What we found is that in third grade, about 75% of kids love school, which is a very good proxy for engagement.

And by 10th grade, 25% of kids say they love school. So there's this real dramatic drop-off.

Welcome to Kid News Convos. I'm Tori. And today we're having a fascinating conversation with Jenny Anderson,

award-winning journalist and co-author of the book

The Disengaged Teen, Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. It's about why kids lose

interest in learning and how to regain that spark of curiosity. And it's surely timely advice

at the start of the school year. Thank you, Jenny, for joining us. It's great to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.

So your book, The Disengaged Teen, what do you mean when you describe teens as disengaged?

We set out to try to answer the question why so many kids were struggling in school, why they found it hard, why they found it boring,

and why were some of the reasons they kind of checked out. That is what we mean by disengaged.

So sometimes you check out because you're overwhelmed, sometimes you check out because you're

super bored, sometimes you check out because you're upset about something that's going on.

So much of learning is invisible. And so we were really trying to

understand what are some of the reasons we wanted to talk to young people and say what's happening

in your classrooms and your homes and your friendship groups and your life, your sports and your

clubs, you know, what's happening that makes you turn on to learning and get in there and get

super excited and what happens to turn you off. And so

disengagement is like a wonky term for kind of checking out of your learning. And is there an

age when kids start to get disengaged? Yeah. So we did a lot of research for this book,

like surveyed 75,000 kids and 2,000 parents and talked to a lot of young people

themselves, follow them for three years.

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