Something has gone quietly wrong with how we raise and support young people. The current generation reports the lowest sense of personal efficacy ever measured — they believe, more than any cohort before them, that they cannot improve their own lives. Where Millennials were marked by an almost reckless confidence — the Mark Zuckerberg generation, full of founders and risk-takers — today's young people are afraid to be in charge, afraid to act, and perpetually convinced they are not yet ready. The question is: what made them this way, and what are we doing to make it worse?
A Generation Afraid to Run Their Own Experiments
A cell biologist who runs a prestigious pre-med internship program described a striking change in the students she hosts. These are the top college graduates in the country — the most prepared cohort she has ever seen. And yet they will not run their own experiments. They tell her they are still building their skills. They are not yet ready. And in almost every conversation, they report on their mental health — how they are feeling that day — before they attempt any work.
This is not humility. It is a learned helplessness, and it is spreading across institutions. The external locus of control — the belief that outcomes happen to you rather than because of you — is now the dominant psychological posture of an entire generation.
The Problem with Talking About Your Problems
The instinct of caring adults — parents, teachers, clinicians — has been to create space for young people to process their feelings. But a growing body of research suggests this instinct, taken too far, causes real harm.
A large Australian study called the Wise Teens program taught emotional regulation and coping techniques to over a thousand teenagers. The result: participants became sadder and more anxious. The reason is straightforward. Regularly dwelling on negative feelings — what psychologists call rumination — is not processing; it is amplification. Rumination is, in fact, the number one cognitive symptom of clinical depression.
Academic research psychologists, when surveyed, largely agreed: many current practices around youth mental health are making things worse. Clinical therapists were more divided. The conflict of interest is difficult to ignore. A therapist's income depends on ongoing sessions. The least economically rational thing a therapist can do is discharge a mildly anxious teenager whose parents pay reliably and on time. The most economically rational thing is to treat that teenager indefinitely. The incentive structure of the therapy industry is not aligned with patient recovery.
One child psychologist — Camilo Ortiz — stands as a notable counterexample. He begins every course of treatment by setting a fixed number of sessions, and has patients sign a waiver acknowledging that therapy carries risks. If their symptoms worsen, they must report it. He treats specific, defined problems. He does not treat a child like an annuity.
Anxiety and Depression Are Not the Enemy
There is an important distinction being lost: the difference between an anxiety disorder and anxiety itself. Anxiety exists for evolutionary reasons. It improves performance — preparation, focus, alertness. A person with no anxiety before crossing a street does not look for cars. A person with no nerves before a competition does not prepare. UFC fighters, before every bout, are terrified. The ones who perform worst are the ones who feel nothing.
The same logic applies to depression. Major depressive disorder is a serious condition requiring treatment. But ordinary low moods following loss or failure serve a purpose. Evolutionary psychologists describe depression as adaptive: it slows us down, prevents rash decisions, and creates the conditions in which we recognize that something needs to change. Medicating away that signal before it is heard can trap a person in the very circumstances causing the pain — too numbed to feel the motivation required to leave.
When we intervene too early, too aggressively, and with medication, we do two things. We rob young people of the chance to build what might be called emotional musculature — the lived experience of feeling terrible and then discovering they survived it. And we erase meaningful parts of human experience. The anxiety before Christmas morning is part of why the memory is vivid. The nervousness before a first kiss is inseparable from the kiss itself. These are not bugs in human psychology. They are features.
What We Stopped Saying — and Why It Matters
There used to be a set of phrases adults said to children without much ceremony: You'll live. Shake it off. You'll be fine. These phrases have nearly disappeared. Their disappearance is not trivial. When a child is never told they will survive a minor injury, they have no framework for believing they can survive a major one.
The extraordinary story of human history is one of resilience. Every family, across every generation, contains stories of loss — death, displacement, financial ruin, illness — and survival. Grandparents who lived through genuine hardship did not, as a rule, develop permanent psychiatric conditions. They formed families, held jobs, showed up for their friends. That is the human story. We are no longer telling it to children.
Instead, we tell them they have trauma. We tell them they need to process it. We validate suffering so thoroughly that teenagers claim PTSD from driving past a middle school where they were once teased. The memory feels bad — of course it does — but a bad memory is not a flashback. Feeling anxious near a place where painful things happened is the ordinary operation of a nervous system doing exactly what nervous systems do. Calling it a disorder does not help. It teaches the child that they are broken.
Resilience Is Learned, Not Granted
The worst thing that has ever happened to a person is, by definition, the worst thing that has ever happened to them — regardless of whether it is a dented car or a dead parent. Everyone's threshold is relative to their experience. The role of adults is not to prevent children from ever reaching their threshold. It is to expand that threshold over time by letting children encounter difficulty, feel discomfort, and discover — repeatedly, in small doses and large — that they are capable of continuing.
The corrective is not cruelty. It is not telling children their feelings do not matter. It is telling them that difficult things are survivable, that pain is not permanent, and that the capacity to endure and adapt is not something other people have — it is something they have too, waiting to be used. That message, more than any coping curriculum or therapeutic intervention, may be what this generation needs most.
