Lawless Thinking brings you insights, tools and encouragement direct from my world of bold C-suite strategy delivery.

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Thought of the Week

“Nothing is as easy to sell as a victim narrative”

Jim Lawless

TL;DR

• Our school’s parental WhatsApp group lit up this week: phones, AI and the ‘Anxious Generation’.

• Underneath the concern sat a trending dysfunction: performative blame and public self-righteousness instead of serious adult agency and accountability over a parenting challenge.

• The same dysfunction shows up at work. Our role as leaders, in the boardroom and at the kitchen table, is the same: ‘create’ adults who take their own Decisions and their own Actions to deliver their own Results within clear boundaries.

• Social media personalities such as Jonathan Haidt have become standard bearers for that dysfunction. He is right that something has gone wrong. But he allocates responsibility based on correlation rather than cause and he is wrong about whose job it is to protect our children. The popularity of his outsourced parenting message is worrying.

• The problem is serious, damaging for our children and our economy, so I won’t be bowing to fashion in addressing it.

The Group Chat

Our daughter’s school’s parental WhatsApp group lit up last week. Phones. Social media. AI. Phones = mental health crises (not communication between friends or augmented thinking). The “Anxious Generation” guy says …

People seemed keener to be on message and to blame-on-trend than to share strategies – Decisions and Actions – to bring about the Result of protecting our daughters and preparing them for the real world they will (they already do) inhabit.

Capable, accomplished and often very senior people had arranged themselves in an extremely fashionable, virtuous circle of complaint about the school; the algorithm; the tech bro billionaires; the Government.

This victim narrative is encouraged by authors, social media personalities, mainstream media and the government. It’s big business. It wins advertising eyes and ears, political votes and audience ratings.

What Is A Parent’s Primary Job?

I’ve been reading and reflecting on that question for 29 years of parenting (so far, my youngest is twelve). I certainly do not propose my view is ‘correct’.

But my personal compass bearing is: To love, nurture, role model and teach my children to become adults who can function fully and happily in society: without me.

What’s yours?

(I’d be happy if they lived with me forever. I adore their company. But live with me whilst being able to function fully without me – or I have failed them, in my opinion.)

And who is responsible for parenting our children? School? Tech bros? Regulators? the Prime Minister? Of course not.

Parents are responsible, hopefully with ‘a village’ in support.

I take the increase in anxiety amongst young people extremely seriously. The viciousness of both the ‘femisphere’ and ‘manosphere’ are surely just symptoms of a terrible pain and isolation.

I have a duty to help my daughters navigate the world as it is presented. Not as I wish it to be. That world presents very real dangers therefore my job is to consciously parent her to navigate these.

I can’t support my daughters to live healthy and anxiety-free lives in a world of social media, AI and smartphones by demanding others to change the world to my preference.

That is lobbying; and it is legitimate work. But it is not parenting.

What Is The Job Of A Leader?

In a world of increasing pace, increasing investment in intellectual capital and increasing demands for adaptability and managing uncertainty:

A leader must surely be aiming for happy, fully functioning, independent adults who can operate without them to deliver the strategic outcomes the leaders have clearly set.

Ironically, despite the comparison to parenting, this is about moving away from ‘parent-child’ to ‘adult-adult’ accountability within boundaries.

A Word On Haidt

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a carefully constructed social media phenomenon and also a book. It is an easy flag for broadcasters to gather around: and gather they do in their droves. It removes accountability from us as parents and gives us all pitchforks to wave at the castle. There is nothing as easy to sell as a victim narrative.

Let me be fair to him before I disagree. He has shown that adolescent mental health, particularly for girls, deteriorated sharply across the Western world from around 2010, and he is right to refuse to look away from this terrible suffering.

His central claim, however, is causal. The evidence is correlational, and at population level the numbers are vanishingly small. The same window also covers the financial crisis, the collapse of youth services, youth clubs and libraries, rising academic pressure, reducing job opportunities (that are not yet due to AI) a (statistically largely unjustified) terror of letting children out unaccompanied, and a long decline in unstructured childhood time alone and with peers that began well before the iPhone.

Well used, the smart phone is a vital way for our young people to connect with friends, overcome homework worries or have an expert ‘teacher’ explain a tricky maths problem to them step by step.

