New Research Shows How Parents Can Reignite Teens’ Love of Learning
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Parents of teenagers can't avoid headlines about how their kids are acutely vulnerable to the intoxicating pull of social media and relentless peer pressure. With so many external forces attempting to control their kids, is it even possible for parents to have influence?
Luckily, there's some good news: New research shows parents shouldn’t give up attempts to communicate with their kids in a meaningful way. In fact, “parents have as much influence as teachers and as peers do, even in adolescence when it seems like they would rather eat nails than have a conversation with you,” says Jenny Anderson, a journalist who pioneered coverage on the science of learning at Quartz.
Anderson and her co-author, Rebecca Winthrop, the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, delve into the profound impact parents have on teens’ attitudes towards learning in their new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. In it, they argue that adolescents have a natural desire to learn and grow — what they call being in “explorer” mode — but being bored, overwhelmed or stressed out by school snuffs out their love of learning. Kids can get stuck in a combination of other modes, which they’ve called passenger (doing the bare minimum to get by), resister (those who ignore schoolwork or skip school entirely) or achiever (whose self-worth is tied to grades and performance).
Parents, they say, can re-ignite the spark — even in video-game or TikTok-obsessed teens — and get them back in explorer mode. “This is somewhat intuitive when they're younger,” Anderson says. “With toddlers, you know you have a lot of influence because you're pointing things out, you can explain things to them and you're making sense of the world for them because they’re teeny-tiny. With teenagers, it doesn't look the same. You can't explain things to them anymore because they think they know it all.”
The trick is knowing how to shift from an “instructional” tone to a more “invitational” one filled with fewer declarative pronouncements and more open-ended questions. To master the vibe, Anderson and Winthrop offer these suggestions.
Take a back seat. “Help them explore the thing without telling them the thing, because that's the journey they want to be on,” Anderson says. “They want to be discovering for themselves.” You can ask them questions to try and help guide their thinking. For example, if they haven’t been doing the homework, you can ask: Do you need to talk to the teacher? Do you want a tutor? Do you have a different plan to get back on track? “We just always want to get to the outcome or the end point, and it's so much more about helping them get there,” she says.
The other way parents need to take a step back is by letting kids discover what brings them joy (whether or not it looks good on a college application). “It’s really important for parents to stop trying to lead, rather than follow, students' interests,” Winthrop says. “As long as their hobbies aren't hurting themselves or others, be encouraging. Ask about it, learn about it, lean into it, because interests are so crucial for love of learning.”
Lead with the good. When I first got my copy of The Disengaged Teen, I flipped through the pages, and the first heading I saw said, “Start with their favorite classes and then ask about the ones they are struggling with.” That's exactly the opposite of what I’d been doing with my 9-year-old at dinner, when I would immediately grill her about whether she had any assessments or homework assignments in her weakest subject. (“It would be like asking us about our most annoying work colleague or irritating project every day,” the book states.) After doing a big facepalm, I felt better knowing that it was something I could change about myself immediately. It also gets pretty fast results — my daughter was definitely happier to yap about her after-school D&D campaign than her upcoming test.
Stop nagging. This one, I must say, is harder to implement, if my own personal experience can attest. But nagging doesn’t work. Parents know in their hearts it doesn’t work, and research backs it up. Anderson mentions a study that had moms talking to kids in a nagging tone while their brains were being scanned. It made the problem-solving part of the brain turn off. “When we nag, we're shutting down the part of their brain that needs to be activated to solve the problem you're nagging for,” Anderson says. Again, reverting to asking questions in a neutral tone is more effective than nagging.
Reserve judgement. Nobody — adolescent or adult — wants to feel judged, and teens are especially sensitive to it, says Anderson. They want to feel respected. If they can hear the judgement behind your questions, it might not be an effective conversation.
Don’t take the thing they love away as punishment. That doesn’t mean “don’t put limits on the thing they love most.” If their passion is videos or gaming, for example, you can still set screen-time limits and tell them their homework has to be finished before they can log on. But if they do something bad or if their grades aren’t up to snuff, taking away the thing that sparks their love of learning might do more harm than good. “They need their interests,” Winthrop says. “They’re learning all sorts of skills in their interests, and they're learning how to learn skills in their interests. It gives them energy. And eventually that energy does spill over into other areas.” Including, we hope, school.
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