How the Mentor Mindset Can Help Adults Show Up Better for Tweens and Teens
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From KQED. You're listening to the MindShift Podcast, where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I'm Kee Sung. Adolescence is such an important time for kids because their brains go through significant changes between the ages of 10 and 25. So how can adults best show up for our kids, students, and colleagues of that age?

David Yeager is an expert on this topic. He's a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the book 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People. He's also a former middle school teacher.

David Yeager, you've spent your career studying tweens and teens, and that's a group a lot of parents and teachers, I think, struggle with. But this line in your book sums up a lot. You write, status and respect are to a young person what food and sleep are to a baby. Core needs that when satisfied can unlock better motivation and behavior. Can you explain this line to us? Yeah. So everybody knows when a baby's crying,

The first thing you do as a parent is you try to troubleshoot. You're like, all right, wait, is the baby hungry? Is the baby tired? Do they have a dirty diaper? And you don't get mad at the baby for like feeling so entitled to our time that they need a new diaper or need a nap. You just problem solve.

But for some reason, as young kids grow up and become adolescents, we get frustrated with them whenever they have a bunch of behaviors that seem like a puzzle to us and seem frustrating. And we kind of blame them. We end up saying, well, this generation is flawed or they're entitled or they're weak or they complain too much.

And what I'm trying to do in this book is just to say, look, if you understand what it is that they need, and it's not always their physical needs or they do need to sleep and eat. But if you understand their kind of emotional needs, then we can have a much better time in this age period and stop this thing where –

Adolescence is something where you pity the adult who has to interact with the teenager and pat them on the back and you say, "Well, that's a really tough time. Sorry for you." And start having more of a just kind of a joyful connection and admiration for young people in our lives. So tell us what does an adolescent need that's different from younger kids?

Yeah, so from kind of the moment that puberty strikes, the brain starts getting sensitized to social experiences. And in the book, I write about this concept of status and respect. And I'm not just talking about how many likes they get on Instagram or whether they have the coolest clothes, but more just this idea that they're evaluating whether or not they're being taken seriously socially by the people whose opinions they care about.

And that might be adults, could be mentors, could be peers. And that sense of whether they're doing well socially becomes really, really important for that age group. So they're not just asking themselves, like, do I have friends or not? But rather, am I viewed as someone who brings something to the table? Like, do I contribute something?

And that's a big question. And it comes in part from our evolutionary past. So when you were a child in the savanna in our evolutionary history, hundreds of thousands of years ago, you're taken care of by the adults in the group or the tribe. But at some point, you have to show that you bring something to the table. Otherwise, your wandering band of humans isn't going to keep you around.

I mean, are you hunting? Are you rearing children? Are you burying children? Are you helping keep people safe? And I think that deep worry about where you stand socially in the group is rooted in our species' ability to survive.

It's not frivolous and it's deeply motivating because it's, it kind of defines what it means to no longer be a child that's taken care of and start being on the path to contributing to the survival of the people that you're a part of their group.

So one thing I appreciate about your book is you focus on the important role adults can play, especially for adolescents to be their best selves, that we have to do the work to be better parents, educators and bosses to these young people. In your book, you identify three types of roles adults play. What are they and how can adults be helpful or not helpful?

Yeah. So in writing the book, I spent a lot of time, not just in our research, kind of reading dusty old books, but also getting out in the world, out of the lab and trying to find exemplary adults who do an awesome job mentoring the next generation. And one thing I found that was in common across all of these different exemplars is something very surprising to me.

They aren't caught in this dilemma between being hypercritical and demanding versus very friendly and caring. They kind of do both of those things. They're very demanding but also very supportive so that the young people that they work with can meet those demands or those rigorous standards. And I call that a mentor mindset.

where in general, your goal in any given interaction is to be a supportive influence on a young person to help them in a way that's going to be good for them in their long-term self-interest. And that's different from something I call an enforcer mindset. An enforcer mindset is where you just do half of that. You're just having extremely high standards, but you kind of

Clear your hands of the idea that you need to be supportive and help them to meet that standard. And that can lead us to, although we're still caring about them, we're helping, we're in our minds helping them to meet what society is going to demand of them. We can end up with coming across kind of like an authoritarian or a dictator where we're just being unreasonable and mean and pushing young people away.

The alternative to that is something I've called the protector mindset. And this is the idea that young people have been through a lot. They're stressed out. Maybe they've experienced toxic stress as a kid. And because of that, they can't accomplish very much. And therefore, they can't be expected to do anything that is rigorous or demanding. And in that protector mindset, we have very low standards, but we're very caring and supportive.

