Kids These Days, Revisited

By Karen Sternheimer

Nearly 20 years ago, in 2006, my book Kids These Days: Facts and Fictions about Today’s Youth was published. The book focused on common concerns and complaints about kids in the late 1990s and early 2000s, mostly focusing on fears that young people were becoming overweight, rude self-centered bullies who weren’t interested in school. At the time, there were also concerns about kids being at increasing risk for being victims of violence, particularly by other kids. My conclusion then--and now--fear sells, especially fears about kids.

As the subtitle indicates, many of these concerns were based on fictions, and each chapter contained data to illustrate that despite dramatic headlines, the young people of the early 2000s were not uniquely problematic compared to previous generations.   In fact they were at less risk for many of the things that we were told to fear for them, or at least no more at risk than adults are as well.

A lot has changed in the last two decades, but some of the fears are back. Fears about—and for—young people never really go away; as long as people have children they will worry about them, and as long as social changes take place, people will project these fears onto young people.

A big change in the past twenty years is how people learn about the world around them, as our news sources have become hyper-segmented. Rather than relying on a handful of common news narratives, like those that I explored in the book, we are more likely to get our “news” from social media sources that runs on an algorithm that privileges dramatic stories. We might consume a regular diet of “fictions”—videos and incidents that may be real, but not representative of larger trends—than we were twenty years ago.

We have also seen a dramatic decline in traditional journalism in the past two decades, meaning that there are fewer sources of professional journalism and hyper-local sources such as Nextdoor are often our local source of news. In my neighborhood, a local blogger covers many stories that journalists do not, from the causes of neighborhood power outages, updates on nearby wildfires, and her take on local social problems, especially that of local youth.

Her blog regularly features pictures of local teens getting into fights, complaints about them staying out late in a local park, vandalism, having sex in public—and encouraging readers to take pictures of offenders to publicly shame them. (I’ve chosen not to link to this blog to prevent promoting it.)

To understand “kids these days,” it is best to look at data rather than rely on anecdotal observations like these. As you can see from long-term data on juvenile arrests for ages 10-17, arrests have plummeted since 1996, perhaps most dramatically between 2006 and 2020. The likelihood of a young person being arrested during this time period fell nearly 80 percent.

According to data gathered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 19 percent of 12-18-year-olds reported being bullied during the 2021-2022 school year; this is the lowest percentage since the data were first collected on school year bullying in 2005 (when 28.5 percent reported being bullied; for context, the recent high was 31.7 percent in 2007). As the graph below details, the likelihood of student victimization at home or at school declined in the last ten-year period.

 Source: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_230.45.asp

Fears about young people today also focus on social media, which teens often use regularly, especially TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. A Pew Research Center study found that adults are heavy users of social media too, but are more likely to use Facebook than teens.

And yet fears about social media focus on young people. As criminologist James P. Walsh notes:

Youth are … positioned as undisciplined and pathological, with social media branded a leading culprit…. Crusaders, who often utilize the very technologies they condemn to whip up outrage, techno-panics provide an alibi for manning the “moral barricades” and reasserting the hegemony of their values.

Concerns about bullying, being distracted, and mental health challenges are real, but they are not limited to young people. Fears about being exposed to content that may seem “age inappropriate” are not new; as I wrote about in Pop Culture Panics, these fears arise with every new form of communication, from movies, to television, and yes, even books.

We have witnessed significant social changes in the last few decades; smartphone usage in the U.S. grew from 35 percent in 2011 to 90 percent in 2023. Combined with a global pandemic and political instability, much has changed for all of us. Likewise, the experiences of childhood and adolescence are quite different for young people today than they were even ten years ago, let alone when most adults were kids.

Fears for kids represent fears for the future. How else have the fears of “kids these days” manifested in recent years?