Today's Youth

I think a lot of it is that this generation and the next generation are just luckier, in some ways. Especially when it comes to technology. I mean, my little cousins got a laptop each when they were five. So yeah, there's big differences between the generations but I wouldn't say we were doomed.

^
Well, of course. If the technology didn't exist way back when there's no way previous generations would have access to it. I think the teenagers and not just the young young people of today are spoiled by technology. I got my first cell phone when I was 19 and I see teens of today taking cell phones way too much for granted, like they have some human right to owning a cell phone.

^
Yeah, definitely. I mean, my boyfriend's little brother got a phone when he was like, nine, he's got every handheld console except the 3DS, he has an ipod touch and thinks he should get his own laptop. He's not even a teenager yet, but for him and his friends that's the norm. I didn't get my own laptop till last year, and that was only because I was moving around.

What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?
Attributed to Hesiod (~750-650 BC)

Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.
Attributed to Socrates (~470-400 BC)

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.
Attributed to Plato (~420-350BC)

The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.
Attributed to Peter the Hermit (1274 AD)

pravda.:

What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?
Attributed to Hesiod (~750-650 BC)

Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.
Attributed to Socrates (~470-400 BC)

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.
Attributed to Plato (~420-350BC)

The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress.
Attributed to Peter the Hermit (1274 AD)

Exactly. Thank you.

I remember once reading a quote about how once people learn the "error of their ways" in a given lifestyle, they turn vehemently, almost dogmatically against it, preaching the dangers of it to anyone who will listen. When I read this, it was applied to things like alcoholism, religion, things like that, but I think to an extent that's what people do regarding the "youth of today."

Because do a lot of kids at young ages start smoking, drinking, partying, doing drugs, having sex, etc.? Yes.

But I know for a fact that my parents did most of the same things. I know because they've told me. I know that my mom slept around when she was about 18, and that my dad started smoking and drinking when he was 12 and was doing drugs when he was 16, and I know that both my parents went to parties, and both my parents did things that would have appalled their parents if they had known. And now that they've grown up and realize how reckless they were being with their own lives and futures, they are in the mindset that they know better and the youths just don't understand and don't listen--when really, that's a lesson, they seem to forget, that they learned the long way themselves.

I think there is SOME truth to the notion that the upcoming generations are doing more "bad" things, only in the sense that society is a little bit more liberal on what is acceptable behavior and what is not. Just for one example, sex at 16 isn't as huge a deal now as it was thirty years ago; whether there are more people having sex at younger ages now than then, I don't know, but it's something people are more open about now. There are activist campaigns against slut-shaming. The downside to that--the part that makes the "problems with the youth today" seem so much more exaggerated according to older generations--is that the media picks up on things like this and glamorizes them, so that it seems like, according to the media, almost every young person is engaging in reckless activity; and when that media image is portrayed everywhere, more and more young people will pick up on it, assume that's what being young is supposed to be, and the easily influenced will follow along, thus making it a bigger problem than it needs to be.

Really, every generation does things the previous wouldn't have liked. Every generation rebels about the same amount, I would wager; just in different ways, so that what was rebellion to my parents would be acceptable to them if I were to do it now, but what I find acceptable (due primarily to cultural changes over the last few decades) may be seen as rebellion by them. (Or, you know, some kids just genuinely want to deliberately rebel--but so did some of our parents.)

Sorry to have practically written a novel here. I hope my point was coherent.

“We tell our children they’re trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another.”
-Grant Morrison from Supergods
This pretty much sums everything I have to say on this matter.

The youth of today act no differently from the youth of any other era, they just have access to much more tech wise and are more spoiled because we have the capabilities to give them things that we didn't before.
If there's anything wrong with the kids then it's on a social or localised or individual level and not just the fault of the youth.
It's just that age when you're told to act like an adult but people still treat you like a child and you're still working out who you are and during that time pretty much everyone I know (including myself) had a phase that they are now embarrassed of.
Kids have been having sex, doing drugs, drinking alcohol and being violent since those things were invented, our species has hardly changed.
I think A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burges expresses the transition from child to adult and the bad things that children do really well without vilifying them.

I think studies have shown that teens are having sex and oral sex at younger ages than they were before. I know when I was twelve, thirteen years ago, not one of my classmates would have been giving head to another. But that's a "norm" now.

@ schrodinger's cat.

@ dru's troubled soul
Not trying to prove you wrong or anything, you're probably right but I guess my views come from what I've seen locally and from what my 15 year old cousin does.
I'm not saying that everywhere has always been the, I was just saying that there have always been kids that have done these things so there always will be. I know that when I was twelve people were afraid of holding hands, but there were those kids that would just be on each other's faces every chance they got. Maybe we're just more aware of these things now, like how people used to deny the notion of child molestation but it happened and still happens.
And now that pretty much all of them have access to the internet they can learn about things much quicker. Even though I knew a lot about sex at the age of six because my mum gave me this factual book about sex for kids and I used to get up in the night and watch eurotrash. I don't really think there's as big of a problem with the youth as a whole as people will have you believe.

@ schrodinger's cat.
I don't really think there is a "problem", persay, except for giving teens inaccurate birth control information and sex education. But I do think the newer generation of teens is having sex earlier. And gauging what a person who is 15 now is doing is just supporting my theory because that's who I'm referring to. I watched porn with my girlfriends in high school, but I was a virgin until I graduated and my other friends were virgins until they were seniors.

