Sooner or later it comes. At dinner, in the back seat, just before falling asleep. A child asks what the world will be like when they grow up. Sometimes the question is more direct: Will it be okay?

We know the moment when we hesitate. Half a second too long. Then we say something reassuring. It will be fine. Don't worry. Or we change the subject and ask about homework.

Children notice the hesitation. They notice it more clearly than any answer that follows.

Hardly anyone talks about this moment. Not in offices, not at conferences, and certainly not in professional networks. There we talk about strategies, markets and technologies. There the future is a line of business. About the future as a question at the kitchen table, we stay silent. Yet for millions of people it is the question that truly occupies them at night.

Who Is Actually Afraid

The numbers show how widespread the unease is. In a survey by the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of Germans expect today's children to end up financially worse off than their parents. In France, Italy and the United Kingdom it is around eight in ten. In many countries this figure has reached record levels.

Beyond money, many parents have lost their bearings. In the United Kingdom, almost half of parents say the pace of change leaves them struggling to give their children career advice. In the United States, more than half of parents of teenagers are unsure whether their child is being prepared for a working world shaped by artificial intelligence. In China, four in five better-off parents worry about their children's job prospects. One in five of them openly admits not knowing how to prepare.

This is not a national feeling. It is a global one.

The children themselves carry a heavy load. In the German trend study "Jugend in Deutschland 2026", 29 percent of 14 to 29-year-olds say they feel they need psychological help. One in five has concrete plans to leave the country. In an international study of 10,000 young people, three quarters describe the future as frightening.

And yet there is a finding that surprises. The young are more confident than we are. In a UNICEF and Gallup survey across 21 countries, 57 percent of young people believe the world is getting better with each generation. Among older people it is 39 percent. With every year of age, this confidence measurably declines. The German Shell Youth Study shows a similar picture. The young are more worried than they have been in a long time. Still, the majority looks with confidence at the future of society.

So the fear does not sit with the children first. It sits with us. When we hesitate at the kitchen table, we often pass on more worry than the child brought along.

The Map That No Longer Holds

Parents have always given their children a map. Learn something solid. Work hard. Then you will find your place. This map was often unfair. It was often wrong. But it existed. It rested on the experience that the children's world would be similar enough to the parents' world.

That assumption no longer holds. In the World Economic Forum's survey, employers expect almost two in five core skills of workers to change by 2030. Professions we recommend today could disappear before our children finish their training. The professions they will work in often have no name yet.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead described this condition as early as 1970. She distinguished cultures in which the young learn from the old from cultures in which both generations learn from each other. Then she described a third form. In it, the old must learn from the young. The reason is simple: the world of the young has become foreign to the old. Mead saw this as an exception of her time. Today it is everyday life in almost every family.

Anyone who wants to explain the future to a child therefore faces an unfamiliar situation. We have more life experience than our children. But that experience comes from a world that is dissolving.

What Was Different Before

One could object that parents never had a certain answer. For the generation of our own parents, that is even true.

In the early 1980s, the psychologist Sibylle Escalona asked schoolchildren in New York what the world would look like in ten years. Around 70 percent spontaneously spoke about the possibility of nuclear war. Studies in Finland, Australia and the Soviet Union found similar fears. The parents of these children had no answer either. They did not know whether there would be a future at all.

But their uncertainty had a different shape from ours. They asked whether the world would go on. If it did, they knew fairly well what it would look like. The same professions. The same schools. The same paths into adult life. The fear was directed at a single abyss. Beyond it lay familiar ground.

For us it is the other way around. The world will very likely go on. But no one can describe what it will look like. There is no single abyss we could warn against. There is a terrain that changes while we step onto it.

This is what is new. Earlier generations knew the fear of the end. We are the first generation of parents who cannot describe their children's world.

What Children Really Hear

The era of nuclear fear also produced a finding that helps us today. Researchers observed back then that children looked at the future with more confidence when their parents became active themselves. These children considered the great problems solvable. A child psychiatrist who worked with many families at the time drew a clear conclusion. Children respond more to what their parents are than to what they say.

He observed something else. Children do not break when parents openly admit their worries. It becomes hard when parents hide their fear. If they then expect cheerfulness from the child, the child carries a burden that no one explains.

This changes the question at the kitchen table. We search for the right sentence. Perhaps it does not exist. What the child takes in is our attitude. It sees whether we freeze in front of the future. Or it sees that we are working on it.

An Answer That Is Not a Forecast

So what can we say? We cannot predict which professions will remain. We cannot promise that everything will be fine. Both would be dishonest. Children would see through it sooner or later.

But we can say something else. The future is not something that simply descends on us. People shape it. We are among them. This is not reassurance. It is the most accurate description of the situation we have. Precisely because no one knows what the world will look like in thirty years, it is open. Openness means risk. It also means room to move.

What we can pass on is therefore no longer a map. It is the ability to walk without one. A child who has experienced how to correct a mistake fears the unknown less. A child who has seen people solve something together trusts themselves more. Such experiences do not become outdated. They hold in every world that comes.

It is worth noticing where this insight appears as well. The same employers who can no longer promise secure professions count resilience, curiosity and lifelong learning among the most important skills of the future. The economy is describing the same luggage that parents can pack at the kitchen table.

This luggage includes a sentence many of us avoid: I don't know. It is not a failure. Spoken to a child, it is an invitation to find out together.

What We Owe Them as a Society

Up to this point, this sounds like a task for individual families. It is not.

In the studies, the young generation says very clearly what it is missing. The youth researcher Klaus Hurrelmann reads from the German trend study that young people feel too little involved in the great questions of the future. In the international study of 10,000 young people, anxiety was closely linked to the impression that governments are not doing enough. Many of the respondents experience this as betrayal.

It is the same observation as at the kitchen table, only on a larger scale. Children measure us by what we do. That is true for parents. It is just as true for societies. A society that preaches confidence to its children while postponing decisions creates exactly the distrust that shows up in the numbers.

A civilization reveals its attitude toward the future in how it treats those who will inhabit that future. Of all people, they have the quietest voice today. Many of them are not yet allowed to vote. They sit on no supervisory boards. They negotiate no budgets. Yet they bear the consequences of almost every decision for the longest time.

If we cannot give them a forecast, we owe them visible action. Young people already sit at some of these tables, as youth delegates at the United Nations or as young members of parliament. What matters is what their voice changes there. If it is only heard, participation remains a ritual.

The Answer We Can Give

Perhaps we really are the first generation of parents without an answer. There is no shame in that. There is a task in it.

The next time a child asks whether it will be okay, the most honest answer is not a prediction. It is this: I don't know. But I am working on it, and you will be able to as well.

Whether we mean it, the child will not read from our words anyway. It will read it from what we do the next morning.

Homepage: https://planet-futures.org