The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - How to Think Like a Child (with David Yeager)

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Why do kids do disruptive, annoying or maddening things? Usually when children behave badly, the first thing adults do is yell at them, tell them they're bad and dole out punishments. Developmental psychologist David Yeager says that's the wrong approach. Instead parents need work out why their child made bad decisions in the first place.    David is the author of the book 10 to 25  and argues that we should work out what's at the root of bad behaviour in young people. Maybe they want to gain status with their peers, or crave more outlets to be social. Once adults work out these motivations, they can encourage their kids to find better ways to reach their goals without breaking the rules.    This series on parenting coincides with Dr Laurie's new free online class, The Science of Wellbeing for Parents which is available now at Coursera.org. You can sign up at drlauriesantos.com/parents. Get ad-free episodes to The Happiness Lab by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows.  Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkinSubscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plusSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart podcast. Hey, it's Dr. Laurie Santos. It's no secret that I love to travel. Not too long ago, I had an amazing experience in Italy. I could go on and on about the food and all the sites I got to visit. Our Airbnb was in the perfect spot, surrounded by these little family run restaurants. I keep going back and forth about what was better, the pizza with the most amazing fresh mozzarella or the handmade pasta that literally melted in your mouth.

Hey, if you're planning your own adventure filled with great food, why not let your place earn you some extra travel money while you're away? Whether it's for a few nights or a few weeks, you can host your entire home or just a spare bedroom. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. entire home or just a spare bedroom, your home might be worth more than you think.

Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. Pushkin Growing up is weird. One moment you're a kid. You feel certain that you know what you need to be happy. But there's often a very frustrating obstacle in your way. Adults. Those authority figures, often your very own parents, who insist that just because they've

been around longer, they know what's best for you. It can feel maddening. You swear that when you have kids, things will be different. You will understand. And then in what seems like an instant, you're the grown up. You've got your own kids. It's your turn to be in charge. And somehow along the way, you've forgotten that promise that you made to yourself.

You find yourself caught up in that same intergenerational tension that you once swore to avoid. In this episode in our series on happier parenting, I'm talking with someone who's trying to break that cycle by changing the way adults and kids communicate. Hi, I'm David Yeager. I'm a developmental psychologist and the author of the book 10 to 25. David's book explores the science of how to motivate young people effectively.

And his effective strategy begins with understanding the kids in our life, which admittedly is hard. Not only because we've forgotten what it's like to be a child, but also because it can feel like kids today are speaking an entirely different language. We have four kids and two teenagers and a lot of skibbity toilet risler, G-Yachts in our house.

The slang can be funny and sometimes completely indecipherable, but the true parent-child communication breakdown often goes much deeper than vocabulary. There's this equivocation when adults say, listen to me, what they mean is do exactly what I say right now without any argument. And when kids say you didn't listen to me, what they mean is you didn't make me feel hurt. You didn't understand my me, what they mean is you didn't make me feel hurt. You didn't understand my perspective and where I'm coming from. A lot of times kids have a reason for why they don't want to do something.

And we were uncurious about that. And so because of that equivocation, we get into this conflict where we say one thing and then they hear another and then there's this fight over our misinterpretations. And I think a lot of times what we need to think about is not necessarily having our goal be the conventional, maybe 1950s parents' version of listening or respect. It doesn't mean that they subjugate their entire will to everything we say immediately, but instead we want them to be able to be proactive and make great choices that are good for their long-term health that may or may not align with the immediate thing we need them to do right now. And part of what we go wrong when we're trying to motivate kids is, as you've argued, is

that we kind of have this incorrect model of how young people work. So what's the usual model that we bring to how the young brain works? The conventional model is something I call the neurobiological incompetence model. And it's the idea that young people just lack a prefrontal cortex. They can't think about the future. They can't plan or reason logically. And because of that, we need to make all the decisions for them. That is, if young people lack the planning part of the brain, then there are risks to

themselves and to society at all times. And once we adopt that view, then our communication approach turns into something that I call grown-splaining, which is where we just explain our thoughts and our plans for them and expect them to willingly do whatever we say. And although that makes sense to us because we think we're more logical in a lot of ways, it doesn't work well because young people don't want to be communicated to in that way. Comes across as disrespectful.

