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

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, youve 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 wont 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 childrens 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.

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 weve always usedwell-respected universities leading to in-demand professional jobs with high pay and status? Or will it depend on our childs 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 theyll 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 childrens 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 were not really sure which childrearing rules apply and which have passed their expiration date. Its tough to make plans when we arent sure what were planning for. Ive spent the last three years speaking to a wide range of experts around the countrycaptains of industry, military leaders, scientists, academics, and futuristsand 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 cant change this lack of consensus on what the future will bring. But I can help you to understand the price uncertainty exacts from usfrom our ability to make good decisions, exercise our optimal parenting skills, and nurture our childrens healthy development.

The more we know about how vulnerable our thinking can be under uncertain conditions, the more capable well be of making decisions that are clearheaded and in the best interest of our children. Thats 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. Were not at a complete loss here, and the evidence suggests that well 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 futurethings like creativity, flexibility, curiosity, and optimism? As we learn about the science of epigeneticsthe intersection of genetics and environmentwe will see that we can, to greater and lesser degrees, cultivate these protective traits in our children. Well 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.