Why Kids Can’t Change Until Adults Do with AJ Crabill (Episode #126)

About Our Guest:

It’s a rare person who can gracefully cause us to pause and rethink things we thought were written in stone. And AJ Crabill is one of them. 

People like AJ have the ability to gracefully challenge our assumptions while completely protecting our dignity. And if you love people who make you pause to rethink things with fresh eyes, then you will love this interview.  

There, you’ll find reason to understand that AJ has a knack for finding that perfect balance between creating psychological safety and challenging us to get something done.

In this interview, we will share a conversation that includes AJ’s wonderful, energizing thoughts on how we can shift from a  “survival mentality” to an “expression mentality.”

We’ll chat about how we all have to find a better balance between honoring the goals of the past and our ancestors, versus investing in our futures. 

We will share AJ’s counterintuitive insights on how maladaptive behavior is rooted in very understandable logic, if we look at things from the child’s point of view. And we can apply that to our own choices and those of the people we love.  

With our dignity in tact, after this interview, we will be able to do something AJ challenges himself to consider every day: 

“I have to be willing to reevaluate what I’m doing, if what I’m doing isn’t working.”

– A.J. Crabill

AJ is a thought leader in education who is challenging our notions about what’s possible once the adults in our school boards rethink and then recommit to fundamentally better goals in education. He is famous for saying, “Student outcomes don’t change until adult behaviors change.”

But his insights go way beyond the world of education. 

After listening to AJ in this interview, instead of getting annoyed or angry about the negative behavior of others (on the news, social media, in your work, on a board you participate with, etc.) you may find it very easy to pause and think how that behavior is simply their way of adapting to some circumstance they face, that you know nothing about.

Instead of unconsciously following impulses like overwhelm, contempt or despair, you will find it easier to be more compassionate, or at the very least, avoid treating the negative behaviors of others as a threat to your well-being or influence.  

It’s all about everyone’s attempts to adapt. 

And once we get a firm grip on that concept, we can look at problems like gang-membership, teenage pregnancy, malicious behavior on social media, and much of the negative noise in society, with fresh eyes and a new angle on what problem actually needs to be solved. 

AJ has the most graceful, thoughtful way of facilitating the hard conversations about how adult behaviors must change…. he casts no stones, looks for beautiful yet undiscovered places for collaboration, and generally protects everyone’s dignity in conversations that could be very hard. 

And THAT’S why I wanted to interview AJ… I KNOW he is one of the voices that many of us are searching for: helpful, measured, approachable. 

You know how we might see a news story where something terrible suddenly happens that is caught on film…. And almost everyone in the scene is running away from the calamity? Well, a thought leader on this podcast taught me to look for the “helpers”…. There will almost always be someone who is rushing in to start helping. 

This is how I see the potential in AJ Crabill’s growing role in how we move Education (and solve other social problems) to meet the needs of our modern world. 

“Student outcomes don’t change until adult behaviors change.”

AJ Crabill repeats this mantra often as he travels the country working to persuade community leaders, educators, and board members to examine what they are optimizing for. 

We can keep defending systems and goals that were designed 40-70, even 100 years ago—for a completely different world…. Or we can take a deep breath—together—and make sure everything we do is in service of collectively better outcomes.