I was thinking about this the other day. Obviously nowadays it’s the internet and mobile phones. Perhaps a decade or two ago it was computer games and before that it was TV. All were far too popular with kids and were harbingers of doom. If I remember rightly, there was a period, before TV, when the wireless was the new thing that was hooking kids and bringing about the end of the world.
Based on a quick Google search, it still seems common to wonder if rap music is a negative influence on kids these days.
Unfortunately, my search has been a little hampered. It turns out there was an indie band from Chicago called “Kids These Days”, and now they’re clogging up Google. So I actually really am a little irritated with Kids These Days, now.
I find myself occasionally falling into this when I watch my nieces. I think part of the issue is that in a few minor ways they really are worse but that in most ways they’re the same or better. We just tend to focus on the worse.
For example my nieces are constantly–and I mean constantly–texting on their phones. They have a hard time going more than 30 seconds without checking to see if they have a message. They never read a book for pleasure because they’d rather text “lol” and “omgm2” to their friends. They do this at the dinner table or when we are talking. This drives me nuts and I believe it will cause problems for them in the future.
And yet they do well in school, play sports and music, and have participated in the school play. They are respectful and generally kind to others. One has a friend who just came out as a lesbian and she’s being supportive, something that my generation would have found difficult. But I keep getting annoyed at how they are never off that *@#$ phone and never read a book.
I’m not sure about that passage in particular, but I definitely remember reading “kids these days” passages in The Republic. He also complains about their music.
The only thing missing is that he doesn’t tell them to get off of his lawn, so we can’t say there’s been no progress at all.
I think this is a big part of it. And it’s for this reason that the “kids these days” theme has gotten a lot more play these days than it did a long time ago (quote from the Greek guy notwithstanding). There’s a lot more change these days.
Things now are a lot more different than they were 20 years ago than things 300 years ago were different than they were 320 years ago. So to the extent that all change contains elements that can be complained about, there’s a lot more to work with these days.
It is the duty of each new generation to offend its parents. A guaranteed moment of horror is when a mother or father says the kid’s favorite music is cool.
I noticed this attitude myself a while back and wondered at it’s cause. I recall being a somewhat obnoxious kid at times (shouting at people as we drove past, and stuff like that).
I think this is one of those ‘who/what stands out the most’ issues.
As a kid, you’re fairly oblivious to the adults around you when you’re in public on your own or with friends, so you probably don’t notice (or care about, if you do) the disapproving looks or discomfort of the adults around you.
As adults, the kids we notice most are those that are being loud and unruly. News media (and people in general) almost never talks about the kids that do their homework, behave in public, and don’t get into trouble.
So, we remember being fairly well behaved as kids and only notice kids being loud and obnoxious. When the reality is you we were (probably) just as loud and obnoxious as kids, and the kids we notice are not necessarily a majority of the population.
Kids have stayed the same. As our old people live longer and longer we just hear such phrases such as “kids these days” more and more often. So, I believe, young people are the same as always, we just have many times more crusty, bitter observors than before, so we hear that message more.
My experiences and perceptions are no more to be taken as gospel than anyone else’s. But I find that the high school and college students I meet are smarter, busier, more polite, more responsible, harder-working and generally more together than my friends and I ever were at their age.
Their parents would undoubtedly be happy to refute my contention!
Regardless, I very rarely encounter the jerky kids I hear about in some circles.
I see both. I see the type of kids that my company hires and deals with. Much brighter and worldly than the kids I entered the workforce with in the early 80’s. Companies have become much more demanding and zero in on these Alpha kids with much more precision than before.
And then I see some of my daughters friends. They restore my faith in the bottom of gene pool and it’s ability to thrive.
A minor hijack, but one of my favourite things from a Cracked.com Photoplasty (I believe it was “browser add-ons which would make the internet a much better place” or something like that) was an extra level of filtering for internet searches - the first one filtered out “fan” works like fanfiction and art etc, leaving only “official” sources, and the second was called “hipster fan filter” and it filtered out results like the one Bouzit describes (also, IIRC, the image mentioned something about “Obscure K-Pop bands with random English words as a name” or something along those lines.)
As to the thread topic itself, I think the “kids these days” thing is less pronounced than it used to be thanks to the internet. I don’t have a lot in common with someone in their 50s, but I can find lots of things to talk to a 19 year old about, despite the decade-sized age gap, because we’ve probably seen the same YouTube videos, read the same Cracked articles, taken the same Buzzfeed quizzes and LOLd at the same amusingly captioned cat pictures.
I think that, as we mentioned up-thread, the pace of life spurred by technology has increased. This creates an ever-widening gap between increasingly narrow age groups. I’m in my mid-thirties, and have friends 10 years younger than me; to them, I’m an old man. They’ve never heard of most of the music I listen to (nor I theirs); regardless of education, there are gaps in their knowledge of the liberal arts that astound me, and so on.
However, they are incredibly knowledgeable about the pop-culture that our mainstream media feeds them. They interact in an astonishingly dynamic environment through social media, non-stop texting, IM, etc. These are things that most of us use to some extent, but for the 30+ crowd; the ones I interact with are astonished when I tell them I’m having a “zero comms day,” and will only use communications formats that I initiate - no phone calls, no Facebook, no email, etc.
I do think that something is lost in all of this; we have fostered a consumer culture to the point where the youth don’t understand much about how the tools they’re using work (or how to maintain privacy). Traditionally, generations have been defined by 20-25 year intervals. Just this weekend, a girl 5 years younger than me drew a distinction between my generation and hers.
The distinction is made because those of us in our mid-thirties are the *very tail-end * of GenX. People five years younger are Millennials. Heck, people three years younger than me are Millennials too.
The “kids these days” thing is pretty easy to understand. When you’re an adult you have different priorities and values.
If you’re a kid playing football in the street, you’re just having fun with your mates and any grown-ups who complain are pathetic killjoys. If you’re an adult and there are kids playing football in your street, you are getting annoyed by the noise (which sounds much worse if you’re inside trying to do something else than if you’re outside being part of the noise), you are worried about your car getting dented or scratched, or your garden getting trampled, or a window getting smashed, or…
I know this from first-hand experience. I live in the same house I lived in as a child, having bought it from my parents. I get pissed off with the kids playing outside in the very same street that I played in when I was their age. I remember the walk of shame to knock on doors to retrieve a ball that had gone over the fence, and now I’m the grouchy grown-up telling the kids to be more careful, or go and play somewhere else, and “If it comes over again you’re not having it back!”
So what? You’re drawing lines like there is a quantum leap from one side of the line to the other. It’s like saying I’m heaps older than you because I was born on 31 December and you were born the following year on 1 January. Just because someone made up some names and drew some arbitrary lines doesn’t mean anything much.
The Gen X boundaries are extremely arbitrary. I’m sure I used to see 1977 (my birth year) as the cut-off, and yet now I see people claiming that early-80s kids are also Gen Xers.
I would have thought a mid- to late 1970s cut-off makes more sense. I think I, born in 1977, have more in common with someone born in 1987 than with someone born in 1967. I had the internet while I was still a student, so my entire working life has been “online”. OK, I did go through my whole time at university without a mobile phone, which does actually boggle my mind slightly. How the hell did I ever organise a social life?
