How is Gen Z coping with out-of-control American grownups?

The Centers for Disease Control’s just-finalized 2022 death totals are appalling. Drugs claim a record toll. Suicide remains devastating.

Source: Centers for Disease Control 2024.

Grownups point accusing fingers at social media for allegedly “rewiring childhood” and smugly demean teenagers (especially girls) as seduced victims of their own intrusions into mature-adult realms.

That middle-aged delusion, never justified to begin with, is gone. Devastating statistical trends show rapidly deteriorating behaviors among Boomer, Gen X, and older Millennials in the internet age.

Deaths are only the iceberg-tip of the grownup crises teenagers (unlike professionals, officials and academics) must endure in families and communities. Unfortunately, privileged elders control most media and all political and professional forums.

Mature, responsible adults would humbly recognize that our power is best exercised with humility and self-restraint. Instead, we’re grossly exploiting it to hide our exploding troubles while blaming young people. Now, harsh statistics are dismantling our hubris.

Real grownups would laugh and shake our heads when Surgeon General Murtha (whose male 45-49 age group suffered 8,543 suicides and overdose deaths in 2022) emotes on how we must rescue younger teenage girls (238 such deaths) from social media. Murtha is paid $400,000 a year to boldly confront Americans’ worst health crises, not indulge popular culture-warring.

How, then, is Gen Z coping with adult crises? We don’t know. We rarely ask them questions that might pain us aging snowflakes.

Psychologist Jean Twenge raises some interesting ways Gen Z is “different” from previous generations: plummeting real-world risks (led by massive reductions in young-age crime, violence, incarceration, unplanned pregnancy, and school dropout) and less dogmatic attitudes regarding sexuality, race, and politics.

In particular, Twenge cites a surprising finding from Monitoring the Future: 12^th graders today actually get along better with their parents than past generations. We would expect teen-parent relationships to deteriorate as parents suffered epidemic addiction.

Yet, continuing a long-term trend, MTF reports that 1988’s peak of 48% of high school seniors frequently fighting with parents fell to 36% in 2010 and 29% in 2021. Further, teens’ satisfaction with their relationship with parents rose slightly, from around 5.20 (on a positive scale of 7.00) in 2010 to 5.45 in 2021.

One could dismiss this seeming contradiction as resulting from MTF’s focus on an older cohort (12^th graders) who rarely spend time with parents (fewer than 4 in 10 eat as many as 3 dinners a week at home). Instead of nit-picking surveys, let’s embrace the contradiction.

Gen Z teens are likely to have very different views of “adults” than past generations. Those most at risk spent their childhoods and, especially, adolescences adapting to grownups’ widespread, soaring addictions (800,000 suicide and overdose deaths plus 12 million 30-59-year-old hospital ER cases of self-harm and overdose poisonings from 2010 to 2021, the same period teens became more depressed) and increasingly loony politics.

As a result, many Gen Z teens may simply assume that, yes, it’s depressing, but risky and crazy is not something to get angry at or fight with; it’s just how adults behave. Middle-agers’ self-flattering self-reports on surveys that they enjoy robust mental health are a bad joke, just like elders’ claims to support more money for schools, sacrifices to deter climate change, and “free speech.”

Put to real-life tests, aging Americans’ noble sentiments crumble. Yet, authorities typically cite grownups’ sunny self-reports while ignoring real-life crises.

The unspoken reason? Older Americans, including leaders and professional psychology and treatment establishments that should know better, still deeply stigmatize addiction and poor mental health as moral weaknesses and personal failings. That’s why these establishments rush to blame such troubles on powerless teens (just as they blamed them on minority and immigrant populations) while protecting politically respectable older ages from stigma.

I suggest that Gen Z’s liberalizing attitude revolution may include greater acceptance of parents’ troubles and less inclination for family conflict, paralleling their broader ability to escape to lives outside their families from the early 1990s forward. That new reality parallels CDC-survey findings that teens who are online, while more likely to report depression, are less at risk of actually attempting suicide, self-harm, and other major risks.

I suggest these conclusions because they best fit the known facts and the mathematical associations in the CDC and Pew surveys and real-world trends. We need definitive, on-point surveys that explore relevant, uncomfortable issues directly to determine what teens’ answers mean rather than continued speculations molded to fit ideological biases.