young generation problems essay

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

How Teens Today Are Different from Past Generations

Every generation of teens is shaped by the social, political, and economic events of the day. Today’s teenagers are no different—and they’re the first generation whose lives are saturated by mobile technology and social media.

In her new book, psychologist Jean Twenge uses large-scale surveys to draw a detailed portrait of ten qualities that make today’s teens unique and the cultural forces shaping them. Her findings are by turn alarming, informative, surprising, and insightful, making the book— iGen:Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us —an important read for anyone interested in teens’ lives.

Who are the iGens?

Twenge names the generation born between 1995 and 2012 “iGens” for their ubiquitous use of the iPhone, their valuing of individualism, their economic context of income inequality, their inclusiveness, and more.

She identifies their unique qualities by analyzing four nationally representative surveys of 11 million teens since the 1960s. Those surveys, which have asked the same questions (and some new ones) of teens year after year, allow comparisons among Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and iGens at exactly the same ages. In addition to identifying cross-generational trends in these surveys, Twenge tests her inferences against her own follow-up surveys, interviews with teens, and findings from smaller experimental studies. Here are just a few of her conclusions.

iGens have poorer emotional health thanks to new media. Twenge finds that new media is making teens more lonely, anxious, and depressed, and is undermining their social skills and even their sleep.

iGens “grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet,” writes Twenge. They spend five to six hours a day texting, chatting, gaming, web surfing, streaming and sharing videos, and hanging out online. While other observers have equivocated about the impact, Twenge is clear: More than two hours a day raises the risk for serious mental health problems.

She draws these conclusions by showing how the national rise in teen mental health problems mirrors the market penetration of iPhones—both take an upswing around 2012. This is correlational data, but competing explanations like rising academic pressure or the Great Recession don’t seem to explain teens’ mental health issues. And experimental studies suggest that when teens give up Facebook for a period or spend time in nature without their phones, for example, they become happier.

The mental health consequences are especially acute for younger teens, she writes. This makes sense developmentally, since the onset of puberty triggers a cascade of changes in the brain that make teens more emotional and more sensitive to their social world.

Social media use, Twenge explains, means teens are spending less time with their friends in person. At the same time, online content creates unrealistic expectations (about happiness, body image, and more) and more opportunities for feeling left out—which scientists now know has similar effects as physical pain . Girls may be especially vulnerable, since they use social media more, report feeling left out more often than boys, and report twice the rate of cyberbullying as boys do.

Social media is creating an “epidemic of anguish,” Twenge says.

iGens grow up more slowly. iGens also appear more reluctant to grow up. They are more likely than previous generations to hang out with their parents, postpone sex, and decline driver’s licenses.

Twenge floats a fascinating hypothesis to explain this—one that is well-known in social science but seldom discussed outside academia. Life history theory argues that how fast teens grow up depends on their perceptions of their environment: When the environment is perceived as hostile and competitive, teens take a “fast life strategy,” growing up quickly, making larger families earlier, and focusing on survival. A “slow life strategy,” in contrast, occurs in safer environments and allows a greater investment in fewer children—more time for preschool soccer and kindergarten violin lessons.

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“Youths of every racial group, region, and class are growing up more slowly,” says Twenge—a phenomenon she neither champions nor judges. However, employers and college administrators have complained about today’s teens’ lack of preparation for adulthood. In her popular book, How to Raise an Adult , Julie Lythcott-Haims writes that students entering college have been over-parented and as a result are timid about exploration, afraid to make mistakes, and unable to advocate for themselves.

Twenge suggests that the reality is more complicated. Today’s teens are legitimately closer to their parents than previous generations, but their life course has also been shaped by income inequality that demoralizes their hopes for the future. Compared to previous generations, iGens believe they have less control over how their lives turn out. Instead, they think that the system is already rigged against them—a dispiriting finding about a segment of the lifespan that is designed for creatively reimagining the future .

iGens exhibit more care for others. iGens, more than other generations, are respectful and inclusive of diversity of many kinds. Yet as a result, they reject offensive speech more than any earlier generation, and they are derided for their “fragility” and need for “ trigger warnings ” and “safe spaces.” (Trigger warnings are notifications that material to be covered may be distressing to some. A safe space is a zone that is absent of triggering rhetoric.)

