The kids are all rightNEWS | 17 March 2026It was December 2025, and Katie Tobin’s kids were fighting again. This time it was because her six-year-old, Tori, wasn’t sharing toys with her little sister, Sunny. Sunny retaliated as three-year-olds often do; she hit Tori in a fit of anger. Then, of course, Tori started crying.
Tobin handled the situation as she always does: by validating her kids’ feelings, helping them see each other’s perspectives and emphasizing limits. She brought Sunny onto her lap and explained that she knew Sunny was frustrated but that it wasn’t okay to hit because hitting hurts. She also tried to help Tori understand why Sunny had hit her.
Ten minutes later Sunny calmly walked up to her big sister. “I’m sorry I hit you,” she said. “It’s okay,” Tori replied. “Just don’t do it again.”
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If you were to ask most people how kids are doing these days, you’d probably get an earful of complaints and concerns. Compared with children from past generations, kids today are often portrayed as being less mentally healthy, less resilient and less empathetic. “America’s Children Are Unwell,” read a New York Times headline last November; online magazine Parents recently ran “How to Know if Your Kid Is a Narcissist—and What to Do about It.” In a 2025 Common Sense Media survey of 1,300 nationally representative parents, 61 percent said they believe kids today lag behind past generations in their morals and values, and more than half said youth today are less resilient and independent.
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.
One big question is why. Many factors are probably at play, but thoughtful, emotions-focused parenting—reflected in the kinds of conversations that regularly occur in the Tobin household—could be an important driver, experts say. Another big question is why negative narratives about “kids these days” are so popular even when they’re wrong. Here research points to evolutionary biology and cognitive biases that distort our memories and our perceptions of others.
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.
Konrath has looked into trends in narcissism, a personality trait that involves an inflated sense of self-esteem, and that work also reflects well on youths today. A 2021 study she published with San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge and others found that narcissism among U.S. college students increased from 1982 to 2009—then started declining and continued to do so through 2016.
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.
In addition to their interest in helping people, youths today also appear to be more accepting of others and their differences. Some research suggests that youths are becoming more open-minded and inclusive across various realms.
Studies suggest youths today are more empathetic and less narcissistic, as well as more open-minded.
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.
Kids’ IQs seem to be increasing, too, and their emotional-regulation skills—their ability to handle and process emotions and practice self-restraint—are improving. In 1970 Stanford University psychologists Walter Mischel and Ebbe B. Ebbesen conducted the first iterations of the famed Marshmallow Test, a classic but controversial assessment of self-restraint and patience. In these tests, children are offered the option of immediately eating one treat placed in front of them or waiting an indeterminate amount of time to get two treats. The self-control and delayed-gratification skills associated with waiting have been linked, if inconsistently, with beneficial outcomes throughout life, including wealth, improved health, and less substance use and criminality.
Scientists have conducted various versions of the Marshmallow Test with children since 1970, and in 2020 John Protzko, a psychologist now at Central Connecticut State University, analyzed the results of 30 such studies. He found that over the past 50 years, delayed-gratification skills in children younger than 10 had improved. Whereas kids of yore could wait about three minutes for a second treat, kids in 2018 could wait more than eight minutes.
Protzko’s findings run counter to popular narratives that kids today have less patience and shorter attention spans than previous generations. We have views of the past that “don’t match reality,” he says. Today’s kids may be able to exhibit greater self-restraint in part because of better emotional-regulation skills. When kids can manage their feelings in healthy ways, they’re less likely to act impulsively or cope by turning to drug use or violence.
Although little research has tracked children’s broad emotional-regulation skills over the years, there are reasons to think they are improving. Bullying incidents among kids have gone down, and rates of serious violent adolescent crimes have dropped. Drug use among teens has also been steadily decreasing. In 1997, 50 percent of U.S. 12th graders had reported ever using marijuana, 82 percent had reported ever drinking alcohol, and 30 percent had reported ever using illicit drugs such as cocaine, heroin, meth, inhalants or hallucinogens. In 2022, however, only 38 percent of high school seniors reported using marijuana, and 62 percent said they had drunk alcohol. A mere 13 percent said they had ever used other illicit drugs.
What’s driving these positive shifts? Researchers suspect changes in educational approaches and parenting styles are involved.
In 2000 the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine (now named the National Academy of Medicine) published a landmark report, From Neurons to Neighborhoods, that synthesized research in social science and neuroscience to explain what was known about children’s development of crucial skills and how these skills related to future outcomes.
Among other things, the authors of the report argued that parents, schools and childcare centers need to prioritize kids’ social and emotional development because these “soft” skills are at least as important for future outcomes as “hard” academic skills such as literacy and numeracy. “No one would refute the fact that experiences a child has in their environment—home, school, and so on—will shape their development in positive ways and also negative,” says Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, an applied psychologist at the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.
Jen Christiansen; Source: “Empathy Trends in American Youth between 1979 and 2018: An Update,” by Sara Konrath et al, in Social Psychological and Personality Science, Vol. 16; December 28, 2023 (data)
After the report was published, some childcare centers and schools began to focus more on kids’ social and emotional development, as well as on how students were treated by adult staff and how students treated each other, Moore says. Many schools have adopted dedicated social and emotional learning curricula to support the development of empathy, emotional regulation, inclusivity, and other related skills. During the 2023–2024 school year, 83 percent of U.S. K–12 principals reported that their schools used a social and emotional learning curriculum. That number marks a steady increase from 76 percent in the 2021–2022 school year and 46 percent in the 2017–2018 school year.
