We have learned to call the youngest generation anxious.

There is ample reason for doing so. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation gathers a sobering body of evidence concerning the collapse of adolescent mental health beginning in the early 2010s. He argues that a play-based childhood was displaced by a phone-based childhood about that time, bringing sleep deprivation, fractured attention, addiction, loneliness, social comparison, and a retreat from the embodied world into the virtual one.

His account is compelling. More importantly, much of his advice is actionable. Children need more independence, more unsupervised play, more embodied friendship, less constant access to social media, and fewer hours spent staring at devices designed to capture and retain their attention.

And yet I do not believe smartphones and social media access tell the whole story.

They may accelerate old problems, enlarge them, make them more portable, and place them in the hands of nearly every child. That is a fair observation. But they did not invent anxiety. They did not invent vanity, fear, unbelief, social comparison, generational conflict, neglectful parenting, institutional hypocrisy, or the human preference for comforting falsehoods over costly truths.

Just as automobiles did not invent transportation, smartphones did not invent communication. New technologies allow old human activities to be performed faster, with less energy, more constantly, and sometimes more destructively. They do matter immensely. Yet they do not relieve parents, schools, churches, or previous generations of the duty to ask what they have taught, modeled, permitted, rewarded, punished, or failed to pass on.

We would do well to remember that before there was a phone-based childhood, there was a stubborn and rebellious generation whose heart was not steadfast and whose spirit was not faithful to God.

That is the diagnosis of Psalm 78.

Its concern is older than the Internet and deeper than cortisol levels. The Psalm inescapably asks us how one generation becomes unstable, forgetful, unbelieving, and unfaithful—and how another might become something better.

Steadfast generations do not arise by accident, after all.

They remember.

They interpret.

They transmit.

Steadfast Generations Remember

Psalm 78 begins with a charge to listen:

“Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth.”

The Psalmist intends to speak of things heard and known, things received from fathers. But Asaph will not keep them as private family lore or religious trivia. They must be told to the coming generation—even to children as yet unborn—so those children may rise and tell them to their own children in turn.

This is generational memory with a purpose. And that purpose is that those who come afterward will set their hope in God, remember His works, and keep His commandments. Thus they are to receive more than a set of stories, and more than a feeling. They are to receive nothing less than a comprehensive orientation toward reality.

Memory is not a lifestyle choice. It is a moral duty.

We live in an age that alternates between flattering the past and resenting it wholesale. One side presents earlier generations as wiser, tougher, more faithful, and generally superior to the soft and confused people now inheriting the world. The other side treats the past as little more than a catalog of oppression, ignorance, and prejudice from which enlightened people have finally escaped.

Psalm 78 permits neither vanity.

It does not offer a sanitized family history. It does not tell only the impressive stories. It does not preserve merely the honorable deeds of ancestors while quietly omitting their unbelief, cowardice, ingratitude, idolatry, hypocrisy, and rebellion, whether chronic or acute.

The children of Israel saw the sea divided. They followed the cloud by day and the fire by night. Water poured from the rock. Manna rained from heaven. Their enemies were judged. They were led like sheep and settled in a land they had not won by their own strength.

And still they forgot.

They grumbled and demanded what they craved. They distrusted God. They flattered Him with their mouths while keeping their hearts far from Him. They repented under pressure, to be sure, but then returned to the same familiar patterns. In short: Their hearts were not steadfast toward Him.

Psalm 78 is therefore the farthest thing from nostalgia. It is faithful testimony.

It remembers the mighty works of God and the repeated failures of His people. It remembers not only their deeds, but also their failures of memory and belief. It records the Lord’s mercy without apologizing for His judgment; it candidly summarizes man’s sin without eclipsing divine patience in the process. It tells the truth about one generation’s fathers so that the next generation may avoid becoming like them in all the wrong ways.

A faithful record of how we went off course is requisite for getting back on track.