And it ends up thwarting our goals because young people reject what we say, not because of the information, but because of the way in which it was delivered. And you've talked about two consequences of this sort of mode of thinking about young people, that we either become kind of too authoritarian or too permissive.

What do you mean there? Classic research going back 80 years suggests that for a lot of parents, there's a kind of nice and nasty dance, you could call it, where either we start out saying, look, here's the law. Here's what we need to do. This is very important. You've got to listen to me.

And when young people don't immediately acquiesce, then we increase threats, we increase punishment. Maybe we try a little bit of bribery or distraction or sleight of hand. I think all parents listening right now get this mode. Yep. So that's like the nasty part. And then we feel guilty. We've fallen off the wagon. We haven't been intentional parents. We didn't do what the Instagram video that your spouse sent you told you that you're supposed to do. And you just feel ashamed about yourself. And so we go back into nice mode and we become permissive and we say they need a little time with no rules to just do what they want.

But eventually, of course, kids being kids get out of control and we have to put the nasty hat back on. And so it feels like there's this dilemma that we can either be tough authoritarians that lay down the law or we can be kind and friendly and caring but then be pushovers. And what I argue is that there's valid parts of both of those. You can do a version of both. You can have very tough standards and be unrelenting on what's important to do, but you can be very flexible and caring and concerned about how young people live up to those standards. So that way they can actually reach it without all of the fighting and threats and blame. And an easier way to do that, you've argued, is to come up with a kind of

better, maybe more accurate theory of what the adolescent brain is trying to maximize. So evolutionarily, how should we think about the young people brain? It's not this idea that it's incompetent. What else is it trying to do? What's its mission? Of course, the brain develops and so there are different levels of ability and maturity. But what we tend to focus on is in the 10 to 25 range, and even maybe a little earlier, there's a shift in motivational priorities. And those motivational priorities can influence what young people choose to pay attention to. That is, where do they deploy their considerable intellectual powers?

And once you think of it as a motivation problem and not solely an ability problem, then you realize, well, maybe I'm not tapping into the right source of motivation. And it's like our conventional view is that kids are motivated primarily by the desire to please their parents or at least not piss off their parents. And we get offended. We're like, don't you know how angry you're making me like right now? And that feels like they're trying to intentionally get our goat for something. But they've got a different set of priorities that often it's, especially in the peer group,

to look in a peer like a respect worthy person who deserves status and has a good reputation. That is, someone who's viewed as socially valuable. And that's a good thing. That in our evolutionary past helped young people learn how to be contributors to our culture and to our society. But we often fail to tap into that source of motivation, and therefore we end up at loggerheads with them. But there are examples of great parents,

leaders, coaches, teachers, who do know how to tap in to that drive for status and respect. And they do end up with well-deployed prefrontal cortices where young people can plan ahead and be proactive and do what we think is right. You've talked in the book about some of these cases of both individual people that have done this well, but also kind of programs that have done this well.

One of my favorite examples that you talk about in the book are these so-called effective anti-tobacco programs. How did the tobacco program sort of harness this idea that young people really want to be independent and be respected and so on? Very briefly, the bad programs used a tagline to attack teen smoking. This is in the late 1990s, early 2000s. And their tagline was, think, don't smoke. Now think about that.

If I tell you to think, the grammatical implication is that you're not thinking. Like if I told you to smile right now, you'd be like, that's a weird thing to say, David, because I'm smiling. Yeah. The implication is that if I tell you to do it with a command, then you're not doing it. And so think is already an insult. But then don't smoke. Not only does that threaten your autonomy as a young person, and one of the main things you want to do in your teenage years is have a sense of grown-up autonomy and

