As a school principal, I am often asked why so many adolescents today are struggling with anxiety, depression, and dangerous behaviors. The rise is not theoretical. Since 2011, surveys in Israel have shown a steady increase in emotional distress among adolescents – around one in five by the late 2010s, rising to closer to one in four in recent years. What educators experience daily, now has statistical weight behind it.
The explanations most commonly offered are familiar. COVID disrupted two formative years of schooling, severing routines and social frameworks. The past two years of war exposed children to sirens, shelters, funerals, absent parents, and constant threat. These experiences matter; they have left marks that will not disappear quickly.
But they are not the core issue. COVID and war did not create this level of anxiety. They accelerated something deeper: a generation growing up in a world where uncertainty is no longer episodic, but permanent.
A time of anxiety
Over the past two months, as tensions between the United States, Israel, and Iran have played out on the global stage, I have been asked variations of the same question again and again. “What will you do if there’s a war?” “Will there still be school?” “Will you move online?”
These are reasonable questions – once.
But what is more revealing is how often they are asked, and what follows them. I have lost count of the number of people who tell me they “know someone” or “know someone who knows someone” serving on a base who has “seen preparations,” or “heard that planes have been moved from A to B.” Rumors circulate as facts. Speculation becomes certainty. Anxiety presents itself as vigilance.
Parents tell me they are afraid to let their children go out at night or on weekends. Some refuse to allow travel – even between cities – because “you never know what might happen.” Others postpone plans indefinitely, waiting for clarity that never comes.
Children watch all of this.
They learn, not from lectures but from behavior, that life must be suspended until the future becomes predictable. They learn that uncertainty is dangerous, not manageable. They learn that fear is preparation.
But uncertainty is not a phase we are passing through.
Living in a world of crisis
Political instability, rapid technological change, artificial intelligence, climate anxiety, economic volatility, and global conflict mean that we are already living in a period where there will always be something unresolved, something looming, something unknowable. Wars no longer begin or end decisively. Crises overlap. Information arrives faster than understanding.
For today’s adolescents, the question is not how to cope with a single crisis, but how to live in a world where the next one is always possible.
This reality demands that we fundamentally rethink the role of parents.
Parental responsibility can no longer be understood only as protection from danger. It must now be understood as modelling how to live when danger cannot be fully eliminated. When a young child cries because he fell off a swing, the solution is not to take him home and never let him on a swing again. Rather, we tell him that we can see his pain and that we know that it must hurt. More often than not, the child’s next move will be to turn around and get back on the swing because he knows he must deal with reality.
Children do not need parents who can answer every “what if.” They need parents who can say, implicitly through their actions: we don’t know what will happen, and we can still live well today.
When parents speak constantly about worst-case scenarios, children internalize helplessness. When adults cannot make plans because “everything might change,” children learn that agency is fragile. When fear dominates family life, anxiety becomes the emotional baseline.
This does not mean ignoring reality or taking reckless risks. It means choosing containment over catastrophizing. It means filtering information instead of flooding children with it. It means continuing routines, social lives, and forward motion even when the future is unclear.
Most importantly, it means recognizing that calm is not denial – it is leadership.
Schools can provide structure and support; therapists can help children process distress. But the most powerful lessons about uncertainty are taught at home, quietly, every day. Children learn whether uncertainty is something to endure or something to be paralyzed by.
We cannot promise our children a stable world. That would be dishonest.
But we can promise them something far more important: adults who are steady even when answers are unavailable, who do not outsource their sense of safety to rumors or predictions, and who show – through daily life – that uncertainty does not get to run the household.
In a world where not knowing is here to stay, this may be the most critical role parents now play.
The writer is the principal of Doco Ankori, the School for Social Awareness and Action Research in Petah Tikva. He is also a counsellor for parents of adolescents.