How to Talk to Young People

Perspectives on Childhood, Education, and Parenting

How to Talk to Young People

By Tom Northrup

Tom: Happy new year, Mike, Look forward to continuing our conversations on books we believe can be helpful to parents and educators.Thanks for suggesting Dr. David Yeager’s book, “10-25: The Science of Motivating Young People.”

I hadn’t heard of it. Then the day after you recommended it, I read David Brooks’ column. You’re on the cutting edge!

Mike: Hardly! But as someone with a teenage son and a daughter nearly ten, who also happens to run a summer camp where most of the campers and staff fall in the 10-25 age range, I knew this was a book I needed to read.

Tom: Makes sense. What are a couple of the most valuable ideas for motivating young people that you will add to your “tool kit?”

Mike: My first big takeaway was “how you talk to young people matters.”

Yeager explains that young people have a neurobiological need for status and respect from their peers and important adults in their lives, and he provides studies that demonstrate that nagging and “grownsplaining” results in anger and frustration, not reflection and future planning. Yeager glibly reminds his readers that while it feels good to tell someone what to do, it can sometimes feel pretty terrible to be the person being told what to do.

Instead, he encourages adults to try “collaborative troubleshooting,” which requires a neutral tone, curiosity, and asking authentic questions. When young people feel like their perspectives matter, they are far more invested in finding solutions.

Another point that really resonated was that young people are far more capable than adults often think. As Yeager says, “Instead of thinking of the adolescent brain as fundamentally flawed due to puberty’s hormones, we can think of it as ready to change in response to the prospect of status and respect.” The question is, what pathways are available to young people to find status and respect, and how are we challenging and supporting them along the way?

Tom: Yeager’s thesis reminds me of Matthew Lieberman’s insight and advice in his book “Social–Why our Brains are Wired to Connect (2013).” This UCLA psychologist makes the case that schools and parents are often not properly responding to the “social brain” of the adolescent. He asserts that the reason “academic performance and interest often drop in many school in junior high is that the need to belong, our most basic social motivation, is not being met.”

The challenge for educators and parents is to “stop making the social brain the enemy and figure out how to engage it”.

One of his suggestions is to place middle school students in leadership roles such as having them tutor younger students. When they are given the responsibility to teach and mentor, he has found (as I have) they perform at a high level.

Offering such opportunities promotes a sense of belonging as well as bestowing well-earned status and respect.

Mike: Adults have bemoaned the challenges of working with this age cohort since time immemorial. I think it’s time for us to update our narratives and start to see all the potential this age group possesses, so long as we remember that feelings of status and respect are the prime motivators.

Long-time educator Tom Northrup is Head of School Emeritus at The Hill School in Middleburg