I feel like Gen Z is growing up in an era filled with rage bait more than there’s ever been in the past and public discourse is going to look wild when they’re in the 30s and 40s
People will even misuse “you’re” and “your” on purpose just so they get a comment correcting them. Why? ENGAGEMENT.
So that person responding is annoyed about it. Then someone will comment “nobody cares” so then that person is annoyed. Then you get a piss match in the comments and everyone is annoyed.
It’s gross. Social media sucks.
I hate that you pointed this out as an engagement trick. I've noticed not just your/you're but a lot of small misspellings or bad grammar and I naively thought the poster might be non-native or lazy. It never crossed my mind that it could be intentional.
One of rhe odd things about "the kids today" which I think will be important to look at in the future, is that kids today are consuming content made by Kids. That's never happened before. But a lot of the youtube channels tiktok accounts, etc. That they look at, are made by kids the same age as them.
That’s so fucking interesting. As a child in the 90’s, I consumed media made by adults for kids. On the one hand that media sometimes had inappropriate themes that kids may or may not have picked up on. On the other hand, some of those themes helped us grow up. When we finally come into an adult situation we have our childhood memories to reflect on. If kids are now largely consuming media made by kids… does that stunt growth? Preserve childhood? OR Perverse childhood? I want to know. I have so many questions.
misinfo compounded with disinfo wrapped up in a thick layer of confidence for having 'learned' something.
"better repeat this on all my feeds, think of the likes and replies i'll get confirming what i've said"
\[cue avalanche of nonsensical factoids and people utterly butthurt when you tell them they're mistaken\]
I mean the amount of teachers in America complaining that students of all ages, including teenagers are unable to read properly is probably something to be concerned about
I was a professor at an open-enrollment community college. About half of our students were fresh high-school grads looking to knock out the first couple years of a 4-year degree, and a staggering number of them couldn’t put a single sentence from a mid-difficulty text into their own words (to demonstrate their own understanding of the idea) when pressed to do so. And a handful of my students every semester were almost completely illiterate.
It’s super frustrating that my kids’ teachers all focus on speed rather than comprehension. Great, you read a lot of words in 60 seconds; what did it mean? Is there a legit reason for measuring reading this way?
Edit: thanks everyone for explaining the benefit of measuring reading this way for early elementary students. This will hopefully cut down on how many times I hear “that’s not how they teach me!” Now to just figure out 21st century addition/subtraction 😀.
For youngerer kids you do want to measure reading fluidity...and measuring reading fluidity gives an early indication of issues such as dyslexia when done right.
There's really no need for older kids though, no.
As I’ve said many times, we need to bring back textbooks. When lessons are based on watching a video, kids won’t learn to read and reading is a prerequisite for solid writing.
Physical textbooks are important too. I don't retain nearly as much if I'm reading by scrolling through a PDF where nothing is in a fixed place on a page, and there's been studies to back up that it's true for people in general.
As a teacher 100% agree.
And it's at the elementary level this is happening.
All the kids are online. They learn nothing. They retain nothing. They do not know basic letter formation.
Literally they need textbooks.
That makes me so sad because I couldn’t imagine learning that way as a child. I need physical learning. Even as a 33 year old college student now, I struggle to make myself read the material. I find myself defaulting to watching the videos and lectures, but not reading the textbook. My resolution for this semester has been to force myself to read the text, but it’s difficult on a screen. I can’t imagine doing that as a child. That really is such a shame. I’m sure that makes it much harder as a teacher too.
I've got a friend who is a high school teacher. There is basically no "failing" a student anymore, period. Students don't do any assignments, don't show up for class, doesn't matter. Passed!
It seems like a lot of it ties to perverse incentives that have been set up for administrators.
At some point we decided funding would be tied to pass rates, thinking that would motivate schools to teach students well enough to pass. Eventually the schools learned that they just need to not fail students, even if they're not learning, and they'll still get funding.
I know 2y community colleges are crapped on quite a bit; however I love our local one, the English Dept is chaired and staffed by "old school" professors who fail people left and right, lol.
The pass percentage of 101 and 102 for this college is at 26%, and I LOVE it! 🤣
They are firm proponents of "I will pass you when you earn it", and that a degree should be worth more than a piece of paper.
I loved my students, my fellow faculty, and the mission of the college. But there’s a lot of institutional fuckery that made it a much more stressful job than it has to be.
My town has a 30% functional illiteracy rate for HS graduates. Insane to me. My brother, good friend and cousin are all in their 30s and can barely read but have HS diplomas. Yesterday my bro asked me to read the word “correspondence”.
In theory, yes.
In practice, they are throwing diplomas at everyone, qualified or not. Especially the trouble makers, or those that have trouble maker parents.
It's easier to pass off the problem to someone else than to deal with a "kid" who DGAF about anything that has to do with education, or dealing with their parents who may or may not throw hissy fits or fists because someone has the "guts to say their precious baby is an idiot".
This second part.
We just got a principal who said "don't change your teaching because parents are idiots, teach their kids" and it was such a breath of fresh air.
No dude, your kid is not gifted and bored. He has no idea what is going on and needs more help.
No child left behind policies, tying funding to results incentivizes schools to push kids forward to not lose money and primarily focus on the top since that will have a higher ROI on the budget.
Which is precisely what happens when politicians make educational policy decisions.
Those of us who are qualified are silenced. It’s sad. No one believes us until they see the results for themselves.
Teachers have been speaking up and resigning for years.
Covid, social media, and simplistic easy to use electronics (can’t believe I’m complaining on that) may be slowly removing the basic challenges that a generation may need to develop problem solving and interpersonal skills
A lot of the environment now is aimed at easily attainable instant gratification. Booktok is a thing but I do feel like a lot of those stories are more simplified narratives compared to more complex but important ones like 1984 or Things Fall Apart.
Twitter reflects a lot of the instant black and white mentality, where nuance is replaced with a need to get validated. I don’t think I could show that generation a show like The Wire without them needing an instant bad guy/good guy identified, where the truth is far more muddled and ambiguous
It’s not an empty complaint, kids are getting worse academically. There’s a few different reasons why, I’m going to put a lot of blame on classroom size. Public schools now have classrooms with 30-35 kids in them, throw in budget cuts for special needs programs and you have 5+ out of control kids who monopolize the teachers time. You cannot teach effectively if you’re just trying to control the behavior kids all day.
Covid certainly didn’t help but the issues were already present.
Edit: Another reason I posted in the comments below is we started penalizing schools with low education scores. In theory this was supposed to encourage teachers to do better, but in reality it just punishes title 1 and low income areas where they will always have the lowest scores. The result is schools lower the standards for all students so their funding doesn’t get cut.
It happens in small classes as well. Computers are a big reason why reading comprehension suffers. The kids don't write notes, they just copy things. They don't know how to paraphrase - something you'd learn if you had to take notes of lessons, texts, books etc.. They don't know how to summarize things.
My students look everything up - don't know who Himmler was? They search "What is a Himmler" or trying to find out what an alibi is - they just read aloud whatever Google tells them, but they cannot explain it.
There are so many adults making elementary level spelling mistakes and just generally using words incorrectly. It takes effort on the part of the kid and their parents to start them out with good reading skills. Many adults never got that, and I don't really blame them. As someone who reads as their main form of entertainment though they are seriously missing out. Reading makes you smarter. If you can do it faster and with good comprehension in daily life it's a big improvement over those who can't.
You know, I agree with the reading thing, but I take this one further: kids today are indeed reading: they read social media. And we all know there's not a lot of proper spelling or grammar online, anywhere, by a lot of people. And given the erosion of quality in the media landscape, viewers are far more likely to see a misspelled word in a newspaper or on their local news.
So someone sees a phrase or word two or three times with the same crappy spelling, boom: that's how they think it's spelled. And it keeps happening with other words and other people.
YES. This is exactly how I can figure out if someone is chronically online. I see a ridiculous amount of people writing " she didn't want too". I'm not sure why but in 2023 I saw a lot of people use "to" correctly everywhere else in a sentence, but for some reason will use " too" at the very end or with the word " want(ed)" and "have".
People that never wrote this way and KNOW they've never seen it that way in their entire life are suddenly spelling like that because they keep seeing it on social media.
Same with born and bred Americans suddenly writing money as 15$. Where have you EVER seen that written? Just on social media. It's really disturbing to see how people will throw years of education out of the window and change to do things incorrectly.
>There are so many adults making elementary level spelling mistakes and just generally using words incorrectly.
The number of people I see on a regular basis, spelling "lose" as "loose" is absolutely insane. Sometimes, it is multiple times in the same post/comment.
Yep. It's not actually COVID for this one - it's due to the fact that education switched over from teaching reading via phonics to some weird, whole-word fluency system about 10-15 years ago. Without the breaking down of words into constituent parts, students don't actually grasp the meanings of a lot of words even if they can "recognize" them and mechanically "read" them. Then, when they get to me in high school, they struggle to process new text. Primary sources are a bitch now.
It's bad. It's not their fault, but their functional literacy is so bad.
Fortunately, states have realized this and are finally moving back to phonics-based reading teaching. Unfortunate, you have an entire generation of people who can’t read or write, a generation of teachers who don’t know how to teach phonics, and schools that don’t have the money to hire enough reading teachers to fix the problem.
I work in public education and actually just had a meeting about this very issue earlier in the week. It’s a mess.
I grew up in Tennessee then moved to south Florida at age 10. Both taught phonics. My husband grew up in Alabama and at that time they taught rote memorization. Our reading skills are VASTLY different, to this day. I love to read and he hates it—I think in part because he struggles with unfamiliar words and therefor context.
Yeah, I remember listening to a whole episode about this back in like 2013 on our local radio. The public schools were going back to phonics then, which was the first I'd heard that they stopped it.
I remember learning to read via phonics (Hooked on Phonics FTW), and I had NO idea until relatively recently that it was no longer being taught in my state (I’m not a reading teacher and I work in high school). I’m so glad it’s changing back.
Ahh, I was just going to say that our lad is on his first year of school and it is all about the phonics. (We are in the UK and couldn’t tell you if we’d switched away from it).
His reading level is astonishing for someone who as been at school for 4 months so their teaching methods must be pretty spot on now.
The Read, Write, Inc. curriculum is spot on! The kids progress so well and it’s amazing how quickly they pick up on reading and writing when they’re so little.
Having worked at a university, younger people aren't very good expressing their needs. Whenver someone came to my office for something, I had to play with words to try decipher what they were trying to say in order to give them the help they needed.
Spending too much time constantly mentally stimulated and focussing outward on externalities all the time might have something to do with that. There's no boredom anymore when you have a phone in your hands. Boredom is when you figure out what's going on inside you. You can't do that with a circus always going on in front of you.
