Are Kids Getting Better?

[Voyager]

@Lil_Ol_Lady

I would say kids today are charitable when it’s convenient for them. I find few that would actually do something that costs them something. When I was a young girl we would actually give people things to the point of not getting something for me.

They are tolerant on things they agree with. But just as intolerant of those things they don’t agree with.

Not nearly as intolerant as we were in the 1960s. In fact, kids today may be too damn tolerant. Our generation has screwed up the economy so that it is hard to get a job when graduating from college, and we hear nary a peep.

This is a great point. Today’s kids have more realistic expectations. But this in some ways takes away the fun of being young. When I was young everything was an adventure. I once drove from NYC to LA for the opening night of a play I wrote. Of course it was bad and closed two days later. Can you imagine driving 3,000 miles now to see a play that you wrote? I guess it takes youth.

Just a few weeks ago my daughter, who is in grad school, drove from NJ to Boulder for a conference. She and her husband went to all 50 states when they were in college. My other daughter, with some but not enough German, did a year abroad there. I did some nutty things too, like driving from Boston to Florida to see the Apollo XVII launch, but my kids win on that regard.

I will also admit we were fake polite in the 50s and 60s. But it costs nothing to be nice and hold your tongue. It costs nothing not to air your dirty laundry. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone screaming into a cell phone about personal things, I’d be embarrassed to talk about to anyone.

I’m not sure that is rude as opposed to having lost a sense of privacy, the same sense that used to keep people from sending naked pictures of themselves out for all to see. That may be the biggest difference. There is a big difference between my 29 and 24 year olds in this regard, the older one being far more private. Not that the younger one would ever do anything stupid - she is sensitive to her German students stalking her on line. She does communicate far more than I or her sister do.

[Voyager]

@Oakminster

Today’s kids are horrible. When I walk through the local mall, I’m often shocked by hearing children not only say “no” to a parent, but even swear at their mothers. They have zero respect for authority, are uncouth, loud, and generally unpleasant. That shit flat out did not fly when and where I grew up. I’m 45 years old, outweigh my mother by well over 100 pounds, and I have no doubt that were I to swear at her today she’d rattle my teeth so fast I’d never even see it coming…and I’d deserve it. When a parent tells a minor child to jump, the acceptable responses are : "Yes, Ma’am/Sir (as appropriate), or “How high, Ma’am/Sir?” “No” is not an option.

Parents just don’t discipline their children anymore. The world was a much more pleasant place in my day.

I’m 15 years older than you, and I hear none of this. Maybe I don’t hang out in malls enough. And people of my age weren’t perfect little angels as kids. One of the kids in my class could have been valedictorian except he missed too much school from being stoned half the time. Kids today are far better disciplined than we were.

[doreen]

@RickJay

It’s strange how I don’t seem to know any of the precious snowflake parents. This is a complaint you only hear from people who don’t actually know any kids.

Seriously, where ARE these allegedly spoiled children, these kids who are not subject to discipline?

They exist , just like they did when I was a kid. I’m sure they’ve always existed. The only difference might be the method of spoiling.

[Voyager]

Here is one way kids today are better - they seem a lot less bigoted than we were. SSM support is one indicator. Maybe it comes from being in a very diverse environment, but my younger daughter was totally race and sexual orientation blind in high school. I wish I could say this is a result of my training, but I give a lot more credit to our schools which were very serious about this kind of thing.

[VinylTurnip]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

“Badness” is not genetic.

Are you calling George Thorogood a liar?

[miss_elizabeth]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

“Badness” is not genetic.

No, but things are passed through families by more than just genes.

[voltaire]

I think at least a small part of it has to do with how hard it is to get away with shit these days. Cameras everywhere, police just a cell-phone call away, crimes that were considered minor and were overlooked when I was a kid are now likely to get kids today into serious trouble.
All that, and growing up in a post-Columbine, post-9/11 world puts a serious dampener on delinquency, which forces kids to behave more maturely in general.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

@Voyager

Here is one way kids today are better - they seem a lot less bigoted than we were. SSM support is one indicator. Maybe it comes from being in a very diverse environment, but my younger daughter was totally race and sexual orientation blind in high school. I wish I could say this is a result of my training, but I give a lot more credit to our schools which were very serious about this kind of thing.

Agreed. My friend and I do make racial/ethnic jokes but they’re often for our race/ethnicity.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Cat_Whisperer

I think the rate of change has gone up drastically. It took however many thousands of years to get to the industrial revolution, then things have taken off like a rocket since then. In my lifetime we’ve gone from computers only showing up in science fiction to three fairly modern computers in my own household (for two people).