Now, that has downsides as well because it prevents young people from growing and from being taken seriously. And that's not ideal either. And what I learned in studying these exemplary people is that you're not like born with the mentor mindset and able to do it all the time. Instead, most people tend to start with one or the other mindset.

imbalance. They either start with the really high standards and then they need to meet those standards with support. So they need to go from enforcer to mentor, or they tend to start with very low standards with very high support and they need to increase their standards to adopt more of a mentor mindset. Since so many people have to be taught how to teach with a mentor mindset, what does it say that more people don't

go down this path or don't already, or that people have to learn to have a mentor mindset versus, I don't know, like already embodying those qualities? Like, what does it say about where we are and who we are? I mean, it's a really interesting question because if the research is suggesting that a mentor mindset is the most effective leadership style with young people, age 10 to 25, then the question is, why isn't everyone doing it?

If people are generally concerned about how they're interacting with young people and there's a kind of efficiency to the market, then you think everyone would just

copy the mentor mindset style. And what I realized when writing the book is that these other two options, the enforcer and the protector, are really attractive when you have an underlying belief system that young people are fundamentally not competent enough to perform at an adult-like level. And there's a cultural belief system that I call the neurobiological incompetence model.

which is very simply the idea that many people have heard, that teenagers' brains are immature, they're not developed, and therefore we can't expect them to do any kind of independent thinking or to be mature.

And I'll say that neurobiological incompetence view has a certain purpose. So it's been used to great effect to try to reduce sentencing, for instance, life without parole or the death penalty for youth offenders, because the argument is that their brains aren't fully developed and therefore they shouldn't go to prison forever or die because of serious crimes committed in the passions of youth.

But that argument taken to its logical conclusion suggests that, for example, young people shouldn't be trusted to vote or trusted to make any of their own decisions about sex or reproduction or even their identities or what college they should go to. And if you look at the young people under the care of adults with a great mentor mindset, you see lots of independent people.

action and planning and wise decisions. And the neuroscientist Adriana Galvan at UCLA, she likes to argue that, look, the prefrontal cortex is for goal-directed behavior. And of course we know that adolescents can do goal-directed behavior. They might not engage in the goal-directed behavior adults want them to engage in, like factoring trinomials on worksheets or rewriting essays in English class.

But they're really good when they want to do things like sneak out of the house or throw a party or have an elaborate proposal to someone to go to prom with them. And so you can think about adolescence as a period in which they're highly capable of planning and goal-directed behavior when it's for something that matters to them.

The whole trick is figuring out how to capture their motivation by tapping into the desire for status and respect. And if we can do that, they're capable of great things. And if you have that last belief, then all of a sudden the mentor mindset makes more sense. If you don't, it would just seem insane to say, I'm going to uphold high standards and help them to meet it. Because you just don't think that would ever plausibly work if you were stuck in that cultural incompetence model.

We're going to take a quick break. Stay with us for more with David Yeager. Support for MindShift comes from Landmark College, offering executive function and social coaching support for neurodivergent individuals online or in person at the Bay Area Success Center in San Mateo.

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If a teacher or parent is ready to take on the mentor mindset, what are three important steps you recommend they take? In the book, I write about practices that anyone can start using right away. So the mentor mindset is really just aligning your actions and resources with the long-term best interests of the young person that you care about. And once you do that,

Then there are some concrete tips for how to make that high standard and that support really effective. The first is what I call transparency, which is very simply the idea of explaining what you're doing and why in a way that makes your intentions clear to the young person you're working with.

So a great example is our research on how to give critical feedback. This is connected with Jeff Cohen at Stanford and Valerie Purdy Greenaway at Columbia. And in this research, we looked at the circumstance of a seventh grade teacher giving critical feedback to their students. And the students are like, well, why did you hate my essay? And why are you so biased? And why don't you like me? And that's a problem because if they

think that way, then they're less likely to want to fix the mistakes that were pointed out and therefore less likely to learn and do good work. And so in our experiment, what we did is we simply had teachers be more transparent about their intentions. They wrote a handwritten note that was put on students' essays in which they said, look, I'm giving you this feedback because I have very high standards.

But they implied I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't think that you could meet this standard with the support that I'm providing you, that is the feedback on this essay. So it appealed to the high standards and was assuring of the support.

And that very simple note increased the rate at which students fixed mistakes on their essays and turned in revised essays. And that was especially true for black students of white teachers, which we think is because in that specific school, there was a concern among black students that they were being treated differently. And we know that that is plausible because of the discipline records that we analyzed in the school.

