# Are Kids Getting Better? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 15, 2011, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086 "2011-07-15T01:12:15Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2011, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/81 "2011-07-16T22:33:55Z")
> [@heathen\_earthling](#): > > I think there is some truth to what you’re saying, but I wouldn’t call it an improvement. I find it very lonely being an extremely cynical and nihilistic Gen Y’er! That is a function of your age, not of your generation. ---
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2011, 10:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/82 "2011-07-16T22:51:06Z")
> [@MandaJo](#): > > I’ve taught high school for ten years, and I like today’s teenagers better than the ones I knew in my own high school years (early 90s). A lot of that may be my point-of-view: I’m sure there’s a lot of nastiness I don’t see. But generally speaking, kids seem happier than we were, with a lot less angst. In the 90s, being “cool” meant actually being “cool”: not being too invested in anything, not too passionate, always being a little wryly detached, never worrying about the future because it was going to suck no matter what. That’s just not the case any more: it’s ok to be a geek, it’s ok to be interested in things, it’s ok to see society as something you have a place in, and will have a place in as an adult. In the early 90s, we had this vague idea that feeling any sort of connection to the wider adult world was “selling out”. > > Now, maybe I hung out with terrible slackers then and happen to have great kids now, but I like now better, and it sure feels like a change. This is exactly the impression I have from my encounters with kids as well. And it’s a little weird that this is exactly what was predicted by the guys mentioned above who theorized this generational cycle of “prophets,” “artists,” etc. Weird because as far as I can tell they had no sensible method for coming up with their cycle or their predictions. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2011, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/83 "2011-07-16T23:10:18Z")
> [@Frylock](#): > > This is exactly the impression I have from my encounters with kids as well. > > And it’s a little weird that this is exactly what was predicted by the guys mentioned above who theorized this generational cycle of “prophets,” “artists,” etc. > > Weird because as far as I can tell they had no sensible method for coming up with their cycle or their predictions. I’ve read [_Generations_](http://www.amazon.com/Generations-History-Americas-Future-1584/dp/0688119123/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310857735&sr=8-1) and [_The Fourth Turning,_](http://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turning-American-Prophecy-Rendezvous/dp/0767900464/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1) and come to think of it, I can’t recall any statement of **method,** other than what might be expressed as, “We looked at American/English history from a certain perspective and this is the clear pattern we discerned.” They do have a theory as to how every generation’s upbringing by the previous affects its characteristics, but that’s all an after-the-fact explanation of the pattern. Well, so what, they’re not even claiming to do falsifiable science, here. (How one **would** do falsifiable science on this topic is a daunting question.) ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2011, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/84 "2011-07-16T23:25:04Z")
[Here’s](http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/resources/pdf/TBR_1940-2006.pdf) an interesting graphic. When was the highest teen birthrate? In the 60’s with free love and no legal abortion? Nope. The 1950’s peaking in 1957 at 96.3 births per thousand to girls 15-19. By the 60’s it was dropping fast. The drop leveled out a few years after abortion was legalized and then went up late 80’s early 90’s to peak then at a more modest 61.8 in 1991, dropping significantly since. ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2011, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/85 "2011-07-16T23:38:40Z")
> [@heathen\_earthling](#): > > I think there is some truth to what you’re saying, but I wouldn’t call it an improvement. I find it very lonely being an extremely cynical and nihilistic Gen Y’er! Why should you be cynical and nilhistic? I can understand some cynicism but nilhism?!?! ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 2:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/86 "2011-07-17T02:55:34Z")
> [@DSeid](#): > > [Here’s](http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/resources/pdf/TBR_1940-2006.pdf) an interesting graphic. When was the highest teen birthrate? In the 60’s with free love and no legal abortion? Nope. The 1950’s peaking in 1957 at 96.3 births per thousand to girls 15-19. In the 1950s, I daresay, a significant number of those teenage girls were **married.** ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/87 "2011-07-17T03:14:30Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > In the 1950s, I daresay, a significant number of those teenage girls were **married.** After they dropped out of school in “shame”. I recall my mother telling me how about half her female classmates just vanished. ---
