Let’s not leap to stigmatize "Generation Covid"
In talking about the teen mental health crisis, let's remember that the kids are good—it's circumstances that need to change.
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The teens have been in the news a lot lately.
I don’t write about teens much, because I don’t have one. I have a toddler, so Teen-land feels like an intriguing but foreign territory to me.
But that’s kind of odd really, because I am full-time faculty at a university where I teach a lot of 18- and 19-year-olds. Just me, and a room full of teens. That’s my job. I think of them as “college students” I guess, and adults. Which they are. But most of them are also teens.
So actually I know a lot of teens. Probably way more than the average person.
Since the youths have had a lot of press the last couple weeks, I have been thinking about them as a category. Here are a few things that I have observed about the ones that I know:
They don’t know who Barbra Streisand is (?!!). At all. Couldn’t pull her out of a lineup.
They do know who Dolly Parton is, and they approve.
They love Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya so so much. They will talk to you about Euphoria all day.
But here’s my main observation about the teens: the teens are great.
They are pretty wonderful, actually.
It’s a bit of a tradition to bag on the younger generation (a toxic tradition, imo—more on that in a minute). But mostly, my university colleagues and I take pride in our Gen Z students. In fact, we prefer them to other people in a lot of ways.
They are open-minded, accepting, sensitive. It is normal for them to understand issues around race, gender, and sexuality in ways that I never did at their age. They are informed, they are tolerant, they are aware of prejudice and bias, and they are comfortable talking about it.
My colleagues and I have often talked about how the future will be okay, because the kids are okay.
My personal classroom observations are also born out in research. According to a 2020 Pew study on Gen Z, they are more racially and ethnically diverse than any previous generation, and they are on track to be the most well-educated generation yet with lower high school drop-out rates, and higher college enrollment. Most see the country’s growing racial and ethnic diversity as a good thing.
They are cool with using gender-neutral pronouns, and they say that society should be more accepting of people who don’t identify as a man or woman, according to Pew. And they might not suffer from quite as much political polarization on these issues, either. Even 3 in 10 Republican Gen Z’ers say we should be more accepting of people who identify as non-binary.
The teens are well-educated, they are tolerant, inclusive—see what I mean? They sound like the exact kind of American kids we would hope for. The kind of people we need more of.
It’s against this backdrop that I would like to put in a good word for the teens (and their parents and teachers, who have clearly been doing a lot right) and a little plea that we don’t start stigmatizing “Generation Covid” just yet.
While Gen Z has been on track to be the most educated generation, and inherit a strong economy, obviously that took a turn for the worse in 2020, and of course they have been impacted by it. Those struggles, and the related teen mental health crisis, have been in the headlines quite a bit lately.
In my neck of the woods, an article came out last week in the Chronicle of Higher Ed that created a lot of ripples among college faculty. It’s titled: “A ‘Stunning’ Level of Student Disconnection: Professors are reporting record numbers of students checked out, stressed out, and unsure of their future.”
This piece quickly made the rounds on social media and sent faculty chat groups alive, including in the dept. where I work, because unfortunately it largely rang true. The Chronicle asked faculty members to share their experiences with student disengagement this year. More than 100 people wrote in, using words like “defeated,” “exhausted,” and “overwhelmed.”
The article refers to recent survey data from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health, showing that among students who sought help, self-reported feelings of social anxiety rose significantly in the fall of 2021. Academic worries remained higher than they were before the pandemic, as did feelings of generalized anxiety, family distress, and trauma.
My partner and I both work in academia, and we have noticed this, too. We have also noted (and ahem, complained about) the missed assignments, the absences, the spacing out in class. We are back in person, but the students sometimes seem to be checked out. Of course, all of this has raised a collective cry from a lot of people as to why this is, and what to do about it.
One history professor in the article gives a quote that I think sums this up the situation pretty succinctly: “My students are struggling to focus within and outside of class,” she wrote. “They feel overwhelmed and pressed for time. They cannot separate the existential dread of Covid and now Ukraine from their daily ability to live.”
