The kids are all right
vox.com
vox.com
I, for one, don't want youth to blindly accept the conventions of their elders and meekly conform to the way things are. I'd like to see more metrics around positive aspects of nonconformity rather than just the negative, and see if we're losing both ends of the spectrum here.
At a glance, it seems nice. Less hard drugs, less pregnancy.... But in the big picture, I'm not sure I want a generation full of wimps. It sounds like the beginning of enslavement to me.
Plus, what about soft drugs and prescription drugs? You can't tell me those numbers are down. Two other things that frequently lead to pacification!
What? How does enslavement follow from lower rates of teen pregnancy? Perhaps it just mean higher usage rates of contraceptives, which is backed by evidence. It might also imply that young women are choosing to be more independent.
For some, those interesting things are sex drugs and rock'n'roll, which you'll all agree are bad. For others, those interesting things translate to youth leadership, contact sports, and other things that make boys into men.
All I see when I am with American kids is a whole bunch of iGaming on iDevices and SnapChatting under the watchful eye of overprotective soccer moms who are doping them up with garbage food and SSRIs.
Good luck with all that in 20-40 years if China, Russia, or the Muslim world decide to make aggressive battle-tested men.
Because we should be training our children for the impending apocalypse at all times?
Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll are purely hedonistic. I don't know how you can see them helping build positive qualities.
I figure the next generation is always going to be different, whether it's more conservative or more liberal, or that they use weird apps on their iDevices. You have to make your peace with that.
Trying to paint everyone of a generation with the same brush is lazy just an excuse to be resentful.
I highly doubt WWIII is going to hinge on the personalities of the infantry, if it even has infantry.
The soccer moms may be big on medication, but I think that garbage food is for a different economic stratum.
To me, (and this will grab more downvotes), the alarming part of that data is the idea that "less fighting" is good. There are certain behaviors that I feel are good for teenagers. Teens not fighting = teens not being teens, for whatever reason that may be.
Also what do you mean by fighting?
I don't perceive 'teens' to be being particularly passive? (Though, for around 3 more months the term applies to me, so that might change my perspective.)
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...
If that's what you call wimps, yes, I want a generation full of wimps.
2. If true, why do you think it's compensating for reduced smoking?
Very interesting. Are there statistics that demonstrate this? Specifically, are people really drinking more, and if so, how do we know it is to compensate for reduced smoking?
Do you mean you smoked for 20 years, or that you lost 20 years of lifespan due to smoking?
If it's the latter, I remember reading in a medical study that the adverse health effects of smoking are mostly reversed several years after the person stops smoking. :)
I used to be a reasonably heavy drinker, then I quit more or less cold turkey, didn't drink a drop for over 6 months, and even though I've now gone back to drinking a bit, I'm very careful now to limit my intake to well within the health guidelines (i.e. no more than one or two a night, no more than a couple of nights a week). Not only has this done good things for my health, it's done great things for my finances.
Other damage is certainly done to the lungs that can cause other issues--emphysema, cardiovascular problems, etc--but the risk from the "scariest" threat out there is greatly diminished.
When I was in high school, it was just hard to interact and hard to find stuff to do. We mostly didn't have cars, phones, or spaces of our own, so we had to sort of clandestinely squeeze our lives into grownups spaces. Have a friend over in our parents house, borrow our parents car, use the shared phone (that our parents could listen in on).
And we were limited to what little entertainment was in our hometown. For me there was a movie theater and a couple of coffee shops, but largely just a lot of empty space.
These days kids can create unlimited spaces in virtual reality* to connect with each other, and they have unlimited access to virtual spaces created by people all over the world. They can just pull out their phone and be endlessly entertained.
The idea of having a baby is much more appealing when you are bored as hell and have no other apparent future.
The article on apparent causes (http://www.vox.com/2014/8/20/5987845/the-mystery-of-the-fall...) also didn't mention feminism, which is an odd omission. More and more young women are able to imagine all kinds of futures for themselves. Girls have more to lose by getting pregnant than they ever have, and because of the internet I think they know it.
* When I say virtual reality, I'm talking about Instagram, Tumblr, etc, not Oculus. The metaverse has existed for a long time, Oculus is just helping us immerse our bodies in it.
There's a hump in reported cannabis use in the UK drug use data sets from the brief period when it was decriminalised - not necessarily because more people were smoking, but because more were admitting it.
Any other examples of interesting dynamic content?
My point? It is at least possible that these teens are now wise enough to know admitting to any sort of nefarious behavior, no matter the setting, is just a dumb thing to do.
On the whole it seems quite reliable, although some stats are not very meaningfuk. e.g. watching TV is a bit of a silly stat if you ask me, kids have just moved from traditional TV but they're probably 'wasting' as much time on media entertainment as before through other channels.
Also, people in my high school were very open about their illicit behaviors. One guy even claimed he was part of a gang in the middle of our class. Further, before the surveys, there would always be at least one person who said something like, "hey guys, lets just answer 'every day' to every 'how often have you <x>' question. LOL". Obviously, those submissions get thrown out as outliers, but the point is I don't think teens are any wiser to know not to admit to any nefarious behaviors. Heck, just ask them if they know what the first (or second, or third...) amendment is - many teens (and citizens in general) are totally unaware of their rights and of the law. Yes, self-report metrics are always subject to loads of biases, but I just disagree with the bias being towards under-reporting in this case - I can't tell whether the metrics would be boosted or lowered as a result of these biases.
Take this anecdote as you will, but it will take me a lifetime to be convinced that a faceless government form can poll the group of cards closest to a teen's chest with any aggregate accuracy.