So is it your working hypothesis that Plato et al were all wrong about the kids in their age being bad, and it’s really the kids in your age that are the bad ones?

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

Agreed. My friend and I do make racial/ethnic jokes but they’re often for our race/ethnicity.

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.

[YogSothoth]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

“Badness” is not genetic.

But it is contagious. Living near, living with, or being the offspring of bad people can warp you.

[BrainGlutton]

@miss_elizabeth

No, but things are passed through families by more than just genes.

But the families who choose abortion are not necessarily any better than those who don’t.

[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. Either from teachers or on the job. It took a lot of time; a precious resource scarcely available to young adults, much less working ones. Self study and college were expensive and for the elite. Trades were learned from apprenticeships. That is why people were so very impressed with a “jack of all trades” or a well learned and traveled person. They had put in an enormity of effort to amass such information. Even deeper, knowledge is power. The status quo was enforced and made possible by the nature of the dissemination of information. Either deliberately or just as a natural consequence of the way the world worked, people knew less about less, and were not inclined to over think things they didn’t know anything about.

Today, everything is available at the touch of a button, the flick of a finger across a touchscreen. That most valuable of currencies, information, has been seriously devalued. They don’t NEED a master to apprentice to. They don’t need to spend hours tracking down facts, procedures, or materials. Anything you could want to know, or check for accuracy is available 24/7, 365 days a year. Having spent my early half of childhood without these amazing revolutions I fully appreciate, and am consistently amazed by, the vast wealth this gift is.

Now take a moment.

Imagine growing up in a world where this has always been reality.

In this new world, politicians find it hard to blatantly lie, and have to rely on spin instead. In this world facts can always be checked. In this world we are in constant contact with a huge variety of peoples and cultures, limited only by our own willingness to interact. Certainly there will be negatives to this new mindset. Already we are seeing useful skills like critical thinking, and logic start to lag as we grow lazy and complacent with our new abilities. I’ve no doubt that in time we will arrive at a very different world, where we think differently about information that we have ever conceived of before in our history as a species.

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. They can fact check any bullshit statement* in seconds*. They don’t need information, they need experience to interpret it. They want their ideas heard because they already know everything we do. Oftentimes they already know more.

People say that they are impatient. Why shouldn’t they be? Everything is available to them immediately; or at most limited only by their bank account and realities of shipping logistics. In a world where you can have anything so log as you can afford it, what value is there in waiting uselessly? Why is it better later than now?

People say that they want to be equals when just starting. Why shouldn’t they? They KNOW something it has taken us all our evolution to figure out: We are essentially all equals. They understand teamwork and won’t put up with petty power plays.

Kids today ARE different. In a deep and profound way that will be difficult for those who haven’t had the benefit of sharing in this revolution in their formative years. I don’t think it will be all bad though, and I mostly have hope for the future. In certain ways, they are worse than past generations. In others they are far better than we will ever be.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Acid_Lamp

Now take a moment.

Imagine growing up in a world where this has always been reality.

I teach these kids, and I see how it affects them (I just had to gently turn down an ex-student’s Facebook friend request). It’s a big deal, sure, but not one that I see changing the basic nature of childhood. “Kids these days” as a general rant is in the same category as “The apocalypse is coming”: it’s been said so many times by people so determined to believe they live in special times that it’s extremely difficult for me to countenance any such claim. (Not that you’re really ranting–rather, my skepticism toward others in this thread who were).

Already we are seeing useful skills like critical thinking, and logic start to lag as we grow lazy and complacent with our new abilities.

Really? I think schools teach critical thinking and logic at much younger ages than previously. How much time did you spend doing independent research when you were a child, versus how much time students spend doing such research today? How do yesteryear’s diorama projects compare to today’s plays/storythreads/photostories/PowerPoints/posters?

Not all teachers are doing it, but it’s a major move in education. The name annoys me: 21st Century Skills. Despite the irritating name, the emphasis on higher-order thinking skills is enabled, not hindered, by better information technologies.

But kids are still kids.

[DSeid]

So the conversation has moved, mostly, from asking whether or not kids are better behaved today to why they are.

The Freakonomics hypothesis has been somewhat debunked. At its best it was a correlation, not necessarily a causation, and, when the errors made were factored in, it turned out to be a very weak correlation at that.

Of course the real test of any hypothesis is not its ability to make postdictions, to explain that which has already occured, but to make testable and falsifiable predictions. Since Freakonomics 2005 publication the generation born in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s have become teens and young adults, a set of years marked by a significant decrease in the abortion rate (and a several year rise in teens giving birth). If increased abortion rates indeed caused less crime by teens, then decreased rates should be beginning to cause increased crime rates right about now. But such is not happening. It seems that abortion rates as a factor of significance in explaining why kids today are, by and large, better behaved than the several generations before them, is pretty much falsified.

