Ryan Vet on Mind Blend: The Parenting Pendulum and What We're Passing On

Thank you so much, Karen, for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. When you look at a lot of futurists, they're looking at the economy and trends and things like that. And while I get excited about that, I wouldn't say that's my land of expertise. What I like to look at is what forms people. And when we think about formation, and how people — groups of people — are shaped, a lot of times we look at generations. So that's the most common nomenclature. And I often don't get locked into saying, hey, these are the exact birth years, though I do use them in definitions. The reality is generations are a little bit of a blur, depending on how many people were in your family, where you were raised, your socioeconomic status. Lots of different components go into that. So really I use generational futurist as a term to help us understand what forms people, and then most importantly what's going to happen with the next generation as they grow up and become parents, as they enter the workforce, and how do we as leaders manage that every single day.

Exactly. I mean, it almost all boils down to two things, and it's true of any relationship that we get involved in. It's all about communication and trust. It seems oversimplified. There's obviously a lot of nuance to working through both the communication issues cross-generationally as well as trust and how that's perceived. But really, when you boil it down, those are some of the biggest issues in the workplace that we face. And if you look at how much communication costs, the numbers are as high as $1.2 trillion a year in bad communication costing corporate America alone. Forget everywhere else — just in America. So it's a massive, international-scale issue when it comes down to communication and poor communication in the workplace.

Lost productivity. Lost productivity due to poor communication, and that's a pretty widely cited number that you can find. It was published first in 2025, looking at just the fact that when we communicate poorly there's productivity loss, whether we're duplicating work, or not doing work, and things like that. So communication is a significant cost in modern corporations.

Yeah. I think the generational pendulum — I'll put it simply for the sake of brevity. If you look at how baby boomers were raised — let's look at pretty much the oldest working generation right now — their parents for the most part were Silent Generation. Again, I'm going to generalize for the sake of speed here, but their parents grew up in a post-Depression-era America, which means that their parents were frugal, stingy and all that. That translated to how boomers were raised. So boomers didn't often get gifts at holidays, or if they did, they were handmade gifts, or one gift. They usually came from bigger families, so there weren't a lot of gifts. But the family was always together. Their parents usually worked a Main Street job, maybe a factory job, something like that. And as you swing and the boomers start to grow up, the boomers wanted to explore. They wanted to break out of tradition. And so that's when you see things in the 1960s and '70s: the pursuit of identity, the pursuit of social justice matters for the first time on a large national scale. You're seeing all these things happen. Then as boomers become adults, it's the first time you have the two-household income becoming a thing. So you have two working parents, which means they delayed parenthood. They became older parents of younger kids. They wanted the American dream, which was indicative of their generation. They wanted the white picket fence, the 2.2 kids and the suburban house. That was what they wanted. Well, their kids, mainly Gen X, came home to an empty house. They became latchkey kids, because their parents were trying to provide a better life — but in providing a better life, they weren't home. And so there's these trades, these quiet trades every generation is making. Hey, if I can just get my kids into that sporting event, or into that school, or to have that house, or be able to have the cars, then they're going to have a better life than I did. Well, Gen X kids were like, "No, I wanted my parents there. I didn't want my dad traveling to somewhere. I want him at my baseball game." And so Gen X overcorrected as they had kids, mainly millennial kids. And they became the helicopter parents. They became hyper-involved in their kids' lives, saying, "Hey, we're going to program you, put you in every single program we can, we're going to do all these things." And so the average millennial — and I have a breakdown of this in one of my essays — "worked," I'm doing air quotes there, between 48 and 55 hours by the time they were in middle school, if you look at their schooling, their extracurriculars and all of that. And right now parents spend as much as — Linda Flanagan talks about this, she's a child sports expert — three hours or so every single day involved in sports. Significant, if you're involved in sports. It's not every kid. So you're looking at all these swings back and forth. Well, then Gen Z kind of started to push back against that, as their parents were millennials. And so Gen Z came up — and you have to look at what's going on in history — came up with smartphones, and they didn't want the craziness of the world and the hectic schedule. So they went inward, and they had their phone and their device, and they would go sit in their bedroom, not with a light and a book, but with a phone that was feeding them all sorts of constant information. The problem is the parents didn't know what was on that device. And so you see this pendulum swing back and forth. And now, as millennials are becoming parents and Gen Z are becoming parents of Gen Alpha and Gen Beta kids, they're starting to really push back. They're going to a non-screen world for the most part. They're going to a lot more natural play, more outdoor play — but it's still supervised. That's the new recalibration, right? They might say, "Hey, you can go play in the neighborhood" — but by the way, we've got surveillance cameras watching you play, we've got an AirTag in your shoe. And so we swing back and forth, and that's kind of how the generational pendulum swings. And you can look at the acceleration, at how fast it's swinging, with the advancement of progress in technology.

