Like, we take advantage of object permanence when the baby's like nine months old, right? And that's our go to habit as parents is like, the way to avoid distress is to hide things from you. Because I'm just trying to placate you to have.

You never have distress. But like, that's not a good approach for teenagers.

Like, you need to help them confront distress, figure out what's what, the root causes, listen, be a sounding board, be patient, all these other things. And you may not feel like kids appreciate it in the moment, but they always appreciate it in the long run.

And the kinds of relationships where, when kids get to college and they screw up or whatever, they make a difficult life choice, but they still come to us, and then we are there to help them through a hard life choice. That doesn't happen overnight. That happens because parents were willing to have those hard conversations early on in adolescence.

Dr. Yeager, we're almost out of time, but I did want to ask you, what do you want readers of 10 to 25 to leave with?

I think the most important thing is this different view of adolescence. We have to change our mindsets about this whole age group. You know, stop pitying anyone who works with adolescents and instead start seeing the.

The kind of power and beauty in the age group. Second is a sense of hope that we can figure out how to harness their unique energies and, and talents. I think it's very important.

Um, and the last thing is, like, some very specific tips. I mean, the do over is one, the wise feedback is another. But there are others in the book like it. When your kid is stressed, what should you say?

So we've done tons of experiments on that and published them, and we know the answer.

And so I'd like people to take these topics like kids purpose in life, whether they belong, they're stressed, they make a poor life decision, all these hard conversations. I want parents to feel empowered that there is a better way and then start adapting the insights from the book to their unique kids.

And I think a lot of kids will appreciate that.

And as parents will stop feeling like we're either a garbage parent or a great parent and instead realize that we are growing and we're improving and we're adapting, and that's okay, and that's a positive part of the journey.

Really fascinating insight. Dr. David Yeager, developmental psychologist and author of 10 to 25. Really appreciate your perspective today. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thanks for having me. To learn more about today's podcast, guest and topic, as well as other parenting themes, visit whereparentstalk.

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