A Sense of Control: How Students Achieve Academic Success With Less Stress

In this episode of The Self-Driven Child Podcast, I’m joined by the brilliant Dr. Bill Stixrud, co-author of The Self-Driven Child and What Do You Say? We dive into the challenges parents face around academic pressure, mental health, and helping kids find their way without being overwhelmed by stress. Bill shares powerful insights on why a sense of control is so essential to young people's mental well-being, and we explore practical strategies for fostering resilience, decision-making, and problem-solving skills in children.

This episode is perfect for parents, educators, or anyone working with kids who wants to learn how to support them better without adding more pressure. If you're looking to understand how to motivate your kids without micromanaging or forcing change, you’ll love what we have to share. Tune in as we unpack the importance of being a “consultant” to your child and how building strong, empathetic connections can reduce stress and improve mental health.

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] – Introduction to the episode and discussing the importance of the parent consultant approach.
[2:33] – The connection between academic pressure and adolescent mental health, and why it’s a global issue.
[5:58] – Why a sense of control is key to mental health, and how we can foster that in our kids.
[8:17] – How increasing a child’s sense of control improves both their learning and decision-making.
[9:14] – Five key principles for parents to raise self-driven children, with connection being the foundation.
[11:48] – Exploring the consultant approach: empowering kids to solve their own problems.
[21:53] – How to reduce stress for both you and your child by changing the way you approach decisions.
[24:31] – The power of letting kids make their own decisions and learn from their mistakes.

Links & Resources:

If this episode has helped you, remember to rate, follow, and share the Self-Driven Child Podcast. Your support helps us reach more people and create more content that makes a difference. 

If you have a high school aged student and would like to talk about putting a tutoring or college plan together, reach out to Ned's company, PrepMatters at www.prepmatters.com

Transcript

Bill Stixrud: 0:49

The language of a parent consultant, the language of getting buy in. So rather than just saying you should do this or giving the kid orders, you say, you know, I've got an idea about that. I run it by you. Or I wonder what would happen if you tried it like this. And what I say a lot is, if whatever it's worth, I use that a lot of the kids I see where I want to impart an idea to them, but I don't want to feel like I'm trying to force it so if whatever it's worth, and then I'll say that, or simply, kids bring up a problem. It's a way that I get help. It's so empowering to kids. The idea is that this is your problem. I respect that. I'd love to help if I can, but I'm not jumping in to solve it, so that we offer help and advice and all the thing about forcing is you really can't make a kid do anything, and so I find it as a parent, when my kids are little, I found it very empowering to say, obviously I couldn't make you do I know that, so let's kind of work this out together. And then it was easy. Just once I realized I wasn't supposed to be able to make them do stuff, it was easy.

Ned Johnson: 1:48

Welcome to the self driven child podcast. I'm your host, Ned Johnson and co author with Dr William stick shoot of the books, the self driven child, the science and sense of giving your kids more control over their lives. And what do you say? How to talk with kids to build motivation, stress, tolerance and a happy home if you're a parent or a teacher or a student, there are two things about school you know to be true. One, we want kids to do well in school. Two, there's a lot of pressure around doing well in school. For a lot of people, it feels like it's a trade off. You can be successful or you can be relaxed, but you can't be both relaxed and successful. And respectfully, we see that quite differently. I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. Hi Bill. Hey, my friend. So I thought it might be fun to share with folks a conversation we just did with a really great school system out in the Palo Alto area, where parents are struggling to balance the academic pressure that their kids are under with their happiness and mental health. And I don't think that's particular to that corner of the world, but as we know it, too often seems when people are trying to figure out which to prioritize, it's not the happiness and mental health that tends to prevail. And so the conversation we had was making the point that this is really a false dichotomy that is simply not the case, that people have to choose between supporting their kids and having their kids be healthy and well and being successful in school. And we'd like to talk a little bit about why that is. Yeah,

Bill Stixrud: 3:24

you know, I think that for this happened to be particularly kind of affluent and very high achieving school system in the heart of Silicon Valley, and yet we talk to people all over the world who have the same concerns about academic pressure. We know that excessive pressure to excel is the fourth leading cause of unwellness in adolescence worldwide, behind only poverty, trauma, discrimination,

Ned Johnson: 3:47

yeah, the center of Jenny Wallace's book, never enough, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know.