**Author:** ![Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/f04885/32.png) [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Qin_Shi_Huangdi)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/88 "2011-07-17T03:28:49Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > After they dropped out of school in “shame”. I recall my mother telling me how about half her female classmates just vanished. Eh, drop-out rates were in general quite high back then. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 5:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/89 "2011-07-17T05:46:59Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > After they dropped out of school in “shame”. I recall my mother telling me how about half her female classmates just vanished. No, I was thinking how the average age of first marriage has risen over the years. In the '50s – especially in rural areas – probably there were still a some families where marriage at 16 or so was simply expected. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 1:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/90 "2011-07-17T13:28:41Z")
[True.](http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/05/1/gr050107.html) > [@](#): > > Unmarried childbearing. Even though teen childbearing overall has declined steeply over the last half-century, the proportion of all teen births that are nonmarital has increased equally dramatically, from 13% in 1950 to 79% in 2000 (see chart). Two factors are at play. The first is that marriage in the teen years, which was not uncommon in the 1950s, has by now become quite rare. (By the mid-1990s, the typical age of first marriage in the United States had risen to just over 25 for women and 27 for men.) The second is that this trend has extended to pregnant teens as well: In contrast to the days of the “shotgun marriage,” very few teens who become pregnant nowadays marry before their baby is born. > > Abortion. Birthrates rise and fall as a result of changes in the rate at which women become pregnant or resolve their pregnancies in abortion, or a combination of both. Among teens in the United States, at least in recent years, declining birthrates are not the result of more pregnant teens opting to have an abortion. The U.S. teen abortion rate, after rising through the 1970s and holding fairly constant during the 1980s, then began a steady decline. By 1997, the rate was 28 abortions per 1,000 women 15-19—33% lower than the rate a decade earlier. > > Pregnancy. Recent declines in teen birthrates, then, are attributable to reductions in pregnancy rates. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the U.S. teen pregnancy rates rose. They remained steady through the 1980s, even as sexual activity among teens increased, due to improved contraceptive use among those teenagers who are sexually active. The rates declined 19% from 117 pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15-19 in 1990 to 93 per 1,000 in 1997—the lowest rate in 20 years. The recent decline is particularly encouraging, because—as with the teen birthrate decline—all population groups followed a similar pattern, regardless of young women’s age, marital status, race or ethnicity. ---
**Author:** ![Hyperelastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Hyperelastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hyperelastic)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/91 "2011-07-17T17:40:39Z")
> [@Acid\_Lamp](#): > > I think some of us still don’t get the fundamental difference between technological revolutions of the past and the one that we are currently undergoing. In pace, scale, and impact it is like nothing we have ever undergone as a species; and we are seeing the early results. I’m 31. I can remember a world without personal computers and the internet. I remember how _long_ it took to earn knowledge on any given subject. I remember long hours spent with encyclopedias and cross referencing books in the library to find little nuggets of information. Until the advent of the internet this was how we gained knowledge. I agree that the impact of the internet has been underappreciated. But in the 1800s, a large proportion of people could not read at all, and those who could often had access only to a few books and maybe a local newspaper. It took longer, but the difference between that and generally accessible public libraries, TV and radio was probably comparable to the impact of the internet. > [@](#): > > People say that kids today are arrogant. Why shouldn’t they be? They know more than any generation before them. Most are global citizens exposed to arts, music, and ideas from around the globe. Here is where I lose you. I believe the internet tends to magnify the difference between the ignorant and the knowledgeable. People who are ignorant, credulous or fixed in their beliefs, and God knows most people are like this, are becoming more set in their ways because of the internet. One can find the most [false](http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/) and [useless](http://www.fanpop.com/spots/paris-hilton) information