If you’ve found yourself saying this, as a parent or an educator, don’t worry. Every step forward we make new mistakes as we try to reconcile the discomfort of helping young people grow with wanting them to be happy and healthy. But make no mistake, if you have said it you’re doing yourself, and the young person you’re trying to help, a great disservice.

My generation, the millennials, grew up with participation trophies and ribbons. This was deeply confusing for us, muddying the waters of what success was, what the point of effort was. I remember putting in hours and hours of work creating my own instrument for a music class assessment, only to get the same praise as a kid who put dirty water and rocks in a water bottle he found in the bin 5 minutes before class.

Teachers and parents were trying to figure out how to motivate young people without damaging their self esteem and we made a mistake. We’re doing better now, with work like Dr. Dweck’s “Mindset” work teaching us that we need to reward success oriented effort, and moderate praise of outcomes (in a nutshell) instead of rewarding everything.

But we’re still making mistakes. The new trend, which was just emerging with millennials, is the phrase “We’re just trying to find their thing”. Parents and educators will use this as a way to explain or justify quitting activities, or trying new ones before obstacles can be overcome. At Risky Kids, it’s something we’re seeing daily, and we’re also seeing the consequences.

What we’ve seen in families is a growing discomfort in the discomfort of their young people. This makes sense, and isn’t unhealthy at all. Of course we should want the best for our young people, but along the way we’ve lost our sense of how that should be achieved. Every person we speak with will agree kids need adversity and challenge to grow, and risk taking is healthy.

However, when faced with these things, young people become uncomfortable, unhappy, frustrated and even vigorously upset! This is where the cognitive dissonance kicks in. We want kids to grow, we’re happy for it to be through discomfort, unless it of course results in them being uncomfortable.

Yet it’s not clear cut in the way we respond, this is why it’s insidious. We don’t say “I don’t want my young person to be uncomfortable”. That’s not how our minds work. When we’re avoiding discomfort ourselves, we become justificatory. We use a process called “Defensive Decision Making” where we resort to easy to defend reasons, rather than the harder to defend ones. 

Once more, this is often an unconscious process, where to avoid the tough truth that we might not be strong enough right now to watch someone we care about struggle through growth, we look to a more palatable thought. “This must not be their thing, because if it was their thing they would enjoy the discomfort and find it rewarding and persevere”.

There’s been an intensification in parenting and child education over the last several decades. We need to meet the needs of each child’s individuality, we need to allow them to be autonomous, we need to give them firm boundaries, we need to be their counsellor, their nutritionist, their life coach, their therapist, and throughout it all we need to keep them safe.

The pressure to get it all right is enormous, and impossible. Life is about learning and having a shared experience and it’s just as reasonable for us, the adults, to make mistakes and grow on the path of raising a young person as it is for them.

It’s still a problem though. Families are looking for the “perfect” hobbies and sports for their young people. The thing that they’ll just fall in love with, and be willing to pursue no matter how uncomfortable it is. This doesn’t happen though except in movies and the odd, one in a million exceptional savant.

More importantly, the thing that all young people will share is that we can fail at the things we love if we don’t have the resilience to pursue them through the hard times.

The second big reason that “finding their thing” has the potential for harm is because it teaches a young person, and us, that their abilities are fixed. Whilst it might relieve immediate discomfort (“phew, I’m bad at this because I could never be good at it”) it creates long term consequences.

If a young person believes this, then they’ll feel that out there is something which will be effortlessly easy to be successful at, that in that moment they will just “know” that it’s their thing. This then translates into behaviours of avoidance. When we encounter difficulty or adversity, its’ because it’s “not our thing”.

It means that if the thing we’re good at is going to be easy, we won’t need to try. Inversely, anything which is hard, we shouldn’t try at. We can see where this goes, and Dweck’s work on Mindsets tells us that this results in a fixed mindset, with unhealthy focuses on outcome and appearance, rather than growth and learning.

Each time this happens, it creates a downward spiral. For young people, they not only develop a fixed mindset, but they begin to experience the buoying effect of novelty again and again. Each time they start something new, it’s exciting and growth is often effortless as they tackle the basics.

As soon as they hit later stages of learning, they begin to grasp and flail and revert to avoidance themselves. This triggers their parents to respond once more “we’re just trying to find your thing” and move on once more. The child never learns what it means to persevere and how to strive to master a skill.

This is something at Risky Kids that we call “Program Tourism”, the modern tendency for parents, educators and everyone raising young people to flip them between activities each time they become bored, unhappy or uncomfortable. It’s not something that we just hear as families move on from our clubs either, it’s something they’ll say as they sign up. Telling us “they’re not a sporty kid” or “martial arts just wasn’t their thing”. Next on the list of things that won’t be their thing is Risky Kids unless we intervene (which we do).

That’s not to say we shouldn’t try new things with young people and help them explore different hobbies and interests. It’s also not to say that some young people will just enjoy and thrive in different environments.

But it is to say that it’s unhealthy and unhelpful to see that as the best way to approach discomfort during the process. Exploration is an objective, not a solution. The question I’m asked that you might be thinking is “how do I tell the difference?”.

The point is that you don’t, because it’s not your responsibility to find what’s best for your young person. It’s theirs, and you get to guide them on that journey and share it with them.

When they’re struggling, unhappy or uncomfortable, help them navigate those feelings and persevere when they should. Challenge decisions to quit by helping them understand the consequences, and have them take responsibility for ending relationships or obligations. When they’re happy and thriving, get them to reflect on why, and what’s next. Pre-empt plateaus and help prepare them for hard times while enjoying the good.

We’re seeing this impact in the next generation of workers. Increasingly diminishing commitment to employment or career choices is currently being seen as a belief that millennials and younger generations are purpose driven. They change careers or pursuits more frequently than older generations because they’re more interested in… you guessed it, “finding their thing”. For the same reason that this sounds reasonable for kids, it’s also celebrated among workers.

This is a growing problem, because workers will be left feeling more and more unfulfilled as  they swap between less and less fulfilling jobs. New trends in people who want to “lie flat” and avoid the perceived discomfort of hard work for the sake of earning money miss the point. Learning is always hard at the beginning, and certainly not a lot of fun after the novelty wears off and we still haven’t built up a decent skill set. We’ll feel uncertain, uncomfortable, perhaps even stupid and definitely doubtful.

The parallels are unmistakable once they’re seen, the diminishing rates of risk taking and adversity in young people, the increasing levels of program tourism all align perfectly. Younger generations are being perceived as less and less resilient in the workplace, increasing rates of mental illness related workplace injury claims, higher rates of staff turnover as people move to different careers.