Today’s colleges are tied in knots trying to reconcile their students’ increasing care for others with the importance of having open dialogue about difficult subjects. Dis-invitations to campus speakers are at an all-time high, more students believe the First Amendment is “outdated,” and some faculty have been fired for discussing race in their classrooms. Comedians are steering clear of college campuses, Twenge reports, afraid to offend.

The future of teen well-being

Social scientists will discuss Twenge’s data and conclusions for some time to come, and there is so much information—much of it correlational—there is bound to be a dropped stitch somewhere. For example, life history theory is a useful macro explanation for teens’ slow growth, but I wonder how income inequality or rising rates of insecure attachments among teens and their parents are contributing to this phenomenon. And Twenge claims that childhood has lengthened, but that runs counter to data showing earlier onset of puberty.

So what can we take away from Twenge’s thoughtful macro-analysis? The implicit lesson for parents is that we need more nuanced parenting. We can be close to our children and still foster self-reliance. We can allow some screen time for our teens and make sure the priority is still on in-person relationships. We can teach empathy and respect but also how to engage in hard discussions with people who disagree with us. We should not shirk from teaching skills for adulthood, or we risk raising unprepared children. And we can—and must—teach teens that marketing of new media is always to the benefit of the seller, not necessarily the buyer.

Yet it’s not all about parenting. The cross-generational analysis that Twenge offers is an important reminder that lives are shaped by historical shifts in culture, economy, and technology. Therefore, if we as a society truly care about human outcomes, we must carefully nurture the conditions in which the next generation can flourish.

We can’t market technologies that capture dopamine, hijack attention, and tether people to a screen, and then wonder why they are lonely and hurting. We can’t promote social movements that improve empathy, respect, and kindness toward others and then become frustrated that our kids are so sensitive. We can’t vote for politicians who stall upward mobility and then wonder why teens are not motivated. Society challenges teens and parents to improve; but can society take on the tough responsibility of making decisions with teens’ well-being in mind?

The good news is that iGens are less entitled, narcissistic, and over-confident than earlier generations, and they are ready to work hard. They are inclusive and concerned about social justice. And they are increasingly more diverse and less partisan, which means they may eventually insist on more cooperative, more just, and more egalitarian systems.

Social media will likely play a role in that revolution—if it doesn’t sink our kids with anxiety and depression first.

About the Author

Diana Divecha

Diana Divecha, Ph.D. , is a developmental psychologist, an assistant clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center and Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and on the advisory board of the Greater Good Science Center. Her blog is developmentalscience.com .

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IELTS essay, topic: Young people are facing problems at school and at home, what problems and how can parents help?

• IELTS Essays - Band 8

This essay topic was seen in a recent IELTS test in Canada

Today’s young generation is facing many problems at school and at home. What are the problems? What can parents do to help their teenage children?

Sample Band 8 Essay

Young people today are under a lot of pressure, which seems to come from many directions. The problems they are experiencing happen not only at school, but also at home, and it seems that without adult guidance, our young generation will continue to struggle.

Teenage years have never been simple, and many would agree that the amount of challenges has only increased with the passage of time. Bullying has been a problem for quite a while, and children and adolescents would have experienced it at school in the past, but then it would stop at home. At present, however, things have been made worse by social media penetrating the supposedly safe space of our teenagers. The unfortunate behaviour of their peers can now reach them even in their bedrooms, causing them constant distress.

Another issue troubling many young people is the pressure to succeed by their families. Whether at school or at home, they often feel as if they are not smart enough, which creates overwhelm and despair. Understandably, their parents are pursuing a worthy goal of ensuring their children get a great start in life; however, many teens feel that they are failing their families when they don’t live up to their expectations. This often leads to dishonest and unethical behaviour, such as cheating on tests or plagiarising other students’ work. When uncovered, these incidents have a profound effect on young people’s future careers, not to mention their emotional well-being.

