ready or not?

Author and Dr Madeline Levine wants to prepare children for an uncertain future, and it all begins with us.

Describe yourself.

I grew up as a working-class kid from New York City. My dad was a cop, and he tragically died very young, so I grew up on welfare. It was tough when I was growing up, and that experience helped shape my expectations around childrenʼs development and prompted questions I explored in my work for many years. Professionally, I have a PhD, and I specialise in childrenʼs developmental psychology. I worked clinically for the first twenty years of my career, but Iʼve been in this field for about thirty-five years. I wrote my first book about fifteen years ago because it became clear to me that certain issues needed to be addressed on a bigger scale than one-on-one therapy. Since then, Iʼve written two more books. My latest book is Ready or Not: Preparing Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and Rapidly Changing World. It was released two weeks before Covid, which was rather timely.

What’s the common theme in your books?

Thereʼs an obvious common theme and a less obvious common theme. The obvious theme is that weʼre having a big increase in mental health issues in the United States and other Western countries. And one of the reasons I think this is happening is because kids are ill-prepared to meet challenges. There has been too much emphasis on performance and competition and not enough on character. And while my books talk about kids, Iʼm really writing about parents, and no one ever talks about that. If parents believe life is about performance, youʼre not going to be able