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The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast
1KHO 802: Uncertainty Is the New Norm | Jenny Anderson, The Disengaged Teen
00:55:43
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- [00:01]
Podcast Host (Sponsor Reader)
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- [01:13]
Jenny Erton
My name is Jenny Erton, the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I'm so excited for today's guest calling in from London, Jenny Anderson. She has an incredible substack. She's newish on Instagram. You can find her there. But more importantly, most importantly, it's all important. But. But she has an incredible book called the Disengaged Teen and I have never read a book about being disengaged. The subtitle is Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. Jenni, welcome.
- [01:41]
Jenny Anderson
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
- [01:43]
Jenny Erton
What an interesting topic that kids are disengaged. You talk about how a shocking number of young people don't see the point of school anymore. Give us a bit of your background. I'm always interested how people land in a topic that I'm not even familiar with.
- [01:58]
Jenny Anderson
Sure. So yeah, my co author and I, Rebecca Winthrop, we kind of set out in 2021 with a simple question like why are so many kids struggling so much in school? Like, why are they having such a tough time and how I got to that question, to your. To your very good question, was I had been a journalist for almost 25 years. I'm ancient. And like, the first 15, I was in finance. And then I switched into education, and I was kind of like, wait a second. We're like, only talking about charter. Not charter. Is Teach for America good or bad? Like, we're not talking about, like, how kids learn and how we motivate them and how we support them at home. And, like, what do you do as a parent if you're not a teacher? Like, and they're either hyper engaged, you know, they're doing homework all the time and they're real perfectionists, or they're like, totally checked out. I didn't. Those felt like really big and important questions to me. This was in, like, 2015. And so I quit the New York Times, where I was writing about education. I joined a new media company so I could write about that. I was really interested in the science of learning, the future of schools, kind of how to motivate kids. And five years in, Rebecca said to me, how about we write a book to get together on this? And she's this big time researcher. She does mega studies for Brookings. And so we had this really complimentary set of skills. She was this sort of academic researcher. And I, at that point spent a lot of time communicating to parents about their kids learning. And we thought, wow, if we could marry this and do some original research and really get into the belly of, like, why kids are stuck, how do we get them unstuck? What's the role school? What's the role at home? How can we do this? We thought it would take a year, it took five. It turned out to be a complex subject.
- [03:36]
Jenny Erton
Yeah.
- [03:36]
Jenny Anderson
So that's the backstory. And I have two. I should say the obvious. I have two teenagers myself. They're 15 and 17. I have two girls, and Rebecca has two boys who are 15 and almost 18. And so we were also living through this, and we kind of felt like, hey, we want to do best by our kids. And what better way than to sort of research, get in there and talk to the experts, talk to young people themselves, talk to parents, and really kind of get in the belly of this thing.
- [03:59]
Jenny Erton
Yeah. It is so interesting because you call it the disengagement crisis. It is a crisis, and it's true. It's like the quiet quitting. You hear about it a lot with adults, but I don't see anybody talking about it with teens. They say they feel like they're trapped in prisons. This is their words. They are stressed out by a weird combination of competitive pressures and insufficient stimulation. Develop a frustration that fuels a pervasive lack of meaning in their daily existence. So this is a tricky situation because you wrote teachers like being in control, and plenty believe that with autonomy comes chaos. But teenagers are in this interesting period of life where they're about to launch into the world. And so it's like they're trying to pull away from that control and figure out what can they do on their own. So this book has a lot for parents. I love that. It's like, okay, this is a great book to read if you're an educator, but it's also a fantastic book to read if you are a parent as well, because it gives you a lot of ideas of what you can do. So can you talk about the actual crisis and is this new or is. Has it been kind of like slowly creeping in?
- [05:09]
Jenny Anderson
Sure. So I'm going to give you, like, the data, the hard facts, and then we can talk about the sort of historical context, because it's a really good question because it kind of feels like, well, hasn't it always been so, you know, yeah, Bueller's Day off was popular for a reason. This is just the teens are not true. So the, the, the raw numbers. So we did this survey. We partnered with Transcendent Education, which is a great nonprofit, surveyed 65,000 kids, which is a lot demographically represent, nationally representative, you know, race, gender, ethnicity, all that stuff, all that good stuff is in there. And we found that in third grade, about 75% of kids love school. And saying I love school isn't a perfect proxy for engagement, but it's actually pretty good. It's been reliably tested and validated. By 10th grade, 25% of kids say they love school. So we've lost that many kids along the way. And you could kind of say, well, they don't need to love learning. Like, we don't, you know, we don't love doing, you know, you don't love algebra all the time. Totally agree. Education doesn't need to be rainbows and jelly beans. But if you don't see the point of school and you don't understand why you're there and you really don't enjoy it and you don't want to go, it's going to be hard to muster the energy to learn. Now, your other question was, hasn't it always been so. So kids have been disengaged from school for a long time. This Is not a new phenomena. What has changed is the context in which it's happening. You could skate by before, as long as you were kind of good at reading and writing and could kind of learn a couple things, you would have, you could find your place in the job market. Right. It was, it was okay. You could skate a lot. You could be Ferris Bueller's day off and go spend the day in Chicago, you know, kind of twisting and shouting and pull it off in the end and you can't do that anymore. We need to be building these learning muscles. We need the, the sort of what the workplace demands, what higher ed demands. We really need to have these collaborative skills, these problem solving skills. We need to be able to be adaptable and flexible. But these are skills that develop over time. You know, you don't get to college and you suddenly know how to learn. You've been learning all along. All those assignments and you know, lectures and conversations and at the dinner table and in school. All of that is building that sort of learning to learn muscle. And we need it now more than ever with AI, with the way the workplace is changing. And so you know, what was always kind of a gap between school and the real world is now a chasm. And we need to like a little bit.
