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First published in the United States of America as The Self-Driven Child by Viking 2018
First published in Great Britain as The Thriving Child by Penguin Life 2018
Copyright © William Stixrud and Ned Johnson, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Illustrations by John D. Fair
ISBN: 978-0-241-29812-1
To my parents, who adopted me, were crazy about me, and let me learn to run my own life.
—W. S.
· · ·
To my beloved Vanessa, who kindled in me a passion for helping children.
To Katie and Matthew: I am endlessly grateful for having the greatest kids in the world.
–N. J.
At first blush, we are not obvious partners. Bill is a nationally recognized clinical neuropsychologist who has been helping kids cope with anxiety, learning disabilities, and behavioral problems for thirty years. People often remark on his calm temperament, most likely a result of the decades he has spent practicing Transcendental Meditation. Ned founded PrepMatters, one of the most successful tutoring companies in the country. He’s an energetic Gen Xer, raising young teens, whose students often say he has the enthusiasm of three people.
We met a few years ago as guest speakers at the same event. When we started talking, we discovered something interesting. Despite our differing backgrounds, disciplines, and client bases, we were trying to help kids overcome similar problems in surprisingly complementary ways. Bill approaches them from the perspective of brain development; Ned through the art and science of performance. As we talked, we found our knowledge and experiences fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. And while Ned’s client might struggle with the panic that she might not get into Stanford, and Bill’s might struggle to get to school at all, we each begin with the same baseline questions: How can we help this kid gain a sense of control over his life? How can we help him find his own inner drive and make the most of his potential?
We came to a sense of control through research on stress and studies of motivation, which we follow because so much of our work involves helping kids minimize the extent to which stress undermines their performance and mental health. We try to steer them to a healthy level of self-motivation, somewhere between perfectionist overdrive and “let me get back to my video game.” When we discovered that a low sense of control is enormously stressful and that autonomy is key to developing motivation,1 we thought we were onto something important. This impression was confirmed when we started to probe deeper and found that a healthy sense of control is related to virtually everything we want for our children, including physical and mental health, academic success, and happiness.
From 1960 until 2002, high school and college students have steadily reported lower and lower levels of internal locus of control (the belief that they can control their own destiny) and higher levels of external locus of control (the belief that their destiny is determined by external forces). This change has been associated with an increased vulnerability to anxiety and depression. In fact, adolescents and young adults today are five to eight times more likely to experience the symptoms of an anxiety disorder than young people were at earlier times, including during the Great Depression, World War II, and the cold war.2 Are things really harder now than they were during the Depression? Or are we doing something that is dampening their natural coping mechanisms?
Without a healthy sense of control, kids feel powerless and overwhelmed and will often become passive or resigned. When they are denied the ability to make meaningful choices, they are at high risk of becoming anxious, struggling to manage anger, becoming self-destructive, or self-medicating. Despite the many resources and opportunities their parents offer them, they will often fail to thrive. Without a sense of control, regardless of their background, inner turmoil will take its toll.
We all do better when we feel like we can impact the world around us. That’s why we continue to push the button to close the elevator door even though most of them don’t work.3 It’s why, in a landmark study conducted in the 1970s, nursing home residents who were told and shown that they had responsibility over their lives lived longer than those who were told that the nursing staff was in charge.4 It is also why the kid who decides on his own to do his homework (or not) will be happier, less stressed, and ultimately more capable of navigating life.
We want our kids to be able to participate in a competitive global economy, to be relevant, to feel they can hack it. We love them and want them to be happy and to thrive long after we’re gone. All worthy goals. But to achieve them, many of us have bought into some false assumptions:
False Assumption 1: There is a narrow path to success and God forbid our child should fall off it. The stakes are thus too high to let them make decisions for themselves. This argument hinges on an assumption of scarcity, one that says that for young people to be successful, they must be competitive at all times—whatever the price.
False Assumption 2: It is critical to do well in school if you want to do well in life. There will be some winners and many losers. It is Yale or McDonald’s. As a result, too many kids are either driven manically or have given up trying.
False Assumption 3: Pushing more will lead our children to becoming more accomplished and more successful adults. Our sixth graders aren’t scoring as well as sixth graders in China? Okay, let’s teach them ninth grade math. College admission is getting tougher than ever? Yikes, let’s pack our kids’ schedules so they’ll learn and do more.