independence, but also it's implying I think I'm the kind of person who gets to tell you what to do So again, it was very serious insults in three words It's kind of evil genius situation where it turns out that a desire to smoke increased The more that to think don't smoke ads were played in those neighborhoods The alternative was something called the truth campaign and this was developed by an ad firm called Crispin Porter plus Boguski. There's a guy named Alex Boguski who kind of understood intuitively what motivated young people. And the Truth campaign sought to portray teenagers as flooding the streets, fighting back against

the tobacco executives, telling them to stop killing teenagers and getting them addicted. In a famous ad, there's body bags they throw on the ground and someone holds up a sign outside of a large high-rise building purportedly filled with tobacco executives and the sign says, smoking kills 12,000 people a day. Have you ever thought of taking a day off? So there's no grown explaining about the value

of non-smoking for preventing cancer. It's not like a health class situation. It's you're joining your peers to stand up for yourselves and what's right and fight against injustice. And that every time you smoke and do the unhealthy thing, you're giving money to people who think they can manipulate you and control you and harm others. And so that taps into an adolescent value

that people already have. Adolescent desire for independence, autonomy, and a concern for social justice. you and harm others. And so that taps into an adolescent value that people already have. Adolescent desire for independence, autonomy, and a concern for social justice. My colleague Chris Bryan, a brilliant psychologist, likes to say it's often far more effective to change behavior by getting people to see the behavior as aligned with a value you already have rather than getting you to care about a different value, such as long-term health. And we've used that insight in a bunch of different ways. For instance, getting you to care about a different value, such as long-term health. And we've used that insight in a bunch of different ways. For instance, getting teenagers to eat healthy, like buy fruits and vegetables and drink water

rather than soda and eat ice cream. By saying to food companies, the reason why they create a bunch of cartoons is to get children addicted in poor neighborhoods and exploit them. And so kids stand up against the companies by eating healthy food in the lunchroom. And this also seems to be getting at something else that this sort of incompetence hypothesis doesn't really allow kids to do, which is like these new ads are kind of saying, hey kids, you're competent. When you actually see what these companies are doing, you will choose yourself not to smoke. It's sort of assuming that they have autonomy, competence, like kind of giving them respect.

Yeah. And it also, it's not like giving them a skill. It's not like these commercials are how to say no to your friends kind of giving them respect. Yeah. And it also, it's not like giving them a skill. It's not like these commercials are how to say no to your friends kind of thing. And that's what the public health establishment thinks is you need to give kids a script for how to say no to drugs or whatever. But they underappreciate the fact that if you look at DARE, where they're going in classrooms and doing skits

on how to say no to your friends, almost always in those skits, the coolest kid is the kid offering drugs. And it's the nerd who's saying no. So now you've just shown a whole group of, like, 12-year-olds that dorks say no to drugs, and cool kids are the ones offering everybody drugs. And the Truth Campaign,

they're not just teaching you a rote skill, they're framing the behavior in a different way, and then assuming that young people's creativity and their agency and ability is allowing them to figure out how to say no and how to not smoke. It's striking how much adults still misunderstand young people, especially since we were all young once. But children and adolescents just want independence and respect, like all people do. And when we learn to tap into that desire with care, life can improve for everyone, regardless of age. But how can you be considerate

about your child's need for respect when it feels like they're the ones who aren't respecting you? After the break, I'll talk with David about the kinds of questions we need to ask to build mutual understanding, even in those cases where your child seems to be acting completely irrationally.

The Happiness Lab will be right back. Hey, it's Dr. Laurie Santos. It's no secret that I love to travel. Not too long ago, I had an amazing experience in Italy. I could go on and on about the food and all the sights I got to visit. Our Airbnb was in the perfect spot, surrounded by these little family-run restaurants. I keep going back and forth about what was better—the pizza with the most amazing fresh mozzarella or the handmade pasta that literally melted in your mouth.

Hey, if you're plotting your own adventure filled with great food, why not let your place earn you some extra travel money while you're away? Whether it's for a few nights or a few weeks, you can host your entire home or just a spare bedroom. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. Acclaimed developmental psychologist David Yeager is the author of the new book, 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People. And surprise, surprise, what motivates kids isn't all that different than what drives adults.

