Many parents are probably familiar with a certain type of teen and their approach to school: These kids turn up. They do their homework. They get good-enough grades. They comply, which in academic terms means they’re behaviorally engaged. But they’re not investing in what they’re learning, nor are they that interested in trying to make sense of it. If you ask them how school was, their usual answer tends to be: Meh.

For as long as there have been teenagers, there have surely been kids like this. That’s one reason the disaffected-teen archetype in popular culture is so rich (and relatable): Holden Caulfield, Ferris Bueller, the entire casts of The Breakfast Club and Sex Education—the list goes on. And because plenty of teens are apathetic about school, many parents and teachers are willing to give those kids a pass. They’re just teens being teens, right? No big deal.

This article was adapted from Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop’s new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better. (Crown)

But teen apathy in school is a big deal—and the data indicate that it might be more widespread than many people realize. Here’s a fact that’s important to remember: Kids are wired to want to learn. And when they’re younger, most say they enjoy learning. While researching our new book on teen disengagement, we partnered with the Brookings Institution and Transcend, an education nonprofit focused on how to improve learning environments. With them, we surveyed more than 65,000 students and almost 2,000 parents. We found that 74 percent of third graders say they love school. But during middle school, kids’ enjoyment falls off a cliff. By tenth grade, only 26 percent of teens say they love school—although 65 percent of parents with tenth graders think their kids love it, suggesting a serious disconnect.

Again, the teens who say they dislike school may not be failing—more likely they’re coasting. Think of them as the original quiet quitters, gliding along in neutral, unwilling to put the car in gear. Half of the middle- and high-school kids we surveyed reported operating this way, in what we came to call Passenger Mode. We also interviewed close to 100 teens ourselves—kids in small towns and big cities, kids from wealthy families and those with limited resources—and those in Passenger Mode told us they felt simultaneously overwhelmed and bored. A lot of them simply didn’t understand the point of school. And so they checked out.

[Read: We’re missing a key driver of teen anxiety]

That kind of checking-out can have lasting consequences. Johnmarshall Reeve, a professor at Australian Catholic University, has been researching student engagement—the combination of how kids think, feel, act, and proactively contribute in school—for the past 20 years. He explained to us that young people in Passenger Mode are “wasting their time developmentally” when it comes to building good learning skills. In our reporting, we found that many teens were outside what the psychologist Lev Vygotsky called the “zone of proximal development”: the sweet spot where a student does not find the material so easy that they lose interest, nor so difficult that they give up. This is part of what we identify in our book as a much broader “disengagement crisis,” and it’s affecting plenty of kids getting good-enough grades—the metric many parents rely on to gauge whether students are succeeding. But grades don’t tell the full story.

Teens who don’t enjoy school are unlikely to be cognitively and emotionally engaged in their learning, which means they’re less likely to absorb the knowledge and skills that many of them will need to thrive beyond high school. This disengagement works on a continuum: If kids start to lose interest, then after a while, many stop doing their work; if they stop doing their work, they’re likely to fall behind; if they fall behind, they might feel as if they’re out of options, and soon apathy becomes the norm. Once kids check out, the hurdles to success get higher, and the emotions associated with clearing them get messier. Checked-out kids become less likely than their more engaged peers to develop an identity as a learner: someone who is curious, adaptable, and able to respond to different challenges and environments.

Many people assume that kids in Passenger Mode are lazy. But our research suggests that, in reality, much of the problem lies with the dominant model of schooling, which isn’t designed to help kids feel invested in their learning. One study found that 85 percent of middle-school assignments merely asked students to recall information or apply basic skills, rather than pushing them to engage at a higher level. Similarly, the Brookings and Transcend survey found that only 33 percent of tenth graders said they got to develop their own ideas in school. Of course, we see numerous exceptions: schools that push kids to not only master essential knowledge but also think deeply and apply what they know in class to solve real-world problems. But these schools remain on the fringe. More commonly, kids see the world around them—wars, social injustice, climate change, disinformation, AI technology that can help write novels and solve complex equations—and wonder why on earth they have to, say, study the Pythagorean theorem. If little is asked of them, or if they fail to see real-world applications, they tend to give little in return.

In an ideal world, we might hope for a wholesale redesign of schools, which plenty of innovators are working toward. But changing entire systems can be an excruciatingly slow process. This means it’s crucial for the adults close to teens in Passenger Mode to step in, to encourage them in ways that help them reengage within the existing system. And precisely how parents go about this makes a huge difference.   

