The Need For Adults

Parents aren't protective enough

Screenshots: TikTok, @tessa.conway

It’s pretty much accepted as fact that parents today are overprotective. We worry about helicopter parenting, and the coddling of Gen Z. But I don’t think that’s the full story. Parents aren’t protective enough.

Or at least, what parents are protective about has changed. They are overprotective about physical safety, terrified of accidents and injuries. But are they protective by giving guidance? Involved in their children’s character development? Protective by raising boys to be respectful, by guiding girls away from bad influences? Protective by showing children how to behave, by being an example?

As far as I can see many parents today are overprotective but also strangely permissive. They hesitate to give advice or get involved, afraid of seeming controlling or outdated. They obsess over protecting their children physically, but have little interest in guiding them morally. They care more about their children’s safety than their character. Protective parenting once meant caring about who your daughter dated, the decisions she made, and guiding her in a good direction. Now it just means preventing injury. And so children today are deprived of the most fundamental protection: the passing down of morals, principles, and a framework for life.

One obvious example of this is that adults act like children now. They talk like teenagers. They use the same social media platforms, play the same video games, listen to the same music. Our world moves too rapidly to retain any wisdom, denying parents the chance to pass anything down or be taken seriously, so they try to keep up with kids, who know more about the world than they do. Fathers are “girl dads” who get told what to think. Mothers are best friends to gossip with. The difference between childhood and adulthood is disappearing, and with it, parental protection.

Beyond that, too, there’s this broader cultural message that adults should focus on their own autonomy and self-actualisation. This very modern belief that a good life means maximum freedom, with as little discomfort and constraint as possible, the way children think. Now nothing should hold adults back. They have a right to feel good, at all times. They stopped being role models of responsibility and became vessels of the only culture left, a therapeutic culture, where it’s only acceptable to be protective of one thing, your own mental health and happiness. Listen to the way adults judge decisions now, how they justify themselves. Parents are celebrated for leaving their families because they were vaguely unhappy or felt they needed to find themselves, even at the expense of their children’s security. Adults talk about finding themselves as much as teenagers do. Parents complain online about the “emotional labour” of caring for family, or express regret for even having children because they got in the way of their goals. Once growing up meant sacrificing for family, giving up some of yourself, that was an honour, that was a privilege, and in that sacrifice you found actual fulfilment, broke free from yourself, moved on from adolescent anxieties, and there, then, you became an adult.

But slowly, without thinking, we became suspicious of adulthood. We debunked every marker and milestone, from marriage to children all the way to adulthood itself. Now we aren’t just refusing to grow up but rejecting the very concept of it. Adulthood does not exist, apparently. It’s a scam, a lie, a myth. Adulthood is a marketing ploy, we say, while wearing Harry Potter merch and going to Disneyland. Adulthood is a performance, apparently, that’s going out of style. “There is nothing, there is nobody which/who would really justify the claim ‘you have to grow up’,” seems to be the sentiment. “For whom? for what?”

And, well, exactly. Why grow up when there’s nothing to grow up for? Why deal with discomfort and take on adult responsibilities for a culture that couldn’t care less about its ancestors? Now growing older doesn’t mean gaining wisdom and respect, but being gradually shut out, shut down. Before the moral code of parents was unmistakable; the purpose of parents was to pass it along. Not doing so would be considered neglect. And that’s how they lived on—they lived on in their children through their moral code. Before they passed on, they passed down.

But that’s gone now. Now we shame anyone who inherits anything. Now all that’s left for adults to do is desperately attempt to stay young. And in their pursuit of personal empowerment, parents disempowered themselves as any source of authority. They feel it’s not their place, so now they have no place. They may have broken free from rules and obligations, but they also freed themselves from respect. And some lost authority even over their own children.

It’s not only parents who are reluctant to step in, but adults, any adults. Before children had grandparents, communities, religious leaders, all who felt responsible for protecting and guiding them. Now it’s often down to a single parent. Neighbours don’t know each other. Families broke down and lost their authority. Religion backed away. Nobody feels responsible. And young people don’t look to their grandparents or ancestors for wisdom anymore, we don’t consider that they could have something to teach, we mock their values, their way of life. We pride ourselves on our non-judgemental morality while judging anyone that came before us. And the only adults left to depend on are people we pay. Adults devoted more to profiting from us than passing anything down.

But then I guess to hand something down adults would have to believe in something first. When everything is subjective, when all is debunked, when all is a social construct, how can you pass it down? If nothing is real or solid, how can you hold onto it? Their hands are empty. Never before in history have so many adults been wedded to nothing, vowed to nobody, belonged to nowhere, had nothing to live or die for. They have political positions, sure, but not principles. Sides in the culture war but not convictions. We live in a world of adults with little faith in anything, least of all themselves.

But it’s hard to blame here. Of course adults are afraid to step in and give guidance, because in modern culture authority figures can never be inspiring, only oppressive. Adults were taught to weaken their convictions, soften their beliefs, that it was almost offensive to believe in anything deeply. There’s no imparting wisdom anymore, only imposing worldviews. But the tragedy is we don’t just need authority figures to command and criticise, but to encourage. When you cast out authority you take with it admiration. You lose recognition from fathers that you are capable, that you can reach your potential. You lose reassurance from mothers that you are worth so much more than you realise. When we killed authority we also killed ideals, we also killed inspiration, and instead of adults who are gentle and kind and aspirational for children, we ended up with adults who are weak, who lack conviction, who command no respect, who can’t even praise their children for acting right because then they would have to admit to a right and wrong. And this is not a young generation who are free and happy and uninhibited, but anxious, aimless and confused, who don’t respect adults or anything built before them, who have nothing to admire and nobody to become.

