Raising Hopeful Kids in Cynical Times
In September, I had a chance to interview Dr. Jamil Zaki. He is the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab and author of the new book “Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.”
Sometimes conversations just stick with you, and this one has been on my mind a lot this week. Particularly this insight:
“Optimism is us telling our kids, don’t worry, honey, it’s going to be fine. First, we can’t guarantee that because we don’t know what the future holds. Second, it leaves our kids on the sidelines observing helplessly as they see things that might be difficult or harmful.” In contrast, hope is telling our kids, ‘“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but you can make a difference.’”
Here’s our conversation — first published on MindShift on October 17:
In the face of uncertainty, parents often seek to protect children by warning them about the world’s threats and dangers. But is this the right approach?
Jamil Zaki is the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab and author of the new book “Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness.” In an interview with MindShift, Zaki said that when adults “try to keep our kids safe by making them feel unsafe,” they fuel a cynicism that can have unintended consequences for children’s mental and emotional well-being.
“If we focus kids on the negative – on the worst parts of life and the worst parts of humanity – we’re going to end up shrinking their world, making it harder for them to trust, and making it harder for them to explore, take risks, and form relationships.”
That doesn’t mean adults should abandon safety protocols. Zaki is the father to two young daughters. When they complain about putting on sunscreen or buckling their seat belt, he asks them, “What’s my most important job?” And they respond, “To keep us safe.” That’s a fundamental parental responsibility.
But the more nuanced question is this, Zaki said: “What are we depriving our children of in the name of safety?” Emphasizing a hopeful mindset over a cynical one, Zaki argues, is an empirically wiser parenting choice.
Defining Hope
Let’s first define some terms. Zaki described optimism as a belief that the world will be better and cynicism as the belief that it will never be better. But hope, he said, is the conviction that the world can be better. Under this framework, hope is empowering because it requires action and allows for agency. The future “can be better,” because humans can do something to make it so.
Zaki put it this way, “Optimism is us telling our kids, don’t worry, honey, it’s going to be fine. First, we can’t guarantee that because we don’t know what the future holds. Second, it leaves our kids on the sidelines observing helplessly as they see things that might be difficult or harmful.” In contrast, hope is telling our kids, ‘“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but you can make a difference.’”
The Connection Between Curiosity, Hope and Data
According to surveys cited by Zaki, the majority of parents believe that teaching kids that “the world is dangerous and competitive” will help them be more successful. But this world-view can be detrimental to children’s academic success. Zaki points to a research study of over two hundred thousand people in thirty countries. Cynics “scored less well on tasks that measure cognitive ability, problem-solving, and mathematical skill.” Despite this, he writes, “the stereotype of the happy, gullible simpleton and the wise, bitter misanthrope lives on, stubborn enough that scientists have named it ‘the cynical genius illusion.’”
Why would cynicism dampen cognitive acumen? Perhaps part of the answer can be found in curiosity. Curiosity primes children’s brains for learning. Curious kids want to know why, and that pushes them past simplistic or absolutist notions about the world. Children have an impulse to explore and make sense of the world – but that also means that they can absorb the fears of the adults closest to them. “Kids are sponges,” said Zaki, “and often we’re saturating those sponges with the dirty water of our own biases, but we don’t have to. We can allow their curiosity to direct them to more accurate and hopeful information instead.”
That means adults have work to do, Zaki said. Building hope often means “unlearning a lot of bad intel” that we’ve received from culture, media, and the “shredder of social media.” Scary stories can feed our worst perceptions about what people are like and cause us to overestimate dangers. “Hope isn’t a matter of tuning out and burying our heads in the sand,” said Zaki. “Hope is a matter of paying closer attention and focusing more intently on what the world has to offer. Hope is a response to data.”
Take, for example, “stranger danger.” According to a 2023 Pew Research survey, 28 percent of American parents say they are “extremely worried” that their children will be abducted, with another 31% saying they were “somewhat worried” about it. And yet the actual risk of a child being kidnapped by a stranger is incredibly low. According to researchers for the University of California Irvine: “The actual risk of a teen or child being abducted by a stranger and killed or not returned is estimated at around 0.00007%, or one in 1.4 million annually—a risk so small that experts call it de minimis, meaning effectively zero.” They continue:
The idea that unsupervised children are in constant danger is relatively new. Just one generation ago, children had much more freedom to explore their surroundings. In the early 1970s, psychologist Roger Hart spent two years making maps of the places that children in a rural New England town were allowed to go by themselves. He found that 4- and 5-year-olds were allowed to travel throughout their neighborhoods alone, and 10-year-olds had free run of the town. Forty years later, Hart returned to the same town and found that although the crime rate was exactly the same, most children were now forbidden from roaming past their own backyards.
