Raising Good Humans in a World That Seems to Have Lost Its Way

How do we support young people to become empathetic, ethical, and courageous when the people leading our world so often model the opposite?

It is difficult to ignore the state of the world right now. We are witnessing new wars, growing political instability, corruption, abuses of power, disregard for the rule of law, and an increasingly fragile sense of the international order we once assumed would hold. Institutions we have trusted appear vulnerable. Leaders who speak about freedom, justice, and morality sometimes behave in ways that undermine the very values they claim to represent.

For adults, this can be disorienting. For young people, it raises some fundamental questions.

Why should I care about doing the right thing when the people with the most power don't seem to?

Why should I be honest when dishonesty appears to be rewarded? Why should I care about other people when cruelty, contempt, and humiliation are so publicly displayed? Why should I believe in fairness when the rules seem to apply differently depending on who you are and how much power you hold?

These are not trivial questions, nor are they simply signs of teenage cynicism or idealism. They are legitimate responses to a world that can feel increasingly unpredictable, unjust, and difficult to make sense of, and if we want young people to grow into empathetic, ethical, engaged adults, we need to take these questions seriously.

Not by pretending everything is fine and not by offering easy reassurances that the world will work itself out. And certainly not by insisting that young people adopt our values simply because we are older.

Instead, we need to begin somewhere much closer to home: with the quality of our relationships with them.

Young people are watching and they're asking questions.

Adolescence is a time of questioning authority, examining inherited beliefs, testing boundaries, and developing an independent sense of identity. Young people begin to look beyond their immediate families and communities to consider the wider world and their place within it.

They are trying to work out what matters, what they believe, who they can trust, and what kind of people they want to become.

At the same time, they are exposed to a constant stream of information, images, opinions, and conflict. Through social media, news coverage, and their own conversations, they encounter suffering, injustice, political hostility, and the apparent impunity of powerful people.

They may also encounter genuine examples of courage, solidarity, compassion, and resistance, but those examples can be harder to see when outrage and conflict dominate the conversation.

Young people are not simply absorbing these messages. They are interpreting them, questioning them, and forming their own conclusions. Sometimes, those conclusions are uncomfortable for us. They may challenge our political beliefs, question the institutions we trust, or point out contradictions between the values we espouse and the ways we actually behave. They may be less willing than we are to accept the familiar explanations that have helped us make sense of the world.

Our instinct may be to correct them, reassure them, explain the context, or remind them that things are more complicated than they realize.

Sometimes, of course, context matters: experience can help us see beyond an immediate reaction. But: if our first response is to defend our own perspective, we risk missing something important.

Young people do not need us to have all the answers. They need us to be genuinely interested in the questions they are asking.

The credibility gap: what if young people are right to challenge us?

As adults, we can be quick to assume that our years of experience give us a clearer understanding of the world. We have lived through political upheaval, economic uncertainty, social change, and personal disappointments. We have developed ways of interpreting events and deciding what matters, and there is real value in that experience.

But experience does not automatically make us wise, objective, or right.

We have blind spots; we inherit assumptions from our families, cultures, and generations. We develop loyalties to institutions and ideas that may be difficult to reconsider. We can become invested in the belief that the world is fundamentally fair, that our leaders are generally trustworthy, or that the systems we have participated in are more stable than they actually are. Sometimes, we have benefited from arrangements that young people now see as unjust, unsustainable, or exclusionary.

When a young person challenges us, it can be tempting to hear disrespect where there is actually a genuine attempt to understand. We may interpret their frustration as naivety, their anger as immaturity, or their unwillingness to accept our explanations as a lack of perspective.

But what if some of their criticism is warranted?

What if their questions reveal things we have stopped noticing? What if their willingness to challenge the status quo reflects not a lack of understanding, but an emerging ethical awareness?

We do not have to agree with every conclusion a young person reaches. We can offer context, question assumptions, and introduce perspectives they may not have considered, but we need to be able to do that without assuming that the conversation is ours to control.

This requires humility.

It also requires us to tolerate the discomfort of not being the authority in every conversation.

Lead with empathy...but don't turn empathy into another lesson.

We often talk about the importance of teaching young people empathy, kindness, emotional regulation, and respect, and these are worthwhile aims. But there is a difference between telling young people what empathy looks like and allowing them to experience what it feels like to be met with empathy.

We cannot lecture young people into caring about others while dismissing their own experiences. We cannot insist that they listen to different perspectives while becoming defensive whenever they challenge ours. And we cannot expect them to develop a thoughtful relationship with power if we use our own authority to shut down difficult conversations.

