Raising Resilient Kids in an Uncertain World: Purpose, Belonging & Gen Z Mental Health

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence, and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Lianne Castelino.

Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is a developmental psychologist and a researcher.

Dr. Isabel Granic is also Industry professor at McMaster University. She has spent more than 25 years researching the key criteria to make young people thrive.

Her work has been featured in Scientific American, Time, and the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Granic is also CEO of Liminal Learning and a mother Young Adult twins. She joins us today from Toronto. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Hello. Thanks for having me here.

You have spent more than two decades delving into what young people need to thrive. I'm curious as to what's the biggest assumption that parents still hold about raising resilient, successful young people today.

Yeah, I think probably the one that's the most consistent that I hear about is thinking that resilience means that you have protected your kids.

I mean, there's this, like, core kind of tension in all of parenting, I think, and I certainly relate to this, where you're trying to protect them, you're trying to keep them happy and loved and so on. And on the other hand, you know, that real life is out there that you're kind of preparing them for.

And so I think the misconception is that resilient kids are always happy, like, never deal with, you know, any kind of hardship or sadness and so on. And I think the.

The real data show, and also lots of experience shows that resilient kids are, you know, they develop in contexts that are challenging. And even the. Even the word resilience means that you're resilient against hardships. Right. So that you have practice.

And that practice means that we have to let young people at least go enough in some difficult situations so that they have the challenge and they learn how to step up with their own emotional resilience, their own skills, their own proclivities to match those challenges. So, yeah, I think that that's a big one.

You talk about being able to relate because you're the mother of twin boys who are 20 years old.

And so as both a researcher and as a parent, wondering, you know, how have your professional insights and have they ever clashed or aligned with what you're experiencing at home in your own lived experience?

Yeah, certainly both of those things I Think for one, all of my career really.

And I only realized it once I had kids because my, so my two sons are 20 years old and I've been a clinical or developmental psychologist, not clinical for longer than that. And really my research has kind of usually been in lockstep with my kids own developmental phase or whatever.

And I only actually realized it very recently.

So right now, you know, the research around young adults and my kids are young adults, talk a lot about them being depressed and anxious, addicted to their phones, lazy, apathetic. And that's not at all what I see in my own kids.

I can see from the, the outside where sometimes they're, they're looking like they have no motivation. They are, you know, on their phones, but they're on their phones, not scrolling. Oftentimes they're connecting with their friends.

A lot of them have moved because they've gone to university. So a lot of times that I'm seeing them on their phone.

And the research is, or at least the, the media hype suggests that what they're doing is doom scrolling and, and doing a bunch of kind of trivial things.

What they're mostly doing is socializing and connecting with their old friends that have moved away and they're, that's a lot of what their time is spent on. So that, that's a mismatch from at least what you hear a lot from the media.

The research actually suggests that that is the more of the reality is the dep. Socializing that young people do online is usually underestimated. And so that's one mismatch.

You know, the part that that is very much aligned is the importance of meaning and purpose in these young people's lives. We've known this for 50 plus years more than that.

How important, especially at this age where they're developing their identity, where they're like challenging, you know, the world around them to fit either their ideals or for them to change according to what, you know, the world is asking of them. Purpose and meaning is essential for that. And I can see it in my own kids that this is, this is something that they're constantly talking about.

And it's because a lot of what they thought was going to be what they cared about most is changing so much out in the real world, right? So for example, one of my kids for a long time wanted to be a human rights lawyer.

And for him right now the context of young people's lives is changing so fast that he's not really sure that being a lawyer is the best way to serve that young group. Right.

So in letting go of being a human rights lawyer, that status marker, that role, he lets go of so much of what he thought was going to be his life's purpose and meaning. And I've seen it, how, how big an impact on his own life, his everyday life is.

Even though he's comfortable, he's happy, he's got, or he's, he's got friends, he's out. That piece is so important. And my young, my other son is deeply, you know, devoted to music and music production and so on.

And he seems like he walks on water or floats around, kind of impervious to a lot of struggles that a lot of people have. Only because he's had this purpose since he was like 8, that he wanted to make music. And it seems to protect him from all sorts of things.

So I think that piece of research is really important for me. Yeah.

So building on that point, because it's a really important point and it's affecting families everywhere. When we talk about mental health challenges, which have fundamentally shifted, you know, in many ways, Gen Z, what are parents missing?

Are they missing something when they interpret anxiety, you know, depression, lack of motivation in kids?

Yeah. I mean, this is such an important question and the answer is not simple.