This applies to nations, churches, families, and individuals.

Thus, honoring our fathers and mothers can never mean calling good evil or evil good. It cannot righteously require younger generations to exchange bitter for sweet and light for darkness by copying sinful examples or obeying sinful commands.

Scripture itself recounts the moral and spiritual failures of fathers—whether they were kings, priests, tribes, or entire generations—sometimes explicitly stating that they walked in the ways of their own fathers to summarize what went wrong.

The Bible does so not because honoring one’s ancestors is unimportant. It does so not for us to heap up contempt on them. The Bible does so because God is to be honored above all.

It must then be possible to speak respectfully about those who came before us without flattering them, and to criticize their attitude and conduct where necessary without having thereby dishonored them.

We can acknowledge the sacrifices they made and the good they handed down while also confessing and repenting of the sins we learned from them. Therefore, we can and must refuse contempt for them while nevertheless rejecting unreality regarding them.

In short, if an older generation insists that respect means flattery or silence about its major failings, particularly when the time has come to decide whether we will repeat them, that generation has confused honor with worship.

Likewise, younger generations must resist the temptation to turn memory into an instrument of resentment. We are not licensed to reduce our fathers to their worst moments or to excuse our own sins because we came by them honestly. An inherited fault is still a fault. Once we recognize it, we must own it. We must accept responsibility for what we do with it.

Fixating on where we learned our particular sins is no substitute for working out our own salvation with fear and trembling.

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief” is a better generational prayer than either self-righteous accusation or defensive denial.

When life becomes complicated, when we are stressed and distracted, when our present troubles fill the whole field of vision, we need to be reminded that the past is prologue.

How did we get here?

What patterns are repeating?

Where have we presumed upon God’s mercies?

Which warnings did we dismiss?

Which corrupt practices were normalized merely because they were familiar and seemed to “work”?

Most importantly, what has God done?

Psalm 78 does not, after all, remember human failure as though human failure is the center of history. It remembers human failure in relation to the character, commands, works, judgments, promises, and patience of God.

That distinction leads to the second requirement.

Steadfast Generations Interpret

A collection of memories is not yet wisdom.

A generation may remember every injury done to it and become bitter. It may remember former prosperity and become proud. It may remember past victories and imagine itself invulnerable. It may remember only its shame and conclude that nothing good was ever handed down.

This is because facts do not interpret themselves.

Psalm 78 teaches us how history must be read. The main question is not simply, “What did our fathers do?” It is, “What did God do, and why?”

God delivered.

God provided.

God warned.

God judged.

God restrained His anger.

God remembered that His people were flesh, like a wind that passes and does not return.

God remained God while His people twisted like a deceitful bow.

This does not make human choices irrelevant. It places them inside a larger and more accurate account of reality.

That is one reason truthful remembrance serves as an antidote to anxiety. Anxiety narrows the field of vision until a present danger appears to be the whole of reality. Faithful memory restores proportionality.

The frightening thing may actually be dangerous. The painful thing may actually hurt. A relationship may actually be toxic. An institution may actually be corrupt. A child may truly be struggling. A generation may be losing capacities it badly needs, spiraling down into ever more anxiety as it both realizes and avoids that fact.

Yet none of these things exist outside the providence of God. And because other people make choices beyond our control, living peaceably with them does not depend on us alone. That is not an excuse for passivity or apathy. It is a correction to both grandiosity and despair.

We remain responsible for our own duties, our own judgments, our own speech, and whatever has actually been entrusted to us. But we are not responsible for controlling every outcome, regulating other people’s emotions, or repairing everything broken in the world before we are permitted to be at peace in it.

A steadfast person learns to distinguish:

What belongs to me?

What belongs to others?

What must be entrusted to God?

That same discipline must govern how we interpret the troubles of the present generation.

Thus, Haidt may be substantially right that smartphones, social media, the loss of unsupervised play, and overprotection in the physical world have injured children. We should not dismiss that possibility merely because examining it may expose mistakes in our own parenting.

