Young people today are shying away from risky behavior such as drinking, sex, and even driving at higher rates than previous generations. While it may be tempting to point to parenting trends as the cause of these changes, psychologist Richard Weissbourd says the picture is more complex.

The director of the Making Caring Common Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education points to a survey his team conducted as part of a 2023 report on mental health challenges among 18- to 25-year-olds. It found that young adults’ top worries were their financial future, pressure to achieve in school, and not knowing what to do with their lives. Coming in fourth — ahead of work, family, and social stresses — was the sense that the world was falling apart around them.

“For a long time, there was a fear that particularly in affluent communities, kids weren’t experiencing enough risk, and that you almost had to curate risk for kids,” Weissbourd said. “Now the narrative has changed so much. We live in a frightening world where things are coming apart. We don’t need to curate risk anymore. What we need to do is try to help kids understand, interpret, make sense, cohere, and stabilize during a very scary time.”

Still, Americans’ changing relationship to risk in childhood is real, Weissbourd said, in part because of parents’ increasing focus on protecting their children from any sort of adversity.

“It’s part of a larger pattern in my mind, of parents, in many cases, organizing themselves too much around their kids, making their kids’ feelings too precious, micromanaging their kids’ moment-to-moment moods,” he said. “It’s not good for kids. They don’t develop the coping strategies that we really want them to develop.”

But of course, Weissbourd added, it’s a good thing that young people are drinking and using drugs less. “It probably reflects some good parenting and some good things that are going on in the culture too.”

Recognizing that some students are arriving at college with less experience of independence than previous generations did, administrators in some universities are encouraging students to get out of their dorm rooms and engage with one another and with the community.

“A lot of student affairs offices and colleges are sending that message: This is really a great time to separate from your parents some and to lead your own life, including taking some risks.”

Weissbourd theorizes that for many young adults, the path to a stable life feels increasingly precarious.

“Part of what you’re seeing in this risk-aversion is that I can’t get off the train, that I’ve got to keep moving forward at locomotive speed — again, mostly in middle- and upper-class communities — if I’m going to get into a good college, if I’m going to get a good job,” he said. “I’ve got to stay on this train, and I’ve got to keep going fast, pedal to the metal, and I can’t let anything derail me.”

It can feel a lot scarier to take a gap year when the consequences of a wrong move feel so dire.

“When we survey young adults, they do feel like things are falling apart, like the adults don’t have their hands on the wheel. They have more faith in their peers to improve the world than they do in older adults.”

The best way to help young people who feel immobilized by the precarity of the world is to talk to them about it, Weissbourd said. In what ways do they feel that adults have messed things up, and what can they do as individuals to make things better?

Teens and young adults may know what risks they can tolerate, but a constant barrage of frightening news can distort anyone’s sense of what’s safe, regardless of their age. Weissbourd said he’s encouraged by young people’s familiarity with meditation, positive self-talk, and other tools for mental well-being.

“To the degree to which young people are able to manage their anxiety, I think they’re able to make much better judgments about what’s too risky and what’s not risky.”