So when you hear about anxiety and depression increasing, what we're hearing about is the population level statistics. Right.

So across populations, these increases in mental health problems are absolutely picking up on a signal that's really, really important for us to look into. But the problem is that we of it as an individual problem. Right. Because we're measuring kids levels of anxiety going up and down.

We think it's in the child that the problem is.

And in fact, the thing that, that is really important to realize is that most of what, you know, part, most of the cause of anxiety and depression is about social context. So it's about the world that is genuinely precarious around them in a way that was very different from previous generations.

There is unemploy rate at the, in these young people that is at levels higher than it's been for decades and decades. There is, there is like true ecological, you know, a climate crisis that is just purely easy to see every day in our heat.

And we're going through a heat wave right now and so on all over the world. The wars out there, the political kind of polarization, all of that is very real.

And that context is absolutely shaping the way that young people are responding to their world around. But it isn't a thing that has been caused, you know from some kind of weakness or limitation in the person.

It's a very logical response to very objective realities that are out there and very precarious.

It's such an important point.

And it really leads into my next question, which is are we then over pathologizing, you know, young people's developmental struggles or are we underestimating the real pressures that you just outlined, some of them that young people are facing today?

Yeah, I think it's both.

I mean, on the one hand, the good news is that the stigma around mental health, it has decreased and so people are more likely to go and ask for help, which means that it's being measured, it's being diagnosed more and so on. So that we can think of that beyond the issue of over diagnosis, but we can think about that as a good thing.

Those who feel like they need help are getting it, they're going to seek help. And that was a huge problem in my generation. In previous ones, people didn't seek help.

Rates of pathology are increasing in part because we are genuinely being able to track it more accurately.

On the other hand, again, but I, I think we are doing a massive disservice if there's anything we leave this conversation with, is this by stigmatizing young people right now?

There is lots of research and there's a beautiful article or a couple of articles that I can share with you and your audience around the way that there's this anti youth stigma.

We talk about them lazy, we talk about them being addicted, we talk about them being pathetic, we talk about them being like victims of social media as if they had no agency.

And they hear this now if you ask me, is it, is it the actual devices or the way that we stigmatize, the way that they use the devices that's having the biggest impact? It's definitely the stigma that I think is having a bigger impact on our young people. And so talk all here is how messed up they are as a generation.

And so we hear so little. And this is, you know, maybe we'll talk about liminal learning, the program that we've developed.

But part of what we do at the beginning of this program is just to say, hey kids, we see you and you're awesome, you're amazing. You have all this latent potential and capacities that we want to sort of unleash onto the world.

And they've, some of them have never heard that kind of message. So I think it's really important.

Yeah. So I think thriving, unlike what how we thought about it in previous generations, is not about credentials.

And again, I think the message is way behind the reality.

So instead of thinking about thriving as this set of you got your degree, you got married, you had two, four children, you did these like sort of developmental, you know, you've ticked the developmental boxes for this phase.

I think thriving needs to be reconceptualized as, as a set of ways of fitting into the environment that make most sense, especially to young people themselves, so that they feel like they have agency, they have a sense of purpose and they have a sense of belonging in the world that they're in. So that as the world continues to change, they too can change along with it.

So it's not about thriving isn't you have a career or you've had a career for 10 years or more, it is the ability to change what you want to do for a career as your own interests change, as the world changes and is calling you to be someone else for this world in service and so on. So that's quite a different way of thinking about thriving, I think absolutely now.

And you gave the example with your sons as well in terms of him changing his ideas on what his future could hold. So when we think about all the things that you just talked about with respect to what's out there that young people have to deal with.

Climate anxiety, political instability, rapid change involving AI and technology. How can parents talk about these large global impact issues without increasing their kids fear or at the same time their helplessness?

Yes, great question and very pragmatic. So we've got studies coming out in the Lancet. Again I can share with your readership and your listenership these studies coming out from the Lancet.

And this is something that kids never talked about in my generation, I'm generation X and so on. And so one of the things, so there's I think, two prongs, a two pronged approach the parents can take.

The first is to not minimize this stuff and go like, la, la, la, it's fine, you know, we're going to be okay, we're in Canada, you know, it's north, we're not going to be too hot, etc, or to say, you know, you know, things go up and down. And it's not.

The, the, the idea of first and foremost validating the concerns that young people have, I think is really important because what they've been hearing is a generational denial, a sense of like, you know, it's not that serious, it's not. And then suddenly the world has shifted and it's on them. This weight of having to deal with many of the precarities, including AI and so on.