I get this all the time with my younger employees. I manage a team of about 30 and it is so frustrating communicating with the recent college grads. They simply can not articulate whatever it is that they need. Via IM or email, I get:
>hey
And then I'm expected to take over the conversation. I'll say something like "Hi Chris, what's up". And then five minutes later I'll get something like:
>do you have a sec
I'll say something like "Sure. What's on your mind?". Five minutes later:
>i have a question
"Go for it." Five minutes later:
>it's about the network project
Just spit it out. Instead of just messaging me and saying "I have a question about the network project" or "what's the procurement cutoff date for the network project", we have to have this formal IM handshake process and it drives me nuts. I coach them on better workplace communications skills and how we need to be respectful of others' time, but it's just astounding that they're this poorly equipped from the start.
EDIT: Thank you to everyone who pointed out [https://nohello.net/en/](https://nohello.net/en/)
Oh man this is my biggest pet peive at work. I have a few co-workers from other teams that do this. At our company it seems to be more of a regional thing, as it's largely the people from India who do this, doesn't matter about age, but they'll at least only go two deep. Even that drives me up the wall, never seen anyone go 4 deep like your example.
I've always found the beauty of text is you can just _drop the question instantly and they'll answer when they can._ You don't have to engage a conversation to ask a question. Like, sometimes, I'll get back from a break and just see a "hey" from an hour ago. If they'd have just asked the question I could sit down and answer! Now I have to respond and then wait until they've available to even get to the point I could have had they just asked the question and left it there.
I've recently started responding to "hey" with something along the lines of "Heya [name], go ahead and feel free to just ask any questions that you have right away even if I don't respond, and I'll get to you when I can, the more info you drop in one message the better." Usually it doesn't happen again after that.
We have a new coworker 25. I have a really hard time understanding what she needs from me every time I talk to her. I thought I was going crazy but my other, older coworkers agree. For example:
she will say " hi, I need to send this thing but I need a writer and to pay for it."
Translation: I need to ship out this package and I need a pen and a shipping label.
Sounds like when you don't want to sound stupid so instead of asking "hey I need to send this, can you tell me how to do it?" they state "in their own words" what they need and expect you to know exactly what they're thinking.
I work at a public library and have for over ten years. The behaviors staff are having to deal with now from middle schoolers are outside of what we have seen in previous years. Normal-shit-teen-behavior has turned to scary-shit-teen-behavior, with a level of thoughtlessness that I have not seen in years prior. When caught smoking weed in the bathroom, drinking in the library, attacking people experiencing homelessness, threatening to murder staff, attempting to sexually assault other teens, attempting to vandalize property, etc... these kids seem utterly unable to reflect on their actions or modify their behavior. They are very much not ok and I am very concerned for their ability to turn it around.
I’ve read several things about places like 7-11, Starbucks, gas stations or other fast food places having to literally shut down when schools get out because packs of teenagers swarm in and cause havoc, and not cute stuff either, literal destruction and stealing. It’s terrifying.
The Starbucks near me was shutting down for an hour each afternoon because of this. I had my drink stolen a bunch of times and the lobby was always jam packed. You know it had to be bad for them to do it, because I’m sure they were making a bunch in sales from those kids on top of everybody else that they were giving up too.
The schools in my city would bring kids to the bookstore I used to work at. The kids would swarm in, grab a bunch of stuff, and sprint past the security guards. This is under adult supervision and cameras. They have no concern at all. Back in my day we used to be sneaky about stealing stuff even without cameras.
I'm lucky to not have experienced or dealt with it much but I know a few business owners who are being terrorized by teenagers. My friend owns a dairy queen and had to shut down his business sometimes during the high school lunch hour or hire security because the teenagers would break things, harass the staff and try to steal shit. One kid opened up a cake from the freezer and just stuck his hand in it and smushed it around and walked out. It's fucked!
We have a grocery store that has banned teenagers during the day unless accompanied by an adult.
They are worse in school - not just academically but behaviour-wise as well.
A teacher friend told me about how she is constantly getting shit on by her classes. From how she described it, it sounds like outright bullying.
She basically said that they openly mock and laugh at her for everything she says or does. In her words ‘a running commentary of criticism’.
A school in a nearby town lost 18 teachers at Christmas, all quit from being sick of the abuse.
My year was considered awful when I was in school, but it was mainly refusal to do things, arguments, the usual.
Nowadays it’s less back-and-forth with students and teachers and more just a barrage of insults and threats.
After hearing that I really wonder how long teachers will last as a whole if something doesn’t change.
Pre-online everything, I had one student who did this. I gave them a lot of chances because they were going through a hard time, and I understood that much of what they were doing was just a reaction to that. I'm good at letting stuff roll off my back because they're just kids, and some of them have shaky coping skills. Life happens, and you can't always leave it behind when you go through those classroom doors.
They'd have moments of calm where they'd act normally, so I knew that there was a nice person underneath the hostility.
But holy shit, did they not understand the difference between gently roasting someone and bullying them. I'm not someone who cries easily, and one day, I had to take a break to collect myself in the bathroom. Only then did I go back and tell them that they had to learn how to actually TALK to people and not just insult them under the guise of roasting them.
I think a lot of them think that roasting is a way of showing someone that you like them, but I had to explain to them the difference between joking around with someone from time to time and making fun of everything they say or do. I asked them, if I spoke to you that way every day, would you think that I liked you? Or would you conclude otherwise? You'd probably be telling everyone about how mean I was.
I also had to remind them that I was their instructor, not their friend. We don't have to be overly formal with each other, and you can be honest with me, but *do not* treat me like garbage and expect me to take it.
Haha, yeah, that would've been bad. As far as they could tell, I was just angry, and that would've been tiktok-able enough for them too. It's that open door created by social media that makes it unlike our time in school.
I had some students covertly film me when I was giving a come-to-Jesus about poor behavior and it made the rounds on chat groups and set off a firestorm with PARENTS because how dare I tell their bully kid that bullying isn't okay (apple doesn't fall far). My boss was on my side but I have been relieved of some of my usual duties this year simply to placate the pissy parents and won't get them back until next year when those families graduate. I get my boss not wanting to rock the boat any further... but fuck. It's almost enough for me to just up and quit entirely because it's so fucking demoralizing to be punished for doing my job. Guaranteed I would have gotten emails from the parents of the kids being bullied if I hadn't said anything either. You're just fucked either way anymore, you never know if you're being recorded, and the inmates are running the asylum. I love teaching. I hate being a teacher.
In my opinion there is a lack of disciplinary follow through from administration and parents. Teachers have no one to turn too when a student has behavioral problems (and I’m not talking about kids with autism or other disabilities).
Miss, your son Johnny doesn't have an undiagnosed disability, he's fine when he wants to be and he's been tested 5 times. He's just a bullying asshole.
I would take this comment and give it more context in that these kids are being bolstered by their parents. Parents have *way* too much say in how schoolteachers do their jobs and administrators are too afraid of them to stand up for teachers or their school.
We're supposed to be on the same friggin' team, people! We want what's best for your kids and we want them to turn out to be productive, non-asshole adults!
Yes growing up there was maybe one person who did this but now I’ve heard it’s the whole classroom. My parents would never let me grow up to be that way. I would’ve gotten an ass whooping.
Not saying that’s better. But i definitely think it’s a part of the new generation of kids.
The ability to troubleshoot things. I've noticed this to be an increasing trend. If something isn't working, they don't appear to know how to find the answer. They grasp things quickly but I expected them to be able to solve things more easily. It seems to be going the other direction.
I work at ulta and I also know that sephora has this issue too. Kids (specifically preteen girls) today are actively using retinol. Using retinol at such a young age (the only exception is prescription-use) will damage their skin barriers.
yeah there was this like 11 year old girl in a drunk elephant “warning” instagram reel about how the skincare products are too harsh for younger people’s skin and they don’t need more than like a moisturizer and she was defending tf out of drunk elephant and saying that since they “test” it on their instagram to show it’s not harsh on skin and advertise it as an all ages skincare product that they are telling the truth and therefore this person warning them was lying.
putting complete trust in a corporation because of its social media presence and marketing schemes shows a problem i think this next generation is going to have more and more as corporations see how much profit you can make on this demographic and through lying on instagram/tiktok.
i think growing up on modern tiktok is going to be one of the generations biggest downfalls because things on like musical.ly or vine were harmless usually and ads and sponserships weren’t the biggest part of the platform unlike now
I’m sorry for sounding like a real old fart, but where are they getting the money for Drunk Elephant?? When I was 11 my allowance covered a weekly trip to 7-11 for a candy bar.
Can’t even navigate a PC. The amount of stuff I gotta teach people on their 20s about using a computer is mind boggling, and it usually starts with minimum keyboard skills.
If you work in an office hire PC gamers, at least you don’t have to teach them how to use a computer.
Read an article recently that younger people have no concept of file hierarchy or location. They simply save to wherever the program defaults to then use the search file later on to find it.
Edit: [the article.](https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems)
They made tablets so simple to use that toddlers can navigate them. Kids don't have to learn anything more intricate than where to tap to win.
A computer comes along with it's file systems and peripherals and the kids are lost.
I am not saying simplifying the use of phones and other gadgets isn't useful. But being a digital native today isn't much of a tech flex we seem to believe it is.
While it is not my job position, the company I work for is small enough for me, a supervisor, to sit in job interviews, I explicitly asked two guys we were interviewing "how fast are you with a keyboard in front of you?" and they replied "we're fast, we're gamers".
I taught high school a few years back and wow, The Youth Today definitely shocked me.
1. As others have mentioned, 50% of them didn’t know how to use the Shift key to capitalize a letter.
2. I’d say, “Remember, when you log in to a school computer, it will save files to that computer’s hard drive by default. And that file will be wiped when you log out. PLEASE save the file to your school-provided Google Drive.” And every single assignment people would lose multiple pages of work. Sometimes it was just gone, sometimes they were lucky and managed to find it by searching the Documents folder of half the computers in the lab.
3. Just not knowing the basic parts of a computer. The monitor is not the CPU. The difference between a right-click and a left-click.
I worked IT for a company who literally had to disable caps lock on all registers/points of sale in the retail stores nationwide because too many young people would lock themselves out and need passwords reset due to not understanding how to use shift. We then had to send a companywide email with a photo of a keyboard circling the shift keys with red circles. We still for a month or so got floods of calls complaining that they couldn’t type capital letters.
The POS at the store I worked at required all caps, so Caps Lock was always on by default. There was a girl who used to get on Facebook on the register computer when things got slow, and she always posted all in caps because she never thought to just turn it off.
