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As a psychologist mom of a 2 year old daughter and a 4 year old son, I naturally spend a LOT of time thinking about who I hope they’ll become, and what I should be doing as a parent to help them achieve their full potential. At the moment, that usually means breaking out of my reverie to slice some grapes or help them locate a sock, but I can’t help but grapple with the question after I tuck them into bed and take the time to reflect on the state of the world. 

I think the biggest challenges that young 2nd and 3rd gen children and teens will face are threefold: an unprecedented mental health crisis, in spite of more access to resources than ever before; the high expectations of our community’s immense success; and, the challenges of a digital world designed to deprive them of sleep, connection, and the ability to focus. 

Thankfully, I think that age-old Hindu teachings and practices are still well equipped to inoculate them. 

Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, offers a clear diagnosis to the mental health crisis afflicting Gen Z and Gen Alpha, and a straightforward cure that I think Hindu American parents are well suited to understand and apply. 

He posits that as American parents have moved away from giving their children early autonomy, they’ve also encountered a society that’s increasingly become insular and disconnected, and both of these things have fed into each other. We’ve become more risk averse, and as a result of the low expectations parents hold of their children, they’ve become less autonomous. 

We don’t let our kids ride their bikes outside alone because we don’t have the implicit trust that our neighbors will call us if something is wrong, and then we never meet our neighbors to build the trust, and we all stay inside behind the “safety” of our devices. 

Though Haidt is a self-professed atheist, he shares that tapping into religion and spirituality is a possible way to start reversing the harms of this insulation. Our opportunity is to see that we can give our children a strong grounding in Hindu teachings that help them see all beings as connected and divine, and the necessity of transcending the experience of ourselves and our egos to feel that connection. 

Of course, the biggest threat to our high achieving Hindu American kids is less likely to be the low expectations that Haidt worries is afflicting our children, but rather the pressure of high expectations and an American culture that pushes our children to constantly be their own harshest critic. 

Even as these expectations have pushed too many of our children too far, the solution is the same as for the stifling of low expectations: to feel grounded in our connected divinity, to learn to step out of our anxiety prone minds. With a grounding in dharma, we can address the pulls of the material world that make our children use achievement rather than their character to assess themselves and come to the conclusion that they “aren’t good enough”. 

When it comes to our kids, thinking about how honest the progenitors of social media have been about their intent to successfully take more and more of our intention, with things like endless scrolling and the like button, while insisting that there are positive benefits of social media, brings to mind the time the tobacco industry gaslit us into believing their products were safe. 

While we respect the ability of adults to gauge the costs and benefits of indulging in a cigarette, I think that Haidt is right that we will look back in horror at the ease with which we allowed social media into the hands of children and adolescents who are absolutely unequipped to be able to protect themselves from technology with such profound power to harm their growing brains and developing power of attention, their ability to connect meaningfully and vulnerably with peers, and their ability to transcend their selves. 

The solution is simple, if not easy: keep our kids off of social media as long as possible, and give them autonomy in the real world instead of the digital one. Hindu culture reminds us we can do this and more. We can remember that we must model, not preach, the behavior we want our children to embrace. 

The challenges to Hindu American parents in 2024 are unique. However, the Hindu Dharmas, in their ancient yet forever applicable nature, give us the tools to guide our children, and modern psychological science has come to see the profound power and truth of what we’ve long known, with more and more grace. We’re all divine, we’re all connected, and knowing and practicing this equips us to make the most of our lives.

 

The author is a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice, and serves on the Board of Directors for the Hindu American Foundation.

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of New India Abroad)