So if we want healthy, happy, engaged children, we need to take a closer look at the strategies we use to motivate our kids. And David has found that even well-intentioned parents often use strategies that, at their core, are pretty ineffective. And perhaps the most common ineffective strategy is the age-old habit of nagging.

There's a beautiful study by Jennifer Silk. She did a broader study of maternal depression of moms and teenage daughters. And as a part of that study, they brought the teenage daughters into the lab and put them in the fMRI machine, so there's a huge magnet wearing around their heads. And while the teenage girls are preparing for the experiment, they listen to their moms nagging them. So their moms are completing the sentence, what bothers me about you is.

And what they find is that 0% of teenage daughters are like, you know, mom, you have a point. I'm really glad you raised all these concerns with my behavior. Good chat. I've got a list and I'll get back to you. Like that doesn't happen. Instead what you see is a dramatic increase in the teenage girls regions of the brain related to anger and a decrease in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex regions related to planning, reasoning, thinking ahead, but

also a decrease in regions related to social cognition, the temporal parietal junction. And that's the basic idea that a lot of times when a parent is making a request of a kid, we're doing it indirectly. And so the kid needs to infer something about the mom's state of mind or the dad's state of mind. An example is when my kid was really young, I used to walk by a huge pile of Legos. That was a mess in the middle of the room. Do you want to clean up those Legos? And you would be like, no, I don't want to clean up those Legos. I want to keep playing with the Legos. But clearly I was in my mind saying clean up the Legos.

And that's just a micro example of so much of what happens is we think we've been clear what we want them to do. They feel nagged. So their TPJ is shut off. They're not giving us a charitable interpretation. And then we're more angry at them for rejecting us and for disobeying us. And then the kid's like, why is this lunatic yelling at me? And so there's got to be an alternative communication strategy that's not nagging that can instead

enliven the prefrontal cortex and get them to think about how they can change and behave differently. It seems like there's two problems with it. One is that they're kind of not getting necessarily what we want them to do, but it seems like they are reading between the lines in terms of something else. There's another unsaid part of the nagging

that really hurts them. So what's that? The other unsaid part is that I, the adult, think you're incompetent, and that's why I'm telling you something so obvious, and or that's why I'm trying to control what feels like a personal choice to you. When a mom says don't forget your coat, in our heart of hearts, we're saying I love you so dearly that I want you to not die of hypothermia.

And what the child hears is my mom thinks I'm so incompetent that I can't even remember to bring a coat. Yeah. Or something like that. And because of that, you need to be way more transparent about your intentions than you think you need to be. You can't just leave the unsaid part unsaid because young people are in this precarious disparity of status relative to us, and they're likely to read between the lines in a negative way because they're used to the nagging, the yelling, telling, and shaming and blaming. That's their default. And they'll assume that new communication is yet more

of that unless we're transparent that it's something different. And this gets the idea that you've talked about of being a warm demander. How do you define a warm demander and how does it play into exactly the kind of solution you were just mentioning? Yeah, warm demander, and I also call it a mentor mindset in my book. Yep. But warm demand is a nice frame because you're demanding, so you're tough, but you're also caring and warm. Actually, interestingly, that term came out of studies of black educators in predominantly black classrooms in Atlanta in like the late 90s,

early 2000s. And you kind of had like a grandma type teacher who was unrelentingly demanding in her standards and didn't put up with any nonsense, but no kid questioned whether she loved them. Members of any group can have this kind of relationship, and I call it a mentor mindset because it's your approach is to be, of course, tough, demanding, and critical so that the young person can make wiser choices, grow, improve, et cetera, while at the same time providing enough support so that way they can meet those higher standards. And I do wanna be clear, for a long time,

people couldn't distinguish between these warm demanding slash mental mindset leaders and the authoritarian ones. Because they're like, these kids are crying all the time. Like if the kid's crying, it's clearly bad parenting. And it turns out in a good home, kids cry all the time. But they're not crying because the parents are yelling at them and shaming them. They're crying just because the standard is inconsistent with what they want. They don't really want to be doing the important good thing,

but they do move on and they figure out how to self-regulate in a way that in an authoritarian home, all you get is just you have to bend your will to the parent and you have no agency and autonomy. And it seems like sort of paying attention to this agency and autonomy is really kind of giving the kid a sense that you kind of are feeling some compassion for the situation that they're in. You're kind of honoring their status as maybe an adolescent or a 10 to 25 year old that's kind of figuring out their way in life.