Bill Stixrud: 3:52

And I think that the things that just keep us kind of motivated to write about this stuff and talk about this stuff is just, it's just so striking that just in the last year, within the last year, the surgeon general called the mental health status of adolescents the defining public health crisis of our lifetime. Also in the last year, a group out of Harvard, the making caring common group at Harvard did a huge survey and found that young adults have but twice as bad as adolescents do, like the 36% report symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, 31% of major depression. We got a serious challenge on our hands here and then, and our concern is, in part, that we don't want developing brains to be too tired and too stressed for too long, because that's the formula forget for getting depressed. I mean, we've made it up. It's a very simple formula to be too tired too stressed for too long, because it changes the developing brain if a kid gets depressed or develops a bad anxiety disorder, it doesn't Doom them to a life of misery, but it does change the brain in a way that makes them more vulnerable. It makes them more vulnerable to periods of depression and anxiety as they get older, because it may be a little bit more pessimistic, have more trouble sleeping, or they may also just we know that something that used to be really pleasurable is still pleasurable, just not as much after you've recovered from depression, and so the brain is still plastic, and then people at least till 25 or 30, and a lot of this can be healed, but it can't heal if kids are too tired and too stressed for too long. So that's one of our major takeaway points, and also, when our friend Stuart Slavin asked kids in high achieving school districts and high school kids in Ohio, what are the major sources stress in your life? The top 12, they had nothing to do with social media. Had nothing to do with internet, youtube, that stuff. It had to do all 12. Had to do it with school and academic pressure. We're fans of John heights book anxious generation, which everybody's talking about these days that focuses on the role of social media. And we think that's not, that's not the whole story by far,

Ned Johnson: 6:05

no, because if it were, kids wouldn't have had, I mean, when we were doing the research on for the self driven child, reading the research of gene 20th, the MMPI, that young people in the early 2000s were five to eight times more likely to endorse symptoms of anxiety and major depression than people were during the what the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, Vietnam, on and on it goes. And so I think it's fair to say that that social media and too much use of cell phone have not helped the problem. But I don't credibly, respectfully to Jonathan Haidt and his work, I think it's not fair to say that this is the singular cause to it. And if only we could rip these cell phones out of children's hands or parents hands for that matter, that everything would be right in the world.

Bill Stixrud: 6:48

Yeah, yeah. And I think that as many people who know our work machines know our work know the major solution, as far as we can see, the most elegant way to think about how do we really help young people is to give them more control over their lives. And we know that every every mental health problem involves a low sense of control. We know that a low sense of control is the most stressful thing you can experience. I mean that you can be a new situation, a really threatening situation, or something that's unpredictable, and if you have a sense like an analyst, it's not that stressful. It's when you don't know what to do, you start to feel overwhelmed and panicked, that you start to feel helpless. That's the most stressful thing you can experience. And all mental health problems are stress related. Think about if he's just anxious. You'd like to stop worrying, but you can't. And think about depression. Forget it. You have no sense of control. And also, we know that there's some recent studies that's showing that the reason that cognitive behavioral therapy helps kids, it helps adults too. This increases the sense of control. Studies of sleep meditation, same thing, when your nervous system works better, you have a stronger sense of control. Part of that is that that prefrontal cortex, when you're in your right mind and you aren't highly stressed and you aren't exhausted, the prefrontal cortex does a good job of regulating the rest of the brain, including the amygdala, with senses and reacts to threat and the rest of the Brain Stress circuits. So you tend to be kind of the moment. You tend to be goal directed, engaged in what you're doing, as opposed to being just just worried and panicking inside.