It is hard to underestimate the importance of parental support to navigating life as a young person. From helping teens build a positive body image and self-esteem, to handling classmates’ difficult behaviour, to guidance where study is concerned, parents can make a world of difference. Talking to their sons and daughters about matters that worry them, listening and making non-judgmental suggestions are great ways to help. Getting a professional involved where necessary and engaging with teachers, councilors and coaches is another opportunity for parents to provide assistance. Last but not least, parents can make their children better and happier people by simply giving them unconditional love.

To sum up, being a young person in the modern world isn’t easy. By banding together and paying careful attention to their teens, families can help them overcome any obstacles to becoming successful adults.

Teacher’s comment: The writer’s response fully covered every aspect of the task. Their arguments are strong, comprehensive, and well-supported. The effective use of paraphrasing, referencing, substitution, information sequencing, and paragraphing in this essay contributes to its high level of coherence and cohesion. The writer is able to clearly explain their message because to their extensive vocabulary and careful word selection. This essay has many examples of uncommon lexical items, all appropriately used. The writer has a great control of grammar, they follow the rules of punctuation and use complex sentence structures very well. Overall, this essay is likely to get Band 8 or 8.5 in IELTS

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World Youth Report: Addressing the complex challenges facing young people today

Today, there are 1.2 billion young people aged 15 to 24 years, accounting for 16 per cent of the global population. The active engagement of youth in sustainable development efforts is central to achieving sustainable, inclusive and stable societies by the target date, and to averting the worst threats and challenges to sustainable development, including the impacts of climate change, unemployment, poverty, gender inequality, conflict, and migration.

The  World Youth Report  focuses on youth education and employment, and explores the complex challenges facing the largest generation of youth the world has ever seen.

The Report provides insight into the critical role of young people in the context of the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and related frameworks.

Advancing Youth Development

Far from being mere beneficiaries of the 2030 Agenda, young people have been active architects in its development and continue to be engaged in processes that support its implementation, follow-up and review. At the level of global policy, finance and measurement are major issues to be addressed as part of worldwide youth development efforts. At the national level, policy and programmatic responses to the Sustainable Development Goals have been slow and should be accelerated.

In education, 142 million youth of upper secondary age are out of school. In employment, 71 million young people are unemployed; and millions more are in precarious or informal work. Disparities within and between countries in education and employment among youth are stark, with gender, poverty, rurality, disability, and migrant/refugee status all being major elements of disadvantage. For instance, about 156 million youth in low- and middle-income countries are working poor (ILO), while almost 30 per cent of the poorest 12- to 14-year old have never attended school.

Evidence-based youth policies, tailored and adapted to national and local contexts, help ensure that youth development challenges are addressed. Key elements that help ensure an effective youth policy include providing political leadership and strategic vision; securing adequate budget and resource allocations; using timely and accurate data on the situation of young people; utilizing the knowledge, experience and expertise of young people in the design, implementation and evaluation of the youth policy; mainstreaming and integrating youth policies across sectors; taking into account the linkages and impacts of policy objectives; and developing a transparent monitoring and accountability framework.

The Report focuses primarily on the areas of education and employment, underlining the realization of targets under these Goals as fundamental to overall youth development. Issues related to other Goals—including gender equality, good health, reducing inequality, combating poverty and hunger, and action on environmental issues and climate change—are also addressed within the scope of the Report.

Source: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/02/world-youth-report/

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

A series of FT View editorials and daily online debates will make the case for a new deal for the young. Beginning on Monday 26 April, they will address housing, pensions, jobs, education, the climate and tax over the course of the week.  Click to register for the events and see all the other articles

Growing inequality between generations has been exacerbated by the pandemic and has left many people in their teens, twenties and thirties feeling like they have got a raw deal.

The Financial Times wanted to bring those young people into a discussion about shifts in asset prices, pensions, education and the world of work so we launched a global survey. We asked people aged between 16 and 35 to tell us what life has been like for them in the pandemic, and which problems need fixing most urgently.

The survey was only open for one week but we had a record number of responses, with 1,700 people replying to the callout and spending an average of 30 minutes each on their responses.

