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this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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Well, neither is true, though. Newer generations don't just magically have less patience. Nor children today are more prone to tantrums and screaming than children in the past 30 million years. That's just good old, "back in my days", backwards thinking that has, ironically, also always existed amongst the older generations.
It's a song and dance, driven by evolution, it has happened before and it will continue to happen. As this thread and hundreds of threads, and newspaper articles, and postcards, and letters, and books, and clay tablets and campfire rants have proven, ever since humans developed speech.
Kids these days.
The internet has drastically and measurably changed the behavior and attention span of children.
Socrates said the same thing about books.
And that is equally true.
We said the same thing. Of the TV. And the radio before that. And of the comics before that. And of the theater before that. And of the circus before that. Etc.
We ought to be careful of many pseudoscientific claims. Specially in psychology. We don't have a control group of children before the advent of the internet to compare today's children with. The "i 'member!" crowd are now all adults, a group who are notoriously biased and bad at being objective regarding their own childhood.
We can compare today's children with and without certain habits, and indeed it has been found that mobile internet access, and social media specially, are detrimental to children in some personality development aspects and cognitive skills. But this is not a pass to make broad generalizations of entire generations of all children and parents across the globe. That's just generational bigotry.
Like, different habits lead to different behaviors? Sure, no shit. But that doesn't change the fundamental make up of human beings.
I'm a little confused why you don't think there have been journaled studies on the differences between children with access to technology and those without. Some examples are impoverished communities and countries and people in strict religious sects. TV, radio, books, they have all had an impact on they way brains develop and process information. Biologically no, if you pluck a newborn and place them in North Sentinel Island, they will adapt perfectly. But that's the thing, the human mind is meant to adapt to its surroundings. The surrounding of the majority of children today is being absolutely bombarded with distractions, and it has a measurable affect on behavior across the board.
Oh, let me clarify. There are studies. What I mean is that you cannot compare today's children to children from, say, 200 years ago, not even 50 years ago. It's not possible as people back then unfortunately couldn't see the future and foresee that their future scientific counterparts would need certain observational data on children's behaviors. So we have cross sectional and cohort studies on the impact of smart phones and the internet. But this won't say anything about generational differences amongst children, or the generational comparative differences to previous cohorts of children. Thus, it is impossible to say "parents today are less patient" or "kids today scream more". Those are stupid and annoying common place generalizations from people who don't know jack about developmental psychology or parenting.
Listen, I have two degrees. The first is a B.S. in Psychology with a Neuroscience emphasis, and the other is a B.A. in Cognitive Science. And anecdotally, I also have two children. I only state that so we can skip past all the talk of "bigotry", and "stupid and annoying" generalizations. It doesn't matter that we can't compare to children 50 years ago, if we acknowledge that "x" has an impact on children and that "y%" of children are exposed to "x", isn't the outcome the same?
For fucks sake, it takes a psychologist to be a pedant idiot on the internet against another psych. I also have a Bachelors in psychology and a Master in sociology. And as my doctorate tutor likes to say during debates when people throw credentials around as if they mean something to basic facts and science, "do you have an argument or are you just interested in comparing dick sizes?"
I was just responding to your statement about "people who dont know jack about psychology", so that we could have a more informed discussion. 🙂
Excuse my exasperation. The comment I replied to was exactly saying those arguments and I was addressing those arguments alone. I never said modern technologies don't have an impact and your interjection with the topic implied you agreed that tech caused a fundamental generational change that validated the idea of "kids these days". If you gave a smartphone with social media to a sentinelese child, they would probably develop behavioural issues as well. But that doesn't mean this change would be universal to their entire cohort of children or that he was magically a new kind of child fundamentally different from the previous generation. To claim that "kids these days scream more" is precisely the kind of ignorant generalization I'm referring to, and it is born out of generational bigotry. It's not a new phenomenon, it's well historically documented. It's the source of the generational rift that has plagued every generation from boomers to millennials, to gen z, etc. Kids today are under new and unique circumstances, just like every kid from every generation has always been.