Which explains precisely how I, and most of the adults I know, are also feeling right now. Why should the teens feel different?
All the reasons that adults live with an undercurrent of dread—climate change, gun violence, erosion of democracy, senseless war—are things that teens also experience, and they may not remember a time when they didn’t. It makes my 80’s and 90’s childhood and young adulthood feel like it’s from a quaint time.
The nagging worry and anxieties that my friends and I talk about in regard to our kids—
Will my kids ever be able to buy a house?
Will I be able to pay for college without massive debt?
Will college even matter?
Will there be jobs?
Should I be buying property in Montana for when we run out of water? Or should it be Vermont? Or should I abandon the U.S. and move to Portugal?
--these are questions that many teens have for themselves and their own life trajectories. Which is a LOT to put on a generation. And all of this was already contributing to a mental health crisis in young people before Covid.
In the time that I have been writing this, there was a terrible subway shooting in Brooklyn, in New York City where I live. Then, the shooter was arrested blocks away from the campus where I work. I checked in with my students during class to make sure everyone was doing okay—and it so happened that we were also holding class on Zoom that week because I had Covid. And yet we all showed up and tried to act natural amidst this cascade of crises and bad news, which has become normal now. But if I sometimes feel like crying and canceling class on days like this, why should I think that my students don’t feel the same way?
Some recent think pieces on “Generation Covid” that have gotten a lot of attention lately make the very good point that we need to take the youth mental health crisis seriously, which we absolutely do. But I also see the language of “fragility” starting to creep in, and I really hope that we won’t jump to label and stigmatize this group of young people the way that we did with Millennials, as though their struggles are due to personal failings or collective character flaws on their part.
On top of gun violence, climate change, and other novel, hair-raising stressors, they are being confronted with a literal once-in-a century challenge in their coming of age. I hope we won’t start talking about what’s wrong with the young, instead of focusing on what we need to change to make things better for the young.
And while we are at it, let’s not stigmatize parents and caregivers, either. Some of the pieces that prognosticate about this generation’s problems suggest parenting styles that might be responsible, and alternate parenting styles to combat these problems (the fact that these pieces are often written by men—some without children—is not lost on me).
I just read about something called SPACE, or Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions, that “forces parents to be less accommodating” to get their kids more used to discomfort and stress. As though forcing even more discomfort on kids, or getting them to eat their vegetables, is going to make a dent in (gestures widely to collective mayhem). The challenges that we face are not caused by parenting styles. They are due to massive social and political events out of our control.
Parents and caregivers have been doing their absolute back-breaking best in unprecedented conditions, and no amount of “accommodating” or “hovering” or any other parent-shaming buzzwords has led to these problems, and parenting styles won’t get us out of them, either.
My students are doing research papers right now in which they get to study something that matters to them. My sense from what they write about is that they want reproductive healthcare, they want better maternal mortality rates, they want to feel like they are participating in an economy that will benefit them, not just exploit them. They want to feel like they are entering an economy that doesn’t grossly exploit other people, either. They are very wary of social media and its effects on them, and they would like to see it better regulated. They want racial justice and justice system reform. They want to feel like they can have leaders that will get serious about the fact that they are inheriting climate disaster and act on it.
They are informed, and they care deeply about this stuff. They’re not cynical; at least not yet.
The kids are good. Time for circumstances to change.
Instagram: @matriarchyreport Twitter: @laneanderson @allisonlichter
Oh boy do I relate to all of this! My students are fierce, wise, self-reliant in ways that I did. not have to be at their age. We have asked them to absorb more information than any of our brains are built to handle, and in turn, they are pushing us to be more inclusive and equitable, and more oriented toward self-care and well-being. This is a great reminder to look at the big picture systems that they are dealing with, rather than doing the habitual finger wagging that is an easy trap for us older folks to get into!