The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives

by William Stixrud

So what does a sense of control have to do with all of this? The answer is: everything. Quite simply, it is the antidote to stress. Stress is the unknown, the unwanted, and the feared. It’s as minor as feeling unbalanced and as major as fighting for your life.

Agency may be the one most important factor in human happiness and well-being. We all like to feel that we are in charge of our own destiny. The same thing goes for our kids.

We have a tendency in our society to think that “with enough hard work, anything is possible.” Well if you didn’t make it, the dangerous corollary goes, you must not have worked hard enough.

“Whose problem is it?” The question is meant to be rhetorical, but parents often look at us quizzically.

That hurt may even stay with you long after she’s forgotten it. But ultimately, it is your kid’s problem, not yours.

Remember that your job is not to solve your children’s problems but to help them learn to run their own lives.

You can’t make your kids do something against their will. You can’t make your kids want something they don’t want. You can’t make your kids not want what they want. It’s okay, at least right now, for them to want what they want and not want what they don’t want.

We want our kids to get to Stage 3, the consciously competent stage, but we can’t do that without letting them graduate through the other stages on their own.

Teachers can teach, coaches can coach, guidance counselors can outline graduation requirements, but there’s one thing only parents can do: love their kids unconditionally and provide them with a safe base at home. For children who are stressed at school or in other parts of their lives, home should be a safe haven, a place to rest and recover. When kids feel that they are deeply loved even when they’re struggling, it builds resilience.

“You are the expert on you.” “You have a brain in your head.” “You want your life to work.”

“It’s your call” does not conflict with limit setting, which will always be an essential part of parenting.

“It’s your call” isn’t about giving kids unlimited choices. That, in fact, is a sure way to stress them out.

“It’s your call” mean? Most simply: When it comes to making decisions about your kids’ lives, you should not be deciding things that they are capable of deciding for themselves.

When children play in unstructured ways, they are making autonomous decisions about how to spend their time.

Teenagers are the closest to legal age, and they are the ones who most need to hear this message: “I have confidence in your ability to make informed decisions about your own life and to learn from your mistakes.”

Parental anxiety isn’t new. Parents have worried about their kids ever since having kids was a thing, but we believe it’s worse now than before. Why? For one, we have a lot more information than we’ve ever had before.

Barry Glasser, a top sociologist and author of The Culture of Fear, concludes that “most Americans are living in the safest place at the safest time in human history,” but it doesn’t feel that way because 24/7 news and social media inundate us with scary story after scary story about kidnappings, drug overdoses, and freak occurrences that, in their ubiquity, muddy our perspective.

Kids come into the world with different susceptibilities to anxiety. Some aren’t bothered by it—scientists call kids like this “dandelion children.” Like dandelions, they’re fairly impervious to their environment. Others are “orchid children,” with a very high biological sensitivity to context. They are particularly sensitive to the parenting they receive. They flourish under parenting that is calm and nurturing, and struggle with parenting that is high strung.

In a competitive, overly busy world, it’s so easy to forget the basics: that enjoying your kids is one of the best things you can do for them, and for yourself. You don’t have to spend every moment with your kid, or convince yourself parenting isn’t hard when it is.

Our highest goal in life isn’t to make our kids feel good—but it’s worth paying attention to what’s blocking you from genuinely enjoying them and removing it.

Mark Twain said, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I couldn’t stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

Your responsibility is to love and support your child. It isn’t your responsibility to protect him from pain. You can’t.

The very best thing you can do to help your children develop self-motivation is to give them as much control over their choices as possible, including asking them what it is they want to be competent at and in charge of.4

When you’re in flow, levels of certain neurochemicals in your brain—including dopamine—spike.

The best way to motivate him for the things you think he should focus on is to let him spend time on the things he wants to focus on.

The tension between Grant and his mother is one of the most common we see, in part because men and women on average process dopamine differently. Girls are generally more interested by—and more consistently motivated to achieve in—school. They tend to have higher standards and to evaluate their performance more critically. They are more concerned about pleasing their parents and teachers.10 Girls generally have more empathy, which leads them to develop a greater fear of disappointing their teachers. Their dopamine levels tend to kick in earlier and to stay with them longer, so that some will go so far as to finish a paper two days early. They’re less likely than boys to need the stress of performing under a tight deadline to get them started. In fact, they are more likely to panic under the stress of a too-tight deadline, activating their amygdalas so that they’re no longer working effectively.

