The Self-Driven Child
Helping parents raise kids with healthy motivation and resilience in facing life's challenges. Oh, and having more fun while doing it!
The Self-Driven Child
Simply weathering the storm of modern life? Help your kids survive and THRIVE!
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In this episode, I sit down with the brilliant Stephanie Malia Krauss to unpack what it really means to help our kids—and ourselves—not just survive, but truly thrive in today’s world. We dig into the idea that modern life isn’t just busy—it’s fundamentally out of sync with how humans are wired to live. Stephanie introduces a powerful framework around the “dangerous weather” we’re all navigating and why so many families feel overwhelmed, overstimulated, and stretched thin.
Together, we explore a hopeful path forward. What if thriving isn’t about eliminating challenges, but about reclaiming the essential conditions that help us endure and enjoy life at the same time? From sleep and movement to play and connection, this conversation will shift how you think about parenting, education, and what our kids really need to flourish—without waiting for the whole system to change.
Episode Highlights
[00:00] - Why I’m excited about helping parents put “self-driven child” principles into action
[03:30] - Introducing Stephanie and the idea of “dangerous weather” in modern life
[08:30] - The word cloud experiment: what families are really feeling right now
[13:30] - Thriving isn’t the absence of struggle—it’s learning to live well within it
[20:59] - Allostatic load explained: when stress becomes toxic
[25:30] - The four forces: overtapped, overworked, overstimulated, overwrought
[34:00] - Rehumaning: reclaiming movement, play, and connection in daily life
[49:30] - Why sleep may be the single most important factor for kids’ well-being
[1:00:10] - The concept of a “thriving ecosystem” and collective care
[1:03:15] - Final reflection: what it means to truly help our kids—and ourselves—thrive
Links & Resources
Substack: @stephaniemaliakrauss
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephaniemaliakrauss
YouTube: @stephaniemaliakrauss
If this episode has helped you, remember to rate, follow, and share the Self-Driven Child Podcast. Your support helps us reach more people and create more content that makes a difference.
If you have a high school aged student and would like to talk about putting a tutoring or college plan together, reach out to Ned's company, PrepMatters at www.prepmatters.com
Hey, folks, Ned here, like me, you want your kids, your students, honestly, all the young people you know to thrive, and you know how much you can help. But like me, you probably also recognize that you fall short more than you like to, in part, because we tend to revert to old ways. We hear a great suggestion or learn a new approach, but to easily fall back into the same darn things that didn't work before, it isn't easy, which is why I'm really excited to share with you that Bill and I have a new book out this spring, the seven principles for raising a self driven child, a workbook. Our goal is to make it easier to put into practice more of the advice from our first two books, the self driven child and what do you say? Full of reflections and exercises to do yourself with your partner and with your children. We want to help make the self driven child way, your way, so you can, more often than not, be as effective as you want to be with your kids in ways that we know you want to be if you get a chance order a copy bill, and I and your kids would be grateful.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:One of the most powerful things about the science of thriving is that it just takes simple shifts. There are counter cultural big system moves like you said, that we can make, but also because our bodies actually already know, biologically and psychologically, how to endure challenge and enjoy life where we're born with it. It's a primal thing, simple shifts kind of signal to the body of like, oh yeah, we're playing, or oh yeah, this is wonder, or, oh yeah, this is love. And the good stuff can happen inside. And I think that that is incredible. And so it's just a reminder that, like we're we're made for this. We're made to stay alive, but we're also made to thrive.
Ned Johnson:Welcome to the self driven child podcast. I'm your host, Ned Johnson and co author with Dr William Stix of the books the self driven child, the science and sense of giving your kids more control over their lives. And what do you say? How to talk with kids to build motivation, stress tolerance and a happy home? Well, it's springtime in DC, and I reckon everywhere, really. And golly, have we had some weather, turbulent weather, turbulent times. And of course, this happens not just in springtime, but in all seasons, and all seasons of life. And handling stormy weather can be a lot, and it depends a lot on the resources that you have, both internal and external. And this is especially so for young people, for children, where the resources that they depend on so often are us, parents, adults, other caregivers, which is why I'm so pleased to welcome Stephanie Malia Krause, author of making it what today's kids need for tomorrow's world. Her second book, whole child, whole life, 10 Ways to help kids live, learn and thrive, and her recently released newest book, how we thrive caring for kids and ourselves in a changing world. In her new book, Stephanie describes the dangerous weather of modern life that our normal is not natural. We adults as kids are overtapped, over stressed and underslept. As parents and educators, if we want our kids to be ready, our job is to prepare them. If we want them to be well and thrive, our job is to care for them. She and I discuss four of the many forces buffeting our children and what we can do to help them, not just weather the storm, but grow and thrive despite it. I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. Well, well, hi. When, when last you and I spoke, it was about your terrific book, a whole life, whole child, 10 Ways to help kids live, learn and thrive, and it feels like you've expanded now, right? Tell me, tell us about your not just kids, but parents too. Yeah, absolutely.