When teens check out at school, many parents respond by nagging: Pay attention; do your homework; you have to study for that test. After all, kids might get sick of the scolding and eventually do what they’re told. But nagging doesn’t work as a long-term motivator. Few people feel inspired to work under duress.

That holds true for teens as much as for anyone. In the 2010s, the developmental scientist Ron Dahl and Jennifer Silk, a University of Pittsburgh psychology professor, started wondering what went on inside adolescents’ brains when their parents nagged them. So the two recorded a group of moms offering neutral statements, praise, and criticism. Then they put these moms’ kids—32 boys and girls ages 9 to 17—into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and played the recordings to see which parts of the kids’ brains engaged and which tuned out. Criticism (“You get upset too easily”; “One thing that bothers me about you”) increased activity in the emotion networks of the kids’ brains. It also decreased activation of the cognitive networks used to regulate their emotions, and in the systems that help a person see things from someone else’s perspective. In other words: Rather than focusing on solving the problem that their parents were criticizing them about, the kids got upset and shut down.

An abundance of other research confirms that nagging backfires. John Hattie, a professor at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, examined the effects of parental involvement on student achievement as evaluated by almost 2,000 studies covering more than 2 million students around the globe. He found that when parents “see their role as surveillance, such as commanding that homework be completed,” achievement drops and students are less engaged.

[Read: Lighthouse parents have more confident kids]

Many parents nag for what might feel like a good reason: They worry that otherwise, kids won’t step up to do their homework or other tasks on their own. But nagging can send the message to kids that they are not competent, which deflates, not energizes, them. Nagging also diminishes teens’ sense of autonomy, which they need for important parts of their brain to develop. When parents monitor their kids like drill sergeants, whether that impulse comes from a place of love or despair (or both), they unwittingly impede their kids’ practice in exercising agency and learning to organize themselves effectively. After all: Sometimes the negative consequences of not getting work done or failing an exam are exactly what a kid needs to feel motivated. By giving teens the freedom to fail something—­a test, a quiz, meeting a homework deadline—­parents put them in control, which (over time) does feel motivating.

Moms and dads who ease off the nagging can still do plenty to get their teens out of Passenger Mode. The key, research suggests, is for them to encourage teens to develop more autonomy. Obviously, we’re not suggesting that parents give teens complete independence; they’re young and need guidance. But parents shouldn’t default to working harder to solve a kid’s problem than the kid does. And they probably should give up a little bit of control; think fewer commands and more supportive nudges. To figure out if what you’re saying might gently push a teen toward autonomy, it’s useful to ask: Will this help my child learn to do this on their own?

Consider the cases of the following teens and parents, whom we spoke with while researching our book. One ninth grader in New York, who spends a lot of time in Passenger Mode, told us that not being asked to study for Spanish and getting an 87 on a test felt way better than being hounded to study and then getting a 92: “It makes me feel like I’m not even accomplishing anything when I get a good grade ’cause my mom made me study all night.”

Another teen, from Philadelphia, told us that his mother texts him four times a day to remind him of things: “She texts me at like 11 a.m. when I am in class to remind me about homework that is due that night. She thinks I can’t manage myself at all, but I think I can.”

[Read: Don’t help your kids with homework]

This sort of “command and control” mindset might feel efficient to some parents, but it can rob children of motivation. A more effective tactic, we found, is to encourage kids to make their own plans and to support them as they carry them out—as exemplified by the experience of Luis, a Denver-based high schooler, and his mom, Susan. (We changed Luis’s and Susan’s names to protect their privacy.) One day, Luis announced to his mom that he was probably going to fail his Advanced Placement U.S. History exam. He had taken a practice test and gotten a 1, but he needed a 3 to pass the class, and the test was in two weeks. At first, Susan panicked internally; failing history freshman year would not look good on Luis’s transcript. But she remained externally calm and channeled her social-worker training. The exchange went something like this:

Susan: Well, what are you going to do?
Luis: I don’t know.
Susan: Do you have a textbook? (This was not rhetorical. Susan had never once seen Luis with a history textbook.)
Luis: Umm … yeah, I guess.
Susan: Maybe you should read it?
Luis: Oh! (Luis actually seemed surprised at this.) That’s a good idea. I think it’s under my bed. (Luis headed to his room and returned five minutes later with a shiny, unopened textbook. He sat down at the kitchen table and opened it.)
Susan: Do you have a notebook and pen? Maybe you should take notes while you read the book?
Luis: Good, yeah. I’ll do that. (Luis rummaged in his backpack for a notebook and pen.) Mom, what am I supposed to do when I take notes?

