The Self-Driven Child

Dr. Stuart Slavin: Simple Curricular Changes That Decreased Student Depression by 85% AND Raised Board Scores

• Ned Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 52

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In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Stuart Slavin—pediatrician, medical educator, and a true superhero in the world of educational reform. Stuart’s groundbreaking work has shown that yes, we can dramatically improve student mental health without compromising academic performance—and he has the results to prove it.

We get into why today's high schoolers are more stressed than med students, how maladaptive perfectionism is quietly damaging our youth, and what it really means to build resilience that lasts. Whether you're a parent, educator, or just someone who cares deeply about kids and learning, you don’t want to miss this conversation. Stuart's work is inspiring, actionable, and—best of all—hopeful.

 

Episode Highlights:

[0:00] - Introducing our new workbook, "The 7 Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child".
[1:08] - Dr. Stuart Slavin on the surprising pressures teens face—more intense than med school.
[3:22] - Stuart’s origin story and how a curriculum role led to mental health reform.
[5:32] - How adolescent anxiety and perfectionism carry into adulthood.
[7:42] - The dangerous cost of maladaptive perfectionism and chronic stress.
[8:36] - What Stuart’s research revealed about depression, suicide risk, and medical students.
[11:41] - The 3-part intervention that changed everything at Saint Louis University.
[14:10] - Can cutting 10% of class time improve both health and test scores? (Spoiler: Yes.).
[17:54] - How a 90-minute resilience curriculum taught students to challenge toxic thoughts.
[22:01] - Why we must teach kids to recognize and reframe distorted thinking early.
[24:20] - Replacing perfectionism with a healthy pursuit of excellence.
[26:53] - Ned shares his own experience with depression and the power of having tools.
[28:26] - From frustrated parent to systemic change: Stuart’s fight for student well-being.
[30:21] - Final thoughts: to help kids thrive, we have to start upstream.

 

Links & Resources:

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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

Ned Johnson:

Hey, folks, Ned here, like me, you want your kids, your students, honestly, all the young people you know, to thrive, and you know how much you can help. But like me, you probably also recognize that you fall short more than you'd like to, in part because we tend to refer to old ways. We hear a great suggestion or learn a new approach, but to easily fall back into the same darn things that didn't work before, it isn't easy, which is why I'm really excited to share with you that Bill and I have a new book out this spring, the seven principles for raising a self driven child, a workbook. Our goal is to make it easier to put into practice more of the advice from our first two books, the self driven child and what do you say? Full of reflections and exercises to do yourself, with your partner and with your children, we want to help make the self driven child way your way, so that you can, more often than not, be as effective as you want to be with your kids in ways that we know you want to be if you get a chance order a copy bill, and I and your kids would be grateful.

Stuart Slavin:

I think there's an argument to be said that in many communities across this country, high school is more demanding and more pressured than than medical school, which is just stunning when you think about that. I mean, we're talking like 14 to 17 year old kids who the demands are greater than that which medical students are facing. They sleep less six and a half hours versus seven hours. Their days are longer, harder, more demanding. And in the schools, I'm looking at, their mental health outcomes are actually worse than medical students. Welcome

Ned Johnson:

to the self driven child podcast. I'm your host. Ned Johnson and co author with Dr William sticks 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. Hey folks, Ned here, too many students think that suffering is the price of success. No pressure, no diamonds. Many parents and educators do as well, but an avalanche of harrowing statistics show that many young people are more traumatized than transformed by chronic, even toxic pressure to excel, and it's not just in high school, but college and graduate school. But what's to be done for those of you dispirited in thinking that the problems within education systems in America are intractable and inexorably lead to more pressure, more burnout and more suffering. I have good news, a superhero for our times, who, with colleagues, helped design and implement changes that improved both mental health and learning outcomes in medical school, no less. Sounds like a Marvel story, nope, but it is marvelous. Take a listen. I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. So our epic hero in the story is a friend to Bill and me. Dr Stuart. Slavin Stuart, welcome to the podcast. Thank you first for your work, and thank you for making time and know your knee neck deep and writing a book that's going to bring this all but but could you tell us a little bit about you and the Marvel origin story of how you got into this so important work. Yeah,

