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

What does Joyful Courage mean to you?

What a fun question. This may be just a slice of it, I think people mistakenly think of courage and fear as opposites, but they’re not. Courage is only exemplified, demonstrated, experienced when you’re afraid because when you aren’t afraid it doesn’t take anything to be courageous. Courageous is doing the things that you know to be true, that you know to be valuable, even when you’re afraid to do them, and that’s just hard to do. From my experience, the joyful part of this is that it can be deeply satisfying to do the things that are important, even when they’re hard to do. The real joyful part of it probably comes back in the telling of it later.

 

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Transcription

Casey O'Roarty 0:03
Music listeners, welcome to episode 242 oh my gosh of the joyful courage podcast, a conscious parenting and conscious humaning Show, a place where we get real about the messy adventure of parenting and growing ourselves as human beings along the way. I am your host, Casey o'brdy. I am a positive discipline trainer and facilitator, a parent coach and humbly walking right next to you, working always to be a partner to my very best friend Ben, and parent to my two kids, who is always on the learning curve and just trying to ride the wild waves of parenting. To teenagers, this is a place where we celebrate the process and always show up with transparency and authenticity. I'm so glad that you're here. I wanted to create a special intro to today's show because I have had so many of you show up in the community, in the Facebook groups, in my own email inbox, struggling with your kids and online school. It is such a brave new world right now, and our kids are making sense of it the best they can with the tools that they have, even if on the outside it looks as though they've completely given up. And that's the work right is to be able to be in the surrender, to be in the trust that we that they grow through what they go through, and holding the possibility that they might just be right where they're meant to be in this particular moment, as painful as it might look, can we do that? Can we can we have our lens be that possibility that they're right where they're meant to be in this particular moment. What happens when you try that on? What do you notice? I'm so excited to share my guest today. His work is all about how to support our kids in stepping into their autonomy. And you know, this is a place where I work every day with my own kids, right? I just wanted to start off this week's show by saying, I see you. I see you in the struggle, and you are not alone. I 100% know that you're gonna get a lot out of the upcoming interview. Thank you so much for being here. You

Hi listeners. I am so excited to welcome my guest today, Ned Johnson. Ned is president and founder at prep matters, an educational company providing academic tutoring, educational planning and standardized test prep, a battle tested veteran in the field of test preparation, anxiety management and student performance, Ned has been a professional tutor geek since 1993 with more than 40,001 on one hours helping students conquer an Alphabet of standardized tests and reach their full potential in 2018 Ned co authored with Doctor William Stix rude, 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 other places. Hi, Ned, I am a huge fan of your work, and so honored to welcome you to the podcast.

Ned Johnson 4:09
Well, thanks, Casey. I am delighted to be with you and your listeners. I look forward to look forward to talking through this stuff with

Casey O'Roarty 4:15
you. Yeah. So first, I am a huge fan of the self driven child. I believe wholeheartedly in the principles, and it is really hard to be in the action of the principles that the book is all about. What do you hear from parents about integrating the ideas from your book into real life? What are the parents saying?

Ned Johnson 4:40
One of our favorite pieces of feedback when the when the book had come out, Bill got a got a postcard or an email from a client who said she'd said to her eighth grade son, there's a second chapter of her book. As I love you too much to fight with you about your homework. And she said this to her son, and at first he smiled. It, and then he hugged me, and then he looked at me and said, is something wrong with you, mom? So it's, you know, it's, it's hard. I mean, because the central thesis of our book is about a sense of control. We're going to talk about this, but, but part of the the challenge of this is that we all feel better when we feel a greater sense of control. It lowers our stress. And to the degree that we know this is important for kids, it we also have to acknowledge that that particularly as kids go from tots to teens, for the kids to have more control over their lives, that means that we, by definition, have less control over their lives. And it's a little bit, I mean, this can be collaborative, but it's also a little bit, or feels a little bit like a zero sum game. And so giving kids more autonomy, more say, more choices, means we have a little bit less and that's And by definition, that's hard, because we love our kids, we want them to do well. And we have all sorts of thoughts about how things could go well, but just because our thoughts about how things could go well may be valid, it doesn't mean that these are the only thoughts by which things can go well. And it's just, you know, parenting is a little bit of a, you know, buckle your seat belt kind of endeavor. And increasingly, as your kids get older, and

Casey O'Roarty 6:17
I appreciate that you have two teens, so you're not only speaking as professional, but also as a parent on the path with all of us. I do.

Ned Johnson 6:25
I laugh. You know, when my when my son learned to drive, my wife, who's a much safer driver than AM, I kind of took charge of this, and she did a wonderful job, and they worked beautifully together, and I was just, I kept having this metaphor pop in my head for anyone who's who's taught their kids to drive. You know that you can switch from the driver's seat to the passenger seat, right? And you've made a shift of maybe three feet. But goodness, is the change in perspective a lot more dramatic than that?

Casey O'Roarty 6:53
Oh god, I can't even my kids know I don't take them driving. I don't take them driving until they have a clear sense of what driving is. Otherwise, I am a nightmare. They don't want me in the car. I don't want to be in the car. It's terrifying for all of us. My husband has to take over for that. So I feel like there's kind of a mindset that can show up that's really like, if I give you control, you won't do what you're supposed to do. How do we shift out of that? Like, I know it's kind of like what you were saying, you know, there's the how, how to be successful. I think we can kind of sit in a fixed mindset around that, because we are looking at how to be successful as a 15 year old. From, you know, I'm going to be 47 this week, from a 47 year old perspective, instead of remembering, like, oh, there were some other options when I was 15 that were valid. Well,

Ned Johnson 7:58
well, first on almost happy birthday that's important. You know, I think part of it is that, well, first of all, I think it's a really good working assumption, to assume that your kids have brains in their heads and they want their lives to work out. Yes. Now, of course, there's short term and long term, and, you know, we may have a long term idea in mind and think this short term behavior is not going to get us there, but it's really hard. It's really easy, rather, to kind of catastrophize and think that a bad decision now puts them on a path that's going to lead, you know, to living in a van down by the river. But we all go there.

