Make America Civic Again
How parents can rebuild community—and protect youth mental health
I am a child and adolescent psychiatrist. Every week, I meet teenagers who feel unmoored—lonely, adrift, and disconnected from a society that seems to be slipping out of reach. Their problems are not just clinical; they are civic. And the solution must be civic as well. What the research makes blazingly clear is this: parents are the most powerful civic engines in their children’s lives. And rebuilding civic life through families is one of the most overlooked, potent, and urgently necessary interventions we have for youth mental health.
Young people aren’t disengaged because they don’t care. They are disengaged because we have not given them structures that anchor them to one another or to their communities. Those structures cannot be downloaded. They must be lived.
On a cold morning in New Jersey, in an empty lot surrounded by chain-link fencing, dozens of parents and teenagers gathered with drills, shovels and paint rollers. Eight hours later, that vacant lot had become a playground. Alexandra’s Playground—founded by Michael and Andrea Vitale after the loss of their daughter—was built on the idea that play and community connection are essential ingredients for resilience. That morning, as toddlers passed out water bottles and teenagers hoisted lumber, the adults weren’t only building a playground. They were building citizens.
The Vitales’ sons watched their parents turn grief into civic purpose. They watched strangers become collaborators, and a vacant lot become a public good. Later, when Alexandra’s Playground launched a Youth Advisory Board that entrusted teenagers with real funds and real decisions, those same children—now older—returned as leaders. They understood, viscerally, what it means to steward a community, a value echoing the Māori concept of Whakapapa: the responsibility to “leave the jersey in a better place” than you found it.
This is what civic life looks like when families build it themselves: collective, intergenerational, imperfect, and profoundly stabilizing. And right now, it is exactly what American young people need.
Contrary to alarmist headlines, Gen Z has not abandoned civic engagement. The data tell a more complicated story. Traditional volunteering among teens peaked in the mid-2000s and then declined modestly, from 28 percent in 2005 to 25 percent in 2015, according to the Do Good Institute. The U.S. Census Bureau and AmeriCorps found that the national volunteering rate dropped to 23 percent in 2021—its lowest in two decades—before rebounding to 28 percent in 2023 (Census 2024).
But researchers note that today’s youth civic activity is “less institutional but no less intense.” They are joining mutual-aid networks, leading decentralized digital campaigns, and mobilizing around single-issue movements rather than the top-down organizations their parents once joined.
The shift is not from caring to apathy—it is from institutions to improvisation.
What teens lack is not motivation; it’s scaffolding. And scaffolding has always begun with parents.
The academic literature is clear: parents are the single strongest predictors of whether children become civically engaged. Studies of middle school students show that parents who volunteer raise children with a significantly stronger sense of community responsibility. Research on children in grades 4–6 demonstrates that even after controlling for socioeconomic variables, kids whose parents volunteer are more likely to do so themselves. And a study of nearly 1,000 adolescents found a remarkably strong correlation between parental civic socialization and adolescent civic engagement.
This is not a subtle effect. It is enormous.
And it is amplified by warmth. Italian researchers found that parent-youth closeness strengthens civic transmission; encouragement matters most when relationships are warm and connected. When a parent says, “Come help me with this,” a teenager hears something deeper: “You belong here. Your contribution matters.”
The opposite is also true. Research shows that parents’ dismissive beliefs—“young people don’t matter,” “volunteering is pointless,” “the world is too broken”—actively undermine children’s civic development. Cynicism is contagious.
Which means that parents are not simply models. They are civic multipliers. Their engagement—or their disengagement—reverberates into the next generation.
The stakes are even higher than most people realize, because civic engagement is not just good for democracy. It is profoundly good for mental health.
A 2023 study of nearly 50,000 U.S. children and teens found that those who volunteered in the past year were significantly less likely to experience anxiety or depression and far more likely to “flourish” emotionally and socially. Reviews of youth civic engagement show that helping others builds identity, strengthens community connections, and creates meaning—protective factors that buffer against depression and loneliness.
