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Rachel, hello and welcome to teenagers.
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Untangled the audio hug for parents going through the teenage years. I'm Rachel Richards, parenting coach, journalist, mother of two teenagers and two bonus daughters. Now, this time every year, kids in the UK and in many other countries around the world are facing a battery of exams, and that feeling they have of a once in a lifetime opportunity to prove themselves. But for what? What are we trying to get them to prove how important are the exams? And what can we parents say to our kids to help them with the challenge? Now I've already created an episode talking with Susie specifically about how we can support our kids going through that first wave of exams at 16 GCSEs. I have four daughters who've been through the system, and Phoebe is currently gearing up to take her a levels. So I've seen this a lot. Now today we're joined by the brilliant journalist Jenny Anderson, who writes extensively about education, the attention economy, learning, science, technology, you name it. She's co author of that amazing book, The disengaged team, which I featured in episode 125, and if you haven't already listened to that interview with her co author, Dr Rebecca Winthrop, you definitely should. So I'll put that in the notes. Anyway, Jenny has a child who's currently sitting GCSEs, and she has opinions. Jenny, welcome to the podcast. Thank
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you so much for having me, and indeed, I do have opinions.
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So should we just go straight in with it?
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What is wrong with GCSEs? So I think the biggest
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issue isn't that there's testing. It's not that we're introducing stress to kids. It's that we're doing all of this at once. It is such a broad it's a deluge of exams we have. My daughter has 26 exams over, you know, four weeks, not unusual in this country, and it's the it's the accumulation of three years of content and the amount of memorization and the taxing of working memory for this task. Just it makes no sense we can do better than this. You know, we can literally do so much better than this for our kids. Our kids deserve better. So I just think it doesn't sort of incorporate in any way, sort of what we know about learning science, it puts too much stress on kids. You know, a little bit of stress is great. You can learn how to manage it. You learn how to push through. You learn how to bounce back when things don't go well, all of that, but this is just the stakes are incredibly high, and it's this one entry point.
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You know, in the US, you take an SAT, you don't do well, you do it again. You know what? If you do better, you send that score to the university. And you know what? That is rewarding growth.
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Isn't that what we want to reward in learning growth? You got better, you put more effort in, you tried harder, and then you got better. Yeah, so I think that's what we
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want to reward.
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Yes, um, Sammy Wright talked about that in his book examination, where he said, maybe it's more like a drunk driving test. It's like, you know, you can take it several times. You can take it as many times as you want, once you passed it, then that's good. And I talked to my bonus daughter last night, who's 27 who did her GCSEs. And I said, you know, talk to me about how did it feel? And she said, The one big problem was that there are some that are compulsory. And she said, You ask me now, anything about photosynthesis, no idea, no recollection of a lot of the things I studied, what was the point and and so that, like you said, you sort of cramming, cramming everything in, aren't
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you? I just think we want to give listen. We just need to mix it up. I'm all for exams. Let's have some exams, right? Let's make sure those exams actually motivate kids to consolidate their knowledge. A little fear with a teenager, we know is a good thing, right? It's just what's the balance? And I think you want multiple entry points for demonstrating your knowledge and mastery of a topic. That can be a paper, it can be a speech, it can be a quiz, it can be homework, it can be a project, it can be many things, and in doing that, you give multiple access points to demonstrate mastery, right? And that is actually what is going to be required. On the other end of this, we want to be preparing kids, not for sitting in a desk and regurgitating a bunch of information, not saying it's totally unimportant, but probably not maximally important. We want all those entry points, and we just don't do that, you know, again, I don't think the US is a beacon of a whole lot right now. I mean, you know, you should have an embarrassment of a country, to be perfectly honest. But I will say in high school, you take midterms and finals, you have opportunities to do projects and exams, and then you have a GPA that wraps up all of that and says, This is over four years what I did. And then your essay, you can say, you know, I really wasn't motivated in ninth grade, and I got motivated by 11th grade. And you know, you're you're sort of demonstrating who you are as a person and as a student and as a learner, and then all of those marks are showing that progression. It's really
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interesting because I, I didn't do GCSEs. I was the old, I'm elderly, and so eye levels and CSEs. And I looked this up, because there's a history behind this. And one of the reasons we take so many exams at 16 was we used to leave school at 16. That was an option. So they wanted to have some kind of certificate. So you could say, well, this is what the kid can do. They're going into the workplace. You know, here you are. But everything, things have changed, because now we're compelled to stay in education until 18 in the UK. So it doesn't even make sense that you're doing all those exams at that age. What are we what are we testing for? Who? Needs this information. Yeah,
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I don't. I mean, I don't think it's, I genuinely don't think it's fit for focus in any way. I do think you need a set of exams at the end of school to sort of see what you can do. But I also just think that there's multiple forms of assessment and multiple ways to be doing it along the way. And honestly, it's just, it is 2025, we have amazing technological tools. We can, you know, we can master a lot of things if we can sort of map proteins with AI. I think we can figure out how to build an exam system that is slightly more humane, and I don't think we should discount that there are incredibly important skills that kids are learning through this, right?
