BACKLASH: a Global Crisis of Emergence (an essay series) - PART 9

Childrearing Today: the Shape of Tomorrow - (continued)

Photo by Ia Huh on Unsplash

‘How we treat the child, the child will treat the world’- Pam Leo.

So … how are the kids doing? And how does the current state of childhood bode for our future?

Part 9 follows on from Part 8, in which we began to take inventory of the state of childhood around the world.

Trends with Literacy and Education:

Youth literacy rates have maintained an upward trend, the world rate being 93% due to a growing access to education. As of early 2025, the global adult female literacy rate is approximately 84–85%, which reflects significant progress though still trailing the male rate of over 90%. Recall that gender balance is a key condition for creating partnership-mode society.

It’s heartening to see that national accreditation bodies are incorporating UN Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) by teaching children the values of sustainability, diversity and inclusivity.

On the downside, there seems to be a growing appetite around the world for the adoption of standardised curricula, high-stakes examinations and competitive assessment. Countries are increasingly aligning national curricula and assessments with international benchmarks like PISA and OECD indicators in a quest to measure their youth against global standards. This has had stressful and toxic impacts. The rush to universalise learning has not yielded promised academic results, but led to spikes in student anxiety – hardly a surprising outcome when we attempt to force young individuals into prescribed boxes. This new push to commodify childhood bends children towards the perceived needs of industry instead of helping them develop their true vocations. Educators and parents are pushing back, giving rise to an interesting array of democratic school cultures around the world.

If we want to end coercive authoritarianism in society, we need to role model a very different approach to mentorship and guidance, one that fosters peaceful self-motivation, from the youngest age.

Trends in use of emergent curriculum:

Traditionally, education has been coercive and compulsory. Children have been obligated to learn what was given them to learn, while their personal interests or passions took a back seat. At minimum, this approach has made school uninviting and at a times a downright drudgery. At worst, this has made school stressful and for some children, even a traumatic chapter in their lives.

The social-evolutionary implications are particularly troubling. When learning is imposed by force, this hardly equips children for self-motivation nor does it foster a democratic instinct. Democracy is not a philosophical exercise to be learned cerebrally from a book; it is an embodied impulse that must be absorbed through direct experience.

Contemporary education theory is shifting towards an emergent curriculum model. In a nutshell, this model rejects a one-size-fits-all approach, while supporting each child to pursue the subjects that they feel the most natural affinity for. Learning is driven by children’s interests rather than a pre-set agenda. Gone are the rigid lesson plans. In emergent curriculum schools you are likely to see educators incorporating nature and outdoor learning, hands-on exploration and learning through play, particularly in early childhood. Instead of relying on exams, teachers tend to use pedagogical documentation for assessment. There are many independent school systems around the world that employ this method in some form, and they are proving to be very successful.

But here is the clincher. Democratic styles of education offer a peace dividend. Not only do they yield positive outcomes in increased academic performance, student satisfaction and self-confidence, they also consistently deliver remarkable reductions in violence (bullying) in schools. It is a no-brainer to guess the societal outcomes of this reform. If we want to end coercive authoritarianism in society, we need to role model a very different approach to mentorship and guidance, one that fosters peaceful self-motivation, from the youngest age.

Trends in screen use:

The jury is back and the science is clear. Screentime has had a devastating impact on children’s mental health and capacity for focus. Screens and their content are highly addictive, corrosive to the brain’s attentional centers, detrimental for cognitive function and mood. And that’s aside from the poisonous effects of influencers and advertisers that target minors, and the disastrous impacts of online trolling and bullying. For the time being, the genie is out of the bottle and most governments baulk at restraining tech giants. As long as this regulatory vacuum prevails, we have a major public health crisis that mostly affects our youth.

Overuse and addiction to screentime are trending up, and this is a retrograde step for children’s psychological development. The effects have been disastrous, leading to dissociation, anxiety, depression and on occasion, suicide.

We are in the early stages of learning to grapple with this new phenomenon, but a handful of governments is beginning at last to respond to the predicament.

In December 2025, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner banned under 16s from using social media. Will this ban be effective? That’s hard to know this early. But this ban seems to be the first volley in a growing call for protective regulations as alarm grows about real harms to children.

Then in March 2026, a California jury found Meta and YouTube liable in a landmark lawsuit for designing addictive platforms that harmed a young user’s mental health, awarding $3M–$6M in damages. This ruling has set a major legal precedent, with repercussions for 20-plus similar trials currently pending in the US.

More sparks – might we see a blaze? In response to a general decline in academic performance, Sweden has earmarked 100 million Euros to wind back the use of screens in schools and return to printed textbooks. And in the Australian state of New South Wales, students can no longer use mobile phones at school, including during recess and lunch. These bold child-protective measures will hopefully serve as a foundation for further global progress.

This amounts to wholesale commercial abuse of children that is unlikely to slow without relentless consumer pressure, class litigation and strong government regulation.

Trends in children’s diets

The new inflammation model of medicine has an urgent message; it shows us that what happens in the gut will soon happen in the brain.