Giving your kid autonomy doesn’t always mean letting go of the reins, but instead trying to see what your kid needs and what they can do, before deciding for them. Susan quickly realized that Luis had made it to freshman AP U.S. History with virtually no understanding of how to study. When Luis announced that he thought he might fail, she curbed the urge to say, “Are you kidding me?” and instead put the onus back on Luis (“What are you going to do?”). When he was stuck, she used invitational language (“Maybe you could … ”). And after their first conversation, she helped him make a plan that broke the work into manageable chunks—providing what educators call “scaffolding.” Eventually, after buckling down for seven days of study, Luis took the exam and got a 3. He told us he was thrilled and felt pride in his accomplishment.

To get better at anything, kids need to practice—and they need to want to practice. Learning is no exception. Luis experienced the success of mastery and felt the spark of internal motivation. Although he still has Passenger moments, he’s more engaged in school as a result of taking charge of his learning. Along the way, thanks to the runway his mom gave him, he developed better work habits, picked up some time-management skills, and practiced organizing himself to reach a goal.

Communicating this way isn’t always easy for busy parents; “just get it done” can feel more expedient than helping children devise a plan and having patience when the plan doesn’t work. But managing teens’ time for them and nagging them to do things will work for only so long. When kids are in Passenger Mode, a better way for parents to counteract their coasting is to notice when they’re stuck in neutral—and then lean gently toward them, to help them find a way to shift into drive.

This article was adapted from Jenny Anderson and Rebecca Winthrop’s new book, The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.

At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.

Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”

Democrats talk a big game about “inclusion,” but as Buttigieg notes, they don’t produce a message that feels inclusive to most voters, because they’re too focused on appealing to the very nonrepresentative set of people who make up the party apparatus. Adam Frisch—a moderate Democrat who ran two strong campaigns for Congress in a red district in western Colorado but got little traction among DNC members when he sought to be elected as vice chair of the party—wrote about his own experience in the DNC campaign. He noted how just about the only people he’d encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were “the impressive delegates from the High School Democrats of America.” Frisch lost out to two candidates who were much better positioned to speak to the very highly educated, very left-wing electorate that is the DNC membership: State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, a “champion for social justice” who has lost multiple statewide campaigns in Pennsylvania by doing his best impression of Elizabeth Warren; and David Hogg, the dim-bulb gun-control advocate who still seems to think “Defund the Police” is good politics. Speaking of things that seem like they came out of Portlandia: Hogg believes that the gun-control movement was “started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and nonbinary people that never got on the news or in most history books.”

Yet Buttigieg pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road of being off-putting and unpopular.

[Read: The HR-ification of the Democratic party]

These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped. And although DEI-speak can and does make Democrats seem weird and out of touch, that’s not the main problem with it. The big problem with the approach Buttigieg rightly complains about—and that Kenyatta and Hogg exemplify—is that it entails a strong set of mistaken moral commitments. These have led the party to take unpopular positions on crime, immigration, and education, among other issues. Many nonwhite voters correctly perceive these positions as hostile to their substantive interests.

What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them according to how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are because of those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences of the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent. That is, they decide that some people are more important than others, and then they don’t even correctly assess the desires of the people they have decided are most important.

Let’s look, for example, at what progressive Democrats have to offer to Asian voters—or, as a DNC member might say, “AANHPI voters.” On higher education, Democrats advocate for race-conscious admission policies that favor “underrepresented” groups and disfavor “overrepresented” ones. In practice, those policies have meant that Asian applicants must clear higher academic bars than white applicants—and much higher bars than Black and Latino applicants—to win admission to top schools. Progressives have also responded to demographic imbalances at selective public K–12 education programs (which are disproportionately Asian) by fighting to change the admission systems. In New York, progressives sought to to abolish the admission exam, which Asian students have dominated; in San Francisco, where the city’s most prestigious magnet school has become majority-Asian, they actually did away with the exam for a time; in Fairfax County, Virginia, they changed admission rules to be less favorable to Asian applicants. Within schools, they have opposed tracking and fought to remove advanced math courses, “leveling” the playing field by reducing the level of rigor available to the highest-performing students.

Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, so they try to stack the deck against them. Not a great pitch to the Asian community.