Speaking personally, I do not want to discover that I was too permissive or careless in ways that have harmed my sons and daughter. No parent does. But not wanting something to be true has no bearing on whether it is true. If correction is needed, then love requires correction.

At the same time, the smartphone must not become a convenient scapegoat by which parents, churches, schools, and communities avoid examining everything else.

How much of the problem is the device?

How much is what the device is being used to communicate?

How much is the disappearance of meaningful work, trustworthy authority, coherent moral instruction, embodied community, direct conversation, and credible adult role models?

How much anxiety is produced when young people receive an incoherent double message: tell the truth, but understand that unwelcome truth will be punished?

How much comes from being told to honor authority while watching authority refuse to be held to an honorable standard?

How much comes from adults demanding that children regulate their emotions even as those same adults build and maintain households, churches, and institutions around adult anxiety?

To be clear, I do not mean for these questions to invalidate Haidt’s diagnosis. Rather, I mean to broaden it.

A phone is a tool, but tools can become masters. “All things are lawful,” Paul writes, “but I will not be dominated by anything.”

If I cannot put the device down, if I cannot be present with the person before me, if every idle second produces an impulse to reach for a screen, I should ask whether the thing I purchased to serve me has made me its servant instead.

But the answer cannot be merely technological.

No software restriction, school policy, age minimum, or new law can produce a steadfast heart. These may be wise restraints, but they cannot create us anew.

A steadfast generation will not be formed merely by lowering its cortisol, removing every demand, or avoiding discomfort and disappointment.

Our bodies are not machines that become stronger the less they are used. Muscles atrophy without exertion, but organic capacities grow through appropriate use, coupled with nourishment and rest. The same is true of courage, attention, responsibility, discernment, and perseverance—all of which this generation needs if it will endure.

If we protect young people from every manageable risk, however, we do not make them safer. We make them fragile.

If we remove every difficult duty and correction, we do not give them peace. We deny them the opportunity to discover that they can bear weight and rise to the necessary challenges of life.

There is an upside to stress rightly understood. There are burdens worth carrying, discomforts worth enduring, and sufferings worth accepting because something good, true, and necessary lies on the other side—and is worth the cost of reaching it.

Steadfastness, then, does not mean never feeling anxious.

It means that when our nervous system tells us something dangerous is happening or may happen, we do not automatically surrender our capacity for judgment, conviction, or duty. We do not suddenly lock up and shut down. That said, when anxiety is brought back into proper proportion, legitimate concern may remain.

We may realize:

Yes, this is dangerous.

Yes, I am concerned.

And I will still tell the truth.

I will still attend to my duties before God.

I will still refuse corrupt practices.

I will still trust Christ.

That is not recklessness, coldness, or selfishness. It is not low emotional intelligence. It is moral steadiness.

Steadfast Generations Transmit

Psalm 78 does not stop at remembering and interpreting. It commands transmission.

The fathers were charged with teaching their children so the next generation—including children yet unborn—would know these things. Those children would then arise and tell their children in turn.

We often misapprehend this, supposing that the horizon is the next election, school year, cultural controversy, or parenting trend.

In actuality, it is the continuity of faithfulness across generations.

In his commentary on Psalm 78, Matthew Henry says the Law was given with a particular charge to teach it diligently to children “that the church may abide for ever.”

That does not happen automatically. It cannot be automated.

Faithfulness is not transmitted genetically. Wisdom does not seep into our offspring through the walls of a Christian home, no matter how many Bible verses we prettily frame and hang on them.

A church may retain its familiar name, architecture, traditions, and statement of faith and still lose its memory of and devotion to God.

A family may speak constantly about its godly legacy while handing down little more than anxiety, image-management, and familiar dysfunction.

Transmission, on the other hand, requires diligent teaching by word and by deed.