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It's not again, I would just want to reiterate, it's not a sort of exams are a very proven way to learn. They actually really help. You know, they motivate kids, and they consolidate learning, and it's a way of actually seeing exactly what you know and don't know, and whether you think you know what you do know and you don't know. And I think just the process of preparing for something super important is actually great. You know that is this, you're learning to deal with stress. You're learning to recognize what stress is, you can sort of one of my favorite stories from the book is this concept of getting your butterflies in formation. So like you're nervous, of course you're nervous, right? Like you're preparing for something important. Don't take that as a signal that you're unprepared or going to fail. Take that as a signal that you're going to something that you care about.
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Get your butterflies in formation. All of those skills are so important. It's just the stakes here are so high, and the sort of demand, the ask of kids, I think, is just unrealistic.
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Yeah, so you said before we came on, that the OCR, which is the organization that actually creates these exams, is saying they're not fit for purpose. Can you talk more about why? So
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they've just issued this. It's a pretty damning report. It basically says it's too much content, which, of course, any parent watching this is like Amen, just looking at the textbooks and the papers and the files and the so and the line I love the most is less content, more learning.
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It's as if they're acknowledging that the way this is designed isn't encouraging the kind of deep thinking, the kind of problem solving, the kind of inquiry right within a topic you need the knowledge base. And then where does it take you? How do you apply it? There's knowledge acquisition, knowledge application. All we're doing here is knowledge acquisition.
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We want way more knowledge application in multiple forms, which will lead to the deeper learning that we want. So OCR, the awarding body that you know sort of issues these qualifications, is calling for a totally different system, as is the guy who wrote the system, also calling for a whole new system. I mean, it's like, the big question is, who's in favor of this? Who is behind this idea, right? Because then, do they have kids? Yeah,
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and I What's really interesting is also, I think that they're using this to test schools as well. It's like a grading system, how's the school doing? And that also feeds into some of the problems with the schooling system, and the pressure that's on schools to just ram kids through these exams rather than really focus on, you know, the more creative ways of learning. It has, you know, many other implications the way that it's set up. And you mentioned stress, and that it's actually beneficial, but what, what is the impact of the sort of stress we're seeing?
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Because I know that boredom is can be good, but how does that?
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How does that create because you've I know you're on record as saying that school is one of the most consistently stressful things for kids. Forget about smartphones. Yeah. More about why?
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Yeah. So I think there's two kinds of boredom. So some boredom is actually really good. It forces kids to their academics actually study this, which is remarkable. There's like nothing academics don't study, which is amazing to me.
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And they call it the process restructuring. So when you are bored, you are forced to think about, I don't like this feeling of being bored. What do I want to do? How am I going to get myself out of it? What am I going to do next? That is actually an agentic process. The opposite of being bored isn't being busy. The opposite of being bored is being interested, knowing what you care about, and then going out and doing it. The problem with these exams is the kids are very, very bored, and there's nothing they can do about it. They have to learn.
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And they have to learn to the mark scheme. I think the very pernicious thing
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is that they are learning to get the right answer, which, for for some people,
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is great. It's just, you know, you master the system and you move on. And actually, you know, there's definitely a portion of kids for whom this is like the dream system, because they're like, you tell me what to do. I do it.