False Assumption 4: The world is more dangerous than ever before. We have to supervise our kids constantly to make sure they don’t get hurt or make bad decisions.
Now many parents instinctively understand that these assumptions are untrue (and we will spend some time in this book debunking them). But that perspective dissipates when they feel pressured—by peers, by schools, or by other parents—to ensure their child isn’t falling behind. The pressure is rooted deeply in fear, and fear almost always leads to bad decisions.
We really can’t control our kids—and doing so shouldn’t be our goal. Our role is to teach them to think and act independently, so that they will have the judgment to succeed in school and, most important, in life. Rather than pushing them to do things they resist, we should seek to help them find things they love and develop their inner motivation. Our aim is to move away from a model that depends on parental pressure to one that nurtures a child’s own drive. That is what we mean by the thriving child.
We start with the assumption that kids have brains in their heads and want their lives to work and that, with some support, they’ll figure out what to do. They know it’s important to get up in the morning and get dressed. They know it’s important to do their homework. They feel the pressure even if they don’t show it, and if they are struggling, nagging them about it will only reinforce their resistance. The trick is to give them enough freedom and respect to let them figure things out for themselves. Even if it were possible to control our kids and mold them into who or what we want them to be, we might be less stressed, but they would be more controlled than self-controlled.
We will talk in this book about important research in neuroscience and developmental psychology and will share our experiences from our combined sixty years working with kids. We hope to convince you that you should think of yourself as a consultant to your kids rather than their boss or manager. We will try to persuade you of the wisdom of saying “It’s your call” as often as possible. We’ll offer ideas to help you help your kids find their own internal motivation, and we’ll coach you in navigating an educational system that is often at odds with giving kids autonomy. We will help you move in the direction of being a nonanxious presence, which is one of the best things you can do for your kids, your family, and yourself. At the end of each chapter, we will give you actionable steps to put into effect immediately.
Some of what we suggest is likely to make you uncomfortable. But much of it should give you a sense of relief. However skeptical you may be, please remember that when we’ve shared our techniques and the science behind them with the families we serve, we’ve seen great results. We’ve seen perpetual defiance transformed into thoughtful decision making. We’ve seen grades and test scores dramatically improve. We’ve seen kids who felt overwhelmed, helpless, or hopeless take charge of their own lives. We’ve seen kids who floundered for a bit but ended up successful and happy—and much closer to their parents than anyone thought possible. It is possible to provide your children with a healthy sense of autonomy and to foster that healthy sense of autonomy in yourself as well. It’s easier than you might think. Let us show you how.
Adam, a fifteen-year-old sophomore, walks from his family’s cramped apartment in the projects on the South Side of Chicago to his underfunded public school every day. Last summer, his older brother was killed in a drive-by shooting while the two boys were hanging out on a street corner together. Now he finds it difficult to concentrate in school, has trouble retaining lessons, and is often sent to the principal’s office for explosive behavior. He’s not sleeping well and his grades, never very good, are slipping to the point where he may have to repeat a year.
Fifteen-year-old Zara lives in a multimillion-dollar house and attends a posh private school in the Washington, DC, area. Her parents hope she will make the cutoff for a National Merit Scholarship when she takes the PSAT this fall, so she fits in test prep between field hockey practice, volunteering for Habitat for Humanity, and three to four hours of homework per night. Zara is getting good grades, but she’s not sleeping well. She finds herself talking back to her parents and snapping at her friends, and she complains of frequent headaches.
We all know to worry about Adam: statistics suggest he has a tough road ahead. What we don’t know is that we should worry about Zara, too. Chronic sleep deprivation and toxic stress during a critical phase of brain development are endangering her long-term mental and physical health. If you put a scan of Zara’s brain next to one of Adam’s, you’d see striking similarities, particularly in the parts of the brain involved in the stress response system.
In recent years, we’ve learned a lot about the damage athletes suffer from hitting their heads too much—either on soccer balls or on the 260-pound linebacker in their way. Today, we think about the long-term consequences of concussions: “Yeah, he looks okay now, but too many more of those and he’s not going to remember his kids’ names.”
