The Self-Driven Child

by William Stixrud

  The kids who come into Ned’s office and sit across the desk from him come from all sorts of home lives. There are kids with doting parents and kids whose parents are workaholics. There are kids with anxious helicopter parents and kids with no parents at all. But no matter what kind and quality of attention they get at home, they invariably benefit from the nonanxious presence Ned provides. And, as a side effect, their scores benefit, too.

  Students are constantly telling him, “If you could just come with me to the test, just be in the room with me, then I know I’d be okay.” Ridiculous, right? How in the world would it help a kid remember the Pythagorean theorem or the meaning of “tumultuous” if Ned were just sitting there, across the room, staring at his shoelaces or twiddling his thumbs?

  But he’s tested this proposition. He’ll give kids sections of a practice test, and sit calmly across the desk from them as they take it. Then he’ll give them a test and leave the room, giving them the peace and quiet of an empty room. Finally they’ll take the practice test in a more realistic setting, with other kids in the room tapping their toes and visibly wracking their brains. Can you guess when they do best? Of course you can. When Ned is there they feel calm, they remember the confidence he’s expressed in them, and the things he’s taught them come easily to mind. When he leaves, they’re on their own, and their own negative thoughts have freer rein. They do worse. And when you add in other kids, other anxious presences, the stress attacks like the plague, jumping from kid to kid and escalating each time.

  We love the term “nonanxious presence,” but we didn’t invent it. It was coined by Edwin Friedman, a rabbi, student of complex systems, and consultant.12 In Friedman’s view, we live in a chronically anxious and reactive society in which there are too few people leading our families, schools, and organizations who can serve as a nonanxious presence. He makes the case that groups work best when leaders are true to themselves and are not unduly anxious or worried—and thus do not communicate undue worry or fear to others. From Friedman’s perspective, this is as true for families as it is for religious organizations or large corporations.

  Scientists back him up. Remember the laid-back California rats (those who were sent away from their moms but then returned and were groomed)? Well, the same researchers later studied the effects of calm versus anxious parenting styles on the development of rat pups, and found that rat mothers with low stress levels spent a lot of time licking and grooming their pups. The pups they produced were calmer and explored more than rats who were licked and groomed significantly less. Why would this be? Because they’re shown more love? That may be part of it. But we and others in the field believe that what those mama rats transmitted was a sense that the world is safe and you’re free to move around and explore in it. It also changed the rat pup’s genes involved in stress regulation.

  It wasn’t an issue of genetics—that calm mama rats produce calm baby rats. When rat pups who were born to low-licking mothers were “fostered” by high-licking mothers, they turned out to be calm—even though they were genetically vulnerable to being anxious.13

  What these rat mothers were doing was making home the safe base we’ve been arguing for in this book. When your home is a calm space, free of excessive fighting, anxiety, and pressure, it becomes the place to regenerate that your kids need. They can go back into the world and better deal with fraught social dynamics, academic stresses, and challenges like tryouts or auditions, knowing that at the end of the day they have a safe place to recover.

  Part of making home a safe base is remembering that it’s your child’s life, not yours, and that his problems are his problems, not yours. It’s easier to adopt this philosophy when we’re calm, and it’s easier to be calm when we adopt this philosophy. When we’re calm, we can let kids experience discomfort and learn to manage it themselves. We can allow children to experience their own painful feelings without rushing in to take responsibility for resolving them. When we’re calm, we don’t give our kids excessive power to take us up and down with them. When parents separate their happiness from their children’s, when they accept that it’s okay for mom to be happy and at peace even if her twelve-year-old is not, it’s easier for them to offer the support their kids need. We often emphasize this point to parents whose kids are really struggling; while they almost never cause their children’s problems, their responses become part of a family dance that often takes them out of the role of chief consultant and into the role of worrier in chief.

  Remember from Chapter One that social support is one of the key factors for controlling stress. If a parent is anxious or critical, the kid doesn’t feel this social support. It’s an unfortunate double whammy: we’re making our kids anxious, and then we’re not doing our job of helping them.

  A friend, Rosa, told us that when she was a new mom, she attended a support group in which all the women went around and shared what it was about their own moms they wanted to emulate and what they didn’t. When it was Rosa’s turn, she talked about how her mom was very loving and affectionate, which she appreciated, but she always took the ups and downs of Rosa’s life too hard, so that Rosa learned to keep things from her to protect her. Rosa’s mom would still be upset about something long after Rosa was over it, which effectively eliminated her as a source of support. As an example, Rosa talked about the time she came home from preschool and told her mom no other kids would play with her, after which her mom burst into tears. Of course, parents can swing too far the other way, too. Another new mom sitting next to Rosa laughed and said, “Our moms should have met because maybe they would have balanced each other out. My mom would have said, ‘I don’t send you to preschool to make friends—I send you to learn!’”

