If the headlines are to be believed, it’s never been harder to motivate young people. The reasons abound: they’re too soft, too sensitive, too overwhelmed, too entitled, too stressed, too social media-addicted, too lacking in work ethic.
Psychology professor David Yeager takes on these contentions and more in his new book, 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People (Simon & Schuster, 2024).
“The idea for this book grew out of a simple observation I made about decade ago,” Yeager writes in the introduction, “that many beloved programs to promote youth health and well-being were shockingly ineffective.”
Yeager’s work belongs to the intellectual lineage of books like Angela Duckworth’s Grit, Carol Dweck’s Mindset, and Mary Murphy’s Cultures of Growth. His major purpose is to lay bare the secrets of what he calls the “mentor mindset,” with its careful balance between high standards and support. The book provides numerous examples of mentor mindset in action, through profiles of successful coaches, managers, teachers, and parents who — sometimes after trying other approaches that didn’t work so well — learned how to get the best from their pupils or mentees.
The “10 to 25” in the title refers to the age range during which, Yeager argues, puberty-linked changes in the brain start to cause the palpable status anxiety we see in teens. Yeager defines status in terms of young people’s longing for prestige, a kind of social currency that young people gain through impressive acts (both those that make parents proud and those that horrify them).
Yeager sympathizes with parents — after all, he is one. But, he argues, parents will flail when not taking into consideration young people’s desire for status and respect. Importantly, both authoritarian and permissive parenting styles suffer from this basic flaw.
“Any time young people interact with socially powerful people — managers, parents, educators, or coaches — status and respect come to the foreground,” Yeager writes early in the book. “Because young people feel sensitive to differences in status, they are subtly reading between the lines with each thing we say, trying to interpret the hidden implications of our words, to find out if we are disrespecting or honoring them.”
Why is it so important to understand motivation in young people? Most obviously, the stakes are high. They include, for instance, young people’s academic achievement, future job prospects, and emotional well-being. Sadly, young people will also follow adults’ lead by either underestimating themselves or seeing themselves as broken when they struggle.
The principal adversary in this story is what Yeager calls the “neurobiological incompetence model” of adolescence. It’s a familiar story: young people’s underdeveloped brains are what cause them to behave impulsively and make poor choices. The model has evidence behind it, including an abundance of neuroscientific findings that the prefrontal cortexes of young people, crucial for decision-making and planning, are still developing.
Unfortunately, argues Yeager, it doesn’t tell the whole story, and it leads to two faulty approaches to young people. One is what he calls the “enforcer mindset,”which is oriented around the threat of consequences for not meeting a given expectation. If a young person’s brain is underdeveloped, what’s the point of reasoning with them? The other is the “protector mindset,”which is sort of the opposite. It prioritizes young people’s self-esteem at the expense of real flourishing.
The mentor mindset, on the other hand, strikes the right balance. Yeager writes, for instance, of a group of students assigned a history project that involved interviewing surviving World War II veterans. There were real stakes in doing a good job; these were veterans whose stories have never been told, and the students were entrusted with capturing those stories faithfully.
“The Enforcer or Protector would never consider giving that kind of assignment,” says Yeager. “Because the Enforcer thinks that young people are only responsive to material incentives or threats of punishment. That’s why the Enforcer walks around yelling at everybody, threatening them, or bribing them.”
The protector mindset fails by coddling young people, says Yeager. “When you’re the Protector you’re like, ‘Oh, no, your life is too hard. I can’t ask you to put the weight of the world on your shoulders. It would cause you stress. It would cause you anxiety. I need to protect you until your thirties and then you can go make a difference.’”
“What I argue is that the Mentor way to do it is to be like, ‘Unfortunately, the world is totally messed up, and there’s a lot of stuff wrong,” says Yeager. “’But you, young person, have an asset, and the asset is that moral clarity that comes from being young and seeing problems in the world, and the energy that you bring to making a difference.’”
10 to 25 is a work of social science. It is also a work of journalism. Yeager credits a friend, Austin journalist and writer Paul Tough, with nudging him in this direction.
“Paul wrote a great book about higher education that features UT as a success story,” says Yeager, referring to Tough’s book The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us. “And I helped him a ton in that reporting.”
His friend’s story-driven approach rubbed off on Yeager. He contrasts himself with an imagined psychologist who, writing a similar book, might only look for stories that support a predetermined conclusion. But Yeager soon realized that the story told by his science alone was insufficient.
“I actually learned a lot from these people,” says Yeager. “And I changed my hypothesis. So, it really was a theory that developed partially through experimental research and partially through a systematic approach to reporting on real people’s experiences.”
An example of one of the book’s illuminating case studies is physics teacher Sergio Estrada, who teaches at Riverside High School in El Paso. His courses are demanding, sometimes just on the verge of overwhelming his students. But Estrada engages his students around some core principles at the heart of 10 to 25. He tells them that struggles are normal and not a reflection of students’ innate ability. He delights in answering questions. He gives hard assignments and tests, but allows them to be re-done. And he makes sure that his students know he will always be there for them. Faced with a frustrated student, Estrada’s approach is to coax the student to explain their thinking on a problem — not just giving them the answer — followed by collaborative problem-solving. While learning such challenging material, students gain a sense of mastery and the prestige that comes with it. In a school where 2% of students are college-ready, according to SAT scores, 95% of his students pass college-level physics.
But Yeager doesn’t just want a model to admire. His goal is to turn the science of youth motivation into interventions at scale. In that spirit, he launched the FUSE Fellowship at UT Austin. The two-year fellowship is a partnership between Texas math teachers and the university’s Behavioral Health Science & Policy Institute. Enrolled teachers receive coaching and exposure to science-based practices, access to the FUSE Library of Practices, and a $1,000 honorarium. Estrada is one of the facilitators.
“We have over 200 teachers and over 40 districts in our program right now, reaching about 12,000 students,” says Yeager. “And we want to be at one thousand teachers a year. My vision is for every single kid in the state of Texas to be taught by a teacher who knows the principles and practices in the book.”
The “mindset” concept has caught on further, too. Yeager just launched a course with Masterclass — the famous streaming service where anyone can subscribe to learn from the world’s leading experts — along with his longtime collaborator Carol Dweck. It’s called “The Power of Mindset.” The class is designed to help students turn challenges into growth and to optimize performance, just as it’s doing in schools across the country now.