What's Eating Our Kids?

The belief that the young need to toughen up has been around since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden. In every generation we find society's elders bemoaning how the kids have got it easy. There are a number of reasons for this, from evolutionary psychology (the desire to see your offspring overcome obstacles and thrive) to the nostalgia of childhood, but the dominant factor, in terms of how it colours the narrative, is material. The steady improvement in standards of living over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has provided both the anecdotal frame and a ready explanation: the decadence of civilisation. The latter has an obviously reactionary timbre, hence youth is associated with a declining respect for both religious and secular authority and a general disregard for hierarchies of esteem (they even killed off Top of the Pops). But there is also a progressive variant of this that admonishes youth for its easy attraction to fashionable radicalism and utopian solutions (the Pied Piper of Islington North), insisting that the young must be properly educated before they can assume their civic responsibilities (i.e. moulded into ideological conformity).

In recent decades, this relational structure between the generations has started to break down, largely because the material basis has been eroded. The young can no longer expect to be better off than their parents at a similar age so the traditional deal - put up with the sermonising now for independence and bragging rights later - no longer seems acceptable. Interestingly, the response hasn't been open revolt by the young (yet) but anxiety among the older generations that a reckoning is coming. This is exhibited not only in the usual moral panics over antisocial behaviour, from loitering in parks to smoking weed in a built-up area, but in the historically unusual desire to infantilise young adults (there was an earlier vogue for this in late Victorian Britain that reflected the impact of early modernity). I reckon the reason why smashed avocado became a metonym for irresponsible youth is because it looks like baby food (and not just baby food but food that will toughen you up). Tropes such as the snowflake and boomerang kids suggest a regression to the hyper-emotionalism and physical security of childhood, but these are the product of a parental sensibility, not that of the child.

"Boomers don't want you to grow up because they fear payback" is a pretty useful thumbnail sketch for the present moment that in turn helps to explain the assumption of politicians that older voters want more crackdowns directed at the young. It also explains the liberal commentariat's belief that the political "youthquake" that raised its head in 2017 has been successfully sealed in its tomb by Labour's "adults". Obviously there's a class and race dimension to the nonsense over cannabis aromas, but the dominant theme is a creeping fear that the young may finally turn on their elders for robbing them of a future. So, who ya gonna call? Certainly not the Metropolitan Police. It might seem odd that at a time when policing has once more been shown to be a welcoming environment for racists, misogynists and murderous thugs that the rightwing press are concerned that it is becoming too "woke", but this is understandable if you look at the members of the force and think they appear to be getting younger.

Faced with this looming generational friction there is a ready appetite for morality tales that pin the blame not on political economy or selfish voters but on external factors. One particularly popular culprit is social media. After early panics about polarisation and filter bubbles, the focus has now shifted to the mental health of teenagers and the continuing perils of radicalisation (these days more about violent misogyny than Islamism, though you can never say that Michael Gove is not tenacious in his prejudices). If in the early days of social media the archetypal victim was a senior citizen sucked down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory by Facebook, the current icon is a teenage girl driven to self-harm by Instagram or TikTok. Just as that elderly relative had probably been listenting to shock-jocks and watching Fox News for years beforehand, so that teenage girl is probably a lot more savvy than you give her credit for.

There's something slightly weird in the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt obsessing about the mental health of teenage girls, particularly when he doubles down in the face of extensive critique of his method and interpretations. My point is not that he's being creepy, but that you wouldn't expect someone who made his name with a theory of moral foundations that was definitionally cross-generational to think social media should be assessed and judged purely through this one, narrow demographic. But Haidt's latest sally should be seen in the context of his last major work, 2018's The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, which was a much broader attack on what "wokeness" has subsequently become shorthand for, from safe spaces and trigger warnings to a general disregard for the wisdom of the ancients. In the view of Haidt and his co-author Greg Lukianoff, American campuses are producing ill-formed young adults. 

The liberal critique of infantilism might appear at odds with the conservative critique of feral youth, but what they share is a belief that the young have been insufficiently socialised. What neither is willing to acknowledge is that this apparent malfunctioning of a process that is as old as humanity can only be blamed on the older generation, given that it is they who do the socialising. Either parents have failed in their duties (and you will get this in a minor key from conservatives, though heavily class-inflected), or the state, as the agent that we collectively depute to manage that socialisation, has failed in its functions (again, another conservative minor key). But what isn't credible is the claim that the young themselves have an intrinsic deficiency that has either seen them balk at graduation to adulthood or made them particularly vulnerable to malign actors such as social media companies. If anything, the evidence points the other way. The young are frustrated that they can't get well-paid jobs or mortgages and they generally manage their use of new technology better than those who came to it late in life.

The idea that the young have gone bad also colours the current (very stupid) debates over so-called "artifical intelligence" (AI). On the one hand, large language models (LLMs) mean that anyone can now generate a high-quality essay or dissertation, so undermining the whole purpose of education as a selection mechanism. On the other hand, AI is going to automate all of those cognitive and service jobs that the young were being trained for. Even if both were true (they're not), it would simply shift further education to a reliance on in-person tutorials and oral exams, if only to reflect that the jobs of the future would necessarily be based on in-person interactions rather than writing. As ever, the anxiety here has two layers: the worry that the youth of tomorrow are going to be economically disempowered in a tech-driven dystopia, which might prompt a future revolution; and the suspicion that they might have it easy once all the boring jobs have been automated in a tech-driven utopia, which prompts a present resentment. 

What's eating our kids is capitalism. The good news is that capitalism's dynamism and volatility means that the current arrangements will not persist for long. The bad news is that our politics is geared to maintaining those arrangements, notably in respect of the rights of property and the privileging of business as a guide to the state. The tension between the two is obvious, and where that tension is most visible is not among the younger generation but among the older cohorts whose material self-interest is in maintenance but who see the effects on their children and grandchildren only too clearly. The natural response is for older people to try and secure their own children's futures, whether through inheritance or nepotism, though clearly both of these simply exacerbate generational inequality at the level of society. We have, in other words, a classic collective action problem: how do we reset our political economy? But just as the green transition is characterised by excessive talk and insufficient action, so addressing the social failings of capitalism is diverted into the distractions of social media and wokery.