- [07:33]
Jenny Erton
Yeah. My husband sent me an article yesterday and it was some company. They were laying off 16,000 employees because Amazon, it was Amazon. That's right. That's right. The world is changing so we have to be engaged and, and What a slope. 20, even 75%. You're like, well, one in four third graders is not interested, don't love school. And then you get to three out of four by the time they're in 10th grade. You had a quote in this book. The book is called the Disengaged Teen, came out last year. It's almost like the one year book Birthday for the disengaged Teen. Parents way underestimate just how disengaged their kids are. They see some apathy, but assum, it's normal. This is a disaster for kids, mental health. And to your point, you want to be engaged in life for all that's to come. So I love that you talked about this today. Engagement is most commonly discussed, not in school. I mean I've not read a book about teens and disengagement. Even though a lot of us are like, you know, they don't like the homework and it takes up so much of their time, so much of their day at this point. I think that's a big change. I read a book recently that talked about how the original compulsory school laws were for ages 8 to 14, 12 weeks. Like you only had to go 12 weeks out of the year and only six of them had to be consecutive. So you could just kind of pop in and pop out. But this is taking up a majority of their childhood. So here's what you say. Engagement is most commonly not discussed in school or universities, but it is discussed somewhere. Can you tell us where it's discussed?
- [09:08]
Jenny Anderson
Discussed by Silicon Valley. They want your. They deeply care about engagement. They are so, so hyper fixated on your kids engagement with their tech tool that they have designed very powerful algorithms to suck them in and keep them as long as humanly possible. Because engagement to them is the ultimate metric of success. So their absolute goal in the morning, Tristan Harris said this. Tristan Harris from the center for Humane Technology said it beautifully. He said, you wake up every morning and you have some goals for your day. Go to school, learn a few things, go to work, get a, you know, get some stuff done, maybe get, put a nice meal on the table, have some nice time with your family. Silicon Valley has one goal for you, for you to get on their product and to stay on it as long as possible. They don't care about your other goals at all. They never have. And so when we think about engagement, unfortunately the term has sort of been hijacked by that kind of engagement. And that is not what we're talking about. We're talking about engagement with deeper learning, engagement with each other, engagement in life, engagement. And you know, and we're not anti tech, we're not Luddites here. There's no part of this book that says ban it all, run the other way, stick your head in the sand. There's none of that. But that is unfortunately where the engagement conversation is being had. And we want to sort of claw it back to the engagement that matters.
- [10:24]
Jenny Erton
Yeah, that's right. And in our families. My friend Aaron Lachner wrote this book called the Opt Out Family. And her whole point of the book was like, let's take these strategies from big tech and use them in our family. So, you know, like I'm trying to think of a good example. Novelty is a good example, right? Like there's always something new. So she's like, well, can you have little bits of surprises within your family rhythms and things like that? So this would be an example of that, which is if you know that these big tech companies are waking up every morning and saying, like you said, the goal of YouTube is to make you forget that you have goals. That's the goal. You know, can we also be having that conversation as parents and educators about the engagement piece? They're having it in terms of our kids, so we need to be having it too, which is like, what can we do to increase their engagement in real world things you write tech is a disengagement enabler and it intensifies the feeling that they do not belong. So you go in this book. Never heard of this before. I love learning new things, Jenny. So I love learning about the four modes of engagement. There's the resistor, the passenger, the achiever and the explorer. These are good things to know so you can kind of get a feel for what they are, you know, the passenger, they're just along for the ride. The resistor that, you know, they might be pushing back. It could be quiet or it could be overt. The achiever. I would love to talk about this because I don't think anyone, you know, would have any problems with the achiever. But you do bring up the fact.
- [11:54]
Jenny Anderson
But, but there's. So there's two parts of it. You want me to jump in?
- [11:58]
Jenny Erton
Yeah, go for it.
- [12:00]
Jenny Anderson
So achiever is a really, really tricky mode. These are learning modes. These aren't identities. They're not labels for kids or a way for them to understand different ways they show up for their learning, you know, and it changes. It can change based on their environment. But achiever mode is in some ways the trickiest because these are kids who are trying to get a gold. Everything they do, they love to perform, they love the Ace, you know, the A pluses, they love the 4.0s, they love 4.9s, whatever it is these days, like, I don't know, you can't keep track. Like they, they just want you any hoop you put in front of them. They'll. They want to get through it right? And they want to get through it faster and better than everyone else. There's this real sort of zero sub mentality and some of this is great. We want kids who are disciplined, who work hard, who achieve. Like we all want kids who achieve. There's nothing wrong with wanting that. And for having kids who do that, the challenge is we found in our research that there's a real dark side. There's a sort of happy achiever who is kind of doing all those good things, and then there's the unhappy achiever. And those are kids who are perfectionists, who are very fragile. They are learning to follow, they are learning to do what the system asks of them. And the system is insatiable. They are not learning who they are. They are not asking, what do I care about? They are not figuring out how to apportion their energy, which is limited. All human beings have limited energy. And so they're giving it all. And so they're very. They're at risk of burnout. And we found that this mode had the highest rate of mental health challenges of all the modes, which really surprised us. We kind of expected to see more of it in resistor mode because that's sort of dubbed the problem children. But it was here and it makes sense because the perfectionism, no one can be perfect. And if that's what you're striving for, you know you're going to burn out. And so it's just. We laid out those modes because we get that as a parent, any parent of more than one kid knows that like what you do for one is not what you do for the other. Right. And so these. Every kid is different. They show up in learning different. They're in different modes in different years with different teachers. And so what can we do when they get stuck in one? So when you have that kid who is just the sort of blinded by perfectionism, what can we do? And so that. And that's very different from what you're going to do with a kid who like, refuses to do his homework.
- [13:59]
Jenny Erton
Right.
- [13:59]
Jenny Anderson
Like, there's no bit of advice that's going to probably let land for both of those kids. They're going to need really different things. And that's the tricky part about being a parent.
- [14:09]
Jenny Erton
Sure. And an educator. You know, you've got these kids that are all different. And you even talked about within the different modes, the different modes of engagement, like the resistor. You talk about anxious school refusal and how that's gone up. So you may see a kid that like, is really not wanting to go to school. I mean, I had periods in time of my life, like in seventh grade where I was like, don't want to go.
