Author, Researcher David Yeager Brings ‘Mentor Mindset’ to CA

Acclaimed developmental psychologist Dr. David Yeager, the author of the national bestseller 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, shared his groundbreaking research during the first lecture in Colorado Academy’s 2025-2026 SPEAK (Series for Parent Education About Kids) series on September 9. By turns irreverent, empathetic, and inspiring, Yeager enlightened and surprised an engaged audience of parents, guardians, faculty, staff, and students in the Leach Center for the Performing Arts with evidence-based ideas about harnessing the power of developing brains.

The neuroscience research at the heart of Yeager’s bestseller helps adults develop an ear for demonstrating respect for young people and avoiding frustrating patterns of miscommunication and conflict. His book was required summer reading for CA faculty and staff, inspiring conversations about effective teaching and mentoring. Now, the author took the stage to speak about his ideas and answer questions during sessions with parents and guardians as well as students.

Yeager hooked lecture attendees from the start with rhetorical questions aimed at demonstrating that, too often, adults fear the rapid changes, distractions, and impulses that seem to sway the thoughts and behaviors of teenagers. “Parents have come to me wondering, ‘How do I give my children the same level of urgency and drive that I had as I worked to become successful? Is this generation of young people unique? Are screens and social media ruining their brains?”

Across the worlds of business, education, mental health, and beyond, today’s teens are diagnosed as being too entitled, too lazy, too fragile, too selfish, or too anxious—or all of the above. And as a consequence, adults fruitlessly look either to tools of control or to forms of coddling to try to change their behavior.

But, according to Yeager, “We hardly ever interrogate those beliefs that we hold about young people—which, in fact, are ridiculous in many ways.” It cannot be the case, he continued, that an entire developmental stage crucial for the survival of the human race is “a total waste of time. Yet we’ve built a mythology that each ‘next’ generation is somehow the worst, and that makes us feel a little hopeless about what to do.”

Many critics, columnists, and influencers have blamed causes such as the COVID-19 pandemic and social media for what seems to be a crisis that is deeper and more widespread than ever, but in truth, joked Yeager, “Adults have been complaining about young people for all of recorded history.”

Each generation, he explained, experiences its own version of the “mentor’s dilemma”: “It’s hard to simultaneously criticize someone and motivate them, but we as adults are often in that position. We know things, and young people are novices in a lot of areas. How do we communicate so that everyone’s happy—so that our lives are easier, and they grow up to be the self-assured, independent contributors to society that we all want them to be?”

The research: ‘wise feedback’

Yeager went on to detail the results of one study he led, examining the effects of different kinds of teacher feedback on student performance. Middle school writers who completed a social studies essay were given either conventional feedback—in the form of well-intended comments penciled in red throughout their draft—or the same comments plus an additional note from the teacher that read, “I’m giving you these comments because I have high standards, and I know that you can meet them.”

The study found that students were twice as likely to turn in a revised, improved essay when the comments were accompanied by this “wise feedback,” revealed Yeager. “We tried to change the narrative and address the core fear that young people have when someone who has power over them critiques their work. We wanted to make it clear that when teachers are giving criticism, it’s because they’re helping you to become more competent.” And just as important, Yeager noted, the teachers expressed trust in the students’ abilities and support for their efforts.

The finding that wise feedback could counteract what appeared to be laziness or indifference was no surprise, Yeager explained, given the scientific understanding we now possess of the human brain’s evolution over hundreds of thousands of years.

The hormonal shifts that dramatically influence teenagers’ brains are not arbitrary or inconvenient; they provided a distinct survival advantage for much of human history, argued Yeager. “Young people’s hypersensitivity about status, how they look to others, and how they feel about themselves—these play a central role in social survival. Feelings of shame and pride and humiliation and gratification help young people figure out how to be successful in the world, which in turn helps human society survive.”

Human brains have not changed very much in several hundred thousand years, Yeager noted. “Social trust, demonstrating social worth, and the fear of social humiliation are deeply seated biological drives that stem from our earliest ancestors.” The same dynamics of fear and shame that kept ancient human communities intact are the very forces that today shape teenagers’ behavior in the classroom and at home.

The ‘mentor mindset’

In another study, Yeager told the audience, researchers monitored the brains of teens listening to recordings of a parent nagging them. This “grownsplaining,” as he labeled it, predictably inspired activation of negative emotions in the brain, rather than leading to any positive change. “This kind of miscommunication causes a block. It makes our lives harder as adults and makes young people feel yelled at.”

What we know about our own evolutionary history, Yeager went on, is that what matters most to teenage brains is social acceptance, having worth and agency as part of a group. “Let’s give them a way to have agency and control over their lives that is more consistent with the healthy choices that we want them to make. We call that ‘values alignment’—rather than lecturing kids about eating healthier foods or not smoking, reframe these as consistent with something they already care about. That is what counts for status and respect in the eyes of their peers, the people whose opinions they value.”

Yeager and colleagues tested this logic in a third study, this time with young people who were instructed to take an unpleasant-tasting medication. One group of patients received familiar-sounding instructions in “doctor-speak”—“Thank you in advance for your cooperation”—while a second group heard language that presumed their agency and worth—“Will you consider taking this medication?”

The second group, according to Yeager, were, again, twice as likely to go along with the instructions. “What that suggests to me is that rather than thinking of the teenage brain as defective and hormonal, instead it’s just sensitive to differences in input. Subtle cues in the way that we might explain something can come across as not respectful to young people, and that can make a striking difference between whether they do what is good for them and good for society or not.”

Yeager argued that this new paradigm requires a cultural shift that reframes how we think about adolescence. To identify this shift, he used statistical analysis to find examples of real teachers whose students, year after year, seemed to be unusually motivated, who embraced difficulty, who were resilient, and who were uniquely successful. Among these “value-added” teachers, as he called them, he pinpointed a “mentor mindset.” 

“What all these great mentors share,” he noted, “is their belief in young people’s potential. They really do believe that young people are capable of meeting the high standards that they set, and they believe it so much that they are relentless in supporting them to meet the standard.”

The mentor mindset stands apart from the two methods today’s parents and guardians typically pursue to try to motivate their children and students. On one side, explained Yeager, is the “blame and shame” technique that simply presents arbitrary standards and metes out punishment when they aren’t met; on the other is the over-protective approach that attempts to shield young people from discomfort by throwing high expectations out the window.

“Rather than one or the other,” Yeager told the audience, “think of these as two halves of the same thing. If you’re the enforcer, then add the support. If you’re the protector, then figure out how you can add high standards.”

Humans have survived as a species in part because teenagers long ago took risks, he concluded. “They went out, they earned reputations, they protected the tribe. They found out how to build trust with others, and that made our societies successful. Rather than trying to nurture brains that wait for adults to transmit a rulebook to them, we should seek to build brains that can rapidly learn and adapt and evolve.”