professionally and cleverly presented on the internet. The only way to develop a critical or skeptical point of view is to have a real person demonstrate its value to you, or to compare what you see in the internet to what you see in real life, and draw your conclusions accordingly. I do think there has always been a tendency for people who start out below a certain level of awareness to become dimmer and dimmer because they learn the wrong lessons from their experiences. For example, a guy plays the lottery and loses, and concludes that his lucky number must be the one that was picked, so he’ll improve his odds by playing that one in the future. I think it’s possible for this to account for the exponential difference between the very able and the totally incompetent. ---
**Author:** ![DSeid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dseid/32/20194_2.png) [@DSeid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSeid)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2011, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/92 "2011-07-17T22:31:41Z")
**BG** , There is also [this factoid](http://www.nationalaffairs.com/doclib/20080826_Pagesfrom90_Controversy.pdf) (pdf) to throw into the mix - > [@](#): > > To be sure, lots of adolescents had babies–even more than do today – but almost all were married before or shortly after the pregnancy occurred. As some family sociologists observed at the time, pregnancy was often part of the courtship process, propelling many young couples into marriage at an accelerated pace. … As many as half of all teenage brides in the late 1950s were pregnant when they took their wedding vows … Not so sure that living in a society that had kids often ignorant of contraceptive choices, and that made being an unmarried parent so horrible of an option that kids married the first or second person they were unlucky enough to get lucky with rather than suffer that stigma, discounts that high 50’s rate in any meaningful way. ---
**Author:** ![Void1967](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/e274bd/32.png) [@Void1967](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Void1967)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2011, 6:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/93 "2011-07-23T06:09:54Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > As a child, peers organized games of Smear the Queer at church. They told horribly racist jokes at boy scout meets. My summer-camp roommate laughingly told stories about his older brother going out literally gay-bashing on weekend nights. > > This is just a few decades later, and I think things are different. Cheers!!!-One thing I think is happening, though, we have a dissappearance of the quote ‘middle class’ and the kids in the ‘hopelessly poor’ group are growing in numbers, which is very sad…I live in an upper middle community and the kids are amazingly brilliant and make good, fair choices, but I drive through my downtown and there are hundreds of youth that can’t find jobs or any way out—in a way deliquincy for them is ‘fitting in’ and dealing drugs is an ‘avaiable job’. You can’t wash off your social class (the way you talk, dress, present) if you don’t know how, and it creates a viscious circle of these teens not getting hired for real work. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2011, 1:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/94 "2011-07-23T13:40:52Z")
> [@Qin\_Shi\_Huangdi](#): > > Eh, drop-out rates were in general quite high back then. The change in attitude is perhaps put into perspective by the fact that when I graduated high school in 1990, I couldn’t understand why my parents were proud of me. Graduating high school struck me as being no greater an accomplishment than, say, completing the seventh grade, or turning 15, or getting a haircut. Probably 97% of the people I went to high school with graduated and the only ones who didn’t were total losers. I found the pomp and ceremony baffling, although I was looking forward to the party. But to my parents’ generation it was a bigger deal. Graduating from high school wasn’t something everyone without a drug problem did. My father never finished high school (although he later got a university degree anyway.) To them it WAS a big deal. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [July 23, 2011, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086/95 "2011-07-23T14:50:07Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > But to my parents’ generation it was a bigger deal. Graduating from high school wasn’t something everyone without a drug problem did. My father never finished high school (although he later got a university degree anyway.) To them it WAS a big deal. You may also find you have a different appreciation for it when it is your own daughter: I also thought graduating high school was pretty “meh”, but man, oh, man, am I proud of my students when they do. It’s not the pride of an unusual accomplishment, it’s the pride of passing a landmark–like pride in a child’s first steps. It’s a moment when you reflect on all the things about that child that you are proud of. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-kids-getting-better/589086.md?page=4)