Austin Scholar #222: The three things that actually make a kid love learning

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. The three things that actually make a kid love learning

2. A summer playbook for building all three

3. Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been thinking about…

This last Thursday was the final day of Alpha NYC’s first year, and the final day of my internship there. I left the end-of-year party with a tote bag of photos with the kids and a kind of grief I wasn’t expecting. I went in thinking I’d make some workshops and teach a few life skills. What actually happened is I watched two ten-year-olds pitch a business to an investor, a middle schooler design a curriculum for the younger kids and then teach it, and a fourth grader corner me to explain why everyone should love quantum physics. I left believing in kids more than I did in September. They are capable of so much more than the adults around them usually let them try, and I am going to miss them a lot.

I’ve also been thinking about them all week because two weeks ago I wrote about motivation, and the inbox response was basically one question, asked twenty different ways: okay, but how do I get my kid to actually love learning?

So that’s what this week is about.

The story most parents have been sold is that loving learning is a personality trait. Some kids have it, some kids don’t.

I don’t buy it. After watching hundreds of kids at Alpha (including my younger sister, who just graduated and is one of the most well-read teenagers I know) and after going through it myself, I think a love of learning is three things stacked on top of each other.

Here are the three:

1. Kids love things they’re good at.

2. Kids love things their friends respect.

3. Kids come out of the womb curious.

1. Kids love things they’re good at

I am a math major at Stanford. I would have bet you a thousand dollars at 12 years old that this sentence would never be true.

I struggled through math for a long time. I felt like I was spending ten times longer on it than the rest of my peers, and I always just felt like there was something missing, like everyone else had been handed a key that I had not. I was getting through it, but I wasn’t enjoying it, and I definitely wasn’t in love with it.

The thing that flipped it was a book, and I am only a little embarrassed about why I picked the book up. I was at a bookstore in Oxford (long story), and I wanted to seem smart, so instead of grabbing the romance novel I actually wanted, I walked over to the math section and pulled down Infinite Powers by Steven Strogatz. I thought I was going to skim three pages and put it back. I ended up reading it cover to cover.

Strogatz doesn’t open with the chain rule. He opens with the idea that calculus is what happens when you take any curved, complicated, continuous thing in the universe and slice it into infinitely many simple pieces, analyze those, and add them back together. That’s the whole game. Once I actually understood what calculus was, I had this overwhelming reaction of oh my god, this is the most beautiful thing humans have ever invented. And then, the very next semester, I was good at it. A year later, I’m a math major and genuinely love it.

Competence first, love second. Pretty much every time.

The research is consistent on this. A 2023 longitudinal review in Annual Review of Psychology by Eccles and Wigfield found that whether a kid feels competent at a subject right now is a stronger predictor of whether she’ll value it five years from now than basically anything else — including how fun the subject is or how good her teacher was. Ryan and Deci’s whole self-determination framework names the same thing: competence is one of the three psychological needs without which intrinsic motivation never really gets off the ground.

The parent move here is the one that feels backwards: stop trying to make the subject fun, and start making sure your kid is actually getting good at it. A kid who is two grade levels behind in math will never love math. A kid who hits mastery on their multiplication facts in second grade starts to enjoy math, because every problem they meet from then on feels solvable instead of humiliating.

2. Kids love things their friends respect

You all know I love David Yeager’s 10 to 25. I have brought it up in essentially every other newsletter for the last six months, and I’m going to keep doing it, because it really is the best book on adolescent motivation I have ever read and it is applicable to almost everything I write about.

Yeager’s whole argument is that from roughly age 10 onward, anything that gets coded as a route to status and respect inside your kid’s actual social world becomes massively motivating, and anything that doesn’t gets tuned out. This is why “because it’s good for you” doesn’t land for a 13-year-old. The kid doesn’t need a better lecture about long-term outcomes. She needs a route to look impressive in front of the people whose opinions she actually cares about.

The reason I’m bringing him up again, though, is that I think we usually only apply this to the bad behaviors (i.e. teens vape because their friends think it’s cool) and miss that it works exactly the same way in the other direction. Teens read Dostoyevsky because their friends will respect them for it. Same mechanism. We’re the ones who get to point it at something worth reading.

My sister is the example I know best. She didn’t grow up loving heavy books. She figured out around 14 that having read a serious book gave her the upper hand in basically any argument with her friends. The book was a weapon, and she found that the weapon worked. She kept reading harder books, kept winning arguments, and somewhere between Crime and Punishment and her senior year of high school, the weapon became the thing. She just graduated, and at this point, she will, unprompted, lecture you on The Brothers Karamazov. The status was the on-ramp. The love of literature and philosophy showed up after.

It also means a kid’s friend group does most of the work, for better or worse. In a friend group where being well-read is high status, your kid will read; in one where caring about school is cringe, she really, really won’t. The peer environment is essentially the variable, from middle school on. This is one of the reasons Alpha works the way it does: when everyone in the building is hitting mastery and getting publicly recognized for it, being good at school is the high-status move, not the embarrassing one.

The parent move here is to take the status question seriously instead of pretending kids should be above it. They aren’t. You weren’t either at 14. Ask yourself: in my kid’s actual social world, what gets respect? And is there a version of learning that earns respect inside that world? For my sister, it was winning arguments. For other kids it’s a YouTube channel, a side business, a sport, a band, a chess rating, a math competition, a debate trophy, a publishable essay. Whatever it is, you’re looking for the same shape: a public arena, a bar to clear, and an audience whose opinion the kid genuinely wants.

3. Kids come out of the womb curious

This is the piece most “love of learning” advice leads with, and the one that actually requires the least work from you.

Every kid arrives on this planet curious. They get obsessed with bugs. They want to know why the sky is blue, why ice floats, how the toilet works, whether the dog can see the same colors they can, what happens if you put this thing in your mouth. A 2007 paper by Michelle Chouinard in the Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development actually counted: preschoolers ask something like 100 information-seeking questions an hour with a parent who’ll answer them. A hundred. That’s not a typo.

You don’t have to give your kid curiosity because they came with it. The job is to not break it, which, depressingly, is most of what school accidentally does. Susan Engel, a developmental psychologist at Williams who has spent her whole career on this, has documented that the rate of spontaneous student questions falls off a cliff in elementary school, sometimes all the way to literally zero questions per hour of class. It isn’t that the kids became less curious. It’s that the classroom around them stopped being interested in their curiosity.