Let Them Climb the Tree

My youngest tried something new last year that didn't go well. Not catastrophically, just the ordinary, low-stakes kind of not-going-well that kids have always needed to experience. What surprised me wasn't how he handled it. It was how instinctively I wanted to prevent it from happening in the first place.

Arthur Brooks wrote a piece recently in The Free Press (paywalled, sorry) that I've been chewing on. The headline stat: in the mid-1970s, 92 percent of 12th graders had tried alcohol. By 2025, that number had fallen to 47 percent. On the surface, great. But Brooks is tracking something bigger. Alcohol is just one signal in a pattern of retreat. Marriage rates are falling. Fertility intentions are down. Gen Z investors prefer safe, liquid assets over growth. Nearly three-quarters of young Americans say "you can't be too careful" in dealing with other people. Only 13 percent say most people can be trusted.

His argument is sharp: the world isn't actually more dangerous. Divorce rates peaked in 1980 and have been declining. Stock market volatility shows no upward trend. Unemployment has been low for years. The risk hasn't gone up. The aversion to it has.

Brooks points at cultural pessimism as a major driver, which I think is right. When every commencement address tells Gen Z the world is broken and it's their job to fix it, of course they're anxious. That's a crushing framing for a 22-year-old. It also feeds the victim narrative in a number of ways that I don't believe is healthy...that's a separate post, though.

But there's a thread he doesn't pull on that I keep coming back to: the parents.

We have built an entire parenting culture around preventing our kids from experiencing failure. We intervene before the fall. We struggle to imagine them in pain or uncomfortable. We smooth the path before they walk it. We appeal to teachers, to coaches, to the system on their behalf. I have literally had parents show up and hand me their 20-something's resume for an interview - no shit! And in doing all of that, we send a message so loud we don't even realize we're sending it: your failures are too big to handle, and they reflect on me, so I'm certainly not going to let that happen.

That second part is the one that stings. Because if we're honest, some of what drives helicopter parenting isn't about the kids at all. It's about us. Our kids' struggles feel like our report card. So we protect them from consequences partly to protect ourselves from the discomfort of watching them hurt, but also from what we imagine others might say about us.

The result is a generation that has never had the chance to find out what they're actually made of. Not because they're weak, but because we never let them find out.

Here's what I believe: kids should try things while we're still around to help them sort it out. That's the whole point of being a parent. Hang around me for more than a few minutes, and you'll hear me talk about "natural consequences" - they're what helps us learn. Not to prevent the fall, but to be there when it happens. To sit with them in the difficulty. To model what it looks like to process failure, get back up, and try again. The window when you can do that, when you're close enough and trusted enough to help them work through it, is shorter than it feels.

If we keep protecting them from that process, we're not raising resilient adults. We're raising people who have never been tested, who believe, at some level, that they cannot handle what the world will hand them.

Brooks ends with a call for optimism from leaders. I agree with that. But it starts closer to home. It starts with letting your kid climb the tree. And standing close enough to pick them up off the ground and ask, "What did you learn?" when they fall, not to talk them out of climbing.