Don't bequeath pessimism to your kids

Nihilistic parents risk giving their kids a self-defeating worldview

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In my most recent piece for the Institute for Family Studies, I argued against what I called “marriage doomism.” The idea is that there’s a huge amount of pessimism about marriage right now, with many big mainstream news outlets portraying it as at best outdated and at worst a kind of prison. “Doomism” in this context is a kind of evangelizing nihilism.

But I wanted to return to the idea of doomism to make two additional points. First, I wanted to stress just how baseless marriage doomism is. And second, and perhaps more importantly, I wanted to raise the alarm that those of us parents who fall into the trap of doomism and despair risk passing pessimism on to our kids — with disastrous results.

First things first: Doomism isn’t justified.

In my IFS piece, I offered a few examples of how marriage is actually getting better. Not so long ago, for instance, there were still bans on interracial marriage. And marital rape was not universally or widely prohibited. That the laws have changed on these issues, and numerous others, is progress.

But probably the most striking example of marriage evolving is the legalization and public embrace of same-sex marriage. Over the course of my lifetime, we’ve seen public opinion shift overwhelmingly in favor of same-sex marriage — last summer 71 percent of Americans were supportive — and less than 10 years ago, via Obergefell v. Hodges, it became the law of the land across the U.S.

I understand that there are a variety of opinions on same-sex marriage, but whatever your feelings on the topic, its evolution in recent years shows that massive changes can and do happen.

For most Americans, this is progress. It’s especially progress of you’re on the political left, so it’s weird that the most prominent marriage doomers are leftists. The left has experienced victory after victory on this issue and should be giddy about the state of marriage. Constantly pooh-poohing it, on the other hand, diminishes the hard work people put in to make marriage better¹.

The most immediate risk of having a doomer attitude is that it can get in the way of the little steps that actually lead to progress. Imagine if everyone had just given up in the early 20th century and concluded that marriage was irredeemable. We’d probably still have interracial marriage bans on the books.

Or, take other forms of doomism. I took the word “doomism” from the environmental movement, where some have argued that constant apocalyptic predictions are neither accurate nor productive. Why put in the painstaking work of figuring out the best way to increase solar energy production, for example, if the end of the world is just around the corner?

So the problem is that doomism — on marriage, on the environment, and on many other issues² — is counterproductive.

But that brings me to the second issue I wanted to raise today, which is the real reason I’m writing about this on a blog about intergenerational family: We seem to be passing our doomism down to a new generation.

That kids today are bummed out is no secret. I’ve written about this before, but to summarize, a little over a decade ago kids’ mental health began falling and it hasn’t stopped since. Many have speculated about why this is, but psychologist Jonathan Haidt has persuasively made the case that it has to do with the proliferation of cellphones. Other interrelated explanations have to do with things like waning childhood independence.

However, in a piece last year, Haidt also argued that the concept of “locus of control” is part of the story³. What this means is that some people believe they are the “captains of their own ship” (an “internal locus”) while others assume a more passive worldview in which they have little agency of their own. Haidt makes the point that a passive worldview (an “external locus”) leads to worse mental health.

Doomism maps pretty neatly onto an external locus worldview, and whatever the cause of this problem — phones, independence, etc. — the fact that kids, specifically, are experiencing mental health declines suggests we’re somehow instilling in them a destructive outlook.

But how exactly are we doing that?

Well, maybe we’re doing it on purpose.

That at least was my concern while writing my previous Nuclear Meltdown post on parenting guru Dr. Becky Kennedy. The post dealt with what I saw as the elitism of intensive-gentle parenting, but buried in the original New York Magazine article on Kennedy (and in a footnote on my post) was the alarming revelation that her parenting advice empire is built on “the assumption that children feel worried and alone.”

Somewhat tangentially, that assumption does not remotely ring true for me. Certainly all humans feel alone and worried sometimes, and no doubt there are kids who experience these feelings more than others. But I’m not convinced that feelings of loneliness and worry — or related conditions such as anxiety and depression — are somehow fundamental or outsized parts of childhood. I’m not convinced that children, as a general class of people, are necessarily depressed and anxious. That doesn’t seem to be the case for my kids, their friends, my own childhood friends, or any group of kids I’ve encountered. I know of no research indicating that “children feel worried and alone” more than they feel, say, happy or curious. (Obviously we’re talking about kids whose basic needs are being met.)

I already have one post on Kennedy and I don’t want to get further bogged down in the specific philosophy of one prominent person. I bring her up again merely as an example of what seems to be a larger trend in which parents build an entire system around the idea of doomism. When I read that line in New York Magazine, my immediate thought was that this is an external locus worldview that foregrounds pessimism. And while it was describing Kennedy. it also seemed to capture the way a lot of middle class parents think about parenting and family life today. It seems like we’re teaching kids that they’re victims of a cruel world, and trying to make them feel better about that, instead of instilling in them an internal locus of control that has demonstrably better mental health outcomes.

At the end of the day, this blog is about intergenerational cooperation. The thesis is that it’s possible to inherit tremendous benefits from the people who came before us (even if you don’t have a trust fund). I’d like to bequeath to my kids some material comfort, sure, but more importantly I want to give them a worldview that will bring them joy in life.

But what we’re also seeing is that it’s also possible to inherit pessimism as well. This has been a disaster for overburdened parents, and for kids who are understandably worried as they grow up against the backdrop of a mental health crisis. The threat of doomism, then, isn’t just that we adults are all bummed out. It’s that our kids learn to feel the way we do.

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1. Alternatively, I could understand conservative marriage doomism focusing on political losses. There’s some of that out there, but the most prominent marriage doomers on the right tend to be fringe influencers. On the other hand, I don’t see prominent mainstream voices on the right arguing that we should give up on marriage.

2. Another common form of doomism among my fellow millennials is financial doomism that frames today’s adults as victims of circumstance, and sometimes as victims of the baby boomers (ha). But not only is the underlying premise of this view wrong — millennials got a slower financial start but have since surpassed previous generations — but it can also get in the way of smart financial decisions such as saving up money or figuring out how to by a house with an FHA loan.

3. Haidt also explores in this piece the reasons liberals, and particularly liberal girls, have seen the greatest declines in mental health. I don’t want to get into politics here, but I think the fact that mental health varies by something as arbitrary as being born into a Republican or Democratic family tells us that declining mental health is a nurture issue, not a nature one. In other words, kids don’t inherently feel worried and alone.