Austin Scholar #151: Why you and your kid are speaking two different languages
(& how to fix it)
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
Why you and your kid are speaking two different languages (& how to fix it)
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…
The craziest thing in the entire world happened: Elon Musk liked and commented on my post!!
I truly never imagined I would get to a place where people like Elon Musk and Andrew Huberman (he liked my post, too!) would not only see my content, but interact and agree with it. I’m so grateful to all of you for helping me get to the place I am now.
On another note, I had a math midterm this last week and have become very familiar with YouTube channels like 3Blue1Brown and Dr. Trefor Bazett (fantastic support if you or your kid find yourselves learning multivariable calculus or linear algebra) and I re-read my old newsletter on creating a formula sheet to ensure I was as prepared as possible. I’d like to think that it paid off, but I guess we’ll see next week.
Why you and your kid are speaking two different languages (& how to fix it)
Has it ever felt like you and your kid are having two completely different conversations?
“Would you please put away your laundry?”
“If I’m so messy why don’t you do it yourself?”
In so many cases, parents and kids have such a disconnect between what they say versus what they hear.
And that is the core dilemma that David Yeager’s book, 10 to 25, tries to fix.
10 to 25 is genuinely one of the best books on understanding and motivating kids that I’ve ever read – it puts a lot of the “feelings” and “vibes” I have into actual words and scientific studies. This book is so insightful and dense that, in this newsletter, I can only cover the introduction along with chapter one. If y’all enjoy this newsletter, I will happily dive into the incredible discoveries and strategies for communicating with your kid in future articles.
Now: onto this disconnect. As Yeager puts it, “it’s very hard to simultaneously criticize someone’s work and motivate them because criticism can crush a young person’s confidence” (4).
To illustrate:
You want to motivate your kid to learn how to clean their room. When you go into their room, you notice that there’s some trash on their desk.
You have two options:
Ignore it
Tell them to clean up the trash
Unfortunately, it’s not likely either of these options has a good outcome. If you ignore it, it will just signal to your kid that they don’t really need to clean their desk after all. But if you say something, your kid might actually hear “nothing I do is good enough” or “why can’t my parents respect that I did my best? I’m so busy that I don’t have time to do everything perfectly,” causing them to give up on cleaning their room completely.
But as Yeager so articulately puts it, “the adolescent predicament…is simply defined as the mismatch between young people’s neurobiological needs for status and respect and the level of status or respect afforded to them by their current circumstances” (45).
10 to 25 draws on a ton of studies which illustrate that so much of puberty and adolescent years are determined by kids’ desire for respect and social status – it’s not that they’re incompetent, they just have different priorities than adults. If your kid is going to have peers or friends over at your house, I bet they’ll clean their room without you having to ask – as long as having a clean room elevates their social status and earns them the respect of their peers.
Why is your kid super disrespectful to you when their friends are around? Probably because they feel that they’ll have a higher social status if they can prove they don’t need or rely on their parents – they gain the position and respect of an adult.
Basically, kids are motivated by things that parents don't always understand, which can make communication... difficult. How can we bridge the gap between parents and kids?