If you can be anything be an Appropriate Adult. It's what the World needs now.

Why is there a crisis of appropriate adulthood in our culture today? We could start anywhere. In a courtroom where a child tries to name the harm that happened to her and is told she’s been brainwashed. In a podcast studio where a man with a microphone speaks in the tone of science while selling delusion. In a Reddit thread where teenagers diagnose each other with trauma, abandonment, personality disorders, and impossible destinies. But all of it points to one central question—where are the adults?

Not the ones who pay bills or file taxes or bark rules. The ones who can hold pain without turning it into a campaign. The ones who stay calm when others panic, who tell the truth without needing to be heroes, who protect without taking control. The ones who step in not with dominance, but with dignity. In UK law, the term “appropriate adult” has a precise meaning: a person who supports a vulnerable person during police custody or interviews, ensuring their rights are protected, their voice is heard, and that they are not manipulated or misunderstood. They act as safeguard, witness, and translator between power and vulnerability. It is a role born of necessity—because when someone is at their most confused or frightened, the presence of the right adult can mean the difference between justice and further harm.

That legal definition offers us something more than bureaucracy. It offers a cultural metaphor. An appropriate adult is someone who knows how to sit in the gap between fear and force, and hold the ground with care. It is a posture we desperately need—across institutions, families, communities, movements. But we have too many elders who were never initiated, too many voices and not enough guides. Too many performances of certainty, not enough models of steadiness. The absence of appropriate adults has consequences. It creates a wound that doesn’t stay quiet. It multiplies into myths and movements and moral panics. It fills the void with gods, grifters, and ghosts. This is the terrain of collective orphan psychology—a society where the loss of reliable adult presence leaves us grasping for certainty, craving protection, and lashing out at shadows when no one shows us how to hold our fear.

We used to have examples. Not perfect ones, but real ones. Fred Rogers, the gentle force behind Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was an appropriate adult in the truest sense. He didn’t talk down to children—he talked toward them, meeting them on the ground where they stood. He told the truth about death, divorce, fear, and anger—but always within a container of care. He slowed things down. He made silence feel safe. He didn’t try to fix a child’s pain. He bore witness to it. Fred Rogers understood, deeply and deliberately, that presence was power. He didn’t posture or perform. He modeled. He knew that children—and the wounded children inside adults—don’t need spectacle. They need steadiness.

An appropriate adult is the social worker who sits beside a terrified teenager in a police station at 2 a.m., not to fix the problem but to make sure the process doesn’t break the child further. It’s the teacher who interrupts a classroom panic with calm instead of control, who de-escalates not to preserve authority but to protect dignity. It’s the grandmother who knows when to hold silence instead of judgment. The coach who apologizes when he gets it wrong. The mentor who names harm without humiliating. The elder who says, “You’re safe now,” and means it. They are not perfect. They are not always right. But they are anchored. And without them, we are a culture improvising adulthood from fragments—mimicking strength instead of embodying it.

In the 1980s, parents and therapists across the United States became convinced that children were being abused in secret cults—victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse, hidden in daycares and church basements. The belief spread like wildfire. Recovered memories, televised trials, expert witnesses, ruined lives. None of it held up under scrutiny. There was no national conspiracy. But the panic was real. Why? Because the story provided coherence. It offered adults a clear enemy, a righteous role. It let them act out their fear and grief in ways that felt productive. But it wasn’t about the truth. It was about the ache of not knowing what to do with fear, of being helpless in the face of vulnerability. It was a culture failing to parent itself. It was a mass enactment of collective orphan psychology, where confusion and grief are transfigured into ritualized accusation because there are no elders to hold the ambiguity with care.

This failure isn’t unique to humans. Across species, the presence of mature adults is not a luxury. It is biological infrastructure. In elephant herds, the loss of elder matriarchs led to a generation of orphaned juvenile males who began killing rhinoceroses—violent, erratic behavior never seen in normal elephant society. It stopped only when adult males were reintroduced. In chimpanzee communities, the absence of older members breaks down grooming rituals, conflict resolution, and alliance-building. In wolves, when the alpha pair is removed, the pack fragments, hunting deteriorates, and pups are more likely to die. Adults don’t just lead. They model how to exist.