Yeah. And I think that goes back to human desire, right? At the core of everything that any human does, we want to make a positive impact on the world. We want purpose. We want to know that our life, our work, our existence matters. That's just an innate human desire. And so for parents in particular, the way that manifests itself quite often is saying, "Hey, I want my kids to have a better life than I had." And if you ask most parents, they would agree with that statement. What they're going to do then — "a better life than what I had" means they automatically think of something negative in the life that they had growing up. So for Gen X it was, hey, I was a latchkey kid, my parents weren't there. That's probably not an accurate statement, but that's what they feel. My mom always gives me a hard time, because she thinks I say I never had birthday parties growing up. And I know that that's not true, but she thinks that that's something that sticks with me. That's my negative thing. I still don't like birthday parties today. I just pretend my birthday doesn't exist — it's easier that way. And so she thinks I'm trying to overcorrect, because we've done some bigger parties for my kids. And that's more my wife's doing, it has nothing to do with my overcorrection. But at the end of the day, we all try to make a better life for the next generation, whether that's through technology and our professional work and advancement, through modern medicine, science, you name it. But in so doing, we usually push past where we need to go before we find out where the happy middle is.

Right. Yeah. And it's human nature, right? We as a whole — not all humans want this, but most humans want to leave a better impact on the world than they found it, in whatever that looks like. And usually people get stuck on a particular cause or mission. And that's what makes us so interesting as humankind: we all have these different desires, and together, hopefully, we're each doing our part to make everything move forward in a better direction.

That's correct. Yes.

Yeah, I grew up in a very normal, middle-class home in the suburbs of Chicago. I often say I never wanted for anything — but if I did want something, I usually had to earn it. So I couldn't just ask my parents for the latest game console, or rollerblades, or the newest bike, or whatever it was. If I wanted that, usually I would have to work to get it. Basic needs were met. Never worried about a meal, never worried about shelter, never worried about clothing. But when I was young, I wanted a PlayStation 2. That was what was coming out, or had been out, and so I had to work for that. And I think it was just a really good lesson for me to learn, because I bought it. I earned the money through lemonade stands, car washes, mowing lawns, whatever I could do. Bought the PlayStation 2, and it sat on a shelf. I never actually used it. It taught me a really valuable lesson of money and what's important in life and what's not. My parents were always very equipping and empowering of me, saying, hey, go pursue your dreams. And I think what my parents did so well was they let me fail. They let me fail a lot. They let me fail often, and they didn't always come to my rescue. Now, it's not like they threw me in the middle of the ocean and said, good luck, find your way back to land. I think they were always waiting with a lifeboat and something nearby if I needed it. But usually I would learn through failure. I was just reading an article on Dolly Parton and how many songs she wrote. In the wake of her death, someone did an analysis on how many songs she wrote, and it said between 1% and 3% of her songs were successes. That means she was a failure 97% of the time. I didn't fact-check that independently, but the article alone, the premise, is really fascinating, because if you think about it — I've seen similar things with people like Michael Jordan, and look at the shots he took and he missed, you know, 50% of his shots, or whatever the exact metrics are. So the punchline is quite interesting. It's like, hey, I had a lot of shots on goal when I was younger, and my parents allowed me to have those shots. And I think it was through those cycles and through that learning that I realized that most things don't break you. And to borrow the phrase, what doesn't kill you often makes you stronger. I wouldn't say always, but—

Yeah. I think that was really helpful for me in my life growing up.