Casey O'Roarty 8:41
We all go there. Ned,

Ned Johnson 8:43
right, your daughter's at a party, your son's at a party and doesn't text you. Was supposed to text you at a 1030 there or 1130 to check in and doesn't. What do you assume? Oh, of course, never, never. They're having a wonderful conversation. They totally forgot. He was gaming too much, and his phone went dead. Nobody has to charge her, you know, he left his phone in McDonald's. Well, that was pretty dopey thing. No, no, always they're dead. They're dead. I know that they're dead, right? And so we I say this, you know, in our book and our book, we want to make clear that that everything that we do as parents is born out of love, because we love these little or tall people. We want things to go well, but the science is pretty clearly on the side of how vital it is to the developing brain, particularly the developing adolescent brain, for kids to have as much control as they can. And I'll say that when we talk about control, the sense of control, the kind of two parts. One is the auto the subjective sense of autonomy that this is my life. I have say I have choices, not that there aren't rules and regulations and family values, but as much as possible. You know, I get to it's my life that I'm trying to build, and ideally that I'm getting more and more experience running and. And the brain state when the prefrontal cortex, with all those executive functions in our decision making and planning and putting things into perspective, part of the brain is running the rest of the brain, as opposed to the amygdala, the freeze, fight or flight, part of our brain that doesn't it only perceives in reactive threat. It's not rational and for us, and I say this as a test prep guy, right? I do nothing but work in the infernal world of standardized exams, I feel very strongly that the most important outcome of high school and adolescence is not where you go to college, it's the brain that you've sculpted as a teenager and you carry into adulthood. And so we want kids to be internally motivated, not just carrots and sticks and doing because someone told them to. And we want them to have stress tolerance. You know, they're about 14 million books written the last decade or two about resilience. And really that is at its core, is the ability to tolerate stress, because, you know, there's so much anxiety with so many kids and so many families for all sorts of reasons, good and bad. And the solution to that is really to help people have a greater tolerance for stress, because otherwise you have to operate in a world that gets smaller and narrower. And if we want to be able to have a grand adventure, we kind of throw ourselves into things that are fun, but kind of, kind of unsettling, and we can talk, and if it's a high level of stress, but if we have the ability to come back to baseline. So okay, that was intense, but we can, we can tolerate it, right? Just like you go out there for battle or soccer game or whatever, you kind of get bruised and beat up a little bit, and the next day, let's try that again, or let's try something else. And so kids need, I mean, everybody needs this sense of control in order to foster brain that's tolerant stress and that's intrinsically motivated.

Casey O'Roarty 11:50
Well, I love that. And what's missing from that is and they have a certain GPA, and they know all of this information like it's so powerful to hear you talk about that. And then as I think about So stress tolerance, I think we all really get what stress tolerance is, right? The intrinsic motivation. I love thinking about intrinsic motivation, and when we couple it with the micromanaging. I mean, I'm raising my hand right now. People you all know I'm this is my life's work is to let go of the inner micromanager and let everyone you know allow the people around me to actually feel some sense of responsibility of their life, to feel that freedom that comes with, Hey, I get to decide how this is going to play out. I'm currently so just to fill you in a little bit Ned and to remind the listeners, my husband is in cancer treatment, and we he and I are spending weeks at a time in Seattle, and the kids are home managing themselves. It's like divine intervention for them to get rid of the micromanager in their life and to really have like, we are forced into this space of like, okay, I have to trust that you are going to follow through. Because Meanwhile, our district is all online. My son is starting high school. You know, it's all new. And I get to trust he can problem solve, he can get it done. He can stay off his phone and pay attention. And we had a conversation before I left, just saying, like, you know, and I said to him, so this is the beginning of high school. It's super weird. And you get to kind of decide the bricks you're gonna lay at the beginning of this, of this path, you know, and, and I love you, and I trust you, and, you know, basically, like, good luck. And I, like, I said, it's, it is, it's, it's both like, Oh, this is the worst timing, but it's also the best timing, because it's really forcing me to not hover. I'm not that bad of a hover, but I have hovering tendencies. So talk a little bit about that, like you talk about healthy sense of control. You told the story of, I love you too much to talk to argue about your homework, and yet parents are so terrified to for Well, I mean, we connected through Jessica Leahy, who is the queen of the Gift of Failure, right? We are still, yes, she is an amazing human being, and we know, we know mistakes are opportunities to learn. We know how important it is for our kids to fail and learn and get up and yet, God, we keep getting in the way. And so connect that with why it's impossible to develop intrinsic motivation if everyone else is holding responsibility for your schooling, etc. Well, yeah,

Ned Johnson 14:56
and let me, I'll make, I make a really quick word about one more quick. Word about, about stress tolerance, and it's this that we all, you know, we all understand this. You know, through stories, you know, through anecdotes, through our own experience. But it's important to recognize that this is scientifically true right down to the to the level. You know, neurons, okay, but the one of the most helpful things for people to know, one of the most helpful. There's sort of two key things that we think are the most important things to know about brain here's the first one. The single best predictor of mental health is how robust are the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala? How robust are those connections? And so this is what we talk about, that the outcome that we want for adolescents is they've sculpted and they've fostered as much connectivity between those two parts of the brain as possible, because that's what stress tolerance looks like when the let

Casey O'Roarty 15:53
me stop you. Let me stop you really quick, just to kind of talk about it in like, regular terms. So you mean the amount of of the relationship between like the amygdala, is that safety radar, it's that high stress. So we get freaky, and then we're able to calm down and come back to the prefrontal cortex. So when we move in that direction, when we practice that over and over and over, is that creating that robust connection, right?

Ned Johnson 16:19
It's the experience of, it's the experience of a tolerable stressor, not something that's overwhelming, right? That's toxic. It's the experience of having something stressful that you deal with, right? And you kind of go into the problem solving part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex activates, and when it does, it dampens down the stress response. Kind of hashtag I've got this, and the experience of doing that over and over increases those connections. So what's going on with your son and your daughter right now, with mom and dad off taking care of dad's health is giving them, you know, daily doses. Oh, wow. This is really intense. I've never actually, you know, done this. I mean, how are what are we? How are we going to figure this out? Well, Mom's not here, she's at the hospital. And so your son and your daughter put their heads together. Well, maybe she tried this. Maybe we should try that. And so so often when when kids are in difficult situations, they forgot their homework, whatever it is, right? We want to as parents, we don't want to see our kids suffer. And so we have this tendency to want to jump in and save them, for which they're grateful, for which we feel like, you know, we've got a cape. Whoo, I'm a superpower. But the problem is that saving our kids doesn't wire their brains. It actually can make the anxiety more because it creates in them this sense that someone other than them is at the core of their lives. Someone other than them is responsible for their safety, someone other than them is responsible for their success. And we do this out of love, but it's a terrible it's a terrible thing that we do to kids because we want and I mean, if I got hit by a truck tomorrow, and that was the end of me everyone My life would, for at least a short time, be be upset, I'd hope, you know, but then I'd want my kids to be able to dust themselves off after, you know, grieving for whatever you know, hours or days or weeks seem appropriate, and then say, well, life has to go on, you know, and in a perfect world that's already within them. Now, to pivoting to your point about motivation, the dominant model of motivation that we look at is something called self determination theory, and is one of the most supported models of the in all of

