Stress and Anxiety from Teens to Job Seekers
The new year has gotten off to a fast start. A bigger-than-expected jobs report managed to spark both relief and concern—with anxiety from both employees thinking about switching jobs and investors remaining high. “Even Harvard M.B.A.s are struggling to land jobs,” reports the Wall Street Journal (make of that what you will).
We’ll get to the jobs landscape in a moment, but first…
The growing trend of teens disengaging from school and elsewhere in large numbers has also been causing a lot of anxiety. My friends
, an award winning journalist, and Rebecca Winthrop, the director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, have a new book out about the topic that has gotten some well-deserved attention: The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn better, Feel Better, and Live Better. I recently asked them some questions about the book. Here’s our Q&A:You did some extensive research for this book with Brookings and Transcend—a survey of over 65,000 students and 2,000 parents—to better understand why so many kids hate what they do at school right now. What did you find?
We found three key things.
First, a shocking majority of kids are disengaged from school, simultaneously bored and overwhelmed, a toxic combination that we seem to have just made peace with. In third grade, 75% of kids say they love school. That figure flips by 10th grade, with only 25% saying they love school. This is a problem on so many levels. We know from the science of learning how kids feel about school affects how well they learn. The more disengaged kids are the less likely to learn the skills they need to be successful in a fast-changing, technology saturated world, and the more likely they are to report feeling sad, anxious or depressed.
Second, very few kids are getting the skills they need to succeed in life and work today, skills like initiative and self-direction. We call these explorer skills, or agency. The Brookings and Transcend research shows that less than 4% of kids in middle high school have regular opportunities to explore in school. Agency is having the skills and the will to set meaningful goals and marshal the resources to meet those. Rigorous, robust research shows that when kids are given more agency they perform better, are happier and have better prosocial outcomes. Good news: parents have tremendous influence in building agency.
Our third significant finding is that parents are in the dark about how bad engagement is. In 10th grade, 30% of kids say they get to learn things they are interested in and develop their own ideas but 70% of parents think they do. Parents can’t solve a problem they can’t see. This is not parents’ fault. They rely on grades. But grades only tell part of the story.
You argue that a lot of learning is invisible. What do you do to help parents see and better understand what’s happening?
We developed four modes of learning to try and help parents and educators understand how kids show up for their learning. These are dynamic, fluid states—not a way to label or pigeonhole kids. Kids move through them based on how they feel, the environment around them, and a whole host of factors. The four modes are:
Passenger mode—coasting, doing the bare minimum to get by.
Achiever mode—striving to be perfect, to get gold stars in everything put in front of them.
Resister mode—often dubbed “problem children,” these kids act out or withdraw, using their voice to let us know something is wrong.
Explorer mode—where kids are developing the muscles to be proactive over their learning. These kids dig in, ask questions about what they are curious about, set goals, and adapt along the way. They are deeply engaged in learning. We want every young person to experience what it feels like to be in this mode.
The challenge for parents and educators is when a young person gets stuck in a mode. That’s when the mode can become an identity. Resister mode kids become the problem children; Passenger kids are dubbed the lazy ones and the Achievers are defined by their gold stars, often tying their self-worth to their achievements and thus fail to build resilient learning skills. They are frequently risk averse and afraid to ask themselves what they really care about.
Your book offers different strategies for kids depending on the mode they are in. Can you give us three general takeaways for parents to help all kids get into Explorer mode?
Number one: less nagging more nudging. We cite a great study that shows what we all know: nagging doesn’t work. When kids were put in a brain scanner, and heard their mothers criticizing them, the problem solving part of their brain basically shut down.
If we want to have influence we have to be heard.
In the same way Reeve suggests moving from instructional to invitational, we can do the same. Instead of “get your homework done” try “what’s your plan for getting your homework done?” Instead of “I don’t care that you hate biology” try “there were a lot of subjects I didn’t like, too. Sometimes when I got better at them, they got more interesting. What are some ways you could get some help so it doesn’t feel so overwhelming?”
Second, focus more on practice in learning and not just performance. School today feels like a sorting and ranking machine more than a place where they learn through practice and failure, which is exactly how learning happens. Emphasize the practice and be OK when it’s a bad practice. Kids have soccer training to practice skills and plays and then test those in games. So much skill building happens in the practice, not just in the games. School is not all about the tests and the academics outcomes; it’s also about learning to study, learning to prioritize when things pile up, learning to manage stress.
Finally, less “find your passion” and more “explore your true interests.” Interests are the canvas on which skills are developed. If young people care about something, they will naturally dig in and find new strategies and be persistent. Those are muscles being developed.
Let kids pursue the interests they have, not the ones you think will pay off on a college application. Interests energize kids, and it matters less what they do as long as doesn’t hurt themselves or others. Interests are a great way to develop Explorer skills, in and out of school.
These work for parents and educators alike. Teens want to be respected and to rise to do challenging work. They often don’t know how or are scared to try. Learning requires courage. We want to help kids to be brave.
Back to Job Moves
I joined WGN-TV in Chicago’s Morning News show to talk about some tips for job seekers from our recently released book, Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career. You can check out our 5-minute conversation here:
I also joined Office Hours with David Meltzer to talk about the book—and its broader implications for making progress in all parts of our lives. Topical subject for the new year! Check out our conversation below.
And Cathy Rubin of Planet Classroom fame interviewed me about the impact of AI on future careers. In her Forbes article about our conversation, she profiled some of the top colleges staying current for their students: Western Governors University, Minerva University, and the Quantic School of Business and Technology. Check out her article, “Top Schools Preparing Students for Future Careers”—as well as our conversation, which you can watch here:
Job Moves on Future U.
On the latest episode of Future U., Jeff Selingo put me on the hot seat and interviewed me about the new book. Here were some of the big topics:
Why you shouldn’t think of the the assets on your “personal balance sheet” coming out of college as just the degree you earned, but also the skills/capabilities and network you developed. And how graduates should understand the different shelf lives of each—in other words, what it’ll take to keep these assets up-to-date.
How the prototyping process in Job Moves can benefit high schoolers picking college. This of course relates to another book I wrote, Choosing College. More on this to come.
Why making entrance to college “friction free” might backfire.
How Jeff and I think about the book-writing process—the process we follow, lessons learned, how Job Moves differed from past books I’ve written, and our tips for others.
The Resiliency of Remedial Education
More than a decade ago, a wave of research pointing to the ineffectiveness of remedial education was followed by a massive effort to rethink how we prepare students who need extra support to begin their college experiences. So why, after all that, does remedial ed still play such a big role on college campuses today? And what does this all say about who goes—or should go—to college?
Anne Kim, FutureEd Senior Fellow and author of a recent report on the remedial education reform movement, joined me and Jeff on Future U. to talk about the Resiliency of Remedial Education.
Predictions for Apprenticeships in the New Year
If you’re interested in reflections on apprenticeships in the United States in 2024 and predictions for what will happen with the movement in 2025, check out “New Year, Evolving Developments in Apprenticeship”—an episode on the Apprenticeship 2.0 podcast that Reach University produces. I joined Anna Fontus, Program Officer at ECMC Foundation; Laura Love, Senior Vice President at Strada Education Foundation; and Brent Orrell, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute to discuss our their top three developments in apprenticeship in 2024, as well as our top three developments to watch for in 2025.
I look forward to your thoughts.
And as always, thanks for reading, writing, and listening.