Are Kids Really Different Today? Why Might That Be?

Are kids more difficult today than they were, say, pre-pandemic?

There's a lot of talk about this among educators, a lot of concern that something is just like really seriously different about this cohort of students.

And I think part of the answer is in what I always talk about, which is school policy.

I think part of why kids seem to be different is that schools are approaching things in untested ways, like taking away consequences, relying heavily on rewards.

I think a lot of this falls on school policy for the real explanation.

But I think it's also worth thinking about.

Maybe kids are different in some ways.

What are some ways they could be different?

Well, one thing that I think we took for granted for many years after the bubble of diagnosis for ADHD and medication is that a lot of kids probably were not medicated during the pandemic when if they were in school, they might have been.

So I don't know if we're still kind of catching up on that.

But Maybe some of that is a good thing.

Maybe we were over-medicating kids.

I don't know.

Let me know what you think about that.

Another big thing to me is screens.

And the evidence keeps coming in that screen time and especially social media are bad for young people.

And especially adolescents, especially girls, especially social media.

Lots and lots of evidence that that is just very destructive.

And I think all the time that students spent out of school during quote unquote virtual learning, you know, a lot of that time was probably spent on social media.

I think we have big changes to parenting norms and just a coarseness to parents and society like the, you know, and you see this on airplanes.

I'm always interested when this comes up in other industries, like doctor's offices now frequently have signs that like you're not allowed to yell at or assault our staff.

You shouldn't have to say that, but a lot of doctor's offices and hospitals now do say that.

Same on airplanes.

We heard all these stories about passengers having to be duct taped to the seats because they were not behaving themselves as adults in public.

Of course, some of that is going to trickle down to students.

Whatever is causing that to happen with adults, probably those same factors are acting on students and we're modeling in a very different way than we have in the past.

I'll just say more poorly, than perhaps we have in the past.

We've got medication, we've got screen time and social media, we've got parents and adults acting differently, and just kind of the eroding social norms to be kind and to behave yourself.

I don't know, what else comes to mind as an explanation for you?

And do you think kids are really any different now than they were in the past?

Because certainly...

To me, a big part of the discrepancy, a big part of the changes we're seeing, to me, is explained by school policy.

So I think there definitely are some things that we can fix on the policy side, even if kids did not change one bit.

But I think it is also somewhat plausible that kids are different.

Now, are those differences enduring?

Are those differences unfixable?

Are they permanent?

I think we can go back to a healthier place on a lot of those things.

But let me know what you think.