But one way we need to do this is to honor a kid's status by not telling them stuff, maybe not groansplaining. You need to show what you want to understand. What are some good tips that parents can use to do that better? There's this wonderful parenting coach that I write about in my book named Lorena Seidel, and she echoes something that has shown up a lot

in the different research literatures. And it's this idea of questioning is often more powerful than telling. Before I explain, I do wanna acknowledge that most normal parents think this is crazy advice because when like the macaroni is burning on the stove and there were paramans at the door and you're late for soccer practice

and like everything's going wrong, that doesn't feel like the time to have a Socratic dialogue. Right? And I get it. But if you don't treat every single crisis as a chance to build a skill, then you've missed out on tons and tons of opportunities for the kid to learn to proactively manage the conflicts that they have, whether it's their internal conflicts, their emotions or conflicts with other adults. So, so Lorena has this never

waste a crisis mentality that I've tried to live that even if it's like I'm trying to get three kids out the door in the morning, so I'm not late for an appointment, I've had to learn to stop and pause and be curious about why from their perspective, it's very hard for them to get in the car and not wear a Spider-Man costume. Which bracketed is why we were 15 minutes late to get started our conversation today. Now I get photographic evidence to prove this. So the idea is ask questions. Okay, so what kind of questions? Now there's bad questions. A bad question would be, what are you thinking? Or why are you ruining my life? Those would not be good questions to ask a kid. Better questions are things like, you seem really upset. Tell me,

what does it mean to you when I'm saying no to the toy? Or what does it mean to you when I said this to you? And then they usually say something outrageous? Or what does it mean to you when I said this to you? And then they usually say something outrageous like it means you don't love me, it means you're a bad parent, it means you hate me, or I'm a bad kid. The next question is like, what else could it mean? And sometimes they'll say a couple other negative things like this will never get better, you know, gonna be sad forever. And then the next question is, okay, if it meant that, would that serve your purposes? Like does that meet your goals? And that's a surprising question for a lot of kids.

They're like, huh, no, that it doesn't serve my goals to think my mom hates me and then she's a bad parent. It's like, all right, well, then what else could it mean? And then eventually you can involve them in generating a different and better appraisal of the conflict. And then once they have that better appraisal, then you can say things like, all right, well, if this better thing was true, would that meet your goals? And then often they're like, yeah. So very brief example is conflict with my now eight year old when he was six. We're leaving the park.

I played with him all day. He asked for a toy. I was like, no, there's no toy. And he screamed to the top of his lung publicly in front of all the other parents, I want a toy. And then I had to ask him, you know, how does it make you feel that I'm saying no? And just felt ridiculous to say, of course. And then he said, yelled at the top of his lungs, you're the worst father. And then I went through this question, does it serve your purposes? That caught him off guard. No, it makes me feel sad. What else could it be? And then he made up something good. Like it means my dad doesn't want us to buy a toy that I'm going to throw away and break because then I'm going to

be sad later. And then if it's a plastic toy, there's going to be more plastic in the landfill and that's going to hurt the earth. And maybe my dad doesn't want to destroy the earth. And I was like, how would that make you feel if that was true? And he was like, well, maybe you feel like my dad cares about the future of the environment and doesn't want me to grow up in a trash heap and also wants me to learn how to be responsible. And I was like, would that serve your purposes?

He's like, yeah, it'd make me feel like my dad loved me. I was like, can we go with that? And he was like, yeah. And then I bought him ice cream. What's incredible is like, if we kind of lead with curiosity, not judgment, we do two things. One is like, we learned that our kids are capable and they are competent at coming up with these good interpretations and things.

