In today’s episode of the Where Parents Talk podcast, host Lianne Castelino delves into the findings of educational experts Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, authors of 'The Disengaged Teen.' They share their insights on the various modes of learning—Passenger, Achiever, Resistor, and Explorer—and how understanding these can empower parents to better support their children. Through a blend of qualitative and quantitative research, the authors share the importance of fostering an environment where curiosity thrives and students regain their independence in learning.

Anderson and Winthrop explore actionable tips for parents to help their teens navigate the complexities of school life, from addressing emotional health to fostering better communication and discipline.

What you'll learn:

• Why the disengagement of teens from school becomes pronounced during their transition into middle school
• How parents can play a pivotal role in their children's educational engagement
• Understanding the different modes of learning—Passenger, Achiever, Resistor, and Explorer
• Why promoting emotional health in teens involves encouraging curiosity and resilience
• Extracurricular activities can serve as vital outlets for teens
• Why the importance of consent and healthy relationships is increasingly relevant for teens

Links referenced in this episode:

• whereparentstalk.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• New York Times
• Quartz
• Time
• the Atlantic
• Brookings Institute
• Georgetown University
• Transcend Education

This podcast is for parents, guardians, teachers and caregivers to learn proven strategies and trusted tips on raising kids, teens and young adults based on science, evidenced and lived experience.

You’ll learn the latest on topics like managing bullying, consent, fostering healthy relationships, and the interconnectedness of mental, emotional and physical health.

Foreign.

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast.

We help grow better parents through science.

Evidence and the lived experience of other parents. Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen.

Or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Leanne Castellino.

Why is your teen zoning out, burning out, or brushing school off as pointless? And what can you as parents do to help them rediscover the joy of learning? Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Leanne Castellino.

Our guests today are a pair of guests in fact.

Jenny Anderson is an award winning journalist and an author who spent over a decade at the New York Times before pioneering coverage on the science of learning at Quartz.

Her work regularly appears in Time, the Atlantic, and the New York Times where she explores the intersection of education, mental health, and parenting. Jenny is also a mother of two teen girls.

Rebecca Winthrop is a globally respected education expert and director of the center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institute. Her research focuses on how to better support children's learning.

Rebecca teaches at Georgetown University, is an author, and is a mother of two boys. Together, Jenny and Rebecca are co authors of the book the Disengaged Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.

Jenny joins us today from London, England, and Rebecca joins us from Washington. Thank you both for making the time.

Thanks for having us.

Great to be here to set the.

Table for our conversation. Jenny, I'd like to start with you and ask you if you could characterize the current state of disengagement when we're talking about teens.

Yeah, it's pretty bleak. We found in our research that when kids are in elementary school around third grade, about 75% of them love school.

By the time we get to 10th grade, that has dropped 25%. Now, loving school isn't a perfect proxy for engagement, but it's pretty close and it gives us a sense that something's wrong, something's amiss.

And that data has actually been pretty consistent for a long time. Kids have been disengaged from learning for a long time. We can talk about a lot has changed and we can talk about that.

But that's kind of the current landscape you layer on top of that chronic absentee, chronic absenteeism numbers, which we can see globally very strong in the U.S. you know, we know that we have a problem on our hands.

Rebecca, you study this. Anything in there surprise you in terms of what the current state is showing us?

The thing that I was surprised at was that the numbers haven't bounced back tremendously. From a post Covid dip. And again, we're still gathering data, but it's not going in the right direction.

So what brought you two together to write a book on this topic at this time?

So I reached out to Jenny to say, please, please, please write this book with me, because I knew how important parents are to student engagement, and I knew how important student engagement is to kids learning.

And I had a personal aha moment as a parent with my own two boys during COVID when I realized I, with all my expertise, misj judged how engaged my two boys were.

I thought my oldest one was really happy to go to school and was in sixth grade when Covid hit and, you know, normally would bop out and get straight A's, I thought he was totally engaged. And the minute his school went to online learning and went past fail, he lost all motivation, refused to try.

And he told me, mom, if it's not counted, it doesn't matter. And I realized he was not engaged in learning things. He was engaged in getting good grades.