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We move on. I don't think that's a lot of how life works. So I'm not sure that's great for everyone. Well, for a lot of other kids, fragile learners, this idea of you have to do it a certain way is literally training their brains to narrow and narrow and narrow, instead of doing what we want to do, which is being able to ask the big question. So I think this idea of being bored and kind of helpless to change your situation, that is a kind of stress that is soul deadening to kids. I mean, that is really, really there's, and it's almost a whole year, they really can't do anything in year 11, right?
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Because first you're preparing for your mocks, and then you're preparing for the exams, and then you actually take the exams whole year, where. Like you just kind of need to stay on task.
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Stay on task. Stay on task at a point where their brains are sort of growing and wanting to explore and ask questions. A teacher at my one of my daughter's school said to me, you know, a student mine recently asked me she really wanted to explore this part of the suffragette movement. And I just said, you know, it's a great topic. It's really interesting, but it's not on the exam. So because it's year 11, let's just stay, stay on task, because we really, you know, I don't want to put more on you.
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It was a very the teacher was a wonderful teacher. She wasn't, you know, doing the wrong thing.
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She was doing the right thing by the student and probably by the parents and probably by the school. And saying, yes, of course, I want you to learn about that. And next summer, you can learn about that. But right now, we just need to get these facts straight on the Russian Revolution and on and on and on China. Because, you know, let's not explore too far. Don't go thinking for yourself right now.
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And of course, that I would think plays into them then wanting to be on their phones, because at least there, you get a quick, easy exploration without having to work too hard, and they get the chance to feel like their brains free, even though it isn't
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absolutely I mean, I was literally explaining this to my daughter this morning. She said, I think I should think I should delete Tiktok for the rest of the exams. And I said, That's a great idea. I'm all for it.
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Maybe we could do it permanently. But anyways, I decided not to push my luck on that one. But I said, Well, there's two things that that might do for you. Number one, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's not going to distract you. But I said, What you might not realize is Tiktok is like stimuli coming in full bore, and it's activating your nervous system in a way, but it's very hard to tamp down, and you've got a lot going on right now, and you want to kind of soothe your nervous system, so go watch, you know, reruns of, I don't know, Tabasco, and laugh, and that's going to bring you down. You know, I'm not, I'm not at all against sort of using technology. It's just that's going to ramp you up. And you're going to see everyone else talking about exams and all of the, you know, whatever. The thing is, it's just going to be more coming in. And what you want is to bring yourself down, recenter yourself, get ready for the next one. You know, kind of this one didn't go well, okay, we move on. You know, you sort of put that one, see if there's anything we can learn from it, and then we have to move on.
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It's such a marathon that I do think that this idea of, sort of the technology being a bit of a distraction, but to the boredom point, the kids are really uncomfortable being bored now because they just use their phones, and so it's yet another reason to sort of carve out time that you're not relying on the phone to assuage the boredom.
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Yeah, and I love your point about that, and it's interesting because I think I it was Jonathan Haidt, who was talking about how actual we're geared towards stories. They're actually sitting watching something that's a half an hour story on TV is really positive.
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It's the flicking through things that doesn't act they don't have a narrative arc, and they don't sort of lead your brain somewhere else. That's actually not so good for us. One of the one of the things that I saw a headline was that the teenagers sitting their GCSEs this summer are the worst hit by the COVID pandemic of any year group at a secondary school. And this was based on a survey of, I think it was 5000 teachers. So it's a lot of people who are saying this, you know, is, how do you how are you receiving this, you know, with your own child? Yeah, I've seen that
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data, and I actually sit on the board of a school, and we are 100% seeing that sort of in the cohort that is coming through. I don't know that. I personally am seeing that. I mean, it's hard to know, right? It's hard to sort of pick apart. I think I would have thought that the grade just above would have been probably a little bit harder hit, because our kids came in sort of year seven. They still had sort of 789, to re acclimate to learning before they had to sort of pick up the kind of again, the high stakes exam, part of it, but I don't doubt it. You know, the fallout from COVID is extraordinary. I mean, we are continuing to see it in data. We are continuing to see it in falling scores, in chronic absenteeism, in the social commitment to school, to parents discomfort with discomfort, and kids discomfort with discomfort, I think there is this rule sense that if kids are uncomfortable, we've got to just totally pull back. And I think that is so understandable, but in the process of doing that, we're not giving kids the opportunity sometimes to sort of get back in and re engage. Sometimes it's, you know, you really do need to pull back, because that's what the kid needs. But I do think that there's a real fragility right now, and it's that's what makes this moment so tricky for teenagers. Because when do you pull back and protect and sort of, you know, set those boundaries? And when do you say, I think you can do this, right?