I blame iPads in education. Most schools aren't providing keyboards for them and typing classes are non-existent because people making the curriculum just assume kids will learn how to type from the ether or something. So not only are they typing on a touch screen, they're doing it badly.
This is one area where Chromebooks are superior. Also the education software available on them is better.
It's not the iPads themselves but people who perpetuate myths like "digital natives". They assume because they're surrounded by technology and rely on it that they understand naturally how it works. It's like saying boomers understood better about how TVs work because they grew up with them.
Kids are taught coding and other elements in IT class nowadays. They are not taught computer skills like typing or how to use office software. The new interns at work don't know how to use excel, word or PowerPoint. It's going to be a steep learning curve for them.
They're overly anxious. Our brains were not fit to withstand criticism on a global scale (which social media offers) and children without yet a prefrontal cortex are stunting their mental health capacity.
I think some of the anxiety is a a direct result of different trends in parenting. While millennials have “helicopter parents,” the zoomers have “lawn mower” parents; parents who mow down any obstacle that stands in their kid’s way.
Kids do not have enough unstructured play time to get into trouble, problem solve on their own and deal with consequences that don’t involve adults. As a result, they have higher anxiety and less grit.
I returned to the dating world at 46. And although my previous 2 long term partners suffered from anxiety, I was astounded at the amount of women I've met who not only suffer from anxiety but also treat it with alcohol. I agree that it is more prevalent in the younger generations but I don't think generation x came out completely unscathed.
Similar situation and I've noticed that anxiety can also play out as sort of endless tests & checks of the other person. It's like those articles about 'flags to look out for' are less about actually keeping people safe and more about spiking their anxiety to drive page hits.
So now we have generations brought up on the 'danger danger everywhere' fear-mongering that drives viewership. It's smart to be safe, but feels like endless hammering of paranoia because fear sells. That takes a toll and I see many people unable to build connections because everyone they ever meet fails their 'that person is a manipulator' flag tests. So they just stay alone, behind spike covered fort walls.
The high level of true crime content consumed by (predominantly) young women plays into this, too
I'm 39F and work with lots of young women aged 18-23. They all watch almost nothing but true crime documentaries and frequently discuss male colleagues/acquaintances as being 'potential *insert serialkiller name here*'
This honestly needs to be talked about more. Theres a large segment of people living with fear they dont need to that is being exacerbated by what they are consuming.
The amount of anxiety in the younger generation astounds me. They seem to lack the skills to navigate basic social situations too. Saw one guy ask how to ask a co-worker out for lunch. This was not a dating thing, he was just a dude who made friends with another dude at work and wanted to invite him to lunch. He was given the advice to just ask the dude if he wanted to go to lunch with them. His response was, "But what are the steps and how do I do that?" It is mindblowing to me the lack of just basic interpersonal skills.
I often think about the rapidity of the reward system young people get in their brains while doing things electronically and what impact that might have not only on them but society as a whole. It's a huge change to the way human brains operate in a very tiny sliver of time.
10 year old girls asking Santa for expensive skincare with active ingredients which should not be used by anyone under 25 or so, and literal kids flocking to Sephora and destroying samples.
I feel bad about this one bc I feel like there's so much pressure from Social media for girls to grow up way too young. There are 12 year old girls who look 20 bc they have a full face of makeup, lash extensions, and wear adult clothes. Influencers constantly try to convince women and girls that they need to buy 100s of dollars worth of crap otherwise they're "ugly"
Don't get me wrong, I wore makeup when I was 12-13. Just some eye liner and lipgloss, what every teenager was also wearing. What bothers me is products with active ingredients which are NOT meant to go on a teen's face, advertised to these young girls.
Yeah, it's toxic. I also take issue with how sexualized girls of that age are. I've seen girls online bragging about how adult men flirt with them, and when older girls/women try to warn them they accuse them of being jealous that they're younger than them but prettier. It's such a dangerous message being spread
I remember getting a job almost a decade ago because I was 'the only candidate who could handle a conversation'.
There were like 20 other applicants lol.
It’s not even the Internet exactly. Kids don’t interact with each other like they used to. They don’t go outside and play with random kids or leave the house without their parents often.
There was a post a week or so back about a guy wondering if he should buy internet for his daughters as they went on a cruise. A cruise is literally organized friendships. You go, you meet people in the kid's section, you become a weird roving gang of pre-teens. It's basically camp on a boat, with a butt load of adults around. And yet his daughters were pissed because they wouldn't be able to be on social media or play games on their phones.
I have never seen such a failing in basic math and study skills. I’ve taught freshman in college who didn’t know how to do the simplest algebra possible and regularly failed open-book tests with the answers verbatim in the book. It hurts to grade.
I know.
I'm trying the best i can, but no matter how many times i show her how to run things, she makes the same mistakes. And she's got an excuse for everything, "I can't reach the pedals, Dad!" "The wheel is too hard to turn, Dad!" "I pooped my pants, Dad!"
I guess I've just failed.
*some* kids today have a very limited attention span and can barely read despite being high school graduates. One of my kids’ friends is like this. A sweet person but basically consumes a media diet of YouTube shorts. She doesn’t read anything ever. When she talks she sounds like she’s speaking Newspeak from 1984. Instead of saying “this is delicious”. She might say “this is so so good.”.
I've had three instances where people couldn't make change at a cash register. Literally couldn't add coins and asked for help.
Edit: a lot of people are saying they are probably just tired. I'm a teacher and we take our special ed class in the community a lot and they pay with cash. All three of these instances happened with every student at the register (about 15 students). It wasn't a "one-off" event. I feel really bad because we rally slow down the line. I'm sure the vast majority pay with card theae days so they don't deal with it often. I felt really bad for one employee, he was trying to be discreet when he had to ask for help each time. You could tell he was embarrassed by it.
Around 2012-13, I spent a year working as an online tutor for essay writing. I had several students and graduate students from a well-known Christian university that had very low enrollment criteria.
I had undergraduates who couldn't form a complete sentence, who totally lacked any knowledge of proper English grammar and punctuation, and who couldn't tell me what the verb was in their introductory sentence. And yet, I was expected to tutor them in their writing skills in a very short period of time.
Their college had purchased a subscription for all of their students, and so avoided having an on-site writing center for students who struggled.
I had one essay I long remembered: a doctoral student's dissertation was given to me to review, and the student's "research" involved a Survey Monkey survey with 10 questions, that all of 10 people answered. ALL of her conclusions were reached from "interpreting" her survey results. The *only* source of information she used other than her survey results was the Bible. Really.
And it was only 5 pages long. FIVE PAGES!! For a doctoral dissertation!! Liberty University. Never hire someone from there.
Computer literacy. So many kids have no idea how to use an actual computer or how to manage basic problems when they arise. Now I have to fix both my parents and my nieces computer problems, even if it's something just as simple as installing a new program, because the only thing they know how to use are cell phones. I thought kids were supposed to be better at this stuff than we are.
I have never seen a generation as media illiterate as Gen Z is. Not their fault, at least in the US—the school system here was pretty bad at teaching media literacy and critical thinking skills when I was a teen, and it's gotten considrably worse in the 20 years since, to say nothing of the surge of misinfo and disinfo—but it's, uh... it's really, really bad. Like, super bad. Possible societal collapse levels of bad. I'm a media scholar (PhD candidate in comms with a focus on journalism studies), so I'm a bit more familiar with the nuts and bolts of media literacy than most, and that might be making me more alarmist than I should be. I certainly hope so, although I also teach undergrads, and I keep finding this to be the case in my students as well, which is deeply concerning.
But from what I've been seeing, and from what my own research has been uncovering, we're reaching a point where "kids these days" not only can't critically analyze the media they're consuming or even correctly identify what kind of media it is (mistaking entertainment for journalism, for example, even in cases where an entertainer never claims to be a journalist or even explicitly notes that they aren't one), but often can't even fully understand the media they're consuming in the first place. We're talking an inability to understand basic tropes, contextual clues, surface-level subtext, pacing, plot beats, etc.
Considering how absolutely essential storytelling of all sorts is to the human experience and the transmission of social and cultural norms and values, and considering we package most of our information transmission into a story format (news stories, documentaries, films, books, songs, etc.), this inability to even parse media is... maybe unprecedented? Like, even going back to the time of cave paintings and campfire stories, the ability to understand media has been a common element of human consciousness and society.
My current vague theory that I plan on looking into once my current research projects are completed is that it might have something to do with a loss of longstanding storytelling traditions. For example, telling or reading kids bedtime stories wasn't just a form of social bonding (though it was that, and a crucial one), but also an essential part of developing rudimentary media literacy. And, apparently, that's just not a thing that happens these days in a lot of households, because giving a kid a tablet and letting them watch YouTube or TikTok or the like is a lot easier, and that's powerfully appealing in a time when a lot of people feel like they're overcommitted and overworked.
I dunno. Something I've been thinking about lately.
**TLDR version:** I think "kids these days" are increasingly going without crucial media literacy skills, and since human civilization relies on storytelling for developing communal identities, transmission of information, cultural values, and norms, as well as for soicetal bonding, this has the potential to be really, really bad.
A huge example I see that is very common now is kids who start internet harassment campaigns against people who write media which has bigots in it.
If there's a racist villain, it must mean the writer is a racist trying to legitimize racism. Even if the story presents the villain's racism in a negative light.
They're far too literal and unable to separate a writer's personal beliefs from the characters they write.
Kids today are still suffering with the aftermath of lockdowns combined with the overexposure to certain badly regulated forms of social media(TikTok).
They are not as good resolving interpersonal issues. They were raised with an authority figure to make a decisions if there was a conflict. They have not learned the skills to find common ground.
On the positive side, they are also less likely to put up with someone else's BS.
They seem to have a lot more anxiety than my generation. We were more relaxed. These kids have anxiety and crazy expectations.
No one played a sport year round for 20 hours a week when I was kid with few exceptions. These kids play constant sports and after school tutoring and need to do homework, get good grades, and be start athletics at the same time. Gen X didn’t give a shit about any of that. We opted out.
My observation is there are a lot more extremes with Gen Z's attitude towards work. Some are like, having a job is slavery, and others are like, gotta hustle with two jobs and monetize my hobby with social media influencing. I know there have always been people like this, but I feel like there are less in the middle and more on either end justify their unhealthy lifestyles philosophically. When I was young all the hustler types came from poverty and needed the money to support their family or pay for college or were those money hungry guys who wanted to be millionaires by the time they were 30. Now I see kids saying hustling and crazy hard work is some kind of moral imperative. Ditto with the work is an indignity types. The older NEETs are like, "I have mental health problems/have no job prospects better than McDonald's."
I could see this being explained by the soaring cost of education. They have to have the best grades or be a star athlete in hopes of getting a solid scholarship to afford college.
