Stop Telling Kids the World Is a Terrible Place
We think we’re helping children by teaching them about the world’s dangers. What if we’re just making them more anxious and less resilient?
NOTE: Tomorrow (May 28), I’ll be hosting University of Pennsylvania psychologist Jeremy Clifton for an AEI webinar exploring his ground-breaking work on primal world beliefs—the subconscious assumptions we all make about the world and its character. Clifton’s work is virtually unknown in K–12 education, yet it raises profound questions about the direction of social-emotional learning (SEL), trauma-informed pedagogy, and what we think it means to “prepare children for the real world.”
👉 Register here
Adults who care about children tend to believe it’s in their best interest to approach the world with caution. A naive or overly trusting child, we assume, is more likely to stumble into danger. So we try to instill a sense of wariness. Teachers and parents often pride themselves on being “real” with kids—helping them confront the harsh truths of poverty, racism, climate change, and other systemic challenges. We treat this as a mark of intellectual seriousness.
But what if this common impulse is wrong?
That’s the argument suggested by an emerging body of research led by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Jeremy Clifton. For the last decade, Clifton and his colleagues have been studying what they call primal world beliefs—deep, subconscious assumptions we hold about the nature of the world. Their research shows that cultivating a pessimistic worldview may do more harm than good—especially for children.
Clifton’s team collected and categorized thousands of statements beginning with “The world is…” from religious texts, novels, political speeches, and a corpus of more than 2.2 billion tweets. From this immense archive, they compiled an inventory of over 1,700 distinct claims about the nature of the world. To bring order to this expansive dataset, the researchers applied statistical techniques—analyzing patterns and clusters among the responses—to identify the most common and psychologically significant dimensions of belief. This yielded three core themes, which they dubbed the “Big Three” primal world beliefs:
Is the world safe or dangerous?
Is it enticing or dull?
Is it alive or mechanistic?
These beliefs shape how people move through the world. Someone who believes the world is dangerous is more likely to feel anxious and hypervigilant. A person with a safe-world belief feels more trustful and at ease. People who believe the world is enticing tend to be more curious and optimistic; those who find it dull are more likely to withdraw. Someone who sees the world as alive may find meaning and awe in nature or human relationships; those who see it as mechanistic may perceive events as impersonal or disconnected.
Crucially—and counter-intuitively—these beliefs are not simply shaped by life experience. In fact, Clifton’s research suggests the opposite: people’s primal beliefs tend to shape how they interpret their experiences. In one study, Clifton and his colleague Peter Meindl found that people’s primal beliefs—especially negative ones—strongly predicted lower life satisfaction, worse health, diminished flourishing, and even increased risk of suicide. The results were strikingly consistent across professions, personality types, and demographics.
This insight should challenge many core assumptions of today’s education culture. From trauma-informed pedagogy to social justice curricula, many well-meaning educators have embraced a mission of radical truth-telling—foregrounding systemic injustice, historical oppression, and future threats in the name of equity and authenticity.
But this approach may be inadvertently teaching children to adopt more negative primals. In one 2021 study, Clifton and Meindl found that 53 percent of parents preferred dangerous world beliefs for their children. They thought it would better prepare them for life. No similar data exist on teachers, but many features of contemporary education at least tacitly impart to children a view of the world as bad and broken. Much of today’s pedagogical thought, practice, and training instructs teachers that many or even most children have suffered adverse life events that are tantamount to trauma.
In K–12 education, this trend toward portraying the world as broken and unjust has become especially visible in the literature we assign and the civic posture we model. A century ago, textbooks like the McGuffey Readers instilled values like thrift, modesty, and perseverance. But beginning in the 1960s and accelerating over the last two decades, young adult literature has veered sharply into darker, more pathologized territory. Novels like Thirteen Reasons Why, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The Hate U Give have become classroom staples. Many schools now treat themes of depression, abuse, suicide, and systemic injustice as not only appropriate but essential to engage students and prepare them for the world.
Even our approach to civic education has shifted. The traditional study of government and history has given way to “action civics,” in which students are asked to identify and organize around real-world injustices. But this, too, risks reinforcing a negative primal: that the world is filled with problems and that one’s job as a citizen is to respond to crisis.
None of this is to deny that suffering exists, or that students shouldn’t engage seriously with complex issues. But we should ask: what are the long-term effects of a school environment where the world is portrayed as a dangerous, unjust, declining place—and where safety and affirmation are prioritized above resilience?
This question takes on greater urgency in the context of rising youth mental health challenges. After the pandemic, 75 percent of schools reported staff concerns about student depression and anxiety. SEL has been proposed as a solution, but it, too, often assumes a posture of psychological fragility and risk-aversion. The Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, cites research suggesting two-thirds of children experience a traumatic event by age sixteen—a claim that has helped propel trauma-informed teaching into the mainstream. Yet even the original ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) researchers have warned that their metrics are being misused, including as de facto diagnostic tools in schools.
Educators have good intentions. But they may also be unintentionally modeling and reinforcing negative primals. They are also operating under a belief—deeply embedded in teacher training programs—that to be socially just and equitable is to be emotionally attuned to harm, trauma, and injustice.
What if, instead, we encouraged children to see the world as basically safe, full of wonder, and alive with possibility?
Clifton’s research does not minimize the existence of suffering or suggest that children should be shielded from truth. Rather, it suggests that the way we frame the world to children—especially in their formative years—can have a lifelong impact on their mental health, flourishing, and resilience. Children who grow up with positive primals don’t just feel better. They tend to do better. They are more curious, more motivated, and more engaged with the world.
Research on how primal world beliefs affect mental health and well-being is in its infancy, but for now, Clifton counsels those who care about children not to assume teaching them that the world is bad is helpful. “Personally, I plan to teach my daughter specific bad things to watch out for but, on balance, the world is good,” Clifton says. “There’s beauty everywhere—we have only to open our eyes to see it.”
This piece is adapted from my chapter“Kids, the World Is Not Bad and Broken” in the forthcoming book Mind the Children: How to Think About the Youth Mental Health Collapse, edited by Naomi Schaefer Riley and Sally Satel (AEI Press, June 17, 2025).
I saw a FB post the other day warning parents to consider color when choosing their children’s bathing suits this summer. Apparently some will make it hard to see them under water.
It’s not just children who are being inundated with the dangers of this world. Their parents are too. It’s making them anxious and almost unbearable to be around. I’m not proposing that we stop taking normal precautions to keep kids safe, but we’re making parents and kids crazy with the current situation.
Whenever I read articles like this, about how we teach children about the world using examples that are speculative and pessimistic, I always think of the phrase-Irrational Exuberance. The parallel isn't exact, but I think many teachers have succumbed to the psychological contagion of "Be Kind".
After close to two decades in K12 I saw teachers put on "happy faces" so that they could avoid addressing real and tangible concerns with instruction, materials, and student growth. At the same time, they would catastrophize specific ideas as existential, dangerous, and unjust.
To go back to Irrational Exuberance, I think this does a good job of capturing the problems with schools. Never before have we had more teachers prompting kids to be aware and engaged with the world; while also telling them their country, culture, and history is tainted by stains they must carry forever. I do not know how we reverse this trend, but the speculative bubble that optimizes for anxiety must burst before we can truly reform K12.