The Gift Of Failure, The Addiction Inoculation, Making Your Life Your Argument & More

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life Podcast.

The younger a kid is when they first try drugs and alcohol, the higher their lifelong statistical risk of developing substance use disorder is. If you can get them all the way to 18 or 21, we can get that risk down nearly to 10%, which is really what it is in the general population. 90% of people who have substance use disorder in adulthood say that they started drinking, raising drugs before age 18.

Faith.

Family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show.

All right, folks, I'm stoked because my guest on today's podcast is not only going to be featured in my upcoming book on parenting, but she also herself is a prolific author. She's written the Gift of Failure, how the Best Parents Learn to Let Go so Their Children Can Succeed. She's written the Addiction Inoculation Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence. You may have heard her on the Tim Ferriss podcast as an educational expert who has taught every grade from 6th to 12th in both public and private schools. She spent five years teaching in drug and alcohol rehab for adolescents in Vermont. She serves as a prevention and recovery coach at sto, which is a medical detox and recovery center. And she writes a lot about education, about parenting, about child welfare. You may have also seen her in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the New York Times. She's even wrote the educational curriculum for Ambulance, Amazon Kids animated series, which is actually an award winning animated series, the Stinky and Dirty Show. And she was also a Pushcart Prize nominee for her creative nonfiction magazine essay, I've Taught Monsters. So her name is Jessica Leahy, and as Jessica was just sharing with me before we began recording, she's probably in the most perfect podcasting environment ever because it's apparently very quiet where you're at, Jessica.

It is. It's eerily quiet. And that's because I dropped my youngest kid off at college yesterday. So we are officially empty nesters. And it's weird. The house is just big and empty and echoey and quiet.

It's perfect. It's perfect. This is the perfect podcast guest. Someone in a forsaken home. So how many kids do you actually have?

I have two. The oldest one is 23 and he's off doing like a real job and everything. He's fully launched. And then I have a younger daughter and her name is Phoebe and she is actually. She's trans and she just started college yesterday. So it's just. It's Been a big couple of years for us around here.

You know what actually turned me on to you in the first place was I think that interview with, with Tim Ferriss. I hadn't heard of you before. And what caught my attention was the part about the gift of failure. Because one thing that I do with my sons each night is we replay our entire day like a movie in our mind, like this process of self examination. And then we ask ourselves what good did I do and where was I most purpose filled? And then finally, what could I have done better or what failure did I experience that I could have learned from? And it seems to me that you have done dug into this quite a bit and even wrote a book called the Gift of Failure. So I'd like, if possible, to start there. Tell me about this gift of failure and why you wrote it.

I actually was teaching middle school at the time when I wrote that book. I never in a million years thought that middle school would be the place where I would completely fall in love with teaching all over again. Never thought middle school was an interesting place to teach. But when I was offered a job, they said, come on, just come meet the kids. And I did. I fell in love with them. And my heart just was lost to middle. I adore it there. But increasingly I was getting frustrated by the parents who were either creating a situation in which they could get rid of all of the obstacles in the way the whole quote unquote snowplow parenting thing, or taking the consequences away. And you know, the gift, the wonderful thing about being in a middle school teacher or in a middle school situation is that a, you have to like that situation in order to teach theory. You won't last like a week. But the cool thing about it is that they just are these people who are screwing up over and over and over again. Because that's sort of what middle school is built around. It's, you know, from a cognitive development perspective, from a challenges perspective, and then wait for these really great learning opportunities to present themselves. Because as any parent knows, as any teacher knows, you can't, you know, just attack everything the moment it goes wrong. It's just you have to wait sometimes. But occasionally those opportunities were being stolen away through various ways, but often by the parents. And I was, you know, it's a bad thing to be a teacher who's in an adversarial relationship with the parents of your students. And so I was looking for information on. I just wanted some research. I'm a big research geek. I wanted research on what sort of this highly. It depends on what you want to call it. Helicopter parenting, directive parenting, controlling parenting. There's lots of names for it, what that does to kids, motivation and what it does to their learning. And I hadn't seen one source that sort of put that all together in one place from an education and parenting perspective. And so I have the coolest job ever, which is to get curious and then write about the thing that I'm curious about and translate it for other people.

So I'm curious if you actually have some good examples of ways that maybe you let your own kids fail and kind of just bit your lip and step back, let them do their thing and what the result was.

