Curiosity: What’s wrong with my teen? At the Big Hug Community Cafe

Well, hello, it's Rachel Richards with my bonus big hug, Community Cafe. And I want to start off by just saying a massive, massive thank you to Wirrohugo, who bought us 10 books. And I can't begin to tell you how grateful I am because, sometimes you just, you're working really hard, you're trying to do your best for something, and every now and then you go into a bit of a slump.

and I've been feeling a bit like that and just getting a review or this kind of thing is just the most incredible boost in the arm. honestly, thank you so much. I cannot begin to tell you how grateful I am. This week, it's another message that came through on the Ask Rachel Anything app button that I'm going to talk about. it's the first thing you'll see when you look at the notes in the podcast.

So here's the question. My 15 year old boy seems to show no curiosity about the world, doesn't know countries, capitals, doesn't read, except when incentivised. Today he didn't recognise the neighbouring village, which we drive through many times. He's middling at school, but good at some subjects, so not a dance. Is it digital distraction? Is it common? I searched your shows and I couldn't find any record of this being discussed. Thank you. Thank you for your question. Now...

What you're describing is really, really common and perfectly normal, honestly, particularly with boys in mid-adolescence. And before I talk about adolescent boys, I'm going to broaden this out to talk about the way we humans work generally. Now, I learned to fly a plane about, I don't know, 20 years ago, and at that time I couldn't even use GPS, so everything was done using physical charts. And I mention this because it demonstrates I'm a really good map reader. In fact,

My camerawoman at the BBC was stunned by how good I was at orienting myself when we were racing around to get to a location to hit the one o'clock news. And yet, put me on a ski slope and I regularly haven't the slightest idea where I am, which lift I should be, which lifts I should use, what the names of the various lifts are. I'm lost, it's embarrassing. Why does this happen?

Well, because my husband is taking charge and I let him do that because he is so much more experienced than I am. I I didn't start skiing until I was in my 30s and actually I don't really care. It's nice to have someone else take that particular role off my hands. So to take it back to your son who's being driven around, I assume he doesn't drive, he's 15, he's not meeting his mates in that town, you drove through, so why does he need to know any of it? And I did actually do an episode on...

⁓ selective thinking and having too many things to consider, too many things to think about. So it might be worth listening to that to get a sense of how our brains can get really overwhelmed by having too many options. And think about where our curiosity comes from. So when we notice there's a gap between what we actually know and what we would like to know, that's when we take an interest. So we've become curious about why...

So for example, you have now become curious about why your son isn't noticing things and now you're looking for information. Curiosity is driven by that gap when we notice it. And there are lots of things that I just simply ignore because they're not of importance to me. My daughter, my bonus daughter ⁓ showed a big lack of understanding of her location when I arranged to meet her.

in a really well-known part of London. Now she was in her 20s and she got completely lost because you hadn't needed that skill before then.

Now my bonus daughter demonstrated a lack of curiosity about geography locations when I arranged to meet her in London and she was late teens then and is a well-known part of London but she got completely lost because she hadn't needed the skill before then and we'll come back to her later because I have noticed certain things about certain kids. But what I'm trying to say is that when things seem important we pay attention otherwise our brain just conserves energy for things that matter. Now let's talk about...

Now let's talk specifically about a 15-year-old boy. They can seem surprisingly uninterested in things we adults assume they should notice and care about, but here's the thing. Teenage brains are going through a massive pruning, so they stop being globally curious. Like, you remember little kids kept saying, why, what, how? And then as a teenager, they start thinking, well, I don't know, why should I store this? It's not necessarily that they don't have the ability to learn, it's that...

just doesn't seem important. For example, at that age, I could tell you the words to pretty much every single song I had listened to, but I couldn't locate any of the UK's major cities on a map except perhaps London, because it didn't matter to me. I remember my father saying to me, if you spent half as much time on learning important things as you do on learning the words to pop songs, you'd be flying through school. What he didn't understand was that those words were the most important things to me at that age.

Teenagers are trying to figure out how the social world works, who they are, and it's their job to be preoccupied with questions like, look, how do other people see me? What am I good at? So what motivates teenagers? They want to get better at something they care about and something that will earn them status and respect. They want to understand people and how relationships work. They also want to understand their identity. Who am I?