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:I was just talking to my husband the other day about like, where do I go next? So if you take the journey of the three books that I've written since the pandemic, the first one making it what today's kids need for tomorrow's world, which you might remember, was about youth readiness. What do young people need to be ready for this crazy future, the future of learning and future of work. And it came out at the height of the pandemic, our households were home schools, and people would see that I was not just an educator but a social worker, and so I'd be talking about what kids need to be ready for the future, and somebody would chat me in the back and say, I'm afraid these kids are going to burn out or give up. Before they get there. And so I expanded. That was round one of expansion, which was, okay, how do young people prepare for the world, and how do we care for them? Well, you know, what does it mean to be ready and well, so whole child, whole life, comes out, and it's about lifelong thriving. So this is much more expansive than what does it mean to be ready for college, work and life now we're looking at the whole lifetime, and what are practices like prioritizing mental health or, you know, cultivating belonging and community that are really going to matter across lifetime. But this new book, how we thrive is a book of collective care. It's about caring for kids and ourselves, kids and adults, but it's also about what it means to be human. And now we've gone from what do you need to be ready for the world as it is and as it's changing, to how the heck can you be well within it, to now, like it's kind of hard to human right now. And how do we re human childhood and our lives in ways that enable us to enjoy the very best parts of what it means to be a human and to be alive. And so yes, in this book, how we thrive, which I can't wait to dig into it's not just kids, but adults. And it's not just readiness and wellness. It's all about what it
Ned Johnson:means to be human. I was, I was trying to look up years ago, I stumbled on a quote there was something the effect of any society that purports to care about children must care about parents, right? You know, because, I mean, because children don't grow up in isolation or silos from their parents, at least if things are going going well. So I really, I really like the way you have grounded this book and framed this work around parents and families and all the people and clinicians and youth development folks and everyone really the ecosystem in which kids are growing up. Because it all, it all matters.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:Yeah, so I have to tell you a story about, like, how I landed there outside of the intersection that I write and I work in education and youth development, while also raising my own kids. So all of this is very real, and I'm in in it with everyone else. So when making it came out, because it was the pandemic, my book tour was only on zoom in the basement, oh, I know, because I couldn't get out to parents and educators and youth workers in in person, I started polling them, and so I had three questions, started six years ago, and the three questions were, how are your kids? How are your families, and how are you? And it would generate a word cloud. So you know, if you think about word clouds, whatever the biggest words were in the center, that was the most people used that word in their response. And so six years ago, I saw the responses were everyone, kid, adult, and the family unit overwhelmed, overloaded, stressed and tired. Well, the polling was so powerful to me and to them to be able to see Yeah, and it wasn't just a lonely experience that everybody was having this experience that I have continued polling every single time that I've spoken to a group of adults caring for kids, and across six years, the answers have always been the same, which is we are increasingly right, overwhelmed, overloaded, stressed and tired. And the kind of burnout in the center keeps getting bigger and bigger and exhausted is replacing tired. And so in making it it was, hey, parents, you've got to know that our idea of what it means to be ready for college and careers. It's outdated. You need this info. You want this info, and then in whole child, whole life, it was Hey parents, what is good for them is also good for us. But here we thrive. It's Hey parents, sometimes we know more about our cars and computers and we actually know about ourselves as beings, and the science of how we thrive for us and our kids, would there is like a link and sink effect. Now, our thriving begets, they're thriving, and their thriving begets are thriving. And we, we have to consider this holistically. And you nailed it at the very end of the book, I talk about a thriving ecosystem, because we're not cogs and we're not in single systems. We are people who live in context and who live in community with each other, whether that's in school or work or other community settings and at home, I have this image with
Ned Johnson:the word cloud. Cloud of thriving being there, there at the bottom, like, like 4.2 point footnote, like, like one person.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:Yes, absolutely, that was most powerful, but in a heartbreaking way, is that every kid cloud, how are your kids you have saturating the center, overwhelmed, overloaded, stressed and tired, but pushed out to the periphery, quirky, funny, awesome, amazing, adorable, unique, and so it's this reminder that, like, we are still here, and this big driving question for me, of who said we have to live like this, everyone, every community, every family, is dealing with the overwhelm of modern life, and that is about the conditions. What I talk about in the book is dangerous weather, yeah, of modern life that we are really pushed and pulled by.
Ned Johnson:Yeah, I would love for you to dig into dangerous weather. But the first thing is, wanted to know in our second book, what do you say we talk about? There's a chapter in there. We're talking with kids about the pursuit of happiness. And your observations really parallel, for me, the work around positive psychology, where the first 100 Years of psychology are like identifying all the ways that people suffer, and how can we decrease that suffering. And, you know, finally, Seligman and others came around said, Can we, can let, can we reframe this and think about, can we, let's actually pay attention to what makes people thrive? That's right, you know, and and, you know, we'll dig into it, but from my sense of it, you know, for people who listen to the podcast, you know, my family has had a kind of run of challenge, probably started about six years ago with my daughter with full school refusal and all the challenge of being an as at that point, not diagnosed, not yet diagnosed, autistic woman, and then my son had a brain tumor and but what? What strikes me, reflecting on what we went through, and true for a lot of other people, is that, and I think your book really speaks to this, it doesn't have to be an either or like you. You don't have to. It's not the case that you can only thrive when there is no challenge, right? Because good luck with that right and paying attention to