The Kids are Alright

Prepare the valet parking, increase the rosé inventory, and emotionally accept that another crypto guy named “Max” is about to explain “macro positioning” at every beach club from Puerto Banús to Estepona. Dubai residents are flooding back to Marbs! Up and down the coast long forgotten “friends” are calling for a “catch up”.

As the UK government pushes ahead with plans to restrict social media access for under 16s amid growing concerns over mental health, screen addiction and online safety, the debate about today's teenagers has never felt more relevant. But before we dismiss an entire generation as lazy, entitled or permanently glued to their phones, perhaps it's worth asking whether our assumptions about "kids these days" are as accurate as we think.

It’s  a refrain as old as time that previous generations look scornfully on the young, their principles, strength of character and willpower questioned by those handing over reigns to a world they feel they have personally shaped through grit, perseverance and strength of character. The common remonstration of “Kids these days!” is really nothing novel, ironically untethered to “these” days, but traceable instead to antiquity. Ancient Greek texts two-and-a-half millennia in age lament wayward offspring, thumbs firmly in the eyes of their parents, inherently selfish in their nature. The Roman playwright Plautus, who died 185 years BC, his works progenitors of the modern sitcom, devoted much attention to the responses of fathers to the perceived moral failings of their sons. 

The youth were characterized as vain and slothful, unwilling to toil for progress, a refrain consistent from age to age and country to country, though layered with further cultural idiosyncrasies and condemnations.

Despite the enduring voracity of these opinions, arguably much progress has been made over the years, a feat impossible to accomplish without the efforts of each new generation of leaders. No doubt the all-too young men and women who helped rid us of tyranny in WWII had previously endured the withering assessments of an older generation soon to be greatly in their debt. We may yet grow to thank today’s soft, entitled “snowflakes” who, to our failing eyes seem less concerned with a hard day’s graft and more preoccupied with trifles such as inequality and the fate of our planet.

Perhaps the key is attempting to open-mindedly look forward as opposed to harking backwards, especially when our capacity for nostalgia seems to be tripping us up.

According to John Protzko, a University of California Santa Barbara psychologist who took a deep dive into the research sphere of delayed gratification, the “kids these days” negative bias is predominantly the result of a memory tic. Analysing a vast dataset gathered over six decades of testing patience in children, his findings, corroborated by the distinguished Professor Stephanie Carlson Ph.D of University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development were in stark contrast to the intuition of most adults and even the majority of his canvassed peers in the developmental psychology profession. Whilst almost all of us assume our on-demand society has inhibited young people’s ability to delay gratification, results showed children participating in “The marshmallow test” (essentially, eat one now or wait to get two...) in 2018 proved more patient their 1960s counterparts.

For Protzko, what was especially interesting about his research was the poor intuition applied by even the most qualified professionals in their very own field of study, 84% wrongly assuming, like the rest of us that kids today are incapable of waiting for anything. Further analysis can elucidate the reasons behind this widespread, perpetual bias and the disconnect with reality it elicits.

Memories are not flawless facsimiles of our perceived reality, endlessly available for revisiting. Memories are constructed. We re-assemble our recollections each time from disparate pieces of retained information, unconsciously and instantaneously padding the “truths” with cerebral, sometimes inconsistent filler. A result of this system of memory is known as “presentism”, whereby we take pieces of our present and unknowingly fold them into our recollections of the past. A bitter divorce for example, may have you recalling objectively happier days you spent together through mud-tinted glasses.

Similarly, for those of us unable to objectively recall how young people really were back when we were of their ilk, our flawed memory systems use present-day information to fill in the blanks. Crucially though, we don’t even use accurate data about present-day youth, but instead, present day us. (Narcissistic tendencies aren’t solely the preserve of the young it seems...)

By subconsciously setting our current, matured selves as the yardstick for approval, we tend to denigrate an entire subset of not-yet-formed humanity via our personal, long-acquired biases. Studies show authoritarian adults typically feel kids of today are more unruly than ever before, well-read adults believe the young now read less and intelligent grown ups believe kids are less smart than they used to be. When making our judgements on the next generation, the fact that as adults we’ve had extra decades to get our act together seems to be lost in the somewhat cynical mix.

It would also behoove us to remember the common refrain that things were simply better in the past is most certainly not a universally held truth.

Just cross the tracks to find a whole different account of reality. We’re nothing if not biased in our perceptions of the world.

Whilst Protzko’s findings elucidate our general capacity for misrepresenting reality, statistics confirm that the much-maligned Gen Z do in fact have much to be proud of.

They’re typically more tolerant, drink less alcohol, take less drugs and wait longer before jumping into bed together than previous generations.

Of course these days, with the cost of a pint of beer getting dangerously close to the hourly minimum wage, it’s not surprising young people aren’t painting the town red. Nevertheless, to their credit, the value judgements they make appear not to be based predominantly around £ signs.

Unfortunately, one area where “kids these days” appears to be a genuinely relevant demarcation is in mental health. Thanks to the rise of the smartphone and the might of the tech industry in capturing our attention through algorithmically-enhanced social media, kids are more isolated, anxious and depressed than ever before. Suicide rates and self harm have increased markedly for the generation whose own perception of reality is warped not by memory, but the beauty filters and carefully curated content of myriad online influencers. Impossible ideals are constantly served up to an audience whose still-developing brains cannot fully parse what’s real or important. The social media landscape is a merciless arena of comparison politics Gen Z were unfortunate enough to be born into. For that reason alone, kids these days deserve not our scorn, but our empathy and guidance