While the majority of respondents were from the UK and US, others who shared their views were from Europe, Brazil, Egypt, and Asia-Pacific. Many of the respondents, though not all, were graduates who worked in sectors such as law, banking, media, education, science and technology. Many did not want to share their full names or personal details for fear of professional and personal repercussions.

People spoke of the difficulties — and benefits — of being young in today’s difficult economic times compared with their parents’ generation, and about issues relating to housing, education, jobs, pensions and the environment.

The responses formed the starting point for an in-depth analysis of the problems faced by young people today by Sarah O’Connor, our employment columnist. It is the first article in an FT series on what policies would make the economy work better for today’s youth.

Here we highlight some of the many hundreds of comments we received from readers:

Cramped housing

I absolutely cannot relate to mid career professionals being glad to be at home in their leafy three bedroom houses with gardens, when I have to have mid afternoon calls with the sound of my flatmates frying fish for lunch in the background. — A 20-year-old female reader living in London

The burden of student loans

Student loans feel like a unique problem for our generation. I can’t think of a similarity in the past when youth had such large financial burdens that can’t be discharged in most cases. Not that cancellation is necessarily the right choice. I knew what I signed up for, but what was the alternative, work in a coffee shop while the rest of my generation bettered themselves?

Mortgages and car payments just aren’t comparable to the $100k in loans I’ve been forced to deal with since I was 22. The rest seems similar. We have climate change and equality, my parents generations had communist totalitarian governments, nuclear war and . . . equality. — Matt, who works in Chicago, US

Mismatched ideas

The older generation has never understood that while our pay has increased it has been wiped out by extortionate rise in property prices. The older generation also thinks young people only enjoy spending money on experiences rather than saving money, which is not true. — A 30-year-old engineer living in the UK

Living with uncertainty

Older generations don’t feel the uncertainty we younger generation live with. Now it is more common for us to have more temporary jobs, for example, the gig economy. This uncertainty makes planning for future harder and makes taking risks impossible. — Ahmed, a lecturer living in Egypt

Scrap stamp duty on housing

The government needs to sort out house prices and stop inflating them. It should also scrap stamp duty and introduce annual property taxes instead. — A 25-year-old investment banker living in London

Emotionally better off than my parents

I know I’ll be better off than my parents. My mom came from an Italian immigrant family with seven siblings. I’m one of the first people to graduate from college with a four-year degree and one of the only people employed. Neither of my parents really ‘did’ therapy through their adult lives despite needing it, whereas I’ve had a therapist since my second year in college.

I think a common misperception about being better off is the focus on wealth — being better off also means being more emotionally and mentally healthy, which I know I am already better off than many of my family members. — Alicia, a financial analyst living in America

London feels increasingly full of anxious, burnt out 20- and 30-something-year-olds who spend half their income on a cramped flat with a damp problem and spend their weekends in the foetal position on their landlord’s Ikea sofa, endlessly scrolling through the latest app.

We have so much more than our parents did at our age, but also so much less. — A 25-year-old woman from the UK

Artificially high property prices

Current policies like Help to Buy are making things worse for young people in Britain. The prices of new builds are artificially inflated as builders know HTB can only be used on new builds! £450,000 for a one bed flat in London? Jog on. It’s insane. — Chris, in his late twenties living in London

Gen X doesn’t understand Gen Y

Generation X, doesn’t understand Generation Y, who doesn’t understand Generation Z — Andreas, a young doctor from Bulgaria

Regulate financial markets

I also have a feeling that regulating the financial markets would create more stability which would reduce the constant fear of a market meltdown — Kasper from Finland

Who is accountable?

