Q&A: UT Psychology Professor Wrote the Book on Mentorship to Young People

By Eliza Pillsbury in 40 Acres, Good Reads, Sept | Oct 2024 on September 1, 2024 at 1:17 am | No Comments

When David Yeager was teaching English and P.E. to middle schoolers in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he learned firsthand that many of the recommended “best practices” for teachers were strikingly insufficient. After one PhD from Stanford University, two master’s degrees, and four kids of his own, Yeager has literally written the book on mentorship. Published on Aug. 6 by Simon & Schuster, 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People offers applicable and scientifically validated strategies to resolve the clash between generations. The Alcalde spoke with Yeager about bringing his research to a broader audience and the biggest takeaways for mentors and young people.  

Why did you decide on this age range?  

We know that puberty starts around 10 years old—sometimes a little earlier for girls or a little later for boys—and in our modern economy, people usually aren’t launched into a career until their mid-20s. So there is a kind of biological onset and a social offset of adolescence. And this lengthening of adolescence means that the motivations of young adults have way more in common with the motivations of 10-, 11-, and 12-year-olds than anyone thinks.  

The negative way to understand that is that teenagers are immature for too long, that these 20-year-olds have brains that can’t think about the future—but the positive way to think about it is that anyone who cares about young people can learn from role models in very different settings. What a manager at Microsoft does is actually really relevant to what a sixth-grade math teacher does, or what an NCAA coach does. Once we see the similarities across age groups, we have way more tools for doing well with this age range than we previously thought.  

How did you distill decades of research into a trade book?  

I had to find stories of real adults who were facing the problems I was describing in my studies. I had to go from being an experimental scientist to a literary journalist.  

For example, I found Texas’ greatest high school physics teacher, [Sergio Estrada at Riverside High School in El Paso,] and I called him every Friday for three years. I asked NBA players who was the best coach they’d ever had, and multiple people said Chip Engelland, the Spurs shooting coach. So I met Chip for tacos in a strip mall in San Antonio, and we did an interview.   

It was really hard. I had crafted an academic style over 15 years, but I didn’t know how to tell a story … In a scientific paper, my goal is to tell you the right answer to the scientific question as quickly and clearly as possible. But in narrative nonfiction, I have to tell you why the wrong answer is super interesting and why everybody believes it, before I tell you the right answer. Otherwise, you won’t read it. And that’s really hard because I already know what I want to say. I already know how to explain it to you, and I already have the science, but I can’t tell you about it until I go and find a good story about the wrong answer.  

How did your experience as a parent add to your scientific expertise?  

It’s mostly that I needed to know the information that I was researching. My kids are constantly saying, “Really? You’re supposed to be a parenting expert!” (My 12-year-old threatened to be my first reviewer so that he could tell everyone what a fraud I am.) So I would say it’s not that being a parent made me an expert—it’s more like, being a parent made me want to know the answer. And what it also did is make me skeptical of most parenting advice.  

Why is this science important when leading young people?  

Well, I could say that teenagers these days are unmotivated, disaffected, and not independent; they quit everything; and they feel entitled to every privilege that adults have without ever having to earn it. If I said that to a normal adult, they’d probably say, “Yeah, sounds about right.” But if you look at the young people under these great mentors I’ve researched, they don’t look anything like that.  

I talked to a manager [named Ole]—whom I consider to be one of the world’s greatest—of a [supermarket in Norway]. He doesn’t have people who sneak in the back to smoke weed or take naps. His employees proactively work to make the grocery store profitable because they care about the success of the store.   

Leaders like Ole are doing two very simple things: They have exceptionally high supports and exceptionally high standards. They’re saying, “I expect a lot of you, but I’m going to help you get there because I care about you.” The reader of this book can do this, too, because there are practices that I’ve observed and described real people doing, and then I’ve created exercises in the book so that anyone reading it can do the same things. 

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

CREDIT: Justin Leitner