There is a global epidemic sweeping through industrialised nations, claiming far more lives and causing more suffering than the Covid pandemic. It is the scourge of chronic inflammatory disease, a largely preventable array of afflictions – from cardiac to cancer, from diabetes to depression, and many more - caused by severely toxic loads in our environment.

Right here, I will limit my discussion to the well-documented link between fast-food and childhood mental disorders, mediated via a chronically inflamed gut, which tends to inflame the brain.

The global incidence of depressive disorders in children and adolescents rose by over 60% between 1990 and 2021, reaching an estimated 158.7 million cases in 2021. If you have been wondering why so many children are struck down by depression, diet is now firmly acknowledged to be a contributing factor.

And how serious is the problem with the modern industrialised diet? For a strong indicator of how bad the problem is: childhood obesity has skyrocketed around the world. The prevalence among children aged 5–19 years jumped from 0.9% in 1975, to 7.8% for boys and 5.6% for girls in 2016. Then it vaulted to around 20% in 2022. This is no less than an absolutely callous disregard for families by the Big Food corporations that view children as a market to exploit. This amounts to wholesale commercial abuse of children that is unlikely to slow without relentless consumer pressure, class litigation and strong government regulation.

Trends in childhood mental health:

Worldwide, statistics tell a story of alarming declines in youth mental health; with one in seven 10–19-year-olds suffering from mental disorders. Youth suicide is increasing in many nations, including the USA, UK, parts of Australasia and Latin America.

Though it’s a tough call to tease out and quantify all contributing factors, there are strong indications that hurtful online experiences and mounting educational pressures have been significant twin aggravators. The new science of nutritional psychiatry has established a link between gut inflammation and brain inflammation, which throws light on how the modern diet is robbing children of their emotional resilience. Combine these factors and you have a perfect storm for a youth mental health crisis.

From these childhoods – what kind of future?

Why do I check on the state of childhood? Because if there is one thing I learned from the study of psychohistory, it is that every advance in peace, democracy and social justice was preceded by childrearing reforms, one and two generations earlier. The inverse is also true: conflagrations and descents into totalitarianism have been the byproduct of scaled-up child mistreatment. These historic patterns have been clear and replicable. You can see the future in the way today’s children are treated.

There seem to be two opposite trends affecting the state of childhood today. We’ve seen remarkable improvements, but also unexpected headwinds. On the one hand, today’s children face dissociative impacts; beginning with the growing medicalisation of childbirth, and followed by pervasive screen overuse with often exploitative or abusive online content. And while access to education is growing, creeping standardisation and competitive assessment are turning schools into pressure cookers that stoke children’s anxiety and depression. Add an inflammatory modern diet, laden with processed foods and sugar, and we have a perfect storm for a children’s mental health crisis.

But at the same time, authoritarian styles of parenting are in retreat, as the culture of non-violent communication – which combines assertive parenting with empathic listening - percolates through homes and schools. Increasingly children are met with acceptance and tolerance for their idiosyncratic qualities and their emotional vulnerabilities. A new awareness of trauma and its effects is infusing public discourse. The culture of punishment and its cruel apparatus are being consigned to the darker annals of history.

Today’s children are subject to a complex mix of currents - some ups, some downs. Taking a broad-brush view, while children seem to be increasingly facing depression and anxiety-provoking conditions, at the same time – and perhaps paradoxically – they are being liberated from the authoritarian, punitive childrearing styles of history. And since those tides are affecting a critical proportion of the world’s young, how will they shape the societies of our immediate future?

For all the troubles that children face today, the further you go back in history, the more children’s lives are marked by neglect, indifference, abandonment and cruelty. This is the consistent finding of psycho-historians, as I recounted in Parenting for a Peaceful World (2013). But from psycho-historical studies we also know that better childhoods lead to fairer societies. Might the advances in childrearing norms of recent decades have provided us with enough evolutionary impetus to push humanity forward, through the current era of backlash into a next level of social progress?

How might the most recent childrearing reforms be bearing fruit through the various paradigm-shifting innovations budding around the world? That’s exactly what I will be exploring in the remaining chapters of this series. I’ll be sharing evidence of some of the most groundbreaking elements of partnership-mode institution that are taking root and surging around the world. I will be looking at broad movements that are transforming the landscape of civilisation, overhauling the operating systems, resetting the very DNA of our collective self-image and what we understand human society to be. Given the preponderance of current news showing us a world that’s breaking apart, you might be surprised to see the breadth and scope of life-affirming transformations underway. Bear in mind, newshounds focus on what the gatekeepers of power are doing. All the while, a quiet revolution goes unrecorded by the headline chasers, weaving through the looms of culture, altering the soil beneath the grassroots. In every field of human endeavour, there are mounting initiatives bearing all the hallmarks of partnership-mode motives and organisation, filtrating through the mesh of society, redefining what is normal. And that’s exactly where we will look. So, please join me for that, beginning with chapter 10!

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