Ned Johnson: 8:25

And if I can add to that, you know, because this talk for the school system, and I think applies to everyone who's listening, we care both about mental health and happiness and kids being and parents being in the right mind. And yet, still, there's still this concern about a need for and wish for kids to do well in school. Everything that you just mentioned there about increasing sense of control the brain circuits working better is also helpful, of course, for learning, because when brains work better, minds learn better. And all those executive functions to be able to put things into context also include organization planning, problem solving, decision making, skills that are pretty important for both learning and for for tests of all types. So it's, again, not either or

Bill Stixrud: 9:07

Excellent point. And the other point that we make about about sense control is that we've come to conceptualize it in two basic dimensions. Subjectively, it's a sense of autonomy. You know, I'm not helpless, I'm not hopeless, I'm not completely resigned and passive. And the confidence that can handle stressful situations, then physiologically, is that that prefrontal cortex regulating amygdala coming down, that the stress response circuits that putting things in perspective, that helps you get a sense of control. And I think with that kind of context, we talked about the various things in our work, that things that we suggest based on five of the principles, five of the seven principles for the book that we have coming out in Marc, seven principles for raising a self driven child. And the first one is actually from our second book, which is to put connection first. But why don't you talk a little bit about that? Yeah,

Ned Johnson: 10:04

yeah. So the five points we're gonna we're gonna share, these are five of the seven principles. We don't want to give them all. We gotta read the book, of course, folks of simply, how do we as parents help to do both of those things that Bill mentioned of having kids have the subjective sense of control. So they're, you know, they're getting adult support, but they're not simply being told what to do with all the time. They're not automatons and then the brain state that supports. And so we're pretty excited for this book, and hope that you are as well. And so we'll enumerate these really quickly, and then we'll talk through them in greater detail. The first point that we make is to put connection first, and this is from our book. What do you say? And simply put, the single most powerful tool against protecting brains against the effects of stress, is a close connection that a kid has with a parent or another caregiver. So. Full stop. It's a silver bullet, really. The second one is for us to be a consultant rather than the boss or manager, because we want to give kids support. But when we're feel like we're in charge, and then, more importantly, they feel like they're in charge, that low sense of control really makes everything go sideways. The idea of being a non anxious presence in your family, because stress is so doggone contagious. When kids are anxious, we get anxious, and when we're anxious, they get anxious. And neither of us is thinking very clearly. We talk about wanting to motivate kids without trying to change them. This is kind of interesting to us. For those who have not yet read what he is saying. This is one of the great insights that we made, something that we didn't realize when we first wrote the self driven child. That a lot of times, when people are asking, How do I motivate my kid, what they're really saying is, how do I change them? And of course, when we try to change people who aren't asking for us to help them change, they fight us. And then we're we're sort of driving kids deeper into a place that we don't want them to be, and probably they don't want them to be. And the last point is to give kids an accurate model of reality, because so many kids, certainly on Silicon Valley and here in DC, where we live, have this idea that to be successful, they have to be the absolute best of what they do. There was a study that just came out of Gallup over the summer that a full 33% of adolescents felt that they needed to be perfect. Ouch. That's a high bar, right? And it's simply not an accurate model of reality, because when we look at, you know, valedictorians, 10 years out of school, are no more successful than everyone else, because in many ways, they're generalists. And wasn't Melvin had that great line that that would have gifted is early on to figure out it is what you suck at, right? And you don't spend a lot of time worrying about that. You focus on what your natural talents are and run hard in that direction. Yeah. So do you want to go through this kind of one by one? By one, Bill,

Bill Stixrud: 12:32

let's deal with this to kind of, yeah, little. Let's sprint through these five points. I think in conjunction, they're very powerful.