And my little one, who I thought had been very disengaged, had recently, right before COVID had been diagnosed with dyslexia and had really internalized this idea that he wasn't smart and not capable and had sort of given up trying. And when Covid hit, he blossomed. He was actually really engaged in learning. He loved to learn.

He just needed a different environment, free from trying to keep up with his peers. And I thought, gosh, I really want to help other parents understand what good learning looks like.

And I knew storytelling had to be a really important part, so recruited Jenny. So, Jenny, thank you for saying yes. And over to you.

Yes, Rebecca is very persuasive. I said no first, because writing books is really hard. And.

But I'd say there were kind of two big reasons when I had shifted from finance journalism into education journalism, and I started going in some interesting directions with kind of future schools and neuroscience of infancy and science of learning. And I'm a sort of like, crazy curious learner myself.

And so I was excited by all of these kind of individual stories, but I wasn't really trying to weave them together in any comprehensive way. And one thing a journalist loves is a hole in the market. A scoop, so to say. And when Rebecca proposed this idea, as I said, I said no.

But I saw that there really was a hole in the market for something I desperately wanted myself. And. And I really wanted for other people as well, which was helping to support kids with their learning. It's a very specific thing.

It's not just emotions which are incredibly important and factor into how you learn. But, you know, there's. There was quite a bit on that, but this was a quite specific ask.

And so I really love the idea of trying to put together a lot of these little things I was doing into a bigger framework. And I've always loved translating kind of experts for laypeople.

I always think of sort of very busy parents and what do they need and how can we give it to them in a way that they can kind of take it and use it and move forward? Because people are really, really busy. And so Rebecca's incredible expertise was an opportunity to marry that kind of how do we.

Super practical and tactical and helpful, but also deeply grounded in research and evidence. So we're not kind of of the moment, but really something, hopefully that's enduring.

You make it sound so simple, Jenny and Rebecca. But the fact is, it's a massive topic.

No, no, it's very difficult.

Yes, it sounds like it, but so worthwhile. Can you take me through what your approach was to tackle something this large with so many different facets embedded within it?

I'm happy to talk you through sort of our research methodology, which is that we did both qualitative and quantitative research from a research perspective, they call that mixed methods. But basically we started by doing a massive literature review. And we looked broadly. We looked at sociology and neuroscience, child development.

We looked at many, many disciplines. And part of the problem of academia is they don't always talk to each other. We did a very broad sweep there.

We did in depth qualitative research where we followed 100 young people, largely in the U.S. all different demographic backgrounds, races, ages, socioeconomic status, parts of the rural, urban, and some in the uk. Many of them were over three years.

And then we did quantitative research where Brookings and Transcend Education nonprofit in the US partnered up and did some big surveys, surveys of students and their experiences, over 65,000 students. And surveys of parents, over 2,000 parents, nationally representative. And that gave us a lot of information, too.

And then on top of that, we interviewed, I think, close to 100 experts, educators, parents, et cetera. So it was very in depth.

Yeah, very in depth. It sounds like parsing through that must have taken quite a bit of time. What was your approach when you were tackling that piece of it, Jenny?

It was complicated. I mean, as I say, I talk to students a lot about journalism.

And I would say that, you know, I lived my own advice, which is rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. I Think we rewrote the book, like, start to finish numerous times because we would come up with a framework that we really liked.

We came up with a framework for the four modes of learning, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But then there was this question of what to do with it. And so it was a quite complicated process where we had one whole different book idea.

And then we switched that we were really looking at school design. And then we quickly kind of pivoted to wait. That's really interesting, and that research is really interesting, but let's focus on parents.

That's really where we want to kind of use our power. And then we really then played with a lot of different structures. I mean, writing is a very.

You know, literally every page can be rewritten 100 different ways. And so we just. It was very much.

We had some really great editors along the way, a lot of sort of friends and academics and experts who came in and helped us. So it was a truly creative process that was deeply uncomfortable for both of us.

Anything in particular in the research that you uncovered, either of you or both of you, that really, you know, took you by surprise?

