The Self-Driven Child

by William Stixrud

  Stress, Anxiety, and Depression

  Affluent, high-achieving communities from Washington, DC, to Palo Alto have become all too familiar with suicide clusters impacting their high schools. When they occur, media coverage features a blend of grief, hand-wringing, and disbelief. Comments go along the lines of: “I just can’t understand it. He was one of the top students in his grade, taking four AP classes and getting perfect grades. He was a leader in our community, a standout on the varsity soccer team. Why would he take his own life?”

  Implicit in such a statement is the belief that it’s only people who are somehow losing the game who would want to kill themselves.

  A brain that is stretching itself and utterly engaged looks very different from a brain that is high performing but under the influence of toxic stress. Chronic stress can transform into anxiety when you don’t give your brain and body a chance to recover. Instead of seeing lions only when you’re on the savannah, you see them everywhere, even when they’re nowhere near and really you’d do much better to chill out and graze. The amygdala becomes bigger and more reactive than it should be, and with the prefrontal cortex cut off, you have a hard time distinguishing between things that are threatening and things that aren’t.20 Welcome to anxiety.

  Chronic stress can create a feeling of helplessness. If nothing you do makes things better, why try to do anything at all? This sense of helplessness will leave you feeling that you just can’t accomplish a task, when in reality you could do it very capably.21 Chronic stress leads to behaviors like problems sleeping, binge eating, procrastination, and a lowered willingness to take care of yourself. Dopamine levels fall, as do levels of norepinephrine and serotonin.22 This is how stress can spiral into depression.

  The kicker here is that a significant amount of this mental and emotional suffering can be prevented. Unlike juvenile diabetes or autism (which are highly heritable), experience plays a major role in anxiety, depression, and addiction. This means that if we change what we’re doing, it should be possible to bring the numbers down.

  Why This Matters So Much

  Toxic stress isn’t good for you at any age, but there are certain times in your life when it’s worse than others. Just as eating disorders can have a profound effect on young, growing bodies, chronic stress can have devastating effects on young, developing brains.

  The times when our brains seem to be the most sensitive to stress are: 1) prenatally (highly stressed pregnant women tend to have children who are more responsive to stress), 2) in early childhood, when neural circuits are particularly malleable, and 3) during adolescence, that powerful but vulnerable period between childhood and adulthood.23

  Let’s look more closely at the adolescent brain, for it is a very active place. Children between the ages of twelve and eighteen show more brain development than at any time in life other than the first few years. The adolescent brain makes important new pathways and connections, but the cognitive functions of the prefrontal cortex, the seat of judgment, don’t mature until around age twenty-five. (The emotional control functions follow at around thirty-two!) When the stress response system is turned on for extended periods of time, the prefrontal cortex can’t develop as it should. This is problematic because teens are more vulnerable to stress than children or adults.

  Normal adolescents, even those who aren’t experiencing any particular stressor, have exaggerated stress responses. In a study at Cornell led by B. J. Casey in which adolescents were shown images of frightened faces, their amygdalas were far more reactive than those of children or adults. Adolescents also demonstrate a higher stress response than other groups when speaking publicly. Animal studies have found that after a prolonged period of stress, the adult brain will tend to bounce back within ten days, while the adolescent brain takes about three weeks. Adolescents also have less stress tolerance than adults. They are much more likely to develop stress-related illnesses such as colds, headaches, and upset stomachs.24

  Anxiety begets anxiety, regardless of your age, but a 2007 study suggests that this may be even more true for teens.25 A steroid called THP is usually released in response to stress, to help calm nerve cells and lower anxiety. But while THP worked in a study of adult mice, acting like a tranquilizer in the brain, in adolescent mice it had very little effect. What this means is that adolescents have it rough: more vulnerability to stress and fewer tools to deal with it. Anxiety builds on itself, with little hope of relief.

  This is also true of depression, which appears to leave “scars” in the brain, so that less and less stress is required to trigger a subsequent episode. Eventually, depression can develop with no environmental stressor. Adults who experienced even a single bout of major depression in adolescence are likely to display long-term problems in their work, their relationships, and the pleasure they take in life.26 Even after teens appear to have fully recovered, they are more likely to have mild but persistent symptoms like pessimism or sleep or appetite issues that will make them more vulnerable to depression later in life.27

  Bill first tested Jared when he was ten in order to rule out ADHD (which he had). Jared was funny, good-humored, and very enjoyable to be around. His parents and teachers raved about his positive disposition, which endeared him to others. Everyone called him the Teflon Kid, because problems just seemed to bounce off him. Bill next evaluated Jared as a sixteen-year-old sophomore. He’d done very well in school and was highly motivated to get into Duke University. Bill was troubled to learn, however, that after starting high school Jared had become depressed and had been taking an antidepressant since then. He told Bill that the combination of high stress about school and being tired all the time had eventually “pushed him over the edge” and caused him to become discouraged and pessimistic. While his medication helped, Jared explained that he still felt highly stressed and exhausted, in part because he commonly stayed up to do his homework until 12:30 or 1:00 A.M. He felt he had to stay up this late: “I’m afraid that if I went to bed earlier, a kid in Idaho would be staying up until one and would get my spot at Duke.”

