The article practically composes itself. It presents a list of practical skills that a baby boomer was supposedly expected to master by the age of twelve: mending a shirt, balancing a checkbook, reading a paper map, making change without mechanical assistance, and, implicit throughout, the unvoiced joke that today’s youth cannot. It is endearing, often partially accurate, and resonates because it flatters a genuine and recognizable sentiment. This sentiment is precisely where the complications arise, as it has been studied, revealing it to be one of the most persistent illusions in human experience.
### The “kids these days” phenomenon
In 2019, psychologists John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler published a paper in Science Advances with the straightforward title “[Kids these days.](https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/schooler/jonathan/sites/labs.psych.ucsb.edu.schooler.jonathan/files/pubs/protzko_schooler_2019._the_kids_these_days_effect.pdf)” Through five studies involving several thousand American adults, they validated the apparent initial premise that individuals perceive the youth of today as declining, while discovering something sharper. The belief correlated with the beliefs of the individual. The more authoritarian a person was, the more they were convinced that young people had lost their respect for elders. The more intelligent they were, the more confident they felt that youth were becoming increasingly dim-witted. The more well-read they were, the more convinced they became that the young no longer engage with reading.
Two biases were at play. We are inclined to notice flaws in others particularly in areas where we ourselves excel, and we misremember our own earlier years, unconsciously imposing our current competent selves onto the youth we once were. The actual awkward twelve-year-old we once were is subtly replaced by a more flattering version. The authors highlight that this complaint is age-old, with variations of “kids these days” appearing in literature for over two millennia. Such a long-standing grievance is not a measure of anything; rather, it is a trait of the observer.
### Skills evolve by exchange, not by loss
That does not imply that changes do not occur, and it would be foolish to claim that a modern twelve-year-old possesses the same abilities as one from 1965. Clearly, they do not. However, the change is primarily one of substitution rather than a decline. Boomers learned to darn socks, handle cash, drive manual transmission vehicles, and navigate using paper maps because their reality demanded these skills daily. Contemporary youth have acquired a different repertoire of competencies that their world has never required, abandoning those no longer rewarded.
Countering the narrative of gradual decline is an inconvenient truth. Measured cognitive test performance saw a significant rise throughout the twentieth century, averaging about three IQ points per decade, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect, attributed not to superior genes but rather to enhanced schooling, better nutrition, and more mentally stimulating environments. It is challenging to align a century of increasing scores with a simplistic narrative that each generation is less capable than the preceding one. However, honesty requires acknowledgment of the other side. In recent decades, that prolonged increase has plateaued and, in some nations, even reversed, with [recent analyses indicating declines in certain reasoning scores](https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2023/03/americans-iq-scores-are-lower-in-some-areas-higher-in-one) among the youngest adults. The implications of this reverse trend are genuinely disconcerting and heavily debated, deserving serious consideration rather than dismissal. Yet, it pertains to recent and specific findings regarding test scores, not a validation of the age-old belief that youth can no longer accomplish anything.
### The true nature of the list
Bringing the two elements together, the nostalgic list becomes clearer. It accurately reflects a snapshot of the specific skills that one era expected its children to possess. It is affectionate. There is nothing wrong with the desire to impart genuinely useful practical skills, many of which merit preservation for their intrinsic value. What the list does not represent is proof that something has been universally lost.
Every generation is provided with a toolkit, discards the components it no longer finds necessary, acquires parts its parents never possessed, and then, with impressive consistency, mistakes that exchange for a decline, recalling its own capabilities while forgetting its own shortcomings. The boomer capable of making change at twelve could not, at the same age, perform a dozen tasks that a modern child can do instinctively, and would have found the reverse list—detailing what the young can accomplish that their elders cannot—equally smug.
### What the evidence confirms and what it does not
A few honest limitations should be acknowledged. The “kids these days” research is based on American adults and highlights a strong average bias rather than proving that youth never decline in specific skills. The Flynn effect and its recent regression are both factual and both not entirely understood.