You'd have to be pretty paranoid in '92 to assume they're out to get you, you'd have to be pretty ignorant in '16 to assume they're not.
I do agree that the kids are less paranoid about surveillance. And I think that's a severe flaw on their education.
I'd expect bigger problems with people making stuff up for fun than from paranoiac heroin users lying about their habits.
Please see the first chart in this National Vital Statistics Report from the Centers Of Disease Control:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr49/nvsr49_10.pdf
It's not very surprising that teen pregnancy has declined since it has been declining for most of the last 60 years.
Of course, there is the separate issue of unmarried teens getting pregnant. The unmarried rate has risen from 12% to 79%, as the chart in the CDC report makes clear. Although even this trend seems to be now slowing, which is an interesting thing the article could have focused on, but didn't.
ETA:
Also, the USA is not homogeneous, and the report mentions this:
"Birth rates for teenagers vary substantially by State. In 1999, the most recent year for which State-specific birth rates are available, the rates for ages 15–19 years ranged from 24.0 for New Hampshire to 72.5 in Mississippi."
I'm not sure that delayed childbirth is really such a good thing for society. If you delay too long, you increase the risk of complications and birth defects, hence the US's increasing infant mortality rate. But more importantly, it weakens families by not having as many generations around for as long. My grandmother was 45 when my older brother was born. Now, our parents will be over 60 at their grandchild's birth. Our great-grandparents were around until our teenage years, but our children won't have the same privilege, because our grandparents are all dead.
Because I think this is not primarily about grandparents, it is about female fertility on one hand and fear of "can I provide"/"I don't want such obligation yet".
I.e: my aunt had her first born when she was over 40, and knows this will be her last one.
I know several of my older peers that had their fistborn roughly at 30, and they attempted the second one already within two years.
I had my first daughter at 26. (Similar to my parents and parents of my wife first-borns were a kind of a happy accident :)
And I can understand these trade offs. Heck, sometimes even I have an argument with my wife how much easier would some things have been if we have been slightly more careful for one or two more years :-)
But I understand the sentiment about grand-parents :)
I am not convinced[1]. Experience and endless media items about health impacts of alcohol, increased binge drinking, etc over the last decade simply do not support it. Seems like they drink far more when they do binge too.
every two years, the federal government asks thousands of teenagers dozens of questions about whether they are all right
Teenagers today are 31 percent less likely to admit binge drinking than teenagers 20 years ago
Is a FAR more likely interpretation. Perhaps that's as a result of all that media coverage!
[1] Or perhaps the UK and Europe experience of alcohol over the last 20 years is the inverse of the US.
This old dude I once knew was shaking his head at complaining about how teens nowadays are just playing with their phones all the time. Come on! This is a good thing! The precursor to all physical conflict is having your hands free to form a fist or hold a weapon. If teens are holding their phones more than they are less likely to fight.
iPhone = world peace.
Excerpt:
The Kids Are All Right written by Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard
Loudly chomping on a stick of gum, Emily finished the last few words of her barely comprehensible text message: “BTW..that shit was cray. WTF!! : )” She laughed, and slid back into her seat to listen. The professor droned on about some dead playwright named Shakespeare. Who cares? The monotone began to recede as she opened her laptop and checked her Instagram, eagerly eyeing the number of “likes” her latest selfie had obtained. One thousand and twenty two! This thrilled her. However, her cheer temporarily soured as she remembered that her BMW was in the shop. How unfair. Now she had to ride home with her roommate Rebecca, a nerd who would force her to listen to pretentious “indie” bands on the drive home. Ugh. Her aged, out of touch, and pedantic professor finally ceased speaking of something called Hamlet and dismissed the class. Excitedly, Emily stood up, pulled down her pink “I love me” shirt, and walked out of the classroom. As she entered the hall, she quickly turned up the volume of her iPod, humming along to the lyrics of her favorite pop song: “I’m so fancy/can’t you taste this gold/Remember my name/bout to blow.”
If you believe that society is deteriorating as traditional values and moral verities decay, Emily is your worst nightmare: vain, selfish, impulsive, and dismissive of anything of transcendent value. You are also not alone. Many moral theorists, from Hesiod to Russell Kirk, have warned about the selfishness and moral vacuousness of the next generation. Recently, researchers have put forward data that seem to at least partially support such pessimism about Millennials. In fact, Jean Twenge’s excellent and entertaining book about these Millennials is tellingly entitled Generation Me.¹ She and W. Keith Campbell followed this book with the more ominously titled, The Narcissism Epidemic.²
Yet in this essay, we will forward a more optimistic perspective, arguing that although some of the data Twenge and her colleagues have advanced are correct, their interpretation of them is not. Some indicators of self-regard and even narcissism have increased from the 70s through to the 2000s, but these increases don’t reflect increasing narcissism; rather they reflect increasing humanism–a general emphasis on the value of all individuals, including the self.³
The kids are not only all right; in many ways, they are better than we are.
[1] http://quillette.com/2016/01/05/the-kids-are-all-right-2/
Sounds like an increasing emphasis on the value of all individuals to me.
The only thing this tells me is that teenagers have become less comfortable about revealing anything about their sex life or smoking. In an age where Facebook photos and Tweets can cause you to lose your job, that is entirely unsurprising.
We know this because every two years, the federal government asks thousands of teenagers dozens of questions about whether they are all right.
I didn't read the entire article. I hope the punchline was at the end.
In other words, of those who smoked, 13 percent fewer do now.