Okay, so I have in one side of my head, like, all of these examples at hand that I'm just not allowed to talk about because my kids get to filter what I do and don't talk about. But a lot of them are examples. Like, my son ran cross country in high school, and he would ask me to come to certain meets, and I loved going to his meets, but I didn't go to all of them. I just went to the ones that he really asked me to come to, and I couldn't go to this one because I was working. And he got tripped, like, maliciously tripped during the race. And if I had been there, I would have, you know, raised a stink. There's my kid, you know, with blood running down his leg, and he's been. You know, the person who tripped him should have been, you know, at least DQ'd or something. And in the end, what ended up happening was that race, he came back just exhilarated, and it was. It was a personal best for him. The team worked together in this incredible way to sort of pull him up to the front of the pack, and they passed the guy that tripped him, and he was just. It was like one of those formative experiences where you realize, like, you know, if you don't call foul and make the whole thing grind to a halt and just sort of see what you've got in you to make that situation work and see what your team can do with you to make that situation work. It was a really magical day for him, and I suspect I would have screwed that up if I had been there. I think I would have made a stink or something. And. And it was a really great moment for me to realize that, wow, those moments in which I step back and I let my kid solve the problem on his own or let him rely on other people to solve the problem with him. That just incredible things can happen.

Yeah. And obviously there's the old saying that you can learn from your mistakes, but it doesn't seem like that's systematized too often or taught in a certain way. Have you ever come across any system or curriculum that actually teaches failure, how to get the most out of failure? You know what I'm saying?

Well, yeah. I mean, I get to one of the cool parts of my job. One of my favorite parts of my job is I travel the world, actually going to various schools. And I'll often get to speak to students during the day and tour the school and do professional development with the teachers in the afternoon and then speak to the parents in the evening. And it's so much fun. But all over the place, I get to see, for example, at the Momentous Institute in Dallas, they teach kids in kindergarten about how their brains work and how the difference between their lower brains, brain functions. Like the whole, I just want to punch that kid when he's mean to me versus the, you know, take a breath and try to develop that upper part of your brain. That's more about restraint and having a conversation. And then, you know, I was in a sixth grade classroom in, I think, California where the first grade teachers were team teachers. I'm sorry, I think it was sixth grade teachers were team teachers. And they would specifically plan moments in which they made mistakes in front of the kids. And then they would very specifically either try to get the kids to catch them in the mistake, or the other teacher would catch the other teacher in the mistake and talk to them about it. And then they would work together as a classroom to either problem solve or work on ways to help guide other people when they do make mistakes. And that was very much a conscious part of their teaching. That has been an incredible revelation. And then in the wake of Carol Dweck's work at the end with fixed and growth mindsets, this word yet has become really important in schools. I see it on buttons, I see it on the wall. And yet is a very growth mindset word. It's like, you know, sweetie, you know when a kid says, you know, I can't do this. I can't. This math is too hard. I can't do it. The answer, well, you can't do this yet. You just learned how to do it. You know, when Eric Clapton learned how to play guitar, he couldn't play Layla on the first try. You know, on the first, you know, after the first hour. That's a yet kind of situation. And having these conversations constantly with kids about the fact that no one can do anything just right the first time, that we're all in a yet situation. It's. We're all in a place where we're, we're continuously learning and trying to do better each day. That modeling by adults, by parents, by teachers is just really, really important. I think where we tend to run into problems in education is where we say, oh great, let's do a fixed and growth mindset curriculum or let's do a grit curriculum. That's not what that research is there for. That research is to instruct how we role model and how we give kids opportunities to learn that stuff. But it's really difficult to put these concepts into an actual curriculum. It's sort of an on the fly how we live in front of our kids and how we operate in front of our kids.

Yeah, that makes sense. And I think again, just doing something like we do, where you're simply at the end of the day pondering your failures, pondering your mistakes, and just jotting a few notes down about what you learned about them. I mean, for me personally, gosh, I think I've told this story before, but there was one streak of five days in a row where I wrote down, I wish I'd played my guitar today. I wish I'd played my guitar today. And I just. We don't actually share our journal entries with each other. We open the floor if people want to, but it's not recommended in case you want want to write something a little bit more private. But I slammed my journal down, it was on a Friday night and said I'm never going to write in my journal again. That I wish I'd played my guitar.

And I haven't missed a day since. It's been like a year and a half. But writing them down at the end of the day, it just seems to result in you being able to stack consecutively better days as you learn from each failure.

The journaling idea is really cool, especially since for kids it can be really hard for them to view evidence of their own progress. One of the things I do a lot at school is show kids examples of their writing from a long time ago when I taught middle school, we would keep yearly, we would keep samples all the way back as long as they had been at the school. And it was a really great way to sort of say, look, you know, it doesn't feel. Writing is something that doesn't sort of often have day to day progress. So that's a really cool thing. And then I Just love so much this idea of what you do with your, your kids. And in gift of failure, actually, I talk about the fact that what we do in our house is seasonally and, you know, now that the kids are gone, you know, I'm sort of trying to figure out how we work this out. But seasonally we would create three goals for ourselves. And the trick always has to be that one of them has to be scary, a little bit outside of our comfort zone. And then, you know, in three months or whenever that season is over, we usually check in with each other to see, you know, how those goals went, you know, what we might do differently next time, that kind of thing. So all of these ways, and you're doing an incredible job, sort of with this daily thing, you can do it on a more long term basis. But that idea of we do what we can with the information we have, and then if we learn better information or something goes wrong, we learn from it and we move forward and we redefine our goals or we commit to our goals.

