If you want to understand America’s youth at any given moment, ask the people who write books for them. As an author of young adult fiction, I’ve spent the past 13 years traveling to schools to talk to junior high students about my books and about the value of reading more generally. I’ve visited 500 schools in 38 states — and, while my impressions are anecdotal, nothing I can scientifically measure, I can vouch that there has been a disturbing shift in vibes among the next generation.

Kids in 2013 were still kids — awkward, spontaneous, goofy. They felt young to me, protected from adult problems by the bubble of childhood. Like all kids, they never wanted to be the first to laugh in a crowd. But once they were given permission, they emoted unabashedly. Many were outspoken, literate, optimistic. There was a sparkle to the masses, one that gave me energy through months of touring each year.

Now kids have a different look in their eyes. Tired, wired, wary. Mischief has been replaced with hollow stares and gallows humor. COVID-19 made it worse, but the signs were there before — like they’d been hit by a second, more long-lasting contagion that had no cure. Maybe it was the smartphones, growing in sophistication year by year, targeting their brains with algorithms and artificial intelligence that coax them into addiction, with every ounce of their data mined and monetized by corporations. Or maybe it was simply the state of our country and our world: the climate instability, the routine school shooting drills, the political polarization, the greed and selfishness of our leaders, the grim economic prospects for those about to graduate.

Whatever the explanation, the kids I have met in the past few years seem to have absorbed the truth about what is waiting for them outside. Instead of being curious about the world, they increasingly fear and distrust it. They have no choice but to worry about what their future is going to look like, or if they’re going to have a future at all.

Once, the questions I’d gotten were earnest and innocent: Where do you get your ideas from? Can anyone be a writer? Have you ever written something really bad? Now the questions seemed more cynical: Will you follow me on TikTok? Do you make serious money? If I write a sequel to your book with AI, will you sue me? Teachers confided that students no longer had the attention to read a novel, unless it was a full-length comic. Instead of finding pleasure in reading, they found anxiety. The whole act of reading is too “silent,” as one teacher in Texas told me.

No wonder that studies have documented jumps in youth depression. Or that, according to the most recent Harvard Youth Poll, just 13% of 18-to-29-year-olds think the country “is headed in the right direction.”

Academics and policymakers have noticed these trends and have raised the alarm. And plenty of measures have been proposed to address the growing alienation among young people — such as limiting teens’ access to smartphones during the school day or forcing social media companies to take steps to protect kids online.

To those ideas, I want to add my own, admittedly unusual proposal — one that will not solve the youth mental health crisis but could help kids to start believing in our democracy and feeling some sense of ownership over their future. It’s also an idea that happens to be the premise of my new novel: What if, after 237 years, we dropped the requirement that the president be 35 or older?

***

I am not an expert in policy or constitutional law. Instead, I came to this idea through my own expertise: storytelling.

The first decade of my career was spent writing lush, romantic fairy tales, a series called “The School for Good and Evil.” As a Harvard undergrad, I had taken a class on fairy tales that immersed me in the original versions of the stories that Disney had raided and recast. These originals, I learned, were not syrupy tales of good’s invincible winning streak against evil. The Little Mermaid was a selfish villain, Peter Pan a ruthless tyrant, Pinocchio a cricket-murdering oaf. These were tales of warning, full of nuance and verve, meant to prepare you for the world beyond childhood. The idea that hundreds of years ago, young people grew up with these stories, while we instead were subjected to sanitized, corporatized shorthand, didn’t just feel like the opposite of progress. It felt like a lie.

“The School for Good and Evil” was my revolt. Over eight books and more than 4,000 pages, I deconstructed the Disney binaries — good and evil, boy and girl, old and young — to build an alt-fairy-tale realm, where a happy ending depended on what kids did, not what adults decided for them. The books struck a chord, and the first was adapted into a Netflix film, starring Charlize Theron, Kerry Washington and Laurence Fishburne.

With the success of the books and the film, there was pressure to stay in my fairy-tale lane. But I had another idea that kept tapping my shoulder, an idea that reflected the same impulse to revolt against the adult-made world — only this time, for real.

Back in 2016, I’d considered writing a novel about a teenage president, but dismissed it as a dead end. For one thing, there was the constitutional barrier. For another, with America ragefully fractured and Trumpism turning politics into a blood sport, the business of running the Earth’s most powerful nation felt too serious to turn over to an adolescent, even in fiction. Any version of it would end up feeling like White House Richie Rich, an exercise in pointless wish fulfillment.

In recent years, however, as I saw more and more doomed stares in auditoriums across the country, and as I watched politics in Washington devolve into playground imbecility, the idea came to feel increasingly relevant. And so, “Young World” began to take shape: a novel about a 17-year-old who runs for president, a mix of a young Barack Obama and Tom Hanks, a candidate who makes people root for him, regardless of ideology, because he reminds all of us what it once felt like to be young and alive to the world before we let the darkness in.