1.

One of the thing that I was most surprised to see was that the kids who were deemed, quote, unquote, the problem children, who we would talk about once we developed the framework as being in resistor mode, actually had a lot going for. They might be difficult at the time, not doing their homework, disrupting class, not going to class.

But a lot of times they could pivot pretty quickly if given not more restrictions, but more freedom, more leadership opportunities, more chances to do really interesting extracurriculars and enrich learning opportunities. In many ways, we in the education system do the exact opposite when kids start becoming, quote, unquote, problems.

So that really surprised me is, you know, the real potential of these kids who are in resistor mode to really pivot quickly and be pretty great.

Can you take us through what? Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Jenny.

Oh, it's okay. No, we can go. Well, let's keep moving. Yeah, no, I was just going to.

Say, like, what would you say to a parent who is wondering why their child doesn't care about school anymore and all the signs that they see from that child indicates that they're, you know, indifferent, apathetic, etc. Etc. What would you say to that parent?

I would say count to 10. It's really, really hard when your kid is resisting school, and it feels.

It can feel like they're sort of challenging you, that they are being lazy, that they this is a sort of act of defiance or that their potential isn't being realized.

And so what our research uncovered is that that is not often the case, that there are a bunch of very complicated or not even that complicated, but more complex than it might seem reasons that kids are disengaging. So what my number one bit of advice would be like, calm yourself as much as you can, because it's really hard.

So count to 10 and get curious what's going on. And that curiosity has to come especially with teenagers, but even preteens and even actually early childhood with a lack of judgment.

So you are not judging them for this resistance, defiance, whatever you want to call it. You are curious about what's going on with them and trying to understand why they're showing up and they're learning the way they are.

And you're there to support them and help them and help them marshal resources and get through the stuff they need to get through.

You're kind of part of team success, but you're not the person who's going to stand over them and dish out terrible consequences in the moment that you realize that they're disengaged. There might be consequences that have to come for not handing in assignments, for not doing things.

But I think just really starting with curiosity and checking your judgment as best you can, it can be very hard, though.

Anything to add on that, Rebecca?

No, I think. I think Jenny nailed it.

One of the things we found when we were diving into kids who were really stuck in this resistor mode is that there was always a reason that they had moved into that mode. It could be bullying, it could be neurodivergence.

They were, like, literally struggling and didn't know what was wrong with them and didn't feel that they could tell anybody. It could be they got behind in schoolwork. A lot of kids just got behind and got overwhelmed. And then they thought, well, that's it.

We had a kid say, well, that's it. I guess I'm not going to college. And he'd been an A student in middle school, and it was like, no, no, you can turn this around.

You were fine, 15 years old. So there's always a reason, which is what I think Jenny's advice is spot on about how to uncover that reason.

And that's after you figure that out, then you can address it and help kids turn around.

So resistor is one of the four learning modes that you identify in the disengaged teen. Could you take us through each of them and what parents should be looking for and how to manage them.

Jenny, you want to do that?

Rebecca, why don't I describe them and then you can do a couple tips for each. Does that sound good?

Okay. Yeah.

The modes are Passenger, Achiever, Resistor, and Explorer. Passenger is as it sounds. These are the kids who are coasting along, doing the bare minimum, racing through their homework. They show up often.

They get good grades because school isn't challenging enough for them. It may be that it's too hard. It may be that it's too easy.

We talk about something called the zone of proximal development, which is that sort of learning sweet spot. And sometimes kids who are kind of checked out of their learning are really kind of under or overwhelmed, one of the two. So that's passenger mode.

It can be very frustrating. Parents often think of their kids as lazy. That is what they will say. They're just, you know, they're lazy. It must. And it's.

It feels maybe like it could be a character thing versus a context and environment thing. So that's Passenger, Resistor. We talked a little bit about Resistor. The dubbed the problem children. We would argue they are children with problems.

They are withdrawing, they are acting out. Everybody knows that there's a problem. There is no mystery with Resistor.