[DSeid]

Another cultural perspective may be useful. This from Great Britain.

There is a widespread belief that antisocial behaviour among children and young people has reached a historically unprecedented high. A recent study by Cambridge University identified intense fears in communities across the UK about “the decline in mutual respect and social cohesion, the dominance of anti-social behaviour, materialism and the cult of celebrity”. …

… Past generations, then, have been just as convinced as we are that the “youth of today” were misbehaving more than ever before. Pearson has suggested that such fears about youth are a way of expressing more general uncertainties about social change and recur with each generation. …

… After a relatively stable period between 1900 and 1930, rates of juvenile crime began increasing in the 1930s. Apart from a slight decrease following the Second World War, youth crime figures continued on a consistent and dramatic upward course until the mid-1990s.

In the 1950s increasing youth crime was largely attributed to a decline in family cohesion following the war, and to increasing consumer affluence. The new youth cultures of the postwar era provided a focus for such beliefs. Particularly notable in the 1950s were the Teddy Boys; with their flamboyant dress, fondness for US cultural imports such as rock’n’roll, and rowdy public behaviour, they were seen as epitomising the new culture of greed and amorality. …

… Harking back to a non-existent “golden age” of deference and respect for elders is not merely harmless nostalgia: it has negative consequences for the overall relationship between adults and the young, which is increasingly characterised by fear and suspicion in both directions. …

More from across the pond.

Under Labour, fear of crime climbed until by 2007 it had become the issue that pollsters identified as the main complaint among voters. (Since then worries about the economy have eclipsed all else.) The heightened fears are a puzzle to criminologists, who point out that over the past 15 years Britain has experienced a steady, deep fall in crime. …

… Parents have probably never been more worried about their offspring, but the truth is that children seem to be less at risk now than in the past. The number of killings of under-15s has “collapsed” since the 1970s, according to Colin Pritchard of Bournemouth University. Professor Pritchard calculates that in 1974 Britain was the third-biggest killer of children in the rich world. By his reckoning it is now 17th, following a 70% drop in child homicides. To be on the safe side, he did the analysis again, including cases where the cause of death was undetermined; even then the number of cases had halved. He credits closer co-operation between police and social services, which kicked off in a big way in 1979.

Children also seem to be committing fewer serious offences themselves. Martin Narey, a former Home Office big cheese who now runs Barnardo’s, a venerable children’s charity, points out that the number of under-16s being convicted of the gravest offences is at least a third lower than it was in the early 1990s. …

…Less crime, less killing, fewer teenage mums, far fewer fags, perhaps a bit less drink and drugs: why is it that the idea of “broken Britain” rings true with so many, when it seems far from reality? Partly, it is because people’s ideas about the state of society are simply inaccurate: the average voter reckons that four out of ten teenagers have children, for instance, whereas in fact perhaps three in a hundred do. …

Those last bits are very notable. (“Fags” btw refers to cigarettes … Brit rag.) Whatever the change is that has correlated with less teen crime since the 90’s, it is true on both sides of the pond.

[DSeid]

And here is an interesting international comparison study (pdf), though not a study specific for teen crime.

… we do not find evidence supporting that abortion rates decrease crime rates as
Donohue and Levitt (2001) find for the US. …

(They do find some support that more in jail has worked for the US though. FWIW.)

[DSeid]

Last multipost, I promise, but this is interesting stuff!

Speculations for the changing crime rates, especially among youth, include greater educational opportunities, decreased prenatal and early childhood lead exposure, and this interesting study (pdf) that correlates the spread of effective psychiatric medications, including for ADHD, with a reduction in crime rates.

We provide evidence that increased prescriptions for mental illness drugs in general are
associated with decreases in violent crime. Our evidence suggests that, in particular, sales of
new generation antidepressants and stimulants used to treat ADHD are associated with rates of
violent crime … the negative relationship is also evident in some preliminary evidence from other
countries around the world that also experienced similar trends in drug sales and crime rates.
These are the first pieces of evidence, and clearly, more research is needed …

[AClockworkMelon]

@BrainGlutton

No, he didn’t.

Yes, he did. Last Thursday.

[heathen_earthling]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

Compared to say twenty or thirty years ago are kids “better” in the sense of being more behaved, less rebellious, and whatnot? Consider the following: crime rates have gone down across the board for the last twenty years and while this generation is quite socially liberal it does not riot or rebel as violenty as say the Boomers forty years ago or as cynical and nilhistic as the Xers twenty years ago.

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!