New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Secrets That Will Make Your Teenager Motivated

Trying to motivate a teenager is like trying to push a boulder up a hill, except the boulder has a phone and keeps telling you that it will roll itself up the hill later, just give it a minute.

So you remind them. They need to do their homework or their chores. This will get you The Teenage Sigh. This is no ordinary sigh. This is a long, theatrical exhale so weighty it could be used to measure atmospheric pressure. It is a carefully engineered emotional payload designed to make you feel like the dumbest, most exasperating person alive.

So you stop being polite and tell them to do it now. This gets you an Oscar-worthy performance of the classic ballad, “Why Me?” Because apparently, living in a house with walls and a refrigerator that magically restocks itself is basically the world’s most elaborate oppression.

Teenagers: the parasite that thinks it’s the host. Their entire worldview is constructed from 30-second video clips, delivered by influencers barely older than themselves, who are somehow both millionaires and clinically insane. They’ll insist you don’t “get it,” as if growing up in an era before social media means you spent your childhood foraging for berries and communicating via cave paintings. Oh, and don’t you dare use their slang, unless you want to be publicly executed via cringe tribunal.

You end up rolling your eyes and saying, “Kids these days.”

But hold on one second there, pardner. Because research shows that is the mistake every generation makes:

Harvard University psychologists analyzed responses to public opinion survey questions from 1949 to 2019 that asked U.S. adults about the moral character of each generation. Older people thought the next generation lacked the moral values of their own generation but didn’t say that their own generation made their own youthful mistakes.

This story is as old as the hills: older people thinking younger people are an unprecedented mess. It’s like the second they become parents adults download some sort of firmware update that erases all memory of their own adolescent follies. As if they spent their teenage years finishing schoolwork weeks before it was due and doing chores with a song in their heart. Riiiiiiiight.

Okay, so your kids aren’t broken – they’re normal. But the problem remains: how do you get them to do things with fewer tears and slammed doors? Trying to parallel park a cruise ship sounds easier.

Well, we’re gonna get some help from David Yeager, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. His book is”10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People.”

Let’s get to it…

 

No, Their Brain Isn’t Broken

We’ve all heard the same story over and over: “Their brains aren’t fully developed until age 25!”

Where did this idea come from? A 2006 paper by Adriana Galván. And guess what? She thinks everybody interpreted her study wrong. What her work actually shows is that young people are better at goal directed behavior than adults. Yes, really. So what’s the real problem here?

Galván says teen brains aren’t underdeveloped – they just have different priorities. Their prefrontal cortexes work just fine, thank you. They just don’t care as much about the things parents do.

Science, the same science that brought us gravity and Advil, is now telling us that teen brains aren’t broken, they’re just less focused on homework and chores and much more motivated by social rewards — like status, respect and autonomy. You know, the stuff we rarely give them. Most adults treat teens like they’re toddlers but taller.

And that brings us to an important point: nagging doesn’t work with teens. In a 2014 study, Ron Dahl and Jennifer Silk recorded subjects’ mothers finishing this sentence: “One thing that bothers me about you is…” Then they put teens into a brain scanner and played the audio. What happened?

The areas of the brain associated with intense emotions all but exploded. The lentiform nucleus and the posterior insula started working overtime, flooding the kid’s body with righteous fury. And then there’s the TPJ — the temporoparietal junction. This is the part of the brain that might ask, “Hmm, let me consider what my mom is trying to say here. Let me reflect on her perspective.” Yeah, that part of the brain shut down.

But what about when parents show them some respect? Everything changed. When Dahl and Silk played audio of mom speaking in a more neutral tone, the emotions died down and the thinking-and-planning brain regions started working again.

So don’t be a nag. Instead, be a wise mentor. Decades of scientific research shows that taking a mentor perspective is the most effective style for getting through to young people. What’s that mean? Combine high standards with high support.

You’re not their best friend, but you’re also not the Iron Fist of Curfew. You’re there to guide them, like a sherpa of basic human decency, helping them climb the mountain of their own half-baked ambitions and questionable choices.

(To learn the emotionally intelligent way to communicate with kids, click here.)

But what about when they’re doing something… but they’re doing it wrong? How do you correct a teen without triggering a meltdown?

 

Use “Wise Feedback”

Geoffrey Cohen, a psychologist at Stanford University, studied something he calls “the mentor’s dilemma.” It’s the tricky balance of criticizing someone’s efforts without destroying their self-confidence and cratering motivation.

His solution? “Wise feedback.” You can be critical, but you need to pair it with the reason you’re giving the feedback, specifically that you think they have the potential to be awesome. In studies this made students twice as likely to revise their homework.

Yes, you’re giving criticism, but the point you’re driving home is “I believe in you and think you have what it takes to be great if you just do X.”

(To learn the ancient traditions that will make you an awesome parent, click here.)

Somehow, the same kid who can spend 97 consecutive hours glued to their game console trying to slay a digital dragon is utterly incapable of opening a book without a court order. So now we have to address the biggest challenge when it comes to teenagers: how do you get them to do that thing they don’t feel like doing?

 

Use The “Vegemite Method”

Unless you’re Australian, you probably don’t like the taste of Vegemite. And doctors know this, so they’ve used it in research to examine how to get people to do things, like taking unpleasant medication. What have they found that makes the difference in whether people follow through or not? Same thing teens respond to – whether they’re asked respectfully.

So here’s the four-step “Vegemite method” of getting compliance:

1) Ask, don’t tell

Asking respects their autonomy and doesn’t provoke resistance.