Humans are no different. Developmental psychology has shown that children without emotionally present adults tend to develop insecure or disorganized attachment. Their brains are wired by chaos. Stress hormones flood their systems in the absence of reliable caregiving, leaving them hypervigilant or numb. They grow up scanning the world for betrayal or approval, lacking the internal regulation that only steady presence can teach. Without a model, there’s no map. And so they cling to whatever fills that void: ideologies, influencers, identity roles, imagined enemies. The orphaned mind does not ask, “What’s true?” It asks, “What will make this stop hurting?”

Why do people cling to extreme narratives even when evidence falls apart? Because certainty is more comforting than ambiguity. A villain is better then a void. The orphaned psyche does not want to sit in the unknown. It wants answers, even if they are wrong. It wants villains, even if they’re invented. In the Salem witch trials, a group of girls in a deeply religious society began having fits and visions. The adults could not imagine a psychological cause. They could not bear to admit confusion or culpability. So they declared war on their own people. Nineteen were hanged. Dozens imprisoned. A whole town consumed by the need for an explanation and some used the panic to take control of other people's property.

This same psychology animates the Red Pill and Black Pill ideologies of today. Men who feel rejected and powerless turn to online prophets who promise a clear, mechanical truth: women are hypergamous, society is a rigged game, love is dead, biology is fate. It feels scientific. It mimics logic. But at its core, it’s myth. A myth that comforts the unparented boy by telling him his suffering is not his fault. That he never needed to grow up, just to wake up. It’s easier to join a war than to grieve.

Without adults modeling how to metabolize grief, how to hold disappointment without weaponizing it, myth becomes a substitute for maturity. People repeat harmful stories not because they believe them, but because no one ever taught them how to tell the truth when it hurts.

Why can’t we stop repeating these cycles? Because we haven’t reckoned with what we inherited. We are haunted. Haunted by the unspoken griefs of the generations before us. Haunted by wars never mourned, by abuse denied, by ruptures that were never repaired. Haunted by the stories that were never allowed to be told. When no one names the ghosts, the children grow up believing the haunting is normal. Or worse, that it’s their fault.

The ghost doesn’t show up with a chain and a moan. It appears in hashtags and podcasts. In viral outrage and TikTok diagnosis. In the panic of a parent who would rather believe in a cult than admit their child is hurting. In the voice of a man who cloaks misogyny in the language of biology. In a courtroom where a child’s voice is dismissed in favor of a clean, symmetrical story. These hauntings are not metaphors. They are the evidence of a species in intergenerational freefall. The raw material of collective orphan psychology—a culture raised without models, terrified of its own confusion, desperate for clarity at any cost.

To be an appropriate adult is to interrupt this pattern. It means more than managing bills or enforcing rules. It means knowing how to stay when someone is scared, how to apologize when you’re wrong, how to create safety without coercion. It means learning to speak truth with humility, to protect with care, to love without possession. It means being able to say to the orphaned parts of another person—or yourself—“I’m here. I’m not going to disappear. We can figure this out together.”

An appropriate adult holds the line not just against danger, but against despair. They model what it means to have power without domination. They teach, by example, how to tolerate discomfort, how to repair after rupture, how to name what’s real without needing to be right. This is the work of healing a culture stuck in the adolescence of ideology and the tantrums of moral panic.

We see the hunger for this everywhere. In the explosion of interest in trauma. In the rise of coaching, therapy, and every modality that promises transformation. In the desperate attempts to build “safe spaces” without the scaffolding of mature conflict resolution. People are aching for structure. But they don’t want it from the top down. They want it from the inside out.

We need adults. Not perfect ones. Not ideologues. Not avatars of certainty. But people who are willing to take on the responsibility of presence. Who can tell the difference between a wound and a war. Who can see past the performance and into the pattern. Who understand that protection is not a story we tell—it is a practice we embody. We don’t need more gods. We don’t need more grifters. We don’t need more ghosts.

The world needs people with the courage to be appropriate adults. The kind who do not seek applause. The kind who know how to stay steady when the stories fall apart. The kind who are brave enough to be boring in the right ways, who know that healing isn’t always dramatic—it’s often quiet, slow, and sustained.

We need to become the people we needed when we were young. And the people the world still needs now.