Between climate change, economic anxiety and political disorders, the world can look like a scary place, especially for children. Young people today have already gone through a fatal world pandemic, they regularly drizzle to prepare for school shots, and they must learn to sail in the era of Disinformation and online danger. These stress factors seem to be wreaking havoc; The measures show Anxiety and sleep deprivation in adolescents are up, and even Adolescent suicide attempts increase.
For parents, the situation may seem overwhelming. The good news is that there are many parents to help their children meet the challenges of the world in which we live, writes a parental journalist (and frequent American scientist Contributor) Melinda Wenner Moyer. In his new book Hello, cruel world! Scientific strategies to raise tremendous children in terrifying period (Penguin Random House, May 2025) Moyer examines scientific research on Children’s mental health and ways to improve it.
Moyer divides his book into three sections focused on the advice supported by evidence to help young people to meet the challenges, to connect to others and cultivate strong characters. American scientist told him about how to protect children from online disinformation, feed self-compassion and bring your children to open with you.
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(A transcription published by the follows.))
The concept of the book, this “cruel world”, resonates so much with me as a parent, and I am sure with so many people. Tell me a little more about how you have started to feel like the world becomes a really difficult place for children.
I had this growing anxiety and anxiety as a parent, simply thinking of the world in which my children entered and that they were going to inherit us. There are so many things that are looming, you know, climate change and disinformation. I also received so many comments from the parents saying: “I’m so afraid in the name of my children, and I don’t know what I can do to prepare them and help them prepare them for this world that we are going to put them back.” And I always try to think of the solutions and try to find ways to reassure myself and my readers. We have some control here. And so I started looking for, what are the key skills we know can help children cross all of this? I was really trying to find concrete strategies that I could communicate to parents to help them feel a little less worried, a little more in control and to feel that they could really do something as parents, because I think parenthood is a form of activism. We raise the next generation of children, and thanks to our parenting, we can change the world.
In what specific ways do you think there are challenges that children face today that previous generations have not really had to face before?
We know by research that there are a lot of pre -adolescents and adolescents who find it difficult for mental health problems. Whether or not you thought that the statistics are as bad as they seem, there seems to be a signal to which we must pay attention. And so a large part of the book concerns: how can we help children to meet? What are the things we can do to help them manage their emotions in a healthy way, rather than unhealthy ways?
Another large is technology. Each generation panics on technology, and therefore the question is, well, how different our situation is today that when the television is released, or printing – they are all big changes at the time. But I think it is certainly the first generation where children have a portable connection with technology, potentially at any time. It seems important.
A message in the book that really talked to me was that helping our children also consists of helping us-that we cannot teach children things like self-compassion, or balance work and leisure, or all these other lessons, until we can embody them ourselves.
I think that a truly neglected aspect of children’s health and development is: how are parents? What is their mental health? What are the skills they have or do not have? Because we teach our children so much thanks to the choices we make. You know, do we fight when we burn dinner? Are we constantly depositing ourselves? Our children learn from this and think, okay, I should do it too. I think we neglect the role of our own well-being. It’s really important because our children are looking at us.
I also want to be careful: I do not say that to exert more pressure on the parents. We already have so many expectations towards ourselves to make sure that our children succeed in everything they do, that they are comfortable all the time, that they are protected all the time, that they are happy all the time. We have these expectations on what we should do as parents who are both unrealistic and useless. When we overprotect, when we have rooted too much, it undermines the development of key skills for them. Resolution of problems and resilience and emotional regulation, they are all skills that children learn thanks to the practice. They must be sad, they must be disappointed and frustrated. They must fail and live what it is and understand that it is part of the learning process. So a large part of what I try to do is give parents permission to take a step back and relax.
You write a lot in the book on connection – how a close link between parents and children is important for their mental health and is protective against some of the things we worry, like bad influences from social media. How do you make sure your connection is strong?
If you are afraid that you don’t connect enough with your children, there are things you can do. I was really surprised by the power to listen to our children – like really listening. I think we hear a lot about your children. And I think that sometimes it can be misinterpreted as a conference for your children, you know, tell them not to do it and not to do this, and to define rules and to communicate the rules. But it is also really listening to them in a respectful way, and being willing to consider their point of view, with which you cannot always agree.
And when they open, place everything. It is impossible sometimes, but when they open up to you, even if it is in a very annoying period, try to allow it and stop what you do. Children often like to connect just before bedtime, which is the most frustrating time of all time, right? But we really have to allow the connection to occur according to their conditions, because it is a form of donation to our children a certain autonomy. If you get your children a desire to be vulnerable with you, I think it’s a very good sign.
There is a relationship between feeling listened to and being ready to be self-reflexive and also humble intellectually, which, I think, is really interesting. So when we feel heard ourselves, when we feel safe and not threatened, we are much more willing to consider what we do not know and to recognize uncertainty in ourselves.
What can parents do if we worry about information, bad actors, frightening and negative things that our children meet online? What can we do to help them differentiate between disinformation, lies and online reality?
There is Very little media education occurs in schools. This really helps if the parent already has some of these skills, because he can then model media mastery a little better and information mastery for children. So I encourage parents to try to find out about the literacy of the media.
One thing that each expert in media literacy told me was to ask your children open questions about what they see and hearing in the media. It is a beautifully simple approach, but apparently it’s very, very powerful. So, it could be something, as with small children, asking: what do you like in this program? Or why do you think this character just did what they did? This could also involve talking about how films and caricatures are made. And when children age, you can ask even more questions, like: Who did that? Why was it done? Why is it presented this way? What or who lacks it? Who could benefit from it? Who could be injured by this? Bringing children to think about these important questions about the media can be very useful to promote this kind of curiosity and this prospect of questioning in children.
These are really wonderful advice, and I will try to put them into practice. As a parent, I always read and try to learn to be the best parent I can be. But sometimes I wonder how really it matters what we do and how we are parent. What part of who are our children and who they will prove to be, is completely out of our control anyway?
People are still debating. We know that genetics, of course, really count. We know that temperament and personality are not things that we will probably be able to change our children. But we also know that many of what we transmit to our children consists in going through the relationships we establish with them, through the conversations we have with them to help them understand how the world works, to help them understand what they can do to establish stronger relationships, how they can interact with people. They really learn a lot from our modeling, in terms of how to behave, how to manage conflicts, how to think of different situations. We know that there are a lot of skills that children learn by observing others, through the conversations they have with others, through the opportunities offered to them to develop skills.
A great example is resilience. We know that children who are too protected, prevented from failing, to meet challenges, that these are children who will grow without knowing how to solve problems and not know how to face feelings of frustration. They did not have the possibility of developing skills in emotional regulation and they will really suffer for that when they age. So I have the impression that we have a lot of power in terms of perspective that we help children develop on the world, on the reasons why it looks like what it does. We can give them opportunities to a young age to develop skills that will serve them the rest of their lives.
This is an article of opinion and analysis, and the points of view expressed by the author or the authors are not necessarily those of American scientist.