Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and Rapidly Changing World

Dedication

To the ever-expanding blessing that is my family:

Loren, Lauren and Emery, Michael and David,

Jeremy and Magen. Roll up your sleeves kids.

There’s work to be done.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Part I: Stuck

Chapter 1: Why the Needle Hasn’t Moved: Doubling Down on the Past When We Fear the Future

Chapter 2: Your Brain on Uncertainty: Why We Make Dubious Decisions

Chapter 3: Accumulated Disability: The Real Dangers of Overprotection

Chapter 4: Learned Helplessness and Delayed Adolescence: A Stalled Generation

Part II: Course Correction

Chapter 5: Unlearning Helplessness and Restoring Capabilities

Chapter 6: Demystifying Twenty-First-Century Skills

Chapter 7: Academic and Foundational Skills in an Age of Uncertainty

Part III: Thriving in the New Normal

Chapter 8: The Squiggly Line

Chapter 9: A Revised Script: Moms and Dads in the Twenty-First Century

Chapter 10: The Future-Proof Family: Building a Better Moral Compass and Stronger Communities

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Also by Madeline Levine, PhD

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

In between changing diapers, wiping noses, folding laundry, dialing for takeout, rushing to work, going to parent-teacher conferences, driving carpool, and obsessing over whether your parenting skills are in line with the latest findings on child development, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the world appears to be unraveling. Not literally, of course, but what with previously unimaginable political friction at home, increasing tension abroad, deteriorating climate conditions, and the ever-advancing tech revolution, the world, as most of us have known it, is becoming ever more uncertain, unfamiliar, and disturbing.

Most of us have been busy trying to keep our families functioning reasonably well while we juggle home life, work life, and something resembling our own lives. This leaves us little time to process the daily onslaught of calamitous headlines the twenty-four-hour news cycle depends on. Cybersecurity may or may not protect our identities. Our kids won’t have jobs. The robot apocalypse is on the way. We weep at the worst of it: another mass shooting at a school, a church, or a synagogue. We cringe at the debasement of dialogue that has become the new normal in politics. We fight feelings of distrust, anger, and helplessness about a future that too often feels dystopian. Increasingly, we turn our attention to our children out of love, fear, and the consolation of being able to exert some control when so much feels out of control.

Amid this drumbeat of disruption, when we take a deep breath, we can see that the changing world actually offers tremendous opportunities for innovation, growth, health, and greater equality. Babies with birth defects can be cured while still in the womb. Paper microscopes that are cheap and easily transportable can help revolutionize health care in developing countries. Headsets that read brainwaves can allow paralyzed patients to control their wheelchairs by simply thinking about movement. CRISPR allows the editing of genes and may soon be eliminating some of our most lethal diseases. We are at an extraordinary moment in time that offers equal evidence for concern, caution, and optimism. Great for scientists and researchers. Not so great for parents and grandparents.

The surreptitiously curated information most of us get is piecemeal, anecdotal, and designed to further addict us to our particular worldview. While it plays to our biases, it does little to actually inform us. We are aware that the world is changing, but experts seem to be short on consensus and it is the velocity of change that we find truly head-spinning. Change has always been with us humans, measured in millennia, centuries, or decades, not in years or even weeks. How do we move ourselves and our children forward when our impulse and our anxiety make us look to the past for solutions that are now outdated? We have always been concerned with the forward trajectory of our children’s lives. Anxiety is nothing new. Historically, it has hummed along in the background. But our anxiety is no longer background noise. Not for us. Not for our kids. Anxiety is now the number-one mental health disorder for both adults and children.¹

Ready or Not is about addressing that anxiety. It is about the damage unchecked anxiety does to parents’ decision-making at the very moment we need greater, not lesser, clarity about everything from which preschool will best nourish our toddler to which university will be the best fit for our high-school senior. Will coding camp or soccer camp or adventure camp help set up our kids for future success? Oh, and what will that success look like? Will it come from the metrics we’ve always used—well-respected universities leading to in-demand professional jobs with high pay and status? Or will it depend on our child’s ability to adapt to ever-changing work requirements, perhaps even the requirement to find purpose while lacking any sort of work in the traditional sense? This book is also about how anxiety (theirs and ours) impacts our kids’ well-being and hinders their ability to develop the muscular mental health they’ll need in a world that is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, or VUCA, as the military calls it. Anxiety does not have to stifle our judgment or our children’s development. By understanding and taking charge of uncertainty and anxiety we can turn our increased awareness into an advantage.

