Why Teenagers Need Mentors, Not Enforcers

In his novel, My Friends, Fredrik Bakman writes, “Little children think teenagers are the best humans, and
teenagers think teenagers are the best humans, the only people who don’t think that teenagers are the best humans are adults. Which is obviously because adults are the worst kind of humans.”

Given that I spend my entire life as an adult working and living with teenagers, this line resonated. Also, I happen to love working with teenagers. They are honest yet mysterious, feisty yet calm, impulsive yet calculating, intelligent yet totally goofy. They make me laugh every single day, and every now and then, they make me cry. I’m guessing most teachers and parents of teenagers would agree.

Recently I read a non-fiction book that taught me so much about teenagers: 10 to 25, The Science of Motivating Young People. In this book, David Yeager summarizes fascinating research related to the brains of humans aged 10-25. Of all that I learned, one thing resonated most: the different mindsets that we can have when working with younger people. 

Yeager explained four different mindsets adults can hold in relation to our standards for and our support of young people. Our standards are the academic, professional, and personal expectations that we hold for our students, colleagues, kids, etc. The support is what we do to help young people as they try to meet those standards. 

1. The Apathetic Mindset is for those who have LOW standards for young people and provide them LOW support. This mindset explains itself, and it’s not good, so I’m moving on. 
2. The Enforcer Mindset exists when we have HIGH standards and yet provide LOW support. I’m sure you can think of these people: they set the bar high, but you never really felt like they were there to help you reach it. 
3. The Protector Mindset sounds better than the previous two, but really, it isn’t. This is the mindset of someone who has LOW standards and HIGH support. Young people may think they like this, but really, they don’t. These are the teachers that hand out the easy A, the coaches that make practice “fun,” but don’t care if you win or lose, and the parents who let their kids make the rules. 
4. Finally, there’s the Mentor Mindset. This is when we have HIGH standards and HIGH support. These tend to be the people who help us the most in life: the teachers who make you earn the grade and teach you a ton along the way, the coaches who make you sweat from the start of practice until the end, the parents who say, “You are going to go even though you don’t want to.” These “mentors” (as Yeager refers to them) support young people as they reach for big goals. They stay after school, they check in after practice, they have the conversation as they drive their kid to the appointment that the kid tried their best to avoid. They believe in us, and then they show up to show it. 

It’s not an easy world to navigate right now, and certainly, there are some people suffering much more than others. Teenagers may look okay, but many of them are not. We may want to be tough on them, or we may want to protect them from pain. Thanks to David Yeager’s book, I’m reminded that the best thing we can do for young people is hold high standards for them and provide high support as they set out to reach those standards. This is true for educators, parents, bosses, and anyone else that believes that all of our futures will be brighter when young people feel that they can contribute to the awesome effort of making it so. 

Coming soon: A new private school with the Mentor Mindset at its core. Stay tuned!