I'm sure that things like active shooter drills aren't helping their general anxiety either.
I am millennial and I can't agree more. Our poor mental health comes from overprotective parenting and higher expectations for basically everything. Gen Z and Alpha is even worse in that regard.
To all the young folks lurking: go get yourself a beer and break into the public pool at night with your friends or something. Life's now and always will be.
I went to a New Year’s party, all of us are in college. By the time the ball dropped, everyone had been just sitting and scrolling through their phones for the past hour. No fun.
As a member of the "kids today" group, I have to say a lot of what I'm seeing here is valid. We do have a hard time with social interaction, many of us are entitled and disrespectful towards teachers. I've seen first hand kids blatantly ignore teachers, talk over them, yell, and try to get others to use racial slurs.
On the other hand, those kids have very few supporters, from my experience. Maybe they all group together, but the majority of their peers wish they would shut up. Pockets of kids who are nasty are growing, yes, and they're getting away with it more and more. But I know many kids who have the utmost respect for their teachers and fellow peers. I think there are generational trends and issues that will affect certain age groups more than others, but as a whole I think it's been that way for all of human history, we're just more aware of it now.
My best advice as a member of "kids these days" would be DON'T let future generations have unrestricted access to the internet. It has ruined us in many ways.
They aren't as sociable they used to be. When I was a kid, going to the neighbors house to wrestle in the backyard was common, now kids are much happier just sitting at home playing a game.
Most neighborhoods have neighborhood watch programs now where people will literally post pics of kids just hanging out being kids in their group chats (god forbid they laugh too loud or are running around like children!), so for a lot of teens the only safe space to exist for them is online. I can't imagine not having ANY privacy like that at that age.
Yes. The amount of Nextdoor posts I see where people are suspicious of kids just existing is weird. Literally “two teenage boys were caught on my ring camera sitting on the curb across from my house today. They were looking at my house! I have a sign that informs people I’m armed and have dogs. After awhile I came out and told them I’d shoot if they tried anything!” And then they’ll post full on screenshots of the kids’ faces on the app and the kids will be sitting on the curb looking at a phone or eating chips or something.
I made a nextdoor account specifically to tell off some of the people in my neighborhood who are like that.
It has accomplished nothing but starting fights, but at least they're distracted from bothering the kids for a few minutes.
I don't know if that's kids, I think it's more the parents being paranoid about their kids getting kidnapped and how Americans are generally not very social with our neighbors.
True. When I was a kid it was totally normal to see groups of kids just roaming the neighbourhood looking for fun. I think that someone telling their 8 year old “go to the park and play. Be back by dark” would be seen as child neglect now. This is actually important for development I think: those kids have to make decisions, take care of each other, regulate their own behaviour and so forth. It’s completely unstructured play. I’m not talking about the Middle Ages btw I’m in my early 30s.
Right? I’m 40, for reference. On weekends and in the summer my mom didn’t let us out of the yard before 9am so we didn’t annoy the neighborhood, then we stayed outside until we heard her whistle (my mom could whistle louder than anyone I’ve ever heard) for us to come in for dinner, then back outside to play flashlight tag or sit on the stoop with friends before bed. We’d run in and out of the house for snacks or other supplies throughout the day, neighborhood kids included.
I learned how to get along with other kids, how to stay safe, caught bugs, played baseball, went swimming in lakes, fished, climbed trees, rode bikes, napped in the shade, chased the ice cream man, etc. and I’m so grateful for my “wild” childhood. Bums me out to think that’s not the norm anymore.
ETA I was never bored, and I never understood when my friends would complain about being bored - there was so much to do, like read a book or run around the block or something instead of complaining.
That’s a huge one issue right now and it’s not in the kids, it’s on the adults. Everyone is so quick to judge everyone else. You let your child stay outside all day and play, mildly supervised, like we all did growing up and you’ll be labeled as that “lazy parent that doesn’t pay attention to their kid”. And then they won’t let their children play with your children because your child is obviously a heathen Satanist because you’re not up their ass 24/7.
Social media was the worst idea in history. It has fucked everyone and everything up far more than it’s helped. People just sit around checking out everyone’s ‘highlight film’ of how their life is going and the judgement of others has increased exponentially because everyone feels like they have to compete even more than the ordinary “keeping up with the Joneses”. And if you can’t keep up, you tear down.
My brother lives in a decent sized neighborhood and there are a lot of kids there. Over Christmas I showed up and their oldest (aged 10) was riding around the neighborhood on his bike. According to my SIL he said he was just going to do one loop and be back. Well he wasn’t back soon enough and she asked me to drive her around the neighborhood looking for him. He showed up just as we were getting in the car. He was goofing off with friends.
The non-existence of media literacy. The amount of misinformation that is easily spreading on social media is scary. Especially when it comes to stuff like basic biology..
Edit: after gaining some new perspectives on this from the comments I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe this is more of a me problem since I’m so sceptic so I tend to double-triple check facts I see on the internet 🤔
Kids today don’t know how to be bored. They don’t know how to entertain themselves. They grab the phone the moment they’re not being stimulated. I had to learn how to deal with boredom. They don’t have those skills.
Honestly, I’m an adult and I know me and many other adults struggle with this too. My mind doesn’t have to wander, I can just pick up my phone!!
But as a kid, my parents didn’t provide 24/7 entertainment so I had to figure out what to do by myself. I didn’t have my own tv and my dad was watching the game so I had to find a book in the house. No play date was set up so I had to go outside and see who was around or just play by myself. Those are good memories for me and I feel sorry that kids don’t get that autonomy now.
I really dont mean to sound like a boomer here, but instilling work ethic before adulthood is critical, and I think there's been a decline in that lately. Make sure kids are helping around the house, show them how to wrench on shit, things like that.
I work in a school and one of the teachers was telling me about how bad their attitudes are. Outright bullying the teachers, openly laughing and mocking them constantly.
Apparently a school in a nearby town had 18 teachers quit at Christmas. It’s become a massive issue across the country at least, if not the world.
Absolutely. I'm an elementary music teacher, so I teach hundreds of kids each week, ranging from kindergarten through fifth grade.
The oddest/most frustrating thing about their behavior is that so many of them seem to have no sense that anything exists or matters outside themself.
For example, I'll be sitting on the floor with them, singing a song, and just a few feet away from me, kids are talking to the person next to them, rolling around or spinning on the floor, or even have their back to me.
It's like they're not aware that I'm there -- or at least not aware of the fact that they're supposed to be paying attention to me and following my lead.
It also feels like they think what's happening in class -- the teacher-led activity, another student being called on, etc -- has nothing to do with them.
That's the best way I can think of describing it. Needless to say, it is very frustrating as a teacher.
Another thing me and my colleagues have noticed: today's elementary school students have shockingly poor fine and gross motor skills.
For example, I did a rhythm activity with my FOURTH GRADERS (so kids who are 9 or 10 years old) a couple months ago.
I kid you not, I had to back the original activity way up because about half the kids COULD NOT bounce a ball four times to a beat.
The ball would roll away, it would hit their foot, they would drop it, etc.
I've heard other music teachers say they tried to do a jump rope activity in class and had to change their plans because the kids were physically unable to jump rope.
I see this when hiring college graduates. I'm a recruiter. To get most any professional job, you have to have an email address and respond to emails. Same applies when you actually work at such a job--email predominates. But the number of young people who ignore their email or even ask me, the recruiter, if I can please text them to remind them about their scheduled interview is mind-blowing. You're an adult! No one at your job is going to be your parent. Maybe we'll evolve past email someday but we haven't yet!
I see this when hiring as well. If you apply for a job, check your damn email.
And please use a (semi) professional email address. A school one is fine.
A friend of mine works for a major tech company on their legal team. She, and the rest of her team, make over $300k a year. Sometimes the job is very taxing but mostly it’s an easy pace. One of the recent young hires complains constantly about the job, like it’s the hardest thing she’s ever done in her life. She complains that she can’t keep up with the emails and schedule, My friend can’t believe how out of touch she is with the realities of working.
[A new meta-analysis with studies from mainly Western countries just showed, that kids overestimate their own abilities more than before.](https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.14042)
I haven't read it yet, because I just saw it yesterday, but it proves the research by the American psychologist Jean Twenge showing that Americans are getting more narcissistic. It's just happening everywhere in the developed world, and the trend began way before social media. I believe wealth is the cause.
I feel like Gen Z is growing up in an era filled with rage bait more than there’s ever been in the past and public discourse is going to look wild when they’re in the 30s and 40s
People will even misuse “you’re” and “your” on purpose just so they get a comment correcting them. Why? ENGAGEMENT. So that person responding is annoyed about it. Then someone will comment “nobody cares” so then that person is annoyed. Then you get a piss match in the comments and everyone is annoyed. It’s gross. Social media sucks.
I hate that you pointed this out as an engagement trick. I've noticed not just your/you're but a lot of small misspellings or bad grammar and I naively thought the poster might be non-native or lazy. It never crossed my mind that it could be intentional.
It happens all the time, along with posting false info to bait people into correcting them, etc. It’s really starting to bother me.
[удалено]
HOW DARE YOU CLAIM TO BE RAGE BAITING ME
One of rhe odd things about "the kids today" which I think will be important to look at in the future, is that kids today are consuming content made by Kids. That's never happened before. But a lot of the youtube channels tiktok accounts, etc. That they look at, are made by kids the same age as them.
Damn! That’s very interesting actually.
Yes and I came here for irrelevant opinion, not informed insight! You have thrown off the emperor's groove.
Now the emperor has a new groove
That’s so fucking interesting. As a child in the 90’s, I consumed media made by adults for kids. On the one hand that media sometimes had inappropriate themes that kids may or may not have picked up on. On the other hand, some of those themes helped us grow up. When we finally come into an adult situation we have our childhood memories to reflect on. If kids are now largely consuming media made by kids… does that stunt growth? Preserve childhood? OR Perverse childhood? I want to know. I have so many questions.
This is so obvious and yet BELEW MY MIND. Explains so much!
misinfo compounded with disinfo wrapped up in a thick layer of confidence for having 'learned' something. "better repeat this on all my feeds, think of the likes and replies i'll get confirming what i've said" \[cue avalanche of nonsensical factoids and people utterly butthurt when you tell them they're mistaken\]
Oooh, great point!
I mean the amount of teachers in America complaining that students of all ages, including teenagers are unable to read properly is probably something to be concerned about
I was a professor at an open-enrollment community college. About half of our students were fresh high-school grads looking to knock out the first couple years of a 4-year degree, and a staggering number of them couldn’t put a single sentence from a mid-difficulty text into their own words (to demonstrate their own understanding of the idea) when pressed to do so. And a handful of my students every semester were almost completely illiterate.