You know, we've always pursued something as a culture and society. Whether that was convenience, whether that was comfort, whether that was enterprise progress, we've always pursued something as a culture and society. And underlying all of that has really been the desire for ultimate comfort, ultimate health, ultimate knowledge, and that has been a pursuit for a long time. And I think what's really interesting with the world in which we're living — I wouldn't say the invent of AI, because for a long time, in the early 2010s, I had several startups that were AI-based. So for me, generative AI is obviously a newer development, but we were doing a lot of interesting things then. What's so interesting right now when you look at the world is: we should know better. I call this the velocity gap, right? Where technology has surpassed human wisdom, where tech is moving faster than time can catch up. You look at the car and the seat belt. It took us a long time to figure out that without seat belts, cars were pretty dangerous. But once we got seat belts, we saw fatalities and injuries go down dramatically. Didn't eliminate them, but it took us some time. Same with cigarettes, until there was legislation on cigarettes. Then you look at social media — and there's a big gap in history there, I'm skipping a lot, I save the rest for the book. But social media: we saw in 2012 this inflection point, but we really didn't start talking about the impact of that for another 10 years. And even right now there's multiple court cases, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, just got slapped with a huge fine. So you're starting to see us catch up. But what we aren't seeing fast enough is what's happening with AI. And I love technology. I've been involved in technology for a lot of my career, before I spent full-time kind of researching all of this. And so I'm not against it. But the question is, what is happening to our brains? What is that cognitive erosion? What are we taking from the basic human things of interacting and having community, building trust and improving communication between two people — and what are we putting onto technology that technology doesn't deserve to have? Technology is a tool, right? AI is a tool. It's like if I give you a hammer and I say, go screw this screw in. Yeah, you're going to be able to nail that in at some point, but you're never going to get that screw back out, and you're going to damage whatever you were trying to do, because that's a hammer and it was not intended to screw in a screw. And with AI, I'm seeing so much happen. And I think it's a good wake-up call right now, because we've been doing this since really the '70s. Look at spell check. It used to start with a little red underline under a word, and that was it. You didn't know why it was spelled wrong, what it was supposed to be — basically all technology was doing at that point in time, in early word processing and computers, was saying, hey, this red underline means this thing is not in our dictionary. But then it got a little bit more advanced and it gave you two or three suggestions: you might have meant this, you might have meant that. Then you got the green underline, and it started to tell you your grammar might not be correct, you might have used the wrong there, their or they're. And it evolved. But now you have Grammarly, and I've removed Grammarly. I used it for a long time, and it's a great tool for some people, but I've removed Grammarly from my computer, because it's rewriting my voice. You're not fixing a grammatical error at this point, you're trying to make me sound robotic. And I think we've done that for so long that we have offloaded our thinking to machines. And for the first time we've seen Gen Z test scores go down. For the first time in American history where we've recorded national test scores, instead of going up every year, we've actually seen a decline. And technology is not necessarily the villain. It's the fact that we have allowed the next generation to lean more heavily on technology than we have on learning.

It does.