Of course, I’m sure Democrats who favor affirmative action would say that framing is very unfair. But these are the same people who keep telling us we need to focus on the effects of actions rather than intentions. When Democrats get control of education policy, they make changes that hurt Asians. Is it any kind of surprise that, as Democrats have become ever more obsessed with racial “equity” as a policy driver, Asian voters have swung hard against the party? Is it surprising that Republicans—in spite of overt racism among some operatives and activists in the party—have made strong inroads among Asian voters? I don’t find it surprising, given that Democrats are the party of official discrimination against Asians.

[Read: Democrats deserved to lose]

Or consider Democrats’ approach to crime. Progressives’ insistence on using marginalization as a marker of moral worth has led them to prioritize the needs of people who are engaged in antisocial behavior over those of ordinary citizens who abide by the social contract. After all, few people are more marginalized than criminals, or the “justice-involved,” as a DNC member might call them. As progressives have grown skeptical of police and policing, they have made it more difficult to detain dangerous defendants ahead of trial, and they have de facto (and sometimes de jure) decriminalized nuisances such as public drug use. These policies, combined with the effects of COVID and the George Floyd protests, have led to an increase in crime and disorder in cities. This has been unpopular. And because major cities are disproportionately nonwhite, the negative effects of the disorder have fallen disproportionately on nonwhite voters. So it makes sense that diverse cities swung harder against Democrats than did whiter suburbs, where physical distance has insulated the electorate.

On immigration, similarly, Democrats are excessively focused on the interests of the most marginalized group in the policy equation—foreign migrants—even though these migrants are not citizens and not really stakeholders in our politics. The Biden administration presided over the entry of millions of migrants into the country in a way that was not in accordance with any intentionally enacted public policy. It did this with the enthusiastic support of progressive groups that purport to speak for the interests of Latinos. But the broader population of Latinos reacted—surprise!—quite negatively to the migration wave, as they watched migrants receive expensive government services, overwhelm institutions of local government, and in some cases produce crime and disorder. Some of the hardest-swinging counties against Democrats from 2020 to 2024 were overwhelmingly Latino counties on the U.S.-Mexico border. If you wanted to predict how the migration wave would affect the Hispanic American vote, you would have done better to focus on the “American” aspect of their identity rather than on the “Hispanic” part; as it turns out, long-settled Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans don’t necessarily put a high premium on ensuring that our government spends a ton of money to house and care for economic migrants from Central and South America.

So the problem here is not really the $10 words. Consider the term BIPOC. This (decreasingly?) fashionable buzzword—which means either “Black and Indigenous people of color” or “Black, Indigenous, and people of color,” depending on whom you ask—contains a clear message about how progressives view the hierarchy of marginalization: Black Americans and Native Americans outrank Latinos and Asians. It seems that the message has been received: In 2024, Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos and Asians. But the problem can’t be fixed by dropping BIPOC from the vocabulary. To stop the bleeding, Democrats need to abandon the toxic issue positions they took because they have the sort of worldview that caused them to say “BIPOC” in the first place.

[Read: How to move on from the worst of identity politics]

Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say that the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of U.S. citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason for being admitted to the United States and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say that the pullback from policing has been a mistake. They should say that they were wrong and they are sorry! After all, Democrats talk easily about how the party has gotten “out of touch,” but they don’t draw the obvious connection about what happens when you’re out of touch: You get things substantively wrong and alienate voters with your unpopular ideas. To fix that, you have to change more than how you talk—you have to change what you stand for, and stand up to those in the party who oppose that change.

Even better, you can nominate people who never took those toxic and unpopular issue positions in the first place.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.

U.S. stocks edged higher in premarket trading on Wednesday as investors awaited Nvidia’s highly anticipated earnings report. New home sales data, set for release at 10 a.m. New York time will provide fresh insights into the housing market’s performance and emerging trends.

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Six months. Five-hundred-seventy-six applications. Twenty-nine responses. Four interviews. And still, no job. When my younger brother rattled off these numbers to me in the fall of 2023, I was dismissive. He had recently graduated with honors from one of the top private universities in the country into a historically strong labor market. I assured him that his struggle must be some kind of fluke. If he just kept at it, things would turn around.

Only they didn’t. More weeks and months went by, and the responses from employers became even sparser. I began to wonder whether my brother had written his resume in Comic Sans or was wearing a fedora to interviews. And then I started to hear similar stories from friends, neighbors, and former colleagues. I discovered entire Subreddits and TikTok hashtags and news articles full of job-market tales almost identical to my brother’s. “It feels like I am screaming into the void with each application I am filling out,” one recent graduate told the New York Times columnist Peter Coy last May.

