The myth of "kids these days"

In 1907, the New York Times ran a piece worrying that young people had “no respect for their elders” and that “the old standards” were collapsing.

The thing about that complaint isn’t that it was wrong. It’s that it has been written, in roughly the same words, in roughly every century we have records for.

Hesiod, around 700 BC: “The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age.” Plato, paraphrasing Socrates, complained about youth who “love luxury, have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for older people.” A 1771 letter in a London paper griped that young men were spending all their time at the coffeehouse instead of doing honest work. In 1859, the Scientific American warned that the new game of chess was rotting the minds of young people. In 1936, parents were sure radio would destroy them. In 1985, it was MTV. In 1999, video games. In 2010, Facebook. In 2024, TikTok.

It would be funny if it weren’t so consistent.

What’s actually new

That doesn’t mean nothing has changed. A few things in 2026 are genuinely different in ways that aren’t just the same complaint in a new outfit:

The phone. This is the real one. Your grandkid’s relationship to a glowing rectangle is not a stylistic choice — it’s the shape of the social environment they grew up in. The rectangle is where school happened during a pandemic, where their friends are right now, where dating starts, where job applications go, where bullying lives, where most news arrives. Saying “put it down” without acknowledging that is a little like telling someone in 1955 to stop watching television because the radio was fine.

Cost. A house cost roughly three times the median income in 1970. In 2026, in most American cities, it’s seven to ten times. That isn’t a complaint about young people; it’s a complaint about a market. But it explains a lot of behavior — moving home, delaying kids, gig work — that older readers sometimes mistake for a values shift.

Vocabulary. They have words for things you didn’t. “Boundaries.” “Burnout.” “Anxiety.” Some of this is real precision. Some of it is therapy talk leaking into everyday speech in ways that flatten meaning. Both can be true.

What isn’t new

Almost everything else.

They are not lazier than you were. The data on hours worked is, if anything, the other direction. They are not less ambitious — they’re chasing slightly different things. They are not ruder; they have different rules about response time and brevity and you read them as rude because the rules changed under you. They are not more fragile; every generation’s parents have said this about every generation’s children since Hesiod.

Some of them will turn out to be good people. Some of them won’t. Same as you. Same as your parents.

The reframe

The “kids these days” feeling is not a clear-eyed observation. It’s a feature of getting older. There’s a real cognitive shift that happens around midlife where the world’s pace stops matching your default pace, and the people moving at the new pace start to look careless. They aren’t careless. They’re just not standing still for you to read them.

The honest move, when you feel the complaint coming on, is to ask: is this actually true, or am I in 1907?

Most days, you’re in 1907. It’s okay. Hesiod was, too.

What to do with this

Be specific. If a young person in your life is doing something you find genuinely worrying, the conversation is much easier when you’re talking about that thing than when you’re talking about a generation. “I’m worried about how much you’re on your phone” lands. “Your generation is addicted to those things” doesn’t, and shouldn’t.

The smaller the claim, the more weight it carries.