Stuart Slavin:

first, a pleasure to be here with you, with you both, and I must I laugh a little bit. I don't think I've ever had an introduction where I've been introduced as a hero or superhero. Thank you for that. It's really very sweet. Yeah, this was this whole, you know, move or pivot for me into well being, particularly of adolescence, was completely unanticipated. So, so I'm a pediatrician by training, and early in my career, got a master's degree in education. And I really consider myself a curriculum person. I was a curriculum design person, first at UCLA, and then in 2004 moved on to to Saint Louis University, School of Medicine, where I took the position of Associate Dean for curriculum and and I had been there a few years, and I started reading about kind of the dire state of mental health and well being of medical students and, and I've been at St Louis U for several years, and I looked at our students, and I i i Just the idea that that they had depression and anxiety levels that were being seen in other in other schools, just seemed impossible. And and I had this idea, well, maybe just be nice to students was all that was needed to make them happy. You know, nice place to start. Yeah, nice place to start. Sometimes we don't do that. And I again, I, I understood individual students were suffering, but I but it seemed like many were doing well, and we ended up doing something incredibly important, which was we decided to measure it. And much to my dismay, we came out with depression and anxiety levels that looked like every other med school and and as. As Associate Dean for curriculum, the only way I could look at that was say, you know, we're doing this to them, and I'm ultimate, I'm ultimately responsible. And so, so I said this, this will not stand. We have to do something about that. And that embarked me on a journey to kind of change the what that students were experiencing, and actually also helped them try to develop skills to better manage their stress. That really led to work that spanned about, oh, five, six years at St Louis University.

Ned Johnson:

Wow. One thing that comes to mind for me is is again where I sort of started with the intro that that parents and students may think, well, this is just the price to be paid, and it's worth it in the end. But one thing that the you and Bill both know better than do i is the problems that students experience with mental health as students don't tend to evaporate once they are done with their schooling, right? Because we're really talking about the development of still developing brains, right in ways that persist and that not only impact the lives of those people, but frankly, the patients that they're caring for. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Stuart Slavin:

Yeah, I think the origins, the roots of this problem that medical students were experiencing didn't just start in medical school, and I think a couple of ways that manifest. First of all, as you both know, if you have depression or anxiety or both as a teenager, you are much more likely to experience depression or anxiety as an adult. So there's a sense of that we're really wiring their brains. And then the other thing that we're wiring, in many ways, are are kind of these, what I describe as these problematic mindsets and that that shape how they view themselves and their performance and and we can probably get into this in a bit, but I don't want to go deep here, but, but one that has fascinated me is something called maladaptive perfectionism, which is just setting the bar so high for yourself you're repeatedly disappointed yourself, incredibly strong correlations and associations with with depression and anxiety, if, if you suffer from that perfectionism, which is you both know, is just incredibly widespread.

Ned Johnson:

I have a lot of students who say I'm the best at that too. Yeah, yeah,

Stuart Slavin:

exactly right. It's having to be the best, not really good. You know? It's this goal to be the best. So, so, you know, I think that those factors are are really huge that parents should be thinking about. This isn't just a temporary phase that they're they're just going to come through unscathed, and

Ned Johnson:

then when they become physicians, contributes to as reading began, there are a few articles that you're kind enough to share that I'll put in the show notes for people who are interested. But in addition to the the suffering for these folks, right? We it leads to lower empathy as for by clinicians, right? Greater burnout, more medical errors, right? Because where brains that suffer that way don't work as well, and

Bill Stixrud:

it's usually increased risk for depression and suicide in physicians after the general population,

Stuart Slavin:

right? Right?

Ned Johnson:

Yeah, I think of most parents knew that. What is it? Women who are physicians are 130% more likely to die by suicide than the general population. I

Stuart Slavin:

don't know the specific stat, but there's no question that there's an elevated risk, just reaffirmed recently in a paper that that said markedly increased risk for for women physicians. Yeah, we've always

Bill Stixrud:

wondered how much that risk is related to what they have to do to their brains as adolescents and young adults to become physicians, the sleep deprivation, the chronic stress related from the excessive pressure to excel and the toxic that maladapted perfectionism that you're describing, Stuart, and what amazed me about what you Did, the intervention you did at St Louis University was that even though these kids, many of them started medical school depressed or not very happy, they're so much better that you really, really the program really seemed to heal them. I'd love for you to talk about the intervention that you did at St Louis U

Stuart Slavin:

Yeah. So one quick thing I want to say before I answer that bill, because, because I think this is important, is, you know, as you both know, I've done research in now close to 20 high schools across the country. And I think one of the most striking findings is that if you look at what medical students experience, at least in the classroom phase, which typically is the first year and a half, two years of medical school. I think there's an argument to be said that in many communities across this country, high school is more demanding and more pressured than than medical school, which is just stunning when you think about that. I mean, we're talking like 14 to 17 year old kids who the demands are greater than that which medical. Students are facing, my research indicates that they sleep less six and a half hours versus seven hours, and they're putting more time in. If you look at class time, studying and extracurricular activities, their days are longer, harder, more demanding. And in the schools, I'm looking at their mental health outcomes are actually worse than medical students. So, so this is the we think of medical school as this pressure kicker. These kids in medical school have been in pressure cooker environments since they were teens, if not sooner. So really important piece for the audience to kind of understand. And then on to your to your question though, about what we did. You know, it was very simple in many ways. I would say it really was three elements kind of that drove it. One is that was primarily an environmental problem. So let's, let's make interventions that can improve the environment and ideally, you know, reduce stressors and eliminate unnecessary stressors. So that was number one. Second, is that helping them develop skills to manage stresses. You know, Life is stressful, medicine is stressful. And so we wanted to help build their resilience. And then the third, and this was one that was just more personal for me, was I wanted to give them opportunities to find some kind of meaning and purpose in their in their life, with the idea that that would sustain them. And so, you know, in each of those areas, basically, I'll say what, you know, what we did, which was, immediately, we cut class time by 10% every every faculty member had to give up 10% of their time. With that

Ned Johnson:

we the early days of Doge

Stuart Slavin:

analogy. No, this were these were good cuts.

Ned Johnson:

These were surgically done. Might, one might say, surgically

Stuart Slavin:

done. And what we did with that 10% decrease in time was we opened up one full day every other week for elective activity and just time for themselves. And those elective activities, they were really driven by these self designed learning communities around themes like like research and public health and service, and that the students ran. And then the the other big one was we had, well, two more faculty. We asked them to decrease the amount that they taught, not just spend less time teaching, but actually reduce their content. And basically, the other was change in grading, which we went from a graded system to a pass fail system. That was pretty rare back in those days. Only about 30% of medical schools use pass fail. I can happily say that well over 95% have pass fail in the first two years now. So that was kind of the structural change the first year and then the second year, we did this very brief resilience curriculum that basically taught students how to manage their way their thinking in ways that were more accurate and less distressing. And those were the two big changes in each year after that, for about three years, we we, you know, made modest changes. One big one was tackling what I would call a toxic course. I think parents can relate to this. It felt like every year my daughters were going through high school, there was at least one teacher who made their lives miserable with harsh grading practices or ridiculous homework loads or, you know, just unrealistic expectations for accomplishment. And so we took on one of those courses and got them to kind of back off the pressure and demands. And that was it, basically, in terms of the scope, cost almost nothing to do. I'd say about 3000 a year. And that was mostly, you know, money for food and, you know, meetings kind of thing. Yeah, before,

Ned Johnson:

before we dig into some details there. I mean, two top level things. One, I can hear some people thinking, Yeah, but, but it was that teacher that I had in whatever grade who really held my feet to the fire, and I became the person that I am. You know, don't, don't students need or benefit from people who really push them to work at that level,

Stuart Slavin:

no question. And I think a key here is not, it's not a binary like some stress stem pressure, as you know, is important. That's, yeah, that's how we grow. But, when the stress and pressure becomes excessive, no, then it doesn't help development in any kind of way. And

Ned Johnson:

what I would I'm jumping around a little bit, and no, Bill, you have your hand up there as well. But from this program, talk a little bit about we've come we'll come back to the mental health, but decrease the instruction by 10% didn't that put kids, students, medical students, at risk of not doing well on their major exams? Yeah,

