Parental Despair in the Age of AI

Every parent is having the same panic attack. We're raising kids for jobs that won't exist and teaching them skills that are already obsolete.

At a recent Silicon Valley panel, all eyes were on Sergey Brin when the conversation shifted to parenting. Here's the co-founder of Google, one of the brightest minds in tech, who is faced with the question of raising children in the age of AI.

"I don't really know how to think about it, to be perfectly honest," he admitted.

The panel was full of fathers, all dealing with the same uncertainty. These are people who could discuss algorithms and market disruption for hours, but they had no clear answers for how to prepare their kids for an unknowable future.

The Playbook is Broken

In a recent interview, Ezra Klein pressed the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution with a fundamental question: "How do you prepare kids for a world you can't predict?"

It's a great question. But here's mine: How is this different from any other time in human history?

Yes, the pace of change feels faster now, but the real issue seems to be our expectations. We want a formula that tells us exactly what to do. Follow the steps, check the boxes, and we're good parents who've done our job right.

For two generations, American parents have followed the same script: go to a good school, get good grades, attend a great college, get a well-paying job, have a successful life. Now that the playbook is going up in smoke, everyone's panicking about what comes next.

That's why people are questioning whether college is even worth it now.

But Klein's kids are 3 and 5. He's not worried about college applications. He's trying to figure out the fundamentals. What should he be teaching his kids right now, at the most basic level?

Everything Has Changed, But Nothing Has Changed

We obsess over what's different. We stare into the future and see more change coming. Change makes us uncomfortable, but that's missing the point entirely.

The human experience remains remarkably consistent. We're born, we learn, we work, we deal with whatever life throws at us, and we age. Every generation goes through this same basic progression.

The technology changes, but every generation of parents has faced the same question of how to prepare kids for a world they can't predict.

The Resilience Gap

When I think about what separates people who succeed from those who struggle, one word comes to mind: resilience.

It turns out I'm not alone in this thinking. Last week, NYU School of Professional Studies held an event discussing how AI is empowering a new era of human leadership. They presented research on the portfolio of skills we need to develop for this new world.

Resilience topped the list.

This surprised the researchers. You'd expect cognitive skills to dominate, but their data showed resilience as the number one capability we need.

The pace of change has compressed to daily updates. AI newsletters arrive every morning with new features that could have monumental implications. When change happens this rapidly and our brains naturally resist change, it feels adverse. Change is pain, and there's simply too much of it.

We need high resilience to survive in an era where change is this fluid.

The great irony is that the very act of trying to prepare kids for everything makes them less prepared for anything.

The problem facing young people today isn't that AI is taking entry-level jobs or that change is accelerating. Societal shifts over the last 20-30 years have left us with children who aren't resilient enough for this reality.

That partially explains the mental health crisis so many face.

Resilience means problem-solving through everyday challenges. Learning from failure instead of avoiding it. Developing emotional regulation when things don't go as planned. Building confidence through small victories and recovered setbacks.

We don't need to bubble-wrap childhood or eliminate all obstacles. We need to give kids the tools to handle whatever comes their way.

Resilience can't be taught through workshops or curriculum. It can't be downloaded like an app. It develops through experience, through failing at something, getting back up, and discovering you're stronger than you thought.

The NYU conversation really broke this down well.

Permission to Figure It Out

The summer before college, I sat in a car with my dad, sharing my anxiety about the unknown ahead. I had some idea about what I was going to study, but I had yet to declare a major. I wasn't sure what to do.

His response was simple: "You'll figure it out."

This unwavering belief that I could handle whatever came next was all I needed. Hearing him tell me what to do or what to study was not necessary. Knowing he trusted my ability to figure things out gave me the confidence and resilience to deal with any challenge.

My dad passed away from cancer two years later, but that belief in me formed the foundation of my adult life. When things got difficult, I remembered his confidence in me, and that helped me find a way through.

The Real Answer

When Sergey Brin admitted he didn't know how to think about preparing kids for an AI world, he was being more honest than he realized. There isn't a blueprint for how this is done. There never was.

My dad didn't have a strategy for raising a child who could handle the internet age. He just trusted that I'd figure it out when the time came.

Maybe what children need most isn't answers, but confidence in their ability to find them.