But I think it also trains them to get a little bit more curious about their own emotions and think, well, my first impression of this situation might look differently or maybe my parent has a different intention. So it's kind of like we're learning to re-navigate their feelings on this. At the same time, we're teaching them to learn to navigate our new intentions on these things too. Right, I mean, the big thing is it's such a pain as a parent when your kids fight two rooms over

and you have to leave whatever you're doing and go over there and say, how many times have I told you guys, don't be mean to your brother, stop fighting? We're always the referee in that situation. We are the only one doing the problem solving. And so of course they don't learn. It's because we've never asked them to even try to do it.

If they've never had to piece it together in their minds, and if the only time we ask questions is when we're trying to make them look dumb, like, haven't I told you this before? The only answer is yes, but the implication is we think they're dumb. So if that's all we've ever done, then of course we're going to have to keep stepping in as the referee. But if we're just tired of doing that, you have to start giving them the coach in the head that they can carry with them. And I'll tell you what, I've seen Lorraine and Seidel, this parenting coach, I've seen

families she's worked with, and they do this questioning routine a lot with their kids. It's tedious, but eventually the kids know the questions. And so she can just yell from across the room, what did it mean when your sister did that? And then they do the whole thing in their head and they're like, okay, fine, mom, I know my sister loves me, we won't fight anymore. And so if you wanna have the kind of house, not with no fighting or no crying,

but where conflicts get resolved in a way where you end up feeling excited for them to go off into the world and to deal with conflict and they're gonna be prepared to live with someone and not get in fights all the time and not be alone, you know, in their 20s and 30s. These are the times right now to teach those lessons and it's a little bit of extra time but you save yourself a hassle in the long run. It might seem silly to ask a six-year-old whether something serves their purpose, but

that's an important first step to helping that child develop a key emotional skill that psychologists call cognitive reappraisal. If you can reframe your thoughts about a situation, you can shift your feelings too. And helping kids practice this skill during small moments of crisis will allow them to learn to handle the bigger challenges that will come later on. After the break, we'll talk with David about other ways parents can guide kids towards happier behaviors with a mentor mindset, from coaching your middle schooler through a math class meltdown to helping your teenager make better choices after a night of bad decisions. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Hey, it's Dr. Laurie Santos.

It's no secret that I love to travel. Not too long ago, I had an amazing experience in Italy. I could go on and on about the food and all the sites I got to visit. Our Airbnb was in the perfect spot, surrounded by these little family run restaurants. I keep going back and forth about what was better, the pizza with the most amazing fresh mozzarella or the handmade pasta that literally melted in your mouth. Hey, if you're planning your own adventure filled with great food, why not let your place

earn you some extra travel money while you're away? Whether it's for a few nights or a few weeks, you can host your entire home or just a spare bedroom. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca. Psychologist David Yeager has devoted his career to understanding why young people think and behave the way they do and how parents and mentors can help guide kids towards becoming their best selves. David has found that many of the interventions adults regularly use

aren't very effective, in part because they're interventions. In fact, David thinks most caregivers need to intervene way less than they think. Take homework, for example. So my daughter's in Algebra 2 and she came home and they were doing some kind of factoring, I think it's like finding the square. And my temptation was to go and like figure out the trick and be like, okay, just do this. But I'd seen these great tutors and these great mentors and I was like, all right, well, the first thing they almost always do is ask what have you tried so far and why do you think it's not working? Mm-hmm. Then immediately, you know what the kid knows. Yeah. And it's hard to ask that because if they're frustrated and they're like banging their head against the wall,

your temptation is to prevent them from having to revisit those times where they weren't getting it. And so that's what I did with Scarlett. I was like, all right, show me what your teacher told you so far. And then she said stuff that I completely forgot because I last learned it when I was 14. And then I was like, well, I see you're stuck here. Well, what happened if you do that? Then she explained, well, this won't work because of that. And then I could just be there as a guide. And I just was curious. I asked her to basically tinker with it. But she was always the agent. She was always doing the problem solving. And then all of a sudden she remembered something the teacher had said two weeks before. And then she's like, Oh, this is where I'm supposed to do it. Now I understand the pattern. So I didn't tell her anything about Algebra

2. I didn't actually go read the textbook. I just worked with her. Now, the reason why this is important is because when we swoop in and say, okay, here's how you factor the problem, here's how you find the square, just do this, now try it, then it makes them feel like we think that they can't figure it out

and that they are incompetent, which is not what you want because there are a thousand lessons like that throughout the school year in just one subject and then you've got seven subjects. So you want them to have the skill of being able to figure it out. But what's hard is when they're totally on their own and they feel overwhelmed and they're like, I can't do this. So weirdly, non informative questions where you're not really telling them answers makes them feel supported enough to go troubleshoot.

