Why Your Teenager Seems So Checked Out of School — & What to Do About It
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Raise your hand if you’ve personally witnessed your child’s love of learning move from joy over an elementary school science project to dread — if not downright despair — over physics or AP Chemistry. In an age of pressure-cooker achievement culture (which, newsflash, hasn’t skipped our kids) and an increasing emphasis on teaching for tests, it’s no surprise that teens today are feeling more disengaged from learning than ever before.
That disengagement crisis — and the tools parents can use to help combat it — are the focus of a brand-new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, by Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop.
Pulling from their own original research — including surveys of more than 60,000 teens as well as interviews with more than 100 — the authors dig into the root causes of today’s disengaged teens, explain four key “modes of engagement” that teens may shift in and out of throughout their day, and offer up actionable ways parents (and teachers!) can help spark (or re-spark) a love of learning and engagement both in and out of school.
SheKnows talked with Anderson and Winthrop ahead of our SK Conversations event for the book to explore why teens are checking out — and what parents can do about it.
SheKnows: You open the book talking about a “disengagement crisis” among kids, writing: “Spoiler alert: Parents are in the dark and the kids are not okay.” Can you explain this crisis?
Rebecca Winthrop: What we learned is the older kids get, the more disengaged they get from school. In third grade, about 75 percent say they love school. By the time they get to 10th grade, that’s flipped; only 25 percent say they love school, which is a really good indicator of how engaged they are. And parents really had no clue. They had a clue when kids were little, but the minute kids hit middle school, kids became much more disengaged and parents thought they became just a little bit more disengaged.
SK: Why are teens disengaging? You say that it’s not just smartphones and social media…
Jenny Anderson: There are a lot of different reasons and it’s important to note that it’s a continuum; it doesn’t happen overnight. They don’t wake up one day completely disengaged. But some of the main reasons they tell us they’re disengaged is, it’s boring. It’s irrelevant. It’s stupid.
“Boring” is a very complicated word. It means a lot of different things. It can mean they’re overwhelmed. It can mean they’re behind. It can mean they’re neurodivergent and they haven’t been diagnosed yet and they don’t know how to catch up. It may be that they totally get the content and they’re bored to tears.
So they’re above what we call the zone of proximal development — that sweet spot of learning — or they’re below it. And they also just feel very unprepared for the world they see through their smartphones. And that creates both a little bit of panic and a little bit of apathy because it’s like, “How am I how am I going to make this work?”
SK: Can you explain the four Modes of Engagement that you’ve identified?
RW: The four Modes of Engagement — these are how your kids show up to learn every day in school, and kids can be in one of four modes.
They can be in passenger mode, where they’re coasting and doing the bare minimum. They might like school to see their friends, but they’re not developing their “learning to learn” muscles and they’re not really excited about learning.
They can be in achiever mode, which is the go-getter kids trying to get all A’s. Everybody loves an achiever, and there are good things about achiever mode — they have really diligent study skills — but they often are very fragile learners because they are for the end goal, not the process. So they’re not going to take a risk in their learning or pursue something they’re really interested in if they think it won’t get them such a good grade, and that doesn’t serve them well. They end up being pretty non-resilient when they face challenges.
You’ve got resister mode — these are the kids who are quote-unquote “problem children,” they are class clowns, not doing their homework, disrupting class, deeply withdrawing, ultimately skipping school… These kids are suffering, and they really are not problem children; they are trying to tell us, the adults, the parents, the teachers, even though it’s often very inappropriate, that school’s not working for them — and we really need to listen to them.
And then you have kids who show up in explorer mode, who are the kids who are super proactive about their learning, they’re going for it, and they care about the learning process. They’re exploring things that they are interested in and they’re asking for more…this starts a virtuous upward cycle of teachers thinking they’re great and giving them more freedom and they become more interested and they just start loving school and becoming really energized. And they have the skills that both get them good grades, but they’re also much happier, and they’re developing the resilient learning skills that kids need in an age of AI.
