In the recent debate that has resurfaced around abortion, one of the most common benchmarks for lawmakers is that once the baby is able to survive on his own outside of the womb, he should no longer be aborted. “So,” I think to myself, “around age 19 or so.” I work with teens and young adults, and have a whole herd of them grazing in my pantry every weekend. None of them seem capable of surviving on their own outside of the womb. One of my own daughters, God bless her, age 17, still hasn’t figured out how to use a can opener. In the unlikely event of a zombie apocalypse, she would die of starvation in a few hours because she couldn’t get a tin of soup open.
But while kids these days might be useless, I’ve been convinced for some time that they’re not fragile. Addicted to screens, anxious due to social media, “triggered” by any number of words or ideas, and confused about gender… this is the caricature this generation endures. But it no longer seems to be the norm, or at least that there is significant resistance among the youth themselves to this stereotype. The fragility of youth seemed to peak around 2020, sometime before the start of Covid. I know vanishingly few teenagers or university students who fit the profile assigned to Gen Z by adults who wish to disparage them. The kids who do are typically socially awkward, have a hard time fitting into the social jungle of high school, use “trauma dumping” as a means to bond with peers, and employ gender identity as a means to mediate their changing relationship between self and world.
Let’s take the example of a gender identity, which is different from being either gay or lesbian. This offers the awkward youth a script she can follow when negotiating the strange in betweenness of adolescence. Identifying with a non-binary label allows her to feel secure in herself insofar as she remains shielded from the perplexities and of maturity, sex, and attraction by the role she has adopted. At one point, about five years ago, gender identities were seen as edgy and cool. A solid majority of the girls in my daughter’s 2020 seventh-grade class were some version of rainbow identity.
But these memories of middle school are now a joke for them: “Remember when I was nonbinary and changed my name to Arlow?” They laugh. Now these identities are seen as, by and large, a way for the awkward teen to grab a hold of something that has the lineage of something edgy, but which has since become establishmentarian. A new Pew survey seems to support this: younger teens, those ages 13-14, are less comfortable with using someone’s chosen pronouns than adults are. They/them is the new square. It doesn’t win social credit points anymore.
And so, basic is back. True, there is a microgeneration, the 21-32-year-olds, for whom the values of extreme progressiveness still register as edgy. They have advertised their fragility as a marker of their morality. But this type of readily offended, easily triggered individual is now ridiculed by the younger members of their cohort who remind me more of Gen X than any of the recent generations we’ve seen lately. I can recall the days when bike-riding teenagers with mullets and rattails did wheelies as they weaved through traffic, roaming through neighbourhoods on a summer evening, all without helmets. I saw just such a scene last week on the corner of Barack Obama Boulevard and Park Street in central San Jose. “This gives me hope for the future,” beamed my husband. It should.
There’s more. From what I see, both among my own high school children and their many friends, and from my first-year university students, is that these kids are more ready to accept intellectual danger than the teens who preceded them a few years ago. In fact, they are hungry for it. They ridicule the false virtue behind those who are easily triggered. They want the truth rather than “your truth”. They are ready to grapple with difficult ideas, and to consider things that are complex rather than merely affirming. They take it as a sign of respect if they are spoken to frankly, rather than treated with tiptoeing consideration so as not to offend.
But very few adults in positions of responsibility seem willing to take a risk and fill the void by giving these kids something dangerous and demanding to grapple with. And so we are at an impasse between generations, each wanting and needing something from the other, neither fully courageous enough to step outside of our mutually self-assigned roles, that of protector and that of protected, to foster youth competence rather than youth self-confidence.
Consider the speeches I heard at last week’s high-school graduation. Before the students processed to the stage, my own high school daughters leaned over to me in their seats and warned me about the clichés we were about to hear: “We made it! We never gave up. Follow your dreams. Believe in yourself.” They were exactly right. The student speeches we heard were predictable and underwhelming.
But for all their banality, the students’ speeches seemed to be original. They had awkward sentences. They referenced in-jokes. They were personal and showed personality. The speeches were delivered with all the enthusiasm of youth, even if they were clumsily written. The clumsiness itself is a part of the beauty of youth. They are not afraid to take a misstep.
The principal’s speech was a stark contrast. It was almost certainly written by ChatGPT. While the youth at least attempted to be funny and personable, hers was vague and detached. It was less than merely bureaucratic and more than merely polished. With a quote here from Henry Ford, another there from Muhammad Ali, and a closing assertion that hard work will breed success, it felt like it was written by the predictive morality of a computer code: both artificial and risk averse — much like the contemporary teen is typified as being.
And yet it is often the parents who are risk averse.
Even the most thoughtful among us — the most prudent, prepared, and planned — realise in short order that we could never have been ready for the arrival of a brand-new human being. But rather than accept the new child on its own terms, as separate, unknown, unruly, we have instead taken solace in books, in “best-practices”, in pop psychology and mommy blogs. Many parenting resources contain good ideas, I’m sure, but even the best ideas are only minimally effective in dealing with complex, emotional, sinful, gracious, self-serving, generous children. But it is understandable to want to attempt to mitigate the risks of having a child by feeling that the scope of what we can control is increasing. And what we can’t control, we often affirm. This gives us at least the illusion of influence. As though how they turn out has to do with our skills of validation.
Which brings us back to the incompetence of the average teen. It is true that most of them couldn’t survive on their own until they’re at least 20. But a large reason for that is because adults have protected them — because we are scared. We seem to have simultaneously too little faith in youth and too many expectations. We have little faith because, in part, we are ourselves timid. We have eschewed forms of meaning that demand something of us and replaced it with a religion of niceness. It makes us feel like we’re in a safe, socially normative space. We’re all spiritual but not religious. We believe in the sameness of our own subjectivity. Our lack of courage around thinking deeply about the painful realities of life has, in part, contributed to the intellectual flabbiness of our youth. When we teach that inoffensiveness is the highest ethic, one becomes timid and alone.
Should we be surprised, then, that Gen Z is returning to religion. It is difficult to track the behaviour of the younger cohort of Gen Z, which is emerging in real time and hasn’t yet entered the world of official statistics. But in my own parish church, located in a quiet urban corner of the Canadian prairies, junior- and senior-high attendance has easily quadrupled over the last four years, now comprising about 10% of the total each week.
Of course, one can’t make a generalisation based on one small church, but the overall positive attitude towards religion is palpable. Perhaps this is because they want to experience competence. They want to encounter something demanding. (Even my daughter, the one for whom operating a can opener is a challenge, is slowly and painstakingly making her way through Dietrich Bonhoffer’s The Cost of Discipleship).
My sense is this: the future is going to belong to the youth who want something difficult and demanding now. The sentence-generating machines that have been programmed with the morality of inoffensive relativism are going to look and feel increasingly shallow, and the strong among the young are going to not only reject this artificial world, but search for something that offers something more to them because it asks for something more of them.
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Author: Marilyn Simon
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