Yeah, yeah. And I would throw one last thing in there before I asked you a few questions about the addiction book that you wrote. And that would. I think, I think that the most important term that I use as a parent, in addition to tacking that yet addendum to many sentences when I'm talking about something that my children haven't learned how to do, is I'll always, even if I notice that they actually do appear to be gifted at something and they'll show me a piece of art or an essay that they've written or a giant book that they've read. I tell them, you worked so hard at that good job and you always recognize the work instead of the, oh, you're so good at that type of approach.

There's a little twist on that. I think for people who don't read Carol Dweck's book Mindset and just read articles about Mindset, they tend to come away with the understanding that you're never supposed to tell kids they're smart and only praise them for their effort. But I think that's. And Carol Dweck has written about this, that that's a flawed understanding of her work. And one of the things that I sort of help parents understand is if you help kids, when you praise them for efforts, if you help them see how far they've come, or you say something like, you know what, a month ago you would have just freaked out and given up on that math assignment and I watched you and you stuck with that for so much longer than you would have before, or you really relied on yourself to come up with a solution to that problem. And I'm really proud of you for that. So it's not just about praising for the effort, but also encompassing. Encompassing sort of the growth and all of the aspects of what it means to become self reliant and self advocate. One of my kids does not really like to self advocate, so I do a lot of. I'm just so proud of you for speaking up and advocating for yourself there, because that isn't something you would have been able to do six months ago.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Now, like I mentioned, you wrote an addiction book. Did that one come after the failure book?

Yeah. So I actually the experiences that went into the addiction inoculations were happening contemporaneously because when I sold the gift of failure in 2013, I knew for a while before that that I was getting into some really things were getting bad with my drinking. I knew that. And so when I sold the gift.

Of failure with your drinking.

Yeah. So I got sober on June 7, 2013, and I am the daughter of an alcoholic and my parent is the child of an alcoholic and my grandparent is a child of an alcoholic. And same thing on my husband's side of the family, actually. So when I got sober in 2013, my first thought was, well, heck, how do I make this end with me? How do we at least increase the odds that we make this end with me? And the research on prevention, science tends to revolve around this concept that substance use disorder is a preventable public health problem. But that word, preventable. I just wanted to understand what really works, what's a myth, what's evidence based. I wasn't really interested in the myths. At least I wanted to be able to figure out what was myth and what was real. So, yeah, this all came out of my getting sober over nine years ago and wanting to figure out how to increase the chances that my kids. Because they're already at a greater risk for substance use disorder just because I gave birth to them.

