Wednesday's Children

My infant daughter Nicole was due the day of the recent coup attempt in theSoviet Union. She waited until it was over to come out and so was born into a new world. In my lifetime, the prospects for this nation have never been brighter.

The nightmare of our long struggle against Stalinism is over, and the forces of social democracy have won. Fewer Americans are dying on battlefields and fewer children are starving than at any other time in this century. Dictators such as Marcos, Baby Doc, and Ceausescu are gone, and the time of the tyrant is winding down. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist has moved its clock far back from midnight. Peace in the Middle East even seems possible.

True, we have AIDS, crack, a recession that won't go away, an unbowed Saddam Hussein, and global warming--among other problems to worry about. But only people blinded by their ideology or their own personal troubles believe that these present-day ills loom as large as the ones just ending. In fact it is the victories over these horrors which allows us the luxury of taking such matters as sexual harassment and the fate of the spotted owl as seriously as we do.

I believe my little Nikki is born into a better word than I was. But I worry that she and her generation will never grasp what is now within their reach. What stands in their way, I believe, is a psychological vacuum--not very different from the "Nothing" that gobbles up the Earth in The Neverending Story. And this nothing is about to be transmitted from us to them.

America's baby boomers and their children are now in a growing epidemic of depression. One of the seeds of depression is pessimism. In the 1950s it became fashionable for thinking Americans to espouse pessimism as a reaction to the boosterism and footless optimism of the "Every day in every way I'm getting better and better" stripe that became popular after the agony of the Great Depression.

Contrary to our national self-image, our epidemic of depression in young people shows that we are becoming a nation of pessimists. Pessimism is an ingrained habit of seeing the causes of bad events--for instance the steady withering of American initiative, the endless history of dictatorship in Russia--as permanent and pervasive: "It's going to last forever" and "It's going to undermine everything." The optimist has the skill of finding temporary and local causes, such as the current Federal Reserve policy and a poor wheat harvest.

Pessimism is not inborn--we learn it from our parents, our teachers, and our Little League coaches. Those of Nikki's generation are steeped in a pessimism engendered by the assassinations of the '60s, by Watergate and Vietnam.

If pessimism were still just a posture, I would not be writing about it today. But it is a way of being that has enormous costs: For individuals it produces vulnerability to depression, lowered productivity and poor health. Multiplied across a nation it produces a vacuum of passivity, caution, and selfishness so widespread as to threaten the prospects of the next generation.

If Nikki's generation absorbs the pessimism of its elders, it will, I predict, lose the economic straggle to more optimistic nations in Asia and Europe. It will lack the nerve to make the sacrifices necessary to maintain a "pax americana," and lack the initiative to clean up the environment or achieve racial and sexual equality.

How can the word that will lodge in the hearts of our children be changed to "yes"?

One of the most important discoveries of modem cognitive psychology is that we have a choice about how we think. We are not forever prisoners of our present cognitive styles. We can choose to change the habits of pessimism into optimism if we are convinced that the cost of the former is too high.

The key to permanently undoing pessimism lies in using a skill we all have: disputing catastrophic thoughts. We are very good at this when others wrongly accuse us, but we rarely deploy it when we wrongly criticize ourselves. Adults and children can, with practice, learn to dispute automatic negative thoughts. Once learned, these skills persist because they feel so good to use. And reality is usually on our side.

Most of our children will not, on their own, acquire the skills to dispute the catastrophic thoughts that are their usual first reaction to setbacks. Optimism is a set of learned skills, and we can teach our children alternative causes for setbacks other than the catastrophic ones. We can teach our children to marshal evidence for the alternatives against the most dire one and to weigh the implications of setbacks rationally.

I commend these cognitive skills to you as parents and teachers, and I urge you to arm the next generation with them.