Posted on 04/21/2006 11:54:15 AM PDT by Incorrigible
BY EVELYN THEISS
They are brash and cynical. They believe they're entitled to quick financial and professional success. They're also lonely and anxious.
That's the picture that psychologist Jean Twenge draws in her new book about the young men and women she dubs "Generation Me."
On the plus side, these young people are confident and also extremely tolerant of those who are different from them. Born in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, they are the children of baby boomers, who she says were incorrectly considered the most self-focused generation.
Not even close, says Twenge, an associate professor at San Diego State University.
She's 34, and therefore part of "GenMe," as she calls it. She has spent more than a decade gathering data on what makes this group different from generations that came before. The results are the subject of her new book, "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled - and More Miserable Than Ever Before."
Two trends are at the core of the book, says Twenge. They emerged in her comparison of personality tests given by researchers to thousands of boomers when they were young and to those in Generation Me in recent years.
"One is that there has been an incredible rise in self-esteem and belief in the individual; and on the flip side, there's been a large rise in anxiety and depression," she says.
Twenge suggests that the two biggest influences in increasing self-esteem were schools and the proliferation of self-help media -- though parents also played a part.
While students in earlier generations felt good about themselves when they accomplished something, now their self-esteem is high even if their performance is poor and they didn't put any effort into doing better, she says.
Twenge isn't the first researcher who has come down on the self-esteem movement. Former Hoover Institution research fellow Charles Sykes in the mid-1990s published a book called "Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write or Add."
And Twenge has her critics, including psychotherapist and author Belleruth Naparstek, who disagrees with Twenge's theory that increasing self-esteem has done such damage.
"I haven't read the study, but I think it's a matter of definition," says Naparstek. "I believe that any young adult who has cultivated his or her self-esteem has also cultivated a sense of compassion and responsibility to others, and I don't think that is missing in any way with this generation."
According to Twenge, her research shows that young people 30 and 40 years ago cared what other people thought of them, while the philosophy of today's youth is that what others think doesn't matter.
She says GenMe has been taught by parents and teachers that "you can be anything you want to be." So when young people see celebrity singers, actors and athletes on television shows and in magazines that celebrate their wealth, they develop unrealistic, even grandiose, ideas about what they will have and be able to afford.
With college, health care and housing costs skyrocketing, and jobs being exported to other countries, it's no surprise that young people get anxious and depressed when they slam up against economic and competitive realities, Twenge says.
Unrealistically high expectations might have been fueled by grade inflation in high school, Twenge says. Nearly half of students who were college freshman in 2004 had an A average, compared with 18 percent in 1968, according to a report by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. That occurred even as SAT scores declined over the years, and far fewer students reported studying six hours a week.
Many young people learned they didn't have to work all that hard in school to be rewarded, she says. So who can blame them for thinking those easy rewards will carry over to the work world.
Sykes says he isn't surprised at what Twenge's work shows.
"If you spend your life in a bubble-wrap of feel-good self-esteem, the real world is going to come as a rude shock," he says. "The self-esteem movement wasn't designed to prepare children for adulthood or adversity; it didn't prepare them for the bumps and bruises of life."
But Naparstek says it isn't just young people who have been negatively affected by the emphasis on celebrities.
"This whole business of translating success into strictly material terms leaves everyone addicted to goodies and starving for them," she says. "It makes people want to fill their emptiness with stuff, but I don't think that's strictly an issue for young people -- it makes everyone crazy."
Twenge says studies show that twice as many young people reported symptoms of panic attacks in 1995 compared with 1980. While the suicide rate for middle-aged people has declined steeply since 1950, the suicide rate for young people has more than doubled.
Twenge theorizes that besides dashed expectations about life, other factors contributing to depression and anxiety are the loneliness and isolation that many young people face as they are likelier to live alone, postpone marriage and hook up sexually rather than having dating relationships.
April 20, 2006
(Evelyn Theiss is a staff writer for The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. She can be contacted at etheiss@plaind.com.)
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Yeah I had a 9 month relation with a Korean-Korean woman and just now started dating a Korean-American woman. Euro-AmerWomen are OUT.
When the term Generation X first came into use, I heard in the media that it represented the tenth generation since the American Revolution in 1776.
That sounds very plausible to me!
ROFL
what happens when we get to Gen Z? And will anyone admit it once we do?
what happens when we get to Gen Z? And will anyone admit it once we do?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
One question-----was this particular person "smart enough" to help pick up the tab?
Same here (born in '76). I came in at the tail end of the time period generally assigned to the X'ers, but I identify more with the GenY crowd, as I was too young to remember the 70's. So mark me down as generationally confused!
Duh!
Hi, from MD. Sorry for belated reply; I was on "vacation" over the weekend.
"So, it's the Baby Boomer's fault that kids today are messed up!"
No, in reality, it's their parents -- the ones who voted FDR into office.
FDR proclaimed a vision that gov't could solve everything. And those people who voted for him ushered in the modern age of socialism in America.
The Boomer generation was divided, as the stats above show. Even if the majority is like their parents and many even like their grandparents, too many of them consume more than they produce.
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