The Anxious Generation: Wise Solutions to Combat Growing Anxiety in Children

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Hello friends. On today's podcast, we are going to explore several wise solutions to combat the growing trend of anxiety and mental illness in children, teens, and young adults. So that's what we're going to dive down deep into today on the Foundation Worldview Podcast, where we seek to answer your questions so that you can equip the children that God has placed in your care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and understand the truth of the biblical worldview. I'm your host, Elizabeth Urbanowicz, and I'm thrilled that you've joined me for this episode today.

Now, for those of you who are faithful Foundation Worldview Podcast listeners, you know that for our past two podcasts we have explored the two main causes of this increased anxiety and mental illness in children, teens, and young adults. And what I have outlined in the past two podcasts has come from this book, The Anxious Generation, and the solutions that I'm going to talk through today are also coming from this book. So again, I highly recommend that you check out this book just for a thorough treatment of this topic.

But today what we're going to look at is how these two main factors causing this increase in anxiety and mental illness—which are overprotection in the real world and under-protection in the virtual world—what can we do to actually combat these trends? How can we take practical steps for avoiding these mistakes in raising our children?

So what I'm going to do is outline some of the solutions that the author highlights in this book, specifically for children of different ages. So first we're going to look at what parents of children ages zero through five can do. Then parents of children ages six through thirteen. And the book actually goes into some more things that you can do with children between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. However, that is not the primary target audience of the Foundation Worldview Podcast. So if you want those solutions, definitely make sure that you go and check out the book.

Solutions for Parents of Children Ages Zero Through Five

So first, we're going to look at what can parents of children between the ages of zero and five do? And the first recommendation is to give them plenty of unstructured playtime. And so unstructured playtime just means playtime that you are not facilitating. You can be around—maybe you're in the kitchen or in the living room while your kids are in the playroom or outside playing on the swing set in the backyard—but just plenty of unstructured, not super highly monitored playtime.

So for homeschooling parents, if you have a five-year-old who is in kindergarten this year, this means that most of your kindergarten day should be play. You might be spending an hour to two hours working on academic things, but the majority of the day should be this unstructured playtime. If you are a parent of a child who is in a full-day pre-K or kindergarten program, most of your child's after-school time should be unstructured playtime. If you are sending your child to a school where in kindergarten they are coming home with homework, that homework should be no more than fifteen minutes. After they are spending seven to eight hours in a structured environment at school, there is no reason why at the kindergarten age they should have homework that takes them more than fifteen minutes. They need to spend the majority of their after-school time in free play.

Another thing that the book recommended is for this free play to make sure that you are spending time with other families and children who are of varying ages and stages of development. One thing that we tend to do a lot in the West is to just put everybody in their ages and stages group, but this is not how God designed us. God designed us to be in a very diverse community, and so therefore, we need to make sure that our children are having time not only exposed to other children of their exact age, but to children that are older than them and younger than them.

Another recommendation the book gave for parents of children ages zero to five is to give your children increased responsibility around the home. I'm going to read a quote directly from the book that says, "Trust your young child's desire to help out. Providing children with responsibility around the house makes them feel like an essential part of the family, and giving them more responsibility as they grow could offer some protection against later feelings of uselessness."

So it's really important that we lean into this God-given desire to help, and that we train our children in some basic responsibilities around the house. So involve them in everyday household tasks, not just picking up their toys, but things like clearing their plate from the table, loading and unloading the dishwasher. Now obviously a three-year-old is not going to be able to load and unload the dishwasher, but a five-year-old can. Training them to sweep the kitchen, training them to do some basic dusting—just different responsibilities that they can have.

Another recommendation for parents of children ages zero to five was to avoid screens whenever possible. And when you are engaging with a screen, engage with that screen together. Do not use the screen as a babysitter. Now, I know that this is really hard, that it's really tempting to just use the screen as the babysitter, but let the play set in the backyard be the babysitter. Let the toy box be the babysitter. Don't let the screen be the babysitter.

And a quote directly from the book says, "Smartphones, tablets, computers, and televisions are not suitable for very young children. These devices transmit intense and gripping sensory stimulation; at the same time, they encourage more passive behavior and information consumption, which can delay learning." So we want to avoid screen time whenever possible with children who are five and under.

Solutions for Parents of Children Ages Six Through Thirteen

The recommendations for parents of children ages six through thirteen. First is to purposely surround your child with other families and children who will model behavior you want your child to emulate. Now, this doesn't mean that we avoid all families and children who have behavior we don't want our children to emulate. That would be impossible because everyone we encounter, including ourselves, is sinful. And so we're always going to encounter behavior that we do not want our children to emulate. However, most of the families that we're spending the majority of our time with should be families who are living lifestyles that we want our children to emulate.

