Transcript
David Yeager (0:00)
Foreign.
Delaney Rustin (0:04)
Welcome to the Screenagers podcast about discovering the best ways to help our youth and ourselves navigate a rapidly changing digital world. I'm your host, Delaney Rustin, physician of tweens on up, author, blogger and filmmaker, including the four Screenagers movies Today. I'm thrilled to have on the show David Yeager, a preeminent developmental psychologist and researcher. David was a trainee of and continues to do research with Carol Dweck, the psychologist credited with the idea of growth mindset. David, who is a professor at UT Austin, Texas, has a new book out titled 10 to 25 the Science of Motivating Young People. And it focuses on the idea of having a mentor mindset when it comes to being with young people, being with them as a teacher, a boss, and as a parent. Central to the idea of mentor mindset is helping youth by holding high standards and being ready to provide high support when needed. And by standards, it's things like wanting our kids to develop good relationship skills, strong study practices, be well rounded, be helpers, and then high support is about supporting them in these and plenty more endeavors. Today's discussion explores fascinating research to help us know how to have the skills and language we can use in working with young people to help motivate them, including around screen time issues. And by the way, mentor mindset does not mean that we don't have rules with our kids.
Podcast Host (1:45)
David, thank you so much for being here today on the show.
David Yeager (1:48)
Yeah, thanks for having me. This is great.
Podcast Host (1:50)
You have such an incredibly large and wonderful repertoire of studies. It's truly wonderful to be talking with you because your dedication to communication science is really unparalleled. After residency, I stayed at UCSF in bioethics to do communication science for a couple of years as a researcher. And so I've been a huge fan of everything that you do and delighted that you've been in two of the four Screenagers movies and really have just completely loved reading your book 10 to 25 the Science of Motivating Young People. And to have you here now to talk about it, I want to start by asking you about the mentor's dilemma.
David Yeager (2:34)
Yeah, so the way I start the book is just this problem that a lot of people have and it's a frustrating problem. It's something that I think gets in the way of us feeling like competent, confident parents, teachers, mentors, et cetera. And it's the problem of us as the as let's call ourselves experts in life. We're older, we're wiser, we've survived at some level and we're trying to give critical feedback to a young person who is trying to make their way. And it could be anything. It could be a teacher critiquing an essay, a parent critiquing a child in a sport or their behavior, or it could be a mentor or even a boss correcting a young person's work. And. And that creates an interesting dilemma, because on the one hand, if you're really tough and critical, it could come across like you're being condescending or talking down to the young person, or you're potentially, you know, like, critiquing them in a way where you think that they're less than you. And so that's one. One thing you could do is just be really tough and critical, but deal with those consequences of how you're coming across. The other option is to not be honest, withhold feedback, and not be critical and bite our lip. And in that case, the young person won't be offended directly, at least, because we're not saying that they're inadequate, but they also aren't giving feedback. They aren't getting the information that they need in order to improve. And so it feels like neither of those options are really ideal because one of them is pushing young people away and the other is getting in the way of their development. And so what I've thought a lot about is how to resolve this dilemma where you can both be honest and critical, but also motivate. And this comes originally from Jeff Cohen's dissertation research at Stanford University over 25 years ago, where it turns out that one way to resolve this dilemma is to still be critical, but accompany your criticism with a very clear and transparent statement, that your criticism is coming from a place of helping the young person to grow and improve, and it's because you believe that they can meet that higher standard. And that's something we call wise feedback. And in one of our experiments, we found young people were twice as likely to take the criticism and implement it if the criticism from an adult was accompanied by that wise feedback.
