Our Kids and the Urgency of Their Future

Raising children in the century of discontinuities.

Every good parent does the work differently.

I love being a dad, and I hope I am a good one, but I really can’t say like I feel like I have any deep wisdom on the subject of child-rearing. If anything, becoming a father has made me far more understanding (and far less judgmental) about how other folks raise their own kids. What do I know?

There is one thing, though, that I see more and more, which is that parenting is different now than it was before we set the planetary crisis in motion. What being a good parent means is evolving.

A baby born today in a middle class family in a wealthy country can expect, actuarially, to see the year 2100. A college freshman this fall will not yet have hit retirement age in 2070. Today’s middle class five year old will likely have their kids sometime around 2040. To have kids is to be bound to the future for decades to come.¹

And we know those will be decades of not only tremendous upheavals in planetary systems, but jolting transformations in technology, the economy, politics and society. The future in which our kids will live their lives, raise their own children, and settle into old age is going to be radically different from the world we parents — even younger parents — grew up in, ourselves.

To be a parent today is to have our deepest loves and hopes chained to discontinuities so large and fast-moving that not only have we never seen them before, but no human beings have ever lived through their like.

To be a parent now is to raise a child whose world will look to us like a maelstrom of the uncertain, the unpredictable and the unprecedented… but will be, for them, just how the world is.

Simply by having kids, we launch them into a future for which none of us has been prepared. How, then, are we supposed to ready them, to guide them, and to smooth their way forward?

I don’t know.

But having pondered all this, I have a few ideas.