What’s up with Generation Z?
I’ve taught teenagers for more than a decade and managed to raise one myself; the jury’s still out on how successful the latter has been, but it seems to have gone okay. We tend to see the teenager years as defined by, what American psychologist G. Stanley Hall called, storm and stress. But don’t worry; it’s not that bad, as Aristotle pointed out:
‘Youth are heated by nature as drunken men by wine’
Okay, so that might not fill you with confidence. How about Socrates:
‘Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.’
Right, that’s not much better.
The point is that the older generation will always demonise the one that came before, and this was the case even in ancient Greece. My generation were known as the slacker generation! In popular thought and culture teenagers are more often seen as a scourge on society, smoking, taking drugs, getting into trouble with the law and just generally being bad and disruptive. But something interesting is happening with the latest cohort of teenagers, the ones we call Generation Z.
A better behaved generation
According to a 2018 study, alcohol consumption amongst young people is declining, along with other factors including crime rates. Researchers asked 10,000 young people in England between the ages of 16 and 24 about the drinking habits and found that around 29 percent drink no alcohol at all. This figure was actually up from 18 percent in 2015, so it could be that teenagers are shunning activities that were once seen as an essential part of adolescence. I know what you’re thinking: how can we rely on teenagers to be honest when asked how much they drink? In fact, you’d be right, young people are often less than truthful in these situations, but traditionally they are more likely to exaggerate not downplay their level of drinking and drug taking.
Generation Z are classified as the generation after Millennials and generally the offspring of Generation X. What really distinguishes them from other generation is their high levels of risk-aversion Not only are they less likely to consume alcohol, their rates of substance abuse is lower than their parent’s generation. The number of teenage pregnancies is also lower among Gen Z and they are now much less likely to be involved in crime. This pattern is generally repeated across Europe and North America. In terms of crime, between 2018 and 2019, the number of 10 to 17 year-olds cautioned or sentenced for criminal offences in England and Wales fell by a staggering 83 percent and the number of those entering the youth justice system for the first time fell by an equally impressive 85 percent. Young people today, therefore, are much less likely to be engaging in anti-social and criminal behaviour than their parents were at their age.
Generation Z are like no other generation that have come before it, and not just because they appear to be much better behaved. The terms we use to denote generation cohorts can be quite imprecise, but generally speaking, Gen Z represents those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As a rule of thumb, the oldest Gen Z-ers will be around 23 years old in 2020. They will have been born or raised around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the rise of tension and continued conflict in the Middle East, acquired a greater understanding of environmental change, witnessed increased political turmoil and polarisation and will now be living through the the global COVID-19 pandemic. Many will have had months of their education disrupted through lockdown and quarantine while others, my own son in included, will have begun their university studies in the absence of face-to-face contact, utilising online technology like never before. Even before the pandemic, they were perhaps more comfortable in the presence of technology than previous generations, and able to negotiate (with varying degrees of success) the real and virtual world. Some surveys have also found that Gen Z is less materialistic than Millennials and have continued the trend of displaying greater self control (in the form of delayed gratification).
But higher rates of depression
However, Generation Z also display higher rates of mental ill-health than previous cohorts, particularly depression and anxiety. This could be the result of growing up in a world they view as inherently hostile but could also have arisen as the result of high profile campaigns aimed at reducing mental health stigma. Other explanations have been proposed, such as increased levels of loneliness among the general population, a greater emphasis on high stakes testing and the rise of social media. All are legitimate candidates, yet all we know for sure is that rates of anxiety, depression and related conditions are more prevalent amongst Generation Z.
Even though the teenagers of today are unlikely to remember events like 9/11 or the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009 (indeed, many may not have been born until after the 2001 terrorist attacks), they are still aware of them and their attitudes may well have been shaped by such events. Teenagers in the United Kingdom and United States, for example, will not have known a time when their nations were not at war, albeit an untraditional one with the vaguely defined forces of global terrorism. These events may have resulted in anxiety and feelings of insecurity among the Gen Z population, especially in countries where seemingly random attacks took place. The Manchester Arena bombing of 2017 during an Ariana Grande concert, for example, resulted in the deaths of over thirty people and more than 800 injuries. Ten of the dead were aged under 20. Such attacks led to many young people seeing heavily armed police officers on UK streets for the first time, following an attack that appeared to be directed at them.
Growing up during the Great Recession, young people have also been witness to a growing income gap and a shrinking middle-class. Unlike the Millennial generation who were more likely to witness higher levels of prosperity, Generation Z have grown up in a society where the gap between the wealthily and the poor has increased rapidly and employment has become more precarious. They are less likely to view employment as inevitable or long-term and have become more independent as a result of witnessing their parents struggle in the workplace.
There is always a great deal for us to worry about, yet my generation (Generation X) seemed to have a lot less than Generation Z. Even growing up in the 1980s when unemployment rates were high in the UK, I didn’t have to worry about not being able to attend university or buying a house. I purchased my first house at the age of twenty-five, something that very few young people would be able to do today. As house prices rose and post-compulsory education became more expensive, young people had to think more carefully about attending university or starting a family. These concerns were compounded by the financial crises of 2008 and the rapid downward turn into recession.
The fear of student debt is now one of the main concerns of Generation Z and many will have given up the prospect of owning their own homes. Millennials also worried about such things but these stresses are set to have a greater impact on the generation that followed them. Indeed, in 2019 article in The Economist, Generation Z were described as being more educated, well-behaved, stressed, depressed and exam obsessed.
We can learn a great deal about this generation from large scale studies, in particular the 2017 Global Citizen Survey involving 20,000 15 to 21 year-olds in twelve different countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Russia, Nigeria, Italy and Indonesia. The survey found the young people in the UK have the second lowest rates of wellbeing of all the countries surveyed (only Japan was lower). Why this might be the case is disputed, with some blaming the high-stakes exam culture, fears over the future and student debt and the impact of social media. We also need to take into account the historical, social and economic factors already mentioned and it’s likely that a combination of these converge to create a perfect storm. It would be all too easy to place the blame firmly at the door or Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and social media more generally (as psychologist Jean Twenge has done) but the evidence for this remains weak at present.
A most interesting generation
All this presents us with a curious dilemma and a puzzle that isn’t going to be easy to solve. On the one hand, we have an entire generation of young people who appear to be better behaved than any that came before it. They drink less, rarely engage in risky behaviours, are less likely to find themselves on the wrong side of the law and more likely to attend university. On the flip side, they are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety and worry about a myriad of factors they can’t control.
This also creates a conundrum for society: in a culture pre-disposed to demonise the young, how do we cope with a generation of teenagers that are better behaved than our own generation?
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