When Children Feel Powerless: Restoring Agency in an Anxious Generation

Anxiety has become so ubiquitous that we throw it around constantly –”I’m anxious about the meeting,” “My child has anxiety,” “This gives me anxiety” – often without stopping to understand what we actually mean.

This wasn’t a word most of us grew up with. It wasn’t something you’d see on a feelings chart or hear parents talk about. Children didn’t name it and families didn’t recognise it.

So what changed?

Children today have more opportunities than any generation in history, yet they feel more powerless. What’s happening and how do we reverse it? In our effort to give children everything, we may have inadvertently taken away the one thing that matters most: the experience of their own power.

Think about a typical weekday for many children. Their wake-up time is decided by their parents. Breakfast is prepared by parents, school is mandatory, after-school activities are chosen and scheduled by parents, homework is supervised by parents, dinner is prepared by parents and bedtime is enforced by parents.

Where, in that entire day, did the child make a meaningful choice?

Where did they experience the direct connection between their decision and an outcome?

This isn’t to criticise parents. Most are doing what they genuinely believe is best, which is providing structure, ensuring nutrition, supporting education and exposing children to opportunities.

However, in the process, we’ve engineered out the very experiences that build a sense of agency.

Children learn they have power by using power. This is not a big, life-altering power, but rather the small, everyday power, such as choosing what to wear, deciding which game to play and figuring out how to solve a problem they’re having with a friend. However, if we solve everything for them, schedule everything for them, decide everything for them, even with the best intentions, we communicate that “You’re not capable. You need me to do this for you.”

Dr Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, argues that this is one of the defining crises of modern childhood. Children are “experience-blocked” in the real world (where they could build competence and agency) and “experience-flooded” in the digital world (where they’re exposed to threats they cannot possibly address).

This results in a pervasive powerlessness, a chronic feeling of “I don’t trust myself to figure it out.” A simple choice becomes paralysing and they start to question themselves: “What if I choose wrong? ”

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So what do we do?

The answer is simpler than we think, though not always easy to implement. We let children make real decisions (not massive, life-altering decisions, but rather small, age-appropriate ones) that genuinely belong to them and we let them live with the consequences.

For example, “What do you want to wear today?” is a real decision for a five-year-old.

So is: “Do you want to practice your reading now or after dinner?”

Or: “You have R50. How would you like to spend it?”

The key is that these are actual choices, not tests with the right answers you’re hoping they’ll guess. The hard part, however, is that you let them experience the consequences. For example, if they chose the shorts on a cold day, let them feel cold (unless it’s genuinely dangerous, obviously). I’m not advocating frostbite. If they spent their money on something that broke immediately, they’ll feel disappointed, but this is what gives them information for next time.

All children need from you is the permission to believe they can do it themselves. Once they know that they have your permission, it gives them a sense of empowerment. Once they absorb this message, it changes the way they see themselves and trust their own judgement.

If you, as a parent, are trusting them to make their own choices, they will inevitably start trusting themselves and become less reliant on you as a parent to make decisions for them.

I recall many moments with my own children when they were littlies while they insisted they pour the milk in their cereal and me thinking to myself, “it’s all going to land up on the floor.” The easiest way out of this is to do it for them, as all I could really think of at the time was how quickly I could get it done, so there wouldn’t be any spills or wastage. I soon realised, battle after battle, that the need for them to do it for themselves was way more important than what I was trying to prevent. The feeling of doing it themselves gave them a sense of empowerment. “You see, I can do it, my son would say,” even with half the milk on the floor.

Sometimes the consequences aren’t pleasant experiences, but these small choices build something called “self-efficacy”. This is the belief that you can influence outcomes through your actions.

What I’ve learnt is that the actual outcome of the decision matters less than the experience of making the decision and seeing the direct result. So my child poured his milk and spilt half of it, he chose to wear sandals on a cold day and he was cold. However, there is something infinitely more valuable than comfort – that is the fact that my choices have consequences and I have power.