2) Honor their competence

Raise the issue but let them decide the specifics of how the task will be performed. This gives them a say and feels less like an order.

Combining 1 and 2 gets us: “So what’s your plan for balancing homework and Fortnite?”

3) Validate their feelings

They’re going to complain. Of course they will. They’re teens. Don’t counterattack. Nod and tell them you understand it’s difficult.

4) Presume agency

Treat them like you would a co-worker. Don’t use a tone that conveys they’re unreliable and incapable of finishing anything without being nagged — especially if history demonstrably proves they are unreliable and incapable of finishing anything without being nagged.

This method may sound more complicated than just shouting demands but it prevents your words from coming across like the adult in every Peanuts cartoon. And it works. Research shows that a solid 66% of teens actually complied with these nudges, compared to just 47% who were ordered around like prisoners of war.

(To learn how to make your baby smarter, click here.)

But what if this doesn’t work? Or what if the task is particularly boring? How do you get teens to do stuff they really don’t want to do?

 

Give Them Purpose And Meaning

Researchers tried to get teenage subjects to complete a difficult assignment. What instructions were most effective in getting the teens to follow through?

“I’m giving you this assignment because I think you have the potential to get an interesting job and make people’s lives better one day, if you develop your skills on assignments like this one.”

That message beat all the others, hands down. Here are the three reasons why:

1) It emphasized usefulness

Tell a teenager to do math homework “because they’re supposed to” and you might as well be speaking in hieroglyphics. Tell them learning statistics will help them destroy their friends in fantasy football and — boom. Motivation.

2) It emphasized an interesting future job

Algebra is necessary for them to be a doctor and you’d love for them to be a doctor. Great – but do they want to be a doctor? Interesting means interesting to them.

Would they love to create video games one day? Programming requires math. Or maybe your teen loves animals. Veterinary science contains that word “science.” Yup, gonna need math if you want to help those puppies.

3) The assignment teaches skills that allow them to help others

Teenagers might act like they don’t care about anything except whether they’ve been left on read, but they actually do care about other things. Social issues, sports, entertainment — they’ve got passions.

If you show them that learning certain things could help them one day change the world or impress others, you have their attention. There’s something deeply satisfying about being the person who “did something.” It’s a combination of social status and genuine purpose. They’re not just studying; they’re becoming the kind of person who matters. And that resonates with what teens dream about.

(To learn the 5 rituals that will make you an awesome parent, click here.)

Okay, we’ve covered a lot. Let’s round it all up and learn one final tip that harnesses that universal teenage trait: Rebellion…

 

Sum Up

Here’s how to motivate your teenager…

• No, Their Brain Isn’t Broken: They want autonomy and respect. When you nag, they tune you out faster than you can say, “Why are there 14 half-empty Gatorade bottles in your room?” The goal is to be a mentor. Be the Yoda of parenting (but without the terrible grammar.)
• Use “Wise Feedback”: If you want someone to do better, you can’t coddle them into mediocrity. But you also don’t want to go “Simon Cowell judges karaoke night” and wreck their confidence forever. Give criticism but with a reason. And the reason is that you think they have potential.
• Use The “Vegemite Method”: Getting them to do something doesn’t have to feel like some End of Days battle. Ask, don’t tell. Honor their competence. Validate their feelings. Presume agency.
• Give Them Purpose And Meaning: If you want to motivate teens to do something boring, stop pretending the assignment itself is going to spark joy. It’s not. And they know that. Instead, sell the dream. Tell them this is how they become the person they want to be.

In the mid-1980’s the federal government launched the “Just Say No” campaign to educate kids about the dangers of drugs. Guess what? It produced no reduction in substance abuse. In fact, some studies show it increased drug use. Wonderful.

So what does get through to teens? In the late 90’s Florida launched the “Truth” campaign designed to get adolescents to not smoke. “Truth” didn’t lecture. It didn’t focus on health or longevity. Its argument? “The tobacco companies are lying to you. They think you’re stupid. Let’s expose their lies and stand up for ourselves. They’re not going to tell us what to do.”

You can guess what happened. After the campaign launched, teen smoking rates declined every year, eventually going from 28% to less than 6%. Public health experts now consider it one of the most successful health interventions ever.

And that’s the big lesson here: teens will actually do things if they feel respected and you tap into their need for autonomy. Do that and they might surprise you by, oh, I don’t know, doing the dishes without you having to threaten exile. Adolescents can be difficult, but they’re not impossible.

The thing about teenagers is that they are simultaneously the most frustrating and the most heartbreaking creatures in the known universe. They are all sharp angles and raw nerves, existing in a state of perpetual yearning, longing for something they can’t quite name but are absolutely certain you don’t understand. They are contradictions in human form: deeply cynical but hopelessly romantic, convinced they know everything but terrified they know nothing, desperate to be noticed but horrified to be seen.

And yet, somehow, you don’t sell them to the circus. Because you love them. More than they will ever understand. More than they would even allow you to. You love them through the slammed doors and the silences, through the sighs and the Ugh, never mind and the Can you just not right now? You love them because you remember who they were, and because you see, in glimpses, who they are becoming. You love them even when they talk to you like you are a customer at a store they resent working at.

So remember this: you used to be just like them. That’s the secret, the source of empathy that will give you the patience to use the above tips to connect with them.

And one day — one glorious day — they will have teenagers of their own. And when their teenager rolls their eyes and flops over like a dying fish at the thought of putting a single sock in the hamper, you will be there.

And you will smirk.