Empathy is not simply a value we communicate. It is a way of being in relationship.

It means being willing to pause before responding. To listen without immediately correcting. To be curious about what sits beneath someone's anger, withdrawal, or apparent indifference. To make room for an experience that differs from our own, even when we do not fully understand it.

It also means resisting the urge to make a young person's distress more comfortable for us by rushing to reassure them, minimize their concerns, or turn their feelings into a problem that needs to be fixed.

A teenager who says, "What's the point of being a good person when everyone in power is corrupt?" may not need a lecture about integrity. They may need someone willing to sit with the question, or they may need to explore their anger, disappointment, fear, or disillusionment without being told that they are overreacting. They may need to know that questioning the world does not make them cynical, that caring deeply does not make them weak, and that uncertainty does not mean they have to abandon their values.

They may need to see us wrestle honestly with these same questions, not as people who have mastered empathy, but as people who are still practising it.

Leading from behind: making room for young people's leadership

If we want young people to become thoughtful, ethical leaders, perhaps we need to reconsider what leadership looks like in our relationships with them.

Our role is not always to stand at the front, setting the direction and explaining the way forward. Sometimes, it is to lead from behind. This means creating the conditions in which young people can develop their own ideas, exercise their judgment, and discover what they stand for.

It means making room for them to take the lead in conversations about the world they are inheriting. Asking what they notice, what concerns them, what they think we are getting wrong, and what they wish adults would take more seriously. It means being interested in their hopes, not just their fears.

What kind of world do they want to live in? What does fairness mean to them? What responsibilities do they believe we have to one another? Where do they see examples of courage or compassion? What would they change if they could?

These questions communicate something important: your perspective matters. You are not simply waiting to become an adult before you can contribute. You are already a person with ideas, values, and the capacity to influence the world around you.

Leading from behind does not mean withdrawing our guidance or leaving young people to navigate difficult questions alone. It means offering support without taking over.

We remain available, and we share our experience when it is useful. We help young people think through consequences, recognize complexity, and distinguish between an understandable feeling and a conclusion that deserves further examination.

However: we do not need to dictate the destination.

We create space for young people to take their own steps towards leadership, knowing that they have a relationship to return to when they encounter uncertainty, make mistakes, or need to reconsider their direction.

Our task is not to produce young people who think exactly as we do. It is to support them in becoming people who can think, care, question, and act for themselves.

The work begins with us

This sounds straightforward until a young person challenges something we hold dear.

Perhaps they question our political views or point out the hypocrisy of a leader we support, or suggest that a system we consider necessary is deeply flawed. Perhaps they express anger about the world in a way that feels exaggerated, confrontational, or unfair to us.

We must pay attention to what happens inside us at that moment.

Do we become defensive, or do we reach for facts to prove them wrong? Do we feel dismissed, criticized, or disrespected? Or do we become anxious about their future and try to steer them towards what we believe is the safest or most sensible conclusion?

Our reactions are human. We have our own histories, vulnerabilities, disappointments, and unresolved experiences. The current state of the world may touch our own fears about instability, loss of control, injustice, or the future we had hoped to leave behind; sometimes, a young person's challenge can stir up much more than the immediate disagreement.

If we are unaware of this, we may respond from our own discomfort rather than from a genuine interest in the young person in front of us, and this is why supporting young people requires us to support ourselves, too.

We need spaces where we can reflect on our own reactions, examine our assumptions, and work through the feelings that make it difficult to remain open. We need relationships in which we can be uncertain without becoming paralyzed, and challenged without experiencing every disagreement as a threat.

For parents and caregivers, this might mean talking with trusted adults, seeking support, or simply taking time to reflect before responding to a difficult conversation.

For therapists, it means recognizing that our own worldview, political assumptions, and emotional responses are part of the therapeutic relationship. We cannot assume that professional training makes us immune to defensiveness or blind spots; We, too, must remain curious about what we bring into the room.

The more aware we are of ourselves, the more available we can be to young people.

We don't need to be perfectly available, nor endlessly patient. But we must be willing to notice when we have become defensive, acknowledge when we have misunderstood, and return to the relationship with a greater capacity to listen.

That, too, is empathy in action.

Empathy is collaborative: it moves in both directions.

One of the risks of thinking about empathy as something adults must teach young people is that we position ourselves as the experts and young people as the recipients of our wisdom.

But genuine empathy is relational: it involves movement in both directions.

We are not simply offering young people a model to imitate. We are participating in a shared process in which both people can be affected, challenged, and changed...and this means allowing ourselves to learn from them.