  Jared isn’t doomed to a life of severe depression, but he will forever be more vulnerable to depressive episodes. His story is a powerful reminder of the dramatic changes that can ensue when kids are tired and stressed for long periods and how a disposition that is by nature easygoing can be scarred by stress. In fact, it is through working with kids like Jared that Bill concluded that being too tired and too stressed for too long is a formula for anxiety and depression.

  A Caveat about Control

  We have a tendency in our society to think that “with enough hard work, anything is possible.” Well if you didn’t make it, the dangerous corollary goes, you must not have worked hard enough. There are enormous differences in people’s natural aptitudes and in how their brains work. (Different people will have different processing speeds, memory, and tolerance for stress.) And you can work hard and still not get what you want. The real question is, what do you make of that setback? Do you take it as a verdict on your worth? Do you decide to come up with a different strategy? Or do you take the hit and try for a different goal?

  Ned sees this dynamic play out vividly in the realm of college admissions. The idea that the admissions process is a pure meritocracy is stressful—and untrue. Colleges value academic rigor, sure, but most also give preferential treatment to recruited athletes, legacies, and diversity of every type (socioeconomic, geographic, ethnic, first generation to college). Harvard could likely fill its entire incoming class with affluent white students from Massachusetts with GPAs of 4.0 and SAT scores over 1400. But they don’t. If someone isn’t admitted to their first-choice college, does it mean they didn’t work hard enough? Of course not. There are so many factors you have no control over, like what the applicant pool looks like that year, or whether the admissions rep was having a bad day or was tired of seeing applications from private school kids in Iowa who were black belts and spoke Russian. We get into d
angerous territory when we take all that on ourselves and believe we can control the uncontrollable.

  —

  A major goal of this book is to help parents help their kids increase their stress tolerance—their ability to perform well in stressful situations—and to “throw off” stress rather than accumulate it. Stress tolerance is highly correlated to success in all aspects of life. We want to challenge our kids without overwhelming them, to stretch them without breaking them. We want them to experience some positive stress and some tolerable stress, but in the right ways, and with the right bolstering. We want to give their brains all the support and room they need to grow strong. The how of all of this comes back again and again to a sense of control. What this means for you as a parent will become clearer in the next chapter, where we encourage you to be a consultant for your child, not his boss or manager.

  What to Do Tonight

  Make a list of the things your child has control over. Is there anything you can add to that list?

  Ask your child if there are things he feels he’d like to be in charge of that he currently isn’t.

  Consider your language around making plans. Do you say, “Today we’re going to do this and then this,” or do you offer choices?

  Tell your kids (if they’re ten or older) something like this: “I just read something really interesting—that there are four things about life that make it stressful: new situations, situations that are unpredictable, situations where you feel you could be hurt, criticized, or embarrassed, and situations where you don’t feel you can control what’s happening. It’s interesting, because in my job I get most stressed when I feel I’m expected to make something happen but I can’t control everything that is necessary to make it happen. Are there things that make you stressed?” By identifying stress in your own life and talking about it, you are modeling stress awareness—a critical step in curbing the effects of stress. As the saying goes, “You’ve got to name it to tame it.”

  If your kid seems to be really anxious, talk to your pediatrician about it. Determine whether some kind of professional intervention is necessary. Research suggests that treating anxiety early significantly lowers the risk of recurring problems.

  You can let your worried child know that she’s safe, that you’re there for her, but don’t reassure her excessively. Let her know that you have confidence in her ability to handle the stressors in her life. But don’t minimize what she is feeling or try to fix it for her.

  Think about ways in which you may, intentionally or inadvertently, be trying to protect your kids from experiencing mildly stressful situations that they could grow from. Are you too focused on safety? Are there situations in which you could give your child more independence or more choices?

  Dozens of scales have been developed over the years to measure a person’s sense of control. The granddaddy of them all is the Rotter Scale, developed by J. B. Rotter in 1966. We highly encourage you to take it so that you can assess your own strengths and struggles when it comes to autonomy. For kids, we like a scale developed by Steven Nowicki and Bonnie Strickland, which asks questions such as “Do you believe that you can stop yourself from catching a cold?” and “When a person doesn’t like you, is there anything you can do about it?” You may be surprised by where your child lands.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I Love You Too Much to Fight with You About Your Homework”

  The Parent as Consultant

  BILL ONCE WORKED with a fifteen-year-old named Jonah who hated homework. What Jonah hated even more than the homework itself was his parents’ hectoring and constant oversight. When Bill asked Jonah to walk him through a typical evening at home, he said, “We usually eat dinner between six and six thirty. And then I can watch TV from six thirty to seven. Then from seven to eight thirty, I pretend to do my homework.”

