Hardwired to Connect

The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities

Hardwired to Connect is about the rising rates of mental problems and emotional distress among U.S. children and adolescents, and how we as a society, can recommit ourselves to forging connections with one another to help bring about a change in the rising rates.

Written by a group of 33 children’s doctors, research scientists, mental health professionals, and youth service professionals, the report does three things:

  1. It identifies the crisis.
  2. Its presents what many of these experts believe to be a main cause of the crisis.
  3. And, it introduces a new concept, authoritative communities, which can help society do a better job of addressing the crisis. (Church communities and youth ministry efforts meet the definition of authoritative communities and can help youth achieve positive outcomes.)

What Is the Crisis?

The crisis comes in two parts:

  1. The deteriorating mental and behavioral health of U.S. children, who are experiencing a high and rising rate of depression, anxiety, attention deficit, conduct disorders, thoughts of suicide, and other serious mental, emotional, and behavioral problems.
  2. The second part is how we as a society are thinking about this deterioration. We are using increased medications and psychotherapies, and designing more special programs for “at-risk” youth. 

The report believes that our current programs of risk assessment and treatment block our view of the broad environmental conditions that are contributing to growing numbers of suffering children.

What Is Causing the Crisis?

The report believes that the deteriorating condition of children’s mental health is in large part caused by a lack of connectedness—close connections to other people, and deep connections to moral and spiritual meaning. 

Where does this connectedness come from? It comes from authoritative communities, which are defined as a group of people committed to one another over time, who model and transmit what it means to be a good person to the next generation.” 

The report outlines the weakening of such social institutions in recent decades in the U.S. That weakening, this report argues, is a major cause of the current mental and behavioral health crisis among U.S. children.

Much of the first half of this report is a presentation of scientific evidence—largely from the field of neuroscience, which concerns our basic biology and how our brains develop—showing that the human child is “hardwired to connect.” We are hardwired for other people and for moral meaning and openness to the transcendent. Meeting these basic needs for connection is essential to health and to human flourishing. Because in recent decades we as a society have not been doing a good job of meeting these essential needs, large and growing numbers of our children are failing to flourish.

What Can Solve the Crisis?

Authoritative communities are groups that live out the types of connectedness that our children increasingly lack. They are groups of people who are committed to one another over time and who model and pass on at least part of what it means to be a good person and live a good life. Renewing and building them is the key to improving the lives of U.S. children and adolescents.

“Authoritative community” is a new public policy and social science term, developed for the first time in this report. It is intended to help all those in our society working to understand and improve the lives of children. Much of the second half of the report is a definition of authoritative communities, an analysis of their role in society, and proposals for strengthening them.

What Is to Be Done?

The report proposes three big goals and 18 recommendations. All of the goals and recommendations focus on renewing and building authoritative communities. The goals and recommendations ask something of all of us: youth service organizations and youth service professionals, all levels of government, employers, philanthropists and foundations, religious and civic leaders, scholars, and families and individuals.

Reaching these goals and implementing these recommendations would constitute fundamental social change in our society. The report argues that nothing less will do. 

Hardwired to Connect is a Report to the Nation from the Commission on Children at Risk and co-sponsored by the YMCA of the USA, Dartmouth Medical School, and the Institute for American Values.

The synopsis provided here was written by
Maggie McCarty, D. Min.
Good Shepherd Center
Baltimore, Maryland