Dharma Lab — Transcript

Parenting Teens

With David Yeager & Richie Davidson

Introduction

Introduction

Cortland

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Dharma Lab. I'm very honoured and excited to be joined by two really remarkable people. Most of you watching or listening will know Dr. Richard Davidson — Richie — one of the eminent neuroscientists on the planet today. And we're joined also by another very eminent scientist, David Yeager, who is really one of the leading researchers on adolescent development — how we can understand the ages from 10 to 25 — and especially this idea of interventions: how can we support younger people in living with more balance and find ways to bring out the best in them? He literally wrote the book on it: 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People. It's a fantastic book, highly recommended.

We're going to talk about a few things. We'll start with some of the misunderstandings many of us have — and I'll speak as a parent, I'm certainly one of these people who can feel like you just don't understand the younger generation. It's probably something every generation in the history of human civilisation has felt. But we're especially excited to get into this topic of wise interventions: what are the small things we can do to support less suffering and more thriving — in the young people in our lives, or if you happen to be a young person, in your own life — and more harmony in our homes and workplaces.

David, why don't we start with you — where do we go astray, and what misconceptions do we tend to carry?

The Problem

Grown-Splaining

David Yeager

Thanks so much for having me. When things aren't going well with young people in our lives, it really harms our wellbeing. If you ask people my age and older what they're most worried about, it's usually their kids, their grandkids. We did a study of stress where we asked kids what stresses them — they said mostly being judged and evaluated. Then we asked grandparents, and they said: I'm stressed that my kids and grandkids are going to make terrible choices and I can't stop them or do anything about it. So to the extent that we care about our own wellbeing, we have to care about how things are going with the young people in our lives.

And given that, it's worth asking: how do we think it's going? Not well. There are very few people who feel a thousand percent confident that they know exactly what to say to a young person who's on the precipice of a poor decision, or who has already made one and needs to readjust, or who's facing an uncertain future. What happens is — if you've had some measure of success in your life — before we give advice, we run a kind of simple checklist: did I make good choices? Yes. Therefore I must know exactly what someone else should do. And now I'm just going to tell you. It's a simple logic, but it's a little bit flawed. And it causes us to do something I call grown-splaining.

Cortland

You're basically explaining my parenting style, unfortunately.

David Yeager

And now I'm going to mansplain grown-splaining to you. It's this simple idea: I, with my smart adult brain, have survived to at least right now. Therefore the contents of my logic and reasoning must be accurate and trustworthy. And you, by virtue of being a hormonally charged, poorly self-controlled teenager, lack that expertise and wisdom. So now I'm just going to export the contents of my thoughts into your ill-formed brain.

And look — I understand how this happens. We have the curse of knowledge. We trust our expertise. But what happens when you grown-splain is that the disrespect of implying that young people cannot think, cannot make their own choices — once we've signalled that, they close their ears. Now I'm frustrated and frightened, and I've got a bad outcome that feels like I can't control it. Which is, by definition, a bad stressor.

Cortland

Richie and I are both parents, and it's so challenging when you're in the middle of it. You feel like you can see how this could go poorly — very clearly. And you also know that coming in and trying to take control doesn't work. Telling them what to do doesn't work. Being hands off sometimes also doesn't work. It kind of feels like you have a series of bad options. Richie, from the neuroscience perspective — this is one of the most fascinating periods of brain development. What's happening between the ages of 10 and 25, and how did knowing that change how you dealt with it as a parent?

The Neuroscience

The Neuroscience of Adolescence

Richie Davidson

First, I'm so happy to be here with David Yeager. I've known of his work for a long time — I know his mentor at Stanford, Carol Dweck, quite well, and his work has been inspiring to much of what we do.

One of the really fascinating things to observe is that the onset of puberty today is occurring much earlier than it did, say, a hundred years ago. That's true across all western countries in which this has been examined. The acceleration of pubertal onset is quite profound — there are certain subgroups in the United States where puberty is now beginning before the age of ten. And yet the regulatory circuits in the brain are on their own maturation cycle. They don't fully mature until the mid-twenties.

Some of the train wrecks we see are really a product of this. In my own case as a parent — I have two kids, one now in his mid-thirties, the other in her early forties, and four grandkids — we went through a very challenging time with our son during adolescence. He's now happily married, an amazing father, and has become a school psychologist. What I think of as a poster child for plasticity. But during the time we were in the thick of it, I would say that my intellectual knowledge was useless in enabling me to address things. I wish I had had some of the insights that David shares in his book and research. David, could you tell us about the different parenting styles you write about?

The Framework

Three Parenting Mindsets

David Yeager

We have four kids, so there are plenty of mistakes happening in my house too. My wife has not read my book — her take was that I should read Dr. Becky's book. Every parent thinks they know a little bit, right? But I didn't write this book because I felt like I had all the answers. It was more the book I needed to read as a newer parent dealing with real challenges — three very ADHD boys and a perfectionist daughter.