Exactly, exactly. And I noticed when I was reading through your chapter that you contributed to this parenting book, to boundless parenting. You talked about how you. In the mistakes you thought you may have made, you mentioned that you actually wish you hadn't allowed your children to have sips of alcohol. And I think it's kind of an interesting debate that goes back and forth. A lot of people will bring up what I believe is somewhat flawed, but examples from Europe that they don't have as much alcoholism over there. And that's because the kids get to have little sips of wine at the table. Although, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think the statistics actually back that up. But then there's the idea that it's like, well, if something's a total forbidden fruit, once a kid gets out of the home, they're just going to go ape nuts on it. So what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, so there's two things. The biggest pushback I get out of all the material in this book is parents come back to me with two things. Well, you know, I give my kids sips because I want them to, as you said, to be raised like those European kids, where alcohol is no big deal. And that's where my head was with my youngest kid, because I completely bought into that. Sorry. My oldest kid. So my oldest kid was raised. He could have sips of things. In fact, I reveal in the book that I put some. We got a really amazing bottle of wine from a friend when my oldest was a baby, and I actually put that wine on his tongue, figuring, you know, the first taste he has of wine should be a really nice one. So I did all that, and then I found out that the problem with that sort of idea and especially holding Europe up as sort of this monolith of, you know, good, moderate behavior, is that the European Union as a whole has the highest level of alcohol consumption in the entire world. The World Health Organization is very, very clear on that. And people will often come back and say, oh, well, that's only certain countries. Well, yes, but the countries that actually have lower rates of alcohol consumption are the countries that have a cultural taboo against public intoxication. But as a whole, the European Union has the highest level of alcohol consumption in the entire world. And the other problem with this myth is that the idea is that you're somehow teaching kids moderation by modeling moderation. And that's great, except for the fact that for me, as someone who has alcohol use disorder, I cannot learn moderation. I cannot to be like, that's not something that I can just learn. So there's a couple problems with that also. The other big pushback I get is, well, kids are going to drink anyway, so we might as well do it, you know, like, in my basement, I'll take everyone's keys, and at least everyone will be safe. The problem with that angle is that the research is also really clear on this, that parents that have a consistent and clear Message of no, not until it's legal for you. And legal for you, I'm less concerned about than the fact that the brain is not done developing until the early to mid-20s. So for me it means no, not until your brain is done developing. Parents that have a consistent, clear message about that have kids with much, much lower levels of substance use disorder and parents who have a permissive attitude around drinking, like the parent I was just mentioning, have kids with higher levels of substance use disorder. And to add one more layer onto this, the younger a kid is when they first try drugs and alcohol, the higher their lifelong statistical risk of developing substance use disorder is. So an eighth grader, for example. And by the way, if you're putting off talking about drugs and alcohol till middle school, you're way behind the eight ball because around 13.5 is when kids start. If you have a kid who's in middle school and they first try drugs or alcohol, they have a lifelong risk of somewhere around 50% of developing substance use disorder. In 10th grade, it goes way down. You're down somewhere around 20%. If you can get them all the way to 18 or 21, we can get that risk down nearly to 10%, which is really what it is in the general population. And a lot of that has to do with brain development. A lot of that has to do with, with some statistical issues we don't have time to get into. But the older a kid is, when they first try drugs and alcohol, they lower their lifelong risk of developing substance use disorder. 90% of people who have substance use disorder in adulthood say that they started drinking. Raising drugs before age 18.

It seems interesting. It actually isn't what I'd expect. Like logically I would think, oh, early exposure allows child to learn responsible use and develop some effective self control. Whereas it sounds more like ease of access increases the significance or the likelihood that that substance will be abused by that human being at some point. And it's probably going to happen before they're like 18 to 21, thus dictating they're going to be even more likely to be addicted to it later in life.

Yeah, so I'm married to a study, so I do have to say for the statisticians in your audience, yes, there are some statistical confounders here around, you know, access, permissiveness and parenting, all that sort of stuff. But let's also talk a little bit about brain development because alcohol and drugs that may have a mild to moderate risk in the adult brain have a much higher risk in the adolescent brain Adolescents, this is the second of two incredibly intense periods of development in the brain. And we know, for example, chronic users of marijuana and, yeah, pun intended, in adolescents have smaller hippocampuses. And smaller hippocampuses are related to problems with short term memory formation and storage. We see thinning in the prefrontal cortex in kids who use a lot of marijuana. And don't even get me started on alcohol. Alcohol is so much more dangerous in an adolescent brain for various reasons than in an adult brain. So we can't talk about drug and alcohol use in adolescents like it's adult drug and alcohol use. It's just not. The brain is not done developing until the early to mid-20s. And until that door closes, it's just a much riskier prospect, both from the perspective of your statistical chance of developing substance use disorder and the damage you do to your brain.

Yeah, it's definitely something that I learned in the chapter that you wrote because it's just different than the approach that I've had. But yet numbers don't lie. And so it's definitely food for thought for me. Now, did either of your children actually go through any type of substance addiction?

So, no. And the. The interesting thing about all of this prevention science is that even if I do every single thing that I lay out in the book that evidence shows is AIDS and prevention, there are no guarantees ever. It's just not possible. But we do know that when we do a lot of this prevention, which is a lot about just information, giving kids the right information, teaching them refusal skills, teaching them what's called inoculation theory, which has to do a little bit with, like, refusal skills. If you do all the stuff that I talk about, what you're also doing is getting kids to a place where they have enough information so that we can shorten the road from oh, my gosh, I think I might have a problem to oh, my gosh, I need help. As anyone who's ever gone to any recovery programs knows, the worst thing you can do to harsh your buzz is get some information about what it's doing to your brain and how addiction works and all that sort of stuff. So for me, prevention science is, yes, it's about preventing my kids from having a problem. But if they do end up having a problem, I'm hoping that I can shorten the duration of their, you know, their substance abuse, their substance use disorder. By the way, we're supposed to be calling not addiction, but substance use disorder and people with substance use disorder instead of, like, addicts or alcoholics.

Good, Good to know. Didn't realize that.

Yeah. So I'm hoping that, that, you know, it also shortens that time before that last puzzle piece drops in place and they're like, oh crap, I need help. I work at Santa at Stowe and we talk a lot about what that last puzzle piece was. And you know, the more information people have, often the earlier they can get to that place of, oh, you know, I really, I'm in a place where I can't do this by myself.

