GoKawiilFrom Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation
Kids these days have it great. Compared with decades ago, young children benefit from more time with their parents and much more time with their fathers. Teenagers drink less, smoke less, and are less likely to die in car accidents. Life is much better for racial and sexual minorities—when I was in high school, someone rumored to be gay would be bullied savagely.
Children and adolescents are less likely to experience physical and sexual violence, and less likely to be murdered. They have access to cheap travel, better food, more information of all sorts, and limitless entertainment. And the internet offers an escape from solitude for those rejected in the real world, allowing weirdos, nerds, and the painfully shy to make social connections in ways that would have been impossible for their counterparts in earlier decades. There is no better time to be young.
For many readers, this is a ridiculous claim. There are good reasons to conclude that this is a terrible time to be young. Compared to their counterparts in previous decades, children and adolescents are more likely to spend their time alone; they devote hours each day to staring at their phones; they play less, sleep less, and read less for pleasure. They have listless and coddled lives. High school students today are more likely to be anxious and depressed (that is particularly true for girls), and are more likely to kill themselves. Our children are living in a time of crisis.
So who’s right? I’ve been reading about these topics for an academic chapter that I’m writing—which might, who knows, turn into a book proposal—and have some ideas that I’d love to get feedback on.
The question of whether there has been improvement or decline since, say, the 1980s, is an important one. Suppose things really have gotten worse. If so, then it’s an argument for radical change. The point is nicely made in No Country for Old Men, where Anton Chigurh says this to a man he is about to kill.
What sort of radical change? Well, perhaps we should restore the values, practices, and policies of the earlier period before things fell apart. We might want to dismantle capitalism, cut back on the welfare state, restore religious values, crush movements like feminism and anti-racism … or double down on them. (Everything depends on one’s preferred theory of why we are in this pickle.)
Alternatively, if things are going better, we should just stick with the plan, confident that, in the long run, the state of the world will continue to improve. (For a good defense of this view, see Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now.) Now this sort of optimism is currently unpopular, but it’s always been unpopular—particularly when it comes to children and adolescents. The Kids Are Never All Right.
Some might look back fondly on the lives of teens in the 1980s, before TikTok and smartphones, when kids hung out in shopping malls, listened to mixtapes, and waited in arcades to play Pac-Man. Maybe they are right to do so, but in the 80s, people were complaining that things had gone to hell. Here’s a popular list (the facts are totally fabricated, by the way) distributed at the time (from the Eibach and Libby chapter in this book).
My bet is that in the 1940s, adults really missed those great teens in the 1890s, who knew the value of work (only half of them went to school) and weren’t yet coddled by indoor toilets.
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