There is a story I tell myself about my oldest daughter that I've been trying to put into words for a while. She is thirteen. She has a clear sense of where she is going, the grades, the tennis, the internal standards she holds without anyone enforcing them. What's harder to describe is what sits underneath all of that. It's not confidence in the performative sense. It's more like a settled quality. She knows who she is.
I saw it most clearly in the group chat situation I mentioned in the Gi piece. When the person running it started posting things she found wrong, she didn't just disengage quietly. She said something. When she got kicked out, she didn't scramble to get back in. She built something better with people she trusted. There was no identity crisis in there. She already knew. So the decision was simple. That settled quality has a name in Bushido. The samurai called it Meiyo, honor.
Most people translate Meiyo as honor, and that's not wrong. But the samurai meant something more specific than modern English conveys. Meiyo was not reputation, not what others thought of you. It was the internal coherence between who you claimed to be and how you actually lived. A life of Meiyo was a life you could stand behind, not because everyone approved of it, but because it was genuinely and consistently yours.
Nitobe Inazo wrote that Meiyo gave the samurai their psychological foundation. The warrior who possessed it was not shaken by insult, because insult had nowhere to land. They were not seduced by flattery, because flattery couldn't offer them anything they didn't already have. They were not easily manipulated, because manipulation requires a gap between who someone is and who they wish they were, and Meiyo closed that gap.
This is different from pride. Pride is fragile and reactive. Meiyo was stable and self-referential. The samurai who lived by it didn't need external validation to know their worth. They had already done the interior work. That knowledge was a form of armor.
Algorithms don't wait for your child to figure out who they are. They start making decisions about that immediately. From the first videos watched, the first searches made, the first content engaged with, a profile gets built. That profile gets refined with every subsequent interaction. The algorithm learns what kind of person your child appears to be, based on behavioral data, not on who they actually are, and it starts delivering an identity to them rather than waiting for them to develop one.
A 2025 systematic review published in Adolescent Research Review analyzed 32 studies involving nearly 20,000 adolescents. The findings were specific: passive social media use, scrolling, consuming, comparing, was associated with higher identity distress and lower self-concept clarity. The algorithm-curated feed creates conditions where the adolescent doesn't explore identity so much as receive one.[1]
The American Psychological Association's June 2025 Health Advisory on AI and Adolescent Well-Being named this directly. The advisory found that adolescence is a critical period for identity formation, second only to infancy in terms of developmental significance, and that AI systems designed to maximize engagement specifically exploit adolescents' heightened sensitivity to social feedback and emotional stimulation. The advisory warned that these systems can shape young people's developing sense of self in ways that serve the platform's commercial interests rather than the adolescent's developmental needs.[2]
A 2025 study in Frontiers in Psychology examined how recommender algorithms affect young people's developing beliefs and identity. After just five days of TikTok usage in a research setting, there was a fourfold increase in the level of ideologically charged content being presented to teen users, content that, through its framing and repetition, functions to normalize specific worldviews and identity categories.[3]
The child with a well-developed sense of identity, who already knows what they believe, what they value, and what kind of person they're becoming, has a compass. When the algorithm pulls them in a direction, they have an internal reference point to check it against. The child without that compass is navigating in the dark.
The most important thing to understand about building Meiyo is that it cannot be told. You cannot hand your child a set of values and instruct them to have a strong identity. Identity is constructed from the inside out, through experience, reflection, and the accumulation of choices that gradually reveal to a person who they actually are.
The first strategy is family values made explicit and revisited often. Not rules, values. Rules govern behavior. Values shape identity. There's a difference between telling your child “we don't lie in this family” and telling them “we are people who believe the truth matters, even when it costs something.” One creates a constraint. The other creates an identity.
In our family, one of the clearest examples of this is what we do every year around Mayo Clinic and Ronald McDonald House. Years ago, my wife and I went through a serious medical event that these two organizations helped us get through. So every year, we make donations to both of them as a family. Not because someone told us to give back. Because we decided that gratitude isn't just something you feel, it's something you do. We want our daughters to grow up knowing that this is what we are: people who remember where we came from, and who show up for others the way others once showed up for us. Every year when we make those donations, all three of them see it.
The second strategy is letting your children make real choices and see the outcomes. Identity solidifies through action. The child who makes a decision and sees what happens learns something about who they are that no lecture can provide. The parent who consistently protects their child from the consequences of their own choices is inadvertently preventing the very experiences that build a self.
The third strategy is being deliberate about what your children are exposed to and for how long. Every hour your child spends in algorithmically curated content is an hour spent receiving an identity rather than building one. The child who also spends significant time in activities where identity is forged through effort, sports, creative work, real relationships, difficult projects, has a counterweight. They are building themselves from the inside rather than being assembled from the outside.
This practice works for kids of about 8 and up and is best done annually, around a birthday or the start of a new school year. Sit with your child and ask them to complete these two prompts as many times as they can:
I am someone who...
I believe that...
No wrong answers. No minimum or maximum. The only instruction is to write what's actually true, not what sounds good. Keep the list. Do it again the following year. Let your child see how it changes, what stays constant, what grows or falls away. The practice asks the child to name their own identity in their own words, from the inside, without reference to what the algorithm thinks they are.
My oldest would have a clear and confident list. My middle one's would be full of warmth and care for others. My youngest: I think her list would be fierce and funny and very, very long. Each one of them is already someone. The practice is just making that visible to them.
The samurai who lived with Meiyo were considered the most difficult to manipulate, not because they were the most skilled, but because they couldn't be bought or frightened into betraying who they were. Manipulation requires a crack. Flattery requires an unmet need. Intimidation requires something to lose that the person values more than themselves. Meiyo closes all of those gaps.
Your child is growing up in an environment specifically engineered to find those gaps and exploit them. The algorithm's job is to get and keep attention, and the most reliable way to do that is to offer people a sense of identity and belonging that they haven't yet found elsewhere.
The parent who helps their child develop a strong interior sense of who they are, through explicit values, real choices, honest reflection, and protected time to build themselves from the inside, is building exactly the kind of armor the samurai understood.
The challenge for this week: do the I Am / I Believe list together. Do yours first. Let your child see that you've been building your own identity for decades and still find it worth naming out loud.