Yeah. Exactly. You know, when you look at polyglots, people who can speak a lot of languages, the number one trait among people who can speak more languages is they're willing to try. And I think about that myself. Our kids have been in a Spanish immersion program, and I grew up in Chicago, so Spanish was a very common language there. I learned it well enough, but as I got older and I got removed from that and no longer lived in an area where it was spoken a lot, I got uncomfortable. And I have to remind myself when I'm speaking to their teachers that it's okay to fail, and it's better to fail. And I think at some point pride, our own ego, gets in the way as we get older, and we don't want to fail. So it makes AI seem so appealing. Because if I was never a strong writer, for example, we go ahead and put it in ChatGPT, and now my ideas actually make sense. And I think we're starting to do that because now it's a pride thing, and we're really removing the human nature of it. Someone came up to me — I was working with an organization, and they came up to me last night, actually. They're like, "Did he use AI to write that?" I said, "Absolutely not." He's like, "How do you know?" I said, "Because it actually didn't make sense, and there were so many typos, and it was formatted so poorly." He's like, "Oh, that's why it didn't make sense." I was like, "Yeah, because that was actually his thinking." He's like, "Oh, I've gotten so accustomed to reading AI writing that I thought that—" I was like, that's really bad. And it happened to me, too. I look back at my 2019 book, and because I stopped using em dashes, everyone's like, "You're using AI, because you're—"

So I ran an analysis. I did run the analysis using AI. I said, what was my frequency of em dashes in writing the old way, before there even was generative AI, and what is it now? And before AI, it was 3.9 frequency out of a hundred sentences. So every four sentences or so I would have an em dash. With AI, it went down to 0.8, because I've been overcorrecting for what AI does — for what I used to already do, which was already my voice. So I've started to — I'm like, I don't care if someone wants to call me out for writing with AI, that's fine. But I know what I did. And my newsletter and stuff keeps growing, because it's human.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think if you look at parents right now in this era, you have mostly millennial parents having new kids, as well as Gen Z. So those are the two main groups of people having kids right now. What's interesting is 75% of the kindergarten class entering kindergarten in 2026 — 75% of those have millennial parents. So it's truly the biggest wave of millennials. And I think what we're starting to see is a lot of trends. One, parenting became really popularized in the '70s. It moved from this idea of child-rearing to parenting. And then by the '90s, kids growing up in the '90s heard their parents talking about parenting. "This is how I parent. My parenting skill." And so fast-forward to millennials as parents: three out of every four millennials has identified with a parenting style, whether that's gentle parenting or whatever else it might be. Which has some serious consequences, because whether you're managing a team or you have kids, no two people are the same. And so if you say, "My playbook for A, B and C parenting is this, this, this, this," and if not, something's wrong with my kid — that's what ends up happening. You do the same thing with work. Around the same time, in the '90s to 2000s, you started to see this huge influx from management books to leadership books and back to management books, and once prescriptive, saying, hey, here's the exact thing that you need to do. Step one is you manage your team by having fewer meetings, and this is the structure. And so everyone does that. The reality is it doesn't work 100% of the time. There are great idea nuggets in a lot of those books. So I think one of the things is we've been programmed now as a generation raised to raise the next generation that if they don't fit this box, something's wrong with my kid. So it's easy to go take them to counseling because something's behaviorally wrong — and I'm not saying anything's wrong with counseling, it has a great place in our world. Or get them assigned a learning disability, or get them assigned all these different things. Again, nothing wrong with that. I was diagnosed with a learning disability really early in the '90s, which was unheard of — dyslexia — and that put me into a separate class, and all of that was damaging to me, because I could actually navigate and overcome that just fine. I still write and read, and—

Yeah. And I've done just fine. And I've had to learn to overcome that. And I realized mine was mild, so I'm not belittling that either. It was particularly with numbers and math, and it did hurt my math grades. But you start to look at that, because I was labeled, it automatically put me into a category that later they reversed, because it was unhelpful to my progress. So when millennials have been raised to think this way about parenting, it's easy to assign everything to a box, and if it doesn't fit the box, something is broken. And that's really, really dangerous. The other thing I'm seeing with millennials right now, especially Gen Z parents, is we're starting to outsource parenting to AI. And again, I have no problem with that at a high level, because we went to WebMD before. You know, if you had a stomach ache, you go down that WebMD rabbit hole and you click—

But with the LLMs — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, whatever it might be that you're using — you start to see the same trend in parenting. It gives prescriptive advice that fits just one person, and that's not helpful. And so if you're using that and said, "Hey, my kid got bit at school," or "my kid bit someone at school," it might say — if you go far enough down the rabbit hole, you could figure out that their whole trajectory is that they're going to be a serial killer. Which is so incorrect. And we're seeing more and more parents get sidetracked and swept into "my kid has a problem because ChatGPT told me." And that is what really scares me for this next generation.