And it's very tough for parents because they feel very judged both by teachers at times and by other parents because their kid is just not doing what they need to be doing. That's resistor mode. And achiever mode is in some ways a really, really tricky mode.

These are the kids who are knocking out of the park gold stars and everything put in front of them. Teachers love them because they make them look good because they're succeeding. They feel like they're doing their job so well.

Parents love them because they feel like they're responsible for the somehow they did something right. But these kids can be very fragile. They can be very fragile learners. They assign their self. Can assign their self worth to their achievements.

And they do not like to take risks with their learning. And they are often crowding out a lot of the creativity they need to be developing as a learner.

Sort of excited about what is out there versus just getting the right answer. And so we do oddly worry about achiever mode more than you might have.

That's what I was going to say in the beginning when you said what surprised you the most? What surprised me the. Is articulating and putting some heft on why.

Why to worry about these kids because I think we kind of know that there's a fragility. And we kind of know there's maybe a cost, but this research really confirmed that there is.

And then Explore Mode is the peak of the engagement mountain. It's not Achiever Mode, it's Explorer mode. And these are kids who are sort of very driven internally. It's kind of where curiosity meets drive.

They're able to kind of express what they want and try to drive the learning to own interests. They can identify what they care about, they can push to integrate that into what they do during their day and into their learning.

And this is really the skill that is going to help kids thrive in an age of AI where AI can do so much for us and can do so many of the things that maybe Achiever Mode is so kind of good at highlighting, right. Jumping through the hoops that we put in front of them. But Explore Mode is really quite different.

It's both identifying goals that you care about, being really resilient and going after them, and being really adaptable when things go wrong, which they always do.

So, Leanne, do you want to talk through some tips on how to. So for kids in passenger mode, typically in the classroom, these are the kids asking for clarifying instructions.

Do you need me to do a four paragraph essay or a five paragraph essay? And then when they get home, parents most often hear the answer to the question, how was school? Fine. Boring. Not much there.

What we found is that there's many reasons kids end up in passenger mode. And one of the typical things that happens is parents get anxious that their kid seems to not care.

And then so they start asking, well, did you do your homework? Well, what homework do you have and when are you going to get done and start nagging?

And interestingly, nagging shuts down the problem solving part of children's brains.

There's been incredible research on this in brain scanners and everything that when mother's voice of course, starts nagging their children, the problem solving part of the brain shuts down. So it's almost the exact opposite thing of what we should do.

And what we have in the book is a whole section on how do you get from the sort of nagging procrastination loop from hell into what we would call a learning to learn cycle, which is oftentimes what will help is helping kids in passenger mode better plan, make better plans about studying and then leave it to them to see if they do the plans. And if they don't do the plans, you know they're going to get some feedback. Wow.

They didn't get their homework in, Oops, they got a little bit of a bad grade.

Now, we're not advocating for letting them go off the rails and fail freshman year of high school, but, you know, give them a couple days to see how it goes.

But oftentimes we found kids really need help breaking things down and making a plan because schools are very busy teaching content, what to learn, and don't spend a lot of time teaching study skills, organization skills, or how to learn. So that is one big tip for kids in passenger mode.

Now, for kids in achiever mode who are doing all the right things but end up being, as Jenny said, quite fragile, oftentimes what you need to do is give them small opportunities to take a risk. You know, if kids in passenger mode in the classroom ask for clarity of, you know, instructions, what exactly? What's the minimum you need me to do?

Kids in achiever mode are asking for the maximum. What do you need me to do to get an A? What do I do to get an A? And they really do not want to not get an A.

And oftentimes helping them just take small risks. It could be on things that aren't that important to them.

This idea of productive struggle and risk taking, it's okay if you take a risk and it doesn't work out great. The feeling and the skill of picking yourself back up really builds resilience.

And then for kids in resistor mode, again, like we talked about, one of the sort of counterintuitive things is that they really do need something they're super interested in.

So helping them find a spark, helping them find something that they're super interested in, can help draw them out and really build engagement over time with school.

And there's actually lots of evidence of if you get kids who are sort of in resistor mode and you give them, maybe they love music and they're part of a band or something, once they really start getting into that, that interest and engagement can spill over to them trying harder in school itself. In the US at least.

