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

In this continuation episode, I’m back with Dr. Bill Stixrud for part two of our discussion that digs into the realities of raising kids in high-pressure academic environments. We explore the subtle yet powerful concept of being a “non-anxious presence” as a parent and what that really means when guiding children through challenges. Bill and I touch on real stories from our practices and new strategies that emphasize motivation without pushing too hard—helping kids build resilience, autonomy, and self-confidence in a world brimming with expectations. 

Episode Highlights:

[0:00] Introduction to being a “non-anxious presence” and its impact on children.
[2:00] The evolving understanding of managing kids' anxiety and why avoiding stressors doesn’t help.
[5:30] A powerful story about test anxiety and breaking the cycle of fear-based motivation.
[8:15] Why taking the long view on a child’s development can alleviate immediate parental stress.
[10:45] The superhero analogy: overcoming struggles as a source of confidence and growth.
[12:50] Fourth principle: motivating kids without trying to change them, exploring self-determination theory.
[15:00] The SPACE program and supportive parenting techniques that work without direct intervention.
[17:35] Real-life success stories from using supportive statements to build independence.
[19:45] How motivational interviewing can shift conversations from conflict to collaboration. 

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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

What's happened in the field of anxiety over the last several years is that the thinking has changed from let's try to prevent kids from being in situations that make them anxious, which basically just makes them more anxious. Because the more we avoid things that make us anxious, the more anxious about them we get. And so what helps is giving that confidence I can handle this. That's what sculpts the brain. Is that ability, that's what develops that resilience or that confidence that I can handle this is the experience of doing it. So we want kids not to avoid their anxious feeling. We don't. We don't want them to traumatize them. We don't want them to chronically or routinely avoid things that make them anxious. Because what we want is from the experience the anxiety, okay, it's not going to kill me if I'm pleasant, but not going to last forever and I can get through it. And there's some I've learned, some tools that I can apply to kind of to make myself more comfortable.