these things that that help us to nurture us, that allow us to find joy and thriving, even while all of this other stuff is really sucky technical term, right? That it doesn't have to be this trade off. And so I think particularly with your work as a as both a clinician and an educator, I think a lot of times it's easy for us parents, particularly parents of young kids, to despair of thinking we have to fix the system in order to and I think if we wait for all the systems to be fixed. We're going to wait longer than we, you know, we're going to wait too long, right? And so making making things better within our own worlds, even while we work on the bigger picture of the world. I mean, because at the start of the book, you talk about the challenges, you know, family and communities, and that can be really small, and then gets bigger, societal and global, you know, historical. I mean, there are a lot of things to tend to. Is that a fair way to frame it, of thinking about, you know, starting micro, but also with an eye towards macro, absolutely.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:And I think this is where the work of Marty Seligman and my work around thriving actually just depart slightly, which is, and I'm trained as a social worker, so I'm trained in all the strengths based positive parts, but the way that I define thriving is in that complexity that we have what we need to continue to evolve, to endure challenge and enjoy life. I think that comes back to like my heart as a mom, and I'm sure this is true for your kids too, especially as you think about going through a life threatening illness and figuring out a complex lifetime condition and all the other things. My ambition for my kids is that they have a good life. I want them to have a good life. I want them to be good people. Yeah, they want them to have good lives. And that is not free from challenge that requires a clear sightedness about what happens, when and if and as you were talking about your own kids, the visual that I got was kind of like, we have this, this wall or this monsoon of of challenge, and it, it feels so dark because it blocks out the light. And thriving, for me, is perforating the wall and poking so many holes that the light shines through that in a given day or in a given moment. You know. In the book, thinking about back to your son and the scary moments in the hospital. I talk about a dear family of ours, Grant and Michaela and their young son, Simon, and their journey experiencing his leukemia from the point of diagnosis to all of the horrendous things, and thankfully, he had a bone marrow transplant that took but watching them still need and delight in moments where they could come together and connect as a family or play or sing or whatever else. I think one of the most powerful things about the science of thriving is that it just takes simple shifts. There are countercultural big system moves like you said, that we can make, but also because our bodies actually already know, biologically and psychologically, how to endure challenge and enjoy life where we're born with it. It's a primal thing, simple shifts. Kind of signal to the body of like, oh yeah, we're playing, or oh yeah, this is wonder, or oh yeah, this is love. And the good stuff can happen inside. And I think that that is incredible. It it makes me think I talk about the study in the book about these homeless shelters across a state, and they researchers looked at a network of these shelters, and in half of them, they encourage people to celebrate kids birthdays, to do birthday parties, and in half, they didn't. And what they found was that the simple celebration of a birthday allowed these individuals to go from being clients or participants in a program to feeling wholly human, from going from just being defined by the crisis or the case to being defined by the community that was gathering and remembering the life worth celebrating, and the impacts of that were completely outsized. They got were more likely to find housing, to find permanent employment. You know, quality of life improved, and so it's just a reminder that, like we're we're made for this. We're made but we're also made
Ned Johnson:to thrive. Well, I would, I love that. It makes two things jump to mind. One, in the in the book, you mentioned that you try to limit how often you refer to young people as students, but you refer to them as kids, as teenagers, as young people, so they're not narrowly defined, as you know, by their schooling. That's the totality of who they are. And it strikes me as the same thing with that. These are, these are humans who happen to be experiencing homelessness, right? And if you're experiencing mental health crises or experiencing substance use disorders, but that's but I'm not an alcoholic, I'm a person with alcoholism. Is that a fair way to think about that?
Stephanie Malia Krauss:Yeah, absolutely. It's that person first language, and I talked about that in whole child, whole life too, that like we have to center our humanity, because even if we don't realize and recognize it, there is a diminishing quality to it. So you know, I'll tell you a story of my younger son, Harrison, his teacher in fifth grade was Miss Dawson. And Miss Dawson had also had my older son for the pandemic year third grade, and then she moved to fifth grade to sort of get those kids again. She felt like she really missed out on this group of kids, and we call Tess. That's her first name. We call Tess our teacher, Mom and I always think about this. Why do we talk about these kids as kids, rather than students? In this way, if Harrison were to ever have gone to Tess after a weekend and said, Miss Dawson, Miss Dawson, I gotta tell you what happened this weekend. If she had looked at him and said, Oh, buddy, we we only talk about school stuff here on your teacher, I would have crushed his soul because to him, yeah, she was an adult in his life, right? An obscene amount of time with him, and even for high schoolers, yeah, no. Young people, you know this from your background and our own experience parenting. Young people are growing up in these buildings and on these sports teams, and it is their integrated life. They don't differentiate between. It's just okay, I'm with this group of adults, and I'm with this group of adults, and I'm with this adult over here. And so it is just we don't have to be perfect with it. But I have found it to be a helpful practice for me. I always remembering that we are adults caring for kids, whether that is. Personally or professionally, and that our job is, if we want them to be ready like making it, our job is to prepare them. And if we want them to be well and thrive, our job is to care for them. So the job, then is preparing and caring for kids.