- [14:33]
Jenny Anderson
Yeah. I don't want to go. Deal with all down in seventh grade. Yeah.
- [14:38]
Jenny Erton
I was like, excuse me, I'm just planning on not going. And in fact I had, I had a year or two where I almost hit the. You know, there's a threshold of absences where they're calling home and they're like, it doesn't matter how well your kid is doing with their grades. If they miss one more day, they're like truant and they're not going to be able to Pass on. So I definitely had my fear of missed school. But you know, you see the kid that's like, don't want to go. But within these modes, so you can read them and really get a sense like that seems like my kid or my kid fits. There's sometimes variations. So the resistor may be really pushing back or the resistor may be quietly resisting and just completely getting lost.
- [15:21]
Jenny Anderson
Yeah, yeah. So we have a couple characters in the book who. And it was heartbreaking because. And it does fall a little bit, not entirely along gender lines. Boys more often act out and girls more often internalize. And so we have Esme, this character in the book who just, I mean, her mom found her in the dog bed curled up one morning and she just said, I, I can't go to school. And she had kind of been performing and doing. She's a super bright kid, just really hated school. It was not working for her. And she had just been withdrawing and withdrawing and withdrawing. And then she was out, you know, and her mom took her out and they had to, you know, she homeschooled her for a while because she just could not get into school. And ultimately she did end up going back to school. What's funny is she's now in university studying one of the most old fashioned studies. You know, she's studying like bioengineering or something. I'm like. So, you know, she just, she needed a bit of, she needed a different way to get onto that path. But it was really profound how much she hadn't complained along the way. Her mom knew she wasn't happy, but like, whatever. Some kids just don't like going to school. You know, you don't sort of pay. And then until that morning that she kind of, she was like, she was gray. She was in the dog bed and she was gray. And she said, I can't go anymore. And she just hadn't kind of seen that coming. And so I think that's the withdrawing and the internalizing and you know, kids start to tell themselves the story, I'm not good at this. I can't succeed at this. I don't belong here. I mean, they don't use that language because they're little kids. But like, that's the story in their head. I'm not good enough. I don't, I have no place here. And so, you know, we got to do some work home and in schools to make it work for them because you don't want to lose those kids and that, you know, those kids, the, the withdrawing ones are the ones we sometimes miss. The acting out ones catch our attention. They marshal resources, you know, with. They're the problem children. The administrators, everyone's paying attention to these kids and, you know, good on them for letting people know. I mean, it's a, you know, pain in the ass as a parent and as a teacher. But these kids are, it's, you know, we like to see it as a sort of cry for help. Not constructive, you know, not always in the best way. But that is typically what's going on. Something is gone wrong.
- [17:32]
Jenny Erton
Yeah, you're right. Resisting is a form of self care.
- [17:35]
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- [20:53]
Jenny Erton
The quietly resisting, though, was so sad because Esme says, I didn't feel like I mattered. She you know, there's this belonging piece. She said she felt like a small cog in the machine. So you read the book and you really get a sense of how different kids might be feeling with these four modes of engagement. The passenger the passenger is just becoming apathetic. So there was a girl named Stella. She says parents should believe their kids when they say they did nothing in school. So you don't just talk about the modes, then you talk about, well, what are some ways that you could engage your kids, that you could help them feel more engaged in life. So one of the ideas in here was just being more intentional about what they're interested in individually. So let's talk about the passenger, the one that's coasting in low gear. They're never fully engaged in their work, but they're getting by about, I mean, to the point of YouTube. The goal is that you have no goals. It's probably harder today for kids to be real engaged in anything because a lot of their time is taken up.
- [21:54]
Jenny Anderson
Yeah, well, as you said, technology is a real sort of disengagement enabler. So if you're disengaged from school, the technology is even more tempting and distracting than it already is, which is profoundly so. But typically, if you've seen kids, super. If you've seen your own kids completely engaged in something that is not technology, you know, it's possible. And so it's, you know. So talking about passenger mode though, to answer your question. So really the most common reasons that kids end up in passenger mode, there's sort of three. Number one is they are outside what educators call the zone of proximal development, which is their zpd, which is the sweet spot of learning where kids feel stretched, they're challenged. So that novelty that you were talking about, it's like, oh, there's something new and hard and I don't know how to do it, but with support they can get there. That's where, that's where learning kind of comes alive. If it is too hard, kids check out because they're like, I can't do this and I don't want to be. I don't want other people to see me not failing. Like, that's the worst. When you're a teenager and you're very sensitive to social pressure and sort of how you're perceived and if it's too easy, you check out. This is so boring. I've done this like 20 times. Like, no way I'm paying attention. So it is really hard for educators to get in that sweet spot. And to know when kids are in that sweet spot, you know, that is. It's been the great promise of educational technology that has not totally materialized yet. But so that is one challenge. Kids are just like, I was bored. I checked out, I was completely overwhelmed. I checked out the number of kids who told us. I was kind of like bored and I sort of did things half heartedly and then I kind of woke up one day and I was like, like hella behind. Like, you know, things were like things had taken off and they didn't know how to catch up. Number two is they don't see the point. So they. This relevance point. I'd say one of the top reasons kids check out in general disengagement is relevant. We are not doing a good enough job as educators and as parents to tie what they're doing in school to the real world. I wish schools did more of this, but I also think parents could. Instead of sort of writing out who's going to need algebra in an age where computers can do everything? Well, algebra isn't actually about being able to do equations. It's about our logical way of thinking and reasoning. And trust me, you are going to want to be able to think and reason when the world can do, you know, when AI can do everything for you. So we haven't. We need to really lean into. Oh yeah, that thing you're doing. That does have relevance. One of that. This is how it connects. You know, I love to joke to my family, to my kids when they're reading Shakespeare. They're this is so boring. And literally, who speaks this way? This is so dumb. And I'm like, literally. He writes about dysfunctional families like it's nobody's business. Like, and those exist all the time, everywhere. Like, he is really deep on kind of some really tricky human emotions. So stick in there. There's some stuff in that will come in handy in your real life. Understanding the crazy things people do. He was a master at talking to that story. So is that kind of bringing it?