JA: I would just add one thing to all that, which is these are very fluid modes. These are not identities. We are not trying to label or pigeonhole kids in any way… some kids turn up and are in multiple modes in the course of a day, and some kids identify more with one or another. But the goal for parents, and one of the key reasons we wrote this book, is we don’t want kids to get stuck — because when they get stuck, that’s when a mode can become an identity.
SK: You describe a dark side to achiever mode. What is the “achiever conundrum” and how the age of achievement can hurt kids?
JA: The achiever conundrum is that something that we desperately all want for our kids, which is a strong work ethic and pride in hard work, can also be harmful to them.
We have kids in two different modes in achiever mode: There are happy achievers, and those kids are balanced. Kids in unhappy achiever mode are cognitively engaged in school but they’re not emotionally engaged in school. They’re not sure why they’re doing it, they just know they have to keep doing it. And a lot of research shows that that mode has incredibly poor mental health outcomes for kids. So those kids are at risk. We can see it in the data.
We have a big role as parents, to walk that balance of, “Well done, but let’s not tie your entire self-worth to this.” When you fail, that’s how we learn. It’s really helping kids take small risks on behalf of their learning so they actually have a chance to fail a little bit, so that the first failure doesn’t feel so colossal.
We need to get much more invested in the process of learning, the practice of learning, and not just the outcome.
SK: As parents, we can feel like we have to push our kids into achiever mode to get them into college. How do we navigate that?
RW: It’s a super hard line that every parent has to tread, and the advice we give in the book — there are a couple of things. One is: It’s better to have a happy passenger than an unhappy achiever.
The world is big and there are many pathways. There are 4,000 colleges and universities! There was some rigorous research that we looked at that showed that unhappy achiever mode kids, by sophomore year, were enrolled in college at equal rates as kids in resister mode — because they showed up and they burned out and didn’t know how to self-direct their lives. So we have to take a long-term perspective.
The other little bit of hope that I would give to parents is that the number one success criteria of how college impacts kids’ lives is not necessarily which college they go to … it really is how engaged they are when they’re at school, and if they are self-driven and motivated and get the most out of it. That is very hard to keep in the front of our minds because of social pressure.
JA: I would add two quick things to that: Sometimes we need to decenter our own experience. I say this from personal experience. I am a high achiever and high achievement brings me great joy — it’s also stressed me out at points during my life — but it took having a kid with learning differences and having someone point out to me that maybe what drove me and made me happy was not necessarily what was going to drive her and make her happy. And when you say it out loud, you’re almost like, “Oh my goodness, how did I not see that?” But I think it’s very easy as a parent to think that. Let’s just not transpose what we think is good for us onto everybody else.
The second is, I think parents want permission to parent their kids the way they know feels better to them. I think sometimes [parents need] the message of, “It’s okay to let your kid go to bed and not stay up until 2 A.M. studying for a test because that’s actually better for them. You’re doing the right thing.”
SK: You talk about the Modes of Engagement as “states, not traits.” Beyond that, what’s the most important thing you want parents to know about these modes?
RW: We really want kids to spend more time in explorer mode. And they can get in explorer mode anywhere, and you can help them. If there was one message we want parents to know, that would be it. And you don’t need to help them as a parent by hiring expensive tutors or enrolling in special extracurricular after-school programs. You can help them in the flow of your daily life, and it really is you talking about what they’re learning at school. Not how they did, what they learned. And thinking about how it’s relevant, and modeling curiosity. And if they have a funky passion and are really interested in something, let them do it.
SK: You say “Discussion is to adolescent development what cuddles are to infants: foundational to building healthy brains.” How do we do this at a time when our kids are famously uninterested in talking to us?
JA: That’s a good question. I think the phrase we use in the book is, “How do you do this when it seems like they would rather eat nails than have a discussion with you?” I also have a teenager who I’m pretty sure is more interested in the carpet than she’s been talking to me at times.
But honestly, they are at a moment of peak challenge and discovery. And so we have to just completely shift from instructional to invitational. They do not want our answers, they want to find their answers.
So [embrace] this idea of invitational and not instructional; less fixing, more inquiring, more open-ended questions, less advice. Just try to keep all those things in mind and give yourself grace. This takes time. It’s often five steps backward before you take one forward.