Ned Johnson:Let me ask you about go back to dangerous weather and you have a really nice framework, I think, Well, you talk about allostatic load, and I'd love for you to explain that to folks who don't know that, and then break it down into four domains, if I have that right, which I found really effective, because when you go back to what you're saying about the word cloud, when people feel, you know, overwhelmed, it's just this wall. And it's like, how do I how do I attack or address this, this, this wall of overwhelm, where, I guess Tina Payne Bryson says, you know, name it to tame it. When you can start to say, I feel over tapped. I feel or, well, I won't take your words. Did you walk us through allostatic load and the and the framework that
Stephanie Malia Krauss:you absolutely so I'm so grateful to learn from so many brilliant scientists and researchers. So in how we thrive, I got to interview more than 100 of them, actually, as a writer, you'll appreciate this. My brother was a longtime NPR producer and he was a journalist, and he said, Okay, Stephanie, this is your third book. You can talk to anybody. Anybody should say yes to an interview. So if you want to talk to them, reach out to them. And not everybody wanted to say yes to an interview, but 100 did, wow. So everyone from evolutionary biologists to neuropsychologists to epigeneticists, and in this case, allostatic load was some a term that I had heard, but it was also something that Pam Cantor, who is a psychiatrist by training, and camellia hostinar, who's a stress researcher, thinking really about children and young people, both of them really were the ones who most deeply educated me on it. And then there was a another researcher, Theresa Seaman, who actually comes out of medicine, and she works on sort of intergenerational, you know, looking across generation studies, she's got a cool program with older adults in a Elementary School in La that is worth reading about in the book, but so all of them have sort of helped me understand allostatic load, and the basics are pretty easy, which is to say, our bodies can only absorb so much stress, and at some point the level that we can absorb, we meet that threshold, and everything outside of that is toxic. And so when we think about chronic, constant stimulation, stress, productivity, pressure, all of those things feed into this allostatic load, and we can bear the load unless we go over that biological biochemical level. And once we do, it starts to break things down, because now we're just kind of corroded with gunk. It's really flowing through our bodies and in bad ways, and that's Allostatic overload. And so what we're finding is that simply being in modern life, that the forces, which I, you know, we'll dig into, I guess, after this, four forces, what I call the dangerous weather, that really are different about living right now that
Ned Johnson:is it fair to think of the dangerous weather because it's, it's separate from, you know, an acute something that pops up right where it's like, it's the it's the chronicness of, is that right? Yeah, so let's
Stephanie Malia Krauss:Okay, so let's go, let's go to dangerous weather, and I'll loop us back to allostatic load to connect the two. So there are external forces right now that are impacting all of us. So it's like a weather system we are in it, whether we want to be or not. And of course, just like the weather, if there's a hurricane warning or blizzard or whatever else, the way that that weather impacts you is going to really it's going to really matter the resources you have. Do you have a house that's equipped for it? You know, if you're on the water, the difference between being on a cruise ship and being on a speedboat or a kayak? I mean, it's going to be vastly different, but we're we're all in the same weather. And so back to Allostatic overload. The weather itself is stressful, and you can think about this outside of the imagery of it, when we know a hurricane is coming, or we're in the middle of a blizzard and we're worried, is the power going to go out? Are we going to have enough food? Is there going to be damage? Are we going to have to get a new roof? All the things it's stressful on. Its own. But if inside of our lives or inside of our house or inside of that boat, there are other issues to contend with already, everything is amplified. And so what I mean by that is that life itself is sending so much toxicity into our bodies and our relationships, and we'll talk about the four forces in a second because of those dangerous weather conditions. But if you were already having a hard life, God, it is so much harder. You know, you know a little bit about my background. I got sober when I was 15. Had my parents were divorced, there was addiction, there was mental illness, there were a bunch of things that were all going on. And I always think about it this way. Life was hard enough for me when I was growing up, but I cannot imagine how much harder and worse it would have been if I had that life today right now. Oh, good point, right? And so let's talk about like, if I was in this weather, what does it look like? So the weather that we are in, the dangerous weather of modern life, our normal is not natural, and we're fraying because of it. So the first force that we're contending with, all of us, is being constantly over tapped. So that's the idea of never having enough time or money. You don't have the resources that you need for everything that life is demanding from you. Life is demanding more than we have, more time than we have to give, more money than we have to give, and that is stressful, and that is fraying us, and that is fraying sometimes our relationships and our quality of life. So that's one force, and yet, because it's our modern day normal, even though it's not natural, this pacing of life, this frenzy of life, we feel like we're not doing enough if our calendar isn't crowded, or if we give spaciousness and we don't know what we're doing wrong if we can't pay the bills. Like, how did we end up here? The second force is being overworked. It is the constant, chronic productivity. You see it all the time, the pressures that students face. And I have a cartoon in the book you may have caught it that like was actually taken from an old domestic abuse visual. Domestic Abuse visual Was that like a man gets in trouble at work, he comes home and he yells at and hurts his wife, and she turns around and yells at her kid, and the kid turns around and kicks the cat. So my version of this with grind culture and being overworked, the toxic productivity is that, you know, somebody is at work, and they're so overworked, and they go to their high school kid and they're like, you're not going to be ready for the real world if you don't work harder and faster and take these classes and do all of these things. And then the high school kid turns around to the middle school sibling and says, You're not going to be ready for high school if you don't do more and work harder and work faster and take on more things, and then the middle schooler turns around to like the toddler, kid who's holding a toy, and toddler, you know, doesn't know what to do, but it is cultural, and I see this with my middle schoolers, where they have zero attendance, you know, like they have zero hero parties to celebrate people who Don't miss school and don't miss any assignments and don't get in trouble at all. And this sort of like the missive, the email that went out about these zero hero parties, was, this is how we prepare them for life. And what I hear from kids is, if this is life, I don't know that this is what I want, right, right, right, right. And so that's the second the third force is and I
Ned Johnson:would just jump in there. What a perfect, perfect recipe to create maladaptive perfectionism, right? 100% I mean, I was, I was lecturing at a school, middle school recently, and in advance of it, the terrific educator said that, you know, the parents all say, Well, it's an all girls school. It's fine for the girls to play in fifth grade, but in sixth grade, they have to get serious meaning with an eye towards college. And I shared the story at a K through three school where Bill and I were talking, and the head of school there is also a terrific educator said, Yeah, hear the parents say, It's fine for kids to play in kindergarten, but by mid first grade, we have to get serious. You know, I mean, Peter Gray is somewhere, you know, pulling his hair out of his head. I mean, it's just, it's Yeah, yeah.