Part of the problem is that the minute kids stop performing well academically is parents start worrying and saying, well, you can't do all these extracurriculars. You need to study math. You're not doing what you should do. And so they take them away as well as school sometimes. So that is not the right strategy.

So I guess it begs the question then, is there something that parents can do proactively to determine what learning mode fits their child?

I mean, I think you can talk to your kids about. You don't have to use the language, but you certainly can.

I would say the one caveat to this, and it's really important, is that these are not labels. We are not trying to say, are you a passenger? Because a kid could very easily internalize that is, well, I guess I am.

And so that's what I am for life. And so I'm just going to live up to that label. Right?

And so we picked, we sort of developed these modes with a very strong recognition that they're very dynamic.

So if you want to talk to your kids about them, which you very much can, it's hey, we all move in and out of these modes all the time there we're making sort of a million rational decisions in our big brains about how irrational, sometimes irrational, whatever. We're making decisions about how we show up in our learning and we do this in work.

We show up at work and you know, one day we're ready to dig in and do all the things we're asked and we don't mind if there's an annoying meeting and you know, we'll, we'll put our head down and do the work and we're really open mind. And other days you come in and you just don't feel it. Right. So we can move through these modes.

Metacognition or this idea of learning to learn is actually the awareness of why we're making some of the decisions we're making and the self regulation to move it. So if you're showing up in passenger mode, why get curious? So how do you feel you're showing up? Here are these moods.

How do you feel you're showing up? If your kid, if the kid says, well, passenger, because school is stupid and boring. Like why, what would you, how would you make it more interesting?

What would you do? What would be something that would make it more interesting for you? Like make them the problem solver.

But again, this isn't a judgment on them, it's awareness of that so that they start developing the skills. All kids can move into all of these modes all the time. You know, what do you think it would take to get you from resistor mode?

You know, you're really hating everything. You don't want to go to school into explorer mode.

Imagine how good that's going to feel if you just are suddenly bursting with the sense of like possibility. When was the last time you felt that? You know what, what do we need to do to get you into that mode, that awareness and reflection? And you can do it.

Don't wait until There's a crisis moment to do it, do it when things are going really well. I noticed that you did so brilliantly on that test. I saw you studying hard. I saw you preparing. What do you think you did that worked?

Anything you did that didn't work like anything you would do differently, maybe you studied too hard. You know, this is a classic achiever mode problem. And I have certainly had this conversation in my house.

Yeah, you got a great grade, but, wow, you put a lot into that.

You think you could work 20% less and get the same outcome and, you know, all of those reflective conversation tools using the language of the modes, but again, just not pigeonholing, not labeling, not judging as much as we can, really. An open, curious conversation. Learning is kind of a fascinating science.

You know, for a kid who has a natural proclivity to science, you could say, hey, there's a science of learning how we learn the things we do. And this is part of that. You know, you want to learn about it.

And a humanities kid, you know, a kid who has got more interests in humanities, you could sort of, you know, explain it a different way, but that's. That. That would be my advice. Rebecca, would you add to that?

No, I think that's great.

You know, I think what's so interesting about what you just shared there, Jenny, is the idea that so many parents, myself, number one on that list, our default and our instinct is to focus on the negative as opposed to what you just offered, which is if something goes well, you know, why did it go well? And giving that its due as well.

So learning for me on that, definitely, when you talk about having these conversations with your teens, like, ideally, what age should this start at if we're trying to be proactive and, you know, prevent potentially a disengaged child?

So Jenny and I feel strongly that you can't start soon enough. And actually, disengagement starts around third grade, second and third grade.

And we call the book the disengaged teen because it really hits a crisis period in adolescence when kids hit middle school. But it's perfectly fine to start looking and talking about engagement with your kid in upper elementary school, your fifth grader, your.

Because we know that the minute kids hit middle school or junior high, depending on your system, secondary school, they. Their disengagement drops. So you do want to get a handle on these conversations before that. Ideally.

One of the things.