Sustainability (renewable energy, mindful meat consumption, plastic usage awareness, social responsibility, ESG) are utmost key, and older generations seem to miss this. It feels they have put us in a stage where there is no going back, and there is no accountability whatsoever. — Renato, a risk manager from Brazil

Soaring rents

Many items that are considered a luxury to older generations, holidays, clothes, going out to eat, for example, are cheaper these days, but buying a house or renting is so much more expensive compared to when my parents were young. A lot of young people can afford the former not the latter, but for many older generations it seems the opposite was true, which creates contrasting views from each side about who has it worse. — Sophie, in her mid-twenties, from London

Young vs old

A number of older people I know are relatively sympathetic to a lot of the issues we face. There is a young versus old narrative pushed by certain sections of the media which, at least for many older people with families, has rung hollow with me. Generally they do recognise that we live in a more competitive world than they grew up in, for university places, jobs, housing etc. If anything I feel older generations probably understand younger people better than we understand them — Alex, a student solicitor in London

Cannot afford to buy a house

There is no acceptance that working from home is not feasible for younger people where you’re in significantly smaller accommodation. My company released an internal communication informing us how to be more efficient working in shared accommodation or working from your bedroom at the same time as starting consultation on closing all offices and homeworking permanently. — Lewis, who is working and studying in Bristol, UK

I have a mildly dystopian view

I feel older generations don’t understand the value of money, and it feels strange because my parents have lived a frugal life and I am doing well enough for myself, yet, given the economy, I feel compelled to save, while they don’t understand why I think thrice before every purchase.

On the issue of non-renewable resources, I feel that my parents have a particularly different mindset compared to mine; I have a mild compulsion to turn off any running tap or switch if it’s not being used. They have this comfort and faith that there will be enough for the coming generations, while I have a mildly dystopian view of the future Water/Resource Wars — Pia, a woman in her twenties in India

Steep housing costs

At my age on an apprentice’s salary my dad owned his own house and was buying and flipping more houses. I’ve got a masters degree, earning about 40 per cent more than the national average and I’m still struggling to find anywhere. They just don’t seem to understand, my dad refused to believe me until I showed him the tiny studio flats selling in my area for almost £300k — A data scientist in his late twenties, working in the UK

My generation is worn out

In many ways I think I am better off than my parents were. I’ve been able to travel and live in different countries. I had more choices than women before me. Where I live, I can love whomever I want to love. I do not have a physical job that wears down my body. But I guess each generation faces different challenges.

My generation is perhaps more likely to be mentally worn out. Housing is less affordable and returns are relatively less certain and I don’t have a pension or a pensions saving account that is protected from double taxation. — Deborah from the Netherlands

Change the voting system

It is probably an unrealistic policy change, but I would like to see some kind of weighting system applied to future voting (be it elections or referendums). The older you are, the fewer years you have left to live and the less you will have to suffer from poor long-term choices.

Brexit is a good example of this. Foolish and impressionable members of the older generation selfishly voted to leave the EU — a decision which will cause long-term damage for my generation well after they are deceased. Older people’s votes should have counted for less in the referendum. — David, working in fintech in London

Introduce a ‘meat licence’

I would introduce a “meat license” which every adult in the UK would require before they purchase/consume meat. To get this license, once a year they would have to go to an abattoir and slaughter a cow or pig. Once they have done this, they are allowed to consume as much meat as they want during the year.

This would encourage others to switch to alternatives that are available or at least reduce meat waste which is a tragically growing issue in the rich world. — Dan, working in London, UK

Replace student fees

Instead of tuition fee loans and maintenance loans I would give all young people a lump sum at regular intervals for their first several years post 18. They could use this towards going to uni, getting training, buying a house, etc. It would help diversify the paths people take post 18 whilst redistributing wealth. — A man in his mid-twenties living in Sheffield, UK

*Comments have been edited for length, style and clarity

Feel free to join the conversation by sharing your thoughts and experiences in the comment section below.

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3 biggest issues affecting youth today

There are a variety of issues facing young people today. Image:  Unsplash/Priscilla Du Preez

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Stay up to date:, future of work.

• More than two-thirds of Europe’s young adults live with their parents.
• Life expectancy among working-age Americans is declining.
• 10 young leaders under the age of 20 will attend this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos.

A group of 10 young leaders, all under the age of 20, will be attending this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos for the first time.

Alongside their – slightly older – peers among the Global Shapers Community , they will be championing the involvement of the next generation in policy decisions that will affect them for decades to come.