Ned Johnson: 12:38

So the thing with connection, I mean, there are a whole bunch of reasons with for connection. First of all, you know, ideally you have children because you want to be connected to them, right? You love them. And nothing is more painful, really, for as a parent, than to have a kid who's pushing you away and you're wondering what to do with this as I mentioned, the first reason that a connection matters so much is it's like Teflon for kids. When they have hard feelings, they have hard experiences, when they feel that they're close to us or to another adult or caregiver, it allows that stress to flow right out of them. The second reason it's so doggone important is back to that perfectionism, when we fall into trying to correct problems, rather than just making kids feel like we're close with them, even when they're kind of in the in the trenches and things are not going well. We're conveying to them that they don't have to be perfect in order to be lovable, that we can love them right where they are, that we have the strength and the courage to handle those hard feelings. The next point is simply that as parents, we want to help our kids solve the problems that they're facing, but it's really hard to help kids with problems that we don't know about, and so we see far too many kids who they're dealing with this, you're dealing with that, and we'll say, oh my gosh, but please don't tell my mom, she'll be so upset. Please don't tell my dad. He'll lose it. He'll blow his top. And those parents love their kids as much as I love my kids, but if the kids have the feeling that the parents are focused more on solving the problem than the connection, you really can't solve those problems very well. So some of the tools that we talk about connection is simply to start with empathy and validation. This is the first chapter in the self driven child, because when a kid brings a problem to a parent, our first reaction is almost always, how do I solve this? It excites something called the writing reflex, where we start making suggestions rapid fire. Or if a kid's really spun up, we try to change the way that he or she feels about say, well, sweetheart, it's not that big a deal. It's only the start of the semester. And both of those have their place, but they're not a great first step, because the person on the receiving end of that feels like they're being told what to do, right, or they're being judged for the way that they feel, you know? And when we when we interviewed all these kids in writing, what do you say? We're asking them all, who do you feel closest to? And sometimes it was mom, my dad, my cousin, my grandma, my coach, and Bill, then had this wonderful question. He said, What is it about them that makes you feel close to them? And they said, well, they listened to me without judging. And two, they don't tell me what to do all the time. So putting this connection first is a really big deal, and the way that you can do it is just to offer empathy and validation, you know, to say, Boy, I see that you're pretty upset about this, and you probably have a good reason to feel this way. The story that's in what do you say? We, Bill and I were actually back out in the Palo Alto world. Had given a lecture there, and the day after lecture, we get an email from our friend Charlene Marc Margo, who had set this up. She had gotten an email from a parent who had attended our talk. Mom had come home to find her seventh grade boy just in tears, the weakest point of seventh grade, and he was just like a mess, and it's late at night and he's tired and I'm tired. And she said normally would have jumped into, Oh, sweetheart, that can't possibly be true. I'm there other kids who happen in the growth part spurred, yeah. Or, I mean, you know, being strong is in everything you're look at, all the things you're so good at, I would have enumerated all of his strengths or told him, you know, everyone in our family is a late bloomer, and you'll catch up. Don't, don't worry about this. But I bent my tongue, I sat on my hands, and I resisted the temptation to do that, and instead, I said something like, wow, it must be really hard if you feel like everyone else is big and strong and you're not there yet, I get why you feel that way. Pretty hard, huh? Said, Yeah, it sure is. And he talked more, and I just reflected back to him what he was saying and saying they had reasons to feel what he was feeling. And he dried his eyes, eventually gave me a hug, and he went off to bed. I went after bed. I didn't know what to do, either. And the next day, my son comes down to breakfast with a written plan for how he thinks he can gain strength and enlists his mom's help. And here's the thing, here's what was going on in that moment. This applies not just to, you know, seventh grade boys wishing they were big and strong, but to kids in academic situations when their friends break up them or whatever. She simply heard him. She saw I see how upset you are, see how hard this is, and you have a reason to feel the way that you do. Now, she might have seen it differently, but she bit her tongue, and she didn't do that. And it's not logic or solving the problem that calms hard feelings. It's feeling like someone is working really hard to understand you. And mom did a beautiful job of this, and so we start with putting this connection first, because if you do nothing else for your children to feel like you're working hard to understand their perspective on things and not trying to change them and not trying to correct them, and not trying to shift their thinking, that alone can bring those executive functions back online. And as this little boy did, put your kids in a brain state where, in a perfect world, they can solve their problems for themselves, which is ideally what we would most like for our children, so they can have that experience.