Ned Johnson: 1:43

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 their 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. So thanks for coming back to part B of this talk. Bill and I were lecturing a really terrific school, but one that's pretty highly charged, a lot of stress, a lot of academic success, but also a lot of academic pressure. Out in the Silicon Valley area, the things we've been talking about may resonate in your our corner of the world, or your school or your family, where a lot of academic pressure, a lot of academic success. And what are some things we can talk about, to reiterate, we shared five points from our new book, The Seven Principles of raising a self driven child, and they were put connection. First two, be a consultant rather than boss or manager. We're now moving on to steps three, four and five, trying to help kids find the healthy balance between healthiness and academic success, I admit, Bill, I have found myself increasingly in the last year using that language of trying to help parents feel that it's safe, yeah, because they worry so enormously, right? When things aren't going well with your kids, socially, emotionally, academically, health wise, whatever, it's so hard not to catastrophize and think the worst. You know, we have, of course, the third point in this list is the idea being a non anxious presence, which some people find that easier, some people find that harder. I have a delightful kid I'm working with right now whose therapist sent her over to me to help with test anxiety, and she has this debilitating test anxiety, and we'll seemingly have mastered the material, and then go and dial up a 37 on a math test, because it just leaves her brain all together. And the therapist shared with me that the parents have said things like, if you don't get your grades up, you're going to end up homeless as a motivational, as a motivational style approach, right? And so understandably, how could this could be anything other than terrified of underperforming on tests? Because not just I do bad on the test, and boy, I wasted my time. And you know, my teacher will think I'm a dope, and all those things, they're threatening the ego, but literally, I'm going to end up homeless. So for us, and certainly for me, with these parents trying to help them feel that it's safe and they've got a lovely kid, really charming, actually has a good head for math, messy, right? ADHD, you know, anxious, complicated, I said to them a line that I picked up from a friend of mine that for every kid there is who's precocious, their children who are post coaches, right? And this child is really likely to be a late bloomer, because that prefrontal cortex is not fully baked yet. And everyone, of course, knows about the cognitive functions, but it reminded them that the emotional functions not not until the early 30s, and so it's not a recipe for despair, but one for hope that things that are hard now can and should get easier over and over and over time. So this idea of being a non anxious presence and really trying to take the long view, I think, is so helpful for parents and for children, if we're if we're simply saying it's okay that things are sucky for now. For now, it has to be, you know, make, make peace with reality. And we know that if you go back to your point about the prefrontal cortex and developing a sense of of I can handle this, one of the things that also wires brains to be able to handle the hard things is going from high stress situations to stress recovery. You know all that work with Michael, meaning the rats that, oh, my goodness, and then they can fully recover. And when the brain has a state of deep relaxation after something intense, it's signaling your brain that things are okay, that things are safe, that we handle that well enough, and what parents often don't. Think about is their role in being that, as we would describe safe base, right? That the world tends to throw enough challenges at our kids, academically, you know, athletically, socially, you know, on and on it goes. You know, global climate change, blah, blah, blah, kids have enough things to worry about and focus on, and when, if they come home, and we're sort of on them about those things as well. Where do they get a chance to recover? And so it's not easy to be a non anxious presence, but it's a really big deal. We know that stress is wildly contagious. We've talked about that quite a bit, but people also be reminded that calm is contagious. And so even if you're not, you know, even if your kid is really spun up, but you're not just your very presence and saying, back to the empathy and validation, I see that you're really upset about this, and you have good reasons to do I'm not going to try to talk you out it, but, you know, I see it a little bit differently. And just for to let you know, I'm not worried about this. I'm not worried about this. Now, there's a story actually, in what he say when my my twin brother, as a paramedic, was on scene and something was, you know, terrible. And for, you know, for this person or this family, this is like, the worst day of their life, right? And for my brother, it's just Tuesday, right? And so he turned to them and say, you know, for what it's worth. I get that you're you really worried about this? I'm not. And if it would help you, I guess this is a hack that they do a lot. If it will help you, I can let you know when you really should panic. And it just completely, completely changed the energy, because gives

Bill Stixrud: 7:25

them a sense of control,

Ned Johnson: 7:26

right? Oh, so good. So good, right? Both his and being anonymous presence and gives them a sense of control. I'll let you know. You know, 123, panic, right? So this idea of being a non exit presence is, is, is so important, and we really want to take the long view on it. I know, when we gave that talk on Palo to the first question we got was about a parent who's 11 year old was struggling to do homework, and mom was trying to help her get this stuff done, also trying to get her in bed. And bed on time. It sounded like all of this strife, and all I could think was, she's 11. Can anybody remember anything that they credibly, that they learned in what's that fifth grade? Maybe fourth grade, as opposed to, like, if you get your homework done, if you want my help, back to the consultant, happy to help. If it doesn't get done, what can I get you for breakfast? I mean, how could it How could it possibly matter? And it's not that we don't want kids to take school seriously, but most kids are already taking school way too seriously. They're so anxious about it. And I think we want to convey that that's I want you to work hard at school, because I want you to develop your develop yourself. But the idea that any piece of homework or any quiz or any test is make or break for your life, I see it pretty differently. Yeah,

