Why Should The Kids Care?
The planet's on fire, student loans suck, and your job doesn't care about you.
The last year has seen an increase in a couple of things through the circles in which I run and participate.
First, a lot of folks want to put the pandemic behind them and never mention it, as if saying any words associated with it will cast some sort of spell down and reign terror. I get the temptation. The reality is that we are still in the pandemic, despite the label being dropped for capitalism’s sake, and we’re going to be dealing with the fallout from its associated trauma for our lifetime.
Second, educators–this includes teachers and anyone else in a capacity wherein many hours per day are spent with young people–have been verbalizing an uptick in misbehavior from kids. In some cases, it’s actual bad behavior, and in a lot more of those cases, it’s a lack of drive or interest from those kids.
The kids are lazy or unmotivated. The kids don’t do their homework or don’t seem to care about their grades, so they’re not studying or paying attention in class. All of these complaints and observations are valid, so I don’t want to discredit them. I also want to emphasize how much I empathize with educators who are not being given the support to handle what has always been a tough job, now made tougher because of everything going on in the world of education.
I have found it incredibly hard, though, not to feel real deep empathy for the kids. To not feel as though we have let them down and that the way they are responding is a reflection of our failures, not their own.
In recent weeks, I’ve stumbled upon several great TikToks that have offered both the frustrations of educators with today’s young people, as well as several that counter those narratives with some contextualization. One that especially resonated with me came from a teacher who asked his students why they don’t seem to care about the things previous generations have.
“Because all you adults do is complain about student loans and how much your jobs suck. Why would we look forward to that?”
Much as I have repeated to myself and others that the kids have lived through life-altering trauma in the form of a pandemic and that because they are in the most developmentally-crucial years of their lives as it happened, I had no considered the way access to adults and the news, both via social media and the internet, has also played a role in their attitudes. Why would a 17-year-old care about getting into college when they know what awaits them is a load of debt for a possible job somewhat related to their major that won’t help them buy a car or a house? Why should a 21-year-old staring down college graduation be invested in finding a great job when they know they will never make enough money to pay their monthly debt on the student loans alone? Add to that any intersections these kids may sit at–gender, sexuality, race, ability–and the fact we have just recorded our hottest day across the world on record and it’s actually a more interesting question of why there are still young people who do care. Where is that coming from? What’s motivating them? What privileges are they able to pull from?
We put so many expectations on young people, and while we do that, we’re stealing the few rights they from them or watching them be stolen. Book bans, for example, are not just pushing kids away from their libraries. They’re pushing them away from reading, period. It’s not like they have the money to plunk down $16 every time they want a new YA paperback or upwards of $25 for a YA hardcover (I use YA here because 16-year-olds can get part time jobs, if those low-paying jobs are not being taken by older adults and retirees, and YA books are still cheaper than books for adults).
Put yourself back into your own shoes, at 14. You’re sitting in your favorite high school class when you get the news about school shutting down for two weeks. You’re excited for time off. Maybe you’re also little nervous or angry because now you’re going to miss whatever the big sports event or major play or other event is, wherein you’ve been putting so much time and effort.
As two weeks turns into two years and you’re back in the classroom, you’ve now missed most of your high school experience. You’re already developmentally stunted, as your brain, which craves social connection and intimacy during this period, has not had access to it. You got your entertainment from a screen which can provide you no feedback. It just is.
Access to that very screen was not dangerous because of the ability to find porn, contrary to popular right-wing rhetoric. Some kids did that, sure, because kids are humans. The danger was all of the time young people had and little with which to fill it. Some used it to learn about injustice and others used it to fall down right-wing conspiracy theory rabbit holes–where there is, for the record, actual grooming going on. Some used that time to play games or create TikToks. Some used it to learn new hobbies and grow a following of people they may never meet. Whatever the time, it was time of consumption. Passive engagement with a tool and with content that pinged the dopamine button unable to be pressed in other ways.
If two weeks of that become a habit, what does two years of it become?
Yet in the momentum of the dissociation-dopamine loop, young people had access to us, the adults, whether they wanted to have it or not. We’re the news, burning down the planet. We’re the news, claiming bodily autonomy when it comes to a vaccine but not when it comes to reproduction. We’re the news, watching as camp cities are wiped clean and the most impoverished in our own backyards are tossed away like trash. We’re the news, worrying more about some billionaires blowing their money to dive the seas in a metal tube than thousands of migrants desperately trying to get to countries like America which, even with our horrific record on rights for immigrants, is still better than their home land. We’re the news, debating whether a cop killing a Black man during a routine traffic stop is or is not excessive force. We’re the news, pretending the pandemic is over, despite ongoing infection rates, despite ongoing death rates, despite never having closure from over a million deaths–where over 200,000 US children lost a parent or guardian (per March 2022 numbers).
We’re the news, talking about how this generation of kids needs to get over it and move on.
Complex trauma is real, and we have hardly scratched the surface of what COVID has done to us mentally. If anything, we as adults need to be looking at the kids and asking what they know that we are choosing to ignore. At the end of the day, their behavior and attitudes are far truer to the mental health crisis we are living in than the ones we as adults are exhibiting.
Perhaps it is us, the grown ups, who are truly dissociating from reality.
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Further reading:
Teen Girls Are Facing Mental Health Crisis and We’re Doing Nothing About It
Teens in America: How The COVID-19 Pandemic Is Shaping the Next Generation
What We Know About Trauma’s Effect on Our Health and How People Can Recover
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Children in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic – this read is especially potent for this : “This concern extends to the relatively few empirical COVID-19 studies of PTSD in children and exemplifies a problem in many child disaster mental health studies, especially those assessing general population samples that primarily comprise children who do not meet the PTSD exposure criterion”–in other words because PTSD standards are so exacting (and note that PTSD and C-PTSD are different!) there is little research on the long-term impact of childhood disasters like a pandemic.
The Explosion of COVID PTSD Cases Is a Mental Health Crisis (Dec 2021)
How the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Triggering My Complex PTSD (March 2020)