by Alfie Kohn
ARE YOUNG PEOPLE SPOILED?
A subset of adults has always viewed those who are significantly younger than themselves with something between impatience and contempt. Perhaps it’s because “every generation in power has issues ceding that power to the next. Boomers [born between 1946 and 1964] were called hippies and dropouts [by their parents]. GenXers [born between the early 1960s and early 1980s] were labeled slackers. . . . [Yet] these two generations conveniently and hypocritically overlook their own youthful dalliances when judging this new cohort” known as Millennials.51
Of course there’s no law against bellyaching—about how parents raise kids (the subject of the preceding section) or about the kids themselves (to which we’ll turn our attention now). But bellyachers who wish to be taken seriously have their work cut out for them. They must first be clear about whom they’re proposing to describe. School-age children? Teenagers? Young adults? Second, in order to argue that things are worse now than then, they have to specify when “then” was. Are they comparing today’s youth to those of a generation ago? Half a century ago? Third, exactly what characteristics are supposed to describe that cohort of tens of millions of youngsters: Are they spoiled? (And what, exactly, does that mean?) Self-indulgent? Self-centered? Selfish? Lazy? Do they think too highly of themselves? Are they narcissistic?
When you think about it, each of those labels denotes a different quality or set of qualities. Thus, if the goal is not just to hurl insults (like a 2013 Time cover story, which labeled Millennials “overconfident and self-involved,” “stunted,” “lack[ing] . . . empathy,” “famous for . . . entitlement”) but to offer a testable proposition for which data can be collected, it’s necessary to define one’s terms. Obviously some kids you’ve met, like some adults, could be described by any of those unpleasant adjectives. But how many more kids than adults, or how many more kids today as compared to kids at some point in the past, would have to be spoiled or self-centered or whatever? And how spoiled? And how exactly could that be proved?
Supporting data on any of these issues were pretty much nonexistent until a few years ago, when Jean Twenge and her colleagues began to publish papers in scholarly journals52 as well as popular books53 that purported to confirm just about any unfavorable description one might think of attributing to young people: greedy, lazy, selfish, superficial, you name it. The articles contain survey data; the books are polemics that reflect her deeply conservative values about parenting, education, and other issues. Both offer a consistent message that kids today think too well of themselves, scoring higher on measures of self-esteem, self-confidence, and even narcissism than their counterparts did in earlier surveys. She also contends that young people today are more anxious and unhappy, which is a bit challenging to try to reconcile with her assertion that they like themselves more.54
Not surprisingly, Twenge’s claims—and her catchy, snide label “Generation Me”—have received an enormous amount of media attention. (Washington Post: “U.S. Teens Brimming with Self-Esteem”; The Telegraph [UK]: “Baby Boomer Parents Raising a Smug Generation”; Time: “The ME ME ME Generation.”) Here, after all, was a social scientist saying she had proof that unflattering stereotypes of young people, the very stereotypes that had long been stoked by the media, were true. But a close reading of Twenge’s articles leaves one with the impression that she has repeatedly cut corners in order to marshal support for her sour view of youth. Indeed, as soon as other researchers in her field, including experts in data analysis, inspected her publications, red flags began to pop up. And when they systematically reanalyzed her data, her claims essentially evaporated.
Given the attention that Twenge’s assertions have attracted, it may be worth taking a few moments to explain exactly why her research proves unpersuasive. First of all, not only does she generalize (almost always unfavorably) about an enormous and diverse population of young people, but her definition of “young people” sometimes lumps high school students together with thirty-year-olds, as if they shared a single psychological profile. Second, the definition of “then” in her now/then comparisons keeps changing and is chosen with no apparent theoretical justification. Sometimes today’s youth are compared to those who were surveyed in 1952, sometimes in 1975, sometimes in 1988, and so on.
