without a spark? executive function coaching can help.
Finding a spark is the relatively easy part; executing on it is where most teenagers stall out.
Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson look at the difference between 'Explorers' and 'Passengers' in their book The Disengaged Teen. The Brookings survey behind the book asked more than 65,000 students about their school experience, and the result is grim: fewer than 4 percent of middle and high schoolers are getting after it, shaping their own learning. About half were Passengers, coasting politely through the school day.
Generative-AI will continue to widen that gap. Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit warn that the distribution of real-world agency is about to go bimodal:
“You’ll either work with the AIs and achieve all the more….or turn large chunks of your life over to the models and become passive.”
Read this NYT essay by a recent Stanford grad, and realize: it’s never been simpler to stay in Passenger mode. LLMs are cheat codes for coasting. Let your model draft a 10-page paper, run it through a 'humanizer' plug-in, and turn it in. No friction or spark required.
We notice three issues with our clients in this area -
1. Motivation is highly uneven, and teens are at the dip
Conscientiousness, the Big-Five workhorse that is closely related to motivation, drops at the onset of adolescence. It only recovers, and slowly, across the 20s and 30s. Here is an adaptation of Soto et al.’s giant (n = 1,000,000+) analysis:
63 percent of teens are below the adult mean, and this was from 2010. Layer on the major changes to teen life since then…and how many sparks survive?
2. Passion can flame out; it needs a supporting infrastructure
Anderson and Winthrop's Explorers turn out to be … project managers, too.
A friend's daughter, a sophomore, discovered last spring that she was obsessed with dahlias. This wasn’t fleeting; she quickly located a plot and ordered some seed packets and tubers. She then ran some soil tests (taught herself how with youtube) and built a watering calendar. She kept tending the bed when slugs and snails invaded, and she waited months for the first full bloom.
That is executive function at work; the easy part was noticing that she loved the flowers, the hard part was sustaining that love into something real.
3. Your spark is an opportunity cost
One of my students, call him John, spent 30+ hours developing a survey in AP Stats. He wanted to know the relationship between sleep and stress among guys his age. He sent out a survey to some friends and quickly got 20 responses. Then he wondered - could I get more? And ended up with 1250.
It was pure joy for him, and he went well beyond what was required for the assignment. His Physics grade also sagged two letters while he did it; he just wasn’t paying attention to it as much anymore.
Passions can be time-expensive. If we want kids to chase a spark, we have to ease up on the pressure in other areas of life; in John’s case, to be ok with a B in Physics, instead of an A.