Where do I belong? So their brain is hyper-tuned and focused on those really important things, and they may not be the things we think are important. And another issue that you have raised is digital stimulation. And yes, it does shape attention, but it's only part of the jigsaw. So I would say there are fast-paced digital environments which train the brain to expect novelty, speed, and immediate reward.

And compared with that, well, something like learning capitals of cities, something like learning the names of places, or reading a book can feel abstract and slow. So yes, keeping our kids off short-form dopamine-driven reels is a really smart approach. But also, the internet exposes them to this vast body of knowledge and information. And maybe they're just more interested in other things that they're finding out, and they don't see the relevance of the books that we're offering them.

So the real question isn't, why is he not interested in his environment? I think a better question would be, what is he really interested in? Because there'll probably be something. And you could say, hey, I notice you're not remotely interested in the names of the towns around us, but I know that's developmentally appropriate. So I'm curious, what really does interest you? Curiosity is also something we parents can model. So children absorb attitudes to a

So children absorb attitudes to knowledge from the parents around them. I mean, no children absorb attitudes to knowledge from the adults around them. So when we adults wander aloud and ask questions, read and show interest in the wider world, that becomes normal. And one of the things I said to my husband was, reading the newspaper on your phone. They can't see that that's what you're doing. All they'd see is you, that you could be playing a game, you could be scrolling reels.

If you're going to sit and read the newspaper, why don't you just get the actual hard copy or at least talk to them about what you're looking at? And I talked about this whole thing in an earlier episode about how we can kind of narrate our thoughts to help our kids understand how we go through sort of a thinking process. There's another issue which I discussed with Dr. Rebecca Winthrop in the episode on the disengaged teen. So curiosity shuts down.

When work feels pointless or repetitive, learning is associated with pressure or shame. The environment rewards performance rather than exploration. Or just the teenager's tired or overwhelmed. And in that episode, we talked about the different modes of learning. So there's explorer, achiever, passenger and resistor. And we can help our teens. Here are some tips. Start with what they're interested in. All of the experts advocate this.

including Ned Johnson in the interview about the self-driven child. He says hobbies aren't a waste of time. They're vital. Let's say your teenager is, I don't know, interested in sport. That can lead them to following their team around the world. So that's geography and learning about statistics, physiology, culture, all these things can be wrapped up in that hobby. If they're interested in gaming, it can connect to design and storytelling or, I don't know, mathematics or like...

It's finance. Secondly, model curiosity rather than testing their knowledge. Asking questions, looking things up, sharing interesting ideas tends to stimulate curiosity much more effectively than quizzing them. Also, don't make them feel judged if they don't know something because they're most likely to disengage further. I would always do that. Anytime someone shames me, it's not a motivator. The thing to ask yourself is, can he concentrate when he wants or needs to?

Does he have a genuine interest in, well, anything? Does he make a real effort when something does matter to him? And how's his mood in social life? So coming back to my eldest daughter, some kids need curiosity and explicit teaching at the moment a skill gap is noticed. And she's a good example because ⁓ she was still terrible at finding her way to things when she got to her mid-20s. And...

She's always been late, always getting lost, coming to see us. And one day when she was late again, I printed off a map of the area and asked her to explain to me how she would go about getting from one place to another. And it was at that point that I realised she just didn't know how to found north. She didn't know how to look for landmarks and orient herself in the map and to compare the map to her environment. She was kind of map blind. And this is...

She's a super bright girl. She's a super bright woman. This is not a personal failing. It's that some people just don't pick up certain skills easily or they might've missed them. So I spent 10 minutes with her and it just changed everything. But that wouldn't have landed if I hadn't been... But that 10 minutes wouldn't have landed if it hadn't been causing her problems. You see what I mean? So we need to spot the gaps.

and then fill them in. So some kids are like that. It's no shame. It has to be relevant to Sinkin. Now she's living and working in Kazakhstan and traveling internationally for her career. She's doing brilliantly. So I think what you're seeing is just probably a temporary narrowing of attention rather than a fundamental lack of curiosity. I reckon he's probably doing better than you think and you're doing better than you think you are too. That's it. Hope that helped. Bye bye.