But the problems with her methodology go deeper. Because it’s difficult to find a single survey taken by people of the same age at two different points in time, Twenge combines multiple surveys despite the fact that they may have been constructed differently, and even though they may have been filled out by “convenience samples,” meaning whichever college students happened to volunteer to answer some questions by their professor. There’s reason to doubt whether any one of those samples represents all college students, and there’s even more reason to doubt whether they represent everyone in that age group. (Only about 20 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds attend four-year colleges.) Most dubious of all is the practice of tossing together several such samples from different time periods and assuming, as Twenge often does, that they can be compared with one another, thus permitting the conclusion that, say, self-esteem is higher in college students today than it was two decades ago.55
When Twenge claims that young people today don’t merely think more highly of themselves but are more narcissistic, a whole new set of problems appears. The psychiatric diagnosis of narcissism, which is different from what most of us mean when we casually describe someone as narcissistic, is based on a combination of characteristics. Some of them are clearly pathological (exploitativeness, self-aggrandizement), some of them are merely obnoxious (self-admiration, a sense of entitlement), and some of them are actually associated with healthy functioning (leadership, confidence, self-sufficiency).56 Depending on which features are emphasized, it’s possible to find data to support virtually any generalization about “narcissism”—for example, to show that it’s either positively or negatively related to self-esteem.57 (If the relationship is negative, which isn’t as surprising as you may think, then the assertion that young people today are both more narcissistic and possessed of higher self-esteem is problematic on its face.58)
When Twenge claims to have discovered higher levels of narcissism in today’s youth, she’s talking about overall scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI)—a goulash of a questionnaire that’s looking for both admirable and troubling attributes. It’s not clear, then, that a rise in such scores would be worrisome even if it could be proved.59 What’s more, the increase she reports is actually quite small, representing only a few numerical points on the survey.60 And that raises yet another objection: There’s no agreed-upon number of positive responses that would officially qualify one as a narcissist—or, collectively, would signify that a given generation is narcissistic. What we do know is that, in absolute terms, most people don’t score very high—they didn’t then, and they don’t now—so what we’re really talking about are “degrees of low narcissism.”61 There’s nothing in the data to support Twenge’s (or the media’s) dramatic claims of an “epidemic” of narcissism in today’s youth.
But that’s not all. When a group of researchers from three different universities added a new dataset to see if they could replicate Twenge’s findings, not only did they find minuscule differences on the NPI between college students in earlier versus later samples, but it turned out that the only statistically significant difference that did show up was with women, who usually score lower than men. Combine that fact with what we know about the benign components of the measure and you start to realize that if this line of research really has turned up any meaningful change over the last couple of decades, it may be mostly an increased sense of self-confidence in young women.62
Because Twenge also claims that young people’s self-esteem is on the upswing, those same researchers, in a separate study, looked for changes in the way high school students viewed themselves in 1977 and in 2006. They used a huge national dataset of more than four hundred thousand hig
h school seniors over three decades who were asked the same questions. And again the researchers came up empty-handed, failing to discover any evidence of the rise that Twenge talks about—not just in self-esteem but also in egotism, self-perceived intelligence, or individualism.63 For good measure, they checked to see whether adolescents in the 2000s were more unhappy, lonely, hopeless, or antisocial than those in the 1970s were. The results: No, no, no, and no.
As other experts have chimed in, the credibility of Twenge’s claims threatens to melt away completely. One pair of researchers used the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (eight waves of adolescents and young adults assessed between 1994 and 2008) and the Americans’ Changing Lives database (four waves of adults of different ages between 1986 and 2002). They found that self-esteem levels may be different for adolescents than for young adults, and for young adults than for older adults, but the levels for a given age group don’t seem to be any different from one time period to the next. “The average self-esteem trajectory has not changed across the generations born in the 20th century.”64 (In the case of yet another claim by Twenge and her associates, that college freshmen today think more highly of their academic ability and creativity than freshmen did decades earlier, a scholar has posted the actual survey results over time so one can see at a glance just how misleading Twenge’s conclusions are.65)
Finally, a group of researchers at the University of Illinois undertook yet another reanalysis of Twenge’s narcissism data and found “little or no trend over time. With the inclusion of still more data [from other student surveys], the evidence for Generation Me disappears.” That they, like the other investigators, were unable to replicate Twenge’s results didn’t really surprise them, though. As they explained it:
Every generation of young people is substantially more narcissistic than their elders, not because of cultural changes, but because of age-related developmental trends. . . . When older people are told that younger people are getting increasingly narcissistic, they may be prone to agree because they confuse the claim for generational change with the fact that younger people are simply more narcissistic than they are. The confusion leads to an increased likelihood that older individuals will agree with the Generation Me argument despite its lack of empirical support.
In other words, there’s nothing unusual about today’s cohort of young people. “Every generation is Generation Me. That is, until they grow up.”66
Once Twenge’s claims are revealed to be essentially without foundation, there is nothing left. No one has ever tried to quantify the extent to which children are spoiled, let alone to compare that number to children in earlier generations, which means we have no way to substantiate the hypothesis that any of those adjectives—self-indulgent, self-centered, self-aggrandizing, lazy, selfish, narcissistic, or spoiled—are more descriptive of today’s children (or high school students, or young adults) than of those from x decades ago.
