Beloved,
This past week I started wading through Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt may be an atheist and an evolutionist, but his book packs a punch that we cannot ignore. His main thesis (which is substantiated by a massive amount of evidence throughout the book) is that “overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world” have led to unprecedented rates of anxiety among Gen Z (those born after 1995 and the first generation to reach the teen years with a smart phone and social media).
Why has mental illness spiked dramatically in recent years among young people? According to Haidt, it is in large measure because parents began sheltering their kids from the dangerous outdoors and instead gave them electronic devices to keep them entertained in the safety of the home. It was a failure to recognize that the dangers online are far greater than the dangers on the average suburban street. But more than that, it was a failure to grasp how vitally important risky and adventurous play without the active input of mom or dad is to a child’s formation into a resilient adult who can face the manifold challenges, pains, and uncertainties of life. Haidt uses trees as an illustration of this, and his illustration is so profound that it is worth quoting in full:
“In the late 1980s, a grand experiment was launched in the Arizona desert. Biosphere 2 was (and still is) the largest attempt to build a closed artificial ecosystem, as a prelude to (someday) building self-sustaining ecosystems in outer space. Biosphere 2 was designed to support eight people, who would attempt to live within it for several years. All of the oxygen they breathed, the water they drank, and the food they ate was to be generated within the facility. That goal was never reached. The complexity of biological interactions among species and social interactions among humans proved to be too much, but a great deal was learned from the multiple failures. For instance, many of the trees they planted to create a rain-forest ecosystem grew rapidly but then fell over before reaching maturity. The designers had not realized that young trees need wind to grow properly. When the wind blows, it bends the tree, which togs at the roots on the windward side and compresses the wood on the other side. In response, the root system expands to provide a firmer anchor where it is needed, and the compressed wood cells change their structure to become stronger and firmer. This altered cell structure is called reaction wood, or sometimes stress wood. Trees that are exposed to strong winds early in life become trees that can withstand even stronger winds when full grown. Conversely, trees that are raised in a protected greenhouse sometimes fall over from their own weight before they reach maturity.”
The application to sheltering our kids is obvious. Dangers and difficulties (i.e., stressors) play a vital role in our children developing into strong adults. Compare playground equipment from fifty years ago to that on the average playground today, and you quickly realize we don’t get it.
My reason for sharing this is not to give parenting advice (though every parent and grandparent would do well to read Haidt with a discerning mind), but to give encouragement in the Christian life. God, after all, likens His people to trees throughout the Bible. If we are going to be sturdy and stalwart cedars, we need wind to beat against us. We need stressors to wear us thin.
Perhaps the most dangerous place for a believer to be planted is in the safety of a greenhouse. For without storms, our roots will remain shallow and our wood weak.
God is not a helicopter parent. As our perfect Father, He knows the important role challenges, dangers, pain, and even distress play in our spiritual development. He so orders the winds, the rain, and the hail that our soul’s cell structure might turn to stress wood and our soul’s root system might stretch wide and sink deep.
Whatever you are currently facing, Beloved, can I encourage you to lean into God’s fatherly wisdom? He knows exactly what He is doing with you through all the storms of life, big and small.
Yours in Christ,
Pastor Nick