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:And I talk about Peter Gray's book. So for folks who don't know it, the book is called free to learn. And what, like, blew my mind, Ned was realizing that we have only lived. This way, so fast, so frantic, so frenzied, so fractured. For 1% of human history that you know, the Industrial Revolution was 300 years ago. Humans have been around walking and talking like this for 300,000 years, and then we've only lived like this, this fast, this frenzied, this fractured, this frayed for like 1% of the 1% and so the question that I kept asking myself as I was writing this book was who said we have to live like this, and why are we being pulled by this dangerous weather and allowing it just to beat us instead of learning to navigate it, figuring out when we need to seek safe harbor, like the storms are too strong, we need a break, and then also recognizing how to enjoy the journey that we're on, even if it's going to be stormy sometimes. And with Stuart's work around play and Peter Gray's work around play and learning. When we look past the 1% kids spent a third of their day playing, because that's how they learned, and that's how they prepared, and that's how they developed socially. The fact that we have so become so disembodied is just devastating. And and again, the kids know they need it, but unlike adults, they can't get up and walk out of school. They can't get up and walk out of the classroom, right? They're they're stuck. So yeah, so let's talk. Let's go back to these toxic, these dangerous weather forces that are driving Allostatic overload and really just making us sick and making harder to human. So you have we talked about being over tapped, not enough time and resource, being overworked, grind culture, hustle, toxic productivity. But the third is overstimulated. The real impact of addictive and manipulative tech. And what we know from emerging research, especially when we're talking about kids, is that these big tech companies, they prey on these kids developmental vulnerabilities where kids typically go on addictive technology platforms for all the right reasons, right they're like, they're bored, they want to create, they want to connect, and the adult told them to all kinds of reasons, and then the algorithms and the design of it hook and harm them. But we do know that that is a dangerous weather that we're living in that is unique and different. It's impacting our kids exponentially, but it's also impacting us and our marriages and our relationships and our own well being. And then the fourth weather condition is being overwrought, the sort of fear for our lives, the existential dread. So when you take it together, just recognizing that we are all deeply impacted by this, and we have to be clear sighted. That's the part of thriving I talked about, of enduring challenge, but it also was the biggest revelation in the book, because what I came to understand this is where the term rehumaning came from. Is that when we are just subjected to the weather and feeling overtapped, being overworked, being over stimulated, being overwrought, are sort of running and ruining our lives. Those forces are deeply dehumanizing. They actually pull us further and further away. Addictive. Tech is a great example from the human experiences and connections that we need, and so it takes work. Think about like rowing against the current. It takes practice and intention and action to actively re human and pull us back to the things that the weather is keeping us from is depriving us from. And play is one of those.
Ned Johnson:That's one I'm thinking about the court case that came down, you know, where, where they found against meta and all the ways, you know, with pretty dramatic, pretty dramatic ruling. And I think Jonathan Haidt probably gets a lot of credit for that, for, you know, helping everyone wrap their brains around kind of what, why this is so bad.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:In the book, I break those down, as you know, into four different areas, the essentials of the body, mind, heart and spirit, and so within the body, for example, we'll talk in a moment, there's movement, but also sleep and eating and regulating. Within the mind, relatedly, there's play and others. Within the heart, there's connection, which happens a lot during play and other things. And. Example from spirit is celebration, which we talked about with the power filters. So there are 14 essentials that the science and human history show us have a profoundly outsized impact on how well we're doing physiologically and psychologically, and again, they're increasingly hard to come by in this weather. So I just want to, like, lean in to what you said about the anxious generation and Jonathan heights research, I am grateful that somebody has forcefully taken on really making the case about the negative and harmful impacts that addictive tech can have.
Ned Johnson:Yeah, it makes me think the technologist, Dana Boyd, made the observations. She said, it isn't so much that teens are addicted to their phones, but they're addicted to other teens, and if their phones are the way that they get to connect with other people. Well, to your point, you know, virtue isn't the absence of vice, right? Taking away the phones is not going to create spaces, necessarily, particularly third spaces where kids need can connect with them in ways that they developmentally and psychologically need. And so if they're drawn to phones, to your point, because they want to connect, they're seeking novelty. They're they're interested in, you know, people or things or whatever. But then the price they have to pay is having that intra base being an addictive technology.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:So the dangerous weather, it keeps us from these essentials that for millennia we've relied on to be healthy, healthier, happier and more whole. And so those essentials, body, mind, heart and spirit, include what you just mentioned, movement and play. And so I talk about in the book, in the chapter on movement, what you mentioned seat time as the new smoking. And so the first is understanding the science, which is that the science is abundantly clear at this point, if we sit child or adult for more than six hours a day, it is a short line to life threatening health consequences, said plainly, if we sit for more than six hours a day, we are probably going To die much earlier than we would have anyway. So from a science perspective, we are having our kids sit for way too long during the school day. They sit on the bus, they sit in our car, then they sit in school. And the difference between now and previous generations is that fewer kids are walking to and from school, fewer kids are playing outside when they get home. And so we've stripped down the opportunities. While people have always experienced school as a place, typically, unless you're at a Montessori school or others, as a place where you sit, now there are fewer opportunities to get moving outside of it. And what is devastating is that the research on exercise from folks like John Brady and others shows unequivocally that by getting our bodies moving, we learn better, we live better. We sleep better, we eat better, we we do everything better that our bodies are made to move. And so when you think about school, what I think is so striking. I was deeply involved in the competency based education movement years ago, and at that time in the state of Missouri, where I ran a school and other places there were, there was called seat time laws. So you had to be in your seat for, I think it was like 1820 minutes for every one high school credit that you could earn. And it was about time and seat rather than knowledge and skills. And it just is so striking to me Ned that like our education laws were seat time laws rather than learning laws, right? So on the one hand, we have that sort of norm of what it looks like to be a student or a worker. We are also sitting too much for many of us when we work, but on the other hand, in schools in particular, and there's a real call for me to re human school. We strict kids movement, so some kids, not only universally, we're all going to be better learners. We're all going to be healthier humans if we're moving the ways our bodies were meant to but some kids, as you know from your experience, they have to move while learning. It is how they learn in the moment, and so it's not the After Effects. You know, the afterglow of exercise. It is how it happens, but we equate that with bad classroom behavior. So not only are we generally saying stay seated and sort of, you know, in controlled movement hours in the day, but also if you feel the need to move, don't or you'll get in trouble. So that is like such a gross visual for me, of for millennia, for all of human history, people have instinctively, naturally known that moving their bodies was necessary for their health, for their happiness and for their learning and work, but we are in our modern structures explicitly restricting or denying it, especially for our Kids. And back to our conversation about devices. If we remove devices because we're worried that it is ruining the attention and focus of our kids, while also withholding movement and exercise, which research shows is imperative for the attention and focus of our kids, then all we've done is take away instead of what do we give back? And so what I pull this conversation all the way around, what I want all of us as parents to understand is that for everything that we're talking about taking away, we also have to grapple with, what do we need to give back? We need to give back healthy, natural movement. We need to give back sleep. I've got a crazy story about sleep too. We need to give back play, and those small moments, a little bit of play, a little bit of movement. The research is like one minute of exercise, five minutes of exercise. This does not have to be a long time. Has this unbelievable impact on health, happiness and learning.
