Darcy (28) and Evan (31)[1] are my favorite Zoomer-Millennial-cusp couple. Married last May, they live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and are pursuing careers in academia. I sat down with them to ask about mental health in their generation: what’s helping, what’s hurting, and what parents can do to build kid resilience in a culture of safetyism.
JD: What was something your parents did, or attitude they took, that helped your mental health and resilience as an adult?
Darcy: The biggest thing my parents did was to keep me away from screens, social media, and the internet. Their “no screens as a toddler” policy made a big difference. I watched my first movie at age three; before that, they read to me or just talked to me. I actually had no phone at all until my senior year in high school, and no smart phone until grad school. Honestly, they could have let me have a dumb phone earlier, that would have been fine, but having a smart phone would have been bad.
JD: Why would it have been bad?
Darcy: Because the world of the internet is fake. The anxieties it produces are anxieties about fake things. Not having a phone allowed me to be present in the real world, as a real person. Also, I was forced to depend on others: to ask my friends for help, ask adults for help. If I was going somewhere, I had to look up the directions for where I was going, plan how to get there, then just go there. If I got lost or something went wrong, I had to interact with other people. It made me resilient.
Also, though it was never explicitly stated, I got the clear idea that it was not OK for me to be in my room for hours on my laptop with the door shut. I was supposed to be with the family, hanging out. Not all the time, of course, but openness was the general expectation.
Evan: I had more screens than Darcy did, but at home, when I was on a screen, I also had to be in a public place: the kitchen, the living room. My parents were intentional about that. Mom didn’t want me to have my cell phone in my room, either, but she wasn’t able to enforce that rule. I would stay up late texting my friends, which did interfere with my sleep. I was talking to people I knew, though, not going on the internet. That’s how I learned how to talk to women!
Also, my mom dragged me to the DMV the day I turned sixteen to make sure I could get my driver’s license as soon as possible. Today, we hear that Zoomers are not having sex, drinking, or driving. The first two are probably good, but being able to drive is important.
JD: You went to private schools in Washington, DC. How did that affect you?
Evan: Safetyism is an aspect of liberal upper middle class America, not America as a whole. My parents are boomer hippies; they instilled a countercultural attitude in me. They fought against the idea that everything has to be organized and supervised. My mom tells the story of how, at an early meeting for my private preschool, the admissions person asked, “Where do you want your son to go to college?” My mom said, “He’s two years old. We don’t even know if he’ll want to go to college.” The administrator’s jaw dropped.
JD: What was a "safetyist" thing your parents did that made you less mentally healthy or resilient?
Darcy: Most of the activities I did as a kid were supervised and organized. My parents encouraged me to push myself in many ways, but I was allowed to go along having things done for me for way too long—driving and cooking, for example. I should have learned to “just do it,” but my parents didn’t really provide opportunities to just do it. Their protectiveness made me less autonomous and more prone to cultivate my various anxieties. (I remember being shocked when the nine-year-old girl I was babysitting casually got out the blender and said, “I’m going to make a smoothie.” At that age, I would never have done such a thing!)
Evan: My parents gave me a lot of autonomy, but they always wanted to know where I was and what the plan was. There was a time in high school, I was 16 or 17, my theater friends and I went over to our drama club teacher’s house for a social event. When it was over, my friend Jeremy and I decided to walk back to his place. It was dusk when we left. The route we took was a safe part of DC, but part of it ran through Rock Creek Park on streets that weren’t pedestrian friendly. The walk took about an hour and a half.
We were most of the way back when both sets of parents called us, completely flipping out. Turns out they’d been calling around to the teacher and all our friends’ parents trying to figure out where we were. We said we were almost home. “We’re gonna come pick you up!” they said. They picked us up when we were 10 minutes away from Jeremy’s house. Their main concern was the distance—also, that it was a sudden change of plan they hadn’t been notified about.
But it ended up being one of my favorite nights of high school. It was a Thursday, and Jeremy and I came up with the line, “Thursday night is adventure night!” It goes to show that safetyism can be at odds with happiness.
JD: What is the worst thing a parent can do with good intentions that is likely to mess up their child's later mental health?
Darcy: Something I hear very often from parents is that they feel like they have to give their kids phones early, because otherwise their kids will be social pariahs. All social events these days revolve around being in the group chat, seeing the notification, or getting the Partyful invite. Parents aren’t thinking, “Who cares, my kid can rot their brain on TikTok.” They’re genuinely worried their kid will be excluded and won’t have friends.
Evan: Maybe, but I think the real worry for parents is that their kid won’t get a lot of likes on Instagram. Likes and follows are the new popularity. And it’s a fake popularity: a projection by insecure parents onto their kids.