- [24:42]
Jenny Erton
That's good. Jenny. My midwife says parenting is all sales, so some of it you gotta sell.
- [24:50]
Jenny Anderson
Yeah. And the last thing with passenger mode kids is a lot of them don't know how to study. So they haven't, they've missed. They haven't really built those executive function skills. And so somewhere between, you know, elementary and middle school, there's a shift from kind of a task that has to be completed and a lot of kind of back and forth that goes between parents and to it's on you. And you got to manage your time in multiple classes and multiple portals and different technology. Like all this stuff and kids lose the plot and they don't know how to plan a project that isn't due the next day. They don't know how to plan steps. They don't know how to chunk the work. They don't know how to. There's a lot of that that comes in. And so oftentimes it is really helping those kids not make a plan for them. Help them plan, teach them to plan. That is something that parents can. There's a ton of resources, you know, executive function skills, lots of coaches, lots of online resources. We've got a bunch of stuff in the book. But just when your kid's like, I have this test, I'm completely overwhelmed. How you can kind of break that down for them, because that's something that you as a grownup have really developed. You know, you might not be a superstar at it, but you're definitely probably light years ahead of your 14 year old. And you can. You just. I gotta think through what they know how to do and, and help them sort of see the smaller pieces chunk it. Which is what educators do.
- [26:06]
Jenny Erton
Yeah. And great information for sure. The passenger is quietly quitting, so they're not causing problems. And you might think that they're just doing fine. But I love, I love this explanation and I love this charge to spark interest. There was a student in here, Mateo. He's got good grades, but he's deeply disengaged. Well, what turns it around for him? He takes a robotics class he really likes. And it's different from all the other classes. And it, you know, you say it's like, it's not like they have to like every single class, but if there's something there where you're like, oh, I'm really interested in this, it changes the whole dynamic. We talked about achiever mode, which is a big deal, just because we have to be able to take risk in life, especially now. Resilience is born from mucking through hard things, not being perfect in all that you do. And this is where you talk also about youth sports. And this is going on all over the country. There's a large share of unhappy achievers. So you have this sentence, help students take it down a notch. How do we do that?
- [27:11]
Jenny Anderson
Yeah, I'm living this one firsthand. So I can, I can give you like a lot of tips on this one. I've tried a lot of things that haven't worked for sure. Number one thing, you are going to defend their sleep like you were an army holding back an enemy. Because these kids are not getting, especially kids in achiever mode are not getting enough sleep. They are burning the midnight oil. They are. And that is this really, really lack of sleep is very highly tied to mental health challenges. So we really just need to get in there and set some rules. We talk a lot in this book about Agency. Agency is very important.
- [27:49]
Jenny Erton
Right.
- [27:49]
Jenny Anderson
Sleep is kind of where I draw the line. And like, you're in charge and no phones in the bedroom ever. If you can, if you're early enough to set that rule. If you haven't set it, you're setting it now. You bought the phone, you're paying for the plan. Most likely you can set the rules, get those phones out of the bedroom because they can't sleep if they're there. There's someone who's texting, there's someone who's awake, there's a new snap, there's a new chat, there's a new fight, there's a new game, there's Netflix.
- [28:12]
Jenny Erton
Like, oh my gosh, it's like taking seventh grade home in your pocket.
- [28:15]
Jenny Anderson
Exactly. So sleep is number one. Number two is giving them permission to take their foot off the accelerator. Now, parents are notoriously bad at this one. I will give you a very concrete example, something I did. My kids take something called gcses, which is a mega set of exams in this country that every kid has to take, every 15 year old has to take. And you take 10 of them. And my daughter wanted to take for her 10th, one Mandarin. And I just knew that one through nine, she was going to be giving it 198%. 198%. And she wanted to take this super mega hard thing on top of it. And I said, I want you to take something easy. And she was like, literally, you're the only parent who's saying that. Every other parent is like, take the harder thing, it's going to look better on the college application. It's going to, you know, it's. And I was like, not my concern. My concern is your well being. I know what you're going to put into those nine and those nine matter hugely. Do I want the 10th to be one where you can give 50% and still do well, I wasn't saying like, get a bad grade. I was saying take an easier subject for you than one that is going to require a lot. And I think she thought I was pretty out there. And she took. But she did take my advice. And I think when it came time to the exam for the exams, which was two years later, she was so grateful. Sure, I'm really grateful. So that's one. And the third thing is taking some small risks. This is a little bit tied to this sort of Mandarin example, but when you're in achiever mode, you like getting the right answer. That is your goal, to get the right answer. Well, there are A lot of things in life for which there is no right answer. You're going to be exploring different answers. You want to be able to think in a sort of out of the box way as well as get the right answer. I mean, you know, the SAT there is definitely a right answer, but that is not how all of life works. So with kids who are stuck in achiever mode, we want them to take small risks. Hey, you want to write a paper on the thing that you know inside out and backwards, but you're really curious about this other thing, do that. I bet you can succeed at that too. Take that risk. You know, it doesn't have to be your junior year, you know, final AP history essay, because maybe the stakes are too high. But when they're in ninth grade and they want to do that thing, oh my gosh, lean in. That is your chance to signal to them, yeah, taking some small risks when the stakes are lower on behalf of your learning, it's a great thing to do because that is something they're going to have to develop and do over time.
- [30:36]
Jenny Erton
These are all great ideas. And the statement, help students take it down a notch is such an interesting one to me, Jenny, because for so long, I think the pressures are coming, come from the parent.
- [30:47]
Jenny Anderson
I know.
- [30:48]
Jenny Erton
And now I think it's the parent and society, it's more than just a parent. So that becomes part of our role, is actually pushing back against that. And you had this phrase in here about learning on the job that a lot of kids are going to end up learning on the job anyway. So the pressure is maybe not needed. They're going to move into an adult role. They're going to get a job they like. Hopefully they're going to learn what they need to do there. And so all of these steps that cause so much pressure when they're younger possibly didn't matter all that much.