Young people may notice injustice that we have normalized. They may ask questions that expose contradictions we have learned to live with. They may bring a different understanding of identity, community, responsibility, or what it means to create meaningful change.

They may also remind us of something we may have lost touch with: the capacity to imagine that things could be different.

We do not need to idealize young people or assume that their perspectives are always more progressive, compassionate, or accurate than our own. They are navigating their own developmental challenges, social pressures, and uncertainties, and they need boundaries, guidance, and accountability, just as we all do.

But: they also need to experience adults who can be influenced by them.

When we acknowledge a young person's insight, reconsider a position, or admit that we do not know the answer, we demonstrate that integrity is not about being infallible: it is about remaining accountable to what we believe and being willing to revise our understanding when we encounter something new.

That is a powerful lesson, precisely because it is not delivered as a lesson.

It is lived.

From helplessness to participation

The state of the world can leave young people feeling powerless. When the problems appear enormous and the people with the greatest influence seem unwilling to address them, it is understandable that some young people become disengaged, cynical, or overwhelmed.

We cannot promise them that their efforts will always succeed. We cannot even guarantee that institutions will act responsibly or that justice will prevail in every situation.

We CAN help them discover that participation is still possible.

That might mean supporting their involvement in a community initiative, encouraging them to explore an issue they care about, helping them find meaningful ways to contribute at school or locally, or simply taking their ideas seriously enough to explore what action might look like. It might mean talking about the people who continue to act with courage and integrity, even when doing so is difficult or unpopular, and it might mean noticing everyday acts of responsibility: standing up for someone who is being excluded, questioning misinformation, repairing a relationship, or taking responsibility for a mistake.

These actions will not resolve global conflict or dismantle corruption overnight, and they are not substitutes for political accountability, institutional reform, or collective action.

But they offer something important: a lived experience of agency.

Young people can begin to understand that the behaviour of powerful people does not determine the limits of their own ethical choices. That the failure of others to act with integrity does not make integrity irrelevant. And that caring about the world does not require them to carry the world's problems alone.

Our role is to help them find meaningful ways to participate, while respecting their capacity to decide what matters and how they want to contribute.

We can stand alongside them without pretending to have all the answers, we can offer perspective without diminishing their concerns, and we can help create communities in which empathy, accountability, and care are not merely words, but practices that people experience in their everyday lives.

We have to live the values we hope to see

Perhaps the most important thing we can offer young people in an increasingly uncertain world is not another set of instructions about how to be good.

It is a relationship in which goodness can be experienced, questioned, explored, and practised...one in which they can disagree with us and still belong. A relationship in which their concerns are taken seriously, and in which mistakes can be acknowledged and repaired. One in which power is exercised responsibly, and authority does not require unquestioning compliance.

This is true whether we are parents, caregivers, teachers, mentors, or therapists.

We cannot control the examples set by world leaders. We cannot shield young people from every injustice or resolve the contradictions they encounter, nor can we ensure that they will adopt the values we hope to pass on.

We CAN be intentional about the environments we create around them. We can pay attention to how we speak about people with whom we disagree, how we respond when someone is vulnerable. How we handle our own mistakes, and how willing we are to listen when our perspective is challenged. We can be intentional about how we use whatever power we have.

We can allow young people to hold us accountable to the very values we ask them to embody.

This is not a call for adults to step aside entirely; young people need our care, our experience, and our willingness to take responsibility. But they also need room to develop their own moral compass, their own understanding of leadership, and their own vision for a world that might be different from the one we have created.

Perhaps we need to trust them enough to let them lead, while remaining close enough to support them. To listen before we instruct, and be curious before we correct.

We need to recognize that empathy is not something we hand down from one generation to the next, fully formed. It is something we build together, through repeated encounters in which we try to understand one another and remain willing to be changed.

We cannot simply teach young people to be the change we want to see. We have to be willing to create that change alongside them.

In a world where so many public examples of leadership seem to have lost their moral compass, that may be one of the most meaningful places to begin.

Supporting young people starts with connection

If you are a parent or caregiver concerned about how a young person is making sense of the world, you do not need to have all the answers. You can start by making room for an honest conversation, listening without rushing to fix things, and letting them know that their questions are welcome.

If those conversations feel difficult, or if a young person is struggling with anxiety, disillusionment, anger, or uncertainty, therapy can offer a supportive space to explore what they are experiencing and develop a stronger sense of connection, agency, and self-understanding.

At Counter Current Therapy, I work relationally with teens, families, and adults, recognizing that meaningful change happens not simply through advice or instruction, but through the experience of being understood, supported, and taken seriously.

Book an initial session to explore whether therapy might be helpful for your teen or family.