The Adulthood Deficit: Are We Preparing Children for Life?

We spend a great deal of time preparing children for adulthood. We teach them mathematics, science, languages, technology and communication. Increasingly, we also speak about emotional intelligence, resilience, mindfulness and wellbeing. We prepare them for examinations, university, careers and an increasingly complex and uncertain world. Yet, somewhere in this journey, I sometimes find myself asking an uncomfortable question: are we really preparing our young people for adulthood, or are we simply preparing them to perform successfully until they reach it?

We often speak about an intelligence deficit, a motivation deficit, a resilience deficit or, more recently, a growing mental health crisis among young people. Perhaps there is another gap that deserves our attention—an adulthood deficit. This is not a deficit of intelligence or ability. Our young people today are, in many ways, extraordinarily capable, informed and accomplished. Rather, it may be a deficit of opportunity: a lack of sufficient opportunities to practise the everyday psychological capacities that adulthood demands.

After all, adulthood is not simply an age or a milestone that one reaches at eighteen, twenty-one or even twenty-five. Adulthood is also about learning to take responsibility for oneself, making decisions and living with their consequences, managing relationships, tolerating uncertainty, recovering from mistakes and experiencing discomfort without immediately expecting someone else to remove it. These are not capacities that can be acquired through a certificate, an examination or a university degree. They are learned through experience.

Agency – A Resilient Practise

The internal architecture of adulthood is built slowly, and perhaps one of the most important beliefs a young person can develop is a simple one: “I can figure this out.” Not because they necessarily know the answer, but because they trust themselves enough to search for it, ask questions, make mistakes and continue. That, to me, is agency. Agency does not mean doing everything alone. It means recognising that one has a role to play in solving one's own problems and shaping one's own life.

Young people need opportunities to experience failure without concluding that they themselves are failures. They need to experience rejection without believing that they are unworthy. They need to wait, to be frustrated, to make decisions and, occasionally, to make the wrong ones. They need to learn the difference between saying, “I don't know how to do this yet,” and saying, “I can't do this.” The first leaves the possibility of growth open; the second can quietly close the door. These capacities cannot simply be developed through advice, lectures or motivational speeches. They need to be practised.

Evolving Learning Spaces

This is where schools have a particularly important role to play. Education is not only about the acquisition of knowledge. It is also about providing young people with opportunities to develop coping skills, problem-solving abilities, interpersonal skills and emotional regulation. Supportive environments matter enormously, but so do opportunities to exercise independence within those environments. The challenge for schools is to create spaces where young people feel safe enough to take risks, make mistakes and occasionally get things wrong without fear that their entire identity or future is at stake.

And here lies one of the great paradoxes of achievement. Consider a young person who has done everything right. They have excellent grades, leadership positions, certificates, internships and extracurricular achievements. Their university application is strong and their CV is impressive. From the outside, they appear ready for the world. Yet, internally, they may still be wondering, “Am I actually good enough?”

This is where competence and confidence can become very different things. A young person may know how to achieve without necessarily knowing how to trust themselves. They may have become exceptionally good at meeting expectations without ever having had sufficient opportunities to define their own. They know how to ask, “What do I need to do to get an A?” but perhaps they have not been asked often enough, “What do you actually think?” That distinction is important. Education should certainly develop competent young people, but it must also develop individuals who can stand independently, exercise judgement, take responsibility and live with the possibility of occasionally being wrong.

A World Based on Substitution

Before, however, we locate the problem entirely within young people, perhaps we should also examine the world we have created around them. Modern childhood is increasingly supervised, structured and optimised. We remind children about assignments, negotiate deadlines, monitor friendships, intervene in disagreements, organise schedules, solve logistical problems and anticipate difficulties before they arise. Most of this comes from love, and much of it is both understandable and necessary. But there is a point at which support can quietly become substitution.

If an adult repeatedly solves a problem for a child, the child may become very good at receiving solutions but may never develop the confidence that comes from solving the problem themselves. If we constantly remove discomfort, young people may have fewer opportunities to discover that discomfort is survivable. If we intervene in every conflict, they may never become sufficiently practised in repairing relationships. If every failure is softened, reframed or rescued, failure itself can begin to feel catastrophic rather than instructive.

From Protection to Preparation

This does not mean that we should withdraw support or leave children to struggle alone. Children need adults. Young people need security, connection and guidance. The question, therefore, is not whether we should support them, but how we support them. Perhaps the journey of support needs to evolve—from “I will do this for you,” to “I will do this with you,” and eventually to “I trust you to do this yourself.” That, perhaps, is the real movement from protection to preparation.

As parents and educators, one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves may not be, “How do I make sure my child never struggles?” but rather, “How do I make sure my child knows what to do when they struggle?” That is a fundamentally different understanding of wellbeing. We cannot, and perhaps should not, protect young people from every disappointment, difficult relationship, poor decision, rejection, failure or period of uncertainty. Our responsibility is to ensure that they gradually develop the psychological equipment to navigate these experiences.

Young people need opportunities to make decisions, make mistakes, apologise, repair relationships, wait, initiate, fail and try again. They need to learn how to ask for help without surrendering responsibility. Most importantly, they need opportunities to discover that they are capable. Capability is not built simply by repeatedly telling a young person, “You can do it.” It is built through experiences that eventually allow them to say, with some confidence, “I did it.”

Redefining Educational Success

Perhaps, therefore, we also need to broaden our understanding of educational success. A successful school should not only produce students who score well, communicate effectively and gain admission to good universities. It should also help develop young adults who can enter unfamiliar situations and navigate them. Young people who can disagree without becoming disrespectful, receive criticism without falling apart, make decisions without requiring constant validation and fail without losing their sense of self. Young people who can ask for help while continuing to own the problem, and who can occasionally say the three words that adulthood sometimes demands most: “I was wrong.”

Perhaps the real adulthood deficit is not that young people today are incapable of adulthood. Perhaps they are simply under-practised in it. And that changes the conversation entirely.

The task before families and schools is not to make life easier for young people, nor is it to deliberately make life harder. It is to find the right balance between support and agency, connection and independence, protection and responsibility. From the inside out, we need to help young people develop self-awareness, judgement, emotional regulation, resilience, confidence and a stable sense of self. From the outside in, we need to create homes, schools and communities that provide safety without over-functioning, guidance without control and connection without removing autonomy.

Our young people need to know that someone has their back. But they also need to develop the belief that they can move forward on their own.

Preparing Children for Adulthood

Perhaps that is what preparing children for adulthood should really mean. It is not about producing young people who never doubt themselves, never fail or always know exactly what to do. Life will not offer any of us those guarantees. It is about developing young people who can walk into uncertainty and say, “I don't know yet, but I can figure it out.”

That, perhaps, is one of the clearest markers of adulthood. And perhaps the antidote to the adulthood deficit lies precisely there: in creating enough space, both inside and outside, for our young people to discover that they are far more capable than we have sometimes given them the opportunity to believe.