Parents Aren’t Worried. Coaches Are.
Parents often tell me their child is fine. Grades are okay, they show up, they’re polite. Then the first session starts, and the coach sees something different: a long pause, a blank look, and “I don’t know.”
As coaches, we’re in the room for that moment. We know that “I don’t know” is often not a statement about what the student knows. It’s a signal that the student couldn’t get the words out in time.
What coaches are noticing
Coaches have always expected “I don’t know.” It’s part of the work. What’s changed is how often it shows up and how much harder it is to move past it. The clients coming to us are more complex than they used to be, and we’re seeing clients who are older than we typically work with.
The problem isn’t only ours. Professors see the stare in office hours. Managers see it in meetings. Those adults usually don’t have an executive function framework, so they read the freeze as disrespect, disengagement, or incompetence. We read it as a skill gap.
What the Forbes article helped me see
I recently read a Forbes article called “Psychology Decodes the Gen Z Stare: And What Leaders Should Do.” It helped me understand what we’re looking at through the EF Lens.
As Dr. Jason Walker puts it: “Talking is hard, not socially hard, neurologically hard. To answer a simple question out loud, your brain retrieves the word, reads the other person’s face, holds what was just said in working memory, and builds a reply. All inside a second. Texting removes almost all of that. You edit before you send, and the screen does the remembering.”
That’s the heart of it. A spoken answer is not a simple act. A student has to retrieve a word, read the other person, hold the question in working memory, and build a response, all within about a second. When a student has little practice doing that, the freeze is what we’d expect.
The numbers behind the pattern
This generation speaks 28 percent fewer words per day than young people did in 2005. Texting gives people time to edit and lets the screen hold the details. Live speech allows neither. Students who grew up mostly texting haven’t had the same repetitions, and they’re walking into college and the workplace without them.
What the skill gap costs
Students don’t get many chances to practice real-time speech under low-stakes conditions. Then they reach college, where they need to ask a professor for an extension, or the workplace, where they need to answer a question in a meeting. A freeze that looked like a shrug in our sessions can read as a lack of interest to someone who doesn’t know what they’re seeing.
What coaches can consider
There’s no single fix, but a few moves help when a student freezes:
Build in think time before expecting an answer, and say so out loud.
Name the task. “Let’s practice answering this out loud” makes the work visible.
Prepare questions in advance so students aren’t asked to think on the spot in every session.
Rehearse short spoken answers, starting small and building up.
What are you seeing?
What does the freeze look like with your students? What do you do in the first thirty seconds? Have you noticed a change in the last year or two? Share your observations in the comments or reply to the newsletter. The best ideas for this work are coming from coaches in the room.