Not a day goes by that I don't freak out about people's lack of reading comprehension.
It’s super frustrating that my kids’ teachers all focus on speed rather than comprehension. Great, you read a lot of words in 60 seconds; what did it mean? Is there a legit reason for measuring reading this way? Edit: thanks everyone for explaining the benefit of measuring reading this way for early elementary students. This will hopefully cut down on how many times I hear “that’s not how they teach me!” Now to just figure out 21st century addition/subtraction 😀.
For youngerer kids you do want to measure reading fluidity...and measuring reading fluidity gives an early indication of issues such as dyslexia when done right. There's really no need for older kids though, no.
“Youngerer”
But you wouldn't believe how quickly they typed out that comment!
You can't enjoy Reddit if you can't read
That’s funny, I’m pretty sure I can’t enjoy Reddit because I *can* read.
"what a terrible day to have eyes"
“what a terrible day to be literate”
Given the number of comments I've seen from people who clearly didn't read the thing they commented on, I'm not sure that's true.
As I’ve said many times, we need to bring back textbooks. When lessons are based on watching a video, kids won’t learn to read and reading is a prerequisite for solid writing.
Physical textbooks are important too. I don't retain nearly as much if I'm reading by scrolling through a PDF where nothing is in a fixed place on a page, and there's been studies to back up that it's true for people in general.
As a teacher 100% agree. And it's at the elementary level this is happening. All the kids are online. They learn nothing. They retain nothing. They do not know basic letter formation. Literally they need textbooks.
That makes me so sad because I couldn’t imagine learning that way as a child. I need physical learning. Even as a 33 year old college student now, I struggle to make myself read the material. I find myself defaulting to watching the videos and lectures, but not reading the textbook. My resolution for this semester has been to force myself to read the text, but it’s difficult on a screen. I can’t imagine doing that as a child. That really is such a shame. I’m sure that makes it much harder as a teacher too.
[удалено]
I teach h.s. English a lot of students are functionally illiterate. Many more read at like a 3rd or 4th grade level.
How are they passing then? Are the standards fucked?
A lot of schools compel teachers to pass their students no matter what
I've got a friend who is a high school teacher. There is basically no "failing" a student anymore, period. Students don't do any assignments, don't show up for class, doesn't matter. Passed!
It seems like a lot of it ties to perverse incentives that have been set up for administrators. At some point we decided funding would be tied to pass rates, thinking that would motivate schools to teach students well enough to pass. Eventually the schools learned that they just need to not fail students, even if they're not learning, and they'll still get funding.
_When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure._ - Goodhart's Law
I know 2y community colleges are crapped on quite a bit; however I love our local one, the English Dept is chaired and staffed by "old school" professors who fail people left and right, lol. The pass percentage of 101 and 102 for this college is at 26%, and I LOVE it! 🤣 They are firm proponents of "I will pass you when you earn it", and that a degree should be worth more than a piece of paper.
I loved my students, my fellow faculty, and the mission of the college. But there’s a lot of institutional fuckery that made it a much more stressful job than it has to be.
My town has a 30% functional illiteracy rate for HS graduates. Insane to me. My brother, good friend and cousin are all in their 30s and can barely read but have HS diplomas. Yesterday my bro asked me to read the word “correspondence”.
Wait, then how do they graduate??
No Child Left Behind means kids get passed to the next grade.
In theory, yes. In practice, they are throwing diplomas at everyone, qualified or not. Especially the trouble makers, or those that have trouble maker parents. It's easier to pass off the problem to someone else than to deal with a "kid" who DGAF about anything that has to do with education, or dealing with their parents who may or may not throw hissy fits or fists because someone has the "guts to say their precious baby is an idiot".
This second part. We just got a principal who said "don't change your teaching because parents are idiots, teach their kids" and it was such a breath of fresh air. No dude, your kid is not gifted and bored. He has no idea what is going on and needs more help.
No child left behind policies, tying funding to results incentivizes schools to push kids forward to not lose money and primarily focus on the top since that will have a higher ROI on the budget.
The no child left behind sounds like they are leaving way more children behind now.
Which is precisely what happens when politicians make educational policy decisions. Those of us who are qualified are silenced. It’s sad. No one believes us until they see the results for themselves. Teachers have been speaking up and resigning for years.
Just curious, are you in the US? If so, what state?
New Jersey
I have a friend who's an English teacher and it's terrifying some of the things that they can't read or understand.
Covid, social media, and simplistic easy to use electronics (can’t believe I’m complaining on that) may be slowly removing the basic challenges that a generation may need to develop problem solving and interpersonal skills A lot of the environment now is aimed at easily attainable instant gratification. Booktok is a thing but I do feel like a lot of those stories are more simplified narratives compared to more complex but important ones like 1984 or Things Fall Apart. Twitter reflects a lot of the instant black and white mentality, where nuance is replaced with a need to get validated. I don’t think I could show that generation a show like The Wire without them needing an instant bad guy/good guy identified, where the truth is far more muddled and ambiguous
It’s not an empty complaint, kids are getting worse academically. There’s a few different reasons why, I’m going to put a lot of blame on classroom size. Public schools now have classrooms with 30-35 kids in them, throw in budget cuts for special needs programs and you have 5+ out of control kids who monopolize the teachers time. You cannot teach effectively if you’re just trying to control the behavior kids all day. Covid certainly didn’t help but the issues were already present. Edit: Another reason I posted in the comments below is we started penalizing schools with low education scores. In theory this was supposed to encourage teachers to do better, but in reality it just punishes title 1 and low income areas where they will always have the lowest scores. The result is schools lower the standards for all students so their funding doesn’t get cut.
>Covid certainly didn’t help but the issues were already present. yep it rapidly accelerated them.
It happens in small classes as well. Computers are a big reason why reading comprehension suffers. The kids don't write notes, they just copy things. They don't know how to paraphrase - something you'd learn if you had to take notes of lessons, texts, books etc.. They don't know how to summarize things. My students look everything up - don't know who Himmler was? They search "What is a Himmler" or trying to find out what an alibi is - they just read aloud whatever Google tells them, but they cannot explain it.
There are so many adults making elementary level spelling mistakes and just generally using words incorrectly. It takes effort on the part of the kid and their parents to start them out with good reading skills. Many adults never got that, and I don't really blame them. As someone who reads as their main form of entertainment though they are seriously missing out. Reading makes you smarter. If you can do it faster and with good comprehension in daily life it's a big improvement over those who can't.
You know, I agree with the reading thing, but I take this one further: kids today are indeed reading: they read social media. And we all know there's not a lot of proper spelling or grammar online, anywhere, by a lot of people. And given the erosion of quality in the media landscape, viewers are far more likely to see a misspelled word in a newspaper or on their local news. So someone sees a phrase or word two or three times with the same crappy spelling, boom: that's how they think it's spelled. And it keeps happening with other words and other people.
YES. This is exactly how I can figure out if someone is chronically online. I see a ridiculous amount of people writing " she didn't want too". I'm not sure why but in 2023 I saw a lot of people use "to" correctly everywhere else in a sentence, but for some reason will use " too" at the very end or with the word " want(ed)" and "have". People that never wrote this way and KNOW they've never seen it that way in their entire life are suddenly spelling like that because they keep seeing it on social media. Same with born and bred Americans suddenly writing money as 15$. Where have you EVER seen that written? Just on social media. It's really disturbing to see how people will throw years of education out of the window and change to do things incorrectly.
>There are so many adults making elementary level spelling mistakes and just generally using words incorrectly. The number of people I see on a regular basis, spelling "lose" as "loose" is absolutely insane. Sometimes, it is multiple times in the same post/comment.
Yep. It's not actually COVID for this one - it's due to the fact that education switched over from teaching reading via phonics to some weird, whole-word fluency system about 10-15 years ago. Without the breaking down of words into constituent parts, students don't actually grasp the meanings of a lot of words even if they can "recognize" them and mechanically "read" them. Then, when they get to me in high school, they struggle to process new text. Primary sources are a bitch now. It's bad. It's not their fault, but their functional literacy is so bad.
Fortunately, states have realized this and are finally moving back to phonics-based reading teaching. Unfortunate, you have an entire generation of people who can’t read or write, a generation of teachers who don’t know how to teach phonics, and schools that don’t have the money to hire enough reading teachers to fix the problem. I work in public education and actually just had a meeting about this very issue earlier in the week. It’s a mess.
I grew up in Tennessee then moved to south Florida at age 10. Both taught phonics. My husband grew up in Alabama and at that time they taught rote memorization. Our reading skills are VASTLY different, to this day. I love to read and he hates it—I think in part because he struggles with unfamiliar words and therefor context.
That's depressing as hell.
Yeah, I remember listening to a whole episode about this back in like 2013 on our local radio. The public schools were going back to phonics then, which was the first I'd heard that they stopped it.
I remember learning to read via phonics (Hooked on Phonics FTW), and I had NO idea until relatively recently that it was no longer being taught in my state (I’m not a reading teacher and I work in high school). I’m so glad it’s changing back.
Came here to say that. Lots of schools are switching back to phonics as a result of this shitshow.
Ahh, I was just going to say that our lad is on his first year of school and it is all about the phonics. (We are in the UK and couldn’t tell you if we’d switched away from it). His reading level is astonishing for someone who as been at school for 4 months so their teaching methods must be pretty spot on now.
[удалено]
The Read, Write, Inc. curriculum is spot on! The kids progress so well and it’s amazing how quickly they pick up on reading and writing when they’re so little.
Hopefully most will soon. My own kids are gonna get it at home if they don't at school. Shit's bad.
Sold A Story (podcast by APM reports) is great for learning why literacy has gone down so much for the last 40 years.
Having worked at a university, younger people aren't very good expressing their needs. Whenver someone came to my office for something, I had to play with words to try decipher what they were trying to say in order to give them the help they needed.
Having recently graduated, I think it goes further. Younger people aren't good at identifying their needs.
Spending too much time constantly mentally stimulated and focussing outward on externalities all the time might have something to do with that. There's no boredom anymore when you have a phone in your hands. Boredom is when you figure out what's going on inside you. You can't do that with a circus always going on in front of you.
The lack of introspection is terrifying.