Bill Stixrud: 8:41

yeah, it's huge. And I remember very early on in my career, I did I didn't have the idea of a non anxious presence, which comes from this guy named Edwin Friedman, who I later learned about, but thank goodness for him. Very early, I remember sitting with the family, probably in 1986 or say, 1987 and they're very worried about their eighth grade son, who seemed to be kind of depressed, and the dad broke into tears and said I just wanted to feel good about himself. And I said after he stopped crying, and I get that, and also, I think we'd more credibly help him feel good about himself if we aren't worried sick. And so if we can find a way to see this, what he's going through now is part of his path. Yeah, it's part of necessary. I mean, we've never seen a plan for his life. For all we know this is it. This is his path, and we can respect that, and we can help him. We can support him, and we can be empathetic. We can give him therapy if he needs it, but if we let our own anxiety just go, go ramp it, he picks up on that. He says, Oh, my God, I must be really in trouble. And so we wanted it. We can do everything to help him. We can do everything we can to support him and use empathy and make sure our relationship is tight with him. Yeah, but that on non anxious presence. Just think about it. You get results from a dot, you have a medical exam, and you go in a doctor, and the doctor is clearly upset about it. It's different that the doctor is, well, okay, there's some issues here, but I think we work through them. It's a different thing. It's just so much more helpful when people can be not highly anxious and emotionally reactive. And it's something that we work at. For both of us, it's been a practice. You know, when I was 23 three people told me I was the most nervous person they've ever met. And actually, one of them said, if there's anybody in this planet that needs to learn to meditate, it to you. So I learned to meditate, and that was kind of a life changing thing, but it's been a practice still. I mean, when my daughter started stuttering at age two, I've never been more panicked in my life, and it resolved quickly, but I was leaping into the future. They can we show up, she'll be teased. You won't have any friends, you know? Because we tend to do that. We tend to leap into the future. Yeah, we do the beautiful. Thing is that most kids turn out fine.

Ned Johnson: 10:53

Well, if I can make a point there, as you know that when things are going sideways, you know, your daughter's stuttering is hard for us not to naturally extrapolate. Well, if they're in this place now, they're on this path to something terrible, yeah, what always, what I always jump to is thinking about every movie, particularly every superhero movie, right? Part of the, you know, every sports story, there's always a place where folks have a setback, right? And they struggle and they struggle and they struggle. It's not a particularly interesting movie or an accurate one, that you're born parthenogenic from the, you know, pop fully formed from the brow of Zeus, and then have a perfect life, and then, you know, get eulogized at the end of your life. That's not how life works. And first, remind ourselves that something like 60% of kids have really profound post traumatic growth, and I'm not looking to voice trauma on anyone or anyone's child, but when we know that the vast, vast majority of people that the things that they struggle with become a source of future strength, and I think for anyone who's listening to this, if you pause for just a moment and think about some of the hard things that you've gotten through Life, and then you think about the things that make you confident in your life. It's probably not having perfect grades or perfect this or perfect that, but that here was a hard situation. Here was a, you know, a fastball Right, right, right in my head and dropped me in the dust, and I didn't expect this with my spouse or my work or my parents or my kids, and I handled it and it was it was good enough. And so our confidence in our ability to handle hard things is almost always born of our experience handling hard things. And so this is not to make light of the challenge that anyone who you know your child is going through, that you as a family are going through, but it is a way to say that in most situations, we can handle things well enough, and that ends up actually being the very thing that supports us to handle even more, even more meaningful challenges further on down the road.

Bill Stixrud: 13:06

Yeah. Well, that's beautiful. And the fourth principle that we're talking about here, out of seven in the book, without a five in this talk that we gave recently. A lot of numbers, folks, but try to keep it Yeah, is motivate your kids without trying to change them. Because, as you said earlier, yeah, it occurred to us, since we started lecturing about the self driven child, people always ask us, How do we get my kid to be more motivated? What they're really saying is, how do we change them? So we started studying the science of change, and we realized that virtually every every approach to helping people change starts with recognizing you can't change them, and the harder you try, the less, the more they're going to fight you if they aren't asking you to help. And so we talked about three aspects of motivation that don't involve trying to change somebody else. One is are really our North Star for thinking about motivation, which is self determination theory, which holds that to be intrinsically or internally motivated, a person has to have three psychological basic psychological needs met for sense of autonomy, a sense of relatedness or connectedness to teacher or parent or boss or somebody, and a sense of competence. So autonomy, competence, relatedness, nothing that had to do with external sometimes making me do this. That's what's required. And so we focus on that. And the second thing we focused on is the space program. That's an acronym for supportive parenting of anxious childhood emotions developed by Ellie Liebowitz at Yale, a wonderful guy and a wonderful scholar, a wonderful psychologist who developed this program for treating anxiety in children that only works with the parents. And it turns out that this is effective. It's as effective in lowering kids anxiety as therapy is for the kids themselves. And the basic principles, the two basic principles of this approach, of the space approach, are number one is to use what they call supportive statements, which are the kids really anxious about standing at the school bus stop by himself, and you say, I know this situation makes you really anxious, or whatever it is, taking a test or having somebody over for dinner that they don't know. I know this makes you really anxious, and I'm 100% that you can handle it. So this combination of empathy and confidence that you're expressing that a