Parenting styles have also shifted in ways that could be fostering positive skills. “There is much greater awareness of the value and importance of parenting, so I think parents are putting much more thought into how they want to parent and how they want to raise their children,” says Christopher Mehus, a prevention scientist who studies parenting at the University of Minnesota.
Tobin, for one, has made a more concerted effort to talk about feelings with her daughters than her parents did with her and her siblings. “We were raised in a very ‘no negative feelings allowed’ household,” Tobin explains. She has also made a conscious choice to teach her kids through conversations rather than punishment, an approach her own parents don’t always agree with. “My parents are always like, ‘Punish, punish, punish,’” she says.
It’s hard to quantify how parenting styles have changed over the years, but Mehus and Megan E. Patrick of the University of Michigan found that spanking became much less common from 1993 to 2017; reported rates of child abuse and neglect have also been on the decline. Research conducted in Sweden suggests that parents today are less controlling and harsh, that they treat their children with more respect and that they tolerate their children’s feelings more than parents did in the past.
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.”
This greater comfort with emotions may be helping to destigmatize mental illness, leading more youths to ask for help. “Because of that normalization and openness, kids and teenagers are more likely to say, ‘Yeah, I’m feeling badly,’ whether it’s sadness, anxiety, loneliness,” Edlynn says. This destigmatization may be fueling some of the rise in mental health diagnoses seen among young people today; in other words, some of the growth in the number of cases may simply be the result of better detection, Edlynn explains.
On the less helpful side, though, this destigmatization may also be causing some kids and parents to think negative feelings are mental health problems. Difficult feelings are often totally appropriate, Edlynn says, and not a sign of a disorder. Prout agrees, noting that even when kids are highly emotionally literate, they still sometimes struggle to cope. “There are still challenges in accessing effective regulation skills,” Prout says. Overprotective parents may worsen the problem, preventing kids from having healthy but challenging experiences in childhood that help them shore up their coping skills. Studies have found that college students raised by overprotective parents are more likely to experience symptoms of depression, drink alcohol and take pain pills recreationally.
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.
Many parents are having more open conversations with their children about various kinds of diversity, which could help explain why kids are becoming more inclusive. Jennifer Pearlstein, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis, talks openly about her disability with her two-year-old daughter—a sharp contrast to her parents, who always avoided mentioning it.
One problem is that cognitive biases often make us think kids today are faring worse than kids in the past.
“Even though everyone knew that I was blind, it wasn’t a common thing that we would discuss,” Pearlstein recalls of her childhood. But around her daughter, Pearlstein is open about her limitations and needs because she wants to help normalize body diversity and differences in ability. “She’s like, ‘Yeah, Mama no see’—that feels really powerful, that it’s something that’s accepted and discussed and that there’s no shame in it. It’s just, ‘This is how bodies are.’”
Other broad societal changes could be shaping some skill shifts, too, Protzko says. Increases in IQ and self-restraint, for instance, may be driven in part by environmental changes that demand more from people. “You put young children with these very malleable brains into a more complicated society, and they sort of grow into it,” he explains. Certain skills may also be improving because children today are less commonly exposed to harmful environmental toxins such as lead.
What about the role of social media? Although perceptions of social media are overwhelmingly negative, researchers have found associations between its use and children’s well-being to be quite nuanced. In a study published online in January that followed more than 100,000 adolescents for three years, researchers concluded that the relation between well-being and social media use is “complex and nonlinear.” Studies have also found that kids who spend more time on social media become more empathetic over time, not less, and that teens who use social media more spend more time with their friends offline, too. “Fixating on that negative story that you see in the headlines isn’t really representing the reality of young people,” Konrath says.
There is, of course, no question that social media can pose risks—but Edlynn and Konrath note that technology may be helping kids connect with others, find support, and learn about world issues in ways that make them more involved in philanthropy and activism. It “can make them more thoughtful, conscious citizens,” Edlynn says.
Given that there’s a decent amount of good news about kids, why is the cultural narrative so negative?
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.
Protzko’s work suggests that our perceptions of social media may also be shaped by our memories and biases. For generations, adults have worried about the societal harms posed by new technologies, including the printing press, radio and television—and the less familiar people are with a new technology, the scarier it seems, he has found. “We have a gut intuition to be scared of societal changes or technologies we didn’t grow up with,” Protzko says.
We are also biologically hardwired to focus on negatives, Konrath adds. Evolutionary ancestors who paid more attention to potential harms might have been more likely to survive than more oblivious ancestors, thereby passing on this propensity. Noticing danger “was essential for our biology and survival, at least in very difficult settings,” Konrath says. But in our modern world, “it’s not as functional for us to be so focused on all the negatives.”
Researchers and governments are sometimes too concerned with the negatives, too, Moore says. “The U.S. has historically measured all the bad things, and it’s been kind of hit-and-miss to have data on these good constructs,” Moore says. Scientists and officials tend to care more about violence, say, than about empathy. And because it’s hard to get people to fill out long surveys, questions that tease out the less critical information often get cut, she explains.
For these reasons, we urgently need more and better research on how traits and skills are shifting among youths and how different types of environments and interventions—school programs, cultural shifts and parenting approaches—shape kids’ development.
For now many parents, including Tobin, are winging it based on a combination of what feels right and what they’ve heard might make a difference. “I don’t know yet whether my children are going to be monsters as adults,” Tobin says. But there’s reason to hope that today’s kids are going to be just fine.Author: Clara Moskowitz. Melinda Wenner Moyer. Source