As someone who writes about the economy for a living, I was baffled. The unemployment rate was hovering near a 50-year low, which is historically a very good thing for people seeking work. How could finding a job be so hard?

The answer is that two seemingly incompatible things are happening in the job market at the same time. Even as the unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent for more than three years, the pace of hiring has slowed to levels last seen shortly after the Great Recession, when the unemployment rate was nearly twice as high. The percentage of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs to find new ones, a signal of worker power and confidence, has fallen by a third from its peak in 2021 and 2022 to nearly its lowest level in a decade. The labor market is seemingly locked in place: Employees are staying put, and employers aren’t searching for new ones. And the dynamic appears to be affecting white-collar professions the most. “I don’t want to say this kind of thing has never happened,” Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, told me. “But I’ve certainly never seen anything like it in my career as an economist.” Call it the Big Freeze.

[Jonathan Chait: The real goal of the Trump economy]

The most obvious victims of a frozen labor market are frustrated job seekers like my brother. But the indirect consequences of the Big Freeze could be even more serious. Lurking beneath the positive big-picture employment numbers is a troubling dynamic that threatens not only the job prospects of young college graduates but the long-term health of the U.S. economy itself.  

The period from the spring of 2021 through early 2023, when employees were switching jobs like never before, was a great time to be an American worker. (Remember all those stories about the Great Resignation?) It was also a stressful time to be an employer. Businesses struggled to fill open positions, and when they finally did, their newly trained employees might quit within weeks. “It’s hard to overstate the impact this period had on the psyche of American companies,” Matt Plummer, a senior vice president at ZipRecruiter who advises dozens of companies on their hiring strategies, told me. “No one wanted to go through anything like it again.” Scarred by the chaos of the Great Resignation, Plummer and others told me, many employers grew far less willing to either let go of their existing workers or try to hire new ones.

Even as they were still shaken by the recent past, employers were also growing warier about America’s economic future. In March 2022, the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates to tame inflation, and the business world adopted the nearly unanimous consensus that a recession was around the corner. Many companies therefore decided to pause plans to open new locations, build new factories, or launch new products—all of which meant less of a need to hire new employees.

Once it became clear that a recession had been avoided, a new source of uncertainty emerged: politics. Recognizing that the outcome of the 2024 presidential election could result in two radically different policy environments, many companies decided to keep hiring plans on hold until after November. “The most common thing I hear from employers is ‘We can’t move forward if we don’t know where the world is going to be in six months,’” Kyle M. K., a talent-strategy adviser at Indeed, told me. “Survive Until ’25” became an unofficial rallying cry for businesses across the country.

By the end of 2024, the pace of new hiring had fallen to where it had been in the early 2010s, when unemployment was more than 7 percent, as Berger observed in January. For most of last year, the overall hiring rate was closer to what it was at the bottom of the Great Recession than it was at the peak of the Great Resignation. But because the economy remained strong and consumers kept spending money, layoffs remained near historic lows, too, which explains why the unemployment rate hardly budged.

Look beyond the aggregate figures, and the hiring picture becomes even more disconcerting. As the Washington Post columnist Heather Long recently pointed out, more than half of the total job gains last year came from just two sectors: health care and state and local government, which surged as the pandemic-era exodus to the suburbs and the Sunbelt generated demand for teachers, firefighters, nurses, and the like. According to an analysis from Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, hiring in basically every other sector, including construction, retail, and leisure and hospitality, is down significantly relative to pre-pandemic levels. Among the hardest-hit professions have been the white-collar jobs that have been historically insulated from downturns. The “professional and business services” sector, which includes architects, accountants, lawyers, and consultants, among other professions, actually lost jobs over the past two years, something that last happened during the recession years of 2008, 2009, and 2020. The tech and finance sectors have fared only slightly better. (The rise of generative AI might be one reason the hiring slowdown has been even worse in these fields, but the data so far are equivocal.)

[David Frum: How Trump lost his trade war]

A job market with few hiring opportunities is especially punishing for young people entering the workforce or trying to advance up the career ladder, including those with a college degree. According to a recent analysis by ADP Research, the hiring rate for young college graduates has declined the most of any education level in recent years. Since 2022, this group has experienced a higher unemployment rate than the overall workforce for the first sustained period since at least 1990. That doesn’t change the fact that college graduates have significantly better employment prospects and higher earnings over their lifetime. It does, however, mean that young college graduates are struggling much more than the headline economic indicators would suggest.