Stuart Slavin:

you just, you just related the fear that many faculty have, sure, you know, and and one of the things, ways I handled that politically is I said I don't think so. I don't think it's going to harm performance, and if it. Does. We'll add it back in. You know, this isn't set in stone. You know, i i a drop in performance is not an acceptable outcome of this intervention. And so maybe that's kind of the sweetest part of the story, right? And we can explain the why, which is, not only did we see depression and anxiety decrease by 80% 80 0% really, I think in many ways, an unprecedented mental health, preventive, mental health intervention. What was really sweet is their performance on step one of the national boards, which was the big national board exam. Their average score rose over those years, paralleling an increase that was going on nationally. But really importantly, their their failure rate was cut in half, dropped to half the national average. Wow, which was fantastic. And and it turns out, I have to say, the theoretical basis for that. It's not surprising, because, as you both know, there's something called the Yerkes Dodson curve, which basically shows that that we have this fundamental belief that more must always lead to better outcomes, right and and that's not the case. There's a certain piece where if you load on too much, not only does mental health suffer, performance suffers as well. So kind of counter intuitively, I think you know you can back off demands, back off pressure, and not actually sacrifice performance at all. And of course, it makes sense. Depression is not good for for academic performance. Sleep deprivation is not good for academic performance. And the last thing I'll say about that, you

Ned Johnson:

basically just articulated my entire approach as a test prep geek for the last 30 years. Yeah,

Stuart Slavin:

right. It's sleep. I used to tell my daughters, sleep is food for the brain, right? And parents need to realize, if your kid's getting six and a half, seven hours or sleep a night or less, they're cognitively and emotionally impaired. They're cognitively and emotionally akin to intoxication, for what it's worth, right? It is, it is, it's like, equal to several beers, kind of, I think people have said so. So I think that's just so centrally important. And why some of the work I did with medical students, I think should resonate in terms of what, what we're seeing in high schools, and even before then, education that that our kids are often exposed to and it's well intentioned. I think nobody's I think, I don't think they're principals and superintendents and teachers coming in. I want to harm kids today, you know, but I, but I think for whatever reason that that we remain blind to some degree, really not seeing or or recognizing the the toxic effects of this excessive demands. Except it's a pressure replacing our kid. Can you tell us

Bill Stixrud:

a little bit more about the resiliency, resiliency intervention you did? I remember being very brief.

Stuart Slavin:

Yeah, it first we, we started with a more extended curriculum that that that students didn't have much appetite for, you know, but it was chocolate Stuart. They didn't like the chocolate. That was, that was true. They got very upset about mindful eating of chocolate. That is, that therapist actually got them through No I think it really reflected that there, that they wanted to focus all their time on mastering the information that anything taken away from that was seen as superfluous, they were understandably kind of leery of and suspicious of. And so ultimately, I would say our core curriculum dropped to an hour and a half in the first week of med school. That was it with periodic I taught in all four years, I had ran courses in all four years with little periodic, little reminders that would come up and a little booster when they face stresses like that, that board exam that I told you about, like, well, here, let's think about these strategies and the strategies. The main one that I taught was cognitive restructuring. So, you know, cognitive restructuring, which is, you know, still gold standard treatment for anxiety, evidence based for depression, if you suffer from maladaptive perfectionism, a therapist would probably use some kind of, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy involving cognitive restructuring. And my feeling is, well, why do we withhold this technique until we develop a mental health disorder. Need to see a therapist so, and just to say a little bit more bill, I don't want to go not too long, but, but basically, it's really teaching students the ability to examine their thoughts and recognize when you know they they're falling into this kind of cognitive trap of these kind of distorted thinkings that are these problematic mindsets or these individual cognitive distortions that are really well studied, well documented, and I think that was a huge piece for them. It is such an

Ned Johnson:

interesting thing right now. I mean, you know, I mean Socrates, right? I mean a metacognition. What could be better than to, you know, to deprive for young people to not. Develop their tools to think about their own thinking and other people's as well. Is what a missed opportunity it is. It's stony, you know. And one, one challenge I know right now. I mean, I bill and I fell into a group of parenting authors at the start of COVID, and I've persisted and developed relationships with with some really, really excellent thinkers and writers and speakers. And one thing that they have noticed, noted in the last couple years is they cannot speak to anything that comes within a whisper of SEL because if they're doing that, then all of a sudden it's, you know, falling into more verboten, you know, dei, or anything else that that is is not, not currently getting support. But when you think about, you know, we have a dear friend who's a neuroscientist, and she says, you know, all learning starts with emotion. If you're if your emotions are all screwed up, your anxiety, your depression, your anger, whatever, nothing's going to happen. And so to your point, to enable young people, in this case, medical students with tools, to be able to recognize their own distorted thinking and go, Oh, it's that thing the doctors haven't talked about, oh, and then how to talk back against it. Because who doesn't have, you know, intermittently throughout life, unrealistic, inaccurate thoughts that are self injurious, you know, that are crazy making. And we want to be able to talk back against crazy making thoughts.