This distrust of authority is especially dangerous for girls. Feminism so strongly pushed the message that girls are as strong as boys that now it feels like they don’t need any protection, not even from their fathers. Chivalry is dead, and so is protective parenting. We attacked all forms of authority, parents politely numbed their protective instincts, and now of course young women feel unsafe, of course they want universities and bureaucracies to protect them, of course they demand more government intervention because we degraded the authority of men they know and trust.

Fathers today, for example, seem less protective than ever before. They don’t think they have the right to be. They can’t care about what their daughter wears, where she goes, who she dates, because that would be backward, because it’s her right. But now we have girls making major life decisions without guidance; we have girls selling themselves to strangers; we have fathers putting their daughters on public display. And I keep seeing all these stories online lately of young women sharing situations they got into of such hurt and heartbreak, and it’s hard not to think they needed more direction. They needed adults. I’m talking about the young women who gave years to men who were never going to commit, who suffered through constant disrespect because they didn’t believe they deserved better, who couldn’t protect themselves because they were taught not to pass judgement, who objectified themselves because nobody objected. We need mothers here, raising girls to know their worth, stepping in sometimes and lending her life experience. We need fathers showing their daughters what real commitment looks like. Now teenagers can’t play in the park but can get into relationships with nothing to guide them. Boys can’t risk breaking their arms but can break hearts without consequence. We got too afraid to lecture and moralise, forgetting we used to call that wisdom, forgetting that’s part of protection. And I think many girls grew up and are now realising as young women that’s what they wanted, needed, all along, actual protection. And wish that adults had never stepped aside.

But we only worry about overprotection. We feel for the children who had no freedom, who were confined and restricted. We don’t talk enough about those who wish they had stricter parents, who feel weak and incapable not because of coddling but because of a complete lack of boundaries. We don’t talk about the children who had to come up with their own moral codes, the girls who had no proper guidance or direction, who made major mistakes early in life, who wish they sorted themselves out sooner and had help to prioritise the right things, who may have been taken care of but were left totally unprepared for adult life. Because I don’t just see coddling but cowardice. I see devouring mothers who don’t dare to step in. I see overbearing fathers who fear their daughter’s opinions. We don’t just have a generation of overprotected children who are anxious and afraid; we have young adults completely in the dark about what is right, what is respectful, how to take responsibility, how to work hard, how to commit, how to even regulate their emotions, and why you would need to do any of these things, what for. They don’t even know how to start growing up. We have a generation dependent on therapists and “experts” because they didn’t have adults. Who feel helpless not because they were held back but because they were set free.

Because men without chests raise children without protection. Young women without the confidence to defend themselves, their worth and their dignity. Girls without a strong moral foundation to guide them through life. Can’t we see how careless it is to teach girls with good hearts that they should never judge anyone, never make anyone feel uncomfortable, never stand by their convictions in case someone gets upset? How cruel it is to leave children to make up their own morality, to pass down to girls nothing but niceness and hope that helps? Girls need to be taught something beyond being nice and non-judgemental so they can say no. Or we leave them vulnerable, unable to resist pressure, unprepared for adulthood, looking loved and coddled but beneath it all, completely unprotected.

And it’s so destabilising for children when adults don’t have strong convictions. I think it makes young people nihilistic. What else can we do? We have nothing to fight for or rebel against. We don’t build anything because for that you need a foundation of beliefs. We can’t even believe the opposite of what our parents believe because they don’t really believe in anything. How can you rebel against a Void? So we have this defeatist attitude. Our approach to romantic relationships is not one of passion and impulsivity but doubt and resignation. Our activism seems less about freedom and fairness than fatalism and destruction. We aren’t revolting because we were restricted by too many rules; we are revolting against too much freedom. When everything is permitted, the only rebellion left is to give up on it all.

Nobody who looks honestly at young people today can believe parents are protective enough. Children are crying out for more protection. They need reassurance that there is a right and wrong. They need adults to define and defend it. And to hold them to a standard. Because when there’s nobody around to judge, there’s also nobody around to ground, or to guide. Nobody to be harsh but also nobody to be honest. Nobody to get in your way but also nobody to get you out of your own way. I really believe my generation is anxious today because we had so few adults in our lives to feel confident in. We looked around and saw adults who were just as vain as teenagers, adults who talked about their romantic relationships like adolescents girls, adults who were forever finding themselves, adults who made us feel very unstable. Who refused to settle into anything, so we couldn’t ever feel settled. And we watched all that and wondered why bother growing up, why take on all these burdens when adulthood seems no different from adolescence, when adults are just as anxious and insecure and uncertain? Why grow up when nobody seems to grow out of anything? Show us it gets better, show us the next stage, show us someone who shoulders their burdens and becomes better for it, show us how.

What the next generations of girls need is more protection. Not protection from physical harm, but protection through proper guidance. Not because women are weak, but because girls are vulnerable. They need boundaries set by adults, so they won’t grow into young women stumbling over setting their own, with the wrong people. They need to know what right and wrong is so they can assert themselves. They don't need less judgement; they need stronger judgement so they can defend themselves against people, against the world. And they need examples of good men so they don’t fall for bad men. Because parents who command respect and stand up for themselves will raise girls who grow up to do the same.

But we need adults to take back their dignity. To stand firm for what is right. To care less about being liked and more about being respected. To abandon this adolescent way of thinking. We need adults who are willing to guide children, and guard them against their worst impulses. Who are authoritative not because they want children to fear them but because they have faith in them, in who they could become. We need adults who act like adults. It’s the least children are owed. Why isn’t Gen Z growing up, people keep asking. Well. Who around us did?

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