Yeah. I was hanging out with a friend two days ago and he was explaining to me how his son is basically addicted to cannabis. And I thought I could run this by you. Not necessarily for cannabis specifically, but let's say a parent is listening and they just know whatever. They have a 15 year old son addicted to alcohol or a teenage daughter addicted to cannabis. Do you have definite pieces of advice that just seem to consistently move the dial in cases like that for parents who might be listening who have children they suspect are addicted to a substance?

One of the things that I do as a lot of the prevention with my kids was talk a lot about, not just about the first time you use something, but also what it feels like, what is happening on a physiological and psychological level when you are.

Moving from sort of use to a problematic use slash.

Misuse place. And you know, a lot of that has to do with change in your kid highlighting. You know, sweetie, I've just noticed you seem so sad, or sweetie, I've noticed that you're not sleeping, or sweetie, I've noticed you're sleeping all the time. Can we talk about maybe why that's happening? So looking for those changes in your kid are really important. They can sneak up on you sometimes. If it's a rapid uptick in use, it can happen really quickly. If you're worried that your kid may be sliding from use into misuse. There's a book by Dr. Joseph Lee, who used to be the head of adolescent medicine at Betty Ford Hazelton. He's now the CEO of Betty Ford Hazelton and he wrote a book called Recovering my kid or Recovering your kid. Recovering my kid. Can't remember either way. It's a wonderful book that's very specifically about that place of oh my goodness, I think I might have a problem. My expertise is in prevention. And yes, I do work with kids who are actually in treatment. Used to, and now I work with adults who are in treatment. But my expertise is really about prevention. So I really do defer when it comes to, you know, like, oh crap, I think this is a problem, and is it time to intervene? To experts like Dr. Joseph Lee and his book Recovering My Kid or Recovering youg Kid is just fantastic.

I'll find it and I'll put a link in the show notes. The show notes, by the way, for those of you listening are at BenGreenfieldLife.com Jessicalahy L A H E.

So I want to ask you a question about something specifically that came up and you highlighted it a couple of times, so I figured it must be important. You talk in the book interview with you in Boundless Parenting about afternoon quiet time.

Why do you harp on that so much?

This is also just a personal thing. A lot of parents come to me and they're like, they want me to tell them how they should run their household. Based on. Based on, I'm going to know their priorities. Whether that's around. Can I let my kid quit music lessons? Or should I let my kid quit soccer? Or what about this nap time thing? So for us, my husband and I, we are big readers. We're fairly quiet people.

And you're speaking, by the way, to a prolific napper who's actually written entire articles about how to biohack a siesta.

I just knew when my kids were really little that quiet time was gonna be super important. And when I had my kids, both of them were really good nappers when they were really, really little. And when the oldest one sort of stopped napping, we realized he still really needed quiet time. Like, I could tell the difference between when he just sort of continued on with his day without sort of having some downtime versus, you know, sort of this enforced, you know, we're just going to chill. This is quiet time. I'm going to read. I'm happy to read to you. And as it evolved, it turned into sort of like alone quiet time because all of us needed that so much, and the older one tended to really need it. And then when my daughter got to the age where she stopped napping, that became a really important part of sort of the family dynamic. And it's funny because even the dogs understand that at a certain point in the day, and especially now, it's really just on weekends, but at a certain point in the day, it's like, oh, it's nap time. And that may not. We may not actually sleep. Although I'm a big fan of naps.

Our house is very similar. It's between about 2 and 4pm it just kind of. It doesn't necessarily mean everyone's napping, but that's usually art time, book time, reading time. There's not a lot scheduled right there. And it's great. We fit in well when we go to Europe too, since everything's closed around then.

I interviewed this. There's a wonderful researcher at USC named Mary Helen Immortino Yang. And I actually was friends with her before she became this world famous neuroscientist. She wrote a beautiful article that I interviewed her about for the Atlantic about Rest is not idleness. And I think a lot of us. And that's a quote from somewhere else. That's not her quote, but that is the title she used for her paper. Because the idea is that somehow we're supposed to rush, rush, rush all the time. And that. And my husband and I can be very Type A. And I think we recognized for ourselves that it was really important to cultivate rest, to cultivate idleness. Because, you know, what happens during idleness or musing or, you know, just sort of. For me, it's weeding out in the garden. You know, that default network in your brain can kick in. And that's where my best, most creative stuff happens. So for me as a writer, my most productive time that doesn't include just bashing the words out on the page, obviously, is that musing and prep time. So my husband knows that I'll be out working in the garden and I'll be quietly out there and I'll come in and I have to write some stuff down because I will have worked out problems in whatever it is I'm writing or had a really good idea for this thing that I need to store away for later. I love the idea that wrestling is not idleness. And it's a really important part of how our brains work and how our bodies recover and all of that.

