Blog Post #107: Self-Driven Children
On our most recent podcast episode, our guest was Ned Johnson, co-author of The Self-Driven Child and What Do You Say? Ned had some excellent advice for Type C parents who feel overly responsible for the success and wellbeing of their children. Here are some highlights!
Helping kids do well is not just about academic success - a lot of it is how to help them find motivation, or if they are overly-motivated, how to help them find balance.
Kids’ mental health improves when they have a greater sense of control over their own lives. It’s almost impossible to be intrinsically motivated if you don’t have a sense of control over your life.
The most important outcome of high school and adolescence cannot be where kids go to college, but rather the brains that they develop and carry into adulthood.
Often, if you ask a child about who’s most upset about schoolwork not being done or not being done well, the answer is parents, followed by teachers, tutors, therapists. The child doesn’t put herself on the list.
When an anxious parent expends 80 units of energy trying to get a child to do something, the child will expend 20. When the parent gets more stressed and goes to 90, the child drops to 10. This doesn’t change until we change the energy. When parents work harder, kids see them as the source of their salvation.
We want kids to own everything in their lives – with our support – especially when things go badly. This is especially hard for loving, Type C parents who are very tuned into their kids’ needs.
Children don’t learn to do hard things without doing hard things. When parents jump in and try to fix things, we’re depriving them of the opportunity to develop stress tolerance, and we’re giving them the message that they couldn’t handle this without us.
As parents, we want to think of ourselves as consultants. We offer wisdom and advice, but we let kids make their own decisions. As parents, we have to move away from the mindset that our kids’ future success is our responsibility.
We have to ask ourselves three questions - 1) whose life is it? 2) whose problem is it? 3) whose responsibility is it? As parents, our obligation is to offer help and support. It’s uncomfortable, because we feel a lower sense of control.
When parents are too permissive, when there are no expectations or structure or discipline, children become deeply afraid and feel that no one cares about them.
Kids have three psychological needs to be motivated - to feel competence, relatedness, and autonomy. We want kids to have to make decisions because we want them to have to own decisions.
The model of collaborative problem solving that we establish with our kids becomes the model they use with other people.
Procrastination is rooted in neurochemistry, not in character. Boys in particular will often put things off to the last minute and only be motivated by an impending deadline.
It’s important to empathize with and validate our kids. Over time we have to move from protecting our children to helping them protect and soothe themselves. A lot of the work is on ourselves - learning to let go. Type C people are more sensitive to the world and it’s harder for us to do this.