Then, of course, these girls grow up and many of them become moms. It’s moms who most frequently oversee their sons’ homework. The result? What we’ve come to think of as the Dopamine Wars.

There are many forms of downtime. Anything that is relaxing or rejuvenating, like gardening or reading, we’re all for. Yet as the pace of life goes faster, we need to radicalize our downtime. Radical downtime does not mean playing video games, watching TV, surfing YouTube videos, texting with a friend, or participating in organized sports or activities. It means doing nothing purposeful, nothing that requires highly focused thought. This is one of the most powerful things we can do for our brains.

When we replay scenarios excessively, or when doing so is painful and we engage in negative thought loops, that’s not mind wandering, it’s ruminating. This is an important distinction. You really need unstressed periods of downtime every day.

Singer further argued in his 1966 book, Daydreaming,

We live in a world where “boredom” is a dirty word, and people often compete to see who’s busier, as if their sense of self-worth could be measured by how little time they have.

Insane ways to define worth.

Psychologist Adam Cox noted that whereas fifty years ago kids might be bored after a couple of hours with nothing to do, nowadays kids become bored after thirty seconds, while most adults feel the need to check their phones in the four seconds it takes to slow down and stop at a stop sign.

We need to be more intentional about downtime now that stimulation is everywhere.

Practicing meditation is increasingly important as changes in the world lead to higher levels of anger and fear, and as advances in technology quicken the pace of life, giving us little time to simply “be” with ourselves.

schools are implementing programs like Goldie Hawn’s MindUP and Mindful Schools,

making decisions about kids’ use of technology is unlike other parenting decisions because parents know relatively little about the tools they’re placing in their children’s hands.

kids’ brains work “completely differently” from their parents’ and from kids’ brains of previous generations. One of the manifestations of this change is that many kids can’t stand a minute of boredom or tolerate doing just one thing at a time.

Technological breakthroughs almost by definition must make life more stressful, because they quicken the pace and raise the bar of what can be accomplished.

If you’re a kid, the formula begins to look like this: the more technology you use, the poorer your self-regulation.18 The more technology you use, the worse your executive function (your Pilot). This matters a lot; self-regulation and executive function are about twice as good predictors of academic success as IQ at all grade levels, including college.

Finland is at the head of the class here: they mandate twenty minutes of outdoor play for every forty minutes of instructional time.

This is where play comes in. Play is crucial for the development of a healthy brain—including a well-functioning cerebellum.

Play is how children strengthen their cerebellum and learn to master their world.

This suggests that the brain needs the whole-body movements of play to achieve maturity, and that there’s a sensitive period in which play is needed for brain stimulation.

Ref

We think the real promise of the test lies in the techniques you can learn to manage stress. As the political philosopher Edmund Burke observed, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” Put another way, it doesn’t matter what you know if you lose your mind when it matters.

Familiarize yourself with the more than 850 test-optional colleges and universities at www.fairtest.org. Knowing that plenty of great colleges don’t require standardized tests for admission can afford your son or daughter all sorts of Plan B options for college.

Many of them have had parents or guidance counselors who have essentially force-marched them down the straight path to college, reinforcing the idea that it’s more important to try to make kids do well than to help them truly understand that they are responsible for their own lives.

The reality is that we become successful in this world by working hard at something that comes easily to us and that engages us. We need to tell our kids that the skill set required to be a successful student is, in many ways, very different from the skill set that will lead you to have a successful career and a good life.

When kids tell their parents, “I’m not as smart as Eric,” or “I’m not as smart as most of the kids in my math class,” many parents will try to reassure their kids by saying, “Yes, you are. You’re just as smart as they are.” Bill takes a different approach. He tells kids that you only have to be smart enough to do something interesting in this world—which they are. He also tells them that he’s grateful for all the people in his field who are smarter than he is. They’re the ones who make up the theories and tests that allow him to make a living by helping people.