- [31:20]
Jenny Anderson
Well, I think. Can I just build on something you said there? Yeah, it's a really beautiful phrase in Jenny Wallace's book Never Enough, which is about toxic achievement culture, which, you know, we, we drew on for our own book and cite some of the same research. And you just said it. This pressure. Someone asked the question, where is the pressure coming from? And this Sonia Luther, who was this brilliant researcher said, where isn't it coming from? It is literally coming from, coming from everywhere. So if we as parents and caregivers aren't building that protective space, who will? No one college. Colleges aren't going to do it. The high schools really aren't going to do it. That's not their job. Their job is, you know, to kind of help kids achieve in their academics and, you know, you hope they do, but really we are the front line. And so if we're in there sort of raising the temperature and I think a lot of us do it from a place of love. I really don't cast blame here. I don't think it's. We're anxious about the future and we think the better you do, the better prepared you are for the future. Yes. And they need to be sort of emotionally intact to get there. And so what can we do to protect their well being? That sleep piece I think is so important that learning to balance, you know, like overdrive all the time is not healthy. I know, it's. We sort of mayonize it in America. It's what we love to talk about. I sleep three hours a night and I'm so amazing. You know, it's like, yeah, like so not healthy. Don't brag about that.
- [32:46]
Jenny Erton
Yeah. And I love that you say, take it down a notch. You're not like, don't care. But can you pull it back just a little bit?
- [32:52]
Podcast Host (Sponsor Reader)
I think for a long time I underestimated how much your outdoor space impacts your day to day life because ours just wasn't working. It felt unfinished. We had a couple mismatched chairs, no real place to sit comfortably. And I've always had this idea that I'd add lighting or make it feel cozy, but never actually got around to it. Then we started looking on Wayfair and it made the whole process feel doable. We found pieces that actually fit our style. Simple, functional, a little bit modern, but still warm. And suddenly the space came together. We added seating, a few subtle decor touches, and now it's a place we naturally end up at the end of the day. The best part is how easy Wayfair makes it to get there. You can narrow everything down so quickly, compare options, read thousands of reviews, and feel confident in what you're choosing. And delivery was seamless, which matters when you're trying to upgrade a space without adding more stress. It finally feels like a space we use instead of a void. Get prepped for patio season for way less. Head to Wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's a Y F A I R.com Wayfair Every style, every home.
- [33:48]
Jenny Erton
I had read a story where it was like parents, they were like, we don't care about our kids grades, which I think is somewhat uncommon. We tend to fall in that camp. But they're like, oh, we don't really care. But the. But the kid was really struggling with perfectionism and they're like, well, where is it coming from? And the author was like, well, they step outside of your home into society and like to the point of the other person, it's coming from everywhere. So you've got these, these modes. And then it culminates with explorer mode. This is really where we want to be. This is where resilient learners build skills that help them thrive. One of the things you talk in here and you brought up earlier, but I'd love to just spend a little bit more time on it, is agency. The critical ability all kids and adults need to navigate the massive technological and social changes happening all around us. How do we help our kids? And truth be told, everyone knows, yes, our kids are going to have to have some agency because they're going to step out. You know, we've got a 17 year old. So in five months, I mean we keep talking about this in five months, it's like, what do you do now? You know, they have to have some agency.
- [35:00]
Jenny Anderson
Yeah. So the, the sort of top of the engagement mountain is not achiever mode, which I think we've made very clear in this call. Like that is not, that is not our goal. Of course we want our kids to achieve. I love that you don't care about grades in your house. I am going to be honest, I do care about grades. I am also just balanced in how I care about those grades. But anyways, you know, takes all kinds. But I. So explore mode is kind of where curiosity meets drive. It's where kids have self awareness. They know what they. They've really had a chance to develop a set of interests and do some culling. I know what I care about. They have some strategies to go after it. So they're not so fragile like the achiever mode. You know, they really have a sense of I can try this. If that doesn't work, I'm going to try something else or I'm going to ask for help. I'm going to go to someone. You know, they have this kind of toolkit of abilities. And what that means is in sort of wonky academic terms, they are agentically engaged to use the phrase you use and in English. Well, we define agency as the ability to set a goal and marshal the resources to meet it. So what that means is I know what I care about and I have some ways to go after it. And if it doesn't work, I will figure it out. And that is very different from a sort of typical achiever mode. When you ask kids in achiever mode, what are you interested in? The most common answer is, I don't know. Which is, you know, like, what are we doing if we're not letting them to answer that question in high school? It's such an important one, you know. And so explorer mode really is giving kids the opportunity to go do things in the real world and get real data back. You know, a part time job, babysitting, working in a, in the pizza place. You know, helping a neighbor doing stuff that is like, has an impact is not tokenistic. Kids know when it's just BS and it's all sort of for cover, for show or for the application. You know, the real stuff, right? Like a neighbor is saying, could you take this meal down to them? Could you cook a meal for them? Some pasta and tomato sauce? It would make a world of difference because they can't get up and cook right now. They have a hurt knee or something that kind of like knowing you're making a difference in someone's life, super important. And so all of those explorer moments, you know, really help a kid figure out. And that can be in a classroom. Like you talked about Mateo and his robotics. That's a great example of it happening in school. It doesn't happen in school for a lot of kids, but it can happen out of school and you can help them just have those opportunities. Which sometimes means, you know, maybe a little less travel, whatever sport it is, maybe it's a little bit less, you know, Sunday football. It's, you know, half of that football game is going to church and spending some time helping the community, you know, whatever. The thing is just chances for those kids to get a sense of what in the world is important and how can I be part of the it and doing that. And that's a very service orientation. It could be a business. You know, they want to make money and go out there and be rich and famous. Great, we'll go practice doing that and test that out too. Like, I don't want to prejudge which lane you get in, but I think the idea is go collect data because school gives you a little bit of data on a kind of narrow lane of academic preparedness. And it's super important, but it is not the only lane. And so especially for kids who are really struggling in school, when they get out and kind of see, oh my gosh, there's this big world, there's so many ways to have an impact there's so many things I could do, you know, then possibilities kind of broaden and they don't have to feel like a failure or like they don't do school well. And so they don't do anything well, which is a story way too many kids tell themselves.