So the first thing is validating and saying, I get why you're worried, I'm worried too. And let's think about the data, what's out there and let's together see it.

The second then is to let you know, teach them skills to regulate that anxiety. So one thing is to understand what the kind of societal story is and to validate it.

But then the second is that in the here and now we have these young people are having experiences that are overwhelming in terms of their tolerance for uncertainty in terms of their anxiety.

And we can teach them how to meditate, how to breathe through our anxiety, how to reframe things, not so that we're delusional, but that we refrain with some agency that we can change, that we can work together to change that.

And another huge opportunity here is that young people are looking to us, their parents, for advice and for collaboration, which I think wasn't really the case in my generation. I don't remember looking to my parents and going, hey, can you help me out with this thing? And these kids are legit asking us for help.

And in, you know, we can step up to that rule not by, you know, performing some kind of sense of certainty or performing some sense of like a know it all attitude. Instead we can sit alongside them and say, here's what works for me, I use these, you know, self care techniques and so on.

And also how about you and I go and volunteer out at the soup kitchen for the homeless, you know, population that we have.

Or how about we go together and think of about ways to get our whole home more green etc so that they feel agency but they also feel a collaboration and a validation from you as a parent.

What great ideas. Definitely. And I don't know how often we think about those things in those terms. Right.

So you describe a purpose driven life as something that many young people crave. What does that actually mean in practice for a 20 something in today's world?

Yeah, So I think one of the things that is overlooked when we think about purpose because we think of it as such an individual thing, is to find your people Find your tribe, find your like group that you can go and experiment with who can witness you trying things out. So there's this program that we've developed called Liminal Learning.

And the most important part of liminal learning is the community building and the agency that we give young people to come into this community and into the program.

And although we have a lot of scaffolds into what the program is going to be like, we ask them to join us, the oldies in figuring out how to build a small p purpose. So this is really important too. It's my personal and research based opinion.

So it's an evidence based opinion that this pressure to find purpose like large p purpose like the lightning bolt that makes you into the writer or that makes you into the politician or whatever scientists is. Most people don't feel that. What they do feel once in a while is this kind of tingle of oh this, this is fun. Oh, I did that well.

And so what we teach young people in liminal learning is to how to stop, open up their attention, join in a community of practices that then helps you listen more carefully to how the world is calling you in small p purpose ways. Maybe you're really good at talking to the older people, you know, in the tavern across. Tavern, where did I get that word?

The pub across the street or something like that. And for some unknown reason you just tend to like vibe with these older people.

Recognizing that in yourself, seeing other people recognize that in you and then thinking through what could you do with this kind of proclivity that you seem to have is what we think of as purpose driven activities. So ways of finding.

And so what's important about that is that your purpose can change and will change over a way longer lifespan than most people have had previous generations.

You can iterate and change your sense of purpose, especially if you're doing it with friends who know you well, with colleagues that are into you finding that purpose and will not put you down when you change it according to the kind of feel of what you think you're being called for next. And that's part of what we teach young people.

So you are the CEO of Liminal Learning and I'm curious as to what was the catalyst that led you to create this program and what is entailed in it for young people.

Thank you for that question. So it's, it's a, it's a big question because it's what led me to resign from full time academia.

So I did what every Gen X kid, especially of first generation immigrant Romanian kid would do is I was raised to find my one career and go deep and go long. And so I did that and I became a full professor at 40 and so on.

And we were at our peak in our lab and I was doing work in the mental health and thriving of young people, teenagers and young adults. And we had a great track record, lots of really great, great publications and grant money and so on.

But I left not because I was burnt out, but because our research wasn't having a real world impact and we need it to do that way faster than the academic ship can turn kind of thing. So I felt very strongly called to resign and to instead take all this evidence based practice.

We know what's going to work for young people right now.

We desperately need to apply it in the real world in community context, not in the academic context with young people themselves who are co designing the program with us. And so I'm super excited about doing that.

And so that's partially what it was, was that my research was basically pushing me into thinking about that real world impact much stronger. The second is my own kids.

You know, they were the same age that I was teaching, so I was teaching these 18 to 24 year olds in universities and I was, was seeing their moods drop, their motivations drop, their connection and engagement drop and the relevance that our, our classes. And I, I wasn't becoming a different type of teacher.

It was the world that was changing around them and my kids were also changing and they were asking me is university really for me and why would I go?

And it wasn't that they didn't feel that they were smart or capable, but they felt like this irrelevancy and their messaging to me became louder and louder like that we need a different conversation. How are you going to help with the mess you've left on?