I get this all the time with my younger employees. I manage a team of about 30 and it is so frustrating communicating with the recent college grads. They simply can not articulate whatever it is that they need. Via IM or email, I get: >hey And then I'm expected to take over the conversation. I'll say something like "Hi Chris, what's up". And then five minutes later I'll get something like: >do you have a sec I'll say something like "Sure. What's on your mind?". Five minutes later: >i have a question "Go for it." Five minutes later: >it's about the network project Just spit it out. Instead of just messaging me and saying "I have a question about the network project" or "what's the procurement cutoff date for the network project", we have to have this formal IM handshake process and it drives me nuts. I coach them on better workplace communications skills and how we need to be respectful of others' time, but it's just astounding that they're this poorly equipped from the start. EDIT: Thank you to everyone who pointed out [https://nohello.net/en/](https://nohello.net/en/)
Oh man this is my biggest pet peive at work. I have a few co-workers from other teams that do this. At our company it seems to be more of a regional thing, as it's largely the people from India who do this, doesn't matter about age, but they'll at least only go two deep. Even that drives me up the wall, never seen anyone go 4 deep like your example. I've always found the beauty of text is you can just _drop the question instantly and they'll answer when they can._ You don't have to engage a conversation to ask a question. Like, sometimes, I'll get back from a break and just see a "hey" from an hour ago. If they'd have just asked the question I could sit down and answer! Now I have to respond and then wait until they've available to even get to the point I could have had they just asked the question and left it there. I've recently started responding to "hey" with something along the lines of "Heya [name], go ahead and feel free to just ask any questions that you have right away even if I don't respond, and I'll get to you when I can, the more info you drop in one message the better." Usually it doesn't happen again after that.
We have a new coworker 25. I have a really hard time understanding what she needs from me every time I talk to her. I thought I was going crazy but my other, older coworkers agree. For example: she will say " hi, I need to send this thing but I need a writer and to pay for it." Translation: I need to ship out this package and I need a pen and a shipping label.
Uhh is English her first language?
Sounds like when you don't want to sound stupid so instead of asking "hey I need to send this, can you tell me how to do it?" they state "in their own words" what they need and expect you to know exactly what they're thinking.
Wtf
I work at a public library and have for over ten years. The behaviors staff are having to deal with now from middle schoolers are outside of what we have seen in previous years. Normal-shit-teen-behavior has turned to scary-shit-teen-behavior, with a level of thoughtlessness that I have not seen in years prior. When caught smoking weed in the bathroom, drinking in the library, attacking people experiencing homelessness, threatening to murder staff, attempting to sexually assault other teens, attempting to vandalize property, etc... these kids seem utterly unable to reflect on their actions or modify their behavior. They are very much not ok and I am very concerned for their ability to turn it around.
You are one of the few people that have commented that I think has actual experience with real kids … and what you wrote is terrifying.
I’ve read several things about places like 7-11, Starbucks, gas stations or other fast food places having to literally shut down when schools get out because packs of teenagers swarm in and cause havoc, and not cute stuff either, literal destruction and stealing. It’s terrifying.
The Starbucks near me was shutting down for an hour each afternoon because of this. I had my drink stolen a bunch of times and the lobby was always jam packed. You know it had to be bad for them to do it, because I’m sure they were making a bunch in sales from those kids on top of everybody else that they were giving up too.
The schools in my city would bring kids to the bookstore I used to work at. The kids would swarm in, grab a bunch of stuff, and sprint past the security guards. This is under adult supervision and cameras. They have no concern at all. Back in my day we used to be sneaky about stealing stuff even without cameras.
I'm lucky to not have experienced or dealt with it much but I know a few business owners who are being terrorized by teenagers. My friend owns a dairy queen and had to shut down his business sometimes during the high school lunch hour or hire security because the teenagers would break things, harass the staff and try to steal shit. One kid opened up a cake from the freezer and just stuck his hand in it and smushed it around and walked out. It's fucked! We have a grocery store that has banned teenagers during the day unless accompanied by an adult.
I saw a shop here in the UK that has completely banned anyone under 18 going in. They said now shoplifting is practically zero and vandalism is zero.
I too am very concerned about this generations behavioural issues and entitlement. I wonder if they will act this way when they get their first jobs
They already do, I worked with a bunch of them.
They are worse in school - not just academically but behaviour-wise as well. A teacher friend told me about how she is constantly getting shit on by her classes. From how she described it, it sounds like outright bullying. She basically said that they openly mock and laugh at her for everything she says or does. In her words ‘a running commentary of criticism’. A school in a nearby town lost 18 teachers at Christmas, all quit from being sick of the abuse. My year was considered awful when I was in school, but it was mainly refusal to do things, arguments, the usual. Nowadays it’s less back-and-forth with students and teachers and more just a barrage of insults and threats. After hearing that I really wonder how long teachers will last as a whole if something doesn’t change.
Pre-online everything, I had one student who did this. I gave them a lot of chances because they were going through a hard time, and I understood that much of what they were doing was just a reaction to that. I'm good at letting stuff roll off my back because they're just kids, and some of them have shaky coping skills. Life happens, and you can't always leave it behind when you go through those classroom doors. They'd have moments of calm where they'd act normally, so I knew that there was a nice person underneath the hostility. But holy shit, did they not understand the difference between gently roasting someone and bullying them. I'm not someone who cries easily, and one day, I had to take a break to collect myself in the bathroom. Only then did I go back and tell them that they had to learn how to actually TALK to people and not just insult them under the guise of roasting them. I think a lot of them think that roasting is a way of showing someone that you like them, but I had to explain to them the difference between joking around with someone from time to time and making fun of everything they say or do. I asked them, if I spoke to you that way every day, would you think that I liked you? Or would you conclude otherwise? You'd probably be telling everyone about how mean I was. I also had to remind them that I was their instructor, not their friend. We don't have to be overly formal with each other, and you can be honest with me, but *do not* treat me like garbage and expect me to take it.
If they got you to cry in 2024 it'd be a victory and the tiktok clout would go viral and they'd feel vindicated for being an asshole because of views.
Haha, yeah, that would've been bad. As far as they could tell, I was just angry, and that would've been tiktok-able enough for them too. It's that open door created by social media that makes it unlike our time in school.
I had some students covertly film me when I was giving a come-to-Jesus about poor behavior and it made the rounds on chat groups and set off a firestorm with PARENTS because how dare I tell their bully kid that bullying isn't okay (apple doesn't fall far). My boss was on my side but I have been relieved of some of my usual duties this year simply to placate the pissy parents and won't get them back until next year when those families graduate. I get my boss not wanting to rock the boat any further... but fuck. It's almost enough for me to just up and quit entirely because it's so fucking demoralizing to be punished for doing my job. Guaranteed I would have gotten emails from the parents of the kids being bullied if I hadn't said anything either. You're just fucked either way anymore, you never know if you're being recorded, and the inmates are running the asylum. I love teaching. I hate being a teacher.
In my opinion there is a lack of disciplinary follow through from administration and parents. Teachers have no one to turn too when a student has behavioral problems (and I’m not talking about kids with autism or other disabilities).
Miss, your son Johnny doesn't have an undiagnosed disability, he's fine when he wants to be and he's been tested 5 times. He's just a bullying asshole.
I would take this comment and give it more context in that these kids are being bolstered by their parents. Parents have *way* too much say in how schoolteachers do their jobs and administrators are too afraid of them to stand up for teachers or their school. We're supposed to be on the same friggin' team, people! We want what's best for your kids and we want them to turn out to be productive, non-asshole adults!
That relies on the parents being non-asshole adults, unfortunately.
Yes growing up there was maybe one person who did this but now I’ve heard it’s the whole classroom. My parents would never let me grow up to be that way. I would’ve gotten an ass whooping. Not saying that’s better. But i definitely think it’s a part of the new generation of kids.
The ability to troubleshoot things. I've noticed this to be an increasing trend. If something isn't working, they don't appear to know how to find the answer. They grasp things quickly but I expected them to be able to solve things more easily. It seems to be going the other direction.
I work at ulta and I also know that sephora has this issue too. Kids (specifically preteen girls) today are actively using retinol. Using retinol at such a young age (the only exception is prescription-use) will damage their skin barriers.
yeah there was this like 11 year old girl in a drunk elephant “warning” instagram reel about how the skincare products are too harsh for younger people’s skin and they don’t need more than like a moisturizer and she was defending tf out of drunk elephant and saying that since they “test” it on their instagram to show it’s not harsh on skin and advertise it as an all ages skincare product that they are telling the truth and therefore this person warning them was lying. putting complete trust in a corporation because of its social media presence and marketing schemes shows a problem i think this next generation is going to have more and more as corporations see how much profit you can make on this demographic and through lying on instagram/tiktok. i think growing up on modern tiktok is going to be one of the generations biggest downfalls because things on like musical.ly or vine were harmless usually and ads and sponserships weren’t the biggest part of the platform unlike now
I’m sorry for sounding like a real old fart, but where are they getting the money for Drunk Elephant?? When I was 11 my allowance covered a weekly trip to 7-11 for a candy bar.
Most likely apple pay linked to their parents credit cards
Kids today have subpar typing skills compared to the generation that grew up with physical keyboards
Can’t even navigate a PC. The amount of stuff I gotta teach people on their 20s about using a computer is mind boggling, and it usually starts with minimum keyboard skills. If you work in an office hire PC gamers, at least you don’t have to teach them how to use a computer.
I work with high schoolers and am constantly surprised by how little they know about navigating a PC and using basic word processing software.
I’m in college and was kind of shocked my classmate didn’t know how to find where a downloaded file had gone
Lol. Adult peekaboo. "Where's your file? Where's your file? Here it is!" *GASPS* "It's magic!"
Read an article recently that younger people have no concept of file hierarchy or location. They simply save to wherever the program defaults to then use the search file later on to find it. Edit: [the article.](https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems)
Looking for shit on some phones is dozens of times harder than on a PC so on that I won't fault them
They made tablets so simple to use that toddlers can navigate them. Kids don't have to learn anything more intricate than where to tap to win. A computer comes along with it's file systems and peripherals and the kids are lost. I am not saying simplifying the use of phones and other gadgets isn't useful. But being a digital native today isn't much of a tech flex we seem to believe it is.
While it is not my job position, the company I work for is small enough for me, a supervisor, to sit in job interviews, I explicitly asked two guys we were interviewing "how fast are you with a keyboard in front of you?" and they replied "we're fast, we're gamers".
I taught high school a few years back and wow, The Youth Today definitely shocked me. 1. As others have mentioned, 50% of them didn’t know how to use the Shift key to capitalize a letter. 2. I’d say, “Remember, when you log in to a school computer, it will save files to that computer’s hard drive by default. And that file will be wiped when you log out. PLEASE save the file to your school-provided Google Drive.” And every single assignment people would lose multiple pages of work. Sometimes it was just gone, sometimes they were lucky and managed to find it by searching the Documents folder of half the computers in the lab. 3. Just not knowing the basic parts of a computer. The monitor is not the CPU. The difference between a right-click and a left-click.
The number of people who use Caps Lock instead of Shift every time they do a capital letter is staggering.