For job seekers, a frozen labor market is still preferable to a recessionary one. My brother, for example, eventually found a job. But the Big Freeze is not a problem only for the currently unemployed. Switching from one job to another is the main way in which American workers increase their earnings, advance in their careers, and find jobs that make them happy. And indeed, over the past few years, wage growth has slowed, job satisfaction has declined, and workers’ confidence in finding a new job has plummeted. According to a recent poll from Glassdoor, two-thirds of workers report feeling “stuck” in their current roles. That fact, along with a similar dynamic in the housing market—the percentage of people who move in a given year has fallen to its lowest point since data were first collected in the 1940s—might help explain why so many Americans remain so unhappy about an economy that is strong along so many other dimensions.

This is a warning sign. The historical record shows that when people are hesitant to move or change jobs, productivity falls, innovation declines, living standards stagnate, inequality rises, and social mobility craters. “This is what worries me more than anything else about this moment,” Pollak told me. “A stagnant economy, where everyone is cautious and conservative, has all kinds of negative downstream effects.”

According to economists and executives, the labor market won’t thaw until employers feel confident enough about the future to begin hiring at a more normal pace. Six months ago, businesses hoped that such a moment would arrive in early 2025, with inflation defeated and the election decided. Instead, the early weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency have featured the looming threat of tariffs and trade wars, higher-than-expected inflation, rising bond yields, and a chaotic assault on federal programs. Corporate America is less sure about the future than ever, and the economy is still frozen in place.

To a certain kind of guy, Donald Trump epitomizes masculine cool. He’s ostentatiously wealthy. He’s married to his third model wife. He gets prime seats at UFC fights, goes on popular podcasts, and does more or less whatever he wants without consequences.

That certain kind of guy who sees Trump as a masculine ideal? That guy is a teenage boy.

Much has been written about Trump’s widening appeal to men, and to young men in particular. MAGA, the story goes, is making masculinity great again. But the version of manhood on display not just from Trump but from many of his closest advisers and appointees isn’t the kind of traditional manhood championed by his vice president, J. D. Vance; it’s a manhood imagined by adolescent boys. (Although of course, plenty of adolescent boys do not look up to Trump.) And at his core, Trump is an adolescent president, surrounded by adolescent flunkies, cheered into office by adolescent men.

[Tom Nichols: Donald Trump, the most unmanly president]

Adolescence, the transition period from childhood into adulthood, is a time of rapid brain development. The frontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates impulse control and future planning, is last to mature. Lawrence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University and widely recognized expert on adolescent development, explained adolescence to me as “a developmental mismatch between the development of the brain systems that are used for self-control and self-regulation, and the development of the brain systems that respond to reward and that generate emotions and perhaps lead to impulsive behavior.” Picture that reward response as an upside-down U: It grows as a child does, hitting its apex around 19 or 20, and then decreases in adulthood. This, Steinberg says, is part of why adolescents (and adolescent boys in particular) are such notorious risk takers: That reward center is so arousable in middle to late adolescence that it overrides the system regulating self-control—a system that is itself slower to develop.

Adolescence has not historically been a developmental stage we culturally valorize. In the MAGA movement, though, an adolescent way of moving through the world—high-risk, low-regulation, near-total disinhibition—characterizes leaders and thrills followers.

Cultures differ in how they distinguish between manhood and boyhood, but the reward-seeking, risk-eschewing, low-self-control aspects of adolescence transcend countries and cultures, Steinberg said. In the United States, manhood in a traditional sense has been distinguished from boyhood and adolescence partly by virtue and obligation: Boys may be boys and teenagers may run around thrill-seeking, but real men are expected to provide for themselves and their families, protect those they love, and demonstrate a kind of moral fortitude that justifies their familial and social authority.

There are all kinds of problems with this traditional model, and feminists like myself are among the first to point them out. The masculinity of MAGA, though, is far worse: It rejects commitment and virtue, but still demands power and respect—it is, as Jamelle Bouie put it in The New York Times, “the masculinity of someone unburdened by duty, obligation or real responsibility.”

We don’t see this sort of masculinity only from Trump. Pete Hegseth, who was confirmed as defense secretary by the narrowest margin in history, says he wants a military full of men who are uninhibited “warriors,” free of any attempt to impose moral order on the teen and 20-something men who generally do the nation’s fighting. His book The War on Warriors argues that while “our warriors” were “busy killing Islamists in shithole countries,” liberals insisting on diversity initiatives were ruining the country and lawyers insisting that soldiers abide by the rules of war were ruining the military. During Hegseth’s confirmation hearings, when Senator Angus King asked him if the Geneva Conventions should be observed, Hegseth dodged. “We don’t need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars,” he said. In his telling, “warriors” should operate with pure aggression; restraint is weakness.