JD: What about attitudes toward therapy? Were you pushed into therapy as a kid?
Evan: There was this one time in fifth or sixth grade when I was crying over a girl not liking me. I told my parents I was “all mixed up inside.” They sent me to a therapist. The therapist saw me twice and said, “He’s fine.” (Years later, the girl became my first girlfriend. And I saw that same therapist, for ADHD, and he was helpful. So everything worked out in the end!)
My parents overreacted, but I guess that “all mixed up inside” statement worried them. I may have absorbed some therapy-speak from my school, which had started to push social-emotional learning. And there are mental health issues in my family, so maybe my parents were right to be concerned.
Darcy: We had this thing called Badger Clan at the alternative K-8 school I went to. It was specifically for girls, for when one girl was being mean to other girls. We sat in a circle on the floor and took turns putting a badger skin on our head, and when you had the badger, you had to say something nice about another girl. My thoughts at the time were: If someone’s being a bully, putting a badger pelt on people’s heads and making them pay random compliments is not a fix.
I didn’t like it when the whole group had to do a kumbaya thing after one person misbehaved. That made it seem like it was everyone’s problem, when actually it was just that one person who was being mean and who should be punished. Also, the message was that there’s something wrong about a group of girls; that a girl bully is a product of the girly system, and all the girls have to take collective responsibility. It’s like blaming the matriarchy for one person’s crime.
JD: Evan, you have sought therapy for ADHD and anxiety. What are the most helpful tools, skills or resources therapy has led you to develop?
Evan: First, seeing that my ADHD also bestows strengths. I think of it like Batman, who turned his fear of bats into his strength.
Second, accepting that the weaknesses and strengths that stem from my mental illness or neurodivergence, whatever you want to call it, are part of what make me who I am. I’m not going to cut out those aspects of myself.
Third, for anxiety, I’ve learned to identify the source of the feeling of doom. Can I articulate the thing I’m actually worried about? Anxiety isn’t necessarily bad; there are many good reasons to be anxious. But it helps if you can externalize the source of the anxiety.
JD: What’s one big thing my generation fails to understand about your generation's mental health and the factors affecting it?
Evan: Our generation has some real problems. It’s no longer possible to live on one income, and it can even be tough on two incomes: maybe you can’t buy a house, you can’t have kids. But there is something incredibly wrong with the view that this is the worst time in history. What would you say to a Jew in Nazi Germany, people on the American frontier, people who were enslaved? For most of human history, we’ve had nothing close to the amount of comfort and security we have today. There is a strong connection between safetyism and a lack of historical awareness.
It’s also a big mistake to think that young people know more about mental health just because they are more open about mental health. Some parents seem to think their 14-year-olds know something, which is ridiculous. They think each generation is morally superior to the last one and that they as the oldsters have to “keep up” and “progress.”
Darcy: I think they don’t understand the pressure young people face today. Sure, this isn’t the worst time in history, but young people face more pressure than ever before. You must have a 4.0 GPA, must have lots of extra curriculars, must go to college even if you want to work in a trade. When my students email me saying, “I really need a 4.0,” it’s coming from intense anxiety: they truly believe if they don’t have a 4.0, they will not get a job. That pressure is coming from the older generations, and young people absorb the expectations. I see it in working-class students, too. It’s not just an elite thing. Not everyone lives in the high-pressure bubble, but the bubble is spreading.
Evan: The anxiety comes from living in a giant sprawling democracy with everything visible, tech running rampant, and no way to differentiate yourself, no way to know your place. There are millions of other people who are equal to you. How do you stand out? We’re living in the largest rat race that has ever been.
JD: What’s one piece of nonobvious advice you would give your fellow young adults when it comes to their mental health?
Darcy: Stop navel gazing! Yes, it’s important to talk openly about mental health. And, sitting and thinking about yourself only exacerbates anxiety. A way to improve your mental health is to help others. Stop thinking about yourself and do something for someone else.
Evan: That’s true, but I would add, good people are good to themselves. Put on your oxygen mask first. Don’t be addicted to helping at the expense of your own health.
Darcy: Yes. And push yourself. If your parents didn’t push you, you need to push yourself to be strong and healthy, to live a strong, healthy life.
Evan: Right. Postmodernism says all standards are either relative or oppressive. Maybe there’s a standard of health for the body, but there’s no standard of health for the soul. Better to start with the view that health means something; that it’s a standard you can work toward, body, mind, and soul.
Jocelyn Davis writes books about leadership, history, and mental health. Learn more at JocelynRDavis.com.
[1] Not their real names