Kids These Days (book review)

Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State, has been sounding the alarm for years that the mental health of American young people is falling apart under the influence of smartphones and social media. She’s bulwarked her case impressively in her 2023 book Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America’s Future.

Granted, I’m not a fan of generational labels since I can never remember what the arbitrary terms are or what birth years they cover. Indeed, even the pundits specializing in generation-watching can’t agree. For example, Twenge defines Gen Z as those born between 1995 and 2012 (ages 11 to 28), while the Pew Research Center uses 1997 as its first year. As I recently pointed out in “Generational Gobbledygook: Astrology for MBAs,” it would be tremendously simpler just to use decade of birth: Group people born in the 1990s as ’90s Babies and so forth.

But, all that said, Twenge is doing important work in pointing out the unexpected but alarming problems plaguing Americans born around the year 2000 (who, don’t get me started, are not millennials).

She begins her chapter on Gen Z with the craziest fad plaguing the new generation, transgenderism, whose explosion in recent years Twenge finds concerning. She notes that in a Census Bureau survey of over one million American adults in 2021–2022:

While only 1 out of 1000 Boomers [born 1946–1964] identifies as transgender…23 out of 1000 Gen Z young adults (2.30%) identify as trans—20 times more…. As for nonbinary identities, fewer than 1% of Boomers identify as non-binary, compared to more than 3 percent of Gen Z young adults.

Here's a stark difference that todays younger generations cannot fathom.

People who grew up prior to the Internet had a very small world to mature in.

For example, when I was growing up in the 1970s, my peers consisted entirely of who I went to school with or hung out with after school (kids in my neighborhood). Nobody outside your town would even know who you are.

Therefore, if you moved just one town away, you would have an opportunity to get a completely fresh start. When I graduated high school on a June day in 1980 and prepared to enter boot camp for the Marines, I only saw one classmate ever again for the rest of my life. I had my opportunity to make a completely new life for myself and leave the baggage of my high school years behind me forever.

It is not that way today in the Internet age. Most children form literally thousands of social media "friends" that they keep connected with, including their high school (and even elementary school) classmates. As well as people from around the world.

What this does is eliminate the opportunity for a fresh start. In order to stay in the good graces of all your online "friends", you need to adopt sort of a hive mentality and a politically correct attitude. Otherwise, you could fnd yourself blacklisted or cancelled. To a young person, this is tantamount to social suicide.

I learned this with my own children when they were going through high school. They did not want me on their social media "timelines" with my antiquated "Dad" views. So I learned not to socialize with them online except perhaps to point out something innocuous like a birthday or sharing vacation pictures.

The "hive" mentality is very hard to break. Younger generations are obsessed with their social profiles and maintaining their "social scores." Thus they are much less likely to take any sort of viewpoints outside the norm lest they be ostracized and "cancelled" by their thousands of online friends.

So if the general consensus is that Trump is bad and transgenderism is good, than most of our young people are pretty much forced to adopt those viewpoints. It's an uncomfortable truth for us older people who are used to having independent thoughts and not afraid of peer rejection, but sadly that's the way it is today.

Of course, their are exceptions. If you have children (or grandchildren) who have the self-confidence to be themselves, regardless of what their peers might think about them, then consider yourself very fortunate.

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