It makes them feel like if they're stuck, they could ask you, but ultimately they own the thinking at the end. And Mark Lepper in the 1990s, a famous social psychologist did this study of the greatest tutors in the Bay area. And he found that 90% roughly of what they said was a question.

It was not, they were great at explaining physics. And I think that lesson still holds today. I think it's so important because as an adult, I know what it feels like when somebody tells me what to do, right? It's kind of demeaning and I get more pissed off and I get more frustrated. But I think we forget that's what's happening with our kids.

We kind of tell them what to do. I think another thing about the questions, and you just illustrated this in your algebra story, is that sometimes our kids have answers that we don't expect, right? When you asked her, well, what did she already know? She actually had some techniques that like, you're like, oh yeah, I forgot about that.

And so there are these cases where our kids kind of know stuff that we don't know, or at least know things about the situation that we might not know, that unless we get curious and ask questions, we'd never see that. And that affects our ability to help them problem solve. And I think a big puzzle I had going into my book,

10 to 25 was, well, why doesn't everybody do this? I mean, there's the time issue, you're like in a hurry. But like, aside from that, why doesn't everybody do it? And I think it goes back to the neurobiological incompetence model. If you think that the reason why your kid is stuck is because when it was explained very clearly by the teacher, the kid was screwing around and goofing off and not paying attention, and then they came home and they weren't being a serious student, and they don't care about

their future, then you're not curious why they're stuck on factoring the trinomial. You're like, this is a character issue. This is not an intellectual issue. And so it feels like we need to have a response to the character issue by giving them a lecture about how they should have paid attention. You need to be responsible. You need to take good notes. You should go review. Your teacher already gave this to you. And that sounds harsh, but like in our studies, 50% of American teachers take that approach. They take a shame and blame approach to a mistake, not collaborative troubleshooting. And I think that's a real challenge because parents want to prepare their kids for a tough future, like a complex world where everyone's

unforgiving. And the reality is, if you just presume most of the time that kids are acting in good faith, and if you're seeing all this other like reluctance behavior, deviance behavior, sometimes that's a cover for the underlying thing, which is it's just actually hard work and they haven't figured it out. So you always treat it like you're a serious student who wants to do right and you're gonna get it and I'm gonna ask you questions just until I understand.

Then they feel respected and valued. And sometimes that safety is what they need to get out of their heads and stop the panic and then start embracing the challenge. And this kind of collaborative troubleshooting is true not just in the academic domain, but maybe in other domains where they like really screw up. Right. How can collaborative troubleshooting help in a case where your kid has kind of messed up maybe in the social domain or even the moral domain?

I heard from a ton of parents far more than I even wrote about in the book, but I wrote about a couple where their kids either snuck to a party or went to a party, but snuck booze to the party and then came home drunk. And the best parents I talked to were like, I've been waiting for this for years. This is the best moment of my parenting life. I was like, really?

I'm just so worried about that moment. And they're like, no, because we got to be honest. And the wrong approach approach and they told me Was the yell tell blame shame the enforcer authoritarian kind of approach and to be honest a lot of that Approach the yelling and telling comes from our insecurity as parents that we feel like How could I possibly be the kind of parent where kids have so little respect for my house rules that they would break this so blatantly? It's more like we're insulted and offended

more than it is our concern with their actual safety. And so the collaborative troubleshooting parents didn't take that offensive approach. Instead, they were legitimately curious about how the kid ended up having drunk too much. Or in the case of the sneaking out, why did they feel like that was the most important thing in the world and more important than maintaining the family rules? And usually it went back to status and respect.