Yeah, I think there's two things that are happening simultaneously. One is parents are now not thinking about their kid, which is really interesting. It goes back to almost how the Silent Generation and boomers were. They were a little distant from their kids. They were providing for their kids, somewhat present for their kids, but they weren't emotionally invested in their kids. And that's what's happening right now. We're seeing that. And I think we're going to see the impacts of that on Gen Beta. Because instead of getting to know their kid and talk with their kid and work through real problems — kids are going to be kids. They're going to bite. They're going to hit. They're going to say things they're not supposed to say. That's kids. Now, there's a limit where that becomes a parenting issue, and some of that's just developmental learning, and they have to learn their boundaries somehow. And I think if the parent stops investing in the kid and outsources to professional therapy or to LLMs, or things that could normally be handled in the home — again, not saying everything can be handled in the home, professionals do need to be engaged when they need to be engaged — but if they start outsourcing it, the kid's not going to feel emotionally loved. They're going to feel like a project that has to be fixed. And that's how millennials were raised. They were raised on portfolio, project-based school. So that's very normal for them. So I think that's one really big concern. And so I think parents need to make sure that they're emotionally invested, not just physically present and prescribing whatever the internet tells them to do. So I think that's one risk that parents don't even see is happening right now.

100%. And you see a lot of pop culture talking about parenting as a job. And it is a hard job, and it is a thankless job, and I agree with all of those things as a parent. But when you base your own validity, your own identity, on how well your kid performs, your kid's always going to disappoint you, because they're a kid. And that's something my wife and I wrestle with: at what point is this learning behavior crossing a line to where this becomes a real problem? And you start to recognize patterns in your own kid if you're attuned. It's like, okay, I know one of my kids, when they're tired, towards the end of the week, certain behaviors are going to pop up more than others. And so we can address that, because we know, hey, it's Thursday, it's nearing the end of the week, they're going to be exhausted because of these things. So let's make sure we try to help them walk through that and call out their behavior. And I think that's something parents are unwilling to do. It's like, hey, I know this happens when you're tired. When I'm tired and hungry, guess what? I'm going to get more angry, I'm going to get more irritable. I'm human too. And I think sometimes parents have stopped being relational with their kids and become transactional, which is really sad. But it's the world in which they're raised, so I'm not necessarily blaming the parent — but parents have to be aware of those behaviors and patterns that might be present in their own life.

Well, I think it's personal. It's emotional. And no matter how much you try — I look at each one of my kids, and when we're out in public and one of my kids picks up a roll and throws it across a restaurant. Which has not happened, thankfully. Not saying it couldn't.

Please don't. But if for whatever reason they did — they were having a bad day and having a temper tantrum — we know that's completely out of character for my kids, and we'd be talking about that later. But if for whatever reason they did, that automatically, as a parent, I feel like I've failed in that moment. I feel like everyone's looking at me, I'm a failure, they think I'm the worst parent ever. Even if everything else I've done is 100% perfect in the parenting world, which it never is. You feel like a failure. And I think we're so used to people looking at us and judging every single decision we make that that causes a lot of issue. And I've seen parents that say, "No, I'm going to be authoritarian, I'm going to go back to the stone ages with my kids." I've seen parents that say, "I'm gentle parenting, I'm hands-off parenting, I'm fill-in-the-blank." I've seen and talked to a lot of people in different camps. And I think what's so concerning is when they adopt a single parenting style and say, "This is going to work for every single kid" — the kid becomes the failure if the parenting style doesn't work. And that's just not fair to the kid. And I think that's why it gets heated, because we do take these as a personal reflection. It's like when you give a presentation at the end of a big project and it's met with — it's not met well, you feel like a failure. But it could have not been met well because AI came out after you started the project and now the whole landscape's changed, or because the economy has soared or crashed, or because three competitors have popped up, or whatever might happen. Things happen. And I think you have to be able to separate your child's behavior to some extent from a direct reflection, especially in those moments when you're in public, or when it gets heated, or when something totally out of character and ridiculous happens. You have to realize kids are going to be kids, and kids have to learn where their boundaries are. Just like driving a car for the first time. You can tell someone all day long not to overreact when a deer comes, don't swerve into the other lane — but as soon as that deer pops in front of you for the first time, the first thing you're going to do is overcorrect. Until you've had that experience with a ball running into the street, or a kid running into the street, and you learn that you need to correct — don't hit them, but you don't have to overreact. I think that's just something you have to learn, and it's hard.

