When you hear someone say kids these days, you probably picture a person in their sixties complaining that nobody writes in cursive anymore, or reads a map, or knows how to make change without looking at the register.
And that person exists. But the complaint didn’t start with them.
It goes back centuries. Ministers said it from pulpits. Philosophers carved versions of it into stone. Every generation, as far as anyone can tell, has looked at the one coming up behind it and decided something important was being lost.
What’s interesting is why it keeps showing up, in every era, with the same certainty and tone of voice.
The complaint is old, and it works the same way every time
John Protzko, a cognitive scientist at UC Santa Barbara, wanted to know what was behind it.
He and his colleague Jonathan Schooler ran five studies across more than 3,400 American adults and found a pattern so consistent it earned its own name: the “kids these days” effect.
The finding was specific. Adults didn’t just think younger people were worse in a vague, general way. They thought younger people were worse at whatever they themselves happened to be good at.
People who scored high on respect for authority were the ones who thought kids had no respect. People who tested as strong readers were the ones who thought kids didn’t read anymore.
People who scored high on intelligence measures were the most likely to believe kids were getting dumber.
That last one is worth pausing on, because IQ scores have been rising steadily for decades. The kids aren’t getting dumber. But intelligent adults are especially convinced they are, because they’re using themselves as the yardstick.
The second part of Protzko’s finding explained why.
People don’t just judge kids against their own strengths. They judge kids against a memory of their own childhood that’s been revised without their noticing.
If you’re a strong reader now, you tend to remember yourself as a strong reader at ten, and you tend to remember the other kids being strong readers too.
That memory feels solid, but it’s been shaped by who you are today, not by what was happening in the 80s.
Protzko called it a memory tic. You take what you currently are and project it backward, and then the present looks like a decline from something that was never quite as good as you remember.
The things we had to learn became our definition of a capable person
If you spent years learning to read a paper map, someone getting around perfectly well with their phone looks less capable to you.
They’re not lost. They got there fine. But they got there without the skill you had to build, and something about that registers as a gap rather than a difference.
The same thing happens with balancing a checkbook, memorizing phone numbers, writing in cursive, reading an analog clock, doing long division by hand. Each of these was, for a stretch of time, something a functioning person was expected to know.
If you learned it, it became part of your internal definition of competence. And when someone younger skips it entirely and still gets by, you don’t update the definition.
You wonder what’s wrong with them. It didn’t just teach you something useful. It became part of how you recognize a capable person when you see one.
The deeper issue is that we tend to confuse the skills our world requires with what every capable person should have. Those aren’t the same list, and they never were.
The world decides which abilities matter, and it changes that list without asking anyone’s permission.
A twenty-two-year-old who can’t fold a paper map can troubleshoot a software problem in minutes, manage six communication platforms without losing a thread, and handle a job market that changes shape every two years.
Those are skills too. They just aren’t the ones the older generation spent years acquiring, so they don’t register as competence. They register as something else entirely.
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We’ve always handed the hard parts to whatever tool was available
Evan Risko, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Waterloo, and Sam Gilbert at University College London reviewed the research on what they call cognitive offloading: the habit of using a physical tool to reduce the mental effort a task requires.
The examples go back long before smartphones.
Writing something down instead of memorizing it. Using a calculator instead of doing the math. Setting an alarm instead of waking up on your own. Tilting your head to read rotated text instead of rotating it mentally.
All of it is offloading, and humans have been doing it for as long as tools have existed.
The pattern is consistent: people offload when they believe the tool will do the job better than their own memory or reasoning, and they’re usually right.
GPS is faster than a paper map for most people. A phone reminder is more reliable than trying to hold an appointment in your head.
The tool wins, so the internal ability weakens, and then someone older notices the weakness and calls it decline.
Risko and Gilbert’s point is that the cost is real. What gets offloaded does get weaker internally. But the pattern isn’t new, and it isn’t a crisis. It’s what humans have always done when a better tool showed up.
The question worth asking isn’t just what did this generation stop learning? It’s what did their world make unnecessary, and what did they have to learn instead?
Sometimes the older generation is right
That’s not to say that the complaint is always wrong. A skill can become less necessary and still be valuable, and outsourcing too much can leave people exposed when the tool breaks or gets something wrong.
Deep reading may be fading. So may the ability to sit with a long argument without skimming. Mental math is weaker in a generation that has always had a calculator in their pocket.
Navigation without a device is rarer. Face-to-face conversation skills have taken a measurable hit in the years since texting became the default.
Noticing those things isn’t a bias. It’s observation. The bias is the next step: jumping from this ability is weaker to this generation is worse. Those are different claims, and only one of them holds up under scrutiny.
A person can be missing a skill you value and still be competent, resourceful, and capable of things you never had to learn.
The distinction matters because it’s the difference between a useful observation and a conclusion, and most of the time what people deliver is the conclusion.
The test you’re grading them on might be the one the world stopped giving
Come back to whatever skill makes you say How do they not know how to do that? Cursive. Map reading. A firm handshake. Whatever it is, it probably mattered in the world you grew up in, and it probably mattered a lot.
Maybe they should know it. Some of these things are worth preserving for reasons that go beyond efficiency, and losing them is a real loss even if the world no longer requires them.
But before you decide the next generation is falling behind, it’s worth asking whether you’re measuring competence with a test the world stopped giving. Every generation eventually watches the one after it stop needing something it once had to master.
And almost every generation, for at least a little while, mistakes that change for decline before realizing the world simply moved on.