- [38:28]
Jenny Erton
I love this, Jenny, because I do think we have to look at the world as a world of possibilities now more so than ever. If you're one of the 16, 000 employees that just lost their job at Amazon, then it's very helpful. If you look at the world as a world of possibilities, what else can I do? And how can I get their agency the ability to set meaningful goals and marshal resources to meet them. So this book, the Disengaged Teen, is really helpful for parents because what you say is most kids are not encouraged to explore in school, which makes sense because you can't have 25 kids exploring different things, often with one teacher in the classroom. And there's not the space and there's not the time for it. So this is something that you need to be doing out outside of that kids can expel, can build, explore muscles anywhere because they're not encouraged to do it in school and often are actively discouraged to do it. So we need to have this explorer mode and agency. This is the age of agency, right? So this transitions then into the disengaged teen. One of the things that's really important for them and for us as adults is to become better at learning, because uncertainty is the new norm. We are in this time of rapid change. So one of the things you talked about, and I love this, is parents need to model the thrill of learning. How can we do that? And I mean, that's such an interesting thing, Jenny. It's like as an adult, you can just get into your norm, right? Which is like, whether you're working out of the home, you're working in the home, you're like, every day I do these things. And you could very much go through life and not learn much. But you say you have to model the thrill of it, which means you have to be in your zone of proximal development. You know, you have to be stretching yourself. So convince the parents to do this and maybe give some ideas on how they can do it.
- [40:22]
Jenny Anderson
So I love this. There's an author in the UK named Ian Leslie. He wrote a book called Curious, and he had this phrase which just. Just kind of blew my mind and really stuck with me. Curiosity is contagious. So is incuriosity. So if you're not asking questions. And if you're not sort of interrogating the world a little bit, being curious and open minded about everything out there, different viewpoints, things that are happening in your community. It doesn't have to be sort of the big world, which is very messy right now. Maybe a lot of parents are like, I don't want my kids like looking out there. We'll look, look locally. There's all sorts of things happening all the time. How did a historical society come to be? I mean that might be a super wonky question for some, but I know some teenagers who just explored this. They went back and looked at this historical society and they were kind of doing real work, real historical digging. They found a crazy backstory and they were super into it because they discovered it, you know, it was very cool. They came to it on their own. So I think this idea of again, I think one really stepping back something we as parents, unfortunately this kind of falls to us is to kind of be the bearers of hope. It feels there's a lot of hopelessness right now. And I think we can acknowledge that there's big problems in the world and you know, excited for the teens of today to sort of step into their power and help solve them. But like there's plenty to be hopeful for too. And that curiosity is very connected to hope. Right? I am curious about how we've gotten out of previous wars. You know, if you're in Ukraine right now, it's a. They just passed the 2 million mark on people dying. Like this is. But Russia has a pretty big history of being at war with Europe. So like what happened in the past and like how do, how do we solve these problems? How do we move forward? How do we come up with a peace accords? How do we break through when we feel stuck? Like be curious because curiosity is also the root of problem solving. So I do, I really just do think it's, you know, if it's a conversation you had with someone, you know, on your dog walk and it was something interesting you learned that is modeling curiosity, something you learned in the newspaper or online or something share that that's something you learned, you know, a development, you know, at the, at the school that you, that you heard about, ask about that. It's just really that kind of capacity to be open and to always be
- [42:40]
Jenny Erton
asking questions is good model the thrill of learning. So in our home we. I play the piano, I play the piano since I was a little kid and it's one of my favorite things. But then you have kids? We've got five. I'm like, I'm too busy. You know, I don't have time to practice. And then I interviewed this woman who, named Linda Flanagan, who wrote a book about you, called this Youth Sports Culture. And she said, in this book, this changed me. This was a couple years ago. Jenny, how are we modeling adulthood? Are we modeling adulthood?
- [43:09]
Podcast Host (Sponsor Reader)
Like, it's a big bore.
- [43:10]
Jenny Erton
And I'll post about this sometimes on social media. People do not like it because her advice is to skip some games. She's like, go to the championship. Go to see. Go to some of the things. But here and there, skip, because you want to show your kids that adulthood is a destination that's exciting. And you go out with friends and you go play your own sport. You know, you go to the field next to it and you kick the ball around. So the seeds were planted for me there. And then I talked to this woman who wrote a book called still about how she has this, like, daily, like, artistic practice where she'll just take a photo of. Of nature that she finds. But she does it every single day. She did it every day for, like, 10 years. Then her house caught on fire, and I think she took a couple days off. But this turned into this huge project. So I thought, my goodness. Like, anyway, so I started a little bit. I'm like, I'm gonna take piano lessons alongside my kids. You know, they're learning. I'm not doing it at all. So it's like, I'm gonna pick it back up, you know, My youngest is nine, so I'm doing a piano competition in less than a month. There's an adult division, and I have. I'm learning this piece. It's like an old hymn. It's called I'll Fly Away. And I've never been super good at memorizing, but I talked to this man who said, everybody can get better at their memory. And your brain starts to grow, like, these little bits, you know, Even after just a short session, you can see this, like, micro growth in the brain. So I went. And he's like, your mindset's what matters. So I was like, I can memorize, you know, a piece that's got 1200 notes. I mean, you know, in the past, I'm like, I know. How do you even do this? You know? But I'm, like, going in with a different mindset, and I'm able to play through the whole thing. So there just is a lot out there. Like, you know, I've got a daughter that's interested in embroidery. And people are like embroidering on their Converse and they're embroidering on their sweatshirts. Like, you know, they'll put little flowers around the sleeves and there are so many cool things in life.