No, it has to be different for different situations, different conversations. And I think, to the gentle parenting in particular, I think that's a big detriment to kids for the most part. And the reason being is life has structure. Everything is structured. We have a legal system, we have a tax system, we have a political system. I'm not saying any of those are flawless or perfect, but we have these systems. In a corporation, you have a system. There are systems. There are consequences in those systems. And we're raising adults, right? Kids already know how to be kids. They know how to say "mine" before you ever tell them. They know how to say no before you ever tell them. They know how to be selfish. They know how to be greedy. You don't have to teach those behaviors. What you have to do is say, hey, I'm raising adults. How do I set them up for success 18 years from now, when they're no longer in my house? And that doesn't mean you strip them of fun. You still let them have fun. You still let them play. In fact, let them play more. Because we're seeing more and more studies that outdoor play, free play, is what is allowing kids to learn. It's when two kids are fighting over a stick that they found in the yard and one hits the other kid with a stick, which is going to happen. If there's no parent around, almost always — not always, depending on how hard they hit — they're going to sort it out. They're going to figure it out. It's amazing. But the second that they know there's a camera watching them, the second they know their parents are watching through the window, they come running up the deck stairs and come yelling in, saying, "So-and-so did this to me." And they're not even hurt, but they cry. One of the best pieces of parenting advice — I wouldn't say best, one of the most interesting pieces of parenting advice I got from someone. They had their kids over, they were older parents, they had many more kids than we had at the time, and we heard a thud and a couple tears upstairs. And we're sitting downstairs in my family room, and my wife and I were about to jump up and go run upstairs to see what's going on. And the other couple, who we really respect, they're like, "No, sit here." And I'm like, "What if someone's hurt?" "If someone's hurt, they'll come down and get us. If not, they'll sort it out." Sure enough, within 30 seconds, there's laughter again.

And it was just one of those moments that — it's going to be okay. And kids are capable of solving their own problems. Kids are capable of working it out. But if we always step in, if you always get a mediator, if you always get a counselor, if you always get between the problem — when the kid has an issue with their roommate, guess who's going to get called? The parent, or the RA, or the dean of students. When it's in the workplace, guess who's going to get involved? They're going to call their parent for advice in their unique workplace. It's just not the reality of how the world should work.

