The Wildcard Generation: Raising Kids on a Spinning Globe of Chaos

by Alexander Tidd

Raising kids in 2025 feels like trying to build a treehouse during a hurricane. The wind keeps shifting, the boards keep warping, and every now and then someone hands you a hammer made of jelly. But we’re doing it anyway. Because that’s what parents do. We build while everything turns strange.

The ground is not steady. We’ve got artificial intelligence evolving faster than we can spell “algorithm.” The climate is doing its best impersonation of a sci-fi dystopia. Grocery bills make us blink twice, and the news has all the emotional comfort of a fire alarm. Add in whatever fresh hell the culture wars are cooking up this week, and it’s no wonder parents feel like we’re living inside a blender someone forgot to turn off.

But the job stays the same. Raise good kids. Help them become decent humans. Make sure they eat a vegetable every once in a while and understand that kindness matters more than clicks.

It’s not that the old rules don’t apply. It’s that there are no old rules. The playbook is soaked, shredded, and being rewritten in real time. And still, every morning, we pack the lunches and lace the shoes. We push strollers across cracked sidewalks and wave to teachers who look just as tired as we do. We hope. That’s the wildest part. We keep hoping.

Chaos Is the Constant

Some nights I lie awake thinking about how much we don’t know. What jobs will our kids have? What skills will matter in a decade? Will the oceans behave? Will empathy survive the algorithm?

It’s a heavy kind of unknowing. Like carrying a backpack full of sand that shifts every time you try to adjust the straps. You want to give your kids something solid to hold on to, but the world keeps turning to smoke and mirrors.

Our own childhoods were built on expectations that no longer exist. Work hard, go to college, get a job, buy a house. Now we tell our kids to be flexible. To adapt. Or “find their passion,” whatever that means when the robots start coding poetry better than we can.

But maybe the uncertainty is the point. Maybe this generation isn’t lost. Maybe they’re forged in the fire. They’re the wildcard—born into noise, raised on shifting sands. Maybe they’re the ones who won’t panic when the system glitches. They’ll expect it. And they’ll improvise.

Building Something That Lasts Anyway

So what do we do in the meantime? We build resilience like it’s our job. We show our kids that discomfort isn’t death and that being uncertain doesn’t mean being unsafe. We let them fail and help them get up. We laugh with them, especially when everything feels absurd. We find the rhythm inside the chaos.

Probably most important of all, we must teach them to think. Not just memorize. Not just consume. To think critically, deeply, independently. And not just because I keep half-joking with my friends that, with the rise of AI, this might be as smart as humans ever get. Because if the world keeps rewriting itself, the one skill they’ll always need is the ability to tell signal from noise.

And we protect wonder. That’s harder than it sounds. Wonder gets crowded out by worry if you’re not careful. But if you look closely, it’s still there. In the way your kid builds a rocket ship out of couch cushions. In the way they ask if birds dream or in the quiet moment after a storm when everything smells clean and new.

Wonder is fuel. It keeps them curious. It keeps us going.

Maybe this era isn’t all that different from any other, just louder. The Cold War kids didn’t know if they’d see graduation. The Great Depression generation grew up on dust and grit. Uncertainty is part of the deal. The difference now is that we can see it in real time, broadcast in high-def, with breaking news banners and TikToks that spread faster than common sense.

But you know what? We still get to choose who we become in this mess. And we still get to raise our kids with the kind of stubborn, beautiful love that says you matter. You are not a product. You are not a trend. You are not here to be optimized.

You are here to be human. Full of contradictions and questions and wild, relentless hope.

So we keep going. We hold their hands when they’re scared and we let go when they need to try. And we must tell them the truth, even when it’s messy. Especially when it’s messy.

And every once in a while, the wind dies down. The hammer hits right. The light filters through just so. And you remember that raising kids—even now—isn’t just chaos. It’s creation.