- [45:07]
Jenny Anderson
There's so many cool things in life. There's so many possibilities. I love the embroidery and the crafting. There's a real sort of, I think return to crafting in, you know, Gen Alpha, Gen Z. And I think it's really wonderful. I actually, a lot of people asked me to read their kids college essays because I'm a writer and because I love teenagers. And this young woman had been a real introvert. Real introvert does not for a long time really didn't like socializing with other kids. And they put her in a. She loved to embroider and they put her in an embroidery club because they felt like she really needs to socialize. And she sewed her whole, you know, she found all these different outlets for it. And then she wrote her college essay on it and it was one of the most beautiful and authentic essays I've ever read because it just came through all the things that it gave to her. It gave her peace when there was a lot of noise outside. It gave her sort of dexterity and a real sense of competence and mastery. During the pandemic she was sewing masks for people and gave. So gave her. She was like. It suddenly had like a life saving quality to it. And you know, I think that I. That idea of exploring yourself through this thing was just so. When you talked about the embroidery just made me think of that story and, and how sometimes we, I think a lot of parents would have maybe said to that kid, embroidery is not going to get you into college. I need you to get on a sports team. I need you to get out there. You need to join some clubs that are going to look good on the college application. And her parents said, this is your true love. The only thing we're going to ask is that you do it with other kids and not just do it alone at home because we need you to be socializing. And now she's a super social kid. It just took some time, you know, but I love that story for the sort of authenticity, simplicity of it.
- [46:49]
Jenny Erton
Well, and it, you know, you can't make a lot of money off embroidery. I mean it's not probably like, I mean, and it did, it did help with her college because that's what she wrote about in her entities exam. But we had bought into her.
- [47:00]
Jenny Anderson
She, she applied early for one college. And she got in and I was like, of course she did. Because it was. She had good grades. I mean, you know, but I. I'm sure that essay jumped off the page. I read, like I said, I read a lot of college essays. And to me it was. There was nothing manufactured about it.
- [47:15]
Jenny Erton
Yes. So the point is that as adults, we have to do the same thing. We have to model the thrill of learning. So we have to find what is our spark. You can use the book, you know, you can talk about it with your teen and figure out what are their interests. But you can, I think that we have the responsibility to do the same thing. Is it gardening? Is it baking? Is it woodwork? Is it. You know, I've got a friend, she like constantly is renovating her home. You know, she has all these skills and she does woodworking. So I love this. Parents who share their passions model the benefits of interests. They expose their kids to a range of new context issues and people. This is what's in the book. It's called the Disengaged teen, but possibly are we disengaged adults? So it starts with us.
- [48:03]
Jenny Anderson
My kids tease me all the time because I've been traveling a lot with the book. They were like, are you going to write a follow up, the Disengaged Adult?
- [48:10]
Jenny Erton
I know, Kenny. Yes, we all were. So many of us are disengaged.
- [48:16]
Jenny Anderson
I know.
- [48:17]
Jenny Erton
I think I was disengaged.
- [48:19]
Jenny Anderson
I said, I'm over engaged. And they were like, well, that's a problem too.
- [48:23]
Jenny Erton
The right amount of engagement. That's funny. Yeah. So that. So I love this sentence. And this is. Goes for us and for our kids, it matters less what they are learning and more how they're learning, you know, that they're actually doing it, that they're actually growing.
- [48:39]
Podcast Host (Sponsor Reader)
So whatever the interest is, to your
- [48:40]
Jenny Erton
point, about the family who was fine with the embroidery club, it didn't matter what it was, it just mattered that they were doing it. So this is going to help with your kids, with their agency. It's going to help them to be able to deal with uncertainty. It's going to make them more flexible. They're going to be more engaged in their learning. Since you brought up Jennifer Wallace, I actually had the wonderful opportunity to interview her. She had a book that just came out recently called Mattering. And then you brought up the book Never Enough. There's this huge sentence in your book. A whopping 44%, almost half of young adults age 18 to 25 in the US said they did not feel like they mattered to other people. Wow. First of all, wow, that is a shocking statistic. How can we possibly change that? That's so important to change.
- [49:32]
Jenny Anderson
Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with us as parents, because I think the corollary to that. I don't know if you're looking at the book or if you put this in your notes, but when Jenny was doing research for her first book, she also asked kids. And I don't have the data in front of me, but it's a shockingly high number. How many of you think you matter? Your parents love is conditional on your grades. That somehow doing well in school was kind of tied to. To that love. And a lot of kids thought it was. And I think that's where we know we can make a difference, but we kind of have to come to terms with being okay with it. You know, I think a lot of us really want our kids to do well. And guess what? The kids completely know that. So if it's really important for you that your kid do well, they may well internalize that as that's why I'm loved. I do well in school. And so I just think we kind of need to love them. And they're messy, 3D emerging, becoming selves. You know, not only when it's pretty and there's an A plus next to it and a well done and a top travel team. Like, we personally get so excited when the good things happen and then we pretend that we're not disappointed and they know we are when the bad things happen. And I think we have to be really kind of come to terms with the fact that not everything goes well all the time. Even in high school. Especially in high school. I know we're accumulating a GPA here, but this is also kids developing their identity. This is also kids learning about how they want to show up in the world. This is about kids taking risks. It's about kids experimenting and doing things like, we gotta get behind that and be okay with that and communicate to them that they matter for all the little things. I love the notion people in the early childhood years use this phrase all the time. And we need it in adolescence, which is catch them being good. Teenagers can be super annoying. Like, properly, you know, my kid, everything I do, my kids think is sort of like dumb or irrelevant or, you know, whatever. Eye roll. And that's developmentally normal, right? That is totally fine. So. But I still need to catch them being good. I still need to. When they talk to their. My mom has dementia. They talk to my mom a lot at night. They're so sweet with her. I just say to them, it means the world to me that you guys spent some time with her. I know it can be tricky to have those conversations, but, wow, like, what a good granddaughter you are, like, and what a good daughter you. You are to me. That's a huge help to me. You know, that kind of calling them out for being good, you know, instead of only like, oh, my God, did you really not pick up your socks again? Are you kidding me? Like, because all that stuff also happens. But how do we balance it out?
