Six Ways to Build the Village: Raising Grounded Kids in a Distracted World

Raising kids can feel overwhelming, especially when it comes to helping them grow into grounded and capable humans in a world swirling with chaos, distractions, and pressures.

To complicate matters, kids are developmentally impelled to prioritize peers over their parents when they hit puberty. This often  happens at precisely the same moment as they are entering the digital world.  If there are not meaningful community relationships in place in the real world, it is a good bet that they will find these online instead.

This is not always bad. There are countless stories of kids in smaller communities finding others in the world who share their niche-weird interests. I will never forget meeting a group of classically trained UK music nerds who shared my passion for mid 1990s Tom Middleton and his Global Communication project in an AOL Chatroom (!!)

For kids who struggle with the real world (and there are many good reasons for this), in-person community can be a strong protective factor against mental distress.  And when families come together with shared values and a bit of intention, they can create something powerful: a living structure that helps kids build identity, agency, belonging, and purpose, preparing them for greater resilience in the ever-increasingly uncertain future.

Community-based rites of passage don’t have to be elaborate. They just need to be thoughtful, consistent, and rooted in connection. Here are a few basic building blocks to help you get started.

1. Create community You can’t start this too early. Find other families that your kids (and you) vibe with and create a pod. Talk to the other parents about the benefits of long-term community and discuss different ways to help animate your kids’ inner lives.  Try to come to some agreement about device access – which can really compromise identity, agency, belonging and purpose as kids hit adolescence - and back each other up when it comes to enforcing these. Create some ground rules and shared agreements and a meaningful process for managing disagreement.

2. Help kids practice developing identity, agency, identity, belonging. It is amazing how many opportunities there are to do these when you focus on it. Especially as kids hit upper elementary school they are wired to be more independent, so give them tasks, and ask them to reflect on their experiences.

3. Help kids become aware of their bodies. There is so much research now about the wisdom of the body. Teach kids (and yourself!) to slow down and experience the body’s insights and signals. Where does intuition reside and how do you notice it? What does stress feel like? Joy? Anger?  What are the benefits of pausing before acting out of anger? Own it when you slip up, and they are more likely to do the same.

4. Talk candidly about shadow. Carl Jung said that the shadow is the part in each of us that we either don’t want to look at or we can’t recognize. (To find your shadow, notice whom you’re jealous of, and who you judge harshly. There is probably some of your shadow living in there.)

   Help kids understand that it’s OK by sharing age-appropriate personal examples, like “Sometimes I get really irritated when I’m tired—and I notice that part of me wants to snap at people. When I see it, I take a deep breath.”

5. Create rituals. Bring a regular element of reverence where everyone stops to take a moment to be together. I worked with a pod of 3 families who, whenever there was a birthday, they got together the following weekend to celebrate with a special dinner and appreciations of the birthday person – parents and grandparents included.

   Another family I talked to intentionally shares moments of awe and gratitude at the end of the day. We know from research that awe, gratitude, and forgiveness are linked to improved physical health, stronger relationships, and greater life satisfaction.

6. Foster their imaginations. Play games like “What would you do if X” or take a page from Trevor Noah’s podcast “If I ran the world I would…” Follow up with questions that help them think about ethics and morality. Kids understand critical ethical reasoning and moral imagination intuitively - they just need practice using it.

AI is poised to change everything, but there is no way it can take our essential humanity unless we let it.  In future posts, we will share some examples of modern, community-based rites of passage adolescents.