What I liked most in doing the reporting for the book was interviewing this amazing parenting coach — Lorena Seidel. I met her because I met some families outside of New York whose kids were every bit as challenging as mine, and yet they would take their plates to the sink without being reminded nineteen times. I thought: is there mind control happening? Do they have electric shock collars on these children? They told me: we have this parenting coach. I immediately needed to talk to her. And if you're wondering whether I talked to her more than was strictly necessary for the book so I could get free parenting advice — the answer is yes.

What she described was a process of still being very demanding in terms of what you expect kids to do — their independence, their autonomy, from household chores to resolving conflict with peers — but what stood out most is that she almost always asks questions. She doesn't sit there telling kids what to do. Her philosophy is: what kids have to figure out how to do, as their brains are changing the way Richie described, is how to pursue goal-directed behaviour in the culture they're adapting to. How to resolve conflict. And if every time kids are in conflict we panic and resolve it as fast as possible, they never get to practise that. The only goal they have to pursue is how to subjugate their emotions to the will of the parent telling them to be quiet.

Lorena said to me: "I was tired of refereeing fights. I want them to figure out how to referee." So it's a little Socratic process she goes through. And before every parent listening says "that's cute, but the macaroni's burning on the stove, the repairman's at the door, you're late for practice, and your kids are punching each other in the face" — I understand that. There are moments where you just separate them. But if all you ever do is suppress your kids' intense negative emotions, they never learn, and you've created more problems for yourself.

The same is true of great teachers. A great teacher doesn't walk around marking things wrong and explaining the correction. They find ways to have students collaborate on mistakes, problem-solve together. And I followed the NBA's best shooting coach — Chip England, who's at the Oklahoma City Thunder. They went from the worst shooting team in the NBA to the best in three years. He doesn't list everything you're doing wrong. He watches you take a shot and asks: "How did that feel?" He's asking you to figure it out in your head, so that all the hours when he's not there, you have a coach in your own head.

That's a good metaphor for what great parents are doing. My goal is not to have you only know how to behave when I am here to tell you. My goal is for you to have the reasoning skills — and a coach in your own head. That parenting style is what I call the mentor mindset. I contrast it with two others: the protector mindset — shielding kids from distress by removing expectations — and the enforcer mindset — my way or the highway, tell, blame, shame, demand without support.

Richie Davidson

Could I offer a friendly amendment? When you say "coach in their head" — I'd add: also in their body. It's not pure reason. It's reason plus a kind of emotional decision-making that is at least in part based in the body as well as the head. Would you agree?

In Practice

Ask, Don't Tell

David Yeager

Absolutely. In my book I write about the example of my daughter Scarlet, when she was in seventh grade and auditioning for first chair in cello. She got in the car with butterflies in her stomach. A lot of parents call the school and say "my kid can't come in, they feel sick." I knew I was writing this book, and if I did that my teenage daughter would call me a hypocrite for the rest of my life. Other parents say "suck it up, stop whining" — that's the enforcer. I was trying to be the mentor.

She was going through a visceral experience — butterflies, sweaty palms, racing heart, heavy breathing — in addition to the mental anxiety about what it would mean if she failed. At the time I was finishing a paper with James Gross on what we called Synergistic Mindsets, building on Alia Crum's work at Stanford. The idea was to help kids reappraise that physiological arousal of distress — first, as a sign that you've chosen to do something ambitious and important that not everyone would attempt. It doesn't mean you're going to fail. It means you're the kind of person who has something they care about and they've put themselves in a hard position. And second, the physiological part — that racing heart — is actually your body mobilising resources, getting oxygenated blood to your brain and muscles to help you perform at the level of your preparation.

That's what I was about to say to Scarlet. But I thought: let me try the mentor mindset. I asked her: "What do you think I'm going to say?" And she said: "Oh, you're going to tell me the butterflies in my stomach are a sign that I'm doing something ambitious and important that I care about, and that my racing heart is getting oxygenated blood to my brain and muscles so I can perform at the level of my preparation." Exactly right. How did she know? She reminded me that two years earlier, she'd said the same thing while water-skiing on a lake, and I'd used the same framing. She'd held onto that rope, popped up, and had the time of her life. She remembered it two years later — not because a professor told her something, but because it was functional for her in the moment.

Cortland

Beautiful. And it's amazing how much this parenting dynamic maps onto the way we relate to ourselves and our own inner experience. The enforcer and the protector — that's usually how we treat our own emotional discomfort. Either very judgy and harsh, or avoidant, trying to smooth things over. In a lot of the work we do around meditation and working with internal states, it's a very similar process: learning to be your own inner mentor versus your inner enforcer or protector. Coming at your own experience with curiosity rather than judgment or avoidance.