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Yeah,
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yeah. And it's interesting that I've been reading Greg Walton's book called ordinary magic, and he talks a lot about these sort of positive spirals up or negative spirals down. And this, this sense that belonging is one of the most crucial things in a school environment. And I think if kids feel like they're in a.
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System that are, I mean, the exam systems are set up to create winners and losers. You know, you won, you lost, you were, you know, you're graded in the system. And that, that ability to make people feel like they genuinely belong somewhere, I think, gets lost in that, that sort of noise. I
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think, I think Greg's research is so fascinating. We have a whole bit of the book on belonging uncertainty. And I do love this idea of it just crystallized for me something I felt myself, personally, I've sort of witnessed with my own kids, I think we're all familiar with, which is when you're in that position of feeling you don't belong, and you're questioning and you're actively looking for evidence to confirm that you don't belong, you find it, you know. And so it's, you know, the teacher is a little critical, and you immediately think the teacher doesn't like you, and then you look for evidence that the teacher doesn't like you, and then you decide that sort of you're doomed in that class, and you're that's kind of your mindset toward it, versus when you're in a sort of better position, and you are going to give the teacher makes a critical comment, you give them the benefit of the doubt, like they're being tough on me because they know I can do better. I mean, think of the difference in that framing and where that takes you so and exactly exams are doing precisely the opposite. I mean, at some point, you know, you do have to kind of measure whether you've learned it or you haven't, but it doesn't have to be in this sort of sorting, like perniciously sorting way. You know, the fact that we tell a third of kids in the UK that they are failures at age 16 is just honestly, it is shameful.
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It really is.
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We've always had this problem, to an extent in education. It's not a brand new problem, and if anybody will say that, but the mismatch between what's going on in education and what's going on in the real world has become a massive gulf. I've said this on one of my other episodes, the change in the law that kids, a lot of places, won't accept them working there until they're 16, so they're not even getting sort of hands on experience of a working environment or being part of a community, doing something really worthwhile, so that they're doing all this practice stuff, like practicing it being an adult, and then they're not actually getting any experience if there's not a connection between the school and the workplace that we would hope for.
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I love the way Ron Dahl, who's an integrative scientist, he founded the Center for the developing adolescent at UCLA, and he talks about the sort of neurobiological imperative of adolescents, and it's, you know, sort of to separate from your caregiver, find a maid, find a tribe, right? That's it. And to do that, you go gain respect you.
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And to earn respect, you have to make authentic contributions to your community to earn respect, and you should be able to do that in multiple ways. You talked about a job. I mean, think about your you know, working in an ice cream shop, you don't wipe down the counters, and your colleague is like, what the hell? Like, wipe down the counters, like, don't leave it for me to do. That is like life skills gold, right?
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Oh, we're all in this together.
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We need to do this there. A lot of work is drudgery. You know, the customers, a lot of people are giving you things at the same time. You've got to manage it. You've got to be polite, you've got to think of the orders like we, I think we really underestimate that. And then we somehow think that, you know, yet another GC, you know, at a 10th or 11th GCSE, and that's what's going to get you through life, versus managing people, managing real responsibilities. And I'm not saying that academic responsibilities aren't real.
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They're very real, but that shouldn't be the only one. I could not agree with you more.
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We care so much about the content and so little about the experience. And the experience is what shapes them, the feelings that they have from the experiences they have. And of course, some of that has to be academics. It's school. Like no one's gonna contest that, but we have absolutely lost the plot on the balance there, right? It is so academic focused, so little on experience and integration and experimentation in the real world. And you know, doing things that you do, you mess up that, and you can pick up yourself and dust yourself off and move on. You know, the stakes for exams and doing that pretty high.
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Yeah, yeah. And you, I think you fan of one thing that we're doing here, which is the epqs. So an EPQ is an extended project qualification, and it's the opportunity for the student or pupil to pick a subject that genuinely interests. And my daughter did, I think it was an HP, I think it was the one before it so during GCSEs, and she actually did an entire paper on sweeteners, and they use it in food, and whether there's any real evidence of whether they're harmful or not. And she found it really, really fascinating. She learns a lot from it. So, you know, what do you think about them?