If we’re trying to get a broader fix on young people, however, there are a couple of findings that may be relevant. One study that combined multiple samples of college students over about thirty years (a questionable technique, remember) reported slightly lower levels of self-reported empathy in 2009 as compared to 2000, but there was no change during the two decades before that.67 On the other hand, 88 percent of college freshmen in 2011 reported having done volunteer work in the past year, up from 82 percent a decade earlier—and 69 percent a decade before that.68 “Having a career that benefits society,” meanwhile, was identified as a particularly important life goal by a significantly greater proportion of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds than by those who were at least thirty-five years old.69
Frankly, I have my doubts about the relevance and significance of any of these findings. The generalizations one chooses to apply to the younger generation seem to depend mostly on the worldview and experiences of the person doing the generalizing. As we’ve seen, older people have always insisted that children are unusually spoiled, or that young adults are unusually egocentric or entitled. One can make such a case today, just as one can make the opposite case—that today’s youth are more tolerant than their parents were and admirably committed to making the world a better place. But the overriding reality is that there is almost certainly “more variation among members within a generation than there is between generations.”70
Unfortunately, the naysayers are more numerous and more emphatic, and they have a habit of offering the most negative possible interpretation of qualities that could just as easily be seen as laudable, or at least developmentally appropriate for an emerging adult. Why should focusing on one’s projects and goals be construed as noxious egocentricity? Why should having faith in one’s capabilities, and high expectations about what life has in store, be interpreted as “entitlement” or inflated self-esteem?71 To deride young people this way, as Twenge and many others do, is not only unfair—and unsupported by good data—but doubly unfortunate in that it may create a self-fulfilling prophecy: Fling derogatory labels enough times and the people at whom they’re flung may start to internalize those assumptions and live down to expectations.
DOES PERMISSIVE PARENTING CREATE SPOILED KIDS?
Even if a lot of parents were permissive and a lot of children were self-centered, these phenomena are not necessarily related. Those who criticize what they see as an indulgent style of child-rearing are obliged to show, rather than merely assume, that it explains the characteristics in children they find troubling.
There’s nothing new about trying to link undesired outcomes to insufficiently traditional parenting. Indeed, the entire 1960s counterculture was attributed to parents—well, let’s just say “blamed on” parents, given the assessment of that counterculture by those who did the attributing. Specifically, the fault was said to lie with moms and dads who supposedly let their offspring have their way too often. This connection seems to have been sparked in the spring of 1968 by a New York Times Magazine essay called “Is It All Dr. Spock’s Fault?” written by a young sociologist named Christopher Jencks. “The new ethos . . . on leading college campuses,” he declared, is the result of “upper-middle-class children who . . . are mostly products of permissive homes.”72
The trouble was, the homes that Jencks proceeded to describe—and it’s not clear how common they actually were—didn’t seem permissive so much as simply respectful of children. They were defined by hands-on parenting, but the active involvement consisted of justifying rules on their merits (rather than demanding absolute obedience), listening to kids’ reasons, and involving them in decision making. As Jencks saw it, these parents still relied on discipline to elicit compliance, but it was a version based more on wielding disapproval and guilt than on the crude employment of power.
Furthermore, despite his article’s title (which was likely supplied by an editor), Jencks didn’t entirely condemn what was happening on college campuses or the new generation’s resistance to authoritarian institutions.73 But a parade of conservatives who appropriated his thesis certainly did. For example, Spiro Agnew, soon to be Richard Nixon’s vice president, turned this issue into one of his signature campaign tropes, blasting student radicals as “spoiled brats who have never had a good spanking. . . . [Their] parents learned their Dr. Spock and threw discipline out the window.”74
One inconvenient fact for such critics, which didn’t escape Jencks’s notice, is that some of the products of those allegedly permissive households ended up to the political right of their parents, challenging the established order as rebellious Goldwater conservatives. But an even more decisive rejoinder to the basic argument is that there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support it; indeed, there were several good reasons to question its plausibility. Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out that the young activists “were far from being the stereotyped products of permissiveness. In fact, they were no doubt among the hardest-working, most disciplined members of their generation.”75 Moreover, a social scientist who reviewed some empirical investigations of t
he issue found that they “demonstrated rather clearly that the political activity of young people . . . shows no substantial relationship with ‘permissiveness.’”76
People with a strong distaste for what they viewed as indulgent parenting couldn’t substantiate their contention that it bred political radicalism, so eventually a new charge was dredged up: Such parenting was now said to have produced a generation of narcissists. (Similarly, we’re told, “Today, punishment has a bad reputation” and the result is that we find ourselves with “self-indulgent, out-of-control children.”77) Is there any evidence to support these claims? As we’ve seen, the contention that there is more narcissism or self-indulgence in this generation doesn’t hold water, but it’s still possible that, to whatever extent some young people do turn out that way, it’s because of how they were raised.
Most writing about the childhood roots of narcissism is theoretical or based on clinical case studies. Psychoanalysts tend to argue that a lack of parental love and empathy, a diet of coldness and indifference, is what produces narcissists. Grandiosity is an attempt to compensate for the care one failed to receive as a child. By contrast, theorists who believe that a parent’s approval should have to be earned, and should be used to reinforce desired behaviors, are inclined to think that “noncontingent” or excessive praise would permanently swell the little ones’ heads.