Stuart Slavin:

No, it's absolutely right. And and these mindsets, not not only are endemic, they're increasing. I mean, there's absolute evidence that perfectionism, and particularly maladaptive perfectionism, are increasing in teenagers as they face these pressures. So so I think it's one of the biggest kind of absences in our in our kids education is we tend not to routinely teach them how to examine their thinking, know, when it's distorted, and basically be able to tell a different story, a story that's that's, you know, more accurate and and less harmful. Gosh, you know when

Ned Johnson:

I and I love the preventative idea about it, because it always occurs to me that it is hard, it is hard with the distorted mind to note the distortion in one's own thinking, right where, if this is done preventatively, saying, you know, Junior is going to be really intense, and chances are somewhere along the line, you're going to face some real challenge. Challenges, and you may fall short of your expectations, and you might start to think that I'm never the you know, I'm never going to be I'll never catch up or never do well enough this every time, but blah, blah blah. And you may start to generalize and catastrophize and prophesize those things. And when you do, note that this is what's happening. Here's the brain science on and blah, blah. And here's the thing or two you might do to talk about, you know. And so you just do that, you know, prophylactically, so when predictably it happens, because who doesn't have imposter syndrome at some point, all the way through one's medical one through education, no matter what level, yeah, to just identify it, right? Yeah. It's

Stuart Slavin:

really interesting, too. Occasionally I have the opportunity to do this with teenagers, with high school students, and they then their their heads explode. They're like, Oh my god, like you, like you can read my mind. You understand what's going on. And I think one of the things when I do it as a workshop that's really powerful is I have them like self evaluate these mindsets and then compare them to to to their neighbors, and, and it's just like you have imposter. How could you have imposter? You're the most amazing person I've ever met. And so, yeah, I think that there are interventions that we could be using, that that could be relatively brief and followed by support of, you know, supportive adults to help people in these skills. I think they're vitally important skills.

Ned Johnson:

Teachers. Oh, go ahead,

Bill Stixrud:

Bill, what I love about this Stuart, as a neuropsychologist, I see a lot of young people who, particularly teenagers, who are wildly perfectionistic despite years of cognitive behavioral therapy, yes. And I think that the power of having all medical students, many of whom are perfectionists, in the same room, yeah, I think that we're all in this together, because so much of the professions is he's going to get it. He's ahead of me. I couldn't be smart because he's smarter than I am. They put them all in the same room. They realize we all have this bullshit. I mean, that's exactly

Stuart Slavin:

right. That's really right. There is there's powerful in recognizing you're not alone in this thing, you know, and that you don't have to think this way. That's the other piece. When I talk to teenagers, is, mean, they like again, they're just like, stunned. You mean, I can actually like, change my thinking. And it's really important for the audience to understand, if you have, you know, maladaptive perfectionism. The goal isn't to get rid of that it's almost impossible to do. No, the goal is to kind of be able to recognize when you're thinking a certain way and change it in ways that that cause less harm and are, frankly, more accurate. And the other is. A therapist I work with, initially on this was she always said, it's about having a healthy pursuit of excellence, not an unhealthy and impossible pursuit of perfection. So yeah, that's the place you want to occupy. It's not like abandoning your standards and like becoming a slacker. No, no, have high standards for yourself.

Ned Johnson:

He said that so beautifully that is almost word for word. What we have in our newest chapter on an accurate model of reality and our newest book, The Seven Principles, and literally, we will whole exercise of that people can do with their kids. What does it look like to be an excellent seeker? What does it look like to be a perfectionist, maladaptive perfectionist? Yeah, and, you know, it's interesting. I had a wonderful conversation with my son the other day, who loves thinking it was was he was basically rhapsodizing about how much he loves metacognition and all the things that he's learned in school, and he's, you know, followed on social media and stuff he's reading. And I am one of these people who was perfectionistic at a very young age, and then a difficult childhood, and so had had really intense depression, was hospitalized in seventh grade, and I still, you know, Bill years ago, pointed out that people who study depression say it'll scar the brain, and I have that in me, right? And I had a bout of this couple weeks ago, and I can feel myself just sort of being pulled, you know, pulled into with this ditch of despair, as it were, and I know exactly what's going on, and it takes a lot of work, but fortunately, I have the tools that I'm not buying. You know, I you know, Ned, you're upset, you're depressed, you're having these reactions. It's okay that you're having them, but they're not actually tied to reality. And so what can I do to sort of, you know, get more sleep, meditate more, you know, find someone who just listened to me, vent, you know, and say, Well, you know, and just validate the feelings.