Casey O'Roarty 18:27
psychology. And self determination theory theory, self determination

Ned Johnson 18:31
theory, and it's a model of internal or intrinsic motivation, as opposed to extrinsic. So classically, if you think about school, carrots and sticks, if you do this all, you'll get an A if you do this, I'll give you a pat on the back. If you do this all, you know, you know, pain for allowance. I know you talked about, you know, paying for chores. You know, we use carrots, right? Or we threaten if you don't do this. So, you know, I'm going to take away your phone. You're never getting college. You know, something terrible. And these things work short term, sure, but long term, it's a terrible model, because you we want our kids, if you think about school just as an example, we all want our kids to be successful in school. We all want them to do well, but we would pause it fundamentally more than wanting them to do well. It's important for them to want to do well, you know, not to make mom or dad happy, not to improve their impress their teachers, but we want them to really engage with whether it's school or music or art or reading, whatever it is there be really into doing. So there's this, this model of self determination theory holds that to create intrinsic motivation, we need a balance of three things. We need a sense of competency, right? If I'm feel like I can't hit the tennis ball at all and everyone laughs at me, I feel like I'm the biggest dummy in my math class. I don't want to work harder to get better. I don't want to do it at all. Right? We need a sense of relatedness. And I know Jess talks about this, you know, so eloquently that the three R's. Teachers, the three R's of being a great teacher are relatedness, relatedness and relatedness, and this is true whether school or mom and dad, whether it's a coach. And the third piece is autonomy, that subjective sense that this is my life, I get choices. I could just I have a say over how I spend my time if I'm going to do this, how I get to do this. And I want, we want people to think about this as a three legged stool so often, I think you got you're out in Seattle, right? And Seattle, yeah. Okay. I thought, you know where I'm in Washington, DC area, which Bethesda, Maryland, just outside of DC, is the most educated place in the world. When you look at the percentage of people who went to college and graduate degrees, it's really because of NIH and and I thought there's the most intense place in the world. Turns out there are other places that are, you know, vying for that, for that title. But what happens is they care so so so much about how kids do educationally. They lean into that competency thing. Let's tutor everything you know second grade. Do your own private soccer coach, whatever. And they push, push, push. And even things like soccer and sports for little kids, we kind of weaponize it, right? Well, if you're going to be a college recruit, you better take this seriously. Not interested.

Casey O'Roarty 21:15
Yeah, pick your sport, and that's the sport. I mean, yeah, yep. And

Ned Johnson 21:20
with the thing that we want, and there's no problem. If your kid says, I love this, but I want to get better. Could you get me a teenager to coach me? Could you could if that's what the kid is asking for, awesome. It's that when we as parents think, wouldn't it be better if and we risk, you know, we can risk getting things out of balance, because when we push the competency we we risk under mining our relatedness with our kid. Mom isn't someone who loves to go, Oh, it's so fun to watch you play soccer, but who's critiquing and playing second coach all the time, and we undermine the autonomy. And so if you make, if you have a three legged stool, and one leg is two feet and the other one is a is a foot that's gonna topple over so and so, when we talked to one of the guy named Edward Deasy, who put forth this theory and has been researching this for decades, we said it's our sense that of the three of these, if we as parents were going to really focus on one and lean into it, it's the autonomy piece. And he said, Absolutely, because the longer kids are in school, the less autonomy they have. Think about the free time we get in kindergarten. And yet, you're a 17 year old girl and you have to raise your hand to go to the bathroom, the teacher says, No. How could I possibly know whether that girl really has a real read need real reason to need to go. You choose the ladies room. It's, it's just, it's, it's a terrible model. If we're trying to develop kids who are very quickly going off to be to be to go to college, to be colleagues, to be citizens that we need, we want to trust them with as much autonomy as they show that they can, they can handle even, even if im perfectly

Casey O'Roarty 23:01
so the relatedness piece, is that about relationship, or is that about what? Okay, so it's not necessarily like is this because I'm thinking about kids in school, you know, and how many things kids have to sit inside of, and they're thinking rightly so I'm never gonna use this in my life. So I was thinking relatedness around like, how well

Ned Johnson 23:27
it certainly can be. You know, this is something that I like, but the core of it is, is, is a, is an interpersonal connection for the person or people who are involved with

Casey O'Roarty 23:36
this. Okay, okay, great, great, great. I'm, I'm a die hard relationship, person. So that works. That works. Um, one thing, and I think this fits with this autonomy well, does fit with the autonomy conversation. One thing that's come up a lot. You know, we're in the middle of this pandemic, and school has completely transformed for most of our country. And so something that's coming up a lot in my in my community of parents of teenagers, is that there there's a lot of conversation around their kids, seemingly lacking any motivation for online school. And I think a lot of us also have a healthy amount of fear about what this time I mean, I don't really have a fear, because I'm thinking, listen, all the kids are having the same experience. It's not like there's a portion of the population that isn't getting normal schooling, and whatever normal schooling is anyway, you know, but there's a lot of fear around what is this going to do to our kids, for their futures, versus like, how might this be happening for our kids? What are your thoughts around just how kids and what are you seeing in your work and with your colleagues, around how kids. Are intersecting with this online school situation. Are you guys online? Out where you are? Yeah,

Ned Johnson 25:05
yeah, yeah. So it's interesting. My daughter's a is a high school junior, and school is entirely online for her. And my wife is actually share something with Jesse. She is a Latin teacher of all things, right? And so her school is all gone, gone online. So I've been, it's been interesting to hear her talk about the struggles connecting with her students. And my daughter had the same, you know, from the other side of the coin, talking about what school feels like. You know, there's a small cohort of kids for whom this is great, right? You know, they're introverts, right? And they go, you know, and they're and they and school many times are fewer hours. Certainly, one of the silver lines for a lot of kids is they're getting more sleep, or at least have the opportunity, because