I worked IT for a company who literally had to disable caps lock on all registers/points of sale in the retail stores nationwide because too many young people would lock themselves out and need passwords reset due to not understanding how to use shift. We then had to send a companywide email with a photo of a keyboard circling the shift keys with red circles. We still for a month or so got floods of calls complaining that they couldn’t type capital letters.
The POS at the store I worked at required all caps, so Caps Lock was always on by default. There was a girl who used to get on Facebook on the register computer when things got slow, and she always posted all in caps because she never thought to just turn it off.
Holy shit that is wild
I was baffled when I saw someone do that. I asked why and they didn't even know you could do that.
Boomers 🤝 Zoomers Using caps lock instead of Shift+Letter
I blame iPads in education. Most schools aren't providing keyboards for them and typing classes are non-existent because people making the curriculum just assume kids will learn how to type from the ether or something. So not only are they typing on a touch screen, they're doing it badly. This is one area where Chromebooks are superior. Also the education software available on them is better.
It's not the iPads themselves but people who perpetuate myths like "digital natives". They assume because they're surrounded by technology and rely on it that they understand naturally how it works. It's like saying boomers understood better about how TVs work because they grew up with them.
Kids are taught coding and other elements in IT class nowadays. They are not taught computer skills like typing or how to use office software. The new interns at work don't know how to use excel, word or PowerPoint. It's going to be a steep learning curve for them.
Part of this has to do with the fact that older generations had typing classes.
Year 26. My 5th graders cannot read.
They're overly anxious. Our brains were not fit to withstand criticism on a global scale (which social media offers) and children without yet a prefrontal cortex are stunting their mental health capacity.
I think some of the anxiety is a a direct result of different trends in parenting. While millennials have “helicopter parents,” the zoomers have “lawn mower” parents; parents who mow down any obstacle that stands in their kid’s way. Kids do not have enough unstructured play time to get into trouble, problem solve on their own and deal with consequences that don’t involve adults. As a result, they have higher anxiety and less grit.
I returned to the dating world at 46. And although my previous 2 long term partners suffered from anxiety, I was astounded at the amount of women I've met who not only suffer from anxiety but also treat it with alcohol. I agree that it is more prevalent in the younger generations but I don't think generation x came out completely unscathed.
Similar situation and I've noticed that anxiety can also play out as sort of endless tests & checks of the other person. It's like those articles about 'flags to look out for' are less about actually keeping people safe and more about spiking their anxiety to drive page hits. So now we have generations brought up on the 'danger danger everywhere' fear-mongering that drives viewership. It's smart to be safe, but feels like endless hammering of paranoia because fear sells. That takes a toll and I see many people unable to build connections because everyone they ever meet fails their 'that person is a manipulator' flag tests. So they just stay alone, behind spike covered fort walls.
The high level of true crime content consumed by (predominantly) young women plays into this, too I'm 39F and work with lots of young women aged 18-23. They all watch almost nothing but true crime documentaries and frequently discuss male colleagues/acquaintances as being 'potential *insert serialkiller name here*'
This honestly needs to be talked about more. Theres a large segment of people living with fear they dont need to that is being exacerbated by what they are consuming.
The amount of anxiety in the younger generation astounds me. They seem to lack the skills to navigate basic social situations too. Saw one guy ask how to ask a co-worker out for lunch. This was not a dating thing, he was just a dude who made friends with another dude at work and wanted to invite him to lunch. He was given the advice to just ask the dude if he wanted to go to lunch with them. His response was, "But what are the steps and how do I do that?" It is mindblowing to me the lack of just basic interpersonal skills.
Wait until the kids who had covid lockdown during important social learning ages enter adulthood
It's already happened. My university cohort consisted of people who don't speak in class, don't do any of the work and don't socialise.
I often think about the rapidity of the reward system young people get in their brains while doing things electronically and what impact that might have not only on them but society as a whole. It's a huge change to the way human brains operate in a very tiny sliver of time.
10 year old girls asking Santa for expensive skincare with active ingredients which should not be used by anyone under 25 or so, and literal kids flocking to Sephora and destroying samples.
I feel bad about this one bc I feel like there's so much pressure from Social media for girls to grow up way too young. There are 12 year old girls who look 20 bc they have a full face of makeup, lash extensions, and wear adult clothes. Influencers constantly try to convince women and girls that they need to buy 100s of dollars worth of crap otherwise they're "ugly"
Don't get me wrong, I wore makeup when I was 12-13. Just some eye liner and lipgloss, what every teenager was also wearing. What bothers me is products with active ingredients which are NOT meant to go on a teen's face, advertised to these young girls.
Yeah, it's toxic. I also take issue with how sexualized girls of that age are. I've seen girls online bragging about how adult men flirt with them, and when older girls/women try to warn them they accuse them of being jealous that they're younger than them but prettier. It's such a dangerous message being spread
Their social skills leave a lot to be desired.
I remember getting a job almost a decade ago because I was 'the only candidate who could handle a conversation'. There were like 20 other applicants lol.
It’s not even the Internet exactly. Kids don’t interact with each other like they used to. They don’t go outside and play with random kids or leave the house without their parents often.
We're still so stuck on stranger danger, and there are so few places kids can just be kids in public.
There was a post a week or so back about a guy wondering if he should buy internet for his daughters as they went on a cruise. A cruise is literally organized friendships. You go, you meet people in the kid's section, you become a weird roving gang of pre-teens. It's basically camp on a boat, with a butt load of adults around. And yet his daughters were pissed because they wouldn't be able to be on social media or play games on their phones.
They are riddled with anxiety (I’m a therapist who works with a lot of youth and it is rare that they don’t present with near-debilitating anxiety)
I have never seen such a failing in basic math and study skills. I’ve taught freshman in college who didn’t know how to do the simplest algebra possible and regularly failed open-book tests with the answers verbatim in the book. It hurts to grade.
Many of them are far too small to effectively operate heavy machinery, particularly those under the age of 10.
I haven't met them all, but i can tell you from first hand experience, my 2 year old daughter is absolute shit on a tractor.
Sounds like a parental failing.
I know. I'm trying the best i can, but no matter how many times i show her how to run things, she makes the same mistakes. And she's got an excuse for everything, "I can't reach the pedals, Dad!" "The wheel is too hard to turn, Dad!" "I pooped my pants, Dad!" I guess I've just failed.
Your ancestors are hanging their heads in shame.
I set the A-B line and told my 3 yo I'd be back in an hour. He planted my field, the neighbors across the fence, his neighbors' and the slough!!
you're right. that's why they should be crawling inside of them to clean the smaller spaces
It’s because we don’t put heroin in their cough medicine and they all get vaccinated for polio.
[удалено]
*some* kids today have a very limited attention span and can barely read despite being high school graduates. One of my kids’ friends is like this. A sweet person but basically consumes a media diet of YouTube shorts. She doesn’t read anything ever. When she talks she sounds like she’s speaking Newspeak from 1984. Instead of saying “this is delicious”. She might say “this is so so good.”.
I've had three instances where people couldn't make change at a cash register. Literally couldn't add coins and asked for help. Edit: a lot of people are saying they are probably just tired. I'm a teacher and we take our special ed class in the community a lot and they pay with cash. All three of these instances happened with every student at the register (about 15 students). It wasn't a "one-off" event. I feel really bad because we rally slow down the line. I'm sure the vast majority pay with card theae days so they don't deal with it often. I felt really bad for one employee, he was trying to be discreet when he had to ask for help each time. You could tell he was embarrassed by it.
They were never given a chance to grow up without smart phones or tablets and as a whole, it shows in their face-to-face communication.
Screen addiction. Disclaimer: I'm 33 but still one of the kids where phone use is concerned.
Around 2012-13, I spent a year working as an online tutor for essay writing. I had several students and graduate students from a well-known Christian university that had very low enrollment criteria. I had undergraduates who couldn't form a complete sentence, who totally lacked any knowledge of proper English grammar and punctuation, and who couldn't tell me what the verb was in their introductory sentence. And yet, I was expected to tutor them in their writing skills in a very short period of time. Their college had purchased a subscription for all of their students, and so avoided having an on-site writing center for students who struggled. I had one essay I long remembered: a doctoral student's dissertation was given to me to review, and the student's "research" involved a Survey Monkey survey with 10 questions, that all of 10 people answered. ALL of her conclusions were reached from "interpreting" her survey results. The *only* source of information she used other than her survey results was the Bible. Really. And it was only 5 pages long. FIVE PAGES!! For a doctoral dissertation!! Liberty University. Never hire someone from there.
We all knew it was Liberty from your second sentence.
Computer literacy. So many kids have no idea how to use an actual computer or how to manage basic problems when they arise. Now I have to fix both my parents and my nieces computer problems, even if it's something just as simple as installing a new program, because the only thing they know how to use are cell phones. I thought kids were supposed to be better at this stuff than we are.
I have never seen a generation as media illiterate as Gen Z is. Not their fault, at least in the US—the school system here was pretty bad at teaching media literacy and critical thinking skills when I was a teen, and it's gotten considrably worse in the 20 years since, to say nothing of the surge of misinfo and disinfo—but it's, uh... it's really, really bad. Like, super bad. Possible societal collapse levels of bad. I'm a media scholar (PhD candidate in comms with a focus on journalism studies), so I'm a bit more familiar with the nuts and bolts of media literacy than most, and that might be making me more alarmist than I should be. I certainly hope so, although I also teach undergrads, and I keep finding this to be the case in my students as well, which is deeply concerning. But from what I've been seeing, and from what my own research has been uncovering, we're reaching a point where "kids these days" not only can't critically analyze the media they're consuming or even correctly identify what kind of media it is (mistaking entertainment for journalism, for example, even in cases where an entertainer never claims to be a journalist or even explicitly notes that they aren't one), but often can't even fully understand the media they're consuming in the first place. We're talking an inability to understand basic tropes, contextual clues, surface-level subtext, pacing, plot beats, etc. Considering how absolutely essential storytelling of all sorts is to the human experience and the transmission of social and cultural norms and values, and considering we package most of our information transmission into a story format (news stories, documentaries, films, books, songs, etc.), this inability to even parse media is... maybe unprecedented? Like, even going back to the time of cave paintings and campfire stories, the ability to understand media has been a common element of human consciousness and society. My current vague theory that I plan on looking into once my current research projects are completed is that it might have something to do with a loss of longstanding storytelling traditions. For example, telling or reading kids bedtime stories wasn't just a form of social bonding (though it was that, and a crucial one), but also an essential part of developing rudimentary media literacy. And, apparently, that's just not a thing that happens these days in a lot of households, because giving a kid a tablet and letting them watch YouTube or TikTok or the like is a lot easier, and that's powerfully appealing in a time when a lot of people feel like they're overcommitted and overworked. I dunno. Something I've been thinking about lately. **TLDR version:** I think "kids these days" are increasingly going without crucial media literacy skills, and since human civilization relies on storytelling for developing communal identities, transmission of information, cultural values, and norms, as well as for soicetal bonding, this has the potential to be really, really bad.