Along the way, I expanded the novel into a multimedia diary, illustrating the rise of a new political party — the Revolting Youth — in more than 150 neon-bright visuals. I hired three artists to design the party’s look, including its mascot: a mutt flashing two fingers, the old V-for-victory turned into a Y for youth. I also brought on a researcher to seek plausible ways to dispose of the presidential age restriction. Instead of creating a YA novel, it felt like I was writing a real-world manual for generational revolt.

I finished the book in December 2024. Six months later, I happened to be in Manhattan for publisher meetings on the day of the Democratic mayoral primary. It was 90-plus degrees, hellishly humid, but the streets were full of Zohran Mamdani volunteers, fanned out at intersections and subway exits, waving signs and coaxing strangers to the polls. Most were young, and their passion was buzzy, euphoric.

I’d actually known Zohran as a teenager, having once been an assistant to his mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair. Now here he was, a living avatar of the Revolting Youth: a brown, immigrant kid who’d risen from nowhere to win over a city. Imagine a presidential election with that kind of fever. Imagine the way young people would wake from their haze of doom. This was what I was striving to capture in fiction. This feeling, this hope — all built by someone under 35. Mamdani also can’t be president because he wasn’t born a U.S. citizen — another topic entirely — but why would we not want someone his age to create this enthusiasm at the presidential level?

Or consider Charlie Kirk, who founded Turning Point USA at just 18 and brought a vast number of young citizens into politics before he was assassinated at age 31. Mamdani and Kirk were ideological opposites, but they had a lot in common. If we measure political power in the ability to galvanize, both men arguably wielded more power than most of the people who nominally run Washington.

The Constitution does not explain its choice of the number 35. Presumably, the age rule was meant to ensure maturity. In 1789, that might have been wise: a fragile new republic, a fear of demagogues, a desire for legitimacy amongst skeptical European powers. But we’ve since seen no shortage of presidents over 35 who lack judgment and restraint. And we’ve seen phenoms under 35, like Mamdani and Kirk, display far greater clarity and poise.

At 18 or even younger, you can take on student loans, credit card debt and mortgages that will follow you the rest of your life; you can open businesses and get married; you can be tried in court as an adult and sentenced to life in prison; you can vote to decide the future of this country and die in wars to defend it. And yet, we demand you be nearly twice that age to ask that country to lead it.

In real life, of course, this restriction would not be easy to unwind. For “Young World,” I go the route of the Supreme Court, envisioning a moment where a surging youth movement forces the justices to reconsider the age clause. The threat of anarchy pushes the court to take seriously the new party’s message: that shutting young people out of the most powerful job in the country is impossible to square with a system that claims to treat everyone equally — and that opening the presidency to youth is the one release valve we have left before the system explodes.

None of this is going to happen at the actual Supreme Court, which views qualification clauses as absolute. This leaves only one path: a constitutional amendment to remove the age restriction and let young people run for president. Two-thirds majorities would be required in both the House and the Senate, followed by ratification from three-fourths of the states. The median age in the House is about 57. In the Senate, it’s about 65. In other words, no one should hold their breath.

***

Do I genuinely think a teenager should be president? Ultimately, I think rationality would prevail at the ballot box: Voters would simply reject a too-young candidate. They already do the same with candidates they consider too old or out of touch.

But what matters more than whether someone under 35 would be elected is the damning message the age restriction sends to young people from those in power: We’ll use you only when we need you. We’ll let you be our canvassers, our volunteers, our content creators. We’ll let you fill our rallies and energize our base. But what you cannot do is lead.

Opening up the presidency to those under 35 would instantly reverse that message. It would supercharge youth engagement in politics. It would ignite downstream runs for school boards, city councils and state legislatures, injecting new ideas into state and local government. Above all, it would constitute an implicit invitation to America’s young people to lead the way in fixing the problems we are bequeathing them — climate change, gun violence, toxic algorithms, screen addiction, runaway AI. On those questions and many more, ending the presidential age restriction would provide a much-needed jolt of both empowerment and hope. It could turn a generation’s anxiety into focused power.

This week, I start a monthlong tour of high schools across America. For once, I don’t have to hide behind fairy tales. I can look these kids in the eye and say out loud that their fears and pressures are genuine, that they have a right to feel that the system has failed them. Even if the presidential age rule isn’t going to disappear anytime soon, maybe a novel can at least start the conversation. A conversation that tells young Americans the rules of the game are not laws of nature. The rules can be rewritten. And not just in fiction.

Soman Chainani is the author of “Young World” and “The School for Good and Evil.”