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Hey Pandas, What’s The Most Concerning Thing You Have Witnessed With The Younger Generation?
I am targeting Gen Alpha, LOL. We kinda need to raise awareness, though. But what is the most concerning thing you have seen with them?
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They get corrupted way too young and from what I’ve seen: they refuse to read and study. My gen Alpha brother has the vocabulary of a sailor despite not even knowing what half the words even are
I'm in my late 20s and I give English lessons to people of various ages (English is a 2nd language where I live). One day, I had some free time with one of my students, a 15-years-old guy, so we scrolled through his TikTok (which I don't use) for a moment.
Now I don't have this kind of "boomer mentality" and I'm DEFINITELY not conservative, but I could feel my braincells actively dying. I've heard about the horrors of TikTok content, but reality is somewhat even worse. Absolutely stupid content with no value whatsoever, borderline racist "jokes", obnoxious influencers, you name it. I'm seriously concerned about the mental state of anyone who's subjected to this for several hours a day.
me and my best friend both declared TikTok absolute brain rot and swore an oath to never download it
I’m book lover and passionate reader. I often read, always wish for a book as a present, praise reading and share my impressions from the books i read. I began reading books to my kids since they were babies, and kept reading them until they could read books themselves. We have big bookshelf with many, different books for children.
My kids don’t read. Prefer to spend hours gaming or watching YouTube and TikTok. I beg them to read. Nope. And honestly, most young kids I’ve seen are the same- even if they read, that would be only manga.
Personally, I love manga and comics. They're pretty much the only printed books I read. However, I am not a gen alpha, and I go to a very rigorous school where I am reading long passages non-stop. This kind of demotivates me from wanting to read literature in my limited free time. So for me, reading a story with beautiful art on every page is calming and relaxing for me. Developing minds should still be reading "real" books, however, I cannot help but defend manga/comic readers because I know how enjoyable it can be.
the use of electronics and slang. they act like adults too, like sephora and stanley kids!?!? let kids be kids for gods sake. and limit the screens too! let them play outside!!
I'm a teacher since over 23 years. What I witnessed here in my country (at least in my area) is the steady decline of living healthy. A lot of fast and junk food. Sweet drinks, potato chips every morning and afternoon break. Parents at home cooking less and the kids just heading into the next fast food joint for lunch.
Less or no sports or even light activities in their free time. Average weight went up a lot with a lot more overweight kids already in their teenage years. Bad teeth are another issue. I wouldn't know a single kid in my class now that didn't already have to fix the teeth.
Some bounce back when they're grown-up. But I've seen many again years later with the same lifestyle still going on. That's gonna cost them somewhen.
To be fair, a lot of the teenagers have less extracurriculars because they don't have the time or mental capacity. The healthy eating is a huge issue though, I'm lucky enough to have parents who can cook and have money to buy healthy food, but I know a lot of kids who don't, and the school lunch is literally just pizza. Every day.
I'm Gen Z, and both my generation and Gen Alpha are both way too obsessed with tech. I know I am, and I'm trying to disconnect some, but most of us don't even know how to spend time without a device. Also, my 8th grade English teacher spent every Friday the whole year re-teaching us how to use proper grammar and not texting grammar, so COVID messed up the reading comprehension/writing skills of a lot of us. I'm lucky enough to have escaped that, since I work well alone and have parents who could help me with stuff, but Gen Alpha seems to not. The only Gen Alpha kids who are remotely normal that I know are my cousins, and that's only because my aunt is SUPER strict about screen time and things like that with them.
How little hope they have for the future, and I can't say I blame them; I'm a millennial, and for a long time it really has felt like the narrative has been "nothing good is ever going to happen again". But what makes it worse for Gen Z and Alpha is that they've been getting that message from an even younger age, maybe even right out of the gate. I wish I knew what to do or say to help.
It's unfortunately true, but most of the people I know my age have more of a "well the world is going to hell in a handbasket so screw it why bother doing stuff that makes me sad" mentality.
Lack ofpatience, they are so used to having everything on demand.
this sounds weird, but it's a little bit concerning for me.
that kids, lets say, 7-8 year old girls wear crop tops, really short shorts, etc. i feel like i am even younger than them, i'd never wear those things for reasons, and it just feels wrong that small(er) children wear teenage/grown up looking clothes. some also act like teenagers, they have a lot of things that even i don't have because of age limits (i'm 11), for example a 5-6 year old i know has tiktok, that's 12+, and younger children have snapchat which is 13+. i wouldn't DARE ask to download those apps (my parents have parental controls) because of the age limit. i asked my mum if i could download roblox, bc i said that i played it before (true) and you can pick the game type so you dont hav to play older children things, but no, it was 12+.
