Introducing A Possibilities Mindset
If you’ve been a parent, think of a moment when you “lost it”—a moment when you didn’t act the way you wanted to deep down; a moment when you weren’t your best parenting self.
That was a question that I asked in the in-person phone interviews I conducted with parents as one part of the Breakthrough Years studies—I wanted to better understand the thinking process we go through when we have a conflict with a child. By losing it, I told parents, I didn’t mean falling apart, fighting, yelling, becoming sad, or refusing to talk, though these things can happen. I meant the moments when we become reactive, not proactive, when we are not the parents we expect or want to be.
For Shannon, it was that her son was resisting school. He initially switched high schools from the local public school to a Catholic School, but when he turned eighteen, he figured out that school administrators weren’t going to call his parents if he didn’t show up, so he quit going to school altogether. Every morning was a battle. Shannon would yell at him to get up and go to school. Brendan would stand his ground: “I am not going.”
I’d say, “Brendan, you have to get up. You have to go to school.” He was totally defiant. He ignored me. I’d get more demanding, but it was crazy for me to think that yelling at him was going to help.
Shannon searched for causes to explain his behavior. Perhaps it was because of an old football injury. She didn’t expect to discover that her mindset mattered, but it did.
Like Shannon, I didn’t expect to find a different mindset when I interviewed parents—I just wanted to better understand parents’ experiences—but that’s what I discovered. In listening to parents’ stories, I could see there were three sets of beliefs that shape how we, as adults, respond to conflict with our children.
A Growth Mindset
The first part of the Possibilities Mindset—the belief that things can or can’t change—may sound familiar and it is. It is based on the ground-breaking research of Carol Dweck of Stanford University and her colleagues where they have identified and studied the power of a growth mindset—the belief that things can change and people are capable of improving, versus a fixed mindset where people believe that their abilities are inborn, set in stone, and thus can’t be changed.1
Stress-Can-Be-Enhancing Mindset
I am going to focus a bit more on the second aspect of the Possibilities Mindset— whether we see stress as a challenge or a threat—because it is less well known.
To do so, I will share some new research on adolescents by Jeremy Jamieson of the University of Rochester and his colleagues. They make the crucial point that we don’t come up with mindsets in a vacuum—how others see an issue can affect our own views. In general, they find stress is seen as a bad thing to be avoided or kept at bay. In other words, we tend to have a “stress-avoidance” mentality, which “ignores the reality that elevated levels of stress are a normal and, in many ways, even a desirable feature of adolescence.2
Over the past years, this research team has been experimenting with an approach they call stress optimization. This approach helps people reframe stress not as distress—not as a threat—but as a challenge.3 In a series of six ingenious experiments, David Yeager of the University of Texas at Austin, Jamieson, and their team created a thirty-minute online intervention that is anchored in changing the way we think about stressful situations by targeting two related set of beliefs. 4
Like I do, they tie together a growth mindset with a stress-can-be-enhancing mindset. For the growth mindset, which they call a growth mindset about stress, they present normal but challenging stressors (taking a test, giving a speech, keeping up with coursework) not as dangers to be avoided but as opportunities for learning and self-improvement.
The second is a “stress-can-be-enhancing” mindset, which focuses on learning that the physical symptoms of stress (racing heart, being out of breath, feeling anxious) can be positive because they are our body’s way of mobilizing energy to reach a goal.
These two mindsets go together—both are necessary to equip adolescents (and all of us) to take on challenges in a lasting way.
With more than four thousand high school and college-age students across the six experiments, the research team tested their approach, comparing those who received the intervention with control groups. In one experiment, for instance, eighth-through-twelfth-grade students were asked to imagine that the instructor of their most stressful class had assigned a very demanding assignment but they had only two days to complete it before presenting their work to their classmates. In another, students actually took a timed quiz. In still another, students participated in the Trier Social Stress Test, where college students were asked to give a speech about their personal strengths and weaknesses in front of two peer evaluators who were trained to provide negative nonverbal feedback (such as frowning, sighing, and crossing their arms) and no positive verbal or nonverbal feedback. Afterward, the students were asked to do mental math (counting backward from 996 by sevens).
The outcomes the researchers assessed included cardiovascular reactivity, daily cortisol levels, academic success, anxiety during the pandemic lockdowns, and self-regard—how good or bad the students felt about themselves, which is a precursor of anxiety and depression.
The study results indicate that this thirty-minute self-administered online training helping adolescents see that they can grow and learn from stress and that they can reframe their physical stress reactions from a threat into a challenge is effective. They write:
Our studies suggest that we might not teach adolescents that they are too fragile to overcome difficult struggles, but that we might, instead, provide them with the resources and guidance that they need to unleash their skills and creativity in addressing big problems.5
I love the way that well-known author and psychiatrist Daniel Siegel of UCLA writes about the differences between threats and challenges. He says that threats create a “no brain-state” that activates a protective response of fighting or fleeing, while challenges activate a “yes brain-state, when ideal learning can take place.”6
Self-Efficacy Mindset
A number of these parents I interviewed knew “change was possible”; they just didn’t believe that they could change, echoing the research of the late Albert Bandura on self-efficacy. The belief I can make a change7 is the third part of the Possibilities Mindset.
