Connecticut ranks among the wealthiest, best-educated states in the nation. Its Fairfield County towns — Greenwich, Darien, New Canaan, Westport — are synonymous with exceptional schools, engaged parents, and extraordinary opportunity.
I live just across the border in Pound Ridge, NY, and I work and raise my children in this world. I know its advantages intimately. And I am telling you: we are failing our children. Not for lack of resources. For lack of the right priorities.
Across Connecticut and the broader region, anxiety and depression among children and teenagers have risen 70 percent in a single decade. Suicide is now the second leading cause of death among Americans aged 10 to 24. In Connecticut alone, youth mental health emergency visits have increased sharply. These are not numbers from struggling communities. They are numbers from some of the most affluent zip codes in America.
At the same time, artificial intelligence is rewriting the economy faster than any school curriculum has ever adapted. The World Economic Forum projected that 85 million jobs would be displaced by automation by 2025 — not factory jobs, but white-collar roles in law, finance, writing, analysis, and design. The very careers that Connecticut families have spent generations and fortunes preparing their children to enter.
We are standing at the intersection of a mental health crisis and economic disruption, and our education system is responding with more AP courses.
We have been optimizing children for a world that is disappearing. The skills that will actually protect them — resilience, creativity, practical capability, social intelligence — are precisely the ones we have been crowding out of childhood.
I grew up in Soviet Latvia. When I was 12, my mother left for Finland to support our family, and my older sister and I ran the household alone for five years. We cooked, cleaned, managed money, navigated conflict without adult intervention, and took full responsibility for our own lives. That experience, hard as it was, became the foundation of everything I have built since — including a career, a family, and a life I am proud of — rebuilt from scratch after losing our home to Superstorm Sandy.
I am not arguing about deprivation. I am arguing about capability. And I am arguing that Connecticut — a state with the policy infrastructure, institutional relationships, and educational talent to lead on this — should be the place where this conversation becomes action.
The evidence is not ambiguous. The 85-year Harvard Grant Study found that children who did household chores were more successful adults than any other variable measured — more than IQ, more than family income, more than academic performance. Finland’s top-ranked education system begins compulsory craft education — woodworking, cooking, sewing — in first grade, alongside literacy. Finnish students report lower anxiety, stronger purpose, and higher academic performance than their American counterparts.
These are not nostalgic ideas. They are evidence-based conclusions about what children actually need to develop confidence, resilience, and the capacity to function in a complex world.
What Connecticut’s education policy is missing is a serious, sustained commitment to what I call the six foundational skills: gratitude and emotional grounding, self-reliance, social intelligence and relationship skills, practical life skills, financial literacy, and creativity and entrepreneurship. Not as electives. Not as after-school enrichment. As core curriculum, woven into K-12 education with the same seriousness we currently give to algebra.
Some Connecticut districts are already moving in this direction — project-based learning, social-emotional learning frameworks, and financial literacy requirements. These are encouraging signals. But they remain peripheral. They do not yet reflect a fundamental reckoning with what school is for.
What we need from Connecticut’s policymakers, school board members, and education leaders is the courage to ask a harder question: Are we preparing children for life —or just for the next test?
The answer to the youth mental health crisis is not more therapy. The answer to AI disruption is no more coding. The answer is children who know how to show up—who are capable, grounded, socially connected, and genuinely useful to the world around them.
That is not a program. It is a philosophy of education. And Connecticut has both the means and the obligation to lead it.
Elina Kapostina is the founder of BEUSEFUL, an initiative to reform how we raise and educate children for the age of AI and complexity. She is the author of BE USEFUL: How to Raise Useful Human Beings.