The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better

A groundbreaking exploration of the four modes of learning, revealing the root causes of student stress and apathy—with effective parenting strategies for kickstarting teens’ inner drive.

Some students advertise their disengagement openly, responding to their parents' questions with conversational dead ends like "My day was fine" and complaints like "What is the point of history? I will never use this in the real world!”

For the past five years, award-winning journalist Jenny Anderson and Brookings Institution’s global education expert Rebecca Winthrop have been investigating why so many children lose their love of learning in adolescence. Now, weaving extensive original research with stories of kids who dramatically transformed their relationship with learning, they offer a powerful toolkit that shows you exactly what to do (and stop doing) to support academic and emotional flourishing. They identify four modes of learning that students use to navigate through the shifting academic demands and social dynamics of middle and high school, shaping internal narratives about their skills, potential, and identity:

Resisters struggle silently with profound feelings of inadequacy or invisibility, which they communicate by refusing to do homework, playing sick, skipping class, or acting out.   Passengers coast along, consistently doing the bare minimum and complaining that school is pointless, often because their classes don’t align with their skills, interests, or learning needs.  Achievers show up, do the work, and get high grades, but their achievement obsession can their erode self-worth, causing too many late nights and triggering mental health challenges. Explorers investigate the questions they care about and persist to achieve their goals, driven by internal curiosity rather than external expectations.

Understanding your child's learning modes is vital for nurturing their ability to become Explorers. Anderson and Winthrop outline simple yet counterintuitive parenting strategies for connecting with a withdrawn child, tailoring your listening and communication styles to their needs, igniting their curiosity, and building self-awareness and emotional regulation.

About the Author

Jenny Anderson is a award-winning journalist who spent over a decade at The New York Times before pioneering coverage on the science of learning at Quartz. She now writes a column on education in Time and regularly moderates at high-level events such as the World Economic Forum and SXSW.

Rebecca Winthrop is the director of the Center for Universal Education at Brookings and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. She leads global studies on how to better support children’s learning and is a sought-after speaker and advisor by education policy makers, U.N. agencies, and organizations from the Lego Foundation to the Obama Foundation.

Author Residence: London, England; Washington D.C., USA