Shannon told me that for weeks, she and Brendan continued to have pitched battles and they tried different solutions. For example, they sat down as a family and decided Brendon could drop out of school if he got a GED and went to community college. He followed through with a GED, but devolved back into doing nothing. Since he’d been a lifeguard, Shannon suggested becoming a paramedic, but after some community college classes, he told her, “No way am I going to be seeing kids hurt like that in accidents.” She recalls:
At that point, he was still respectful and cared about what my husband and I think. I realized that if we kept going the way we were going, we might alienate him completely. To me, that was the worst thing that could happen.
I knew someone growing up who was oppositional, a partier. His family alienated him and he’s been living on the streets for twenty years. I thought, “You know, Brendan could walk away.”
It was an internal mindset shift, she says. She had been on a dark path of feeling angry and scared. It broke her heart that one of her kids wasn’t going to graduate from high school and college. She was afraid that this was going to be forever, that there was nothing they could do to change him. But she learned to let go of thinking that she knew what his path should be.
Shannon was in an Adversity Mindset and was feeling threatened: Nothing works. Things won’t be any different. My child won’t or can’t change. I won’t or can’t change. I can’t make a difference. She felt very threatened.
Shannon’s impetus for change was figuring out what she as a parent wanted to be. She couldn’t change Brendan; she could only change herself— but, in response, things might be different:
I asked myself, what’s my point as a parent? I saw that my parenting was not about Brendan’s accomplishments so that I could feel good about myself. It was about my relationship with him—not what he was doing, but how we were together.
There were still expectations: that he should be able to turn unconditionally to his family, no matter what; that he should be able to go out, sustain himself, care about his work, and care about his contribution.
I had to pause, and let it go, and begin asking questions. I had to think of “new possibilities,” rather than “He’s not doing what I think he should be doing. He has a life of doom.” I had to meet him where he was rather than assuming he would have the life I had mapped out for him.
Over the years, Shannon could see that switching to a Possibilities Mindset is working. Brendan got his own apartment, found a job, and joined a union. Recently, Shannon saw something she’d never expected to see: her son was studying for a test that could lead to a promotion at work:
Brendan was motivated to study! It was a moment of joy—a reminder that I had handled things well, that challenging times pass, and to enjoy the good times.
Testing A Possibilities Versus an Adversity Mindset
In our nationally representative Breakthrough Years study of 16666 children nine-though nineteen-years old and their parents, we assessed parents’ mindsets and then looked to see how these were linked with how adolescents reported they were doing. We found:
A Possibilities Mindset in parents is associated with their adolescents being more hopeful about their futures, while an Adversity Mindset in parents is associated with their adolescents reporting lower positive moods, more negative moods, less hopefulness about their futures, more stress, and more conflict with their parents.
In addition, we found that an Adversity Mindset in parents shows a somewhat stronger relation to adolescent outcomes than a Possibilities Mindset, suggesting that negative perceptions might have more sway.
Finally, we found that Possibilities and Adversity Mindsets are not strongly related and they both exist in varying degrees in us. One way to think of this is that each mindset has its own dial, rather than one dial with Adversity at one end and Possibilities at the other.
The bottom line: We can shift the way we see challenges with our children either by dialing up Possibilities or by dialing down Adversity. Like Shannon discovered, this can affect our children now and in the future.
Lisa S. Blackwell, Kali H. Trzesniewski, and Carol Sorish Dweck, “Implicit Theories of Intelligence Predict Achievement across an Adolescent Transition: A Longitudinal Study and an Intervention,” Child Development 78, no. 1 (2007): 246–263; “An Analysis of Learned Helplessness: Continuous Changes in Performance, Strategy, and Achievement Cognitions Following Failure,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, no. 5 (1978): 451–462; Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008).
Jeremy P. Jamieson et al., “Optimizing Stress Responses with Reappraisal and Mindset Interventions: An Integrated Model,” Anxiety, Stress & Coping 31, no. 3 (February 2018): 245–261, https: //doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2018.1442615.
David Yeager et al., “A Synergistic Mindsets Intervention Protects Adolescents from Stress,” Nature 607 (July 2022): 512, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04907-7.
Ibid.
Ibid.,519.
Daniel J. Siegel, interview by Ellen Galinsky, July 18, 2023.
Dweck, C. S., and Yeager, D. S. (2019). “Mindsets: A View from Two Eras,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(3), 481–496; Bandura, A. (1977), “Self-Efficacy: Toward a Unifying Theory of Behavioral Change,” Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215.