Are Today's Kids Going to Be Alright?

Source: New Society Publishers

How can we help support and enable growth, development, and a thriving mindset in today's kids? These are questions many of us have, and yet, we are often left wondering and without useful insight or answers. Fortunately, this is the central throughline of a recent book that many parents could benefit from reading.

Kids These Days: Understanding and Supporting Youth Mental Health

In Kids These Days, Will Dobud and Nevin Harper bring to bear their backgrounds in therapy and outdoor recreation to point out something interesting related to perspective about youth:

"For millennia, adults argued the youth they live with were the weakest, most selfish, and least respectful across the evolution of human existence. Those same annoying teenagers went on to build bridges, go into politics, break athletic records, and continue today to develop modern technologies never dreamed of historically. Ironically, they also went on to raise children of their own, who they too described as even more lazy, rude, self-absorbed, and lost to the luxuries of modern living than they were accused of before!"

Despite this, the rise of social media and our reliance on technology have changed things. In exploring what has happened and what can be done, Kids These Days covers a huge range of issues across three related parts: interference, intevention, and ideology. As the authors summarize in the introduction:

"Part I: Interference explores increased loneliness, loss of connection, digital interference, and the impact of environmental toxins on youth development. Part II: Intervention takes a critical look at the labeling of mental disorders, psychotherapy, the overprescription of psychiatric medications, and universal school-based programs teaching social emotional learning. Part III: Ideology shows how the dogma of safety led to an extinction of experience and how this impacts youth. We aim to show how adults can, at first, at least notice these shockingly obvious concerns, and more importantly, to be courageous in addressing them. Not blaming kids these days, but rather listening, learning, and leading."

Risky Business

The theme in this book that really resonated with me as a person who was a kid and as a father and grandfather was that related to "risky play" under the umbrella of "rough and tumble play," and the concept of over-parenting and failing to allow kids to gain experience through action. The adults in the room often think that explorative, unstructured, and rough play is dangerous. Yet, the authors point out that rough and tumble is "one of the few ways for all kids to learn and practice the combination of social and physical skills in a meaningful manner. Rough and tumble play is not just a human concept, but rather a mammalian behavior."

Reading this made me immediately think back to how I tried to articulate the concept of stress in Becoming Batman. The word "stress" tends to drive negative emotional reactions in people. Aren't we trying to manage and reduce stress? That depends on what the stress is. In assessing the biology of Batman, stress was framed in its physiological context—stimuli that drive useful adaptation and change in bodily systems. Without stress to sculpt and sustain it, we literally do not have life.

William Dobud and Nevin Harper quote developmental psychologist Chris Lalonde, who was "passionate about the dignity of risk and believed that children learned their own boundaries through testing them."

Stress, Risk, and Resilience

If we lack appropriate stresses, we fail to develop. Without stress, Batman can never be. Without an element of risk, how can we expect kids to develop a true sense of agency as animals in the world? My takeaway from Kids These Days is that we need to let kids experience risk. It's part of the strength of life in the same way that physiological stress is.

Stress builds bones and stronger muscles, and exposure to challenges through risk can help to help build resilience. It's not to say that risk should be careless, but rather, that we should plan for possibilities but live for probabilities. Just because something could happen doesn't mean it's very likely that it will. And to live your life and to allow your children to experience life through the idea of worry about an infinitesimally small probability of some negative possible outcome is not a good way to move forward.

Everything comes down to the issue of risk versus reward and probability versus possibility. When I wrote Becoming Batman, I deliberately entitled it "possibility of a superhero" to explore the idea of "Could this thing ever exist?" Not how likely it is that it would exist. As I explored in that book, parts of the Batman mythology are possible and therefore can be a beacon for our own personal achievement and goal setting.

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But the probability of it is vanishingly small to achieve the total sum. When it comes to exploring the world and the concept of risk again, it's a balance of probability versus possibility. But it should be flipped around from what I took in the Batman book. Here it's more about an understanding that, yes, there are certain risks that are possible and that could have negative outcomes, but the overwhelming likelihood that they would occur is vanishingly small. The probability is heavily weighted more toward experiential learning and understanding our world, instead of a small possibility of fearing the negative outcome.

Kids these days do need our support to find a sense of agency and embrace who they can become now and in the future. Part of that surely entails the adults thinking about how they got to where they are instead of just thinking about now.

(c) E. Paul Zehr (2025)