Navigating Uncharted Waters

Every week, we're talking how to build legendary kids.

Sweat trickled down my forehead as I leaned back in my beach chair and closed my eyes. It was a hot day, and I’d just finished setting up our three young kids with a slew of sand toys and boogie boards.

The sound of kids laughing and waves crashing lulled me to sleep, when all of a sudden, my wife woke me up with a frantic shake.

“Where’s Arman?” she asked, with panic in her voice.

I jolted awake.

Arman was just five, and at less than 40 pounds, was too small to even go on water slides with his siblings.

He’d just been there at the edge of the ocean, 10 feet away, when I’d closed my eyes.

I looked around and saw my other kids– but Arman was nowhere to be found.

My wife started screaming.

No one plans to lose their child at the beach and few things are worse than realizing they don’t know how to swim in the ocean.

Twenty interminable minutes later, we found Arman safe at the other end of the beach. He’d followed a toy out to sea where the water was just a little too deep and strong for him.

He was lucky he got brought back in.

As a parent, I feel like I’ve recently been hit with wave after wave of bad news around how smart phones, social media, and algorithms that serve kids dangerous content, destroys their confidence, and if unchecked, can lead to serious mental health issues.

From the American Psychology Association’s report to articles like “TikTok’s Diet of Darkness” and ads like Dove’s “Cost of Beauty”, there’s a growing realization that although social media is useful, it might also be inadvertently harming our children.

But technology like social media isn’t going anywhere. In fact, we’re in the midst of the next big wave—artificial intelligence. And as with any technology, it has both risks and exciting potential.

Try as they might, politicians won’t be able to prevent progress.

And even if they could, they can’t prevent kids from hounding their parents for a tablet or to get online with their peers.

So whose responsibility is it to prepare our kids for this new reality?

Ultimately, it’s too much risk to defer responsibility in this urgent area. It falls on us, as parents, to make sure our kids have the confidence they need to navigate a new world.

Which brings me back to my own son, Arman.

After that day at the beach, I realized I couldn’t always intervene if my kid was already knee-deep in trouble. Instead, I needed to prepare him before he got swept out to sea.

So I put him in swimming lessons and taught him to read the signs and understand the tides. After a while, I could sleep at the beach again. (Or I would have been able to if his twin brother Arjun stopped throwing sand at my head.)

After studying confidence and learning from experts these last two years, I know that just like swimming, confidence can be practiced and mastered.

And I believe it’s confidence—how you see yourself, treat yourself, and believe in yourself— that will help our kids navigate the uncharted waters of their future. I don’t want to watch over my child’s shoulder whenever they’re online—my goal is for them to be able to find their way on their own.

At Legends, we’ve created a confidence-training program because we believe that just 5-minutes of practice can, over a period of time, quantifiably improve kids’ “inner fitness”—helping them not just to believe in themselves today, but to be better prepared for the inevitable dangers of tomorrow. So that when they're awash in glossy feeds, unrestricted chats, and questionable content, they’ll be able to swim.

See you next week,

• Behind-the-scenes of the Red Bull guy’s unbelievable space jump!

• Even more on the dangers of smartphones and kids by Adam Grant (H/T to Legends' Insider Tamara for sending through!)

• An awesome and astute kid’s take on losing social media and finding motivation

• Daily Stoic’s pep talk on focusing only on what we can control

• AI is accelerating astronomical developments 

• A very apt and hilarious New Yorker cartoon 

• Brisk, an AI co-teacher for educators and homeschoolers

• Jerry Seinfeld’s perfect story about staying in your lane and staying the course

Actionable Advice from our Head of Program & Development

This week, Fish talks about the three things your kids need before they log on to social media—and how confidence training can help. 

1. “Common Humanity:” an understanding that everyone has challenges—no matter how their posts may make it seem.

2. “Self-concept stability:” a rock-solid sense of what’s true about them, which can’t be easily shaken by what someone else says.

3. “Social self-efficacy:” a belief in their ability to make and keep friends without using ‘likes’ as a metric.

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Research TLDRs from our Director of Research & Evaluation

Dr. B talks about the abrupt decline in confidence at age 10 and its ties to social media—and explores the findings from our national survey on confidence.

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A word from our Executive Director of Legends Lab Foundation

Dean Sue shares how her belief in the power of prevention led her to help open Duke's Integrative Medicine Center.

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