But this takes intentional parenting, just as the workplace requires intentional leadership.

We need to ‘get us on their side’. Not ‘get them on our side’ if we want our messages to land.

I have a different candidate for the more causal relationship between screen and childhood mental distress.

The first relationship a child has with a screen is mediated by their relationship with the adult holding one. What an enormous number of children have learned, before they have ever held a phone of their own, is that the device in their parent’s hand is more interesting than they are.

That seems as plausibly causal to me than the smartphone in the hands of the child, but it is a hard sell compared to the case Haidt makes for governments and billionaires to be blamed.

But my deepest objection is structural. Haidt’s framing positions children as objects of policy, acted upon by algorithms and rescued by regulators.

The parent is almost absent. The child is passive throughout. Tech bros and regulators run the show.

The lesson she learns is that the rules of her life are written by powerful adults elsewhere, and her job is to wait for the adults to write better ones.

Which is, arguably, the same lesson that has appealed to the adults on the WhatsApp group demanding that somebody must do something to parent their child.

Subjects, Not Objects

There is a phrase I keep coming back to. It was told to me by the legendary acting teacher Ian Ricketts of Guildford School of Acting when I studied under him in the late 90’s.

“Children are not preparing for life. They are living their lives.”

The twelve-year-old in our house is not in a holding pattern waiting for the adult version of herself to begin. She is, right now, an active human being making decisions about who she is and what she does, in real time, with real consequences and immediate feedback.

Our job is not to delay her use of tecnology until we have removed the influence of the tech bros.

Our job is to give her the tools to live the life she is already living and to fly the nest successfully, in the technological landscape she inhabits.

That is a parenting agenda. It happens to also be a leadership agenda.

…At The Speed Of Trust

Change happens at the speed of trust.

Not the speed of policy, not the speed of legislation, not the speed of the next bestselling author on the “podcast for Instagram algorithm soundbites” circuit. Trust.

A child who trusts you will tell you what she saw online. A child who does not, will not.

A direct report who trusts you will tell you he lost a tool on the deck of an aircraft carrier. One who does not will hide that dangerous error.

Get you on their side. Show up consistently. Manage your emotions.

Trust is a pattern. It is built by being consistent, present, interested, and by handling well the things people tell you. Lose your temper once when she confesses something difficult and you have taught a lesson no legislation can unteach, which is do not bring this home.

My Fortnight

I’ve been to two athletics meets with my youngest daughter this fortnight. Many phones on view. Mainly being used by friends to find friends around the track and by youth athletes (who train their disciplined hearts out) to calculate target split times for their parents to shout from the sidelines at strategic positions!

I’ve also delivered a virtual presentation for a global pharma company, a day of detailed moonshot design for a most fantastic consultancy and a trip to Paris to present to a tech conference amongst preparing for an exciting Executive Team high performing team design workshop next week.

And then there was a marathon! 

Heartfelt thanks to everybody who supported Together for Short Lives and me.  You’re amazing and every single penny makes a difference.

It turns out that when they say “if you can do a half you can do a full” they lied. A ‘race’ of two halves with a half marathon on target and a cramped hobble home from docklands. 

But it was done. I have NEVER received so much support as was screamed out by the spectators across the route and – if you have been meaning to support Together for Short Lives and the families they serve in the most awful of times – now is your chance.

Book of the Fortnight

How to Raise an Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims.

Lythcott-Haims spent a decade as Dean of Freshmen at Stanford watching capable, accomplished, well-meaning parents quietly disable their own children. The work of parenting is the deliberate, patient transfer of agency to the human in your house, and the substitutes we have invented for that work, however well intentioned, are not working.

Read it with a notebook. The chapter on what she calls checklisted childhood may sting in places, and that is rather the point.

A Book for the Children

You Are Awesome by Matthew Syed.

Syed wrote this for nine to twelve year olds, distilling the growth-mindset thinking from his adult books Bounce and Black Box Thinking into something a child can pick up and use. Capability is built, not given, and the person doing the building is the child themselves.

It’s more on growth mindset than agency and power – but then the foundation of a growth mindset is an empowering: “Perhaps I can!”

Write Your Story 🖋️

Jim