Every family has the moment. A grandparent sighs about children today and their phones. A teenager rolls their eyes at the hopeless way their parents do things. It feels, from inside it, as though each generation simply has quirks the others have to put up with, and part of growing up in a family is learning to tolerate them. Some of that is true. But a surprising amount of what we take for another generation’s failings turns out to be a documented illusion, and seeing that makes the tolerating a good deal easier.
The clearest example runs from the old toward the young.
The oldest complaint in the world
Grumbling that the youth of today are in decline is not a modern reaction to smartphones. It is at least 2,600 years old. A minister named Thomas Barnes complained in 1624 that “youth were never more sawcie,” that “the ancient are scorned, the honorable are contemned, the magistrate is not dreaded,” and you can find versions of the same lament stretching back to ancient Greece.
The Artful Age
A weekly letter on aging well, family across generations, and the creative life after the kids leave home.
The psychologists John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler decided to test why this complaint is so perennial, and published their results in Science Advances in 2019. Across five studies, they found that the belief that kids these days are worse is largely a trick of memory. Tellingly, people saw the sharpest decline in exactly the traits they themselves valued most: the well-read were sure children no longer read, the respectful were sure children no longer respect their elders, and the intelligent were sure children were getting dumber.
The mechanism they identified is a memory bias sometimes called presentism. You quietly take your current self, your love of reading or your respect for authority, and project it backward onto your memory of your own childhood peers, who then seem to tower over the children of today. It cannot be an accurate read of reality, the researchers noted, because on measurable things like IQ, each generation has actually been scoring higher than the last. The decline we feel so sure we are witnessing is mostly a tic in our own memory.
And it runs the other way too
Before this becomes a lecture aimed only at the old, it is worth saying that the young do exactly the same thing, just with the content reversed. To a teenager, the older generation is not declining but stuck: out of touch, rigid, incapable of understanding. It is the same move, a whole group flattened into a single dismissive type, differing only in which direction the contempt points.
What this does not mean is that generations are secretly identical. They are not. People grow up in genuinely different worlds, with different tools, different pressures, and different manners, and those differences are real. A grandparent who prints out their emails and a teenager who narrates their afternoon to a camera are not imagining the gap between them.
The illusion is not the difference. It is the ranking, the quiet conviction that one generation’s way of doing things is a falling-off from another’s. The quirk is real. The story that the quirk makes the other person lesser is the part that keeps failing to survive contact with evidence.
The thing that actually dissolves it
Which points to the cure, and it is an old and unglamorous one. The most reliable way to stop caricaturing a group is to know its members as individuals. Decades of research on prejudice, summarized in a large analysis by the psychologists Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp, found that ordinary contact between groups tends to reduce hostility between them, and there is no reason age should be an exception.
A whole generation is easy to dismiss because a generation is an abstraction. A specific grandmother, or a specific fifteen-year-old you actually talk to, is much harder to fit into the stereotype, because you know too much about them. This is why the multigenerational family is such a natural antidote, but only if the generations are genuinely in contact rather than merely adjacent, passing in the hallway and filing each other under a type.
What this leaves a family with
A couple of honest limits belong here. The kids-these-days research is one program of work, mostly with American adults, though it documents a pattern that has repeated across cultures and millennia. Real cohort differences exist and matter, and contact is not a magic switch that erases every friction. None of this asks you to pretend the gaps are not there.
What it does offer is a gentler way to hold them. When you catch yourself certain that the younger generation is going soft, or that the older one just does not get it, it is worth remembering that every generation before you has felt precisely that certainty, and been wrong in the same way. The quirks of the people a little older or younger than you are usually just the accent of a different time. The contempt is optional, and it tends to melt the moment the other generation stops being a category and becomes, again, a person you happen to know.