The suicide-prevention literature says the same thing. National guidelines identify family, peer, and community connectedness as core protective factors against suicidal thoughts and behaviors. A powerful study of Spanish adolescents found that family connectedness was the single strongest protective factor against suicide risk. And among teens hospitalized for suicidal behavior, those with stronger connections to family and community adults had fewer suicide attempts over the following year.
Civic participation creates precisely these conditions: belonging, purpose, and a sense of being necessary. These are the very things adolescents tell me they cannot find online.
Civic life—shared activities, shared burdens, shared purpose—is not a luxury. It is a psychological intervention.
In my practice, I see what happens when parents create the conditions for civic belonging. One teenager, convinced he was directionless, joined the inclusive service program Yachad because his parents insisted. Working alongside neurodiverse peers in Israel, he found purpose. He returned home with a new plan for college, and a sense of direction no clinical intervention had been able to spark.
Another teen struggling with social isolation found connection through the Posse Foundation, a program that places diverse cohorts of young leaders into “posses” that support one another through college. Her mother’s persistence in finding the program changed her trajectory.
These were not medical interventions. They were civic ones.
Parents often tell me they don’t know where to start. They imagine that civic engagement requires heroic sacrifice or a clear plan. But the parents whose work most transforms their children’s lives didn’t begin with clarity.
The Vitales began with a playground. Other parents start with a pantry shift or a blood drive. Some begin with athletic fundraising. The Pan-Mass Challenge (PMC), a 192-mile bike ride founded in 1980 by Billy Starr, has raised more than $1 billion for cancer research and now includes Kids Rides, giving even toddlers a chance to participate. The PMC Kids program alone raised more than $420,000 in 2024. Riders like me and my daughter return year after year. As Starr once told me, “You need community—community is number one.”
You can see the same civic alchemy in two other parent-built organizations.
In 2008, Danielle Butin returned from Tanzania shaken by a physician who wept over the lack of basic medical supplies. She began collecting unused but still-sterile items that New York hospitals legally had to discard. Her garage became the first warehouse of the Afya Foundation. Her kids helped her pack shipments. They watched her climb into dumpsters for cardboard and cold-call supply managers. They learned that civic life is not abstract. It is boxes, tape, sweat, and persistence. Today Afya has shipped more than 14 million pounds of supplies to 89 countries. But the more important story is what her children absorbed: if something is broken, you are allowed to help fix it.
During the early pandemic, former professional tennis player Melissa Subin and her daughter Brianna began by baking cookies to thank local police officers. That tiny gesture grew into Bake Back America, a youth-powered food distribution network that has delivered more than 250,000 pounds of produce and 100,000 meals. Kids didn’t just serve; they led. They designed initiatives, created donation drives, and discovered that “small things done consistently become something much bigger,” as Brianna told me.
Both organizations began with ordinary parents facing extraordinary moments. Both transformed their children—who learned, through action, what civic responsibility feels like.
And yet even the most impactful civic acts are struggling. Consider blood donation. Donations from individuals ages 19 to 24 dropped by 32 percent from 2019 to 2021. Only 3 percent of eligible Americans donate at all—despite the fact that a single donation can save up to three lives. The infrastructure of giving is running on fumes.
Imagine if families treated civic engagement the way they treat sports, SAT prep, or college tours. What would happen if volunteering, donating blood, or building a playground were nonnegotiable—not because they boost résumés, but because they build resilience?
The path forward is not complicated. Parents must model civic behavior, not lecture about it. They must discuss community problems openly rather than insulating their children from them. They must make service a shared family activity rather than a chore. And they must start small—one inch at a time.
Young people do not need grand plans. They need adults who demonstrate that one inch, done consistently, becomes miles.
Alexandra’s Playground teaches this better than any study. The children who watched their parents build something from nothing did not absorb a political message. They absorbed a civic one: you are capable of shaping the world around you.
In an era of adolescent loneliness, anxiety, and disconnection, that message is oxygen.
A civic revival will not begin in Congress, in statehouses, or in school assemblies. It will begin in garages, community centers, blood drives, bike rides, playground builds, and kitchen tables. It will begin when parents decide they are temporary custodians of the world they will hand to their children—and act accordingly.
The jersey is in our hands. And our children are watching what we do next.