Unfortunately, my muse primarily comes to me when I'm swimming, which is super frustrating. So that's the one activity in which I can't actually stop to jot the idea of.

Well, actually, I can tell you. So Ron Lieber, who's the youe Money columnist at the New York Times, he told me that he keeps a. He has a little board that has a waterproof marker that he keeps in the shower. So maybe you could stick that on the side of the pool.

You probably could.

I'm sure it could work. Now, of course, the problem I ran into was when I used to swim frequently. A lot of it was open water swimming. Like in a lake or an ocean. Yeah. So the tablet thing didn't work out so well for Me. Now, you also talk a little bit about kind of like your flavor, your version of coming of age rituals or what you think about that particular practice. And obviously that's something that I think has piqued a lot of interest of late. I've seen all these vision quests and rite of passage organizations popping up that promise to put a young man or young woman through some kind of journey of self discovery, at which point they're officially receiving the adult stamp. But tell me your thoughts about these coming of age rituals.

This holds a really fond place in my heart because back when I was at the New York Times, I wrote a column for three years called the Parent Teacher Conference. And I loved writing that. And when they archived the column, they stripped away a lot of the photographs and video and stuff like that just for storage purposes. And one of my favorite things that got lost was I had written a column about the fact that as sort of a non religious, you know, sort of person from European background that doesn't really have a. We didn't have like a ritual to expect. It wasn't a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah. There wasn't any sort of big celebration. So, you know, for me, I just wanted there to be some marking. And so we came up with this random list of things that we kind of thought it was important for our kids to learn how to do as they got older. And when my son Ben turned 13, we had this summer of sort of. Of learning some skills. And the one that I recorded on video that I'm happy to send you the video of, because it's really quite funny. I had a friend who had a dairy farm and my son Ben was a big drinker of milk, and I thought it was really important for him to know where that came from. So he learned how to bring in and milk a herd of dairy cattle. That was just one of the random skills that we thought it was important for him to know. To know where his food comes from and to know how to prepare it and all that sort of stuff. And that actually led to my very first speaking engagement. Actually. I got a call from the Jewish Education foundation and they were doing a big discussion about the future of bar and bat mitzvah. And I loved that engagement because I ended up sitting at a table with a whole bunch of rabbis talking about these traditions. It was really, really cool. And I love learning about the various traditions people have around the world. And I just had to invent some of my own.

Yeah. And it's interesting how I think Especially at least for my sons, the part of at least a coming of age ritual esque type activity or rite of passage has been actually very much like the farming experience your son had. Going out and doing something that involves providing, in their case for both of them, bow hunting their first animal and bringing that food home. And actually my, my son in a couple of days is making the whole family dinner from a deer that he got a couple of weeks ago.

Nice.

It was one of his first big deer hunts. But you can just see them standing a little taller, acting a little prouder. And I think that intentionally weaving experiences like that into a child's life, it doesn't have to be going off in the mountains for five days with a knife and a wool blanket, but something that is remarkable and somewhat ceremonial, I still think is largely absent.

Yeah, I, I think it's really important. And along with that, the sort of lessons that get integrated into it, even little things. A friend of mine who has two very introverted children, one of them who really has like a social anxiety disorder sort of situation, at least when they were little, she created a scavenger hunt and the kids had to go through this. It was, it's a very small sort of safe town that, with a really quaint New England downtown. And they had to specifically go speak to adults all over town in order to get various clues that their mother had laid out ahead of them. And so, you know, it was in a safe situation where they felt really empowered and realized just how helpful being able to talk to adults can be, especially in a world where, you know, I grew up, you know, in the. I'm 50 and so I grew up in the 70s and 80s being told never to talk to strangers. And yet it's an incredibly important skill, self advocacy and being able to tell people what you need. And so I love building activities, traditions around things that give kids really important life skills like self advocacy or, you know, telling people what they need.

Yeah. In terms of common threads within this parenting book, it pops up over and over again. Nearly every parent or set of parents intentionally wove some type of recognition of either coming of age into adolescence or coming of age into adulthood in each of their children's lives. So I think we're just going to see people realizing that and hopefully doing it more and more. So you also mentioned when it came to education, evidence based learning methods and how much you favor those versus traditional learning methods, but could you actually define what you mean by that? Evidence based learning methods?