And so I'm equally moved to have started liminal learning because of my own kids who need it as much as all these other young people I think need it.

So it's interesting because despite the evidence and the science and the research and all of the data that's available, you're still going to have parents who, you know, define and believe in job titles and, and traditional paths. How can they go about reframing their own thinking in order to better support their young adult child in today's context? In today's world?

Yeah.

Well, I think one of the things is again for all of us as a generation older to kind of snap out of our own denial because I think they see like the conversations I'm having now just in the last year has changed dramatically.

They see if you're a young person who's come over to Toronto from different places or have grown up in Toronto, one of the very basic paths that you would have been supported by a well meaning parent is programming. And there is a thousands, tens of thousands of young people who have gone into a undergrad program for computer programming.

And now we can vibe code within minutes. I can code my own app, which would have taken two years of training from for most of these young people.

So as a parent I am deeply concerned that my kid is prepared. And so one of the things that I think helps with this reframing is that liminal learning is pitched at and developed as a world readiness program.

So you remember how Head Start and so on was around and it was a whole new movement recognizing that 0 to 3 year olds need to be ready for school.

And so then there was this school readiness, tons of money and grant money put into helping young children be ready for the schooling that they were and evening out the playing field. What we're considering is saying These young people 18 to 24 need a year to transition and to consider what the world is calling them for.

And that's not going to be a job title necessarily. 20 To 40% depending on what univers, 15 to 40% depending on what university of kids are dropping out of undergrad.

They're dropping out either in the first year or right at the ending or they're coming out and being unemployed for at least two years.

So the question that I have for these parents is do you want them to train up to a career that may not actually be even in existence in a couple of years? We are all just learning right now what, what is going to be needed.

The other, the good news is however, that young people themselves completely naturally feel out what is needed.

So you, if you look at these Gallup polls and, and Deloitte also has a recent study that came out with tens of thousands of kids that, you know, young people right now of Generation Z are looking to care professions more and more, not necessarily strategically, but because they feel called. So this is nursing, this is social work, work, this is, you know, elderly work, politics even, and so on.

They care about caring in a way that I think previous generations didn't. And it's not only, although it is somewhat a response to AI and what AI can't take over.

So again, I would challenge parents to say what would a, what would my young person need in this changing world?

And what they need is, is a, an ability to tolerate uncertainty, an ability to make friends and keep friends, to have social skills so that they continually learn, meet new people, learn to have long term relationships which are, are the number one predictor of happiness and prevention of anxiety and depression is good social relationships and then how to like build that purpose with other people. And so those are, or I, I hate that word, soft skills, those are skills that you can learn so that you're prepared for any career. Right.

That comes up. So it's not about dropping any sense of careers matter.

Of course they matter, but we don't know exactly the ones that are going to be the most important.

And so, so that your young person isn't constantly in this fear driven kind of mode of learning because all of these traditional jobs are, are being lost. There's other things that you can support them in, in learning.

You've mentioned belonging. And belonging is a key pillar, a core pillar of building a meaningful life, a purpose, full life. Why is it so critical?

And more importantly, how can parents foster and better foster that sense of belonging in the home?

Yeah, so, so it is first of all indeed really, really important.

There is a sort of massive study that we all look to that was a meta analysis that went through hundreds of studies looking at what is the number one predictor of mortality and what they find over and over. So this is a meta analysis, a study of a bunch of studies looking at the impact of social relationships.

And what they find is good social relationships are a better predictor of mortality and all sorts of other types of outcomes than obesity, than smoking 15 cigarettes a day and drinking more than something like six alcoholic drinks. So that's how important social relationships are to protecting you for a good life kind of thing.

And how do you foster that is that you actually need exposure.

It's that the basic idea is that you need to make it a value that's important to you more so than so many other things that we thought were, were more valuable. So we do a lot to get, feed our kids good food and ask them to go outside and so on.

But friendships seems like a trivial thing to support and yet it's super important.

So at home there are ways to, you know, open our homes to the friends of our children and to have them at the dinner table, which we hear a lot about.

But, but it's so important to have those conversations so that they learn to be in front of other people, adults and young people together at the same table. And then there are, there are social skills that are really easily taught. And we do a lot in liminal learning to think about.

How do you actively listen?

How do you, without anticipating what you're about to say, what are the skills required to do this kind of mirroring, to hear somebody deeply, to empathize, to do the eye contact, but also to share yourself, yourself vulnerably.