We think stress should be talked about in this way, too. Chronic stress wreaks havoc on the brain, especially on young brains. It’s like trying to grow a plant in a too-small pot. As any casual gardener knows, doing so weakens the plant, with long-term consequences. Rates of stress-induced illnesses are extremely high in every demographic, and researchers are working furiously to uncover the reasons behind the rise in anxiety disorders, eating disorders, depression, binge drinking, and worrisome patterns of self-harm in young people.1 As Madeline Levine has made us aware, affluent children and teens are at particularly high risk for developing mental health problems such as anxiety, mood, and chemical use disorders.2 In fact, a recent survey showed that 80 percent of students in an affluent and competitive Silicon Valley high school reported moderate to severe levels of anxiety and 54 percent reported moderate to severe levels of depression.3 Depression is now the number one cause of disability worldwide.4 We think of chronic stress in children and teenagers as the societal equivalent of climate change—a problem that has been building over generations and will take considerable effort and a change of habits to overcome.
So what does a sense of control have to do with all of this? The answer is: everything. Quite simply, it is the antidote to stress. Stress is the unknown, the unwanted, and the feared. It’s as minor as feeling unbalanced and as major as fighting for your life. Sonia Lupien at the Centre for Studies on Human Stress has a handy acronym for what makes life stressful—N.U.T.S.
NOVELTY
Something you have not experienced before
UNPREDICTABILITY
Something you had no way of knowing would occur
THREAT TO THE EGO
Your safety or competence as a person is called into question
SENSE OF CONTROL
You feel you have little or no control over the situation5
An early study that looked at stress in rats found that when a rat is given a wheel to turn that will stop it from receiving an electric shock, it happily turns the wheel and isn’t very stressed. If the wheel is taken away, the rat experiences massive stress. If the wheel is then returned to the cage, the rat’s stress levels are much lower, even if the wheel isn’t actually attached to the shocking apparatus anymore.6 In humans, too, being able to push a button to reduce the likelihood of hearing a noxious sound will reduce their stress levels, even if the button has no real effect on the sound—and even if you don’t push the button!7 It turns out that it’s the sense of control that matters, even more so than what you actually do. If you have confidence that you can impact a situation, it will be less stressful. In contrast, a low sense of control may very well be the most stressful thing in the universe.
On some level, you probably know this. You may use it as a justification for cleaning up your desk before starting on a difficult task. Most people feel safer when they are driving than flying (when it should be the opposite) because they believe they are more in control. One of the reasons why traffic jams are so stressful is that there’s nothing you can do about it.
You may also have experienced the power of control in relation to your kids. If your child is very sick or struggling and you feel there’s nothing you can do about it, your stress level is likely to rise. Even less distressing events, like watching your teenager take the car out alone for the first time, or watching them perform at an athletic event or in a play, also cause stress. You’re in the role of spectator, and there’s little you can do beyond hope everything turns out okay.
Agency may be the one most important factor in human happiness and well-being. We all like to feel that we are in charge of our own destiny. The same thing goes for our kids. That’s why two-year-olds will say things like “I do it myself!” and four-year-olds will insist “You are not the boss of me!” It’s why we should let them do what they can for themselves, even if we’re running late and it will take them twice as long. It’s also why the surest way to get a picky five-year-old to eat his vegetables is to divide the plate in half and let him choose which half to eat. One of Ned’s clients, Kara, was incredibly insightful about this: “When I was a kid, when my parents would say, ‘You have to eat this or that food,’ I hated it,” she said. “So if they told me I had to eat something that I didn’t want to, I’d throw it right back up on the table.” Kara remarked that sleepaway camp was a highlight of her childhood because campers got to decide from a range of choices what to do all day, and what to eat. And given the freedom to act on her own, she ate responsibly.
Alas, sleepaway camp is not the world we live in. When she was around twelve or thirteen, Kara began to experience anxiety. “I think I first started having anxiety when people started telling me what to do,” she said, “when I didn’t feel like I was in control. And then when I switched schools and had to worry about fitting in and about what other people thought, I think that made it even worse. For me, feeling like I have a sense of control, that I am in charge of my own life, is so important. Even now, I like it when my parents give me choices. My friend’s mom will say, ‘Let’s play this game for a while and then let’s bake cookies.’ And that’s great and all, but it would make me nuts to always be told ‘Here’s the plan’ instead of asking me what I want.”