Ned Johnson: 15:28

kid or and academically, right? You know, I know that you are worried that your homework is not perfect. You know that Mrs. Johnson is going to be really upset with you, but I'm confident, one, that it's good enough, and two, that if she did get a little frustrated with you, that you can handle that feedback in a way that's constructive.

Bill Stixrud: 15:46

Yeah, I think what's happening in the field of anxiety over the last several years is that. Thinking has changed from, let's try to prevent kids from being in situations that make them anxious, which basically just makes them more anxious, because the more we avoid things that make us anxious, the more anxious we get about them. We get right, right? And so what helps is giving that confidence I can handle this, that begin, that that's what sculpts the brain, that that is that ability that develops that resilience or that confidence that I can handle this is the experience of doing it. So we want kids not to avoid their anxious feeling. We don't want them to traumatize them, right, right? We don't want them to chronically or routinely avoid things that make them anxious. Because what we want is from the experience the anxiety. Okay, it's not going to kill me if I'm pleasant, but, but it's not going to last forever and I can get through it. And there's some I've learned, some tools that I can apply to to make myself more comfortable. So it's that, it's supportive statements. I know this makes you really anxious, and I'm 100% confident you can handle it, and then it's stopping doing what we all are wired to do, which is help kids avoid the things that make them anxious. So you actually write down, you write out a little, a little script, and you say something like, I used to think that perfectionistic kid, you know that if I, if I proofread your your homework three or four times before you got to sleep. Did it make you less anxious? But I've been doing it now for six months, and I think you're more anxious than you were. This isn't helping, and I love you too much to do something that's not going to help you, but I think it's maybe actually making things worse. So I'm not going to do this anymore, and I know that you're really anxious, but I'm also know that you're strong enough to handle it. So that kind of idea, again, it helps people change without any effort to change them. In fact, this approach comes out of non violent resistance, where the idea is that I'm going to protest, I'm going to resist, but I'm not going to try to change you. I'm just going to be really clear about what I think is right for me to do, and that's what I'm going to do.

Ned Johnson: 17:48

And in many ways, what that is doing is conveying back to step three of being a non anxious presence saying, you know, I understand that you want this to be perfect, but I don't, I don't see the need for that. I think it's good enough. I think you've put worked really hard at this, and if it's less than perfect on your homework, it just feedback. No, no, no, it's gotta be. I understand, I understand why you feel that way, and I understand you're so committed to doing great work in school, and I love that about you. I just see it a little bit differently, so I'll check it once, but I'm not going to check it. Check it three times, and there's a whole There's a wonderful book, breaking free of childhood and anxiety and OCD, by Ellie Lieber, actually, but podcast interview with him,

Bill Stixrud: 18:25

breaking free of childhood anxiety and OCD, thank you. Billy Lewis, yeah, thank

Ned Johnson: 18:29

you for correcting me. No, you're right. It's a wonderful book, and again, it is Bill pointed. We don't have to. We don't change our kids. We don't try to change them. We just change our own steps.