It's interesting actually. This is a Great time to talk about this because we just heard that if a research organization is getting, or sorry, if a research journal, for example, is getting federal funding, they're going to have to make those research articles free to the public. And that's massive because for a long time the research on what really works in education, for example, has been siloed and it's been behind a paywall. And so it's been for a long time it didn't triple trickle down to the people who are actually teaching children. And increasingly that's changing and I'm so grateful for that. So, you know, teachers have often just operated on this is how I learned and therefore this is how it will work for when I teach. And a lot of that comes down to like sage on the stage lecture format or you know, I'm going to put the kids in the rows and I'm going to teach a little bit and then maybe I'll give little a, a quiz and then I'm going to give this huge test at the end of the unit that's worth 20% of your grade and no backsies. And then we got to keep moving forward those sort of strategies. We do those often without thinking about whether or not they actually work for learning. And I'm a big fan of taking something that I'm doing in the classroom and holding it up and saying, wait a second, why am I doing this? Is this just because it works well for me or because I enjoy it or because it actually works for learning? So when my daughter switched schools, we moved when she was just leaving 8th grade and about to go into high school. I got really lucky in that we moved into a school district in Vermont where the school district was really interested in the evidence on what works for learning as opposed to what's convenient for teachers. And a lot of that came down to standards based grading. So for example, rather than having these A through F grades that are sort of willy nilly based on like how well the kid plays the game or how many homework assignments they hand in that are perfect and that kind of stuff, it comes down to whether or not kids have actually learned skills. And the other part of that is, you know, when I talk about teach a little, teach a little, teach a little, give a huge test at the end of a unit that's called a summative or cumulative assessment. And that is not a great learning tool. It works great for me as a teacher because then I can have these nice neat rows in my grade books and I have an end date to when we're done with this particular bit of teaching, and then I can move on. But not all kids learn at the same rate. So instead of doing those cumulative or summative assessments or in addition to those, my daughter's school district does form a lot of formative assets assessments, which are low stakes, low anxiety quizzes constantly so that the kids are really figuring out what they do and don't know, exercising what's called metacognition, which is our understanding of what we do and don't know. If you do really poorly on a formative assessment, it's not that it's going to torpedo your grade. It's that you have to do this extra work with the teacher to figure out, okay, oh, I thought I knew this, but I didn't know that. Here's exactly why I thought I knew knew this, but didn't know that. Here's what I need to learn in order to do better on this next time. And all of that exercising of metacognition helps kids become better learners. It helps kids get used to being assessed on a really regular and frequent basis. So that it's not assessment anxiety is less prevalent. There's just a lot of ways that we know work for learning. And for example, the fastest way to turn off any learning is to increase stress in a kid's environment. So if a kid is going through something stressful at home, if Covid's happening, for example, if their, you know, guinea pig Squeaky died last night, they're not going to be in a great place to learn. So we have to figure out how to dial back some of the, you know, some of the stress where we can, like with big tests or, you know, timed tests. In fact, we know the work of Joe Bowler for U cubed at Stanford University. You know, it's really clear that when we're trying to teach kids math facts, one of the worst ways to do that is to do timed math fact quizzes, tests, because the minute you start timing kids, you up the chances that you're going to increase math anxiety. And you're also proficiency or mastery and speed are not the same thing. And we also know that some kids react differently to competition. Some kids rise to the challenge, and some kids just fall apart and their working memory just goes out the window. So understanding what works for learning and adopting those methods as opposed to, well, this is how it's always been done is a really important part of what I've done in, I think in my education journalism over the years.

Yeah, I know that two powerful Strategies, retrieval practice and spaced practice are actually kind of part of evidence based learning methods. And our whole family is planning to go to Italy next year, do a cycling trip of Italy. And I've heard a lot about duolingo and finally started using duolingo with the whole family and, oh my gosh, everything from the gamification to the review of materials that you've briefly seen the day before, to retrieving via speech or listening or written text the modules that have come before it. It's the fastest I think I've ever learned a language. And I mean, I'm only like three weeks in, but. Have you used duolingo before?

I have. And actually you bring up gamification and gamification is actually in this context, actually, it tends to work pretty well. But gamification is one of those other things that can also backfire on you. Often gamification means timing something or making kids work to a particular speed. And sometimes that backfires for some kids. So education is definitely not a one size fits all kind of.

So knowing your kids, knowing how they learn best, knowing what works and doesn't work for them is a really important part of helping advocate for your kids learning.

You actually, I think, may have brought this up when Tim Ferriss interviewed you. And I think you wrote it towards the end of my chapter with you in Boundless Parenting. And it went something like, I choose to make my life my argument. And so I know that that saying must mean something important to you. Can you explain what that actually means?

Yeah, it's actually not. It's not my quote. It's Dr. Albert Schweitzer.

Okay.