And in the book, it outlines how it's during these elementary school years that children start to apply what's known as conformist bias and conformist bias is doing what everyone else is doing, and then prestige bias, which is copying the people who everyone else looks up to. And so it's important for parents to think about who healthy learning models will be and how to get these healthy learning models into their children's lives. So be looking for families and other children that you would like your child to emulate the lifestyle that these families are modeling and start doing life together.

Another recommendation for parents of children ages six to thirteen is to gradually release more responsibility to them. Now, there are seven suggestions that the author of The Anxious Generation recommends to gradually release your children to have more responsibility and to stop overprotecting them in the real world. You may not agree with all seven of these, and that's okay. These are just seven general guidelines of things that you can consider or things in a similar vein that you could consider.

One thing is to practice letting your kids get out of your sight without having a way to reach you. Now, this is not talking about having your six-year-old ride their bike three miles down the road with no way to get in contact with you, but thinking, okay, is it okay for your child to go next door and knock on the neighbor's door and ask if the neighbor's children can come out and play while you are not outside? Just to gradually release this responsibility. By the time they're twelve, it would be wise to allow them to run a simple errand within walking or biking distance without having a way to immediately reach you, where they're going to have to be aware of their surroundings.

The second recommendation is to encourage sleepovers and don't micromanage them. I know not all parents will be comfortable with this, but if you can find another family or two at church who lives very similarly to you, where their children are the kind of children you want your children hanging out with, to be able to have a sleepover or two and don't micromanage them.

If your children go to school and it's a neighborhood school, one of the encouragements was to encourage walking to school in a group. So again, giving children some more responsibility.

The fourth suggestion was reserving after-school time for free play—to not have your child in activities most days of the week. Maybe there's soccer once a week, or maybe there's piano once a week, but the majority of after-school time should be reserved for free play.

Suggestion number five, which was not my favorite one, but some of you might be excited about, was to go camping to allow children to experience more freedom in nature, to spend time being creative where they don't have the conveniences of modern life.

Suggestion number six was to find a sleepaway camp with no devices allowed and no safety theater, meaning allow kids to take more risks, allowing them to have more free play time. Again, I know not all families will be comfortable with this, but if this is something you would like to consider with a Christian camp, that could be something to do.

And then the seventh suggestion was to form child-friendly neighborhoods and playgrounds. So just to start making it in your community just a habit of kids being outside playing. I actually happen to live in a neighborhood that is like this. Right outside of my house all the time, there are children that live on my block that are playing together, that are biking together. Just recently—I'm recording this in April of 2025—the sun has started setting later. And so where I live, the sun doesn't set until around 8:00 PM now. And so every night at around 7:00 PM, a group of neighborhood children gather just a few houses down and they go and they ride their bikes around the neighborhood, and the children in this group are roughly between the ages of seven and twelve. But just to form these neighborhoods that are more child-friendly.

And then the author really encourages parents who may be nervous about engaging in some of these types of activities. He writes, "The cure for such parental anxiety is exposure: experience the anxiety a few times, taking conscious note that your worst fears did not occur, and learn that your child is more capable than you had thought. Each time the anxiety will get weaker."

So again, he's not encouraging and I am not encouraging to take unhealthy risks. We're not going to send a six-year-old out in the backyard to play with a chainsaw, right? We're not going to send a seven-year-old four miles down the road to run an errand on their own. Those things would not be developmentally appropriate. However, sending a twelve-year-old down the road to run an errand—that is developmentally appropriate. Allowing our six-year-old to play by themselves in the backyard is developmentally appropriate. So to be able to take some of these risks and realize that our worst fears are not coming true.

Now, if you're just thinking, "Oh goodness, I am just not sure what is developmentally appropriate and what is not," I highly recommend you check out an organization that is outlined in this book. It's called the Let Grow Project, and if you go to letgrow.org, they have a parent kit that you can download, and it gives you over a hundred different independence activities that your children can work towards. And so it can give you tons of ideas for ways to gradually release more responsibility to your children.

They also have a really neat thing in that packet. It's called a "kid license." And so if you are sending, for example, if you're sending your eight-year-old to the corner store to buy a gallon of milk and there's a good chance that somebody's going to stop them, and then I might be called a negligent parent. What this is, this kid license—on it, it gives the child's name and it says, "I am not wandering off on my own. My parents know where I am. If you'd like to check that out, here's their number," and it gives a place for you to put your number so that they can call you and check out should your child be there. And then there's a little quote at the bottom. It says, "It's adults like you that care about me that help keep me safe." So there's just lots of great things at letgrow.org. So I highly recommend you go and check that out.

Another suggestion for parents of children ages six to thirteen is to model healthy phone usage and screen engagement. So when your children are still in the phase where they do not have a smartphone and you're not allowing them to interact on screens independently, make sure that you are modeling what healthy smartphone usage and screen engagement looks like. So when you're interacting with your child, be completely present. Don't be subject to the dings of your phone every few minutes. If you know you have an important email or an important phone call or an important text coming in, make sure you let your child know, "Hey, this person is supposed to call me or they're supposed to text me at this time, so I'm going to check my phone every few minutes for the next ten minutes." Something like that. But other than that, when it's not super important things like that, don't be checking your phone all the time.