It requires credible embodiment. It requires us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, as our spiritual worship.

Otherwise, children intuitively pick up on what adults fear. They notice what subjects cannot be discussed. They notice whether confession is demanded of the weak but never of the powerful. They notice when “honor” means never questioning a parent and when “unity” means never cross-examining a leader.

They notice whether the adults telling them not to be anxious are themselves slaves to anxiety.

Before we can help the anxious generation, then, we must soberly consider what part our generation has played in their becoming anxious.

Have we taught them to set their hope in God, or to arrange their lives around our emotional comfort?

Have we given them meaningful responsibility?

Have we allowed them to make recoverable mistakes?

Have we shown them how to confess and repent when they sin?

Have we formed homes and churches where honest disagreement is permitted without banishment, rage, or emotional collapse?

Have we taught them to go directly and privately to someone when offended, or have we modeled gossip, triangulation, and public pressure campaigns that spurn due process?

Transmission is not merely telling children what conclusions to reach. It is cultivating the capacities by which they may recognize, love, and remain faithful to the truth when obedience is costly, as we are promised in Scripture that it sometimes is.

They need Scripture read, explained, remembered, and put into practice.

They need worship.

They need prayer.

They need Sabbath rest.

They need chores, work, competence, and responsibility.

They need friendships and communities that take place in bodies, at tables, in rooms, fields, workshops, sanctuaries, and neighborhoods—not merely through glowing rectangles.

They need adults who can say, “I was wrong. This is what is right.”

They need healthy boundaries that make individual responsibility clear and achievable.

They need to learn that a mistake is not the end of the world, that failure may be survived, examined, repented of, and learned from.

They need to see that courage is not the absence of bodily fear but faithfulness in its presence.

This is how a generation becomes less fragile.

It is not sheltered from every difficult thing. It is taught how to meet difficulty with honesty, work, prayer, repentance, community, and confidence in God.

None of this means the coming generation will never wander. Psalm 78 itself provides no sentimental guarantee. The children may become like their fathers in all the wrong ways. People are people, and human beings remain adept at forgetting what they have been carefully taught.

Yet the likelihood of drift does not relieve us of the duty to transmit.

We do not control whether our children trust and obey. We are responsible for whether we hide the works of God from them, whether we distort the record, whether we model hypocrisy, and whether our instruction is contradicted by our conduct.

Psalm 78 concludes with David, after all.

God took him from the sheepfolds to shepherd Israel. Asaph says that David led them with an upright heart and guided them with a skillful hand.

Both matter.

An upright heart without skill may mean well and still make a mess of things. Skill without an upright heart, on the other hand, becomes deceitful and manipulative. The coming generation needs leaders, fathers, mothers, pastors, teachers, and older friends who cultivate both character and competence.

It needs more under-shepherds than hirelings.

It needs more witnesses than propagandists.

It needs more custodians than brand managers.

The Coming Generation

We cannot guarantee a steadfast generation.

We can cultivate one.

We can tell the truth about the past without romanticizing it or despising it. We can confess where our fathers failed without imagining that we are therefore superior to them. We can recount the mighty works of God in both mercy and judgment. We can interpret present difficulties in light of His character, promises, and commands rather than through the narrow frame of panic, resentment, or fashion.

And we can hand down something better than inherited instability.

A steadfast generation is not one that never feels its nervous system activated.

It is one whose heart is set right.

It remembers who God has been.

It interprets its circumstances under His government.

It transmits His works, commands, promises, and mercies to those who come after.

It permits children to grow strong through responsibility rather than merely keeping them soothed and distracted.

It tells the truth before God even when that truth is unwelcome among men.

It knows how to repent.

It knows how to rest.

It knows what has been entrusted to it and what must be left in the hands of God.

The many anxieties afflicting this generation need not have the final word.

By the grace of God, an anxious generation may yet become steadfast—and arise in turn to tell its own children what God has done.