These are exactly the circumstances most kids experience every day. Lest you doubt how little control children and adolescents like Kara actually have, think of what their days are like: they have to sit still in classes they didn’t choose, taught by teachers randomly assigned to them, alongside whatever child happens to be assigned to their class. They have to stand in neat lines, eat on a schedule, and rely on the whims of their teachers for permission to go to the bathroom. And think of how we measure them: not by the effort they put into practicing or how much they improve, but by whether another kid at the meet happened to swim or run faster last Saturday. We don’t measure their understanding of the periodic table, but how they score on a random selection of associated facts.
It is frustrating and stressful to feel powerless, and many kids feel that way all the time. As grown-ups, we sometimes tell our kids that they’re in charge of their own lives, but then we proceed to micromanage their homework, their afterschool activities, and their friendships. Or perhaps we tell them that actually they’re not in charge—we are. Either way, we make them feel powerless, and by doing so, we undermine our relationship with them.
There is another way. Over the last sixty years, study after study has found that a healthy sense of control goes hand in hand with virtually all the positive outcomes we want for our children. Perceived control—the confidence that we can direct the course of our life through our own efforts—is associated with better physical health, less use of drugs and alcohol, and greater longevity, as well as with lower stress, positive emotional well-being, greater internal motivation and ability to control one’s behavior, improved academic performance, and enhanced career success.8 Like exercise and sleep, it appears to be good for virtually everything, presumably because it represents a deep human need.
Our kids are “wired” for control, whether they’re growing up in the South Bronx, Silicon Valley, Birmingham, or South Korea. Our role as adults is not to force them to follow the track we’ve laid out for them; it’s to help them develop the skills to figure out the track that’s right for them. They will need to find their own way—and to make independent course corrections—for the rest of their lives.
Let us make one thing clear: we don’t think it’s possible to protect kids from all stressful experiences, nor would we want to. In fact, when kids are constantly shielded from circumstances that make them anxious, it tends to make their anxiety worse. We want them to learn how to deal successfully with stressful situations—to have a high stress tolerance. That’s how they develop resilience. If a child feels like he’s in control in a stressful situation, then in later situations when he might actually not be in control, his brain will be equipped to handle that stress better.9 He is, in effect, immunized.
Bill cried every day for the first week of first grade because he didn’t know any of his classmates. His teacher was quietly supportive, and when other kids would whisper, “Mrs. Rowe, he’s crying,” Bill would hear her say, “He’s going to be fine. He’ll like it here, don’t worry.” He did, in fact, figure out how to manage the stress of an unfamiliar situation and the coping skills he learned appear to have generalized, as he never cried again in an unfamiliar environment. (So far, anyway.) The teacher was right to let him work it out, instead of swooping in and giving him the sense he couldn’t handle it on his own.
The National Scientific Council on the Developing Child has identified three kinds of stress:10
1. Positive stress motivates children (and adults) to grow, take risks, and perform at a high level. Think of kids preparing for a play, nervous and a little stressed beforehand, but then filled with a sense of accomplishment and pride afterward. We could call this the jitters, excitement, or anticipation. Unless the jitters are excessive, they make it more likely that a child will perform well. Kids experiencing positive stress know that they ultimately have control over whether or not they perform at all. As it happens, kids are more likely to persevere and to reach their full potential if they know they don’t have to do something.