Casey O'Roarty 25:46
there's so well rested right now. Oh

Ned Johnson 25:48
yeah, I was looking, there was a piece in The New York Times a couple weeks ago about some people are actually trying to study this. And it's, it's, um, experience is not monolithic, because for every kid, for who's sleeping better, their kids are sleeping more poorly because too many people and they can't get outside and exercise and but you know, for parents who are worried about what their kids are learning are not learning, certainly there's a small slice of America who may be your followers, certainly the people who work with with my test rep stuff, who have the idea that there are only 30 schools in the country and and their kid is toast if she doesn't get into one of those 30 schools, right? And so there, that's his third worry. But she can't take the SAT. But her grades aren't it's not a 4.0 anymore. And blah, blah, blah, and I, and I go back to the brain that she's developing matters more than does she get into number six on the ranking? You know? I mean, I laugh like the US News and World Report rankings just came out, and if I read this and saw this just in passing that the University of Florida is now ranked as the number six university in the country, and which it was, I was like, Huh, interesting. Because two decades ago, it was kind of held in a different view, right? And so and so they've done a lot of work, frankly, to look at the numbers, to change things. And the question is whether they've really changed the educational experience. Have they changed the numbers? So I say that only, only to say that you can get an incredible education anywhere, if you're, if you're sense that it's Harvard or bound, you know, Harvard or bust Well, or Stanford or bust out in your court. Well, well then, okay, sure, you know golf go full court stress like it's your job that schools disrupted, and somehow Stanford is not going to come together. But in our part of the reason we wrote this book is that there is so much anxiety among young people, and they get the Misbegotten idea that where they go to college is going to dictate the rest of their lives, and it's just the evidence doesn't support it. And now, Casey, I have no idea where you went to college. You didn't mention where I went to college. I did actually graduate college, and case listeners are worried. But other than that, you know, here's a piece of advice from the best college counselor on the planet, who I won't even give you a name, but she said, I thought

Casey O'Roarty 28:08
you were, I thought you were claiming that title for yourself. Now,

Ned Johnson 28:14
people are much more, much more sage than I bill and I have a mutual friend named Kathleen, who is the wisest person I've ever met, and she said I tried to tell people for 40 years, and they don't really listen to me. But that's okay. This is important. Whom you marry matters so much more than where you go to college right now, it is a fair question about is school being disrupted? What's being lost. For my part, I can't remember that much of what I learned in high school. I can remember bits and pieces, but you know how much and you as you talked about before, you know, kids like, Why do I even need this? So, you know, I said that there are two really important things that we think are the two most important things about brains. One was that the best predictor of mental health is that kind of connections between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala stress response. And the second one is that the best way to develop your brain is to work really hard at something you're interested in. Yeah. So there's a guy named Rita Larsen, whose work we look at in our book. And he was studying, how do teens become intrinsically motivated? What do they do? How does that happen? And he said, and found, it's not by dutifully doing your homework. It's not one more worksheet. Hey, I got another Amen. Woohoo. He said, it's through the passionate pursuit of pastimes, and that can be sports, that can be music, it's rock climbing, it's coding, it's it's small engine repair, it's anything in the world that kids find challenging, but challenging in a good way, like if they're really into this. I've been, I have a cabin in upstate New York. We've been in stock. Since Memorial Day, and I have been for the last 12 years rebuilding a stone wall. Now you can't tell by listening to me, but I am barely 510 and barely 160 pounds, so I am not built to move really large rocks. However I enjoy it. I have a pretty good head for visual, spatial for for Applied geometry. So this, for me is, it's, I can't tell you, and I'll be like, six hours into my wife is like, can you please stop and have lunch? It's two o'clock, right? I just, I'm completely engrossed. So I do worry about kids missing back, because so many of the ways they spend their time in school, yes, it's school, but it's also all the kind of ancillary things are into whether it's palms or soccer or whatever, you know, they're working really hard at. And so many of those things are also disrupted, along with trigonometry and French three. And so for me, if I as a parent, I'm trying to figure out, how can I give How can I create opportunities for my kids to still do those things that are really, really meaningful to them. Because, you know, as my colleague, Bill stixcher, is a clinical neuropsychologist, and I should point out, he has spent 35 years working with kids for whom learning is not easy, where things where things are hard, they have learning disabilities and behavioral issues and all kinds of things. And he said, as long as the kid has something that he's working on he said, I don't worry about you. I don't worry about you. I'll tell this story. It's a little it's a little funny, it's a little embarrassing about Bill, but he tells himself, so I'll do this. So he grew up just outside of Seattle, Washington, where you are. And he said, back, you know, so Bill just turned 70. He said, Now when I was in school to go to the University of Washington, you had to have a GPA of 2.5 he said, I was, I was a little bit of an overachiever. I had a 2.8 I still kind of kick myself for all that extra effort, right? He said, I never, I never. I never read past page 50 on any book. I handed everything. I really wasn't. I wasn't intellectually interested in anything. Yeah, I was, however, though a rock and roller, and he is, he's okay, he's got a really good ear. He's got a talent for it. And then when the Beatles came to town, everybody in the world wanted to and so rock and roll was the most important thing in his life. And he said, had this little room in my in my house, and I go upstairs and I'll go work on the song for half an hour, and then I'll do my homework, and I come down later having completely lost track of time, and three hours were spent. And he said, I'm absolutely convinced that that hard work of listening to song over and over and over and figuring out the chord structures and the solos of this high focus, high determined, you know, high effort, lower stress, is what wired my brain to be able to go pedal to the metal when I finally found things that are interesting. And he's 70 and he's still a clinical neuropsychologist, I know few people who work harder than he does, because he loves the things that he does, and he works hard at the things that matter to him.

Casey O'Roarty 32:44
And he graduated with a 2.6 everyone. That's the point of the story.

Ned Johnson 32:52
Well, it's funny, you know? He, this is funny too. He, you know? He, after Washington, he got into the PhD program in literature at Berkeley, which back then best program in the country is probably still top of whatever, you know, he said, but I got in there, and this goes back to the anxiety. He said, When I showed up there, I was so anxious, and there was a kind of things going on his life, he said, but I was so anxious, I kind of felt like imposter, because all these other people gone to Ivy League schools. He said, It was so anxious, I didn't hand in a single assignment for 20 weeks. 20 weeks nothing. He said, When I get underachievers, I'm like, top that. And then they threw me out. And he said, at first, I thought it was the biggest disaster of my life, right? I've ruined my whole life. And two months later, I realized it was the best thing that could ever happen. I was really good at it, but I wasn't meant to be a professor, an English professor of literature. It just, it wasn't, you know, I was good at it, but wasn't really my calling. And fast forward, he is the best neuropsychologist in Washington, DC, hands down. He it's hard for me to express how good he is at what he does helping kids who have very complex, neurologically atypical minds, and he helps figure out what's going on. It's exquisite. And so all I can say is, thank God. Yeah, thank God.

