“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
James Baldwin, The Nation, Nov. 1, 1980
Baldwin’s words, written over 4 decades ago, speak with urgent clarity to the work before us today. The mental health of our young people is not simply a matter of individual well-being; it is the wealth of our collective future. How we nurture, support, and listen to our youth today will determine the character and capacity of the leaders who will shape our world tomorrow. The Youth Mental Health Summit (YMHS) initiative, led by Erlanger Turner, PhD, and Celeste Malone, PhD, is a strong step in that direction.
The YMHS recognizes that young people are not merely future leaders waiting in the wings; they lead in the present moment, providing opportunities for us to be humble enough to follow. Yet for them to lead with wisdom, compassion, and resilience, they must be respected, their leadership cultivated. They must be nurtured and enriched from childhood through environments that affirm their worth, protect their minds, and expand their sense of what is possible.
Too often, decisions about the systems and structures in which young people are educated and reared are made without their voices at the center. This is a profound missed opportunity and one that YMHS intends to rectify. Youth carry practical wisdom forged from lived experience, wisdom that must actively inform our policies, our practices, and our recommendations. They understand, from their interiority, what it feels like to move through the world our decisions have built. That knowledge is irreplaceable, and we have an obligation to seek it out.
With the YMHS, we are doing precisely that. Rather than designing wellness frameworks for young people, YMHS builds them with them. YMHS directly engages our youth to understand, from their own perspective, what conditions would foster a genuine sense of safety and comfort—the foundational bedrock upon which well-being is built. Through YMHS, their answers are not supplementary data; rather, they are the blueprint for informing policy recommendations that shape the context of their lives and our collective future.
For all of us to be well, across communities and across generations, we must recognize that the children are, indeed, always ours. Investing in their mental health, and centering their voices in that work, is among the most morally serious commitments we can make together. Radically well, together!