The need to engage younger people in this process has perhaps never been greater, and the challenges they face are complex, interconnected and seemingly intractable.

Have you read?

There's a global youth unemployment crisis. here's what we can do about it, why local communities are essential to curbing youth unemployment, what you need to know about the world's youth, in 7 charts, this is what millennials look for in a job, a home of your own.

More than two-thirds of young European adults live at home with their parents . While that might sound great for those parents dreading the moment their kids leave home, it's also an indication some young adults across the developed world simply can’t afford a place of their own.

While their parents’ generation enjoyed high wage inflation and benefitted from rising property values , the young face relatively low levels of income and social mobility, particularly in the US and the UK, but elsewhere in the developed world, too.

Incomes for 25- to 34-year-olds have only increased by 19%, which might explain why home ownership among the same group fell from 55% in 1997 to 35% in 2017.

A similar pattern exists in the United States, where housing costs have quadrupled since 1950 and homelessness rates have hit highs not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Between 1949 and 2018, mortgage debt as a percentage of GDP grew from 15% to 80% in the US.

The Global Shapers Community is a network of young people under the age of 30 who are working together to drive dialogue, action and change to address local, regional and global challenges.

The community spans more than 8,000 young people in 165 countries and territories.

Teams of Shapers form hubs in cities where they self-organize to create projects that address the needs of their community. The focus of the projects are wide-ranging, from responding to disasters and combating poverty, to fighting climate change and building inclusive communities.

Examples of projects include Water for Life, a effort by the Cartagena Hub that provides families with water filters that remove biological toxins from the water supply and combat preventable diseases in the region, and Creativity Lab from the Yerevan Hub, which features activities for children ages 7 to 9 to boost creative thinking.

Each Shaper also commits personally and professionally to take action to preserve our planet.

Join or support a hub near you .

Working-age life expectancy

In addition to struggling to afford a home of their own, studies show young people today suffer from more mental health challenges . And in some developed countries, life expectancy rates have slowed or even reversed.

In the UK, life expectancy for under-50s has fallen behind some other European countries. This is fuelled, in part, by a wave of drug-related deaths, most acutely in Scotland .

In the United States, between 2010 and 2017, mortality rates for working-age people, between 25 to 64, increased from 328.5 deaths per 100,000 people to 348.2 deaths per 100,000. The main causes were drug and alcohol abuse and suicide .

Time to listen

By most measures, youth unemployment is likely to be higher than that of the overall working population. Around 621 million young people between the ages of 15 to 24 are not in education, employment or training .

Across the 36 OECD countries, three stand out for very high youth unemployment: Italy, Spain and Greece. There, youth unemployment rates are 32%, 34% and 40%, respectively. South Africa, which is not a full OECD member, has a youth unemployment rate of 53%.

Although some countries, such as Japan, face the challenge of an ageing population, the world is dominated by young people. One-quarter of all people alive today are younger than 14 and the global median age is just 30 .

For one young leader attending the Forum’s Annual Meeting, now is the time to elevate the position of young people. Grace Gatera, a mental health worker in Rwanda, says, “Young people are largely ignored when decisions affecting them are being made.”

Doing so is a tragedy, she says: “It’s time to pass the mic.”

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Most in the U.S. say young adults today face more challenges than their parents’ generation in some key areas

About seven-in-ten Americans think young adults today have a harder time than their parents’ generation when it comes to saving for the future (72%), paying for college (71%) and buying a home (70%), according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in October 2021. These findings come at a time when younger Americans are more likely than previous generations to have taken on student debt with tuition costs steadily rising, and to face an affordable housing crisis as rent and housing prices have grown markedly faster than incomes in the last decade.

To learn more about how Americans view the circumstances young adults face across various life measures compared with their parents’ generation, Pew Research Center surveyed 9,676 U.S. adults between Oct. 18-24, 2021. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way, nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and  its methodology .

There’s less consensus when it comes to assessing labor market outcomes for young people today compared with their parents’ generation. Similar shares say finding a job is easier (40%) as say it is harder (39%) for young adults today. A smaller share of U.S. adults (21%) say it’s about the same.