Also, don't use your phone for mindless scrolling or purely entertainment things. Use it as a tool for helping you accomplish tasks. So use the GPS on your phone. If you're trying to search for information from a question your child has just asked you, say, "You know what? Why don't we do a search for this?" and pull out your phone and do that together. But don't model sitting on your phone and using it to just mindlessly scroll through social media or play games. Because what you're doing when you do this is you're sending your child the clear message: "This phone is something that I use to entertain myself," not "This phone is a tool that is used to help me."

Then model the kind of phone usage that you want to be normal for your child because your child will eventually need a phone. It's just part of the world that we live in now. They won't need a phone when they're a child, and this book highly recommends that you not give your child a smartphone before the age of fourteen. Fourteen would be the youngest age that you give a child a smartphone, and even then have really strong boundaries around how they can use the smartphone. But as you're using your smartphone, think, "What would I want my child's usage of a smartphone in their teen and young adult years to look like?" and start modeling that.

Then another suggestion that the book gives is to talk with your preteen about the risks of smartphone usage and then get their thoughts on it. Make clear to them that once you have a smartphone, exposure to pornography is virtually certain. That's something that this book outlines—that once a child has a tablet or a phone in their hand, exposure to pornography is virtually certain. So talk with them about the game plan for what they will do when they do encounter pornography.

Then talk with them about one day when they do have a social media account—which this book recommends no social media until at least the age of sixteen—but once they are in their upper teen years and you let them have a social media account, discuss the risks of sharing public content, that that content can never completely disappear. Even if you take it down, someone might have a screenshot of it. Talk about what the risks are and any potential risks that they see.

How These Solutions Align with Biblical Worldview

So now what we're going to do is we're going to look at how these different suggestions that we've just talked through align with the biblical worldview. Because as I've mentioned in the two previous podcasts, the book The Anxious Generation does not stem from a biblical worldview. The author is coming from a secular perspective. However, his findings align with what we find in Scripture.

Now, all of the suggestions that I've outlined in this podcast focus on developing and maintaining relationships with others or increasing responsibility. So those are the two main focuses: either developing and maintaining relationships or increasing responsibility. And these two things flow directly from the biblical worldview because relationships and responsibility are two foundational parts of bearing God's image.

As I've mentioned in the last podcast and in many other podcasts, we are relational because God is relational. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have been in perfect loving relationship with one another from eternity past. We are designed in God's image, so therefore we need relationship. We are relational, and in fact, the entire story of Scripture is a story about how God has reconciled us to Him in relationship. So relationships are vital. They are part of us being image bearers. We cannot thrive without healthy relationships.

So every time we say no to a screen-based form of entertainment, or every time we resist picking up our phone when it buzzes while we are with our children, we need to remind ourselves that we are seeking to raise our children according to God's design. That's why we're saying no to certain forms of screen-based entertainment and to limiting that and to not being distracted by our phone—because we are seeking to raise our children according to God's design. We are seeking to develop healthy relationships with them, and we are seeking to help them develop healthy relationships with others, and most importantly, healthy relationship with God.

Then as God's image bearers, we were designed to need responsibility, and this is because God has tasked us to be His representatives on this earth. So we need to give our children increased responsibility. It is what they were designed for as God's image bearers. So every time it takes us three times longer to accomplish a task because we're training our children to do it, or every time our stomach gets in knots because we're releasing more responsibility to our child and we have less control, we need to remember that we are equipping our children to fulfill their God-given role by exercising dominion over creation. So it's so important that we are gradually releasing responsibility to our children, that we are teaching them that they are capable, that this is how God designed them.

Conclusion

Now, it's been my prayer that through these three episodes, as we've outlined these findings of this book, The Anxious Generation, that you've been able to see how what has been revealed by research directly aligns with how God has designed us in His image.

Don't miss future episodes like this one! The rising anxiety epidemic in our children is one of the most pressing challenges Christian parents face today. If you want to stay equipped with practical, biblical wisdom for raising resilient children in our digital age, join our email list at foundationworldview.com. You'll receive our latest podcast episodes, helpful parenting resources, and biblical insights delivered straight to your inbox. Plus, explore our carefully crafted curricula designed to help you equip the children in your care to think critically and embrace the truth of God's Word. Visit foundationworldview.com today—because every child deserves to be equipped for the challenges ahead.

If you have a question that you would like for me to answer on a future Foundation Worldview podcast, you can submit that question by going to foundationworldview.com/podcast.

As we leave our time together, my prayer for you is that no matter the situation in which you and the children that God has placed in your care find yourselves, that you would trust that God is working all things together for your good by using all things to conform you more into the image of His Son. I'll see you next time.