Kids These Days Are Doing Better Than You Think
The media is full of panic headlines about Gen Z, but scientific studies offer a hopeful corrective.
Listen to most of the media and you’ll come away scared silly about the youth mental health crisis in America.
The crisis is “life or death” the New York Times claimed back in 2022. The tone hasn’t become any less apocalyptic since. Teen girls are in crisis, many outlets reported in 2023 in response to a particularly depressing CDC report. 20-somethings aren’t doing much better, according to the Atlantic. The Guardian recently summed up the situation this way: “Youth is no longer one of happiest times of life.”
I could go on. But you’ve probably already heard plenty about spiking levels of anxiety, depression, and even suicide among young people. Maybe you’re convinced kids these days are coddled, self-obsessed, fragile, and screen-addled.
Parents are understandably worried. But perhaps they should save their anxiety for the world’s many other problems. Despite all the scare headlines, recent science paints a far more complicated—and rosier—picture of how the kids are doing.
A kinder generation
One Scientific American headline leapt off the page when I can across it recently. After years of being bombarded by terrible news about the state of the nation’s youth, here was a respected science publication announcing, “The kids are alright.”
Asserting that younger generations are actually doing OK both in terms of their mental health and their values is a bold claim these days. But writer Melinda Wenner Moyer offers a host of studies to bolster her case.
Empathy is on the rise. In 2011, psychologist Sara Konrath and her colleagues published a paper showing empathy among college students sharply declined from 1979 to 2009, which led to much media fanfare. Last year, they updated their analysis and found empathy has been rising and is now “higher than it had been at any other time over the previous 39 years.” This new finding was met with relative silence.
Narcissism is down. Everyone is a narcissist on social media, but fewer youth are in real life. Another study by Konrath and Jean Twenge showed a similar pattern, with narcissism increasing up to 2009 and then receding steadily since.
Emotional intelligence is improving. Scientists have been giving kids the famed marshmallow test to measure self-control and emotional regulation for decades now. A 2020 analysis shows they just keep getting better at it.
Bad behavior is on the decline. A variety of studies show that a range of problematic behaviors are all decreasing. “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,” Wenner Moyer reports.
Bigotry is fading. Analysis of millions of implicit bias tests, a common measure of negative attitudes towards other groups, shows “substantial declines in anti-gay and racial bias, especially among young people.”
The youth mental health crisis is starting to turn around
This might be the most detailed and comprehensive rundown of evidence that the kids are doing OK that I’ve read. But it’s not the first. Last year, UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Magazine also rounded up evidence that the mental health problems among young people may be starting to fade
“Things have been looking up in many ways,” science writer Anya Kamenetz reported, but “the incipient positive turn in youth well-being is not receiving the same amount of attention as the negative trendlines before it.”
The underreported (if still early and partial) evidence for improving youth mental health includes:
Data from the Healthy Minds Network shows “a two-year uptick in college students who are flourishing” for the first time since 2012.
Other sources indicate a small decrease in reported loneliness and anxiety among young people.
Numbers from Surgo Health’s Youth Mental Health Tracker show four-in-five reported “being satisfied with life, happy, and feeling that what they do in life is meaningful” in 2024.
A national HopeLab survey released in July 2025 found 55 percent of youth rated their mental health as “good,” “very good,” or “excellent.”
In July 2024, 94 percent of 10- to 18-year-olds told Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation that they felt happiness “a lot” the previous day.
Suicide rates, the ultimate marker of distress, are down a bit, declining 0.66 percent from 2022 to 2023 among people aged 15 to 24.
Why are we so fast to judge young people?
These various studies and polls are far from a slam-dunk case that the younger generations are just fine and we have nothing to worry about. The world remains perilous and unpredictable, and finding your way into adulthood is, and will always be, hard. Parents and policy makers can’t declare “job done” and stop worrying entirely. But the latest evidence suggests we probably shouldn’t be panicking about the state of the nation’s youth either.
So why are we? The fact that bad news draws more attention than good certainly plays a role. When media outlets run scare headlines, they’re responding to this fundamental psychological fact.
But another factor is likely in play too. From time immemorial, older folks have romanticized youth and looked back on their own younger years with rose-colored glasses. This overgenerous estimation of their own younger selves means the younger generation always fails to measure up.
Bad memories fade faster than good ones
Harvard developmental psychologist Alexis Redding and her colleagues demonstrated this by comparing old interviews with college students discussing their lives with the recollections of the same people about five decades later.
Now grown up, “they remembered triumphal narratives of their experiences navigating college and career. They told stories about the certainty they felt in their choice of profession. They described how they navigated obstacles with confidence and recalled the warmth of friendship and community they felt when they struggled. But listening to the tapes, it turns out that, at the time, they felt just as uncertain and lonely as students today,” Redding explained on CNBC.
Psychologist Adam Mastroianni has showed something similar happens with values. Studies he conducted show that we all tend to see morals and standards declining. But when Mastroianni and his colleagues looked at past polls and people’s actual performance on psychological tests of selflessness, they saw no decline over time.
“Say you got turned down for prom,” Mastroianni offered as an example. “That was probably a pretty terrible experience at the time, but looking back, maybe it’s funny. If you had a great prom, that memory is probably still pretty good. Both bad and good fade, but bad fades faster.”
The problem, again, is biased memory. And the result is unfair judgements about younger generations.
“Thoughtful parenting”
The perennial compulsion to complain about kids these days may be a quirk of the human mind, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing different about recent generations. Today’s young people have gone through incredible shocks like the pandemic and the entire remodeling of childhood around screens. Generational struggles are real. Some kids really are in crisis. Concern and research are warranted.
But, as Scientific American’s Wenner Moyer points out, not all changes are negative. Yes, today’s young people have weathered some tough things, but they also have, on average, adults around them that support them in new and better ways.
When it comes to kids’ surprising resilience “many factors are probably at play, Wenner Moyer writes, but “thoughtful, emotions-focused parenting… could be an important driver.”
It is possible to take “gentle parenting” to problematic excess. But a greater focus on kids’ emotional skills and well-being, both at home and at school, seems to be buffering kids against hardship.
Whatever the exact mix of causes behind the panic over youth mental health and the quiet determination of kids to flourish anyway, all this evidence points in the same happy direction. Raising happy, well-adjusted kids is always going to be hard. But parents today can probably stop worrying quite so much.
In general, the kids are doing far better than we often give them credit for.
A version of this post originally appeared on Inc.com. Books and authors mentioned have affiliate links, meaning I receive a small commission if you click and go on to buy them.