He evinces a similar lack of continence in his personal life. Hegseth is currently married to the woman he impregnated while still married to his second wife, who herself was the mistress he married after cheating on his first wife. Life is complicated, and marriage more complicated still. But a series of extramarital affairs—something that also characterizes the president’s personal life—is not typically the mark of a respectable, responsible adult man.

Elon Musk, more keyboard warrior than hardened soldier, is cut from similar cloth. He, too, has fathered many children with many different women. And he, too, seeks power without responsibility. He has put himself in charge of reforming the entirety of the federal government, one of the largest and most complex bureaucracies in the world, despite not growing up in the U.S. and having no government experience. Arrogance is one word for this; delusion is perhaps another. His effort has so far been an abject disaster. But it’s easy to see a teenager’s bravado in his actions—the lack of self-control and self-awareness, the inability to grasp what one may be incapable of doing.

Musk is notorious for sharing edgelord memes on X, the kinds of things that might be passed around by teenage boys. He also has a remarkably juvenile sense of humor. For example, he edited the X bio of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation to say it is 69 percent government-funded (69, get it?). He recently changed his name on the same platform to “Harry Bolz.” His Department of Government Efficiency is itself named after an internet meme about a shiba inu. He proposed “a literal dick-measuring contest” with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He bought Twitter and turned it into X after being annoyed by its moderation policies, which he compared to censorship, but once in charge, he experienced serial emotional meltdowns over content he didn’t like, some of which he then censored. He has gone on sprees of banning accounts that offended him in some way, while allowing white supremacists and Nazis to proliferate on the site. He often communicates on X using video-game jargon, the lingua franca of teenage boys.

[Tom Nichols: The great manliness flip-flop]

Stephen Miller, the Trump whisperer who has long shaped much of his boss’s immigration policy, was an actual adolescent when he ran for high-school student government and asked, “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?!” (In defense of adolescents, his peers booed him offstage). As a fully grown adult, he may no longer be the leader of the “Mom, Make My Bed” caucus, but he remains just as petulant, and seems just as tickled by the teenage penchant for provocation. At a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, he echoed the notorious Nazi slogan “Germany for Germans only” when he bellowed, “America for Americans only!” He has also been instrumental in slamming the door shut not just to migrants, but to refugees—even though Miller’s own grandfather sought refuge in the U.S. from the anti-Jewish pogroms of Eastern Europe.  

As these psychologically adolescent men work together, they fuel one another’s worst impulses. Much of Steinberg’s work is research on juvenile offenders; adolescent boys and young men, according to crime statistics, commit a hugely disproportionate number of crimes. “And they commit their crimes in groups, disproportionately,” Steinberg said. “When they’re with their buddies, their tendency to engage in reckless and risky behavior is amplified.” This is both a result of peer-pressure dynamics—kids who might not otherwise behave badly are pushed to by friends—and a kind of mutually escalating group dynamic.

The realities of human group behavior, so magnified in adolescence, mean that the teen spirit of the Trump administration may animate even those men who might not have otherwise behaved similarly. Zuckerberg, with his gold chain and Shaggy haircut, seems to have embraced dressing like a teenager at roughly the same time that his politics shifted rightward. He attended Trump’s inauguration last month, and blamed former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg for the company’s efforts to create a more inclusive workplace. Zuckerberg’s image has, until now, been fairly straitlaced, standard-issue nerdy, and moderately liberal. But he recently went on über-bro Joe Rogan’s podcast to complain that the corporate world was “pretty culturally neutered” and getting too far from the “masculine energy” and “aggression” men need to thrive.

Perhaps this midlife return to the trappings of adolescence was an inevitable evolution for a Millennial man whose success came so early and so spectacularly, catapulting him into the world of serious adults before he was completely ready. But it’s also not difficult to speculate that our immature cultural moment—spurred on by Trump’s reelection—–is what turned Zuckerberg, whom Musk not so long ago derided as “Zuck the cuck,” from a naive techno-optimist 20-something into a middle-aged man in a gold chain opining about masculine energy.