Casey O'Roarty 34:11
Something that is useful for me as I navigate the things that come up on my personal parenting journey is thinking about all of my friends who I know had a complete shit show of a teenage experience, who didn't go to college till later, or failed out, or, you know, got a GED and did something different, like it's and they're high functioning adults, and so that is useful to me. That's such

Ned Johnson 34:40
a good point. It's such a way. But we have a whole chapter in her book called alternate roots. And it's funny for anyone listening, if you you know, if you sat there and thought about the 50 people who, in your view, are the most successful in life, and then you made a separate list, and if you ranked the fifth, which you consider to be the 50 Best Colleges. Is in the country or the world, if you want to include Oxford or whatever. And then you tried, and then you looked at how much overlap was there between those 50 successful people and how high they placed. I know there'd be some who went to Harvard or Princeton or Stanford or whatever, but there'd be all sorts of people who went to Penn State or Purdue or community college, you know, who? Because we all want to be successful in ways that are meaningful to us, you know. And your your point about things going poorly, you know, for kids who you know, where the high school is a disaster is such an important one, because, particularly with issues of anxiety, they're people who think they're on a path for whatever, and then everything falls apart. And there's a woman named Adele diamond who's a guru on executive functions, and she has this love what I think is a lovely insight. And she said, when you talk about executive function, so you know, inhibition and planning, all these skills that we need to design and pursue meaningful lives. She says, if you're sad or you're lonely, tired, stressed or poor physical health, those executive functions will be impacted first and impacted most. So I don't know, maybe you are one of two lovely children. Your parents are great, but your dad gets cancer, and six months of your life are kind of wiped out because you're just doing your best to hold it together and keep your head above water while your parents try to make sure that your dad is healthy and your GPA doesn't stay where it was, because you didn't have the energy, you couldn't do it all right? And so, so part of this is is being sympathetic to ourselves, and part of this is being sympathetic to our kids and not catastrophize, and also kind of taking the long view. So I,

Casey O'Roarty 36:39
I have a long view. Yes, it's easier

Ned Johnson 36:42
for me to do this, and it's easier for Bill, because we've seen hundreds of kids who are disaster, I mean, a disaster when they're 14 or 16 or even 24 who end up coming out better 24

Unknown Speaker 36:55
what?

Ned Johnson 36:57
Well, yeah. So the two things on this so that one, so one of the things that's in the prefrontal cortex is the slowest part of the brain to develop. It doesn't it's not fully baked cognitively until age 25 plus or minus three. So probably plus three for boys, minus three for girls. Girls do everything better earlier than guys, right? Of course, as you know, emotionally, 30 for the motion cog, you know, the cognitive functions of emotion with the prefrontal cortex, 30 plus or minus three. So if you're, if you're an ADHD boy, there's a decent chance that your brain isn't until age 30, where some girls are at age 21 or something, and, and, you know, this may have some people like, you know, just want to put their head in the oven. Go, forget it. But, but it's, it's a, it's a reason for all of us to keep in mind that we never, never, never give up on a kid, and we don't let them give up on themselves, because we have these markers that by age 18 you should be able to do whatever. By age 23 you should be, well, that's nice, and that's on average. But really, nobody's the average, right? And and when we talk about resilience and all these kind of things, for so many of us, we can reflect back. I'm sure you can reflect that Casey on the hardest things in your life, and goodness, you wouldn't wish these on your kids. You'd really probably not go back and redo them. But for many of us, we wouldn't want to not have had those things happen, because there's such a source of strength for us. So you talked about oversharing, I tend to overshare a little too. So I had a my father was an alcoholic. He eventually drank himself to death. My mother struggled mightily with her mental health in and out of institutions. At some point, this kind of overwhelmed my developing nervous system, and I spent three months or so in seventh grade in a pediatric psychiatric hospital, not as cool as it sounds. And I mean, and yeah, I mean, before this. I mean, unfortunately for me, I was at a Chinese public school. School is easy for me, but I spent several years of my life getting the best grade in every class that I was in for years, but also thinking, Should I kill myself? But you know what? I also wanted my life to work out, and so at this point. I mean, I love my life. You know, people seem to kind of like to spend time with me. You know, my wife is great, my kids are great. You know, not without Well, we're not all without our flaws. But if you looked at me at seventh grade and said, This guy was going to have a life that I have now, you like, right? So it's a way for us, if you take that and the Adele diamond point, it's a way for us, when we have kids are having a hard time, that we don't have to be afraid that, because life is sucky now it's going to be sucky later, because when we start to stress, we want to take more control. We take that control away from our kids, and we make their problems harder, and we've now become part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Casey O'Roarty 39:55
Oh Ned, thank you so much for sharing that. I just want to take a second. And really encourage the listeners to let what was just shared sink in, because I know that there are parents right now that are deeply, deeply concerned. You know? I mean, there's already just teenage experience, but this overlapping of pandemic and quarantine and pulling back of the curtain. I mean, uncertainty has always been there. I think that is something that is alive in your book, like being with the unknown, but it feels as though, the last year it's like right up in our face, like there's no religion now people like truly, there is the unknown in front of us. And so, of course, we're sitting in this puddle of, oh my god, right? And then our energy is being poured out into our kids, who are, then, in turn, holding this space of what's the point, you know, and I hear you talking, you know, going back to I fully believe, I mean, even my own educational journey, I did what I needed. I got the grades I needed to get to keep driving my car, because my grades were tight whether or not I was allowed to drive my car. I got into college. Yeah, I got into college and partied my ass off until it became like, oh, shoot, I have to do a bare minimum to not get kicked out of college, which I did. And then I discovered sociology, and I was so intrigued by reading about the 60s and the civil rights movement and Freedom Summer and learning about feminism and learning about, you know, the sociology of the family. And then so I eked out my, you know, a BA and then I was a bartender for a while, and then I wanted to be his teacher. And so it became something that I wanted to do. And it turned out, all I had to do was show up sober, do the work and school, no longer was this thing that was really difficult. I pulled a four point out without even I mean, I wouldn't say without trying, because I did try, but I didn't have to try that hard because I was so interested in it, right? So I'm thinking about a lot of kids right now who are bumping up against this lack of motivation, this unknown future, who, also, from the parents perspective, don't seem to have any other thing other than maybe scrolling tick tock or, you know, just like passively consuming YouTube or Netflix, and it feels really it just like the feeling of hopelessness, whether or not it's like real or if we're just worried like it just feels so palpable right now for parents, how do what are your thoughts around continuing with The autonomy, continuing with the relationship, which is something I talk about all the time, but encouraging them in that, not incompetence, meaning, like, you have to get all A's, but really, like, how about a hobby? Like,

Ned Johnson 43:12
it's a really, it's a really good point, you know. And one thing I would point out from your story is that we never know when someone's when a kid is going to find something that lights him up. We never know when it when a kid is going to find make a connection that makes her think, this is what I want to do. And we have this kind of artificial sense that you're supposed to be doing such and such by eighth grade, or by the time you graduate high school, or by the time to graduate college, right? And we kind of look at the people who seem to be nailing the whole thing and think, Well, if only my kid were like that. And of course, that's not the way the world works, you know? It's it's so much serendipity, you know, I would say, for if you have kids are heading towards college, my biggest piece of advice is to look at the rate my professor and find the professors who seem to have that Mojo, that juice that everybody loves, because it almost doesn't matter what you know your kid's going to want to work hard at that,

Casey O'Roarty 44:09
that relatedness is off the charts, right, right?