Parents are faced with many challenges over the course of raising children. But at the moment, we face the usual challenges of parenthood compounded by the uncomfortable feeling that we’re not really sure which childrearing rules apply and which have passed their expiration date. It’s tough to make plans when we aren’t sure what we’re planning for. I’ve spent the last three years speaking to a wide range of experts around the country—captains of industry, military leaders, scientists, academics, and futurists—and their projections of our near future, say ten or twenty years down the road, range from life pretty much the way we know it, perhaps with tweaks in self-driving cars and package-delivering drones, to what is called the singularity, in which human intelligence and artificial intelligence combine in some sort of cyborg mash-up. I can’t change this lack of consensus on what the future will bring. But I can help you to understand the price uncertainty exacts from us—from our ability to make good decisions, exercise our optimal parenting skills, and nurture our children’s healthy development.

The more we know about how vulnerable our thinking can be under uncertain conditions, the more capable we’ll be of making decisions that are clearheaded and in the best interest of our children. That’s not to say that there is a single solution for all kids and all families. Every child is different, just as every family is different. However, child development is one of the more mature fields in psychology. We’re not at a complete loss here, and the evidence suggests that we’ll need to adjust some of our traditional assumptions about good parenting. We can look at the data, consider the science, and decide whether we want to shift our attention and intentions or not. As it stands, we are not preparing our children (or ourselves) very well for confronting an unpredictable, rapidly changing future. Just the opposite: in our efforts to protect our children from experiencing distress, we are unintentionally setting up the circumstances that nurture distress today and will surely exacerbate it tomorrow.

Fortunately, while there is little consensus about what the future will look like, there is far greater consensus about the kinds of skills our kids will need to flourish in the coming decades. As Darwin discovered more than 150 years ago, adaptability is the sustaining feature of those who not only survive but who thrive. If you have more than one child, you know that kids seem to come into this world with different degrees of adaptability. One child will only eat grilled cheese or spaghetti for a year or two and another seems to go from baby food to tacos and sushi with great enthusiasm. So can we cultivate adaptability? And what about those other attributes that are likely to give kids an advantage in our uncertain future—things like creativity, flexibility, curiosity, and optimism? As we learn about the science of epigenetics—the intersection of genetics and environment—we will see that we can, to greater and lesser degrees, cultivate these protective traits in our children. We’ll learn how to inoculate our kids against the most disconcerting aspects of an uncertain future and maximize their ability to find fun, challenge, and fulfillment in exactly this kind of environment.

We will need to develop in ourselves a shift in attitude about how, in fact, most people become successful. I’ve spoken at hundreds of venues to a number north of 250,000 people about trajectories of success. I’m using success in a broad sense here. There are folks with large amounts of money and little self-worth. Others are just getting by but have fulfilling, happy lives they feel good about. Ultimately, success is an achievement that can only be defined by the person who feels successful. It’s not about grades, colleges, salaries, or employment. It certainly can be, but not necessarily. And the vast majority of adults who consider themselves successful have had winding (what I call squiggly) life paths. So we’ll look at the benefits of a squiggly path going forward, the pressing need for moral clarity, as well as how to incorporate a more robust sense of community for all of us who too often feel isolated and alone.

In a popular quip, the scientist Alan Kay said, The best way to predict the future is to invent it. If I remember right, when I had three children, a private practice, an ailing mother, a husband on too many on-call nights, and an ever-expanding list of responsibilities I never seemed able to meet, inventing the future was about the last thing on my mind. Since most of us find the demands of the present crowding out our ability to fully invest in the future, let’s at a minimum commit ourselves to preparing our children for that future. Every generation adds to the repertoire of previous generations in fresh and unexpected ways. That is how we adapt, how we innovate, how we continue to move forward. In a time of great uncertainty, if we can raise children who know how to optimize that climate and who greet it with anticipation, optimism, and enthusiasm, we will have done our best to prepare them for a hopeful future they will gladly inherit and invent.

Part I

Stuck

Chapter 1

Why the Needle Hasn’t Moved

Doubling Down on the Past When We Fear the Future

It was bad enough when I had to choose between attachment parenting, tiger parenting, authoritative parenting, and just following my gut. With everything changing so fast I’m more bewildered than ever.

—Mother of a 9-year-old fourth-grader

I’m on another stage somewhere in the Midwest. For more than a decade I’ve been crisscrossing the United States talking about rising rates of anxiety and depression in our kids, and more recently, about parenting challenges in our rapidly changing and uncertain environment. I’ve had the privilege of meeting with groups of all stripes: public, private, liberal, conservative, rural, urban, and most everything in between. But what has genuinely surprised me is the uniformity of concerns, regardless of which community I’m in. Parents want to know what to worry about and what they can safely take off their plates. They want to know how to prepare their kids to be successful in a future that seems so unpredictable. How to deal with the endless alarming news about children and teenagers. Most of all, they want to know how to protect their kids and ensure some stability for them in a world that seems anything but.