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Yeah. So they're extraordinary. And I think this is being replicated. The head of the College Board in the US, which is one of the major testing bodies that I heard the CEO say, we are facing a crisis of boredom, and we need to change our assessment system.
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And they are looking also at doing exactly the same kind of thing. They have AP seminar. And the underlying piece here is choice. You know, I'm sure Rebecca talked about this in the podcast. But the number one thing to build agentic learning, which is honestly the best kind of learning you can have, which is where you're motivated and you achieve and you perform. You know, the number one piece. So that, from the student standpoint, is some choice again, not choose your own adventure education, and not like you know, you get to decide what you're going to do all day, not that at all, some choice and how you do an assignment and what you decide to study. So those epqs are an opportunity to look inside yourself. What do I care about? What do I want to spend a year on? What am I going to commit myself to. And then having to manage your time, you have to set up, you know, your my daughter, school. You have to set up all of the meetings with your mentor. You pick your mentor. Who are you going to pick? What do you look for in a mentor? Again, really important life skill that you're going to have in the workplace. How do you manage your time?
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Apparently, most kids handle it really badly for the first semester. Awesome, amazing.
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Like, just what you need to learn, that you need to do better, and then you have another semester to do better, right? Like that is just the or, sorry, another term to do better, two terms. So I just think it's like, it is that beautiful combination of a little bit of choice, tons of scaffolding, you know, you've got a mentor, you're in an academic setting, you have some goals you're going to be assessed. It's a different kind of assessment than an exam. I went to the EP q9 at one of my daughter's school. She wasn't.
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She was like, Mom, why are you here? Like, I'm not. I'm only in your 11. Like, this is so embarrassing. And I was like, I just want to see what they're doing, and to listen to some of the kids talk about their projects. They were animated.
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They were excited. They could tell you why they did the thing they did. I always asked, What was the biggest obstacle you faced? And they loved that question. They were like, well, you know, I changed my mind halfway through, like, I couldn't find the research. I couldn't do that, like they had so many problems. And then, of course, the follow up question is, what did you do about it?
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You know? And that, to me is they're learning content. They are actually learning research skills, which will be so useful if they go on to university, right? Sort of, where do you find deeper research? How can you triangulate different kinds of research? So I just love that piece of it. And I think that balance of that and some sort of, you know, it's going to be harder to do that in a maths class. I get that so you can do some of both. I really just think this is about balance more than it is about total revolution, or, like, you know, some utterly progressive choose your own adventure education. I think they're really so to me. I really do love the EP my younger daughter did one, and they did a sixth grade, or, sorry, your sixth version at her school. And it was so sweet to see all the different things that these, you know, 1011, year olds picked.
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And so they just scaffolded it for that age. And so the idea was just a project that you
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think is amazing, and also it gives them that opportunity to find a mentor who they really can click with. And then that increases their sense of belonging and their agency, their sense that they yes, they can, they do matter, and they do belong. Here
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one of the number one predictors of whether young people feel they've had a positive experience in university is that they have found someone who takes them seriously, a mentor and and sort of being seen and connected to a professional, you know, that could either be through an internship. And so it is training them in the skill of finding a mentor, which is again, life, life skills, goals, you know? I mean, that's something anyone who's been in the workplace knows, sometimes you just get one by luck, but if you can make your luck, that's better than hoping for luck. And
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I've seen that with my girls in the workplace.
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You know, when they found somebody who they genuinely it's aspire to be like and they like spending time with them, it's really made a difference to their career. So I can completely see that one of the things that my 27 year old said, which really struck a chord with me was she said that there was absolutely no instruction in financial literacy, and it's only and also my my 30 year old has said the same thing. She said, I've only just really started to understand how important this is now my younger girls, I've done, I've created a program with them since they were very young, since they turned 18, which is, they have an allowance, and they get to manage their money themselves.
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And this, the 18 year old now has an ISA that she set up herself and researched. And, you know, she's become much more literate as a result. But this is stuff that actually we really, you know, my 27 year old said, why are we not as a compulsory part of education, including things like this, why are we not including an understanding of how to manage AI, for example, all those sorts of things that we are going to genuinely be needing as we go forward. And I think I don't, I don't know, what do you think
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So absolutely, and the reason we don't is that we think the content exams is the only way to go, and that's the only knowledge that matters.
