How to Speak Young Adult

 

"10 to 25

By David Yeager

Avid Reader, 464 pages, $32

Increased rates of depression and suicide. Failure to launch. General malaise and unhappiness. Are young adults all right? In his most recent book, Jonathan Haidt of New York University blamed smartphones and social media for creating what he called "the anxious generation," but psychologists and social scientists have been grappling with the challenges young people face beyond the perils of the internet.

In "10 to 25," David Yeager injects scientific rigor into a sometimes overwrought discussion, drawing on recent studies and his own research. The author, who co-founded the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, humanizes the data with a welcome profusion of anecdotes. The book is as ambitious and revelatory as its title is milquetoast.

Mr. Yeager explains that evolution has led young adults to seek out experiences that confer social status and respect. But adults -- parents, teachers and, yes, managers at work -- often fail to understand and support this drive for prestige. "If the parent believes that teenagers are lazy," writes Mr. Yeager, "they're more likely to use tools of control: threats of punishment for noncompliance (yelling, telling, blaming, shaming, grounding) or rewards for compliance (bribes, promises, relaxed curfews, lower expectations)." Such tactics, says Mr. Yeager, don't inspire teens to act diligently and independently.

The problem, he explains, is a false narrative about the cognitive limitations of the "10 to 25" cohort of his title: Young adults can't be held accountable for their actions, the story goes, because their prefrontal cortex, which aids with planning for the future, isn't fully developed. (Increased testosterone levels are also thought to make impulse control difficult.) But teens and young adults are not cognitively impaired, Mr. Yeager believes. Instead, they operate with a distinct set of incentives that once made them evolutionarily fit.

In the societies in which humanity evolved, gaining respect on the brink of adulthood once meant helping peers and elders with important tasks: chasing down large game or keeping an infant from freezing to death. Contributions were noticed and rewarded instantaneously by the group. An influx of hormones during puberty, Mr. Yeager speculates, helped create a hypersensitivity to status, something that would have been of great use when the goal was to secure a place in the community and, ultimately, stay alive.

While today's slammed doors and disregard for sensible rules appear to be irrational, they are the product of biological and psychological urges that once served an existential purpose. "Young people," writes Mr. Yeager, "deploy their considerable cognitive resources to attend to and protect their immediate social status and respect." If the signals they get from adults threaten "their social survival by robbing them of the status and respect they crave, they'll likely tune it out." Mr. Yeager argues that adults need to appreciate this evolutionary imperative and reframe parenting and mentorship. He calls for a "mentor mindset," a phrase that embraces high expectations, respectful communication and access to resources.

What does this look like in practice? Mr. Yeager recounts how a manager motivated first-year analysts in J.P. Morgan's home-mortgage division. Their painstaking fact-checking of loan applications, he explained, supported what could be a family's most important financial decision: buying a home. He elevated the tedium of entry-level tasks by imbuing them with a sense of meaning and higher purpose.

The author describes a college physics instructor who had trouble engaging students. Despite her efforts, she found that outcomes weren't improving, especially among students from poor families and low-quality high schools. She attributed the lack of motivation to a sense among some students that they couldn't handle the academic demands. So she shared moments of insecurity in her own journey -- a time when she failed an exam but corrected course by reaching out to successful classmates and changing her study strategies. She reminded students that the path to excellence includes setbacks for everyone. After that, more students showed up for extra help and passed the final exam than had ever before, with smaller racial, ethnic and gender disparities.

Instead of shielding young people from high-stakes situations, according to Mr. Yeager, we should raise their consciousness of where their efforts sit in context and why those contributions matter. The author says we need to rebrand "stress" and help young adults harness those racing hormones for their own benefit. He cites research by Jeremy Jamieson, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, who found that when nervous test-takers were presented with scientific proof that stress responses enhance test-taking performance, the students' cortisol levels dropped and their scores soared.

Mr. Yeager talks through the timeworn conflict of a teenager breaking curfew and coming home drunk. Many parents, he argues, typically revert to one of two extremes: the anger and yelling of a disciplinarian or the passive path of least resistance. The mentor, he says, approaches the situation with hands-on curiosity. "Authentic questions" (not rhetorical exclamations like "what were you thinking?") combined with "uptake" (incorporating the answer into further discussion or exploration) can lead to productive dialogue. Leading with curiosity -- "I hear you that you were desperate to be with your friends tonight, but can you explain to me why it made sense to you, at the time, to break the family rules to be with them?" -- can initiate collaborative troubleshooting. It signals to status-hungry teens that the parent is looking to help, not seeking to prove they are incompetent or immature.

The author may not fully demystify the most confounding members of our species, but "10 to 25" offers baffled adults new approaches -- and possibly new hope -- during some of their families' most difficult years.

---

Ms. Finnerty is the deputy editor of live journalism at the Journal." [1]

1.  How to Speak Young Adult. Finnerty, Katherine.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 27 Sep 2024: A.15.