DO NOT REVEAL YOUR AGE ONLINE! Op, please, please, please change that.
They have no resilience whatsoever and their parents have no interest in letting them build some.
But it gets even worse. They do believe they're suffering even when they have the best lives ever.
They create so much drama!
Every little thing is a catastrophe. They expect perfection at every turn. Someone not liking what they like is the harshest criticism. I sometimes feel like they live in the original story of the snow queen and they all got a splinter of the devil's mirror in their eyes that magnifies even the tiniest little flaw into a huge mess that just isn't there.
I bet OP went to school barefoot, in 3 feet high snow. With bricks in their backpack. "Hardship" is relative. Your personal baseline tells what feels hard for one. I bet OP wouldn't want a sibling dying, but hey, that was reality for Humans for thousands of year, so clearly OP must have 'no resilience'.
Honestly? The rise of misogyny and the likes of the Tate bros. Gen Z boys are being fed more dehumanizing content and gen Z girls are understanding earlier and earlier that they live a society created for their male peers...
This is the thing I worry about most for my daughter. She's only 6 but it won't be long until I have to start explaining this s**t to her.
This is coming from the newer generation where what I see in school is just annoying, slang all the time and I would think it would be in another language at times, the disrespect and entitlement, the 5 year old mentality when they are much older than that, there is so many things gone wrong and it is starting to effect me too.
Their obsession with photographing themselves. This happens non-stop at my gym and is very disturbing for a couple of different reasons. First, it's a serious invasion of privacy as most of it happens in the locker room, yes, seriously. Second, the constant posing, photo taking and posting disturbs me greatly. Why would someone take so many photos of themselves and what do they do with them? Do they post them all and who do they think is looking at them? I suspect there's a lot of dirty old men who like to look at little girls bums. I wonder if these youngsters think about who is looking at them, surely they don't think that their settings stop people doing it? As well as taking photos they are constantly looking at themselves in the mirrors, fixing their make up, checking their hair to make sure it's just right, even before they go work out! The obsession with their looks, especially their butts is disheartening. I thought we were moving beyond being totally appearance driven. I can only speak for the young women/girls I see as I have no access to the men's locker room. Please chime in men, I'd love to hear if this type of thing happens in there also.
How incredibly spoiled rotten Gen Alpha is. I'm Gen Z, and looking at the Christmas list my cousin (She's 11) made makes me cringe. She asked for a BRAND NEW iPhone, Lululemon clothes, Drunk Elephant skincare products, Stanley cups, and a bunch of other things. When I was 11, I wanted a 2DS and Pokemon cards.
What?!?! I didn't know what I even wanted for Christmas as a kid, but they want 1,000+ dollars in gifts?!?!
The generations that have grown up with fulltime electronics cannot be alone with their own thoughts for 10 minutes.
Honestly, lots of these are just the modern version of "kids these days, get off my lawn!". Are there issues? Sure! Every generation had its issues. Real issues, and issues made up by older people. I am supposed to be a brain-dead illiterate, because I read comics. I seem to remember that Gen X are all deaf because of the walkman. And the 90s kids were all 'too sensitive to ever make it in life'.
I promise you I'm not deaf bc of my walkman, I'm deaf bc I stood right next to the speaker stacks when I saw The Ramones.
Can't do math. a tween gave me a 20 on a five dollar purchase and asked if that was enough.
What about the same people behind the register? I had an Item that was $4.25. I hate carrying around coins and I had a quarter in my pocket. I gave the cashier a five dollar bill and the quarter. She looked at it and at me and said I gave her too much. I told her that I didn't want the coins and she owed me a dollar. She called her manager over and they both had to calculate the change on her phone. They both looked at me in utter surprise and said You're right!" OMG
They take for granted the fact that they are not entitled to so many things that previous generations used to get from their employers as a matter of course, fully paid health insurance, paid vacations, profit sharing, etc. We used to get a certain number of paid sick days each year. We got time off for lunch. We got breaks. And minimum wage was enough to pay rent on a shared apartment. Young people are barely compensated for their work today and then berated and told they are lazy for not doing even more for less! Wrong!
The first one is not exactly new, but the inability to read an analog clock.
The second is, in addition to all writing with devices, that when teaching cursive writing was stopped (in many countries) it is easier to forge a signature. Writing by hand, also researched, would make learning things more effective and keeping them in memory.