Ned Johnson:Well, it's such a good point. And there's a study in our book we talk about, in Scandinavian countries, there are laws requiring twice a day recess for children to say, to learn just as well, right? And the one that really I didn't, I didn't know about this. I mean, I like to think of myself as somewhat nerdy around brain science, but about nitric acid, and so I went and looked this whole thing up. So you mentioned that exercise creates nitric acid, and nitric acid improves learning and memory. So I'm like, Well, how does it do that?
Stephanie Malia Krauss:When they engage in movement that is whole body, movement, like martial arts or dance, that the same neural pathways that are struggling when they're trying to pay attention in school are activated during that whole body exercise of by moving and thinking at the same time. And they can be strengthened like a muscle and so again, you know, what would it look like if you had a kid who has ADHD and they had the opportunity to have an immersive, full bodied movement experience during the day. And so what we see is exactly what you talked about with first graders and sixth graders not being able to play. The older young people get, the more restricted the opportunities for Exercise and Movement become from the removal of recess, which also, you know, I talk in how we thrive about a study where most principals admit, yeah, we take recess away for behavior issues, but that's like the opposite of what you want to do
Ned Johnson:if you if you don't get enough seat time, we're not giving you yard time, right? It's like a prison educational policy.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:I mean, I'll tell you my middle schooler, he is allowed to go outside after lunch, but he's not allowed to play, so they call it pavement time, which makes me think of a prison yard, you know. So they go from sitting in their seat to their their school is super overcrowded. They're building a new middle school right now, to being corralled through hallways to this little bitty 20 minute lunch, and then if they finish lunch fast enough they can go and stand outside, but if they play during pavement time, it's a behavioral infraction, and from the adult's perspective, it's management of many bodies, but it's not the well being of these young bodies. And. And listen for us, we also have to be moving. I interviewed Juliet star at who wrote an incredible book built to move, and her and her husband, Kelly are just phenoms in the education and exercise science space, and she has a grading system for like, how much are we sitting and what has that done? But she built to move, sort of moves through. How do we learn to move our bodies in ways that support us across our lifetime? And so what we know is for us, adults and for kids, flexibility matters, strength matters, stability matters and mobility matters. And back to like, the whole point of our conversation about normal not being natural, natural, whole body movement, hiking, climbing, crawling, swimming, playing in ways that you know are more free play. They engage all of those things at one time. And so that's like, what we just need to
Ned Johnson:do, well. And it's so interesting, me, the point that you made before the brain is part of the body, right? And so the same physical things of mobility and flexibility and strength. You know that our physical attributes aren't those also cognitive ones that we want, you know, and the last thing that I want to pivot over to sleep in just a second, because you mentioned ADHD and all these things, these are all human needs, but, but arguably even more so for kids who are neurodivergent. And one of the things that I see or hear children or parents repeat to me over and over is they've got a kid who's who's, he's wiggly, he's ADHD, he and he needs to move and well intended. I believe educators, you know, you know, sit still and pay attention. And as a kid who is like that, is adult who is like that, as a kid, all that I can think is, you get one or the other, sit still and pay attention. I can sit still, in which case I won't pay attention because my brain is going somebody's or I can move around, in which case my movement is when I need to. I need to move my body to get my brain to be still well.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:And two things there. One is, I talk in the book about for anybody who has a child or who they themselves are autistic or on the spectrum of neurodivergence, of course, for you as as the parent of of your adult daughter, that for for young people who are quite autistic, you know they're they're on the more serious or severe end of the spectrum, stemming is an incredible adaptive response that bodies Have of of I need to move in order to regulate. I need to move in order to be in this world. And got it. It breaks my heart to think about, here's this kid trying to cope in the world with a with a natural coping mechanism that works, and then we might restrict or deny it. And just like how painful that is to really like, sit and think about that. Of like, this is how I make it in the world. And you are going to deny me of that very thing.
Ned Johnson:I don't want you. I'd like you to continue to be dysregulated in this world that you have to live in.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. Also, just in terms of, like, the sit and get or the sage on the stage, as they sometimes talk about in education, there's another chapter in the book on flow, and you know, being able to focus, and the research on that shows that lectures and listening are actually the like least likely to produce flow and active learning. And so it's not just our young people who are struggling with attention issues or adults as well it it is anyone who then is in that environment, back to this kind of call to rehuman school. I want to see a school that lays out these essentials like sleep and play and movement and flow, and has an honest audit of in what ways for the adults and the children in our buildings Are we restricting or even rejecting these things, and how do we better protect and prioritize them? And again, sleep is a great example of what they should really evaluate.