So in the case of a kid who snuck out, the kid was just a hyper social kid and was worried that everyone would have this epic night and there'd be some memory like they found a golf card and got to do donuts on the golf course or they ran away from the cops or something that they would never forget and would talk about until their high school reunion or to their funeral. Think about it like I definitely have stories of hour and a half events in high school. Like, I've 100% vividly remember some of the most fun times, and I remember who was there. I wouldn't want to miss out on that, right?

There's a cost benefit, yep. You don't want to be the person who missed out on this epic, unforgettable night. So the mom started with this, like, look, I know you're social. Let's find other ways for you to have epic, unforgettable nights that don't involve lying and cheating. But it wasn't, don't be social.

In the drinking case, there was one kid who normally would just sneak like two wine coolers in his pockets, but this one day brought a backpack because he was trying to be a good friend to a lot of other people who asked for booze. And then he ended up drinking up most of it. And so he got super drunk. But again, it came from this desire to be social and to help others. And so the punishment was to talk about his drinking

and his plan every night before he went out. And it was an agonizing 45 minute conversation about his plan before he could go to a party. And that was a worse punishment than grounding. But in the end, they started understanding his logic and his plans and they could subtly suggest things. And when that kid went to college, he didn't have any trouble with alcohol. And he had the skill. So it's a kind of never waste a crisis situation and questioning really

helps to build that mental muscle in the kid. I love these scenarios because they really show that you're parenting for the future, right? Like in both of these cases, you're talking not about how you solve for this incident, but how you solve for future incidents. Maybe incidents that are going to happen when these kids go off to college and you're not going to be there to kind of see them out the door and that sort of thing. I'm kind of curious how you brought this into your own life, both collaborative troubleshooting and questions and all the stuff we've been talking about.

I obsess over parenting for the future in specific moments that I know because of my sociology friends and colleagues set kids up for a lifetime. But I think there are a lot of moments in our kids' lives, trying out for a certain sport or activity, definitely taking a class, like applying for a summer job. There are these moments where they're going to be freaked out because it does have a big impact on their future, or they're not taking it seriously and they need to. And those are moments where you do have to be tough and demanding and unrelenting, but also supportive so that way

they see a reasonable path and their fears have to be legitimate to you. You have to be legitimately curious about why they're worried. But there, you know, there's lots of crying my house in those moments where it's like, you need to do this thing. But what I will focus on is like, how do I be honestly curious why you're being reluctant and troubleshoot with you and find a solution that works for you? I'm not going to lower the standard, but it does matter to me that you're on board

and that it feels good for you. So the next time you're struggling with your kids' behavior, try to tap into what studies show is really motivating, that sense of mastery. Everyone wants to experience agency and independence, regardless of their age. So remember that the old neurobiological incompetence model of childhood is out. The science shows that what's in are respect and understanding. How can you respect your kids better?

Well, stop groan-splaining and instead get curious and ask questions. Guide your child toward the habit of cognitive reappraisal so that they learn to manage their difficult feelings as they get older. You can also strive to be a warm demander. Have high standards for your child, but still be loving and supporting. Try to understand your child's perspective, rather than yelling, telling, blaming, or shaming. And finally, use those small moments of crises

as opportunities for collaborative troubleshooting. It may be a little inconvenient, and you might even end up 15 minutes late for a very important podcast interview. But remember that taking the time to help your child learn in these small moments can make a huge difference. Next time on the Happiness Lab, we'll wrap up our series on happier parenting

with a look at how technology is affecting kids' happiness. We'll dig into the impact of screens and social media on self-image, attention, and mental health. And we'll share tips for building a plan that fits your family. And if you found these discussions helpful, you'll likely enjoy my free online course, The Science of Well-Being for Parents.

To learn more, just head to drlarisantos.com slash parents. That's drlarisantos.com slash parents. Until next time, this has been the Happiness Labs special series on happier parenting. With me, Dr. Lari Santos. You're listening to an iHeart podcast.