Bill Stixrud: 18:39

Okay, can I mention one thing Ned please do? Yeah, just I was talking to a friend of mine recently, who recently was trained, she's a therapist. It was trained in the space approach, and she worked with the parents whose kid was like, 11 years old, and they're still lying down with him for a half hour because he's two anxious to fall asleep by himself. And so they do the supportive statements, and they do it. They do approach eventually stop going in there. The second therapy session, the kid comes in and tells the therapist, I slept through the night. Last night, he was so proud. He was so proud.

Ned Johnson: 19:13

Yeah, wow,

Bill Stixrud: 19:14

I love I interrupted. I'm

Ned Johnson: 19:15

sorry. Buddy. No, no, it's one. It's a wonderful story, you know, and it's these things don't always resolve themselves that quickly, but they often can to echo point you made earlier about just changing the energy. The last part about how to motivate kids without trying to change them. Is something called motivational interviewing, and it came out of psychology working with problem drinkers. And what would often happen is people would articulate all the reasons, enumerate all the reasons why you got to give up the bottle bill because A, B, C and D. I mean, what would happen is people just fight it. That's not true. You don't understand it. You know, I got this under control, and they would deny it. Or a kid who's you got to get your grades up? No, it's fine. It doesn't matter. And the the insights are simply them. People are ambivalent, right? A kid who's struggling in school recognized to be put in more work, and things went better. Teachers would approve more. Parents would be more relaxed, blah, blah, blah, different choices, on and on it goes. But also knows that if I work really hard at this, you know, I don't like that teacher, and this is really boring for me, right? Or I'd have less time to do other things that matter more to me as reason not to want to do that work. Or I work super hard, and I go from grades that are kind of meh to meh plus, and then actually recognize the actual limit of my intellectual cognitive abilities. That's a scary thing to do. And so in those situations, people are a little bit stuck. And what we do with motivational interviewing is ask open ended questions, use reflective listening so we empathy and validate, repeat back to people what they've heard, and then look for change talk. So I want to go back to my friend who reached out to me about her kid, which she was trying to enumerate for. Kid who was looking at colleges, either, you know, Harvard or community college. And she said, Well, what about this school? And he said, It's too small. And she said, Wait, you attend a school that's such and such, and if you go two times that, you said, maybe twice the size, that'd be 8000 this school is 8500 That's exactly it. He says, Well, it doesn't have enough sports. She said, sports? Since when do you like sports? You don't even like sports, right? And and she and I said, I said, respectfully, do you see what you're doing? Every time he says a reason why he doesn't want to do it, you fight him on it. And he's going deeper and deeper and deeper into why the school is a terrible place and he doesn't want to do it. I'm going to make a stab. I'll let you know how this goes. I'm going to make a stab at motivational interviewing with him. And so, so tell me about these schools. And if he were to say something like, Well, you know, it's way too small, so fantastic to know. So tell me about So how big is the school? What's, what's the perfect school for you? That makes sense, right? You know, I want to go to school of sports. School of sports. What would you get out of that, right? Is it the camaraderie? Is it, you know, you have to connect more with with other folks who are also athletic, the way, tell me more about that, right? And what will happen is, I hope, predict, I'll come back bill, is that the kid will eventually articulate his own reason to choose places that are between Yale and McDonald's, right? Not that a community college of McDonald's, but he's stuck, and all the middle, middle ground has been tainted, one, because the parents ram it down his throat. And two, because he's ambivalent. He's going to shoot for the stars, and if he doesn't get in the hardest place in the world, well, no big deal, because it was a pretty low likelihood anyway, and then he can safely go into community college, because one, he'll save money, which matters to him. But two, he also knows that, basically, he certainly will get into local community college because he's academic enough, and he's avoid he's open enrollment. And it's open enrollment, right? You know, this is and the funny thing, this is a bright this kid is bright. This kid is bright. And so what we want to do with this motivational interviewing is not try to force things on kids, but rather than giving kids the reason to do this or that, to have them give, give them the grace and the space for them to articulate for themselves the reasons to make the change easier said than done, it's in the book worth reading. 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 you.