Chronic stress is rampant among our children and youth nowadays. These circumstances could include pressures from completing assignments, college admissions, homework, social integration with their peers, and so on. However, these situations are usually harmless so why the increase in toxic stress, chronic anxiety, depression, addictions, and self-harm? According to the book, The Self Driven Child: The Science and Sense of Giving your Kids More Control over their Lives, it is due to a lack of self-control in children’s lives. Authors William Stixrud, a clinical neuropsychologist, and Ned Johnson, founder of an educational company called PrepMatters, have worked extensively with children and youth for over 20 years and have paired up to write about the importance of encouraging children to have self-control.
Why Agency Matters
The authors have studied that a healthy sense of control is related to good physical and mental health, academic success, and overall happiness. Without the ability to make meaningful choices, kids feel powerless and overwhelmed. Even if their parents offer many opportunities and resources, they will often not thrive because of them.
The authors claim that many parents have the sense that there is one linear route toward success. In those instances, they believe that if their children have one setback, they won’t be successful down the line (i.e., they will not enter a good university, not get a good job that will give them financial and domestic security, etc.). These same parents fear the child will make the wrong choices and suffer in even smaller routine areas, such as completing their homework on time.
According to these authors, if children had more agency, even if they made poor choices, that very suffering would help them become resilient and make better choices in the future. They also claim that always knowing what is happening locally and globally through the internet has made all of us more afraid to let our teens make choices and go out in the world. Quite the contrary, we actually have been living in much safer times than our own grandparents did.
Our duty, therefore, is to be more like a consultant with our children and teens. It may be difficult to believe or even enact, however, it is the best way to help children make decisions for themselves to become more independent and, therefore, less stressed. The parent’s role is to help the child make informed decisions. We are wiser and hope to guide our children throughout their lives, but how we espouse our values and wisdom onto them must be done in a way that children still feel that they have a sense of control about their lives.
Here are some quick tips on how you can start being a “consultant.” When helping your child or teen make an informed decision, let him/her know:
- That you trust him/her.
- That you are present, and you will support him/her.
- That you will help him/her think through what kinds of information he/she needs to make a good decision.
An example will help solidify the last point: “I know you want to do this. Let’s think through the pros and cons. Let’s also think about a Plan B in case it doesn’t work out the way you want it to.” When it doesn’t work out the way the child wanted it to, you will ask, “How do you think we should handle it?”
Through these negotiations, you can help your child “gird against setbacks,” and frame missteps not as failures but as signals that it is time to come up with another plan, inshaAllah, God willing.
The authors give six specific reasons why children need to have a sense of control:
1. Science is on our side.
Neurologically, the child’s or teenager’s prefrontal cortex (the front part of our brain that makes higher-order decisions) are not fully matured. However, when they are given room to decide, it allows them to feel in charge in other situations. This is what happens internally:
- The brain learns to protect itself from the stress of feeling helpless when it is given hard choices.
- The child has more internal motivation to go through with a task.
- The experience a child has from managing his/her stress and overcoming their own challenges helps the prefrontal cortex mature and helps regulate the emotional part of their brain.
2. Kids don’t want to feel like an empty extension of their parents.
The more parents force their children to do something, the more children are likely to rebel against them. Even for those children who do comply with their parents’ decisions, they usually grow up feeling like impostors if they succeed. Children need to feel that they accomplished something on their own. They need to feel that their parents are confident in their ability to make informed decisions about their own lives and that they will learn from their own mistakes.
3. Giving kids a sense of control is the only way to teach them competency - in decision making and in whatever skill they’re learning.
When we negotiate with our children and let them make a decision, they become more competent in their decision-making skills and whatever new skill they are learning at any given time. Key to this is the need to experience the consequences of their choices.
4. You don’t always know what is best.
The authors claim that there are many paths to success and sometimes people will find the right one by getting a little lost. There are many opportunities to give our children choices, such as which sport they would like to play as an extracurricular. In those moments, we feel like we know what’s best, but it helps to ask them and let them try out what they like. Of course, you keep playing the role of a consultant where you help them to make an informed decision.
5. Kids are capable. Really.
Author and neuropsychologist, William Stixrud, found that children were consistently able to make a decision at least as good as the one an adult might make for them. Of course, the parents still have to give the pros and cons of a choice and then let them decide. A study had found that 14-, 18-, and 21-year-olds made the same decisions experts would recommend for the situation presented in the experiment. Whereas, 9-year-olds' scores in their decision-making skills were only slightly lower. Further research has found that 14- and 15-year-olds have the ability like that of adults to make rational decisions because most of their cognitive processes have reached adult levels by then.
6. Good decision making requires emotional intelligence. Kids need to learn what matters to them.
While knowledge and wisdom are important for decision-making, how we feel about a situation is integral to the process. Evaluating whether something is right or wrong, beneficial, or harmful is best done when we are tuned in to our emotions. Kids should pay attention to the emotions they are feeling, know how to label them, and learn to manage those feelings when presented with a similar situation again. For example, if a child feels angry about a sibling not sharing a toy with him/her, then we need to help them recognize their feelings and then help them decide how they want to manage the situation at hand.
