Dr. Ellen Braaten on Helping Kids Stay Motivated

In Bright Kids Who Couldn’t Care Less, learning expert and associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Ellen Braaten, presents a guidebook for parents, educators, caregivers, and others who work with children, that helps to explain the lack of motivation that we see in seemingly bright children and what we as can do to motivate them to succeed. Piggybacking off her previous book, Bright Kids Who Can’t Keep Up, which focused on children who struggled with processing, this book is intended to help motivate all kids, including adults! She recalled, “I had this idea for this book in 2019 and played around with it with my editor and then 2020 happened, and we changed the book from a focus that really was about kids who were really having trouble with motivation and had significant issues to one that kind of related to lots of kids and to be honest, to us too. A lot of us are having trouble with motivating ourselves and finding what gives us pleasure and what really is important and makes life worth living.”

In her book, Dr. Braaten discusses the term “flexible goal” as a motivator for children to stay on track. Rather than settling on a fixed goal where one has to meet the goal within a certain time limit, a flexible goal eliminates the rigidity and allows an individual to adjust and make changes to the goal as circumstances change. She explained, “When I talk about goal setting, we tend to think in our culture that goals are a static sort of thing… so a flexible goal really plays into something of what we call a growth mindset and that’s a term that was coined by a psychologist and a researcher, Carol Dweck, who was interested in thinking out why some kids develop resiliency and some kids don’t… think about the fact that having a fixed mindset, thinking about a goal as being fixed, can often lead us to feel helpless because oftentimes we don’t meet our goal. It’s really common to set a goal that we don’t meet, at least not in the time that we expect to meet it…. So if you go through life thinking, ‘I set a goal, I didn’t meet it,’ [then] you don’t want to meet new goals. You also don’t ever reach the goals you set out to do. So having that kind of a mindset helps kids who are unmotivated because it helps them realize what they need in order to be more successful and that’s a way of helping us feel more empowered…”

Regardless of what obstacles our children face or how they deal with those challenges, Dr. Braaten wants parents to reflect on one final thought, “I think the one thing I would like them to think about is to love the child you have, not the child you wish you had, and that’s a really hard thing to do as a parent but I think a constant, ‘this is who they are, this is who I am and I love them for who they are’ is the best way to help them find the bliss and the pleasure and the motivation in their life.”