I’d begun my lecture with the latest numbers on anxiety and depression in adolescents, a subject sure to resonate with parents who are no strangers to anxiety themselves. Statistics show an ongoing decline in the mental health of our kids, I told them. Anxiety disorders occur in almost a third of 13-to-18-year-olds.¹ From 2005 to 2014 the number of teenagers who experienced a major depressive episode increased more than 30 percent.² This translates into about 13 percent of teens suffering from full-blown clinical depression.³ In the last ten years, the number of young people committing suicide has steadily increased as well. Suicide statistics, while profoundly disturbing, only begin to tell us how demoralized and hopeless many kids are feeling. For every completed death by suicide in young people aged 15 to 24, there are somewhere between 50 and 100 attempts that (thankfully) fail.⁴

The trends are upsetting but not irreversible, I say: We know how to lessen our kids’ distress and achieve better outcomes for them. And I share what an abundance of research reveals about how to raise children to be emotionally healthy and productive adults. Engagement, that is, optimism and enthusiasm about learning, coupled with high levels of motivation, is highly correlated with academic success.⁵ Many types of workplace success depend heavily on emotional intelligence, the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one’s own emotions and the emotions of others.⁶ And few things predict emotional health as well as self-regulation, the internal guidance system that allows us to direct our behavior and control our impulses.⁷ Finally, it is parental adjustment, especially mom’s well-being, that has a critical and continuing impact on our children’s well-being.⁸

I tell the assembled parents that if our children are to thrive in a world that is rapidly evolving and full of uncertainty, they need less structure and more play. They need to become comfortable with experimentation, risk-taking, and trial-and-error learning. Shielding them from failure is counterproductive. Our kids need to spend less time burnishing their résumés and more time exploring and reflecting.

I reassure the parents that I’m not downplaying the value of academic success or a financially rewarding job. On the contrary, I’m telling them how to make those outcomes more likely. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and focusing primarily on one facet of a child’s progress—typically academic or athletic performance—limits the attention paid to other important aspects of child and adolescent development.

The audience listens politely, but impatience is in the air. Well-educated and attuned to the latest in child-rearing theories, most of them have heard some version of this talk before, either from me or from like-minded colleagues. They’re waiting for the Q and A. When it arrives, I brace myself for the questions I know are coming:

My daughter loves art, but everything seems to be about technology. What should I encourage her to do?

I keep seeing that ‘soft skills’ like curiosity and creativity are the new hard skills. But can you even teach those things to children?

OK, so kids will need soft skills. But I don’t see lots of high-paying jobs where the qualifications are ‘compassionate problem-solving communicator.’

"We don’t pressure our son. We never have. He wants to take all those AP classes. Why should we stop him?"

No matter what happens, a degree from Brown can’t hurt, right?

What should my kid major in? Can’t you just give me a list?

These queries, full of societal angst, are the new normal. Parents are worried sick about their children’s prospects in an unstable world teeming with threats near and far—whole categories of jobs disappearing, not just to other countries, but everywhere, forever; global financial upheaval; terrorist attacks; refugees in misery; the environment under assault from poisons and rising temperatures. Their concern is not merely about career counseling or even happiness. It’s about survival. Which is why it’s so difficult for parents to reconsider the metrics that served them well in their own formative years—test scores, college admissions, that degree from Brown. They rightly ask, What are we supposed to do instead? And the answers I’ve been able to provide, while developmentally sound and emotionally beneficial, often don’t strike them as enough fortification against the unknowable future their children face.

It’s not that individual parents haven’t been listening to messages such as mine. Mental health professionals and educators have helped many families turn down the heat on the high-pressure, high-stakes environment that has been throttling the creativity, engagement, and emotional well-being of too many children for the last few decades. More parents have become willing to enforce reasonable bedtimes, to see the wisdom of backing off on that one extra AP class, to tolerate the less-than-optimal GPA without insisting that their kid needs therapy or medication, or at the very least tutoring. Yet the statistics on our children’s mental health remain grim.

While a good number of families—and even some communities and school systems—have introduced infinitely saner schedules and expectations for their children, the prevailing cultural norm remains singularly focused on nabbing the gold star regardless of cost. Parents (and too often their kids) see life as a zero-sum game with only winners and losers. No parent wants his or her child to fall into the latter category. Our increasingly bifurcated economy adds plausibility to this concern. The fallacy though is that pedal-to-the-metal living and learning are likely to produce successful children. In fact, the opposite is true. For most kids, having something resembling an old-fashioned childhood—playing outside, meeting challenges without constant parental interference, being bored, having chores, taking some risks—is far more likely to build the kinds of competencies kids have always needed and that will be particularly important in the future.

