The kids are all right - Surprising studies show young people are doing better than previous generations in many ways

Given that there's seemingly been a huge uptick in posts here and more broadly about how the younger generations are doomed/broken/somehow differently flawed than other generations, I thought this was really refreshing to read.

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Although quality data are sparse, the research that does exist suggests a different narrative—one in which kids are faring better in many ways than those of previous generations. Studies suggest youths are more empathetic and less narcissistic than in the past, as well as more open-minded and inclusive. Drug use is down, youth violence has dropped and teen pregnancies have declined. IQs have gone up, and kids exhibit more self-restraint and patience than they did 50 years ago. “There are a number of trends that are in a positive direction,” says Kristin Moore, a senior scholar at Child Trends, a nonprofit research organization focused on child and family well-being.

In 2011 Sara Konrath, a social psychologist at Indiana University Indianapolis, and her colleagues analyzed changes in empathy—concern for others and the ability to take their perspectives—among nearly 14,000 college students from 1979 to 2009. They found that empathy had sharply declined across the 30-year period. Their paper led to a flurry of articles, including in this magazine, lamenting the loss of empathy among youths.
Then, in 2025, Konrath and her colleagues updated their analysis to look at empathy trends through 2018. They were excited to discover that 2007 was actually the low-water point for empathy—levels dipped to their lowest that year but then shot back up. A decade later empathy in young people was higher than it had been at any other time over the previous 39 years.
This new, more positive discovery didn’t get nearly as much media coverage as the one published in 2011, which Konrath found frustrating. “I have to say that I’ve noticed good news is not as popular as bad news,” she says. Recent science supports her assertion: a 2025 study found that negative and alarming articles about children are more likely to go viral than nuanced and balanced stories.

Kids today are highly interested in helping others, too. In work presented at the 2023 conference of the European Research Network on Philanthropy, Konrath and her colleagues surveyed nearly 700 adolescents and found that 73 percent had volunteered or given to charities. “Fixating on that negative story you see in the headlines isn’t really representing the reality of young people,” Konrath says.

Although there’s no question that racism and homophobia remain persistent problems, a 2019 study analyzed more than four million tests of implicit and explicit attitudes administered to people in the U.S. between 2007 and 2016 and found substantial declines in anti-gay and racial bias, especially among young people. A 2024 study found that homophobic beliefs and attitudes have been dropping among adolescent boys in Canada, and in another study, researchers in Turkey found that Generations Y and Z hold more egalitarian views about gender and are more likely to reject violence against women compared with Gen Xers. “I frequently hear from parents how shocked they are by their children’s complete comfort with the spectrum of sexuality and gender identity, and I think there’s a contrast with how we grew up,” says Emily Edlynn, a clinical psychologist in Illinois who has been practicing for 20 years.

One important skill these shifts may be nurturing is emotional literacy. “Over the past 15 years of clinical work with young people and their families, I have definitely noticed that many kids come in with a richer emotional vocabulary than kids I saw earlier in my career,” says Tracy A. Prout, a clinical psychologist based in New York State. “They’re often better able to name feelings, talk about mental health, and recognize concepts like anxiety, overwhelm or burnout.”

But warmer, more empathetic parenting could help explain why kids are becoming more empathetic themselves. In a 2024 study, researchers at the University of Virginia invited 184 13-year-olds and their parents into a laboratory and observed how empathetic the teens’ mothers were when their kids asked for help. Every year after that, until the children were 19, the researchers also observed how empathetic those teens were with their closest friend. They found that the more empathetic the mothers were with their teens, the more empathy those teens showed for their friends throughout adolescence. The study suggests that empathy can be passed down from parents to children through warm everyday interactions.

One problem is that cognitive biases often make us think kids today are faring worse than kids in the past. In a series of experiments published in 2019, Protzko and Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, found that intelligent adults (those who did well on a vocabulary test) think youths today are less smart than kids used to be, and well-read people (based on an author-recognition test) believe kids today enjoy reading less than kids did in the past. Yet data don’t bear out these ideas. These misperceptions, the researchers found, are driven by people’s tendency to notice the limitations of others in areas in which they excel combined with a memory bias that causes them to project their own abilities onto entire past generations. “No reality can match an artificially elevated view of the past,” Protzko explains.

TL;DR: The kids are actually doing great - better than those before them in a shockingly large number of metrics - and you shouldn't worry as much as you probably have been about backsliding culture and online vitriol. It's a problem, we should work on it, but the overall trend is still good and the kids are still alright.