What’s Gone Terribly Wrong with Gen Z?
The latest generation is troubling, with serious repercussions for the country. But our attentions are always elsewhere.
Alarming rates of anxiety, depression, hopelessness, suicide have come to characterize the young generation of Americans colloquially called Generation Z or Gen Z, defined as those born between 1997 and 2012, now in their teens to early twenties.
The pandemic, which kept youths home from school deprived of in-person contact with their peers, certainly contributed, but only partly. The National Survey on Drug Use and Health had already reported a 69% rise of depression among 16 to 17-year-olds in the pre-Covid years of 2009 to 2017. And in a 2009 through 2021 study that spanned two Covid years the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that high school students feeling "persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness" jumped to an unheard of 44% from 26%. Such subjective criteria need be addressed with some degree of circumspection, though, given that we are in era when it is fashionable for teens to claim some level of despondency. Nevertheless, there is the hard fact that suicide has become the second leading cause of death for children 10 to 14, says the CDC.
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist of some renown at New York University with many books to his credit. “We have a whole generation that’s doing terribly,” he said in a Wall Street Journal interview. He is especially troubled by what has happened to America's teenage girls. His research has found that "they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility” that started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013.
That was a year after Facebook acquired Instagram and teen girls began using self-facing cameras on their smartphones to post their best selves online only to sink into misery upon finding other girls there who were prettier, slimmer, sexier. "Compare and despair”, Haidt calls it. They're "bombarded with messages…that erode their sense of self-worth", U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote in a 2021 report. Facebook's internal research showed that a third of teen girls said Instagram "made them feel worse." Haidt told a Senate subcommittee in May that in the past decade online life "transformed childhood activity, attention, social relationships, and consciousness."
Oddly, Haidt does not mention in the interview that social media has created a cesspool where teens can team up to victimize and drive to despair and too often suicide a classmate more intensely than the gaggle of mean girls in the schoolyard.
A DIFFERENT CHILDHOOD
Gen Z teens were already experiencing different lives than of previous generations, their contacts with peers having shifted to an indoor life of social media and WhatsApp messaging rather than personal contact. Coddled by so-called helicopter parents who ran interference for them, they weren't toughened by exposure to an outside world — outside meant literally. Kids who used to be permitted to roam free out of doors at ages 7 or 8 — "Come home when it gets dark" — now were not allowed out until 10 to 12. They hadn't learned to deal with adversity, “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” of other children, as Haidt aptly puts it. Readers will be horrified, but your writer had trained his son now decades ago how to navigate the New York City subway system on his own by age 10.
Haidt says the data provides an unmistakable correlation between vastly different child-raising and the immersion in social media with the phenomenon of over 25% of young females experiencing a "major depression" by 2020 compared to fewer than 9% for boys. For the millennial generation that preceded Gen Z, for whom there was no Instagram, and Facebook had barely begun, the numbers were about 13% for girls and 5% for boys.
Boys form social groups to play sports or compete in video games without psychic upset in losing is one hypothesized reason for lower depression incidence, but they have their own set of problems. That's a concern of Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who explores them in his book "Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters and What to Do about It."
Boys mature later than girls and lag well behind them at school, most showing little interest, to the extent that Reeves thinks they should be "red shirted" — start school a year later. They drift and find themselves with a lack of education and competence which leads to drugs and alcohol to a far greater degree than among girls. This in turn results in three times the likelihood of what Reeves calls a "death of despair" than with young women. The problem is not limited to the U.S. A study of male suicides by Fiona Shand and colleagues, she a professor at the University of New South Wales, found that the words that men most used to describe themselves just before committing or attempting suicide were… Click to continue reading