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We are so overweighting that so, you know, there's only so much time in the timetable, so Absolutely, let's sort of, you know, first deal with the obese curriculum and then put in some things that matter. I would say a couple things, the financial literacy thing, is so powerful.
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Todd Rose, who's a wonderful researcher in the US, did some does this what is the purpose of education survey through his populist Institute, and the number one thing parents want is that they are seeing that their kids don't have sort of basic life skills, and they feel like that is. A component that has somehow just gotten completely forgotten. So I think that the data bears out what you and I both feel, which is that this is just something that should be done. You know, I and they can stick it in PS, HC, there's a there's a place to put it in the curriculum, but it's also fun.
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You can game. You can do a sort of gaming approach, yes, financial literacy and management. You can I think the AI piece is trickier and even more important, because if kids don't learn how to manage ai, ai will use them, just like social media has, you know, they are their product. And so I think there are some really interesting efforts. I'm actually part of one right now, with large of night and a few other people to try to think about how to get useful AI literacy, you know, into media literacy, into a much more experiential learning format. So I think we just have to find it's not just the thing they need to learn. It's not another content subject. First of all, generative AI you have to play with. So we need to find ways, in time, in the timetable, for kids to be doing things, experimenting with things, in a scaffolded, sort of supported environment so that they learn exactly what the AI is doing, what it can and can't do, and how they're going to need to be able to use it. If they don't have that skill, they really will be at the mercy of it, and that is not what we want for our kids. Yeah. Now
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we obviously, as parents, we don't have much control over this stuff. We can lobby our government. We can make choices based on that, but we're stuck in this system right now. What are your suggestions of things that we can be doing at home to help our kids, perhaps have a healthier relationship with the grades and exams that they're having to deal with? Yeah,
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I mean, you alluded to this earlier, and I'm sure you've talked about this in a lot of your episodes. I've heard it on some but I'll just reiterate it, because it's so important, your kids matter beyond their grades. They are worth so much more than their marks on these exams. They are so much more than this.
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Recognize the effort they've put in, if they haven't put in the effort, and I know a lot of parents struggle with that, this isn't the moment
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really to highlight. I don't think, I think there will
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be a time for that. So this has played a long game here, which is lessons learned, that the kids are feeling the stress acutely right now, so get behind them. You're in their corner. You're going to feed. I keep telling my kids, be like the dog when you need to go out. Go out. When you need to be fed. Be fed. When you need a hug. Tell me you need a hug.
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When my dog wants attention, she comes up and like, pause me, right? That's not what teenagers always do. And I say, be more like the dog. Be more like Tiggy, because this is going to be hard. It's going to be really hard. And I do love to borrow Glenn and Doyle's phrase, we can do hard things. You've got this yes or in your corner for whatever happens. Shit hits the fan. We're here, right? Things don't go well, we're here.
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Things go well, celebration, not because you got a nine, because you put in the work, and you feel good about that. And on to the next. And I'm giving. I mean, this is just a, I don't know. This is my I love cards and I love writing, so I'm giving my daughter a card every day with some silly quote and something funny on it for every day of exam, she goes into I have it, and she rolls her eyes, and she reads it, and she smiles, and then rolls her eyes again, which is all to be expected, but it's all I'm saying is, you've got this, you know, you're and again, sort of cheesy quotes that I picked up might be a Taylor Swift quote.
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It might be a, you know, more philosophical one, or it could be my dad. My dad had some really funny quotes, and so I keep, you know, throwing in some of his quotes, and it's also levity. And honestly, I guess that's my tip. My final tip is humor. I mean, honestly we this is, I shouldn't admit this, but I'm going to, we watched the hangover with our kids the other night,
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the most
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inappropriate movie, and I kid you not, we were on the floor laughing, all of us, and it was just what we needed to kind of everyone had had a tough day for different reasons, and it was just what we needed so a little humor, a lot of support. And in their corner, they matter beyond their grades and butterflies in formation they're feeling stressed. Remind them that stress is their way.
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Their body's way of getting ready for something important.