2. Tolerable stress, which occurs for relatively brief periods, can also build resilience. Critically, there must be supportive adults present, and kids must have time to cope and recover. Let’s say a child witnesses her parents arguing a lot as they’re going through a divorce. But the parents are talking to her, and they’re not having blowouts every night. She has time to recover. This is tolerable stress. Another example of tolerable stress might be an episode of being bullied, so long as it doesn’t last too long, it isn’t repeated too often, and the child is supported by caring adults. A tolerable stress might even be a death in the family. In an influential study, graduate students took baby rats away from their mothers and handled them for fifteen minutes per day (which was stressful to the rats) and then returned them to their mothers, who licked and groomed them. The graduate students repeated this for the first two weeks of the rats’ lives. The baby rats who were removed and handled for a brief period showed much more resilience as adults than the pups who stayed in the cage with their mother.11 The researchers referred to them as “California laid-back rats,” as they were difficult to stress as adults. This is probably because in situations like these the brain becomes conditioned to cope, and this conditioning lays the foundation for resilience.12
3. Toxic stress is defined as frequent or prolonged activation of the stress system in the absence of support. Toxic stress is either severe, such as witnessing an assault, or recurs day in and day out, in which case it is chronic. Supportive adults—who minimize exposure to things that a child isn’t developmentally ready to handle—aren’t readily available. The child perceives that he or she has little control over what happens. There seems to be no reprieve, no cavalry coming, no end in sight. This is the space many kids live in today, whether they are obviously at-risk students like Adam, or seemingly high-functioning kids like Zara. Toxic stress does not prepare kids for the real world. It damages their ability to thrive.13 To return to rat studies for a moment, when rat pups were taken from their mothers not for fifteen minutes but for three hours a day, the experience was so stressful that when they were returned to their mothers, the rat pups didn’t interact with them. They remained easily stressed for the rest of their lives.14
So how do you capitalize on positive or tolerable stress while avoiding the bad kind? It is simple in theory, but tricky in execution: kids need a supportive adult around, they need time to recover from the stressful event, and they need to have a sense of control over their lives.
To understand how this works, it’s useful to know a few things about how the brain works. In moments of great self-doubt, understanding the brain will help kids grasp that much of their behavior is chemical, not character. Kids today are tech savvy, but they tend to know almost nothing about the hardware in their heads or the software that runs it. Our hope is that you will find a little brain science explains a lot about the thoughts and emotions that we all have a hard time controlling. Those of you who already know how the brain works will have to bear with us as we outline the nuts and bolts.
Four major brain systems are involved in developing and maintaining a healthy sense of control: the executive control system, the stress response system, the motivation system, and the resting state system. Let us briefly explain what each of these does.
The executive control system is largely governed by the prefrontal cortex, the seat of planning, organization, impulse control, and judgment. When we are calm, fully rested, and in control—when we are in our right minds—our prefrontal cortex is monitoring, organizing, and regulating much of the brain. In fact, the key variable in determining the extent to which we become stressed by life experiences is how much the prefrontal cortex perceives itself to be in control.
The prefrontal cortex has been called “the Goldilocks of the brain,” as it needs a “just right” combination of chemicals—the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine—to operate effectively.15 It is easily taken off-line by stress. Arousal, mild stress, excitement, or minor pretest jitters can raise the levels of these neurotransmitters, resulting in sharper focus, clearer thinking, and stronger performance. With sleep deprivation or too much stress, however, the prefrontal cortex becomes flooded with dopamine and norepinephrine and is essentially taken off-line. At such times, the brain is simply unable to learn or to think clearly, a point we’ll return to in Chapter Seven. When the prefrontal cortex is off-line, you are more likely to act impulsively and to make dumb decisions.
The stress response system takes over when you are confronting a severe threat like a predator, or even imagining a threat. It is designed to keep you safe from impending harm. It is made up of the amygdala, the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, and the pituitary and adrenal glands.
The amygdala, a primitive emotional processing center that is acutely sensitive to fear, anger, and anxiety, is a key part of the brain’s threat detection system. It doesn’t think consciously; it senses and reacts. Under high stress, the amygdala is the one in charge. Under the amgydala’s reign, our behavior tends to be defensive, reactive, inflexible, and at times aggressive.16 We’re inclined to fall back on habitual patterns or instinct, as our animal nature prepares us to fight, flee, or freeze like a deer in the headlights.
When the amygdala senses a threat, it sends a signal to the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland. Then it’s an agitated game of telephone to wake up the adrenal gland, which secretes adrenaline. Adrenaline is the hormone that allows us to lift a car when our child is trapped underneath it. This complex sequence of alarm notifications occurs faster than conscious thought. When we are under threat, we need a vigorous stress response. Our survival may depend on the speed of our instinctive reaction, and evolution shaped us so that we cannot think clearly under stress.