Ned Johnson 44:14
You know, for those of us who have kids who are school age right now, and all that they want to do is be on their devices. It's a concern. It's a concern. But I would always start with empathy. And we're working on a second book right now called What do you say? Sort of talking with kids to develop empathy, to you know, to promote change for the you know, to you know, promote the pursuit of happiness. Blah, blah, blah, and we're just working on the chapter about technology right now. And so often what happens is, I think, and maybe it's just me, but I kind of doubt it, where I'm on technology, a lot part of that's work, and some of that's fun, but I can rationalize every minute that I'm on a computer or phone. And. I look at my daughter and wonder what she's doing that kind of, why are you on that? Right? Right?

Casey O'Roarty 45:05
Totally. Are you spying on me, right? And of course,

Ned Johnson 45:07
my favorite thing about that question is it's not a question, it's an accusation with a question mark thrown at the end, just for window dressing, right? And if we really want to, and I know you make this point case, if we really want to change help. Help change kids behavior, if we focus on that relationship we have with them. And so if your kid is on tick tock, you know, spend time trying to understand. We had a talk we give. This was one of the most painful things I've ever experienced. It was a talk we give in his school, and there was his father, and I know who he is socially, and he's worth about a half a billion dollars. He's in her anyways, long so everything in the world. And he was an older dad, and he has this little guy who's about five or six, and all his kid wanted to do was just hide in his room and be honest on whatever game he was playing or whatever he was doing. Maybe he was seven, and the dad was telling this, and he was shaking with fury. He was so frustrated. But it also felt you could just feel just how heartbroken he was, because he has this little person whom he just loves, who doesn't want to be with him. And you think, Oh, my God, you have, you have everything in the world except for that happiness that you want, right? And so I said, what was he doing? And he said, he's playing some kind of game. I said, Well, do you know what game he's playing? And I don't really know anything about video games because I'm old. And he said, I don't know something stupid. And I felt that pain. I mean, that pain was real. My kid is choosing to spend, you know, spend 10 hours a day, or whatever it was, with his nose and a phone, rather than be with me and how rejected that must feel. But the solution to this was for the dad to change his behavior and change his energy, not, not to ask a five or six or seven, whatever the kid was, change his behavior. And so if you said, Well, let's find out what this game who's, who's the coolest character on here to be? So you know, who's the latest Tiktok store. So why they do that? I don't even understand, you know. And try to be as curiously as in you hopefully you can fake it so we make it right. As curious as you can about how kids what, what they're doing, because I think so often what we have this tendency to want to do is to exert power over kids, and it's a fool's errand, particularly with technology teenagers,

Casey O'Roarty 47:23
right? We

Ned Johnson 47:24
want to exert influence, and the way that we exert influence is by, is by showing care and respect, right? And that's how, and that's how we make those connections. So, you know, for so, so for me, I would recognize that if kids are spending a lot of time on technology and you're worried about it. First start by trying to understand is, you know, for for probably several, several conversations, what are they doing? What's it? Why is it valuable to them? Don't start out by assuming that's a waste of time, and that's likely to put you in a much more powerful position, much more influential position. I should correct myself by creating that connection, but also you can then validate here that looks like it's really cool. I love that, you you know, and your friends seem to all be playing Fortnite and but that, I know it's so hard because you don't get to see them, and it seems, is that really how you stay connected? Yeah, it is. And, blah, blah, blah. I do have some concern, you know, that that I can, as a dad, watch you be on this thing, you know, seven hours a night that just feels like it's a little too much. Can Can we kind of work out a plan? And this is the collaborative problem seven, of course, you talk so much about of how we can make a plan that everyone, everyone is part of making, so therefore it's easy for everyone to abide by. Mm, hmm.

Casey O'Roarty 48:44
Yeah, I love that. And listeners, you know that I have the teens and screens mini Summit coming up, and we're going to talk even more about all thing teens and screens. So thank you for that opportunity to plug Ned,

Ned Johnson 48:56
you bet. And that's the hardest one for everyone, right? Every time, you know, yeah, when, when the first question we get from a mom or dad is not about technology, we look at each other like, how did that happen? Right?

Casey O'Roarty 49:08
Well, especially right now. I mean, I think we've all loosened up so much, and now we're like, Oh shoot. Now I'm in an even tougher situation. But, but going back to, I'm just, I just have to ask this one more time. But going back to those really discouraged kids right now, I love, I love the autonomy. You also say in your book, becoming kind of a broken record around it's your call, right? It's your call. So can you talk about that statement in the context of a student who's feeling really from the parents perspective, I think this is important, right from the parents perspective, their teen seems to be really lacking in desire to show up for online school. How can you support us with the it's your call. Handing over that energetic responsibility when it feels like, oh my gosh, they're just not even going to log on. How do we sit with that? Well, I

Ned Johnson 50:09
mean, part of it is starting with accepting the fact that you could it couldn't possibly be your job as a parent to make your kids show up online and care. It couldn't possibly be, you know, because, if, you know, if he wanted to, he could just, he could just turn it off. He can put his head down. He can put the computer under the desk and lie and lie on the desk itself. There's just, you know, in so we don't want to put ourselves in a such a disempowered position, because then, because then we're really highly ineffective. If your kid can just, you know, check out by simply closing his eyes. That's not where. That's where we want to be. I'm also with. We're back to the empathy of being really sympathetic, empathetic, sympathetic with the fact that school sucks. Yeah, right, online, it sucks, right? Because why do most kids want to go to school to be with their friends? Yeah, to be with their friends. And the best teachers, the best teachers are all about creating connection. But now even the best teachers are fighting with one hand behind their back, or one hand, you know, allocated to a mouse. It's just hard. And so I would just, I would, I'm trying to be as sympathetic as possible. And what I, you know, with so my daughter was for three months, school refusal at the end of eighth grade, full school refusal. Now I'm a guy who helps people get into college. What's going through my head, right?