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They can get their butterflies in formation,
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yeah, and I we did an episode about how to support your kids through GCSEs earlier. And again, I'll put that in the Episode Notes. And I think just giving them routine where they just have some structure, like we just the whole we're kind of the scaffolding around them and making sure that we're not. It's not about us nagging them. It's about us giving them that, sort of making sure they have enough sleep, things like that. It's taken away. I mean, one thing i i I understood with my older daughter and all her friends was they would say, you've got to take my phone away, because I'm not, you know, I can't concentrate with it in my room, and I don't, I don't do it myself, if you don't support me.
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So I think as parents, even if our kids aren't saying, can you take my phone away? Just take it away, give it. Give them a break, and they can have it, you know. And I even put a my kids phone in a box with mine, and I said, when I. Take my phone out, you can have your phone, and we'll do it together. And we can, we can really do things like that that can make them feel like they're not so alone.
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Yeah, I'm really, I'm really glad you brought up the sleep one. I always take my kids phones away at night. So, I mean, that's an agreement that we have with them, sort of 930 they need time to sort of detox, but obviously incredibly important. But absolutely, sleep is the most essential. It is, it is, you know, what helps their brains function better. It is what makes them a better friend. It is what makes them feel mentally better. So it is probably the number one thing you can help support, is their sleep. I mean, all the other stuffs, you know, maybe you're into all the emotional, gushy stuff, and maybe you're not, but if you help them sleep, you are doing wonders for them. Yes, and a lot of that is taking away the phone. So, well done. You. I love, I love the box. I love the collective sort of effort of doing it together, all of that brilliant. It's
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stuff I've learned from doing the screen time episode and all the other things I've been learning on this. And one, one last thing, my daughter left school after GCSE. She's taken a year out.
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She's been working and doing a little bit of studying on her own, because it just wasn't working for her. And I just wanted to emphasize that the GCSEs, they're just a hurdle.
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When I talked to my older daughter, particularly my 27 year old, she said they said, these are the most important exams. You've got to do them really well. And and she said, even at the time, she thought, Gosh, this is a bit over, over the top, isn't it? And she looks back and she says, barely anyone's ever asked her what GCSEs were. They're just a hurdle. And also, my daughter's life has completely opened up, and she's flourished as a result of not being hamstrung by this environment. Who's I've been taking her to dance classes, and she said, I'm interested in fishing, so we've gone fishing.
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And it's just those, just trying lots of little things that aren't necessarily in the school environment. They don't have to cost a lot. I take her to free lectures in London. She's, she's been loving that. So I think, I think we as parents can just step in and do other creating interesting things outside of that school environment that are totally disconnected with exams, learning
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you've done such a brilliant job of I mean, the four modes that we identify obviously, explore mode is where we want kids to spend the most times. And the brilliant bit is we actually can help kids create explore moments. It is doing exactly what you just said, really low stakes. Just do a lot of stuff and see what they like, see what clicks for them. You know, London is an incredible city. England is an incredible country. There is stuff. It might be nature, it might be culture, it might be dance, it might be theater, it might be music, it might be all of those things are such great data and reinforce to kids that there is a big, interesting world out there that is so far beyond these exams, so more explore moments. That's the language we would use in the book. But I love the way that you put it, and I do think, I mean, you said this earlier. For some kids, these exams are fine, you know, it's just something to get through. It's no big deal. Other kids, it crushes them. It's definitely a lot. And I think we do have a lot of influence over how they perceive this moment.
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And I think your advice as to something to get through. And by the way, life on the other side, life is on
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the other side.
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Let's go party afterwards. Yes, and I learned the Explore most stuff from you from this amazing book to buy, the disengaged teen. It's actually brilliant, and there are lots of actionable points. It's really user friendly. I found it a very enjoyable, enlightening book to read. So yeah, I love that. If people want to find you, Jenny, where do they come? Sure
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on Instagram at Jenny Anderson writes on sub stack How to Be brave, and we're like that the disengage and buy the book. Of course, you can buy it anywhere. The disengageteam.com has all of our speaking engagements on it, and ways to contact us if you want us to come speak in your school, we speak in your school, we speak to both parents and educators. Oh, wow. And yeah, so we are
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available. Fantastic,
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fantastic. And if you enjoyed this, please right now just send it to somebody who might find it useful. If you want to contact me, I'm on teenagers untangled@gmail.com or my website is www.teenagersuntangled.com at That's it for now. Have a great week. Thanks for having me. You.