A healthy stress response is defined by a very quick spike in stress hormones followed by a quick recovery. The problems come when that recovery doesn’t happen quickly. If stress is prolonged, the adrenal gland secretes cortisol, which is slower to come on board and has been likened to bringing in the troops for a long-term battle. If a zebra is attacked by a lion and survives, its cortisol levels will normalize in forty-five minutes. By contrast, humans can retain elevated cortisol levels for days, weeks, or even months at a time. That can be a problem, in part, because chronically elevated levels of cortisol will impair and eventually kill cells in the hippocampus, the place where memories are created and stored. This is why students have trouble learning when they are under acute stress.
The hippocampus has another role to play. It helps turn off the stress response. It says, “Hey, remember last time you freaked out about being late and it was no big deal? Chill.” It’s like the calm, loyal friend who shows up to talk you off the ledge. It’s perspective—which is invaluable in all aspects of life. People suffering from PTSD, whose hippocampus has been compromised, don’t have this perspective. When they’re in a situation that’s even remotely similar to one in the past—say they’re in a crowded mall instead of a crowded market in Baghdad where an IED went off—their hippocampus can’t put those past memories in context, and they panic.
Stress disorganizes the brain. It reduces brain wave coherence, the desire to explore new ideas and to solve problems creatively. It kicks our prefrontal cortex out of the driver’s seat and limits the flexibility with which we can pull ourselves together or learn. When the Lion Fighter is in charge, you might have sharper instincts on a lion-infested savannah, but less so in sophomore English. How could you possibly focus on Shakespeare or process math when your body is telling you you’re in a fight for survival?
It’s not that the stress response system is bad exactly, but it is a bit like the “heavy” you bring in under duress. You want him there for tough times, but you don’t want him there all the time. Chronic stress enlarges the amygdala, increasing the Lion Fighter’s presence and thus your vulnerability to fear, anxiety, and anger.
The next two systems we’ll only touch on here and will return to in more detail in later chapters.
The motivational system is the “reward center” part of the brain that releases the neurotransmitter dopamine. Anything you experience as rewarding—winning a sports match, earning money, having a good sexual experience, receiving recognition—leads to a higher level of dopamine. In contrast, low dopamine levels are associated with low drive, low effort, and boredom. An optimal level of dopamine allows for the experience of flow, which we come back to in Chapter Five when we turn to the all-important question of motivation. In acclaimed stress researcher Robert Sapolsky’s words, “Dopamine’s more about the wanting than the getting.”17 It is the key to drive. When you are under chronic stress, dopamine levels go down the tubes over time. It’s harder to want to do something, and as a result, you lose your motivation.
For years when scientists used MRIs to assess the brain’s activity, they studied what activates the brain when it’s given a specific task (like counting backward from one thousand). But around the turn of the twenty-first century, scientists started looking at what happens when we’re just sitting with our own thoughts. What they discovered was that there is a complex and highly integrated network in the brain that only activates when we are “doing nothing.” This is known as the default mode network. Our understanding of its functioning is still new, but we know it must be very important, as it uses 60 to 80 percent of the brain’s energy.18
When you’re sitting in a waiting room or unwinding after dinner, if you’re not reading, watching television, or on your phone, your default mode network is projecting the future and sorting out the past. It’s processing your life. It activates when we daydream, during certain kinds of meditation, and when we lie in bed before going to sleep. This is the system for self-reflection, and reflection about others, the area of the brain that is highly active when we are not focused on a task. It is the part of us that goes “off-line.” A healthy default mode network is necessary for the human brain to rejuvenate, store information in more permanent locations, gain perspective, process complicated ideas, and be truly creative. It has also been linked in young people to the development of a strong sense of identity and a capacity for empathy.19 Not surprisingly, stress impairs the default mode network’s ability to work its magic. Scientists are concerned that because of technology’s ubiquity, young people have too few opportunities to activate their default mode network and, as a result, too few opportunities for self-reflection.
That is a lot of brain science to take in all at once. The main thing to remember for now is that chronically stressed kids routinely have their brains flooded with hormones that dull higher brain functions and stunt their emotional responses. Parts of the brain that are responsible for memory, reasoning, attention, judgment, and emotional control are dampened and eventually damaged. Over time these areas can shrink, while the parts of the brain that detect threats grow larger. Ultimately, an overactive stress system makes a child far more likely to develop anxiety disorders, depression, and a host of other mental and physical problems.
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.
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.
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 dangerous 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.