Because it matters just as much to show up as your full self and to be brave enough to allow parts of yourself that usually you may not let others see to open yourself up. Because what happens is other people then tend to feel closer to you and want to be around you. And so those are like basic things that we teach.

There's also ways of, you know, in work context, giving feedback and getting feedback is really hard to do. And they are skills. How do you tell someone when they haven't done a good job?

But how do you hear when you haven't done a good job about a certain thing? How do you listen not about, and not collapse under this sense of shame, but take the feedback, iterate and try again?

All of these things are practicable. That's not a word.

Are skills that you can practice over and over, especially with people who are around you, who've got your back, who've got, who have been with you for like a year or more. And mentors are also really, really important with social skills.

If you're around people that you care about and you admire, you want to be more like them. And so you learn that way as well.

Absolutely.

Dr. Granik, what would you say to a parent who is worried their child may lack direction, purpose, motivation about what is the first conversation that they should consider having with that child? And also what should they try to avoid, avoid saying?

So I think the first thing is to recognize, this is so important, to recognize that their young person is responding to the world rationally. They are not deficient in some ways. Right now, things are changing. We've got lots and lots of data showing how radically the world is changing.

And so as a result of that, that what young people are doing is, for example, including my kids, applying for sometimes hundreds of volunteer positions and not getting even a response, even an automatic email saying thanks, no receipt of, it just goes into a portal that nobody knows.

Now, when you have those experiences over and over, when you're applying for jobs of minimum wage that you don't get even an interview for, and you're perfectly capable of doing those kind of jobs, this is Generation X. We were in ice cream parlors and restaurants and whatever we were Doing all sorts of things like that the jobs aren't there anymore.

And so these young people are trying and getting unreliable feedback from the world. Sometimes they're given a pat on the back and say good job. But most of the time they're ignored entirely and never even given negative feedback.

So recognizing that your child is responding to an unpredictable world rationally, which means they're stepping back and going, going, I don't know, I'm gonna wait and see what happens. And so are all my friends. Not because we're lazy, but because we truly can't predict what's going on right now. It is not the same.

And my and parents who continue to instill not only the same kind of messaging, but continue to imagine that the world is the same as it was, are going to increasingly feel distant from their, their kid because it is distant.

We are so, you know, and as after validating their experience and recognizing that it's rational rather than lazy or crazy, the second thing is to ask them questions, to ask them, what are you interested in? Can we go together to, you know, the job fair thing? Can I? I had an amazing week. I mean I do this day and night, right?

I still sat with, for a week with, with one of my sons as he was trying to get volunteer positions and this was for social work. And I was like, look dude, I've got the, I've got the equation. You just write these really careful cover letters, make sure they don't sound like AI.

Put in your own heart in there. You care about this stuff and you know, don't worry about the, the rejection, just put them all out.

And you know, you get points for your own self esteem if you get rejected even because you tried. And so I'm sitting there for a week with him doing this and not one response came back.

I'll tell you that at the end of that week I felt really differently and he felt differently towards me because he saw that I saw. And the connection between us matters more to me than this feeling of what that I'm right or something like that.

So I think that's super important, is to share the experience and ask them what it's like for them, what it's like for their friends and to show them that you're learning alongside them. I think it's really important.

We're almost out of time, but I do want to ask you if you could leave parents with just one guiding principle for raising purpose driven young adults, what would that be?

I think I would say trust in them, that they have been born into a world that they are ready for. That doesn't mean ignore them or, or let it be.

But, but I think a sense of trusting this generation because they have been brought up in this digital world, they are already rejecting all the bands that we're talking about may not work because these kids themselves have rejected a lot of the big social media.

They've got their little campfires in the digital world with their friends, they're keeping private, trusting that they've learned something from these early experiences and that they are the next generation to take us into something. So one is trust and the second is really learn. Learning to feel like their collaborator and their compatriot and their biggest source.

Like everything that we learned about loving them unconditionally still applies. Love them so damn hard and work alongside them instead of from a top down perspective. Now I think that I think is really these kids.

I just want to just finish with this thing is that so many young people come to us and say, say, oh, it's so weird to be heard for so long. We have these whole exercises where for 10 minutes they're allowed to just blab whatever's on their mind.

The impact that makes on their mood, on their sense of agency, on their sense of like, oh, I think maybe I've got this. I actually just figured out this problem all by myself by talking out loud and being witness.

Just try it with your kid because I think it's really, it can blow your mind. What's in there?

So much important insight that you've shared with us. Dr. Isabella Granik. Thank you so much for your time and your perspective today.

Yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

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