Intimidation of young people with anger and fear of the unknown increases the growth of the right wing, at least in Europe, and young immature brains do not know how to think so objectively yet. They do an unfortunately successful job on social media. I'm still thinking about how stupid and gullible I was myself, and it's horrible, because young people are still the same, but it's easier to get carried away in a social bubble that contains distorted values. Nothing scares people more than the fear of the unknown, a close relative of that fear of the dark. A good and useful fuel for hate speech, then.
I'm part of this generation. I still try to hold onto cursive and analog clocks because it makes me feel that I haven't lost a part of time to the rat race.
I have a couple of concerns that I have for pretty much anyone, not just folks who are younger than me.
There's a lot of folks who don't know how to tend to basic needs, like cooking, cleaning, holding down a job, running a budget, and just making sure their life is not on the verge of collapse. I was required to take courses in high school about this stuff, but I'm not sure the schools do much to prep people for the world outside of school anymore. I think that responsibility has fallen to the parents, but what if they don't know either?
The other is civility. The simple rule of treating people as you would like to be treated seems to have fallen by the wayside. Also, I think social media has taught us to interact with our filters off and say the most terrible things. Out here in the wild, you don't get clicks for acting like a jerk - you get shunned. I think the lines have become blurred on that, though.
They have almost no accountability. Every thing is always someone else's fault. I work with students every day, and I am always met with "Well, no one told me that," or they start off the conversation, "You messed up this or that..." when the mistake was obviously theirs. A big thing is transcripts. We cannot accept them if they've been opened. They bring them in opened all the time and will say, "No one ever told me I couldn't open these" even though it is stamped quite clearly on the envelope that they were delivered in.
*shrug* Well, I guess you'll have to buy another set. They should arrive in four to six weeks.
i go to middle school and after see all the kids my age who have had phones since 3 i just think the human race is doomed
How unhealthy and unfit they are. When I first started in physiotherapy, the average age of people we saw for things like diabetes management, weight management and similar conditions would be middle aged or older, now we are seeing many 20-somethings and even younger with these problems and a large number of 30-40-somethings with lifestyle-related heart disease. I will be 45 this year and I am still much fitter and stronger than many people half my age.
Tenth grader here. Some of my classmates in English B last semester couldn’t pronounce some words that I’m pretty sure everyone should know how by our age (I’ll admit tho I was the kid in elementary school who read two grades above so I might honestly be a bit biased here idk). The one I can remember is when we were reading Macbeth and this boy couldn’t pronounce “agitate”. He pronounced it with a hard g.
I myself suck at math, like a ton of other people. I at least have the excuse of having a REALLY shítty math substitute for like five months last year which really set me back. Like I had to get a tutor and even my tutor got confused to some questions I had for homework.
ANYWAY, my main focus is the stuff I see teachers say. Like 7th graders at 4th grade level??? Really???
Don’t get me started about skibidi toilet…
The United States has a sitting representative that pronounced "indicted" as "in-d*ck-ted" in earnest. We have a sitting governor who is openly hostile to public education. We had a president that was arguably semi-literate. And that was just a couple terms prior to one that was openly functionally illiterate. Guess which side of the aisle exclusively shi#$ these morons?
Is been a long time since I've seen anyone younger than Gen Z who can count change back after making a purchase. And, holy Hannah, DO NOT hand these cashiers $11 on a $6 tab, unless you want to be handed back your single bill by a very confused looking kid, then given 4 more singles as change. Does anyone know how to use a library anymore? How about researching something WITHOUT using Google? Is there one Gen Alpha aged human that can tell me what actual time it is & not just the location of the big hand vs the little hand?
But they can tell you everything you didn't want to know about the personal lives of celebrities.
For me, I would say the tendency to see things in such black and white terms that they are completely willing to write someone off as a result (cancelling), without acknowledging that there are a) frequently shades of grey within an argument and b) people have the capacity to learn and change over time. While I would say that teenagers have always thought of themselves as being right, I find this latest development more motivated by the "herd opinion" online. This all-or-nothing approach drives people towards the extremes on both sides and it is very disturbing for me.
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They don’t read newspapers or watch the news. Instead they believe everything they zee on the internet without checking the facts.
(As a gen alpha) Not knowing your times tables without a valid reason. I don't know all of them, but I actively put in an effort and know most of them. Seriously, they will be your saving grace one day.