Yeah, no, I was just going to say that the reason for that, and it might be very obvious, is that we do a pretty good job A lot of the time in elementary school, recognizing that we're developing a whole child, right? So there's sort of the social stuff, there's the emotional stuff, there's the working in a group stuff, and there's the academic stuff.

And suddenly, very quickly it becomes very siloed, very regimented and very broken apart. And really the relationships aren't often as strong when you get into secondary school.

And that's really when they need it just as much as they did in elementary school. And we need to be focusing on all of those things. And so it's a bit of a sort of design question.

But I think it's useful for parents to understand why that disengagement is happening. They feel less seen, they feel more anonymous.

They feel that they're going to fall through the cracks or no one's going to recognize their achievement.

So a lot of that anonymity and feeling that they can't show that they matter or show that they have a contribution to make or sort of, you know, do that, that's what's happening.

So if parents can come in and help with some of those or have conversations about those things, about friendships, as much as you're talking about math, you know, and about dynamics, when there's a problem with a teacher, like, I hate my teacher. Well, she. You're stuck with her. Like, deal with it, you know, like, that's a very, like, tell me why, what do you. What's not happening?

What would you like to see her do, you know, and then you can help problem solve. And maybe there's something you do need to talk to the teacher about when they're a little bit younger, but all of that.

So I just wanted to put some color around, kind of why that disengagement falls off so dramatically when you get to middle school.

Absolutely. Now you also emphasize in the disengaged teen that learning is how teens explore the world.

How can you, or what can you suggest to parents in terms of how they can help their teen connect with learning as a tool for self discovery?

Well, we have a line in the book where we say, you know, cuddles are to infants, what discussion is to teenagers. So teens sort of make meaning of this world they're coming into.

And they are primed neurobiologically to start exploring and figuring out where they, you know, stand out in their peer group and where they fit in and discussion.

Just talking with your young person is the canvas upon which they are starting to form their own identities and form, form their sort of Sense of self. And, you know, we have a whole toolkit in the book, the second half. The tool of the book is a. Is a engagement toolkit for parents.

And in chapter six, there's an entire chapter on suggestions around having discussions with your teen. Because a lot of parents are like, well, I try. And all they do is roll their eyes at me or give me one word answers.

And something you just brought up, Leanne, is one of the first things we say.

We say, you know, don't do the sort of inquisition of everything they learned at school and don't start each day and don't start with the worst subject. I mean, how would you feel if you came home and you got the, you know, 10th degree about your worst meeting that you hated that you had to relive?

So it's okay to start with the thing that they love if you want to and just talk about the content of their learning and have them teach you stuff if you don't remember. Teens love to do that.

They feel knowledgeable in front of their parents and talk about the content of their learning as much as how they're performing is, you know, one major takeaway, I would say. But, Jenny, what, What. What else would you add to that?

Yeah, a few things. I would say let's valorize practice as much as we do performance, because it's the practice that we see, the growth.

So when you see them working hard, don't ever let that go by. So we keep talking about this, but I want to borrow a phrase from the early childhood folks. Catch them being good, Right? It's catch them being good.

It's a really powerful phrase. You know, catch them with good habits as they're developing habits. Help them when you see worse habits.

The other thing I would add is help them find opportunities to make authentic contributions anywhere in your family, in your community, with a neighbor, you know, that can be babysitting, that can be, you.

Know, doing the dishes.

Yeah. Raking leaves for the neighbor. I mean, definitely having chores in the family.

I think all of these are incredibly important and not, in my view, and I know this is controversial. I do not pay for chores. I give allowance or pocket money, as it's called here.

And then we have a set of responsibilities that are part of being a household together, and those are separate.

I'm not paying you to wash the dishes like you don't, you know, I'm not getting paid to do all the things I'm very happy to do as, you know, a member of this family. But that's not the, that's not the reward.

But I think this, I think young people don't have as many opportunities to contribute authentically because they're very scheduled or they're, you know, maybe they have jobs. And that is a very authentic contribution. But I think we just want to.