Bill Stixrud: 17:41

It's so powerful for adults, too. I was talking with the woman recently whose husband had a stroke, unfortunately, and she had to come home. He's just on the hospital. He had to come home, and the neurologist tried calling my friend, like seven or eight times at night, and so some reason that my friend could tell that she was calling, but the call didn't go through, so she goes to the hospital next morning, and the neurologist is clearly angry, you know, she said I called you seven or eight times, you know? And instead of being defensive and explaining, it said that must have been really frustrating. And she said she just melted. She says it happened almost instantly. Why she didn't defend herself? Why should explain everything? She said, that sounds so frustrating. Just use empathy so it's so powerful. But this is the first chapter really, in what do you say the second book, and the next principle is one that we talk about in all three of our books, which, which is the idea of, especially as kids get older, we think about ourselves as consultants to them, rather than their boss or manager. And I, I got this idea back in the 1980s when I was just started, started as a neuropsychologist, was working with all these kids who, you know who have learning problems, or ADHD and the parents would be spending 90 units of energy trying to make them work and fighting all the time. Kids spend 10 and never change until the energy changed, right? And it was just caused so much suffering over homework, which in elementary school, particularly, where, after 90 years of research, there's no evidence that it contributes to learning. So I said, Just tell your kid I love you too much to fight you about your homework. Just be a consultant to your kid. And the idea from our point of view, we gave a lecture a few years ago about the self driven child in Texas, and this woman came up to me afterward, during the lecture, I happened to mention arguably the most elite high school in DC, and she came up to me, said, I have a therapist at the manager clinic here in Houston with really good mental health facility. Said, we know this school in DC really well because so many of the graduates get into the top colleges in the country. But then as soon as they get a B, as soon as they realize that everybody here is as smart as me. As soon as they text a girl, and she goes them that they crumble emotionally, they take a medical leap of absence, they come here for therapy, and she said to the one, they just don't have enough experience from running their own lives. And that's that's the idea, this consultant idea where our role as parents is not to make sure our kids turn out a certain way, but to help them figure out who they want to be and how to get there, how to create the life that they want. Because what we consider to be maximizing your potential is creating a life that you want. Because we see so many people who are career, really successful career, lots of money, lots of misery and no peace and happiness, and we want kids to have a life that they want. And so the three ways we do this, I mean, the three major ways that we could facilitate as a consultant, number one, we offer our help and our advice, and we don't try to force it down kids throats, because I work with so many kids as a neuropsychologist, most my clients have learning problems, retention problems, and. And I don't unless they're just completely psychotic or so I don't believe in forcing help on them that they don't want, because all they do is fight it. And certainly, we don't want to just kind of, we have parents say, I told them a million times or how do I get them to see well, you don't really mean it's not that effective. What we want to do is we want to get buy in. We want to make it clear that we really aren't for We aren't trying to force in the second book. And what do you say? We have a chapter called The language of a parent consultant, where it talks about the language of getting buy in. So rather than just saying you need to do this, or you should do this, or tell them or give them kid orders, you say, you know, I've got an idea about that. Can I run it by you? Or I wonder what would happen if you tried it like this. What I say a lot. I say a lot is for whatever it's worth. I use that a lot with the kids. I love what I want to impart an idea to them, but I don't want to feel like I'm trying to force it on their throat. So if whatever it's worth, and then I'll say that, or simply, kids bring up a problem, it's a way that I get help. It's so and so it's so empowering to kids, because the idea is that this is your problem. I respect that. I'd love to help if I can, but I'm not jumping in to solve it so that we offer help and advice and all the thing about forcing is you really can't make a kid do anything, and so I find it, as a parent, when my kids are little, I find it very empowering to say, obviously I couldn't make you do that. And I just, I prescribe all the ways they could beat me,

