A book · October 2026

Broken Birthright

Young People on the World They Are Inheriting, and What Adults Owe Them

Between 2025 and 2026 I asked young people aged fifteen to seventeen, in twenty-three countries, the same twenty-one questions, and then I stopped talking. This book is what they said, in their words, to the adults who make the decisions they live with.

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For fifteen years my work has put me in airports. It gave me a habit I would not trade: I book apartments instead of conference hotels, I take the bus, and I sit in the cafes that serve the people who live there. The distance between the conference center and the neighborhood tells you what the decisions made inside produce in the lives of the people outside. For most of those years I was watching adults.

Then, in transit through London, I sat down with a coffee near a group of teenagers waiting for a flight. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. They were talking about climate and politics with specifics and without performance. One of them made an argument about institutional accountability that I have heard made worse in conference rooms by people with advanced degrees. I put my phone down. I did not talk to them. I caught my flight and kept thinking about them.

I am a Scout leader and a father, so I already knew something about the gap between how adults describe teenagers and what teenagers do when no one is grading them. Adults underestimate, usually out of generosity. We assume youth means inexperience and inexperience means simplicity. What I have watched is the opposite. Young people form their picture of the world fast, from evidence they live inside, and it is often more precise than ours because it was formed closer to the consequences. This book exists because I decided to listen, in the plain sense: sit with young people for an hour, ask open questions, and then stop talking.

Every participant started with a written questionnaire of twenty-one questions, designed to give a young person room to think on paper before being asked to speak. The questions were plain: what a normal day looks like, what worries them, what gives them hope, what they would build with real money, what adults should stop doing and start doing instead, and what they would tell the leaders of their country if they had five minutes and the leaders had to listen.

Some went on to recorded one-to-one interviews. Others took part in group dialogues, where several young people from the same place talked through the same questions together. Parental or guardian consent was obtained for every participant. Every recording was made available to families. No one was coached, and no one was asked to perform optimism or hope or any emotion that would have been convenient for the book I thought I was going to write.

Three voices come from recorded one-to-one interviews and appear under their own first names, with their agreement and their families' consent. The rest are composite voices: each carries one invented name and the experiences, phrasings, and concerns that several young people in that place described in group dialogues. Composites protect participants who shared things they did not want attributed directly, and they allow places where speaking openly carries risk to be represented at all. Every sentence quoted from a composite was said by a participant in those rooms, and every composite is identified as a composite in the book. Nothing attributed to anyone was invented.

Recorded interviews

Composite voices from group dialogues

The last six come from dialogues held without the written questionnaire, and their words appear in the book in reported form, without quotation marks. How participants were invited, and how their words were protected, is set out on the project page that ran during the recruitment.

Young people who have never met, in conflict zones and comfortable suburbs, describe the same mechanisms: who pays when adults delay, why they are tired rather than lazy, why they refuse to be called the future when they are living now, and what dignity means when a home, a job, and a safe street are not guaranteed. A girl in Kyiv lives with two clocks, one for school and one for sirens. A boy in Osaka says, “We are exhausted even when we succeed.” A girl in Goma: “I’m a teenager and even I can see that delay is a decision.” A boy in Nairobi: “I think opportunity, not motivation, is what most of us are missing.”

The book sets out twelve things they agree on and six ways their worlds differ, so that a shared verdict is never mistaken for a single prescription. Security decides what the word normal means. Geography decides what is missing. Gender is the clearest line in the material. A policy for Osaka’s silence does nothing for Gaza’s border.

Part Three turns their words into ten asks, each with a measure attached, and into what governments, companies, and everyday adults owe them. The measures are plain enough for a teenager to check: whether the road holds after rain, whether a sixteen-year-old leaving school can read a lease, a payslip, a loan, and a scam, whether a decision changed because a young person was consulted. Underneath all of it is a ledger. Every delayed decision has a duration, the duration has a cost, and the cost lands on people who had no part in the decision. In project management we keep a decision register on every project of any size. Governments and companies keep none for the decisions that shape young lives. The young people in this book have been keeping it for them, and their entries are accurate.

With an Author’s Note, A Note on the Voices, and A Note on Method that says exactly what kind of evidence the book presents. 226 pages. Paperback and Kindle.

Parents, teachers, coaches, and Scout leaders. People who write policy, run companies, and sit on boards. Anyone who has said “when I was your age” and would like to know what the teenager thought and did not say. The book is a report rather than an argument. The arguments are made by the young people in it, and they are better than anything I would have written on their behalf.