  An hour and a half pretending to do his homework? That’s a whole lot of effort put into not doing something. Imagine Jonah sitting there, his homework in front of him, devising excuses for why he isn’t doing it. Why didn’t he just do the damn thing? In part, he was tired of hearing these common refrains from his parents:

  “You only get one shot at getting into a good college, and you’re blowing it.”

  “You’ll thank us when you’re older.”

  “You’re gonna have to learn to do things you don’t want to do.”

  “If you don’t learn to be successful in school, how will you be successful in life?”

  Jonah’s parents meant well, but out of the cacophony of voices around him, one message was coming across loud and clear: We know what’s right for you, and you don’t. Imagine if you had a conversation with your spouse in which he or she said something like:

  “How was work today? Did you get a good report on your project? You understand how important it is for you to take your work seriously, right? I mean, I know it isn’t always easy or fun, but you really should see if you can get a promotion so you’ll have more options in the future. It just seems like maybe you aren’t doing your best all the time. Like maybe you could work a little harder.”

  You get the point—it would drive you nuts. It drove Jonah nuts, too. The only way he felt he could assert his own identity was by not doing his homework.

  We understand where Jonah’s parents were coming from. They loved him more than anything, and it pained them to see him failing to apply himself. They knew how capable he was, and they felt he was shooting himself in the foot, limiting how far he could go in life because he was too stubborn and undisciplined and too—well, fifteen to do the work. They could see the big picture, but he couldn’t. And if they could just ride him hard now, if they could just make him push through and do the work, they could keep him from getting stuck in a rut and from suffering consequences he couldn’t foresee. They were doing this not just because they wanted him to be successful, but because it was their responsibility as parents.

  This is the way a lot of loving parents think. But we’re going to ask you to let go of that way of thinking. To begin with, it doesn’t work. Despite extreme efforts on the part of adults to protect Jonah from himself, he continued to waste his time and theirs because he was not getting the message from his environment that “this is your work, this is your life, and you’re going to get out of it what you put into it.” He needed his parents to offer help, but also to let him know they understood that no one could make him work. Over the years, Bill has seen many kids like Jonah go on to be very successful, but this has only happened when their parents and teachers gave up trying to make them be successful and the kids were given a chance to figure it out on their own.

  In this chapter, we’re going to explain why trying to control your child will not give you the results you want, and why it risks creating kids who must then constantly be pushed because their own internal motivation has either not developed or has been eroded by external pressure. We’re also going to ask you to consider a different philosophy than that of parent as enforcer: that of parent as consultant.

  Think about what good consultants do in the business world: They ask what the problems are and which ones are most important. They ask what their clients are willing to commit to or sacrifice in order to reach a desired goal. They give advice, but they do not try to force their client to change, because they recognize that ultimately it’s the client’s responsibility.

  “This is my child, not a client,” you might be thinking. True. But what’s also true is that it is your child’s life, not yours.

  Our instinct as parents is to protect and lead our kids, usually with the assumption that we know what’s best for them. With infants, this is generally true. We have to take responsibility for managing all aspects of their lives. Yet even newborns assert their individuality in ways that can be completely humbling—and terrifying. Consider infants who won’t sleep or won’t eat. Experts in neonatology and infant development emphasize the
importance of adapting to your baby’s personality and needs.

  When parents come to us concerned about a lack of motivation, difficulty with peers, or poor academic performance, we begin by asking them a simple question: “Whose problem is it?” The question is meant to be rhetorical, but parents often look at us quizzically. When your child is crying because she was excluded by two of her friends or was criticized in front of the class by her teacher, it’s easy to feel that it’s your problem, too. It hurts you to see her hurt—few things inspire the ire of parents more than seeing someone mistreat their child. That hurt may even stay with you long after she’s forgotten it. But ultimately, it is your kid’s problem, not yours.

  This is a reframing that is difficult for many parents, who want the best for their kids and want as much as possible to protect them from suffering. But the reality is that if you want to give your children more of a sense of control, you will have to let go of some yourself. A consultant who loses his wits when the company doesn’t hit its targets or fails to reach its full potential becomes part of the problem. Remember that your job is not to solve your children’s problems but to help them learn to run their own lives. This reframing means that while we should guide, support, teach, help, and set limits for our kids, we should be clear—with them and with ourselves—that their lives are their own. As Eckhart Tolle wrote, “They come into this world through you, but they are not ‘yours.’”1

  We’re not saying this is easy. After all, we invest a lot in our children, and it can be terrifying to realize how little control we really have. But our years of experience have taught us that trying to force kids to do things you think are in their own best interest will compromise your relationship and waste energy that could be spent building them up in other ways.