What’s Next?
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I have the coolest gig in the world. My job is to get curious about something, spend a couple of years researching it in my dark hermit hidey-hole office, then translate all the technical, jargon-tastic, super nerdy research into something other people might want to read or listen to.
When I was teaching middle school, I noticed my students (and whoops, my own children) were being overparented and wondered what impact that would have on their learning, motivation, competence and engagement. Two years later, I emerged from my office all pasty and sun-dazed bearing The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed.
In 2013, I got sober, and wondered what genetic and environmental legacy I’d passed on to my kids. I ducked back into my hidey-hole and emerged two years later with The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence.
These days, I’m curious about lots of things: whether I should become an austringer, how a gray whale showed up in the Atlantic after having been extinct there for over 200 years, where and how eels reproduce, and the etymological and cultural history of the linchpin. Sadly, not all of these topics warrant two years of research (well, they absolutely do, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that I need to write a book about all of it).
I tend to get curious about the topics life presents to me.
My kids were 9 and 14 when I wrote about overparenting, our reliance on extrinsic motivators like grades, points, and scores, and our obsession with academic ends over educational means in The Gift of Failure. They were 15 and 20 when I explored the science, myths, and realities around substance use and substance use prevention in The Addiction Inoculation.
Today, my kids are 20 and 25, emerging into adulthood amid a young adult mental health crisis, economic uncertainty, political unrest, an opioid epidemic, and a world changing faster than we can formulate rules for it.
I talk to thousands of teens and young adults when I’m out on the road speaking, and I give them all my email address in case they want to talk about anything. Over and over again, they ask me how they can feel less lost, sad, anxious, and aimless.
And so, I’m curious: how bad are things for emerging adults and what can we do to help them?
The answer to my first question is things are bad. According to a recent report by Harvard’s Making Caring Common Project, 3 in 4 emerging adults report they lack purpose, over half report financial and achievement pressure and mounting mental health consequences, nearly half are concerned that the world is falling apart, 44 percent don’t feel they matter to others ,and 34 percent say they are lonely. Over a third are freaked out by social and political issues. I’m paraphrasing the report here, but you get the idea.
As for my second question, what we can do to help, I’m not sure yet, but I plan to find out.
As ever, I promise to share what I discover along the way.