And so transparency about your mentor mindset intentions was kind of good for everyone and led to less frustrating behavior in the sense that students revised their essays and benefited from the teacher's feedback. But it also was good at promoting equity.

So start with transparency. Um, it sounds like a lot of other things flow from there. Yeah. So the, that's just one, uh, practice is transparency. And then there are other things that take a little bit more thought, but that are really impactful. A second is questioning. So as I looked at Sergio Estrada, a great teacher and research on expert tutors, um,

And even observing this wonderful NBA shooting coach, Chip England, who was the coach for the San Antonio Spurs for a decade and a half. They ask way more questions than they use declarative statements. So they ask, they don't tell. And so what was really interesting is, for instance, if a student makes a mistake on an assignment, they might come up to Sergio and say, is this right?

He usually doesn't answer that question. He won't be like, yeah, that's right. Or no, no, it's wrong. You've got to do this. And it's because he wants them to think he'll be like, well, do you think it's right?

And it'll start a conversation. Now, students don't like this initially. They often say more or less what I thought it was right. That's why I put this answer. And I'm asking you now if it's right. But he doesn't like let them off the hook. He's like, all right, well, let's see what you have so far. He's like, OK, I see this and this. All right. Now, can you tell me more about why you have this?

And all of the mentor mindset exemplars, whether it's the Microsoft manager or the NBA coach or the high school physics teacher, use some version of collaborative troubleshooting, which is this idea that you don't come to a problem with a young person with your solution in mind that you're going to tell them the answer to. That's something I call groansplaining. It's like, I know everything and I'm just going to fire hose you with all the information until you relent and do what I think and say.

And that's distinct from collaborative troubleshooting, which often starts with a questioning routine. These authentic questions without take. And then the adult authority is positioned as a resource to solve problems. So that ends up being a really powerful second mentor mindset practice. A third and final mentor mindset practice is to...

really sell your vision for the purpose of the rigorous and high standards. So when I interviewed Chip England, the NBA coach, he said, David, you know, the most important thing is to sell the vision. And I was like, what do you mean? And he's like, well, think about it. If you're a 19-year-old draft prospect and you're new to the NBA, you now have millions of dollars.

based on your ability to shoot the ball and score usually. And now a coach is telling you that your shot is not good enough and has to change. That's a risky proposition because if you start messing with it, you can get worse. And then if you're bad enough, you could be out of the league, you know, cut from the team and then you lose millions of dollars. Now, of course,

Chip England, this NBA shooting coach, knows that if they put in the work and fix their shots, then they'll have a longer career. And so very early on, he sells the vision. Now, does selling the vision to that kind of player mean if you put in the work to change your shot, you will make more millions of dollars? Not really. That's not really what he's saying. And also, that wouldn't be plausible because the 19-year-old

just got millions of dollars. And so it's not obvious to them that they should risk losing what they've gotten for the sake of some uncertain reward in the future. And instead he says, look, you know, the average career in the NBA is about three years. Eventually your athleticism declines. The players who make it to 10 or 15 years are the ones who have other ways of scoring, specifically better outside shots. So if you put in the work now to improve your shot,

You're not just going to take care of yourself or even just yourself and your family. You might be taking care of your family's family because of that long MBA career. And so he's appealing to something broader than short-term self-interest. And that's a sense of purpose, I think. It's this idea that your actions now, even if they're tedious and frustrating, have implications for the well-being of others in the world who you care about.

And I think the same is true in a school setting that we often tell kids, hey, go through the misery of learning this hard stuff now and getting critiqued and failing all the time so that in 20 years you can have enough college degrees that you can get a mortgage that you can barely pay.

And that's just not convincing for a 13 to 15-year-old who's deciding whether they should either play video games with their friends or redo their math homework to make sure they understand it. But in our research, we found that framing...

difficulty and challenge now as an opportunity to build a skill that can help them make a difference in the world beyond the self, a sense of purpose, that is, is a more effective way of tapping into their desire for status and respect and their sense of mattering and contribution and therefore motivating them to be diligent and work hard.

Thank you so much, David. Yeah, thanks for having me. David Yeager is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. You can learn more about these mentor mindset exemplars and learn how to become one yourself by reading David's recently published book, 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People.

We'll bring you ideas and innovations from experts in education and beyond. Hit follow on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss a thing. The MindShift team includes me, Ki Sung, Nima Gobir, Marlena Jackson-Rotondo, and Jennifer Ng. Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer. Additional support from Jan Cheehan, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad, and Holly Kernan.

MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED. Thank you for listening.