Ned and Bill, the authors of The Self-Driven Child, discuss the difficulties of getting teens motivated about things like homework. They provide a useful framework for helping teens develop self-motivation and self-sufficiency in their lives.

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Full show notes

Your teen comes home from soccer practice with a bucket-load of math homework, new reading assignments for science class, and an overdue paper for English class. Your teen is tired and doesn’t know where to start. More time might be spent moping than actually working, and you might be at a loss wondering how to motivate your teenager to keep at their schoolwork.

Watching your teen struggle with stress is painful, but you are not powerless. However, taking the wrong actions can be more harmful to your teen’s development in the long run than staying distant.

Overprotecting teens from the stresses in their life deprives them of the opportunity to learn. More importantly, it deprives them of the opportunity to recover. Studies relating to how to motivate your teenager show that when developing brains are exposed to stress and then returned to a comforting environment, they grow in resilience. They become more self motivated in stressful situations as adults. There is a fine balance to strike between the exposure to stress and comfort.

Not balancing stress and recovery right will make it hard for your teen to learn how to self motivate. Research shows that teens that do not encounter periodic stress struggle to learn how to self motivate as adults. On the other hand, teens that do not have places to recover often resort to unhealthy means of stress relief, such as drugs and alcohol.

To learn how to motivate your teenager while balancing stress and recovery, I spoke to Ned Johnson and William Stixrud. Ned is an elite SAT tutor who specializes in developing self motivation for teenagers who are preparing to take important exams. William is a leading neuropsychologist, professor, and expert on the adolescent brain. Together, they wrote the incredible book, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives, and they were so gracious to talk to me about learning how to motivate your teenager.

In our conversation about how to motivate your teenager, Ned and Will explain that parents can benefit from something called collaborative problem solving. Collaborative problem solving is coming up with mutually agreed upon boundaries instead of the parents deciding everything. Ultimately, Ned and Will think parents should learn how to act more like “consultants” for their teens as they figure out how to solve problems in stressful situations.

Parents As Consultants

Being a consultant means communicating strict time boundaries around your availability to help your teen solve problems. For example, you can tell your teen that you are only available to help them between 6-7pm. Ned and William call these “Consulting Hours.” Outside of that time, you don’t have to fixate on how to motivate your teenager. Rather, teens must learn to motivate themselves to solve their problems more independently. And this time frame isn’t just for the teen to honor, but the parent, too!

Something Ned and William emphasize is that your teenager’s problem is in fact their problem! Not yours. Learning how to motivate your teenager involves as much restraint on your part as it does action on the part of the teen. Even if a teen doesn’t have the wisdom to solve a certain problem, experiencing how to manage the stress of a problem helps them become more resilient.

When a parent breaks a boundary like the “Consulting Hours,” it not only reduces the value of that time, but it diminishes the trustworthiness of boundaries in general. As teens learn how to self motivate, your word as a parent is important to their growth. Your teen won’t see its importance, though, if you often break your word and boundaries.

Practicing how to motivate your teenager by choosing not to help them at all times can be hard. However when you put faith in their abilities by giving them space to problem solve, you can build trust with your teen. It takes time and patience, but gives your advice so much more meaning when your teen does ask you for it.

This creates another trap to look out for, though.

The “Command & Control” Trap

As Ned and Will explain, it’s so much better to receive advice when you ask for it than when you haven’t. Even as adults, it’s hard to deliver advice to people who don’t want it. The recipients can get defensive, and that’s often how fights start. They relate this to Consulting Hours by explaining that when your teen does eventually ask you for advice, that you do not squander this opportunity by lecturing. They call this temptation, “command and control,” and this can damage your teen’s ability to recover from stress.

“Command and control” is when your teen asks you for help on one line of an essay, and then you end up deconstructing and rewriting the entire paper. According to the pros, that’s not how to motivate your teenager. By taking “command and control” of a situation after a teen has bravely admitted incompetence, you are making the feedback experience painful for them. This adds to the teen’s stress, when they are coming to you for relief. And they probably won’t come back again.

How “Consulting” Stops Self-Destructive Behaviors

Sometimes you need to know how to motivate your teenager to destress. If they are too stressed out and don’t have a place to unwind, teens can search for other methods of easing their stress. This can be drugs and alcohol, but it can also be food and technology.

However, you can help prevent self-destructive stress relief by being an effective consultant to your teen. By adopting a “consultant” mentality, you can create a framework for establishing boundaries with your teen that you both agree on. Plus, you can mentor your teen on managing stress while solving problems. This should help protect your teen from turning the things that give them joy into addictive, self-medicating behaviors, whether it be eating, browsing social media, or watching YouTube.

Being a consultant to your teen takes time to learn, but when done successfully, you’ll know more than just how to motivate your teenager. You’ll know what your teen’s motivations are. Your teen will trust you to ask questions like, “Can I be late for dinner tonight so I can see my math tutor before tomorrow’s test?” or “What do I do if I go to this party and there’s alcohol?” Those are the kinds of questions you really want your teen to be motivated to ask and solve!

Ned and William might not know how to motivate your teenager specifically, but their strategies can be applied to families of all kinds.

Other topics we cover in this episode include:

• How much sleep does your teen NEED?
• What is a “Default Mode Network”? Why your teen should be routinely bored.
• How to react when your teen doesn’t want your advice.
• Parental authority and good leadership.
• Having conversations with your teen out of curiosity, and not fear.
• Treating kids with respect.

I am so grateful to have gotten to talk to not just one brilliant man, but two! These guys have an amazing sense of empathy that is contagious. Tune in to absorb all they have to shar...