If this new generation really is messed up, what could we do it about it?

Great Debates
1

There seems to be a general sentiment on the board that kids today just ain’t right. Kids seem to be getting stupider. They are being increasingly diagnosed with neurological disorders like autism. They are increasingly fatter and depressed. And of course, then there are occassional threads or posts where Dopers bemoan that lack of manners and respect in today’s kids.

Yesterday, I was in a conversation with someone and I found myself doing the same thing: expressing my worry about “kids today”. I felt old as I was doing it (I’m not all that old chronologically), but I couldn’t stop. It’s hard NOT to wonder about the effects of violent video games, oversexed pop stars (with their exposed vaginas), and all these technogadgets that inject entertainment at all waking hours of the day. Maybe one of these wouldn’t be a big deal (after all, even some of the early Nintendo games were bloody…like Duck Hunt). But it just seems to me that we’re at least approaching some kind of tipping point, one that shouldn’t trigger a panic response but at least thoughtful self-examination.

I’ve come to realize that people will rationalize away even the most glaring warning signs. If we hear about increasing rates of clinical diagnosis, we wave our hands about improvements in detection and screening, or we’ll complain about the “new-fangled” diseases that everyone wants to have. If someone rants about the wild-behaving children in our midst, we remind them, all-knowingly, that every generation has perceived themselves as being better than the one before it. If a teacher complains about how bad her students are, we tell her she’s just burnt out, that she’s suffering from acute perception bias. We don’t think violent video games are harmful, because we grew up playing “Double Dragon” and watching Sleep-Away Camp and we turned out fine. The sex-laden lyrics of today are no different than the sexual inuendo of the past. Blah blah blah blah.

All of this may be true. It may very well be true that today’s youth are no different than my generation or that of my parents. Maybe they’re better, since they do have all this technology at their disposal.

But my question to the masses is this: Will it ever be possible for society to recognize a “bad” generation in time to fix it? I don’t think so. I think we could sprout gobblins and as long as they resemble us physically, we’d look the other way.

What do ya’ll think?

2

As a matter of policy, this office refuses to make blanket condemnations of Youth, the Hair of Youth, the Music of Youth or the Sexual Conduct of Youth. We saw too many politicians make jackasses of themselves when we were young.

Sincerely,

3

What’s a ‘bad generation’ and how do you ‘fix’ it?

I too, at the ripe old age of 24, find myself grousing about ‘the youth of today’ but I have to say the people who I really worry about are the parents of the current generation, ie people about 15-20 years older than my age group…
why do they let their kids dress that way, why do they let them talk on mobile phones loudly in restaurants, why do they have no books in their homes, &c.

It’s not the kids themselves that are horrible, it’s the way they’ve been raised. So I have hope that people of my age will, in reaction against the horrible parenting of their younger peers, not raise their kids in the same way. This could be wishful thinking, but there’s not much more to be done on this topic, really.

4

Indeed, I have to wonder why you’ve latched on to “video games” when parenting, schooling, and such are all probably larger players in causing or correcting such an issue.

5

You’re obviously too young to remember the '60s. If there’s anything like a “generation gap” today, it’s nothing in comparison.

6

I don’t know about you guys, but after I play some PainKiller I have to fight with all my might to resist the urge to make a stake gun and go out on a nailing-people-to-the-wall-literally rampage.

7

I always wonder about these arguments. Yes, we grew up playing Duck Hunt. Then we became the generation to make Grand Theft Auto. We grew up listening to “Pour Some Sugar on Me”, and became the generation to write “Laffy Taffy”. This seems to me to show that there is some impact - Grand Theft Auto would have been absolutely unthinkable in the Pac-Man days, was wailed about by my parents, and is viewed by my kids as pretty tame stuff. They ARE different. Saying they both contain violence is inexcusably reductionist. Does the impact of these changes extend past the art itself? Is it “harmful”, or just gag inducing?

I don’t think that the media (video games, movies, music, etc.) is without culpability. If what we watched, listened to and read didn’t affect us at all, there would be no such thing as advertising. But the fact is that most of this same media is available in other countries which don’t seem so fucked up. Canada has a culture very, very similar to ours. They watch the same movies, listen to the same music, play the same video games, have a heterogeneous “racial” culture…and have far less violent crime, better test scores, more unemployment but less homelessness and other marks of suffering poverty. What’s up with that?

What is different? Parenting, a sense of safety in community and a feeling that you can count on your neighbors to help you out and a sense that politicians are servants, not superstars. I’m sure there are others, but I think those have a great deal of impact on how secure children feel, and that, IMHO, is the greatest predictor of how they act out in ways that parents don’t like. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Canada is a utopia, but their kids aren’t shooting each other up in the school library. (But see? That right there - that’s such a small statistical anomaly, but I *feel *like my kid isn’t safe in school. It’s a logical fallacy, but I hear 10 times a day about 1 student shooter, and I never hear about the hundreds of thousands who helped an old lady across the street today or started a food drive at their schools.)