Casey O'Roarty 51:26
Oh, listen, we could share stories my friend. I'm sure we could. Let's

Ned Johnson 51:29
have a glass of wine and discuss, right? And so part of it is, you know, when things are going well, asking, what's the coolest part of your day, right? And when things aren't going well, trying to understand what about that was hard. And you know, we talk about, we have a chapter on our book called, you know, parents as consultants, right? That we want to get, we want to get out of the business of thinking ourselves, thinking of ourselves as managing our kids. It's our job to manage their education. That's not a good place for you or your kids. You want to think of yourself as a consultant, and so we start by trying to understand their perspective, and then say, may offer suggestion. And I would say this important that we offer advice. We don't give advice, right? We, we, you know, so you want to ask permission, because when you ask permission, hey, can, can I? Can I make a suggestion there by conferring, it may sound wackadoodle, but by conferring some autonomy to the kid, it lowers her stress response. She doesn't think I'm just going to come charging right at her. Lowers her stress response, and makes that thinking, rational prefrontal cortex, part of the brain, come back online, so it's more likely that she's going to hear what I have to say, because obviously, we as adults, we have all sorts of suggestions. Now, of course, what parents say, Well, what if she says, No, then you go, Okay, well, if you change your mind, let

Casey O'Roarty 52:51
me know. Yeah, right,

Ned Johnson 52:52
because I don't know about you, Casey, I have yet to have the experience of having someone tell me they don't want my advice, giving it to them anyway. And have, oh, hey Ned, thanks a lot for completely disregarding my feelings you.

Casey O'Roarty 53:06
But yeah,

Ned Johnson 53:09
and so you know this is again. And I say this, this is knowing for Well, this year is just gonna be hard, yeah, right. And your kids are gonna be up and down and sometimes and foul losing, like, have no idea, I'll tell the story. So So Bill and I were riffing on this the other day, my daughter her first day of school. Partly, there was some jet lag, because she'd been sleeping until noon, and all of a sudden she was up at eight. But on the surface of it, looks so much better. Yep, it looked like she had a great start to school. She kind of bounced out of bed. No one had to wake her up. She made herself, or, you know, kicks, or whatever. She had product placement, right? And then, you know, goes off to class, right? And I can hear up there talking, and she's chatting with the teachers and chatting with her friends. I'm like, This is awesome. And by the end of the day, something had turned and I have no idea. I have no I still don't have any idea what it was. And she was sullen and sulky and mad. And I don't, I don't know it was a teacher, it was a classmate. I have no idea. And so I leaned in as chairman said, you know, hey, what's you look really sad. I said, is anything that can help with? Just shrugged her shoulders, and I asked three or four more questions, maybe three more questions like that. And just shrugged her shoulders, and she kind of like her dad. Well, when she gets mad, she just kind of, you know, sits in a cave, as it were, and so my Okay, well, I wasn't going to push too much, so then I tried a little bit of, you know, the kind of, you know, balloons and clown like, hey, you know, and try to, you know, distract her with something fun. And then my my wife did the same thing. And but the second time she tried, and my wife tried, and my daughter was not taking the bait. But I can see my wife opening her mouth again. I just gently walked over. I said, it seems to me that for some reason, we don't understand she's upset. And it also seems to me that for right now, for right now, that's where she needs to be, or that's where she wants to be. And I think that we should, I think we should respect that. And. Part because, and there come a couple of things that came to mind. One, if we go back to thinking about stress tolerance and resilience in a perfect world, you have a bad day, and you can and you can, but you can get yourself back to baseline. Your kid has a hard day, but she can come up with reasons to go, go back to being in a better mood, as opposed to without my dad or my mom trying to turn me up, I'm toast, right? And if we keep trying to, you know, give these, you know, you've got to be happy. You've got to be happy. It's also given the message that being sad, it's that's not an okay emotion for you to have. We've got to do it as my dad, I'm sure Dad, I'm so worried that I have to change that. And of course, heart emotions have their place too, right? If you're not upset when some when you're you know when, when you're when your grandmother died, then there's probably something not quite right in that relationship. And then the last piece, because we talk about this idea being a consultant, is that if our kids having a hard day, if we seem so intent on getting them out of those bad emotions, we can be kind of unintentionally, given the message that I can only handle you when you're when you're in a good place. And so then when things are really hard, her little light bulb goes off and says, I can't talk to dad about that, right? My whole experience. And of course, it's when things are really a mess that we desperately hope that our kids will come run to us and say, this is, I'm overwhelmed by this. Can you help? You

Casey O'Roarty 56:23
know? And that just brings me right back to, well, I always, and you get this too, I'm sure, from parents, where they want you to, like, but, yeah, but Okay, great. But how do I deal with XYZ? Like, okay, all this is great, but what do I do when my kid, you know, and I'm coming to like, of course, you know our kids that are having a hard time transitioning into this online learning environment, we get to maintain relationship, make sure the message of love gets through, and let them know that we trust that they can figure it out. We're not going anywhere. We're here for support. And they get to, they get to be in the driver's seat in the best possible way, you know? And what happens then, like, like, and I think the personal growth for the parents here is doing whatever it is, supports us in in staying out of it. Like, it's easy to say, be the consultant. It's a different thing to actually be the consultant. It's a different thing to say, can I offer some thoughts and have them say no and then not continue to offer thoughts like, that's the personal growth. That's where you as a parent get to say, Okay, guess what? I get to evolve right now as a human being. And just because it's uncomfortable for me, I know this is actually what I'm being called into right now, closing my mouth, having patience, trusting the process. So I just really so appreciate your

Ned Johnson 58:02
work. And I can add one point to that. I mean, so often again, because we love our kids, we want to solve problems and we want to make them go away as quickly as we can. But it also occurs to me, there's a one. There's a wonderful article in The Atlantic and from May about parenting in an anxious time. It's wonderful. And yeah, you touched

Casey O'Roarty 58:21
it already.