Ned Johnson:Well, it's interesting. You know, we always observe, gosh, if I were a teacher, wouldn't I rather teach a kid for four hours who slept for eight than to teach for eight when he slept for four. I mean, you the Julia, I forget the last time who was the exercise guru start. Thank you. I think it was her quip in the chapter on sleep, she said what people saw as a trick of good parenting was simply my kids being well rested.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:Yeah. So this is fascinating, right? So here's Julia. Jet and Kelly and they they're movement people. I also talked to them about their house, they have like, a climbing gym in their house and balance balls. And she said that they protect sleep like it is their job, like as a family, they have seen the unbelievable benefits. Another person I researched who interviewed in the book is Adriana Galvan who is the co director of the Center for the developing adolescent you and I started this conversation talking about the big systems work. She and I were talking and, you know, we're both moms and understand adolescent development. And she said, yeah, there are so many system issues. But can you just imagine if everybody was well rested, like, how much better, including the decision makers and the policymakers, like, how much better everything would be? So here's my story. This week, my husband is away taking care of his his older mom, and so I'm solo parenting, and my night, I know I'm still a parent. One kid is home sick, the others at school, but I've been normally my husband and I, you know, shout out to all the single parents who have to do this all the time. Normally, we divide and conquer the schedule. And what I mean by that is, my 15 year old son has to wake up at six o'clock every morning in order to catch the bus. And he's a high school athlete. He's a base it's baseball season. He's a baseball player. So all week long, I've been on his schedule. Now I wear a biometric device. I have an aura ring that's tracking my sleep. And so it is, we're speaking on a Thursday. So Wednesday, just Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, I've been on my son's schedule. I'm waking up with him, and thanks to homework and tests that he has to do after long baseball practices and games, I'm going to bed with him. So he wakes up at six to go to school, then he goes from school to sports, and then he goes from sports to home and has homework and studying. So his days are 6am to 11pm and I'm watching my my aura ring. It shows sleep debt, and I'm watching my sleep debt, and I have accrued five hours of sleep debt in three days, which is more than like I also protect my sleep, which is more sleep debt than I normally have in a month. Again, my husband and I will divide and conquer. I might take the night, he takes the early morning, and he's developing. You know, we know that, like our friend Lisa Lewis and others like, the science is so clear that for tweens and teens, they should not be doing anything before 830 in the morning, their body clocks shift
Ned Johnson:only, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. But what
Stephanie Malia Krauss:is only according to right? All of that, all of the scientists, all of the pediatricians, all of the researchers, and we have examples of states and schools that have figured this out. Thank God for the start school later campaign. I'm in California, yeah, yeah. I forget what the coalition is. Officially called, school start school late, I think, is the name of the coalition who who has said, Hey, if you're worried about sports or you're worried about little kids being up in the dark, or you're worried about transportation or work schedules, like we figured this out, but again, like that is that this is this evolutionary endowment across human history, we've needed sleep. We sleep for a third of our lives, if we, if we live to be 100 that's 30 years asleep. And we are depriving not only our kids, but like, if I was still a school leader, that would be my schedule too. Like we are depriving these kids and adults inside of school buildings every day of the very thing that they need to heal and repair their bodies, you know, the deep sleep that they need and the dream sleep that they need to remember things to learn to regulate emotionally, we need to make sleep an incredible priority, just like movement. And you know, it's so interesting, because I think the newness of how we thrive this sort of practicing of rehumaning is we know sleep and movement are important, but recognizing that we have the capacities for it from the moment that we're born and play as well, the science says that it's like so innate that it's pre verbal play. So we have the capacities for things like. Sleep and movement and play, all of these essentials, but we're craving the conditions to be allowed to do it, and that takes protecting like we're not coddling, we're protecting the actual essentials themselves.
Ned Johnson:Protect the inputs and the outputs will more or less take care of themselves. I mean, you know your your point. You know Lisa Lewis's book that the sleep to five teen is, you know, and I guess she was singularly involved in helping passing, getting that legislation passed in California. I mean, whenever we lecture, people ask if there's one thing you could fix, what would it be? I said, Everyone get enough sleep. It's not, it's not even close. And this is a sort of an angry rant against any school or school leader or parent for that matter, who's patting themselves on the back for for getting cell phones out of learning environments, which I think is a great idea, don't get me wrong, but who's doing that without paying attention to the school start time. If you have a school system that's starting at eight o'clock or earlier, and you're patting yourself on the back for pulling cell phones out of the just stop, stop, because we know that there's literature and on the cell phones, but the literature around sleep is 100 times what we know about the use of technology. So until you're willing to take sleep seriously and to your point, protecting it for young people, for the developing bodies and brains and potentiation as they grow into adulthood, until you're willing to do that, please, just don't pat yourself on the back too hard about what you've done with phones.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:Okay, so this, that's right. So let's go back to the inflection point in this conversation where we talked about the importance of getting addictive anything out of the hands, reducing risks for our kids, including addictive tech and the work of Jonathan Hite, a phone, played no role in any of that. And so our power is in the protecting, and that happens by knowing the science and then acting on the strategy I'm teaching him to drive right now. And I was so like worried knowing the sleep data, the data doesn't lie on my device from this week of like putting him behind a wheel,
Ned Johnson:people drive cars better legally intoxicated than they do clinically sleep deprived.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:Yes, yes, I know. So can you imagine? Back to like, okay, so what have we talked about? We've talked about the fact that when, when schools put in two recess periods, the kids learned as much, if not more, that when young people get the sleep that they need and start after 830 that they're better able to remember, and they're better able to learn, and they're less likely to have mental health challenges and a whole host of health risks, and they're better athletes, creative move our bodies normally in learning or around learning opportunities that we are going to perform better. We're going to produce better. Now imagine those are just what three or four of the 14 essentials covered in this the dangerous weather is so wild and rough, but if we are only focusing On getting through that chronically, constantly overloaded and overwhelmed without actively intentionally re humaning childhood, including school, re humaning Our lives, including work by doing the protecting of sleep and movement and Play and the other 11 essentials. Then all we're going to be is ready, but not well, that's not thriving, that's enduring the hard stuff and being kind of toxically resilient, like, Okay, I'm just gonna keep going, rather than the enjoying life