Yeah. Let's take the total extreme. So the one parent who's hyper-involved, right? They're going to probably be the ones with security cameras watching their kids. They're monitoring it. So before they even get up the stairs to that playroom, they've already seen what's happened. They've replayed it. They've already litigated it in their mind, and they're going to sit down and say, "You know what? You shouldn't have done that. Please don't do that again." They're going to walk back down, and what's going to happen? It's going to happen over and over and over again. So fast-forward 20 years, when that kid is out in college, they're going to expect to be watched. Probably 18 years. But they're going to expect to be watched. They're going to expect to have that safety net, and that mom and dad know what's going on. And so when they truly get freedom in some situation, they might not know what to do. So that's really concerning. On the other side, you see the whole "I'm not going to interfere at all, I'm going to let my kids run wild, run shirtless, run pantless down the street." And I know some people that have chosen that parenting style as well. You get all those people. They're probably going to have pretty good interpersonal skills. They're probably going to have pretty good street smarts. If I had to bet on one extreme or the other, I'd probably lean towards them. However, they will likely not have learned the key rules to living in a structured society. We do live in a structured society, and there are certain things that do have rules, and rules are usually meant to protect us. At least that's the intention of rules. They don't always do that. And so I think either extreme has positives and either extreme has negatives, but it's really situational. And I think part of the ease of picking a parenting label, or picking a framework, or outsourcing parenting to an LLM, is because we don't have to think about it as much. In our fast world we're thinking about a lot. It's easier to just say, well, gentle parenting told me to do this, or authoritarian parenting, choosing the opposite extreme, told me to do this, or laissez-faire parenting, whatever it might be. So you start finding either one of those camps and you just stop thinking about the situation, and that in and of itself is cognitive erosion. You're just doing it to your kids, and your kids are now the experiment.

Yeah. So you always have to rewind about 18 to 20 years and look at what was going on in history during their most formative years. So not when they're born, but when they're about three to eight years old is when you really start looking at what was going on in history. Well, if you look at that, social media had already been around. So they were social media natives, and we were already starting to see some of the fears of social media. So some of those entering college this year, for example, that will be in the workforce shortly, aren't on social media as much as even people born five years before them. So that's really an interesting trend, which means that they're already starting to see a move more towards — we're seeing an increase in mall attendance, which is an interesting benchmark.

But we're also seeing an increase in wanting paper textbooks from schools and not doing digital. So we're seeing actually a move towards some more traditional values — I wouldn't say values, but traditional actions, which is really—

Favorable habits. Yeah, thank you. So we're starting to see some of that. So the generation that will be graduating college in the next couple of years and entering the workforce, I think, is going to have a lot of those tendencies. But at the same time, they've been monitored their whole life. They're always hyper-afraid of what people think, because they know that everything that they've ever put online is permanent. And so they're very reserved. They're very guarded. Often socially awkward. They spend more time at home right now than any other generation in history. And they spend more time alone than any generation in history. Really interesting. It's not that they're alone in the home, it's that they're alone in the room. And there are some really fascinating studies, really sad studies, that the family dinner table basically doesn't exist right now in many American homes. Even though the whole family is at home, they're working from home, but they're all living in their world. So you're going to see probably one of the most individualistic generations that we have. And that's going to get mistaken really quickly for being self-centered. We're already seeing — and this is not new, and this is not coming out, this has been around for years — the mental health days, and the "I'm just not coming in today because I can't." And so that's going to continue. And I think some companies have embraced it and added mental health days as part of their work week or their work month. Some companies have said, "No, that's totally bogus. I don't believe in that. You just have to work harder and get over it. We're not going to hire people that are—" I'm not saying these companies are quote-unquote weak. But you have to realize how they were raised. They were raised to talk about their emotions. They were raised to talk about their feelings. They were raised to withdraw when conflict comes. And that is how they've been trained as a generation. Those often cause problems in the workplace. And so we have to teach them: how do you have healthy conflict? Conflict is not bad. Conflict is how we grow. It's like wearing new shoes.

Yeah. Yeah. Like wearing new shoes, you're going to get blisters. It doesn't mean the shoes are bad, or that they don't fit right. It's just you've got to break them in. Or playing guitar. A new guitar player can only play for so long, because they don't have calluses on their fingers to hold down the strings. And if they play too long, they're going to bleed, which is unhealthy too, because then they have to be out of playing for a little while. So what is that healthy balance to develop the calluses that we need to function in life — not become hardened or cold to the world, but just function as adults in a real world?