Unknown: 22:17

flopping the floor, close your European I couldn't

Bill Stixrud: 22:21

make you do I know that, so let's kind of work this out together. And then it was easy. It was just once I realized I wasn't supposed to be able to make them do stuff. It was easy. It was easier. Yeah, yeah, yeah, still, still as humorous. Told me almost 40 years ago, we shouldn't call it raising children. We should call it lowering parents. Yeah, it's still challenging. And one

Ned Johnson: 22:44

of the things about that is to your point, not only is it less stressful when you recognize I can't make my kid doing you make peace with that, and you take a different approach, but just how stressful it is to feel like I have to get my kid to do this thing, I have to impart this knowledge. I got a text last night from a friend whose son is in last year of high school and trying to decide, you know, trying to go through the whole college admissions process. And this boy has decided that he is either he's going to apply early decision to this flagship university in the state that in which they live, or going to go to community college. So if you can't go to the the premier place, it will be Community College. And mom rightfully acknowledges that, gosh, they're quite a few gradations between, you know, Harvard and the local community colleges it were. And she tried to tell him, but, but there's this and there's this and there's this and there's this, and he's just got his mind made up that that's what. And she said, I told him, and then my husband told him, You know what everyone's trying to tell him to apply to these other places. And I said, gently. I said, respectfully, you shared with me, and he shared with me that he's anxious, yeah, and we know that when people are anxious, by definition, a low sense of control is even more stressful to them. And so my hunch is he's fighting you on this and the more he won't listen to you, the more you go back and tell him again, and on and on it goes. And she said, that's 100% right. And I said, if I may, I would simply try to stop trying to tell him what it has to be. And if he says, you know, it's Harvard or, you know, local community college, to say, I granted, I know that's not a flagship school, people private place. But if he says, Well, you know, for what it's worth, your line, you know, I see it a little differently. You know, I have a couple of schools that are sort of in between there that I think might be worth exploring. Okay, if I tell you about them, and that alone, in my experience, is likely to they can say, okay, sure, right. He won't, probably do it with open arms, but at least stop, you know, guarding the gates and with a spear up at her. And it's just, it's, it's when to your point, when we can change that energy and shift how we think about this, because, if because, I also suggested to her that the more she keeps ramming this school and her husband as well, this school, this school, this school, this school, that likely might be the perfect school for him, but because you've rammed it down his throat 16 times, it's now tainted. So he obviously, and he's self respecting. He obviously does not want to eat a plate of crow to go along with this suggestion, and we'll just and he won't do it. So changing the approach makes quite, yeah, it's more effective. And

Bill Stixrud: 25:21

another kind of application is that I use a lot, because I see a lot of kids who are down on themselves. And when I used to do, when I used to do a lot of psychotherapy with kids, you know, what I find myself doing is talk him out of it. No, you are. You know that? Well, you're good, right with that, but the mom that you described would normally do with a seven degree try to talk him out of it, right? And what I do now, what I did for the last three years or so, is I've said I'm not going to try to take that away from you. I'm not trying to force he said, but I see it really different. Certainly. And at some point I'd love to tell you how I see about if you're interested. And they may not at that moment, but invariably, at some point they want to hear, how do you see it? And then I can say, well, here's, here's what I see about you is a little different. And I think that they buy it and they internalize it. So I think that offering and not trying to force is really important. And secondly, it's this idea of of encouraging kids to make their own decisions. It's your call. It's your call. And the thing is that ideally, before kids leave home, they can run their own life, because otherwise they run into the ground where we want them to be able to run their own life. And part of that is being confident I can make decisions for myself. And the way you become confident in your ability to make good decisions is you practice and with advice from other people and seeking I want to understand the situation as best I can, but I want to trust my own gut tell me what the right thing to do, because we want kids to learn to trust their judgment, not ours. I'm