Stuart Slavin:

Yeah, beautifully said, and I'm so glad you shared that. I mean, I think that's another is that there should be no shame or embarrassment about struggle with these things. You know it isn't, it isn't your fault. It isn't like something I don't know that that we should be reluctant to see and address. So, yeah, I think we need much more openness about mental health conditions overall in our society, like, if only

Unknown:

you would try a little harder, you wouldn't have diabetes. Ned,

Ned Johnson:

I was telling Bill the other day I had a client who lovely, lovely, lovely kid, but ADHD, at least, I'm not the clinical neuropsychologist, but everything that I what I think I know, and a year ago, started trying to talk to his his folks about this, and then eventually that, well, tell me about that again. And mom said, Well, Dad doesn't think ADHD is real. And I said, What does he think about diabetes? And he said, Well, that, well, that's chemically based. And like, yeah, as is as is depression, right? So a lot

Bill Stixrud:

of people have strong feelings about things that they know little about No, no. I just, I first learned about you, Stuart, in reading about this spate of suicides that happened in Palo Alto, I think in 2016 and you were at that time assessing adolescence. How did you transition me? How did you doing full time medical students to this interest in the mental health of adolescents?

Stuart Slavin:

Yeah, I'm glad you took it in that direction, because, yeah, as my as I was doing this work with our medical students at St Louis u i was watching my two daughters go through high school and and it's what they were experiencing. Just seemed absurd, the amount of hours they were putting in in terms of studying, they were just exhausted. And so I was actually on the board of it was a private school. I was on the board and and kind of brought in information. So, like folks, this is we're harming our kids. We need to back off and and I lost, oh, my god, lost it. They wouldn't make the changes. And ultimately, I had my I took my second daughter out, and, you know, move, moved her to another school. Because I was just like, No, you can't, you can't continue to do this to my child. And that really prompted me to say, I like, I I can't let this go. And maybe it's my my pediatrician background that that, you know, led me to continue that work. You

Ned Johnson:

got a stethoscope and the cape, that's part of the job, yeah.

Stuart Slavin:

And so I don't you really use the stethoscope. I don't know about the cape, but, but in my current job, which is at the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. I've been at for six years and and my primary focus is on resident and faculty, medical faculty well being. But when I joined them, I negotiated 15% time to work on adolescent and young adult mental health, in part, by by by, you know, making the case that they're coming to. US damaged by the system that came before them. And if we're going to address this mental health problem and physicians, we have to work upstream on this too, you know. So, you know, I'm really grateful that they granted me that time, and that's allowed me to continue to work in this in this space, over in recent years.

Ned Johnson:

So well said. If we're going to address this mental health problem, not just for new physicians, but for all young people working their way through school and into the workplace, we certainly have to work upstream. There are many who are grateful to Stuart for your effort in these spaces to improve learning and mental health outcomes. I simply love that you've proven that it's not an or I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. Hey folks, Ned here, like me, you want your kids, your students, honestly, all the young people you know to thrive, and you know how much you can help. But like me, you probably also recognize that you fall short more than you'd like to, in part because we tend revert to old ways. We hear a great suggestion or learn a new approach, but to easily fall back into the same darn things that didn't work before, it isn't easy, which is why I'm really excited to share with you that Bill and I have a new book out this spring, the seven principles for raising a self driven child, a workbook. Our goal is to make it easier to put into practice more of the advice from our first two books, the self driven child and what he's saying, full of reflections and exercises to do yourself, with your partner and with your children. We want to help make the self driven child way your way, so that you can, more often than not, be as effective as you want to be with your kids in ways that we never do want to be if you get a chance, order a copy Bill and I and your kids

Unknown:

would be grateful. You.