David Yeager

Yeah, that's hard. I have another story — a close friend, an academic at an elite institution, who wasn't going to be renewed at his fourth-year review. I thought it was preposterous — he was amazing, any institution would be lucky to have him. But he had one good job interview and some bad ones, five kids, and he couldn't write his job talk. Total threat-type stress. Everything he wrote sounded dumb to him. The classic spiral: am I the kind of person who can't give a good talk? Maybe they were right not to renew me. Maybe they'll evaluate my talk poorly.

I had to say to him: you have chosen to do world-class research in an amazing way that's going to change the world. You're going to tell other professors about it so they can be smarter, because only you did this research. And they're fortunate they get to hear from you. That stress is a sign that you've chosen to give an ambitious talk in front of world experts and impress them with what you've done for 20 years. He landed the position, got tenure. But even psychologists have to remind themselves to challenge-appraise a situation rather than threat-appraise it.

Reappraising Stress

Cortland

So much of this is about how we relate to ourselves. If we're learning to be curious about our own inner experience, I can see how learning to parent can also be about relearning how you relate to yourself — they're mutually reinforcing. And a lot of this gets to something Richie and I were talking about earlier, which was very much part of your earlier work and clearly carries through now: mindset. So much of this is just seeing that we get stuck — this is the reality, this is who I am, this is just how it is. And seeing instead that everything is always a work in progress, always an opportunity to learn and adapt. Could you speak about the arc of your career — the early mindset work and what's happening now with wise interventions?

David Yeager

One thing I like about Alia Crum's research on this — her mindset work on stress — is the idea of being stressed about being stressed. The secondary appraisal: what does it mean that I'm the kind of person who's stressed out about this? Once you accept that that's a thing that happens to us — that it's not just the stressor we're worried about, but the fact that I'm someone who gets so distressed — it's more obvious why a shift in mindset can help. Because it often doesn't feel like we can change the underlying stressor. But it does feel like we can change our interpretation of what it means that we're stressed by it.

Another example: your kids are misbehaving in public. Other parents are watching. What is your worry? In America — and I learned not everyone thinks this way — we get really mad at our kids not because of the behaviour itself, but because of the signal it's sending to strangers who are judging us as bad parents. When I was on sabbatical at Stanford, I met visiting scholars from another country whose kids just roamed free, and they didn't worry at all about what other American parents thought. I looked on it with envy the whole time.

Cortland

I've spent a lot of time in Tibetan communities and it's exactly that — kids are literally running wild and nobody cares.

David Yeager

Nobody's worried about the secondary appraisal of strangers thinking they're a bad parent. And so — because secondary appraisals matter so much — mindsets can influence how we cope. Early in my career, the question was: can we identify a really problematic appraisal that people are chronically making in a given situation, one that's making things worse than they need to be?

My dissertation work, for example: first week of high school, your middle school friends ignore you in the hallway. Does that mean you'll have no friends in high school, be alone at your reunion in 20 years, die alone? Or does it mean they're insecure and trying to make new friends themselves? Which interpretation you make matters enormously if you're a ninth grader going through that. Similarly with the classic fixed mindset around intelligence — I get a low grade on a math problem. Am I an idiot, does my teacher hate me? Or have I chosen a hard class, I'm in the process of learning, and the teacher is trying to identify my mistakes so they can help me learn more?

That was Carol Dweck's big contribution — not inventing attribution or appraisal theory, but the insight that your general theory about how the world works will shape the situational appraisals you make in any given moment. If I think the world is made up of winners and losers and the task is to end up in the winner group, I'm on the lookout in the first week of high school for early information about which bucket I'm in — and any sign I'm headed toward the loser bucket feels catastrophic and permanent. That's the fixed mindset insight. And the thought was: if I could convince you that these labels aren't permanent, that people can change, that someone who's mean to you now might see you differently later — I could hopefully prevent you from making that catastrophic secondary appraisal.

The Research

How Interventions Work

Richie Davidson

You've beautifully demonstrated that if you can bring people to the more adaptive positive mindset, these benefits accrue. But a question that arises from the kind of work Cortland and I have done: a person may be readily convinced of this — how do you help them remember they've been convinced when the rubber meets the road and they're in a really tough situation? Those are often the moments people forget. Have you thought about this?

David Yeager

What surprises people most about the work is not that I can get someone to feel better 30 seconds after stressing them out. It's: why would they get higher grades nine months later? Why less depression? I remember a very sceptical statistician who visited my office once and said: "I don't get it. I tell my kids things for 15 minutes all the time and they forget it the second I stop talking. You tell them something for 15 minutes and their lives are different a year later. It's impossible." And in my head I was thinking: do you hear how you sound? What kid of yours would ever listen? Of course they don't listen to you. I didn't say that, though.