Ned Johnson 58:22
You really right? And in there, in there they have, they look at the work of a guy named Eli Liebowitz, who runs this, what's called the Space Program at Yale University, and supporting parents of anxious childhood, emotions, something like that. And it finds that when parents go through this training, it is as helpful in treating the anxiety of their kids as if their kids went through CBT. So the kids do nothing. It's just for the parents, because what so often happens is when kids are upset or frustrated or really intense emotions, we want to lower their emotions, to make them feel better, but also to make us feel better, yes. And so one of the hard, hard, hard, hard things as a consultant, as a parent, is to sit there and just be with our kids while they're having a hard time. There's this beautiful there's a the movie Ray, about Ray Charles, right? And so he's so he's 789, whatever, and he's, I forget, I can't remember the details of it, but he's, he's become blind. He wasn't blind before, and now he's blind childhood illness. And Ray, so little ray, is sitting there in the in the family's cabin, and he's calling out for he's fallen and he's calling out for his mom. Now his mom is there. It's like one room, you know, house, or he's in the kitchen, whatever, calling out for mommy, mommy, and he's really upset. And everything, you know we watch this, and everything in your every five of your bean wants to go and just pick up this little Kinsey. So it's okay, sweetheart, it's okay. It's okay. But she knew she couldn't do that. She needed to the ability to learn to navigate. Eat the world. So she sat there, and she says nothing, and Tears are coming down the face this guy says, such a moving thing. And he's sitting there, and he's calling for his, calling for his, calling her. And then he hears a train go in the distance, and he stops crying, and he turns his head, and he listens. And then they orients towards the tea kettle that's burgling, right? And then he hears a cricket. It was like his pet cricket. And he sort of makes his way over, and he gets the crick in his hands, and he puts it up to his feet. He puts it up to his ear, and then he turns and he looks right at her that he can't see anymore, and smiles, and he says, and I can hear you too, mom. Oh, it's so good. Oh, my God, it's so good, right? And so one of the hardest things in the world for us as parents is when our kids are having hard feelings is just to be with those feelings. Yeah, yeah, easy to say, hard to do.

Casey O'Roarty 1:00:46
I understand, yeah, yes, yes, yes, and not impossible. Just because it's hard doesn't mean don't do it, people. It means practice, practice, practice. And the more you practice, you know, easier it gets.

Ned Johnson 1:00:59
And what happens is, you know, so we have a chapter in a book called a non anxious presence, and there's a whole bunch of literature, Mike, I mean, all this really cool stuff, even epigenetics. But what they find is that the model of this is that when you as a mom, when me as a dad, when I when we can be non anxious, even when things really hard, and you tell yourself this is going to be fine in your head. I have no idea how this is going to work out, but this is going to be, you know, and you, and you can be a non anxious presence. We know that stress is contagious, so if I freaked out, I freaked you out, back and forth, and then we're off to the races. But calm is contagious too, yes, so when you can submit, all right, I don't know what happens if I am calm when my kid is upset, if it calms her amygdala again, that problem solving part of her brain can go back online, and she can start to figure out solutions for herself, which is way better than me giving her the solutions. And she comes away with a sense that I solve this for myself. How by my simply being there and kind of imitating a bowl of, you know, cold spaghetti, I oh

Casey O'Roarty 1:02:04
my gosh, I could talk to you for like, three more hours. So you're gonna have to come back on the podcast. This is so great, so I don't want to be done, but I'm looking at the time, so I'm gonna wrap us up in the context. This is a question I ask all my my guests. So in the context of all that we've discussed and your work, what does joyful courage mean to you?

Ned Johnson 1:02:30
Oh, what a fun question. What a sort of paradoxical, you know, and where my brain goes to, you know, idea. Well, I guess I take this, this may be just a slice of it. Um, that that when people, I think people, mistakenly think of courage and fear as opposites, but they're not. Courage is only exemplified, demonstrated, experienced when you're afraid because you weren't afraid. It doesn't take anything to be courageous, right? And so courageous is doing the things that you know to be true, that you know to be valuable, that are your true north, even when you're afraid, to do them right? And that's just and that's just hard to do, right? And so from my experience, the joyful part of this is that it can be deeply satisfying to do the things that are important, even when, even when they're hard, to do the real joyful part of it probably comes back in the in the telling of it later. Yeah, I'm a big fan of Daniel Kahneman Thinking Fast and Slow, named Amos Tversky, who talks about in terms of what our life is like, there's the experiencing self, and then there's remembering self. And so all the things that are hard in life, right? All the things that are hard in life, we reflect on them later. And these are the sources. These are the touchstones. This is inside out. You know that wonderful movie that we look at? Yeah, they create the milestones of the of the the narrative of our lives, right? And so to joyfully go into things that are hard may overstate it, you know, and maybe, like you've got to be kidding me, Ned, right? But, but to recognize that this is how we grow, and how we help our kids grow. And you know, we know that this year is going to be so hard, but I keep thinking. I remember when my, when my my son was 10, and he is this total rock contour and sort of vaguely a fabulous thing. He just makes up things like that's not quite how I remember it. But and I have a, I have a dear friend who's linguistic psychologist, and he and he said, he said, This is how, in this case, little boys who talk about, about how people are kids. He said, This how little boys create their their hero narratives, right? And so he's telling himself the story. Whether it happened the way he remembered or not, does not matter. It's how he experienced it. And so when we think about this whole covid world, I kept thinking about there all these things would be so hard for all of us. But when the hero goes. Into the cave to slay the dragon. He doesn't do it holding mommy or daddy's hand. Yeah.

Casey O'Roarty 1:05:10
Mic drop.

Ned Johnson 1:05:13
Who's gonna Instagram it if you're not there? My God, you've got to save this for you know.

Casey O'Roarty 1:05:20
So good. Where can listeners find you and follow your work? Ned?

Ned Johnson 1:05:24
Well, our website is the self driven child, calm or self driven child? I think I've got every your URL that's ever close. My Twitter handle is at Ned Johnson, so you can, but if you really, you can Google anything if you type in stick Street, S, T, i, x, r, u, d, there's only one bill sticks through in the world, Ned Johnson. The other guy is like the founder of fidelity, so sometimes people confuse us, but at Ned Johnson and

Casey O'Roarty 1:05:53
perfect, perfect. I'll make sure those are in the show notes. Thank you so much. This was such a great conversation. Thanks so much.

Ned Johnson 1:06:00
Oh, what a delight. Thanks.

Casey O'Roarty 1:06:07
Thank you so much for showing up and listening in on another show. I'm so incredibly grateful for the joyful courage community. There are so many ways to stay connected beyond the podcast. You can follow joyful courage on Facebook and Instagram. You can join one of the Facebook groups live in love with joyful courage, or joyful courage. For parents of teens, word is that both of these communities are some of the most compassionate and supportive spaces for parents to really show up in all of their authenticity and all of their vulnerability and feel seen and supported. I am incredibly proud of that. If you want to take it up a notch, you can join the Patreon community. There you get to catch live streams of the solo shows twice a month. We have monthly group calls and so much more. Check that out at patreon.com/joyful. Courage. That's P, A, T, R, E, O n.com/joyful, courage. Head over there. Check it out. And as always, you're welcome to offer thoughts and feedbacks directly to me at Casey, at joyful courage.com. I read and respond to all of my emails. Big thanks to my team for all the ways they support my work. My editor, Chris Mann from pod shaper, and my project manager, Tay, who does more behind the scenes than you can ever imagine, I will be back next week with a brand new show until then, find your breath, release the tension in your body, move up and into the balcony seat and trust that everything is going to be okay.

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