Eps 242: Nurturing a Self-Driven Child With Author, Ned Johnson

Ned Johnson is president & founder PrepMatters, an educational company providing academic tutoring, educational planning, and standardized test preparation.

A battle-tested veteran in the fields of test preparation, anxiety management, and student performance, Ned has been a professional “tutor-geek” since 1993, with more than 40,000 one-on-one hours helping students conquer an alphabet of standardized tests and reach their full potential.

In 2018, Ned co-authored, With Dr. William Stixrude, The Self-Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives. Their book explores how fostering children’s autonomy can help solve two challenges endemic to kids today: facing anxiety and developing intrinsic motivation. Ned is a sought-after speaker and teen coach on study skills, sleep deprivation, parent-teen dynamics, and test anxiety, and his work is featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, BBC, and many others.

Takeaways from the show

• Supporting our kids in stepping into their autonomy
• How to let go of control and have faith our teens know what to do
• Teaching your kids to be resilient and able to tolerate stress
• Leading your kids to intrinsic motivation
• What is a healthy sense of control
• The brain’s experience with stress
• Releasing the expectation of competency all the time
• How autonomy looks in a pandemic
• Alternate routes of education
• How passionately pursuing pastimes is most major contributor to intrinsic motivation
• Being sympathetic to our kids and ourselves
• The time it takes teen’s brains to fully develop varys
• Going through hard things gives us strength
• The teenage experience overlapping with the pandemic
• Teens crave relatedness
• Connect with your kids through what they love
• Reminding yourself as a parent, your job isn’t to make your kids care
• Having sympathetic conversations with your kids
• Being able to just be with our kids when they’re having a hard time

For more show notes, including transcripts, visit our website here.

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