- [52:05]
Jenny Erton
Yeah. And they matter. You know, I know Jenny Walls talks about this is beyond belonging. This is. Do you actually matter? So, absolutely. Then they're helping with your mom and, you know, they're helping with the relationship there, and so they matter. You wrote in the book the Disengaged Teen, every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her. So other things that you can learn about in the book, creativity, daydreaming, constructive daydreaming, time for reflection. We don't just want kids to, like, think that all they have to do is produce the right answer by the day. We want. We're advice monsters. I love that phrase. You talk about entrepreneurship. I mean, there is a lot in this book. And I want to read this sentence because I think this kind of sums it up. The world has changed considerably in a recent survey of employers, a global survey. The skills they value most today include analytical and creative thinking, resilience and flexibility, motivation and self awareness, curiosity and lifelong learning. So these are often the things that are not coming out of seat work. They're coming out of engagement with the world or engagement within your family unit. And so it's time to shift our priorities. Jenny, what a book.
- [53:24]
Jenny Anderson
Thank you.
- [53:25]
Jenny Erton
It's a fantastic one. The Disengaged Teen. Can you tell us where. Where we can find you and what we might find over at your substack?
- [53:34]
Jenny Anderson
Sure. I write a substack called how to be Brave, which is really about how to be brave as a parent, how to be brave in life, and also how to be brave and learning. I mean, I think sometimes we forget as adults that actually learning something new, admitting you don't know something, and then putting in the energy to actually figure out how to do it all while in community with a bunch of other teenagers who are super judgy because that's what they do is tough. And so how to Be Brave sort of summarized my notion of How I want to show up in the world. So I write a lot about parenting, technology, and learning. Those are kind of my three topics. It's pretty much three out of four weeks. I try to write every week and it just never seems to work out. I travel a lot for the book and so. So I'm on substack Instagram at. Jenny Anderson writes. That's more videos and kind of fun stuff. A lot of stuff I see and want to share. I also dig into research quite a bit and look at that. And I've been really looking at AI pretty closely and writing a lot about that sort of how AI is showing up in our classrooms and how we as parents can deal with it at home.
- [54:41]
Jenny Erton
You wrote that you and Rebecca met.
- [54:44]
Podcast Host (Sponsor Reader)
Rebecca is the co author of this
- [54:45]
Jenny Erton
book at an education conference in Bulgaria.
- [54:49]
Jenny Anderson
We did.
- [54:51]
Jenny Erton
So, I mean, I wouldn't have ever even thought like, hey, there's an education conference in Bulgaria. Maybe I should go. Can you just get a little bit of that story?
- [54:59]
Jenny Anderson
Oh, sure. So it was Teach for All, which is. There's Teach for America started by Wendy Kopp, and then she started a global movement called Teach for All, which. Which is. And now there's like 80 of them. And what's fascinating is people from all of those, you know, Teach for Britain or it's called Teach First Year, Teach first and Teach for America and Teach for Espana. Like, all of them come together and they share what they're learning in their classroom. So it's a real sort of innovation in education conference that happens every year. And Rebecca was on a panel and I was the moderator. And I said, I can't believe how little data I can find around learning. I had just been a finance reporter forever, and I was like, there's so much data. And I got into education. I was like, where's the data? And Rebecca was like, oh, I have data for you. And I was like, I like you. And we hit it off and we stayed in touch. And then five years later, we decided to write a book together.
- [55:50]
Jenny Erton
That's fantastic. That's fantastic. And I, I am right there with your kids. I think the disengaged adult has got a ring to it. And I think that it's, it's applicable. But to your point, a lot of that stuff is coming back, which is like working with our hands and, and making sure we have hobbies and, and that type of thing. Because it's easy as an adult to become all of these things. A resistor, a passenger, or an overachiever. And we Want to be Explorers. What an honor to get a chance to talk with you about this fantastic book. It is called the Disengaged Team. It is out and available, helping kids learn better, feel better, and live better. If you read it, it will also enhance your life as well. Jenny, we always end our show with the same question. What's a favorite memory from your childhood? That was outside.
- [56:32]
Jenny Anderson
That was outside. Oh, 100 ice skating. There was a local club in where I grew up in Maryland, and there was. We used to go to the. Go to this club on Friday nights. We would all go and we would skate and it was freezing cold. And I absolutely loved my ice skating and I ended up getting very good at ice skating. But I just kind of remember being like, I really like this thing. And I would look forward to going and I would look forward to the hot chocolate afterwards and I would look forward to being under the star. It was outside and we were under the stars and it was crazy. Like you couldn't feel your fingers or your toes. But it was still, to me, totally delightful.
- [57:08]
Jenny Erton
Okay. I've interviewed 700 people. No one has said ice skating.
- [57:14]
Jenny Anderson
Oh, you're the only one. I could be unique.
- [57:17]
Jenny Erton
Have your kids seen you ice skateboard?
- [57:20]
Jenny Anderson
They have. They probably don't remember it when they were little. We haven't done as much skating since. We've. We moved over to the UK and we haven't done as much here. It's not as prevalent, but when they were little, I used to take them skating and I taught them all how to skate. Taught all my nieces and nephews how to skate too. And so they probably don't. They haven't sort of seen me in my. In my glory. And now I'm so old, I'd be afraid to try anything. I try an axle, I'm gonna break my back again. So they'll probably just have to live with the memories.
- [57:49]
Jenny Erton
Oh, what a legacy. I love that. What a cool thing. And what a reminder that when you have a passion, then you can pass it on. You can pass it on to all the kids in your family. Nieces, nephews, kids. Jenny, what an opportunity to get to talk with you. I love the book. Thank you so much for being here.
- [58:03]
Jenny Anderson
Thank you so much for having me. This is a great conversation.