All the Studies Showing Kids These Days Are Doing Better Than You Think

The media is full of panic headlines about the Gen Z mental health crisis, but actual science shows kids are actually doing OK. 

EXPERT OPINION BY JESSICA STILLMAN, CONTRIBUTOR, INC.COM @ENTRYLEVELREBEL

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. And 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. 

Entrepreneur parents are understandably worried. But perhaps they should save their anxiety for the world’s many other problems. Despite all the scare headlines you may have read, recent science actually paints a far more complicated — and rosier — picture of how the kids are doing. 

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The kids are alright 

When I can across it recently, the Scientific American headline leapt off the page. 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 had sharply declined from 1979 to 2009 to much media fanfare. Last year they updated their analysis and found empathy has been rising since 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 standard 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 run down 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 much touted mental health problems among young people may be starting to fade 

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