Ned Johnson: 26:50

thinking about a client bill that we've talked about who brilliant kid who racked up a GPA just north of 2.0 despite really good brain, and now trying to rebuild. Yeah, and she right exactly, and trying to decide between two graduate programs. And the parents are like, well, which way should we be steering him and are You're lovely? When you and I hopped on the phone, you'd say, I have this crazy idea, this crazy question, what does he want to do? You know, I had a parent who just walked in the door the other day to update me about his lovely son, who was in his first year of college. Dad had said to the kid, you know, if I'm completely honest, I'm not that confident about you doing well in college, because high school was such a mess. And he said, Well, my son said to me, said, there's a difference, dad. And I said, Well, what's that? He said, I had to go to high school. I want to go to college. And dad sort of rolled his eyes, like that's a thing. I said, Oh, respectfully, with a boy who's ADHD right, and who and his parents were lovely folks, but very controlling, that makes a world of difference, because when people we want all kids to know, all people to know that they're going to get out of this life what they put into it, and kids are so much more likely to put a lot of energy into things that they chose to do rather than they were told to do. Yeah, and

Bill Stixrud: 28:14

the way I kind of organized my thinking around the decision making. Number one, is even little kids, when we arm them with information, with enough knowledge that they can make good decisions for themselves, and if they don't, that they'll learn from their stakes. Secondly, I think that I've always felt that the best message we can give an adolescent. Besides, I love you no matter what you do or no matter how hard you work. Thank you for that. Yeah, it is that I have confidence in your ability to make decisions about your own life and to learn from your mistakes, and I want you to have a ton of experience doing that. And thirdly, that, especially once they're in adolescence, you want to be really cautious about giving kids the message I know better than you do what's right for you, because, again, we want them to ultimately trust their own judgment, not ours. So it's the decision making. Thirdly is simply kind of what you kind of implied earlier Ned, which is that we want kids to solve their own problems where they can. Because whenever a person at any age is in a stressful situation, and you have to try to solve it, you go into coping mode, and your prefrontal cortex activates to figure out, what should I do here? And whenever the prefrontal cortex activates, it dampens down the stress response. So you think about if you're a stressful situation, but you've been there before, you know how to handle it, right? That's stressful. It's when something stressful happened and you don't know what to do. That's what's really stressful. And so we want kids to have the experience I learned early on in my career from a parent educator, when a kid brings bring you a problem, first thing you say, ask yourself is, remind yourself is, whose problem is it because of what you mentioned that writing reflex. You know that we're just, we're just because we're mammals, we're wired to soothe and protect our young, and I gotta

Ned Johnson: 29:57

figure out which graduate school for him. Sorry, yeah, yeah,

Bill Stixrud: 30:01

exactly which we're wired to see so difficult, right? But, and the thing is, when we have to do that, when they're little, right? It's just as they get older, we have to be really we have to kind of work on ourselves. That's why our third book is this Workbook format, because it's not easy to do it's not easy to let kids give them a chance to run their life into a ditch. I mean, it's not. It takes some courage. And part of what we're trying to do is make parents understand that it's safe and it's right to do it. The kids turn out really well. When we trust them, when we support them make decisions, when we consult with them, when we let them solve their own problems, as much as we can, with our support, they turn out really well.

Ned Johnson: 30:42

Hey folks, Ned here, over the past 25 years, I've talked to countless parents of high school age students who care. Deeply about their kids' education and how they deal with stress and the pressure to succeed, it can help parents to work with a team they trust won't just pile on more pressure to achieve better scores and grades. That's why I founded prep matters in 1997 to create a different kind of experience for test preparation and academic tutoring. This podcast and my books with my friend, Bill sticks root reflect our company philosophy and approach to helping students. If you have a high school age student and would like to talk about putting a plan together, please get in touch with us. Visit our website@prepmatters.com or while your kids may only text, you might want to actually talk with a person, if so you can reach us at 301-951-0350