Ned Johnson:part well. And the reality is, of course, particularly in a society like the US, where we have the resources, we have the finances, we have the means, we have the knowledge to design societies and way to support people, rather than having, you know, to your point, toxic systems and asking people to somehow just endure them.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:Yeah, that's right, that's right, and it does. It takes creativity. Because, you know, I've been perplexed this week of knowing everything that I know I'm complicit. I'm waking justice up at 615 every morning, or six o'clock every morning, and I'm studying with him at 11. And so the question is, where do you how do you protect? And I think that continue to keep devices out of his room, so that when he goes into his bed he can start shifting, how to start later, how to protect sleep for the kids in their buildings and the adults in their buildings. And you know what behavior issues are down? Down. Academic Performance is up, and mental health challenges are down. Young people and their grown ups are healthier and happier and
Ned Johnson:feel more whole. I know you've got to run away from me. Can we? I love to finish with the very last paragraph in your book. Do you? Do you want to read or do I me to read it? You read it? Okay? So I love this, okay, and explain and to share with us, what? Why? Why this matters.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:So for folks who are just listening, I'm Native Hawaiian. So at the very end of the book, I talk about, I reflecting on my native Hawaiian heritage, and this is actually it, even it gives me goosebumps thinking about this. So, you know, I talked about, we've only lived this way for 1% of human history, right? And that means, if you know epigenetics, where we sort of pass down the blueprint or instruction manual genetically for how to behave in certain situations, I've inherited instructions from my great grandmother and great grandmother, because there's a pass down through that maternal line. So that means that the oldest cells in my body know how to live a different way, and that is, like so encouraging. I actually have the blueprint in my genetic code for how to live a different way, how to live into these essentials. So in Hawaii, those grandmothers all came from the island of Molokai on small, rural island in Hawaii, and they were teachers and mothers and you know, there's a lot similar that got passed down. But on Molokai and every Hawaiian island, historically, they would divide the island up where communities and families would get what was called an ahupuaa, which was a slice of land that went from the mountain mauka to the sea Makai and the mauke to Makai. Spread of an ahupuaa was a full living ecosystem. You had everything that you needed, all of the crops, the soil, the water. It was a full ecosystem for sustaining life. And so I talk about thriving as the essentials are our personal ahupuaa, we are born mauka to makai, with everything that we need to thrive, but we have to have the resources and conditions to cultivate that ecosystem, to take good care of that ecosystem, so that ecosystem can take good care of us. And then Hawaiian history, if one ahupua Ah was struggling, it got hit by the weather or something happened, other people showed up and supported and for me, that's collective care. What we cannot do for ourselves, we do for others. And so, yes, so read the paragraph. So that's sort of the end of the book, right is, is thinking about our ability to thrive as the ahupuaa. We have the capacity, but we need the conditions and the collective care, the community support. Yes, I love it.
Ned Johnson:Yeah, I love it. I love it, and particularly in times of dangerous weather you end your book with we don't know what weather we'll face, but we know our human essentials have carried us through hundreds of 1000s of years. These essentials are our evolutionary endowments. We are entitled to them, and so are our children and their children. By Re humaning our lives, we embrace timeless and same ways to care for ourselves and for others. This is how we human. This is how we thrive. Well, it's a wonderful book. How we thrive caring for ourselves and others in a changing world, good weather or bad, I'm really I'm so grateful for you for doing the work that you and talking to the 100 plus researchers and, of course, your own wisdom and warmth you brought to this book. It's really it's going to help a lot of folks.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:Thanks, dad. I really appreciate it. You know, I think so many of us are trying to practice rehumaning already. We just need language and we need each other to do it and we can. So yeah, if folks want to learn more about re humaning or the book, they can go to just re humaning.com and find resources there videos, and I'll be continuing to add to that, but they can also grab a copy of the book that way, or any other bookstore, and
Ned Johnson:we'll put all those things to the show notes, so make it easy for you to find the help that you need and want for you and your kids. Thanks very much.
Stephanie Malia Krauss:Here's to rehuman Inc, here's to rehumani, thanks, Dad, thanks. A bunch.
Ned Johnson:Some takeaways. Our intention in designing places for children should be to re human childhood and our lives in ways. That enable us to enjoy the very best parts of what it means to be a human and to be alive. For us and for our kids, there's a link and sync effect, and our thriving begets their thriving, and their thriving begets ours. And for Stephanie and for me, we have found it to be a helpful practice to always remember that we are adults caring for kids, whether that is personally or professionally, and that is our job if we want them to be ready, while our job is to prepare them, and that if we want them to be well and thrive, our job is to care for them, for in the end, the purpose of life, of living and so of parenting, is not simply to keep our kids and ourselves alive, but to help all of us thrive. I'm Ned Johnson, and this is the self driven child podcast. Hey folks. Over the past 25 years, I've talked to countless parents of high school age students who care deeply about their kids' education and how they deal with stress and the pressure to succeed. It can help parents to work with a team they trust won't just pile on more pressure to achieve better scores and grades. That's why I founded prep matters in 1997 to create a different kind of experience for test preparation and academic tutoring. This podcast and my books with my friend Bill Stix root reflect our company philosophy and approach to helping students. If you have a high school age student and would like to talk about putting a plan together, please get in touch with us. Visit our website, at prep matters.com, or while your kids may only text, you might want to actually talk with a person, if so, you can reach us at 301-951-0350