They are trying to find ways to really come into themselves and find meaning in the world and doing that in a bunch of structured, scaffolded, almost exclusively academic sports or music ways. Those are great. But if that's it, they're not finding enough ways. So I think look for opportunities for authentic contribution.

The other piece that is so critical in this discussion is really what's going on in the classroom with the teacher, the educator.

What would you suggest to parents in terms of how they can support that teacher and not become, you know, the homework police or a helicopter parent, as many parents, you know, suffer from that as well, but more of a supporter to the teacher in the classroom?

Well, one of the things that we hear a lot from teachers and our research back this up, is that educators want to teach a little bit differently often and give kids a little bit more freedom and autonomy to give them chances to take risks and try, you know, again, or give them a chance to find their interests. And they feel really squished, squished from above by standards and sort of rules that come down.

They feel on high, but also squished from below from parents who don't, aren't trained educators and are sending the message, this doesn't seem rigorous. This isn't going to get my kid into college. And questioning educators all the time.

And a lot of times educators have good ideas on how to help kids have explore moments or be in explore mode. And they've told us they don't do it because parents push back.

So, for example, if you are teaching AP history, it is perfectly fine to assign not only a practice essay for the AP test, but also, hey, maybe a certain lesson you could give kids the options to write a play or do a podcast. That is actually really creative way to learn the content, which is what these young people need.

There'll be plenty of time to practice how to write an essay. That's a real example of something an educator tried and got a lot of pushback.

And so I do think that we want parents to read the book and then go to the educators of their kids with a handout and say, hey, I'm here. I really care about my kids engagement. I know you do too. Is there anything I can do to reinforce at home and then Begin a dialogue.

They care. They're curious. They are willing to push through learning when it gets hard, which is literally like always, but they're willing to kind of dig in.

And I think that's something, by the way, we can really, really help with, because I think sometimes when things get tricky for kids with.

With learning, we either solve it for them because we can really quickly, maybe when they're a little bit younger, or we jump to solve, you know, finding ways to solve it versus just normalizing the experience. That learning is really hard. And we're going to push through and we're going to make a plan and we're going to.

I'm here to support you, but we're going to get through this. But part of learning is just like, kind of requires some struggle. So I think that sort of persistence is a really good sign. And asking.

I honestly think the number one thing is asking questions. You know, is there a compliance orientation? You know, what did you learn? Nothing. How was school? Fine. What did you do? Nothing. What did you learn?

Like, it was stupid, right? That's a more extreme form. But can they sort of talk about their learning if engaged properly?

Like if we're not sort of, you know, kind of doing that thing where we're asking, how did you perform? If we're asking about the learning, can they talk about the learning? That's a really good sign.

And it doesn't have to be sophisticated and brilliant and wonderful. It's hopefully going to be a little bit messy because they are literally learning how to become thinkers and more sophisticated thinkers.

And so it's not always clean. But, like, again, in that conversation, catch them being good, catch the moments of brilliance, and don't focus on the holes in the argument.

My poor husband. My husband and I are both journalists, and I think we often kind of jump in and we're like, that's not logical.

You know, like, here are all the other things you just like. Nope. Just step back and notice the good things.

My husband and I are also both journalists, so I totally know what you're talking about there, Jenny.

Rebecca.

They're getting good modeling of critical thinking. So they're getting something. It's good to balance. It's good to balance.

Last question to you, Rebecca, because we're almost out of time, but I did want to ask you. If you could leave one insight from the Disengaged Teen for parents, what would that be?

The one insight that I think I want parents to know is that you have a lot more power than, you know, actually parents. What we do at home, and it's not about expensive extracurriculars or buying tutors.

It's all the stuff we've just talked about is two times more powerful than socioeconomic status in terms of engaging. You're helping your kids engage in their learning and become explorers. So we are very powerful and we just have to use the time that we have wisely.

Certainly plenty of food for thought. Such an enlightening conversation.

Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop, authors of the Disengaged Team, so appreciate your time and your perspective today. Thank you so much.

Thank you for having us. To learn more about today's podcast, guest and topic, as well as other parenting themes, visit whereparentstalk.com.