I've taught middle school in the U.S. for nearly 30 years, and I can tell everyone hands-down that this generation is almost completely illiterate and unbelievably ignorant. These kids do nothing but stare at phones and tablets and only pick up books at school - and their reading comprehension and retention is nearly 0%. They have 7-10 SECOND attention spans because of TikTok, and their idiot parents (if you can call them that) have raised them to be totally entitled and have no work ethic. God help us all in 15-20 years. I used to love my job, but now I can't wait to retire. 😔
Quite a few things but mainly they need to stop "following" influencers" Be individual in how
The older generation and the younger generation have always been adverserial toward each other. The older generation have lived their lives and it is unlikely to change at this point. They envy the younger generation because they are young and have the future to do whatever they wish. The younger generation envys the older generation because the have the power, the authority and built the worls the younger generation must live in.
In my area (midwest U.S.), there's been a disturbing rise in youth violence since the pandemic. A lot of incidents of groups of teens or even tweens breaking out in large brawls in public places. Two years ago, they even had to close down the county fair (a rather sedate and old-fashioned event) because of the kids fighting. I don't know if that's happening in other places, or if it's just something about the population here.
The raise of antisemitism in the younger generation.
I feel like there is far less cultural and race-based anti-semitism than ever. I believe what you are seeing in youngsters being labeled as anti-semitism is seeing the Israel Palestine dynamic, and viewing the Palestinians as an oppressed minority. While they should study history better, I don't think it's the Holocaust inducing antisemitism older generations think of. It's not right, but it's not the outright bigotry it's being projected as. This is politically driven. If you oppose a radically conservative, corrupt, theocratic government that happens to be jewish, are you really automatically anti-semite?
I am concerned over the anxiety I see. I get that the climate is on the brink, and wars seem rampant, and the economy is on a knife's edge.....but those things have been that way my entire life (64 yo). And the anxiety I see now among younger generations is serious, is clinical, is life altering. I am not sure if it is a societal thing (BP certainly shares a large number of memes on the issue!) or a result of parenting, or what, but I am afraid it will be impactful on a large scale.
Speaking as a 52 year old: we had our fears back then, yes, but we also had hope. The reunification of Germany, Glasnost, and we had more social stability and safety. You wouldn't end on the street because of an illness, and your boss couldn't fire you at will. Zero hour contracts were unheard of. And you had behind you the world getting more peaceful and a bit better. Young people today already see a history of things going downwards. No, our generation didn't have it 'as hard', we had it a lot easier on the whole.
The 15-year-old who thinks he "discovered" the Beatles and can't understand why no one's talking about this great band. 🤣
I keep seeing videos of these ridiculous young girls with too high value on themselves publicly (yet you know in private they’re depressed and have no self worth because they’re too busy watching ‘how to’ videos on ‘getting the —right; rich, tall guy—‘), and it’s making me physically nauseous and annoyed that these little twits watch so much rubbish online, they get it in their heads that they DESERVE a man to pay for EVERYTHING from EVEN BEFORE THE FIRST DATE!! He has to look a certain way and be a certain height but more annoying than all of that is the RIDICULOUS— HE HAS TO EARN MORE THAN 6 FIGURES, GARBAGE!
I can’t watch videos like that on YouTube anymore because it makes me want to go and physically hurt them to SNAP OUT OF IT!
These girls bring NOTHING to the tables!
UCK! Where is this revolting sense of entitlement coming from? Surely not the parents because I am the age of these little toads’ parents! I’ve raised my almost 21year old nephew and he is an absolutely amazing kid!!!
What. Is. Happening!! It’s gross and needs to stop!
It's shocking how manners seem to be an old fashioned concept from the past. I was picking up a fairly large Starbucks drink order for me and my friends. As I was exiting the store with both hands full of hot coffees, two young women were entering at the same time. It never occurred to either of them to hold the door open for me. Instead they entered the store and let the door slam behind them and into me. I almost spilled one of the coffees. That incident hasn't kept me from holding doors open for people but I rarely get a thank you for my effort.
Please. For every one of those, I can think of a boomer who crosses the parking without even looking for traffic, is allowed to merge but has no courtesy wave, gets asked how they're doing, says "good" and doesn't reciprocate. Rudeness is ubiquitous and older generations are every bit as guilty. Every bit.
The ease with which they trade their bodies for goodies or favors, not realizing how bad that hurts future relationships But then, working to keep a relationship going, balancing the give and take, setting boundaries and respecting those of others seems to be alien to a lot of them. But then again, they do not see much else around them, on social media and other media, right?
Ok judgy. I am in my mid forties now and in my 20's I made a very good living from "trading my body for goodies of favours." I worked as a nude model and it meant I could pay my living expenses at university without needing loans and I allowed me to save money. Why would you think that what I did was any less valid than working as a shop assistant, waiter or barrista? My past as an adult model has had no bearing at all on my relationships and if someone were to judge me for it, then they are not the type of person I would want as a partner.
