Once again, the phone rings at my office and an anxious parent on the line is worried about their Generation Z teen and wants me to help him or her. I gently answer that I can’t, but I trust that they can.

Their concerns usually revolve around their worries for their teenager’s future, based on slacking grades, no long-term career plans, demotivation, sedentariness, lots of lip and little help around the house. So I listen attentively and ask them how linear and sedentary their life has been since that age.

And then I go on to explain to them that linearity is dead, and by that I mean that the direct line from high school to college to the golden cage awaiting retirement is no longer an option for most of this generation. And these kids know it, and anyway, they don’t want it. As one teenager, under anxious parental pressure to choose a career path, told me, “Our parents tell us to follow our dreams, desires, passions, and draw out a career path while trudging off to a job that they’re always bitching about!”

I explain to these parents that the developmental task for 15 to 25-year-olds is to walk through the buffet hall of life without stopping, tasting from one table and then moving on to the next. And to definitely not sit down.

Because they lack lived experiences or raw data, this age group is psychologically unqualified to arrive at informed decisions concerning their long-term future. They are running on hypotheses without a data set. Nor do they have the necessary neurological algorithms to effectively process that data.

So the parent’s task is to push them out there into the world and encourage them to collect lived experiences and data. Essentially, supporting their teens to lace up their shoes and become nomadic.

Being nomadic means exploring new experiential landscapes in the real world where their smartphones are useless as a compass. It means colliding with the real world, scraping up and bumping into real things and real people, and yes, sometimes getting hurt. Even though it is heart-wrenching for parents to witness their kids struggle and suffer, it is a necessary part of data collection.

I read an interesting short novel lately in which two teenage boys sell dream-helmets to helicopter parents to protect their children from getting hurt in their dreams. I think the author nailed it, cutting to the heart of the parental anxiety structuring the zeitgeist for this generation.

In my clinical work with parents, parental anxiety is one the biggest sources of conflict with their teens. Kids don’t need their parent’s anxieties; they need a calm, nurturing and supportive home-base to come back to, where they can lick their wounds from having collided with the world. And it’s back at home-base where attentive and calm parents can help their teens process all that new information, and where the nurturing relationship becomes the template for more sophisticated algorithmic re-wiring.

In nomadic cultures, it is the elders who confidently usher the tribe into unchartered territories. So I encourage parents to guide their children into the big-real-world out there, confident that like them, they will find their way. And I guide the parents to become the reassuring, calm and supportive base that their kids return to, bruised but wiser.

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