But the truth is — I was a middle school teacher before I was an experimentalist. My interventions are conversations built on how I learned to talk to young people so that they actually remember. It's a reflection, not a download. Influenced very much by Norbert Schwarz's theory of questionnaire design: the participant isn't just answering a survey, they're reading the questions and inferring what the person who wrote them believes. So when I give a teenager an intervention, the first thing I say is: we're a bunch of lame adults. We don't remember what it's like to be a ninth grader. You know what it's like, because you are one. We want this to help future students, and the only way that will happen is if we benefit from your expertise. Then it's natural to ask them: we told you some brain science — would you mind writing to a future ninth grader convincing them it's true? They're not receiving information; they're generating it. And the subtle thing is respect. I would only ask for your opinion if I didn't already think I knew everything myself.

I always piloted every intervention live in inner-city Oakland, in general education classrooms where the teacher was like: take these kids for a day, I don't even want to talk to them. And my challenge was: can I keep their attention for the whole period? If I couldn't, the intervention wasn't going to work. Whatever moment I caught them — that ended up in the final version. Like a standup comic working out material before an awards show.

The timing matters too. I always tried to do an intervention at a moment when the person would need to use that mindset right away. Scarlet used the stress reappraisal immediately — she got up skiing that day. And because it paid off, it became a functional memory. She remembered it because it worked for her, not because a professor told her it was true. Jeremy Jamieson at the University of Rochester does exactly this in his GRE research — he teaches stress reappraisal and then immediately gives a practice GRE. He did it because he thought it was good practice, but it turns out the timing is part of why it works. Jeff Cohen does this too.

Richie Davidson

I can see how having an opportunity to use the strategy immediately helps to reconsolidate it in a way that is much more effective.

Mindsets Need Context

David Yeager

Now — how did we get from intervening on the kid to trying to influence the adults in the kid's life? Two things. First, I looked back at all the interventions that had worked — getting teenagers to eat healthy food instead of junk food, the bullying interventions, the stress ones — and asked: what do they all have in common? One common principle was status and respect. They always came from a place of honouring and valuing the young person, having them serve as a mentor to someone else.

But the second thing, Richie, is: imagine a world where I've changed your mindset, but you don't have a context in which you can use it. Either there's no opportunity, or worse — something in your context actively discredits the message I just gave you. We did a study where we delivered our growth mindset intervention to ninth graders — your brain can get smarter when you struggle — in a random sample of public schools. In some classrooms, if a student learned a growth mindset and showed resilience, the teacher would respond: that's amazing, you're a serious student, I'm invested in you. It paid off. In other classrooms, the student would say "I love making mistakes, I'm going to tell the teacher so we can fix them" — and the teacher would say "why did you make that mistake? I already told you five times. Get your act together before I help you." The teacher discredited the mindset we'd given the student. And that ends up being about half of classrooms in America.

The Implication

Changing the Adult: FUSE

David Yeager

So the question became: could you take those fixed-mindset teachers who are switching off the treatment, and change them? If you did, could you double the impact of the student intervention? That's the question I've been working on since around 2018. That's why I wrote the book. All of our new empirical work is on changing the adult — so they create what design people would call an affordance for the kid's mindset. A context in which the mindset is functional, where it pays off.

To understand what a mentor mindset actually looks like in practice, I spent two years sitting in the back of Uri Treisman's freshman calculus class at UT Austin — a MacArthur Fellow and perhaps America's greatest calculus educator. By the early 1990s, 40% of all Black Americans with a PhD in mathematics had graduated from his programme. I was like: what does he actually do? Some of it was scalable, some of it was uniquely him. So I needed to find more ordinary versions.

We did a statistical analysis of educators in Texas — a network of about 1,500 teachers teaching college-level courses in high schools — and found the 20 most value-added teachers, the ones where growth mindset was functionally true: regardless of struggle, students could actually improve. We brought them to Austin, spent three days with them, had them explain what they do. My favourite was a physics teacher named Sergio Estrada. If Yoda and the Buddha co-taught high school physics — that's how I'd describe him.

There were systematic things these teachers were doing: asking questions far more than they told. Letting students revise and resubmit exams and quizzes. Establishing the culture of their classroom explicitly on the first day. So we asked: can we train newer, more mid-distribution teachers to emulate the practices of that top 5%? That became FUSE — Fellowship Using the Science of Engagement. A teacher professional learning programme built on mentor mindset practices. Things only scale in education if they're acronyms, so at the very least I made sure the letters on the logo were fused together. I'm pretty proud of that contribution.

Richie Davidson

I'm glad I noticed the hat.