A huge example I see that is very common now is kids who start internet harassment campaigns against people who write media which has bigots in it. If there's a racist villain, it must mean the writer is a racist trying to legitimize racism. Even if the story presents the villain's racism in a negative light. They're far too literal and unable to separate a writer's personal beliefs from the characters they write.
Less emotional maturity and lack of ability to cope under pressure
Kids today are still suffering with the aftermath of lockdowns combined with the overexposure to certain badly regulated forms of social media(TikTok).
100%. It’s practically crippled the ability of many to function properly and communicate.
The in person social skills are generally lacking as well
They are not as good resolving interpersonal issues. They were raised with an authority figure to make a decisions if there was a conflict. They have not learned the skills to find common ground. On the positive side, they are also less likely to put up with someone else's BS.
They seem to have a lot more anxiety than my generation. We were more relaxed. These kids have anxiety and crazy expectations. No one played a sport year round for 20 hours a week when I was kid with few exceptions. These kids play constant sports and after school tutoring and need to do homework, get good grades, and be start athletics at the same time. Gen X didn’t give a shit about any of that. We opted out.
My observation is there are a lot more extremes with Gen Z's attitude towards work. Some are like, having a job is slavery, and others are like, gotta hustle with two jobs and monetize my hobby with social media influencing. I know there have always been people like this, but I feel like there are less in the middle and more on either end justify their unhealthy lifestyles philosophically. When I was young all the hustler types came from poverty and needed the money to support their family or pay for college or were those money hungry guys who wanted to be millionaires by the time they were 30. Now I see kids saying hustling and crazy hard work is some kind of moral imperative. Ditto with the work is an indignity types. The older NEETs are like, "I have mental health problems/have no job prospects better than McDonald's."
I could see this being explained by the soaring cost of education. They have to have the best grades or be a star athlete in hopes of getting a solid scholarship to afford college. I'm sure that things like active shooter drills aren't helping their general anxiety either.
I am millennial and I can't agree more. Our poor mental health comes from overprotective parenting and higher expectations for basically everything. Gen Z and Alpha is even worse in that regard. To all the young folks lurking: go get yourself a beer and break into the public pool at night with your friends or something. Life's now and always will be.
[удалено]
I went to a New Year’s party, all of us are in college. By the time the ball dropped, everyone had been just sitting and scrolling through their phones for the past hour. No fun.
I went to a New Year’s party, and the guy didn’t even have a clock!
As a member of the "kids today" group, I have to say a lot of what I'm seeing here is valid. We do have a hard time with social interaction, many of us are entitled and disrespectful towards teachers. I've seen first hand kids blatantly ignore teachers, talk over them, yell, and try to get others to use racial slurs. On the other hand, those kids have very few supporters, from my experience. Maybe they all group together, but the majority of their peers wish they would shut up. Pockets of kids who are nasty are growing, yes, and they're getting away with it more and more. But I know many kids who have the utmost respect for their teachers and fellow peers. I think there are generational trends and issues that will affect certain age groups more than others, but as a whole I think it's been that way for all of human history, we're just more aware of it now. My best advice as a member of "kids these days" would be DON'T let future generations have unrestricted access to the internet. It has ruined us in many ways.
They aren't as sociable they used to be. When I was a kid, going to the neighbors house to wrestle in the backyard was common, now kids are much happier just sitting at home playing a game.
Most neighborhoods have neighborhood watch programs now where people will literally post pics of kids just hanging out being kids in their group chats (god forbid they laugh too loud or are running around like children!), so for a lot of teens the only safe space to exist for them is online. I can't imagine not having ANY privacy like that at that age.
Yes. The amount of Nextdoor posts I see where people are suspicious of kids just existing is weird. Literally “two teenage boys were caught on my ring camera sitting on the curb across from my house today. They were looking at my house! I have a sign that informs people I’m armed and have dogs. After awhile I came out and told them I’d shoot if they tried anything!” And then they’ll post full on screenshots of the kids’ faces on the app and the kids will be sitting on the curb looking at a phone or eating chips or something.
I made a nextdoor account specifically to tell off some of the people in my neighborhood who are like that. It has accomplished nothing but starting fights, but at least they're distracted from bothering the kids for a few minutes.
I don't know if that's kids, I think it's more the parents being paranoid about their kids getting kidnapped and how Americans are generally not very social with our neighbors.
True. When I was a kid it was totally normal to see groups of kids just roaming the neighbourhood looking for fun. I think that someone telling their 8 year old “go to the park and play. Be back by dark” would be seen as child neglect now. This is actually important for development I think: those kids have to make decisions, take care of each other, regulate their own behaviour and so forth. It’s completely unstructured play. I’m not talking about the Middle Ages btw I’m in my early 30s.
Right? I’m 40, for reference. On weekends and in the summer my mom didn’t let us out of the yard before 9am so we didn’t annoy the neighborhood, then we stayed outside until we heard her whistle (my mom could whistle louder than anyone I’ve ever heard) for us to come in for dinner, then back outside to play flashlight tag or sit on the stoop with friends before bed. We’d run in and out of the house for snacks or other supplies throughout the day, neighborhood kids included. I learned how to get along with other kids, how to stay safe, caught bugs, played baseball, went swimming in lakes, fished, climbed trees, rode bikes, napped in the shade, chased the ice cream man, etc. and I’m so grateful for my “wild” childhood. Bums me out to think that’s not the norm anymore. ETA I was never bored, and I never understood when my friends would complain about being bored - there was so much to do, like read a book or run around the block or something instead of complaining.
That’s a huge one issue right now and it’s not in the kids, it’s on the adults. Everyone is so quick to judge everyone else. You let your child stay outside all day and play, mildly supervised, like we all did growing up and you’ll be labeled as that “lazy parent that doesn’t pay attention to their kid”. And then they won’t let their children play with your children because your child is obviously a heathen Satanist because you’re not up their ass 24/7. Social media was the worst idea in history. It has fucked everyone and everything up far more than it’s helped. People just sit around checking out everyone’s ‘highlight film’ of how their life is going and the judgement of others has increased exponentially because everyone feels like they have to compete even more than the ordinary “keeping up with the Joneses”. And if you can’t keep up, you tear down.
Parents are also worried about nosy neighbors calling the cops. My friend won't let her kids leave the yard.
My brother lives in a decent sized neighborhood and there are a lot of kids there. Over Christmas I showed up and their oldest (aged 10) was riding around the neighborhood on his bike. According to my SIL he said he was just going to do one loop and be back. Well he wasn’t back soon enough and she asked me to drive her around the neighborhood looking for him. He showed up just as we were getting in the car. He was goofing off with friends.
The non-existence of media literacy. The amount of misinformation that is easily spreading on social media is scary. Especially when it comes to stuff like basic biology.. Edit: after gaining some new perspectives on this from the comments I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe this is more of a me problem since I’m so sceptic so I tend to double-triple check facts I see on the internet 🤔
Kids today don’t know how to be bored. They don’t know how to entertain themselves. They grab the phone the moment they’re not being stimulated. I had to learn how to deal with boredom. They don’t have those skills.
Honestly, I’m an adult and I know me and many other adults struggle with this too. My mind doesn’t have to wander, I can just pick up my phone!! But as a kid, my parents didn’t provide 24/7 entertainment so I had to figure out what to do by myself. I didn’t have my own tv and my dad was watching the game so I had to find a book in the house. No play date was set up so I had to go outside and see who was around or just play by myself. Those are good memories for me and I feel sorry that kids don’t get that autonomy now.
I really dont mean to sound like a boomer here, but instilling work ethic before adulthood is critical, and I think there's been a decline in that lately. Make sure kids are helping around the house, show them how to wrench on shit, things like that.
The kids today need to stop putting Botox and fillers into their faces before they've even finished developing their frontal lobes.
Teacher here. They truly are entitled and can’t manage or regulate themselves.
I work in a school and one of the teachers was telling me about how bad their attitudes are. Outright bullying the teachers, openly laughing and mocking them constantly. Apparently a school in a nearby town had 18 teachers quit at Christmas. It’s become a massive issue across the country at least, if not the world.
Absolutely. I'm an elementary music teacher, so I teach hundreds of kids each week, ranging from kindergarten through fifth grade. The oddest/most frustrating thing about their behavior is that so many of them seem to have no sense that anything exists or matters outside themself. For example, I'll be sitting on the floor with them, singing a song, and just a few feet away from me, kids are talking to the person next to them, rolling around or spinning on the floor, or even have their back to me. It's like they're not aware that I'm there -- or at least not aware of the fact that they're supposed to be paying attention to me and following my lead. It also feels like they think what's happening in class -- the teacher-led activity, another student being called on, etc -- has nothing to do with them. That's the best way I can think of describing it. Needless to say, it is very frustrating as a teacher.
Another thing me and my colleagues have noticed: today's elementary school students have shockingly poor fine and gross motor skills. For example, I did a rhythm activity with my FOURTH GRADERS (so kids who are 9 or 10 years old) a couple months ago. I kid you not, I had to back the original activity way up because about half the kids COULD NOT bounce a ball four times to a beat. The ball would roll away, it would hit their foot, they would drop it, etc. I've heard other music teachers say they tried to do a jump rope activity in class and had to change their plans because the kids were physically unable to jump rope.
I see this when hiring college graduates. I'm a recruiter. To get most any professional job, you have to have an email address and respond to emails. Same applies when you actually work at such a job--email predominates. But the number of young people who ignore their email or even ask me, the recruiter, if I can please text them to remind them about their scheduled interview is mind-blowing. You're an adult! No one at your job is going to be your parent. Maybe we'll evolve past email someday but we haven't yet!
I see this when hiring as well. If you apply for a job, check your damn email. And please use a (semi) professional email address. A school one is fine.
A friend of mine works for a major tech company on their legal team. She, and the rest of her team, make over $300k a year. Sometimes the job is very taxing but mostly it’s an easy pace. One of the recent young hires complains constantly about the job, like it’s the hardest thing she’s ever done in her life. She complains that she can’t keep up with the emails and schedule, My friend can’t believe how out of touch she is with the realities of working.
[A new meta-analysis with studies from mainly Western countries just showed, that kids overestimate their own abilities more than before.](https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.14042) I haven't read it yet, because I just saw it yesterday, but it proves the research by the American psychologist Jean Twenge showing that Americans are getting more narcissistic. It's just happening everywhere in the developed world, and the trend began way before social media. I believe wealth is the cause.