A child looks up to see who they will become, and finds another anxious teenager.
Why isn’t Gen Z growing up? The familiar answer is overprotection: parents who hovered, removed every risk and left their children too fragile for the world. Freya India’s essay “The Need for Adults” accepts half of that and turns it around. Many parents today are overprotective but strangely permissive. They obsess over physical safety yet hesitate to give advice or moral guidance, afraid of seeming controlling or outdated. They care more about their children’s safety than their character.
Imagine being a child and looking up at the adults for a demonstration of what you will become. Every adult you see is as anxious, as insecure and as uncertain as you are. There is no next stage and no sign that it gets better, just more of the same. Why would you bother growing up?
Empty hands
To hand something down, adults have to believe something first. India’s point is that a generation of adults learned to hold nothing firmly. Adults were taught to weaken their convictions, soften their beliefs, that it was almost offensive to believe in anything deeply. They have political positions but not principles, and sides in the culture war but not convictions. When everything is subjective, debunked or a social construct, there is nothing solid to pass on. Their hands are empty.
The retreat makes sense one parent at a time. A conviction risks the pain of being wrong, and moral guidance risks seeming authoritarian, so the locally optimal move is to hold no convictions and stay permissive. Each adult avoids discomfort, and the child is left to navigate moral reality alone.
The loss runs deeper than missing rules, because when you cast out authority you take with it admiration. The child loses a father’s recognition that they are capable and a mother’s reassurance that they are worth more than they realize, since praising a child for acting right requires admitting there is a right. Adults who want to be liked by their children rather than respected have given up the courage to be disliked, and that courage is what holding a conviction requires.
A rebellion against freedom
So the revolt takes a strange form. The young are not revolting because they were restricted by too many rules. They are revolting against too much freedom, and when everything is permitted, the only rebellion left is to give up on it all. Children need the small stresses of boundaries, consequences and moral friction to build character. Remove them and you get safety without strength.
India finds the cost sharpest for girls, who are taught to be nice and non-judgmental but not how to say no, and are left unable to resist pressure, unprepared for adulthood, looking loved and coddled but beneath it all, completely unprotected. Teenagers can’t play in the park unsupervised but can enter relationships with nothing to guide them. Adults grew too afraid to lecture and moralize, forgetting that we used to call it wisdom and that it was part of protection. The result is a generation dependent on therapists and “experts” because they did not have adults.
Not stricter rules
The obvious objection is that this is nostalgia for authoritarian parenting that never worked. But stricter rules would miss as badly as looser ones. The better reading is that the crisis is not overprotection or underprotection but the absence of adults who model what it means to hold convictions, shoulder burdens, and become better for it. What’s needed are adults who are authoritative not because children fear them but because they have faith in who those children could become, and who care less about being liked than about being respected.
That adult doesn’t have to have been whole from the start. Shifu is a better model than any sage: a teacher who did real damage and rebuilt himself in front of his students. What the child looking up needs to see is someone bearing weight and becoming better for it. Without that, a generation’s anxiety looks less like a disorder to be treated by professionals and more like an accurate reading of the adults around it, and therapy becomes a paid substitute for the adults who should have been there for free. Why isn’t Gen Z growing up? Ask who around them did.
References:
- Freya India, The Need for Adults