Outdated Adulthood
"Parenting" describes the path. What about the destination?
The purpose of AI is to read every thought that has ever been expressed, find patterns and expose all human biases and flaws … so we can create new ones.
The parenting industry is one of those patterns. “Parenting” is barely sixty years old. Hunter-gatherers did not parent. Farmers and blacksmiths did not need a parenting expert to raise their children. The kids were just there, watching, learning, copying. They picked up hammers and plows when their hands were big enough. Then we lost it. The advice industry exists to fill the void. We feel it. We buy more books and listen to podcasts that promise to make us better parents. The void is still there.
The void is where parents’ life purpose used to be visible.
Try this. Open any AI bot and ask for the best parenting advice. It will mention regulation, validation, attachment, play-based childhood, screen limits, sleep hygiene, connection over correction, discipline. It will be reasonable. Each piece of advice is sound. Watch carefully and you’ll notice something is missing.
The destination.
What do the four most influential voices say?
Connection over correction. — Becky Kennedy
Kennedy’s work is built on the principle that children are good inside, that behavior is a clue to need, and that the parent’s job is to stay regulated, validate the child’s emotions, and build connection capital against the harder days ahead. The frame is internally consistent. It also describes what to do, without describing what the child is being prepared for. Resilience is the named outcome. Resilience means bouncing back, but back to where?
Trust children to be their own teachers and watch them thrive. — Janet Lansbury
Lansbury asks parents to perceive infants as capable, autonomous people whose self-direction can be trusted. Watch them. Respect them. Step back. Thrive is the named outcome. The texture of a thriving adult is, again, undescribed. The reader is expected to know what it looks like.
The play-based childhood has been replaced by the phone-based childhood. It is time to end the experiment. — Jonathan Haidt
Haidt got close. He has done the field a service by naming what was lost — free play, independent exploration, real-world risk, the unsupervised mixed-age neighborhood pack. This is right, but he is reading a second-generation symptom and prescribing a time machine — to go back to a place that no longer exists.
Play has never been a thing in itself. Play is imitation. The blacksmith’s son swings a hammer at a stick because he has watched his father swing a hammer at iron. The hunter’s daughter tracks bugs in the underbrush because she has watched the adults track animals. Play is rehearsal for an adult life the child can see. Strip the phone from a teenager and she does not return to play. There is nothing to return to. Kids cannot rehearse the invisible. Her parents work on laptops with screens incomprehensible to the children.
The phone-based childhood is a play staging the laptop-based adulthood. The kids went online because we had been there. Removing the phones does not fill the vacuum. It just leaves the children in a vacuum without phones.
Comfort is the enemy of progress. The pain of discipline is far less than the pain of regret. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. — Andrew Tate
The message is exclusive to boys, and it lands hard. But where does it lead?
Tate has built a movement on the inverse claim from gentle parenting. Where Kennedy and Lansbury say to remove friction and validate emotion, Tate says to add friction and harden the nervous system. Cold showers, weights, discipline, the relentless suppression of comfort. A son raised on this regimen will be strong and capable. But capable of what? Tate’s named destinations — dominance, sexual access, and material wealth. The Bugatti, the mansion, the women on demand. These are markers, not a life. Tate’s actual life purpose is the platform.
The kid who arrives at this destination finds a void covered in pleasure. He feels cheated. He thinks the solution must be more — more conquest, more proof, more domination, none of it filling the void. The movement treats women as objects, so the misogyny follows. The toxicity of the movement is covered elsewhere.
So here is the field, as the AI sees it.
Four voices, four directions, each internally coherent, each prescribing a path. Kennedy and Lansbury prescribe the removal of certain obstacles — harshness, shame, friction, parental dysregulation. Tate prescribes the addition of other obstacles — discipline, austerity, manufactured hardship. Haidt prescribes the restoration of obstacles that had already been removed by an earlier generation — outdoor risk, peer conflict, the unsupervised dare.
None of them describe the destination.
The assumption that runs through the entire field - remove, or add, restore or replace, and the child arrives at a strong adult self. The arrival is inevitable. The destination is self-evident. It is not.
The gentle-parented child arrives at adulthood fluent in her feelings but lost. The Tate-trained son arrives at adulthood, jaw clenched, body hard, prepared for a competitive world, and finds himself in a Bugatti alone. The Haidt-restored child can spend a free-range childhood building forts in the woods and arrive at twenty-one to discover that the forts have nothing to do with real life.
These are not distinct problems. It is the same problem in different guises. The path is clear. The destination is missing.
My own field of psychiatry is doing the same thing.
I have been watching young people in my office for years, and many of them do not have a sick brain to begin with. They meet diagnostic criteria and research shows brain changes, but I believe it is often secondary. Thinking about the future makes them so anxious that sometimes they would rather die than deal with it. There is a housing crisis, a financial crisis, inflation, wars. Technology is always threatening to take away jobs. A third of their parents believe AI will take their own job and kids can feel it but don’t know what to do, so they get anxious and depressed. When these feelings become unbearable, they numb themselves with social media, video games, online gambling, and drugs. They just want to be happy. In the absence of a destination, the pleasure becomes it.
They are not failing to launch. They are looking at the launchpad and noticing that the rockets that left before them are crashing into mountains.
They feel sad and depressed—we treat a mood disorder. Worried too much - anxiety disorder. The diagnosis is technically accurate, but sometimes it misses the cause.
I am not alone in this assessment. A well-established therapeutic tradition approaches the problem by asking a central question. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) starts with the “toward” — identifying where a person is heading, what they actually value, and how they would act if they faced something they cared about. ACT treats the absence of this “toward” as the primary issue, challenging the common assumption that once depressive and anxiety symptoms are removed, a sense of direction becomes self-evident.
Tate is right about one thing – that we should listen to our emotions rather than sedate them. But he validates only one emotion—anger. We must listen to all emotions. Most critically, we must hear the inner voice that tells us direction.
AI summarizes all human knowledge. It exposes a deep failure: we cannot see where our kids are heading. Is the destination a place full of meaning and genuine opportunities or a void?
The answers to these questions are not in any of the books and not in any prompts.
Consider a thought experiment.
If an AI model has consumed every parenting manual ever written and internalized every influencer’s digital sermon; if it possesses infinite patience, never tires, and never loses its temper; if it can validate, regulate, and train with perfect attunement.
Would it finally be the perfect parent?
By comparison, we do not look particularly impressive. We are outdated and exhausted. We are overwhelmed by the relentless churn of global news, distracted by the glow of virtual meetings, and haunted by the ghosts of our own unmet ambitions. We frequently fail to provide the patient, regulated, attuned presence that the industry has labeled the gold standard.
Will the AI robot replace the outdated parent?
Come back next Saturday.