However, I will note, at the ripe old age of 32, that I’m a bit less worried than I was at 24. There’s a sort of fog that lifts off your head around 22 that makes you look at the world around you and go “Woah! This place is seriously fucked up!” After a decade, you notice that the panicked Cassandra warnings don’t come true, that people are generally good, even when the news media emphasizes the ones who are horrid, that people can have “diseases” and still a good standard of life. We’re not all gonna die this week, but we will all die eventually and maybe that’s not such a bad thing, kids aren’t really all that bad (some of them are actually interesting and have good things to say) even when they’re being annoying, and that it’s probably not the end of civilization as we know it.

Or maybe it is. But if it’s this broken, do we really want to fix it? Let the Canadians take over. They seem to have figured it out. :wink:

8

I don’t have a glimpse into anyone’s parenting. I’m not a teacher or a student, so I’m not privy to anyone’s “schooling”. But I do see video games, watch TV and movies, and listen to music. These media are vastly different than what we were dealing with 20 years ago. And it seems to me that our relationship to entertainment has also changed dramatically. I think it’s a huge assumption to make that good parenting always wins out over bad influences in the media. I do think we’re shaped by what we see and hear from a young age, and that our brains don’t distinguish “make believe” from “real” as much as we’d like to believe.

I’ve not “latched” onto anything specifically, I don’t think. I’m not launching a tirade against video games or anything else. What I’m wondering is, if collectively we are inadvertedly exposing our kids to harms that are damaging them mentally, physically, and emotionally , would it be possible for us to reach a consensus and say “Yup, we’re screwing up our kids.” Because it doesn’t seem like we could. First of all, we’d spend years trying to find what constitutes a “bad” generation and by the time we decided on a definition, we’d already be looking at a brand new generation, one “worse” than the one before it. And at that point, “we” would be dead, dying, or too busy tooling around on Jazzy scooters at the local Jai-Alai to care what happens to anyone.

9

The older generation has been complaining about the younger generation for about as long as recorded history. Go back and read some stuff written in Ancient Greece or during the Middle Ages. The same complaints (of course without the reference to video games and the like) were made then as now.

Or just look at my generation. I’m 29 and I remember people wailing over the violence, sex, etc., etc., that we were exposed to. On the whole, most people of my generation are perfectly normal. Kids are much more discerning than parents think. I watched a ton of violent movies and looked at scores of porno magazines when I was a kid. The result? I’ve only been in two fights (both before I was 15), have never murdered anyone, and I’ve never raped or sexually abused anyone. Media simply does not have all that great effect on kids.

Quit worrying about “the kids.” Like all kids, they are dumbasses. The vast majority will grow out of it.

10

(bolding mine)

But I think we *do *do that. Setting aside the question of how fuzzy “generations” are IRL when we don’t have 20 year spans between parent and kid that match up across the board, every single generation shows a dramatic change in child-rearing philosophy as we try not to make the same mistakes our parents made. The fact that we make all new ones that our kids try to avoid with their kids is just the nature of the beast.

Will media outlets become more responsible and stop making violent and sexy entertainment that’s more violent and more sexy than last decade’s? Not as long as it sells and we live in a capitalist society with freedom of expression. The decision makers are responsible to their shareholders, not to children (who like and get their parents to buy the stuff anyway) or to some abstract idea of the public good. The only way to stop it is government control of all media, and I for one am not willing to go there. Nor do I think it neccesary (see above argument re: same media in other countries with less “messed up” kids.)

11

Step 1: Set a good example.

12

Younger generations always have different values and priorities than the ones immediately before. By the definition of the previous generation, every new generation is worse than the one before it. And this has been going on since probably neanderthal days.

13

By Og when I was a boy folk were smoking pot, dropping acid, listening to Satanic rock music, driving drunk every night, boinking every chance we got, being condemned by our elders for being forced to learn weird new math techniques, wearing jean jackets, and boys were piercing one ear! Not like these damn kids now with their crack and their violent music and their different outlook on education and their stupid clothes and piercings!

Teenagers are annoying to non-teenagers. Elementary schools seem to change the way the teach every 10 years or so just to make sure that parents don’t understand the homework…

More to the point however - what, may I ask, is a “bad” generation? Not acting like little Boomer-clones isn’t a bad thing. Laughing at X-ers is only just. I believe that we are raising the most socially tolerant and technologically savvy generation in American history. Maybe not the most polite, but then again most kids I know are pretty good.

I do wonder if we are over medicating everyone, but that’s mostly because I can’t get the stuff I like.