  How to Be a Nonanxious Presence

  To be—and not just fake being—a nonanxious presence, you have to get a handle on your stress. Make no mistake: you have just as much of a need for control as your child does. And sometimes wanting too much to be there for your kids can actually backfire. Much of the work involved in providing a nonanxious presence for your kid begins with you. Here are a few tips that we’ve found to be helpful for the parents we’ve worked with.

  Make enjoying your kids your top parenting priority.

  In a competitive, overly busy world, it’s so easy to forget the basics: that enjoying your kids is one of the best things you can do for them, and for yourself. You don’t have to spend every moment with your kid, or convince yourself parenting isn’t hard when it is. But think for a moment about the giddy look we give babies when we see them in the morning or after a long day away. Think about the experience of being that baby: every time someone looks at you, they smile as if you’re a miracle.

  Your kid needs to feel the joy of seeing your face light up when you see him because you are genuinely happy to spend time with him. This feeling is incredibly powerful and important for his self-esteem and sense of well-being. Bill still remembers that when he went through a difficult period in his early twenties, he had a pair of friends who always expressed how happy they were to see him. This was forty years ago, and still it’s seared into his consciousness.

  This powerful memory helped shape Bill’s thinking when he started to do psychotherapy with kids and families. He began to suggest to parents that they make enjoying their kids their top priority so that their kids would have the experience of being joy-producing organisms.

  Once that priority of enjoyment is set, work backward. If you’re not enjoying your children because of unresolved anger, focus on resolving that anger. If you’re not enjoying your kids because of pressures from work, focus on relaxation strategies and cognitive techniques for minimizing anxiety. If the lack of enjoyment is due to marital conflict, investigate couples therapy. If you’re not enjoying your kids because of their problematic behavior, work with a professional to help improve this behavior. If you’re not enjoying your kids because you’re not getting enough social support, socialize more. Or perhaps
you’re not enjoying your kids because you’re spending too much time with them. Our highest goal in life isn’t to make our kids feel good—but it’s worth paying attention to what’s blocking you from genuinely enjoying them and removing it.

  Very early in his career, Bill did a consultation with Eric, a twenty-one-year-old “failure to launch” young adult who had had academic and behavioral difficulties in high school, flunked out of college twice, and was struggling to stay clean and sober. After Eric had recounted his struggles in school and the constant conflict that occurred between him and his parents in the teenage years, Bill asked, “Do you think there is something that your parents could have done differently when you were in high school that could have made life better for you?” After thinking for a long time, Eric said, “I think it might have helped if they had been happy to see me sometimes.”

  Don’t fear the future.

  Virtually all our anxiety as parents is about the future—over which we have relatively little control. We’ve seen parents’ anxiety levels drop dramatically when we reassure them that, no matter what their kids may be going through, things will likely work out well. What makes it so stressful and painful when our kids aren’t doing well is the “fear of getting stuck”—the fear that our kids will get locked into a negative place from which they won’t be able to emerge.

  When fear rears its head, remember to take a long view. Life isn’t a race, and the world is full of late bloomers. We know hundreds of stories of children and teenagers who weren’t doing well only to turn out to be happy and successful. Who your child is as a ten-year-old or a teenager is not who he will always be. The prefrontal cortex continues to develop rapidly in adolescence and into early adulthood, which is why Mark Twain said, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I couldn’t stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

  Most kids go through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood without experiencing serious problems. And even if they do have problems, most of them still turn out well. If you worry constantly about the possibility that your child will fall into the small category of kids who chronically struggle, you’re only making matters worse.

  Commit to your own stress management.

  In a survey conducted in the late 1990s, children and teenagers said that what they wanted above all—even more than spending more time with their parents—was for their parents to be happier and less stressed.14 And this was in a period before ubiquitous smartphones, when the pace of life wasn’t as manic as it is today. As the saying goes, “We’re only as happy as our least happy child.” The same is true for kids, who sense their parents’ stress and unhappiness, even when they are not being yelled at, scolded, lectured, or ignored. We worry about our kids, and they worry about us.

  So slow down. Exercise. Get enough sleep (not the four hours that one couple boasted to Ned they were sure to get every night, thus setting a great example for their son). Consider learning to meditate, if you don’t already. One teenager who practices Transcendental Meditation with his family said that in his experience, “TM calms the mind and calms the mom.” His mom is much more able to be a nonanxious presence at home since she’s been meditating regularly.

  Think about your default mode network and nurture your radical downtime—which we’ll cover more in Chapter Six. It is very rare for adults today to have even brief periods of unplugged “downtime” in which they turn their attention within, even though there are hundreds of studies documenting the benefits of doing so. Stop splitting your attention, and concentrate instead on living in the present, and, as much as possible, being fully in the moment with yourself and your kids.