I don't ever want to say it's too late, right? But I think we have to realize that they've been rewired. This whole generation has been rewired. I borrow that from Jonathan Haidt, who wrote The Anxious Generation. He calls it the great rewiring. And the reality is this generation does think differently. And so part of what we have to do is we have to rewire them again. And that's going to take all of society. Parents can start trying to give them more freedom, push them out of the nest a little bit more, and realize that they're going to fail. And the thing that I always try to tell parents — and I'm not a parenting expert by any stretch, I look at generational trends — but one of the things that I always try to tell parents is, if you don't let your kid fail now, they're going to have to fail when they're older, and it's going to be a lot worse. I'll never forget, I remember one of my friends shoplifting when we were maybe in middle school or something like that. I was not with them. We were on the other end of the mall and we saw the mall cops chasing after them. I was with a different group of friends. That's when you still went to the mall. And we learned a lesson from watching that happen, and the stakes were really low. He went to mall jail for a minute and his parents came and got him and he got a slap on the wrist. He returned it. Hopefully he learned his lesson. I don't know where that kid is today, but learning that in seventh grade is a lot better than learning that when you're 25, because now you have much more consequences, the stakes are higher, and things like that. And I'm not saying all kids should shoplift. He had other issues — clearly there were other parenting issues happening before that happened. But I'll never forget seeing that, and just remembering that, and that burning in my mind. And so when parents don't allow their kids to fail young, the consequences for failure when they're older are going to be greater. And it's like a kid learning to walk. When kids learn to walk, they're two feet tall or less. I don't know how tall they are, but they're pretty close to the ground. When they fall, they're not falling too hard. They're, you know, 15 pounds of falling diaper.

Exactly. Yeah. And I think we have to remember that.

Yeah. Exactly. And I think in a world without consequences, especially as kids, they're going to try things that are going to get them hurt a lot later.

I think paying attention. Just actually pay attention. As dumb as that sounds. Stop using every playbook as the play that you've got to run. There's not one single answer. If someone had actually figured out the perfect way to raise perfect kids, we would all have perfect kids, because we would all be doing that. And that's just not the reality of life. And so, yes, read, look at different parenting styles. Understand there's benefits in a lot of these parenting styles, and there are a lot of detriments in some of these parenting styles. But figure out what makes some good, what makes some bad, what works for your family. If you are an angry parent and you were raised in an angry home and you try gentle parenting, it's not going to work anyway, because it's not who you are. And so you've got to take the time to figure out what works for you, what works for your family, and what works for this moment in history and in time. And I think that's one of the other big things we have to consider: the world is changing so fast. Those parenting books the day social media came out didn't work. The day generative AI came out, they didn't work. And so you have to start thinking about what moment are we living in, what's going on around us. And then the most important thing is community, honestly. If you look at the most successful kids — I think Michaeleen Doucleff, in her book Hunt, Gather, Parent, she doesn't say this directly, but it's the idea that your kids are going to be more successful if they're raised in community, if they see how other families are raised, if they are with other kids, if they have multiple people who can speak into their lives. That's one of the best things that you can do, and it's going to give them a more well-rounded perspective on a very diverse world that we live in.

Yeah. Exactly.

Oh, Reese's. Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Until Reese's Fast Break came out — then Fast Breaks.

Yeah.

Be a man of integrity. Do the right thing, whether anybody's looking or not, whether anybody likes me or not.

Yes.

Depends on which kid it is. One of them I can—

Yeah. Just one of them, I can give a look and it'll be over. One of them will only scream if there's a real problem, so I'd probably go figure out what's going on. And then the other one, I would probably tell them "shh," and I'd probably pull them aside and get down on their eye level and have a conversation with them, because that's usually the precursor to something even worse. That's like the smoke at the top of the volcano before the lava overflows.

Well, thank you.

Yeah.

Most fascinating thing — I think everyone thinks Gen Z, because they're the youngest, most technologically native generation, that they love AI. They're actually pushing back against AI more than the two next generations above them. So I think that's pretty interesting.

Yeah. True. Right.

I mean, this is a cop-out answer, but my parents were great. I'm sure there was something that they're missing, but nothing comes to mind.

Yeah.

Thank you, Karen. Yeah, I loved it. It was fun.