As each of us moves through the world, we engage in a regular internal, often unconscious calculus of risk versus reward. Young adults overindex on the potential for good stuff to result from the risks they take, and underindex on potential adverse consequences. This kind of impulsiveness also seems evident in the early acts of the Trump administration. When Trump is given the freedom to speak off-the-cuff, he often makes pronouncements that his team later has to walk back, as he recently did when saying that the Palestinians should leave Gaza so that the Strip might be turned into a Riviera of luxury condos. It wasn’t that the thought just popped into his head—Trump’s statement had sufficient detail to suggest that it was something he had discussed before his press conference—but it seemed clear enough that, to the president, the risks of announcing a half-baked plan (not to mention the risks of the plan itself) paled in comparison to the potential payoffs, which largely amounted to attention.

The skills of adult life—emotional continence, more accurate risk perception, self-control, greater precision in future forecasting—are developed in adolescence through physical changes in the brain and body systems, but also through guidance and experience. As anyone who ever had a great but demanding high-school athletic coach can tell you, many teenagers (and most children) have a seemingly inherent desire for authority figures to help contain them as they live with underdeveloped brains and raging hormones. Adulthood in America has been pushed back: Young people are marrying later, procreating later, and buying their homes later, if they do any of those things at all. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that in this era of extended adolescence, a great many unmoored men are, like teenage boys looking to the coach for guidance, seeking straight-talking male authority figures to teach them how to be men. They’re apparently finding these father figures on YouTube, podcasts, and social media—and in the MAGA movement.

Take the author Jordan Peterson. Peterson is notorious for his misogyny and conservatism, but much of his work is focused on self-improvement—and specifically on how young men can impose discipline on their lives. “Parents, universities and the elders of society have utterly failed to give many young men realistic and demanding practical wisdom on how to live,” David Brooks said in explaining his appeal. “Peterson has filled the gap.” Peterson tells young men to stand up straight. He orders them to make their beds. He says to turn off the porn, get a job, and take responsibility for their life. A slew of other leading male podcasters—Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss, even Joe Rogan—take similar self-improvement tacks. And young men eat it up. They seem hungry for betterment, but also for an authoritative figure to just tell them what to do.

Some have turned their sights to Trump. The president embodies both the aspirational adulthood that is the stuff of teenage fantasies (private jets, models, two Big Macs for dinner), and the punishing father who men wise enough to understand their own need for greater discipline imagine will whip everyone into shape. At a Trump rally in Georgia, Tucker Carlson offered this disciplinarian-daddy vision of Trump’s return to the White House: “Dad comes home,” Carlson told the crowd. “He’s pissed. Dad is pissed. And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’” The crowd broke into a chant of “Daddy’s home!” Mel Gibson used the same metaphor after Trump visited a fire-ravaged Los Angeles. “It’s like Daddy arrived and he’s taking his belt off,” he said. The phrase is so ubiquitous in MAGA circles that Roseanne Barr, donning blond dreadlocks and heavily reliant on Auto-Tune, recorded a postelection rap titled “Daddy’s Home.” You can buy Daddy’s Home T-shirts with Trump on them at Walmart.

[From the January 2025 issue: Misogyny comes roaring back]

The reality of governance by teen boy, though, may be less “Daddy’s home” and more Lord of the Flies. Steinberg, the psychology professor, was clear that he couldn’t diagnose Trump, Trump’s lackeys, or anyone else he hadn’t examined. But he told me, “Maybe what characterizes Trump more than anything else is the very heightened reward-seeking. He just has to get rewards from everything he does. And that may generate very strong impulses that he follows.” Whatever self-control the president does possess may simply be insufficient to tamp down those impulses.

The kind of behavior Trump demonstrates, Steinberg said, is unusual. “You need to distinguish between the people who are behaving this way where we would kind of expect it, although maybe not as extreme as this”—actual teenagers—“and people who keep behaving this way long after we would have expected them to have matured,” he said. “The chances that these people are going to mature in ways that we see as normal development, I think, are very small. They would have reached adult levels of maturity by the time they’ve reached their late 20s or early 30s, and if they haven’t, I think they’re probably not going to.”

What does this mean for the nation Trump leads? Steinberg was careful, again, to emphasize that he isn’t in the business of diagnosing strangers, and that Trump is not in fact an adolescent boy. But, he said, “if I asked the average person, ‘Do you think it’s a good idea to have a 17-year-old running the country?,’ I don’t think most people would say yes. If I said, ‘Do you think it’s a good idea to have an adult who acts like a 17-year-old running the country?,’ I think they’d say that sounds like a pretty bad idea also.”

Yet a majority of voters cast their ballots for Trump, so all of us are now finding out just how bad of an idea it is.