At the end of each chapter, a “What to do tonight” list is given for parents to follow for themselves and for their children. The actions listed are easy to do and are helpful. Moreover, the authors address many frequently asked questions. Children who are neurodivergent, of different temperaments, or who are at-risk are also considered in these FAQs. I feel that the authors have done a thorough job at coaching parents and answering their concerns throughout the book.
An Islamic Perspective
One question asked by one of their parent clients was on the topic of how to ensure their child will follow their faith and religious practices, while cultivating a sense of control. The response was that children usually go along with what their parents do. Therefore, it is important to model the religious practices you want your children to follow and involve them as well. If they have questions about their faith, answer as honestly as you can. Lastly, if they give you trouble in attending the masjid, for example, or keeping up with their salah, prayer, then the authors suggest treating them respectfully and using the collaborative problem-solving approach to find a mutually agreeable situation.
Types of Stress and What Causes It
Quite simply, a sense of control is an antidote to stress - “stress of the unknown, the unwanted, and the feared. Sonia Lupien at the Centre for Studies on Human Stress has a memorable acronym to outline what factors cause stress in humans – N.U.T.S.
Novelty: something you have not experienced before
Unpredictability: something you had no way of knowing would occur
Threat to the Ego: your safety or competence as a person is called into question.
Sense of Control: you feel you have little to no control over the situation
Situations with any of these factors happen throughout our lives, however, how we manage them is what makes us either resilient or more anxious and afraid. But there are types of situations where most people react the same way, causing high levels of stress that are toxic. These situations can include the death of a loved one, abandonment, violence, and more.
According to the authors, there are additional situations which are not dire, but are being perceived as dire that are causing toxic levels of stress among our youth, unfortunately. This is what they are bringing to our attention and trying to mitigate before it becomes an ongoing issue for generations. These perceived dire situations include college admissions, having the best grades throughout one’s school career, being socially integrated among one’s peers, interviewing for jobs, and so on. These are stressful situations, but they need not cause toxic stress.
There is no way that we can live stress free. We must understand the stresses that are quite normal in our lives. Here are the three types of stress outlined in the book:
Positive stress: Children and adults are generally motivated to grow, take risks, and perform at a high level. Think of the nervousness a child feels while preparing for a school play. If they push through it they will feel accomplished and have a sense of pride after acting in the play. Ultimately, they know they have control over whether they perform at all and, hence, they are more likely to persevere..
Tolerable stress: This type of stress occurs for brief periods and can also build resilience. These situations can include watching one’s parents argue a lot as they are going through a divorce or moving houses to a completely new neighborhood or state. In these instances, it is important to have supportive adults present, and kids must have time to cope and recover during and after the situation is over. If the parents are talking to their child throughout the process and giving the child time to recover, then the stress is tolerable. Even in cases of bullying, if it does not happen too often or last for too long, and the child has caring adults supporting him/her through it, then the stress is tolerable.
Toxic Stress: This type of stress involves frequent or prolonged activation of the stress system in the absence of support. These situations can include witnessing continuous assault, losing a loved one to unforeseen circumstances (i.e., gang violence, sudden car crash), or being overwhelmed with work with no respite. If these situations are coupled without a supporting adult minimizing exposure to these situations or not comforting and talking them through it, then the child will indeed experience toxic stress. This sort of stress does not prepare kids for the real world and can damage their ability to thrive.
Therefore, these three elements that are key for a child to thrive when faced with any stressful situation:
- A supportive adult who comforts and talks to them about the situation.
- Time to recover from the stressful event.
- Having a sense of control over the situation.
Lastly, it is important for the parent to be a non-anxious presence in a child’s life because it has been studied that stress is contagious. When one person is stressed in front of another, the other person is likely to catch on to those stressful feelings because of our mirror neurons. Therefore, parents need to make their calmness “contagious” to their children. This topic is a chapter on its own and it covers how we can instead make enjoying our kids a top priority, commit to our own stress management, make peace with our worst fears, and adopt an attitude of nonjudgmental acceptance.
After reading this book, I did much reflection on my own parenting. My children are still pre-school age, howeve,r they are already practicing independence in whatever capacity they can. The authors had suggested giving choices to children at this age. As a home educator, I will put this into practice by giving them more choices. Whether that is in choosing to do one subject or the other that day (both already planned), or which shirt they want to wear. Moreover, I feel that both my children have been more attentive when I have taken a collaborative approach when making larger choices. They usually choose the more sound choice and feel respected. In fact, they are more calm afterwards and do not throw any tantrums. This book is indeed a good guide in learning how to use a negotiative approach with our children.
There are many guidelines in this book that can help parents encourage their children to be self-driven, and hopefully less anxious and more resilient in whatever problems they face when they go out into the real world, inshaAllah, God-willing.
Sumayya Khan is a homeschooling mother of two and a teacher. She has worked with several Islamic schools and organizations in the last 10 years. She is currently teaching Literature online with Dawanet and studying the Qur’an through Al-Huda Institute. In her free time, she loves to spend time with her family and friends, play sports, enjoy nature, and read books. She currently resides with her family in Toronto, Canada.
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