But there’s a wide gap between intellectually grasping that concept and committing oneself and one’s child to it. Dads still tell me their kids can relax once they have a job. Moms fret that we can’t swim upstream when the stakes are so high. As someone who has put the well-being of children and teenagers at the center of my professional life, watching parents and kids continue to struggle is frustrating and painful. After every lecture I find myself thinking, What piece of the picture am I missing? There’s a whole new set of challenges demanding new solutions to be faced in our rapidly changing world, and yet parents remain anxiously preoccupied with grades and high-prestige colleges. Why won’t the needle move?

This book is my attempt to answer those questions, a quest that took me far outside my comfort zone. I sought out not only my usual sources of information, but also looked for people who had spent much of their lives dealing with change. It meant talking to naval admirals in addition to developmental psychologists, corporate CEOs in addition to clinicians, and neuroscientists in addition to teachers. I wanted to suspend my assumptions and take a fresh look at what might be the root causes of so much distress among families, the unseen impediments to improvement, and most especially the strategies that work best to improve outcomes when living in an unstable environment with little precedent. In many ways the journey I traveled to write this book was emblematic of the solutions I discovered. Stay open. Be curious. Collaborate. Get out of your comfort zone. Challenge your perspective.

With the Best of Intentions

Parenting today is full of ironies. Consider the fact that we’re just as addicted to devices as our kids are, but we have much less fun: instead of obsessing over music or fashion blogs, we’re drawn to doomsday news feeds reporting the latest food recall, deadly virus, or mass shooting. Adult anxiety has risen along with that of children and teenagers,⁹ in large part because of the cultural tumult to which we’re constantly exposed. Alarmed and unsure, we overprotect and overdirect our children even more than parents did a decade or two ago, turning our kids into risk-averse rule-followers. Yet that’s exactly the opposite of the mindset they’ll need if, as experts from multiple fields agree, adaptability, curiosity, risk-taking, and flexibility will be the survival skills of tomorrow. We reward young scholars for memorizing all the right answers, but in a rapidly evolving world it will be more important to ask incisive questions. Why? Because content is available with the swipe of a finger. What to do with that content, how to evaluate it and stitch it together with other content in new and important ways, is what will matter. Students are encouraged to compete for awards, trophies, and a few slots at top universities, but in the coming years a talent for collaboration will be far more valuable than a habit of ruthless competition. Time and again, I observe parents making decisions they hope will benefit their kids yet are more likely to debilitate them. In my clinical practice I see well-intentioned parents reflexively pushing their children toward metric success, unintentionally crowding out curiosity, creativity, and flexibility. These need not be either/or propositions. A healthy balance would serve most kids far better than a singular preoccupation.

At the root of this paradox is our flat, technology-driven, climactically unstable world. No one, including the many experts I interviewed for this book, knows exactly what the future will hold. This unsettling reality has had a profound but subtle influence on parents’ approach to child-rearing. Forces just under our radar are driving our decision-making. Parents know the world is changing but are largely unaware of how these changes are already affecting the way they make decisions about their kids. Besides, they reason, this isn’t the first time our country has had to adjust to rapid change. True enough. But there are aspects of our moment in history that make it singularly challenging.

It Really Is Different Now

While every era may feel like both the best and worst of times, rarely have conditions across so many categories accelerated at the rate we’re now experiencing. Within the past several decades, climate change has morphed from a distant Arctic threat to extreme weather conditions affecting every continent and spurring mass human migration. Globalization means that countries are increasingly specialized, which limits the range of valuable job skills and employment opportunities here and abroad. Technology that didn’t exist ten years ago has altered how we communicate and form relationships, forcing change on the most intimate psychological level. Science plunges forward into areas that are at once exhilarating and terrifying—genetic modification, biomedical engineering, and artificial intelligence, to name a few. News delivered via multiple portals offers more information than we can possibly absorb. And because the portals are driven by a profit motive, the news focuses far more on the terrifying than the exhilarating. We’re human: fear still sells; optimism not so much.

Today’s social change feels cataclysmic, so we look to the past for perspective. The shift from an agrarian to an industrialized society in the nineteenth century, waves of immigrants adjusting to the New World at the dawn of the twentieth, World War I, the murderous Spanish flu, the deep trauma of the Great Depression, the horrors of the Second World War and the nuclear age, the upheaval of the 1960s and