Gen Z Is Risk Averse: Here's How to Respond

For forty years my job has come down to one small moment, repeated thousands of times. A young person stands at the threshold of something they cannot see the bottom of, a flight to a country they can't pronounce, a yes they can't take back, and they decide whether to step. I have spent my life standing near that door.

What I have watched lately is that the yes is getting quieter. The hesitation lasts longer, and more of them are choosing, gently and reasonably, to stay on the safe side of the door.

I used to think that was just my corner of the world. It isn't.

This weekend the news out of Chicago was the kind that stops you cold. Six people killed, dozens shot, a Juneteenth gathering that was meant to be a celebration ending as a vigil. The world is not pretending to be safe right now, and the instinct that rises up in all of us when we see something like that is the oldest one there is: pull the people we love close and make the danger stop.

I understand that instinct. I have four daughters. But I have also learned something across four decades of sending young people toward the hard places instead of away from them, and it is this: you cannot build a life, or a faith, on the pursuit of safety. The fear that's loud on the news is not the thing I'm most worried about. The thing I'm most worried about is quieter.

The Great Retreat

Arthur Brooks wrote a piece in The Free Press this week that named it better than I could. He calls it Gen Z's great retreat from risk, and the numbers behind it are hard to look away from. In the mid-1970s, 92 percent of high school seniors had at least tried alcohol. By 2025 that figure had fallen to 47 percent.

On its face that sounds like good news, and in some ways it is. But the psychologist Jean Twenge has shown that the decline isn't really about drinking. Everything from driving to dating to leaving the house has dropped right alongside it. A whole generation is taking fewer chances of nearly every kind.

It goes deeper than habits. In 1980, ninety percent of thirty-five-year-old men were married; today it's about sixty percent and falling. In 1993, 83 percent of twelfth-grade girls said they hoped to marry someday. By 2023 only 61 percent did.

And then comes the number that has not left me alone. According to research Brooks cites from Ryan Burge, only 13 percent of Gen Z believe most people can be trusted, and nearly three out of four say you can't be too careful with other people. In their effort to avoid risk, this generation is quietly avoiding the riskiest thing of all, which is each other.

Faith Is Spelled R-I-S-K

I wrote those exact words on my blog years ago, long before I read any of this research. Faith is spelled R-I-S-K. It's a muscle you only build by using it. When you trust a person, you risk that they will let you down. When you trust God, you risk that he won't come through. There is no version of faith that removes the gamble, because the gamble is the whole point.

Here is what I want you to hear, especially if you love someone in this generation. They are not cowards. They were handed a world that felt like it was coming apart, and a lot of us, with the very best of intentions, taught them that the highest good was to stay safe. We smoothed every path and removed every bump and passed down a cautious legacy without ever meaning to. We became, as I once put it, a nation of risk arbitragers who build our lives within sight of the shore.

But there are no adventures in the shallows. Jesus keeps standing out past where our feet can touch, calling people to come to him on the water. God gives us risks on purpose, because that is how we learn he can be trusted. The retreat from risk is not safety. It's a slow starvation dressed up as wisdom.

So How Do You Actually Respond?

If you're a parent, the answer is not to lecture your kid about being braver. It's to stop rewarding only the safe choices. Bless the risk out loud: when they take a real chance on a person, a calling, a hard conversation, a trip that scares you both, tell them you're proud before any of you know how it turns out.

Then go first. They are watching to see whether your own life is being lived within sight of the shore. A generation learns courage the same way it learns fear, by catching it from the adults who raised them. Give them real chances to get in over their heads while you are still close enough to cheer.

And if you are one of these young adults reading this, I want to tell you the truth the algorithm won't. The careful life you're being sold is not the abundant one. The people you're afraid to trust are the same people you were made to love. You will not find yourself by staying safe; you'll find yourself on the far side of a yes you can't take back.

That is where it has always been. Out past the breakers, in the deep water, where the only thing holding you up is the One who asked you to come.

Seth Barnes is the founder of Adventures in Missions and has spent decades walking with young people through field-based discipleship programs across six continents. He writes regularly at sethbarnes.com.