14

Did you miss the Doom/Quake/Mortal Kombat parental outrage of the early and mid 90s? Oh, and don’t forget the internet porn. If these were all as corrosive as some would lead us to believe then one would think we’d be seeing a massive spike in crime where instead it has actually dropped dramatically in many places, or holding steady. And teen pregnancies are going down too, last I checked.

WhyNot had a good post that I mostly agree with.

If someone has such a tenuous grasp on reality that a friggin’ video game or movie will make them do something horrible then it’s not the medium’s fault. That person is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off and has several psychological problems.

I wouldn’t worry too much about our society going down due to stupidity. Maybe some day, but you’ll be long dead by then because it will be an imperceptible slide. And we (the U.S. that is) should be fine as long as our universities and industries can attract the best and brightest from all corners of the globe. Maybe we’ll have a problem when they start to go elsewhere.

15

Note that I said everything you said in the OP, in anticipation of this argument.

And I’m not in total disagreement.

But the problem I have is that it can be used to dismiss empirical evidence of a troubled generation. Just because every generation has been dismissed as “troubled” does not mean that it is impossible to produce a genuinely troubled generation. In the US, high school drop-out rates have skyrocketed, as has thejuvenile crime rate. Children are suffering from more mental illness and are less physically healthy. Perhaps these stats don’t indicate a “troubled” generation, but surely they suggest one that’s more troubled, right?

16

There happens to be this international market for sex slaves . . . then we can start over . . .

17

I think part of this is due to just how much progress we have made. In my grandparents’ generation, there were a significant number of kids who did not attend high school or who dropped out. My great grandmother only completed eight grade. So, sure, we have more kids dropping out now than in some recent years, but we also have a lot more kids going to high school than in recent history, too.

As for juvenile crime, is it really going up or are more kids being arrested for things that kids used to get away with. In high school I remember kids bringing guns and knives to school fairly regularly. Nothing ever happened. I also remember fairly open drug usage. And that was only 11 years ago. Also, go back and look at the literature of the 1950’s about juvenile crime. This concern is nothing new.

Mental illness – I think this has much more to do with better diagnoses or over-diagnosis rather than more kids having mental problems.

Unhealthy kids – I may give you that one, in terms of kids being fat. However, how many kids now are suffering from polio or smallpox? In recent U.S. history there were a lot more threats to the well-being of kids than there are now.

18

We seem to be flat-lining on video games. Unfortunately.

No, I did not miss these days. However, the mid 90s are not that removed from today. Children who were playing these games are just barely college-age. They belong in the demographic of “kids today”.

Again, internet porn is still relatively new. And crime has actually spiked in lots of areas–including where I live. But I’m not sure that has anything to do with internet porn.

But I would be shocked–shocked I tell you!–if you could produce a cite showing that teens are having less sex than they used to.

Racy TV Shows Increase Teen Sex Activity, Study Says - ABC News

What if the “someone” is a six-year-old child and all he ever does is play the bloodiest, most violent video games (both parents work, and his teenaged babysitter is too busy checking her myspace profile to watch him). He’s doesn’t play outside because he’s entranced by the game, so he’s overweight. He gets bullied and harrassed at school because of this and because his obsession with his technology impedes the development of social skills. By the age of ten, he’s horridly obese, clinical depressed, and–unbeknowst to anyone–he is desensitived to violence. When he gets rejected from college at the age of 18, he decides to shoot his guidance counselor and then himself.

I admit the scenario took a major left turn at the last sentence, but does one have to be a doomsayer to be troubled by six-year-olds playing Grand Theft Auto? Would you let your six-year-old play Grand Theft Auto?

Um, or maybe we can do something before it gets to that point? Why do we have to throw up our hands and allow our society to deteriorate around us, like frogs in slowly boiling water?

19

Monstro, your juvenile crime rate cite is…well, I don’t know where to start. First, it doesn’t show rising rates – it’s predicting them. In 1995.

In the 80s and early 90s many talking heads and so called experts were predicting a massive crime wave to sweep across the nation, but…it never happened. Crime rates dropped like a car going off a cliff. In fact, even by 1995 the predicted crime wave was obviously not happening, but some still went along with the idea because it scared parents into watching TV.

The crime rate fall borders on what I would consider common knowledge. Here are a bunch of cites if you don’t believe me though…

From Freakonomics:

Or check out this 1997 article from CNN.

Or look at the pretty graphs from the U.S. Department of Justice.

So…yeah. Crime went waaaay down in the 90s. Most of the controversy is what caused it since all sorts of different interests and politicians want to take credit. And Freakonomics, for example, stirred up the hive by saying that the biggest reason was due to legalized abortion.

But for this discussion it doesn’t matter why it happened. It did happen. So strike out…

…in regards to crime rate, juveneille or otherwise.

20

Well, there seems to be proof that Internet porn actually reduces crime, at least rape: Proof that Internet porn prevents rape.