@ dru's troubled soul
Yeah I was a virgin until I was 18. And my cousin goes to parties but he doesn't drink, is vehemently against drugs (so I think his parents have lied to him considering what my mum has told me about my family's drug past) and I doubt he's ever going to have sex with anything and his friends are like that too.
When I was 12 there were all sorts of rumours and in my country since I was 13 they've been going on about teen sex and pregnancy rates so I guess I just feel like it's gone down since I don't watch the news anymore.
I agree with the education thing, I had to learn everything about everything important from my mum and thank god that my mum is so open with me about everything she knows, has done and has seen. She'll tell me anything I want to know about anything, which can be a pain sometimes but is mostly freeing. I think people are afraid to tell kids anything, which makes knowing about it cool and rebellious.

How do we know that younger and younger people are actually doing what they say they have? Whilst I have no doubt that younger teens and the like do have sex (and I believe that they always have to some extent), there's also a lot of "OH YEAH, ME AND MY GIRLFRIEND HAVE HAD SEX LOADS OF TIMES" horseshit thrown in.

@ The Master
I'm basing mine off studies, not random fourteen year olds telling me they got laid. I don't talk to teens about their sex life. As a nearly 26 year old woman, that would be pretty awkward.

@ dru's troubled soul

Which studies? most statistics still show the average age for first intercourse in the US is 17. Between young people having sex and young people watching porn the latter seems a lot more worrying to me because porn is full of a lot of terrible messages about what and how sex is, whereas having sex in itself doesn't necessarily affect the way you think about sex or life in general or anything else. I worry about STDs, lack of sex ed as well as young people being pressured into sex by their partners, but I think that if I had been given accurate information and been allowed to feel good enough about my sexuality to want to have sex and be happy about it when I was 14 - 15, having sex that young would have been pretty great? The problem is that we make young people feel bad about themselves / their sexuality, not sex itself.

@ kafka.
My mother was pretty open about sex and I was given a ton of sex information, as well as sex toys and Penthouse letters before I turned eighteen. I still made a conscious decision not to have sex until I left high school because I didn't want to be a teen mother. So I don't know that comprehensive, "joyful" sex ed would make people have sex earlier.

I don't think having knowledge of something necessarily means you want to run out and do it.

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As for studies, it appears you're right. I know I read something somewhere in a magazine once about middle schoolers and oral sex and it beginning as young as 12, but I think that had to be years ago. It guess it just seems like it because I can't read an article that isn't about some fucked up sex thing in middle aged teens and then, of course, there's all the cashing in on the teen pregnancy fad. (Didn't teen pregnancy go up for the first time in a decade last year?)

@ dru's troubled soul

I wouldn't call Penthouse letters joyful sex ed - in fact, I don't think mainstream porn produced for straight men is any kind of sex ed, since it often reinforces terrible gender stereotypes, ignores issues surrounding health / birth control as well as consent / relationship education and is usually just really unrealistic. High degrees of explicitness are by no means inherently empowering and I think sex ed that makes young people feel good about their sexuality would focus not on how alluring / interesting sex is, but on the complete okayness of all sexual feelings, the importance of consent, understanding what intimate partner violence is and where to seek help if you suffer from it or any other kind of sexual violence as well as understanding what types of behaviour reinforce victimization (for example, victim blaming), scientifically accurate, non-alarmist useful information on reproductive health, including pregnancy and STDs, etc etc.

Sex ed that tells young women, don't have sex or you will get pregnant and die isn't comprehensive sex ed. Maybe I'm rather blasé about this because pregnancy risk is pretty low when you have sex with ladies, but although I get that abstinence is the only "100% fool proof" birth control method, it seems absurd to scare young women into abstinence with the threat of teenage pregnancies. The most popular birth control methods have efficiency rates of around 90% - and efficiency goes up the more diligently you use them, even if you end up pregnant, abortion is an option and even if you decide to have a child when you're a teenager, your life won't be over - overall rates of teenage pregnancy are correlated more strongly with socio-economic factors (such as poverty and living in a rural community) and with access to sex ed and birth control (of course the two are interdependent) than with age of first sexual intercourse. The US has astonishingly high rates of teen pregnancies because of its high income inequality, terrible health care system and lack of sex ed, not because people start being sexually active at younger ages.

@ dru's troubled soul

The studies will still be pretty much self report thus I maintain a great deal of skepticism regarding that. And regarding teen pregnancy rates, it's been decreasing year on year since 1998 in the UK. It's now as low as it was in 1969. Generally speaking, neither of these indicate realistic numbers of who is having sex.

@ kafka.
I agree that you don't get any useful information from watching porn, but I, like Dru, watched porn from a young age and didn't loose my virginity until I was 18 (two years after my country's consent age) and have only ever been with two people. I don't think that people, even children, see porn as a guide to sexual relationships (probably a small percentage do), I think the majority are aware that it is staged. From personal experience, I think that kids learn more about treating their partners from their parents than anything else.

People need to stop treating children like idiots, if we don't tell me ourselves they will get the information elsewhere. We need to stop being afraid of teaching our kids. I just really dislike that children get taught that things are black and white and then have to learn for themselves that everything is really just grey.

@ schrodinger's cat.

I know, my point was that I don't think porn makes you feel empowered / good about your sexuality, especially if you're a woman - and I was arguing that if young people felt empowered / good about their sexuality, they'd probably want to have sex.