My husband and I were both Schweitzer fellows. There's an organization called the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship. And it has to do with finding a place for him. It happened to be Lambrene Africa, which there's a whole white savior problematic issue there. But the idea is everyone can find their own Lambrennet. Lambarnay was his hospital in Africa. For me, it was working with kids in Teen Court in North Carolina. For my husband, it was making sure the kids were getting vaccinated in rural North Carolina. And when Albert Schweitzer decided to go ahead and really work as a pacifist and doing the work he was doing in Africa as well in medicine, he has a great quote that I love, which is, I decided to make my life my argument. And I think a lot of people tend to talk a lot, especially because of social media. And don't get me wrong, I love Twitter. That's where I spend most of my social media time. People say a lot of stuff, but it's the people that can really just shut up and make their life their argument instead of just blabbing away about how everybody else should be doing everything. Those are the people I tend to respect the most. And so it's a good reminder for me sometimes I need to just shut up and do the work instead of talking about doing the work.

Yeah. Kind of a refined way of expressing that actions speak louder than words. And it definitely is related to another phrase that pops up over and over again within the book, quoted by many parents, more as caught than taught. And it seems to actually go hand in hand with that idea of, as a parent, what you do is noticed far, far more than what you say.

Yeah. One of my favorite things that I get to do when I'm working with kids in schools is I'll often, you know, I speak to them before. I usually before I speak to their parents in the evening and I ask them, I give all of them my email address, which, if you want to get the best emails ever, give your email address to like a thousand middle school students. And I ask them to tell me what they want me to tell their parents that evening. Like, what things are their parents not hearing or get defensive about, maybe aren't hearing the right way from them. And, you know, the biggest one by far is some iteration of, I'm not my brother, I'm not my sister, I'm not you when you were my age. I'm not your mini me, or I'm not your do over. But one of the other ones is that whole idea of, wait a second, you have expectations for me that I see you not fulfilling all day long. If I can't have my phone out at a restaurant, why do you get to. Or because the parent can make the.

Excuse that it's for business, baby.

Yeah, yeah. Well, and, you know, this came up for me. I was in Texas giving a talk, and this woman asked me, she wanted me to come up with a list of really challenging books that her kids would want to read because her kids don't read for pleasure. And I'm like, well, that's a mythological. You know, we'll deal with that list later. But in the meantime, I have to ask, do your children. Do you read for pleasure? And the mother was like, you know, I'm busy, I work a lot, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, well, unless your children are seeing you prioritize that activity, there's Nothing I can tell you that will make your children. There's no magic book list that will make your children want to love reading or read for pleasure. If they don't, if you're not modeling that for them. And unfortunately, this parent, oh, this is going to kill you. I asked this parent, I said, before I give you this list of things I think your kid might like, can I ask if they do read for pleasure, what they like? And she said, well, they love those Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, but those books are stupid. So I got rid of them. So essentially this woman was saying, I want my kids to read for pleasure, but I do not support their reading for pleasure and they never see me read for pleasure. And so essentially, she's doing everything in her power to make her kids not want to read for fun. So, yeah, we had to have a little talk together, just one on one after the presentation.

There's, I suppose, probably the top two things that I think parents should perk up and listen to from this entire discussion. It would be to let your kids fail and your actions speak louder than words. I mean, those two alone. And then of course, that word yet that you can tack on to any compliment or that you're working so hard on that type of approach. Your books are obviously chock full of a ton of advice. I just love your chapter in the Boundless parenting book and I'm super grateful to have you in it because right when I heard you on Tim's podcast, I was like, oh, shoot, we perfect to get into some of this stuff in the book. So I really like what you're doing. And for people listening in, I am going to link to all jessica's work@bengreenfieldlife.com jessicalahy that's L A H E Y And Jessica, I just want to thank you for coming on today and sharing all this with us.

Oh my goodness. Thank you for having me. This is, like I said, I really do have the coolest job in the world, which is, you know, getting to talk with people about stuff that when Tim brought up in our interview that he was talking about secretly wanting to be a teacher, I'm like, well, you'd make a great teacher because you're curious about stuff and like to ask people about things and learn and this. I can't think of a better way to spend an hour.

Yeah, well, don't go too crazy. Stir crazy in your ultra quiet house.

Oh, I think I'll find things. Things to do. I think I'm pretty good at finding stuff to keep me busy.

All right. Good luck. It sounds like you can all right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Jessica Leahy signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com have an amazing week. So there's two events coming up. You go to both of them. I'm going to go to both of them. Obviously I'm going to fly to Texas, then fly over to Lexington. The Texas event called Runga, is October 13th through the 15th. The wild health one is October 22nd. Go to both. I am. Obviously you can also check BenGreenfieldLife.com camp counsel calendar for all of the events that I'll be teaching at this year. So I hope to see you there.

More than ever these days. People like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. If you liked it or if you love what I'm to up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be. And just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.