  Make peace with your worst fears.

  One of the most powerful questions anxious parents can ask themselves is, “What am I most afraid of?” Envisioning the worst-case scenario and letting it play out can actually be a calming process. Asking “What would I do?” and realizing that they would still love and support their child helps them let go and stop trying to control a situation they cannot control. Let’s take this idea a little further by going over some of the fears we hear about the most.

  “I’m afraid my child will get stuck.”

  Perhaps you’re concerned that somehow, because of mistakes he’s making now, he won’t get a good education, won’t have the skills necessary to be successful in life, will never develop true friendships, will never marry, and so on. First, think of the challenges you had in middle or high school. Are they still bedeviling you? Chances are you grew and changed, as will your kids if given a chance to do so.

  Remember the question we asked in Chapter Two: Whose life is it? If any one of these things happened, would you still love your child and do everything you could to help him? Of course you would. Your responsibility is to love and support your child. It isn’t your responsibility to protect him from pain. You can’t.

  “I’m afraid that if I don’t insist on certain standards and show my disapproval, my child will think I’m okay with his bad behavior.”

  Many anxious parents tend to be hard on their children in part because they believe they need to until they are doing better—and that it would be dangerous to “let up” until then. This can lead parents to be constantly disapproving. But as we’ve already established, staying on kids continually about the same issues (table manners, cleaning up, brushing their teeth, doing their schoolwork) is counterproductive. In fact, kids are most likely to get stuck in negative patterns if we repeatedly try to change them and they resist. Their sense of control becomes dependent on their not letting us influence them. When our spouse, parents, siblings, or friends badger us about changing certain behaviors, doing so is absolutely the last thing we want to do.

  “I’m afraid that if I let my guard down for a moment, my child will get hurt or even killed.”

  If your greatest fear is that your child will be abducted on the way to school or be the victim of an attack or car accident, our response is twofold.

  First, remember that this is the safest time in which to live, and understand the skewed vision of the world these fears stem from. Crime rates and car deaths are all at their lowest in decades. It’s our perception of the danger that’s up.15 We are trying to make everything safe and sanitized, but it’s a fool’s errand. Let’s take the arena of playground equipment, as Hanna Rosin did in an article for the Atlantic.16 Great efforts have been made to take away all risk from playgrounds, so that most play structures leave little room for exploration and creativity. Despite this, Rosin reported that “our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have.”

  Second, if you want to keep your children as safe as possible, the best thing to do is to give them experience and teach them judgment. Let them climb that tree and fall when they’re six—it will teach them important skills about risk and about being in their bodies. Even if they break their arm and are in a cast, they will benefit from knowing that they have experienced and survived a scary incident and are stronger for it. According to Rosin’s article, kids who injure themselves falling from heights are less likely to be afraid of heights at age eighteen. Experience is typically a better teacher than words. What’s more, they’ll pay attention next time. Your kids need practice managing and taking nonlethal risks. After all, life isn’t exactly risk free—we take risks in love, in work, in finance all the time. Learning how to recognize and manage risk is part of growing up. Remind your children that you are not always watching them and that you cannot always keep them safe, so they will take some of that responsibility on themselves. They will be more careless if they take it for granted that you are always there. In the words of one of Ned’s good friends Jennifer, don’t try to carpet the world when it’s far easier to give out slippers. Or, to quote a character from the film Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children: �
��We don’t need you to make us feel safe . . . you made us feel brave and that’s even better.”

  Adopt an attitude of nonjudgmental acceptance.

  Werner Erhard made famous the phrase “What is, is” in the 1970s. Today, we may say “It is what it is” or “It’s all good.” This is another way of saying that it makes sense to accept the world as it is. When applied to people, it’s a way to talk about loving someone, warts and all.

  The common denominator in all emotional pain is a desire to change current reality (“I need my child to do better in school, to do better socially, to be less anxious, to eat more [or less, or better], to not be so addicted to video games and social media,” et cetera). In their book Rapid Relief from Emotional Distress, Gary Emery and James Campbell recommended that we teach ourselves to make peace with reality by first honestly accepting it for what it is.17 They advocate a formula known as ACT: Accept, Choose, Take Action. In the context of your kids it might look like this:

  I Accept the idea that my kid is underachieving/doesn’t have friends/can’t read, and I see this as part of his path.

  I Choose to create a vision of myself as a calm, compassionate parent who has a supportive relationship with my son.

  I will Take action by offering to help, focusing on his strengths, setting limits where necessary, and modeling acceptance and self-care. I will also seek help from others if my child needs assistance with reading, math, or any area where a third party can help him more than I am able to.