Zaki explains that data clearly shows that “people who think the world is dangerous do worse in terms of their mental health, their careers, and their happiness. But because we’ve passed [our fears] on to our kids, they are less trusting than we were, and they have less freedom than we did.”
Zaki recommends modeling “fact-checking” our cynical beliefs. “When I find myself mistrusting somebody I’ve just met for the first time, I say, ‘Wait a minute, Zaki, what data do you have to back up this mistrust?’ And oftentimes the answer is nothing. I have no data here. It’s just my instincts, and our instincts skew negative compared to real evidence. So I try to question my cynical instincts, and I try to encourage my kids to question their cynicism as well, to be curious and skeptical instead of cynical.”
Why We Underestimate Human Goodness
Researchers have found that humans generally tend to underestimate human goodness. This is another area where data can be both helpful and hopeful, said Zaki. Take this study as an example: a group of researchers “dropped” nearly 17,000 wallets in 40 countries over the course of two years. Some wallets had no money, some had the equivalent of $13 and some had the equivalent of $100. The wallets all contained contact information for the “owner.” So how many people attempted to reach the owner of the lost wallet? Researchers assumed that the higher the amount of money in the wallet, the fewer would be returned. A poll of 279 “top-performing academic economists” agreed. But the exact opposite turned out to be true. Forty-six percent of empty wallets were reported, as compared with 61% of the $13 wallets and 72% of $100 wallets. The more money lost, the more people went out of their way to return the money to the owner. People wanted to help out strangers they had never met.
Zaki was not surprised by this because his research has found that “most people value compassion over selfishness.” This is important information: if our kids believe that the majority of people simply don’t care about pressing issues, it’s easy to feel hopeless. Look at climate change, said Zaki. “The average American thinks that 40% or fewer Americans want aggressive policy to protect the climate, but the actual number is more than two-thirds. There are many ways that our kids are probably part of a supermajority that they don’t know they’re part of. If you know that most people want, just like you do, a more peaceful, egalitarian, and sustainable world, then suddenly fighting for it makes a lot more sense.”
After years of working with college students, Zaki believes that much of the young people’s anxiety stems from “the perception that the world is struggling and I can’t do anything about it.” Because of the internet, today’s adolescents are global citizens in ways previous generations were not. Feelings of helplessness accentuate distress.
Richard Weissbourd, director of Harvard’s Making Caring Common project, notes that kids and adults are “more distressed when we feel helpless and passive — and more comfortable when we are taking action.” Adults can help their children turn empathy into activity, teaching them ways to “expand their circle of concern,” reach out to others, and make a difference in the community.
How to Practice Social Savoring
One practical strategy for fostering hope is savoring, or “noticing the good stuff as it happens.” Noticing small moments of human goodness helps us correct the negativity bias that most of us are prone to. As Zaki explains,“Our minds are structured to pay lots of attention to threats. And that’s good because it keeps us safe, but it’s also a bias that often makes us wrong about what the world is like and what people are like. So savoring beautiful things and positive experiences is a great exercise in general in terms of balancing our perspective.”
The Art of ‘Underbearing Attentiveness’
When Zaki thinks of hopeful parenting, one phrase that comes to mind is “underbearing attentiveness.”
Becoming a hopeful parent in a cynical world isn’t easy, said Zaki. Perhaps the starting point is to expand our ideals as parents. “Keeping my kids safe is super important. But having them become engaged citizens of the world who embrace opportunities to connect with people? That’s equally as important.”
Yours in Hope,
Deborah
Deborah Farmer Kris, www.parenthood365.com
P.S. Know what’s giving me hope this week? Kids are about to meet Carl the Collector and his friends. Carl is a warm-hearted autistic raccoon who collects the things he loves, everything from fake mustaches to pet rocks! Carl the Collector premieres 11/14 on PBS KIDS.
I’ve worked on this show for two years as an expert advisor, and it’s a big-hearted-wonder of a show. Check out this behind-the-scenes video and you’ll see what I mean.
This was just the hopefulness I needed today. Thank you!