When it comes to finding a spouse or partner, Americans are more than twice as likely to say younger adults today have it harder than their parents’ generation (46%) than to say they have it easier (21%). Around a third (32%) say it’s about the same.

On some other measures, Americans are more positive in their assessments of young adults’ circumstances. A significant majority of U.S. adults (74%) say it is easier for younger generations today to stay in touch with family and friends. Only 14% say this is harder for young adults compared with their parents’ generation. A plurality (41%) says getting into college is easier for young adults today compared with their parents’ generation; 33% say it’s harder for young adults today and 26% say it’s about the same.

There are notable age differences when it comes to assessing the circumstances of young adults today.

While majorities across all age groups say young adults have it harder when it comes to buying a home, saving for the future and paying for college, Americans ages 18 to 29 are more likely than older age groups to say this. More than eight-in-ten adults younger than 30 (84%) say buying a home is harder for young adults today, while 80% say the same about saving for the future and paying for college. Among those ages 30 to 49, 72% say buying a home and paying for college is harder for young adults today, and 74% say this about saving for the future. Those 50 and older are the least likely to say these measures are harder for younger generations to reach, with 63% saying this about buying a home, 67% saying this about saving for the future, and 66% saying this about paying for college.

When it comes to finding a job, younger Americans are again the most likely to say this is harder for young adults today. Overall, 55% of 18- to 29-year-olds say finding a job is harder for young adults today than it was for their parents’ generation. About four-in-ten or less of those ages 30 to 49 and those 50 and older say this about young adults (39% and 33%, respectively). There are also double-digit differences between the views of adults younger than 30 and those ages 50 or older when it comes to finding a spouse or partner (52% of 18- to 29-year-olds say this is harder for young adults today vs. 42% in the older group) and getting into college (45% vs. 27%, respectively). In fact, a plurality of adults 50 and older say getting into college is easier today (44%). There are no large differences by age on the measure of staying in touch with family and friends.

Generally, these views differ only modestly by gender, with one exception. On finding a spouse or partner, about half of women (51%) – compared with 40% of men – say this is harder for young adults today than it was for their parents’ generation. This gap is only present among those ages 30 and older; roughly equal shares of women (53%) and men (52%) younger than 30 say this is harder for young adults today. Notably, women in older age groups give similar answers as younger women, while older men are less likely than their younger counterparts to say finding a spouse or partner is harder for young adults today (42% of men 30 to 49 and 34% of men 50 and older say this).

Finally, on most of these measures, there are no significant differences between adults who are parents of children ages 18 to 29 and those who are not. On a few items where such differences exist, they tend to disappear when looking at adults 50 and older. The only item where such differences persist among older adults is on assessments of finding a job. Interestingly, those 50 and older who are parents of adult children ages 18 to 29 are more likely than those in the same age group who do not have young adult children to say young adults today have it easier when it comes to finding a job (47% vs. 42%, respectively).

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and  its methodology .

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• Younger Adults

Stella Sechopoulos is a former research assistant focusing on social and demographic trends research at Pew Research Center .

Methodology: 2023 focus groups of Asian Americans

1 in 10: redefining the asian american dream (short film), the hardships and dreams of asian americans living in poverty, majority of americans prefer a community with big houses, even if local amenities are farther away, single women own more homes than single men in the u.s., but that edge is narrowing, most popular.

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It’s never been easy being a teenager. But is this now a generation in crisis?

M ollycoddled and cosseted or stressed and over-pressured. Energised and engaged or bored and turned off. Young people have so many labels and stereotypes slapped on them it’s a wonder these are not visible on their endless selfies. What is undeniably true is that the evidence suggests that rates of depression, self-harm and anxiety among young people are at unprecedented levels.

Youth unemployment is more than 13% , the cost of higher education is rapidly rising, a drought of affordable housing coupled with low pay is keeping many young people sealed under the parental roof and trapped in what one report called “ suspended adulthood ”. The ubiquity of the internet and social media, with its dark underbelly of hardcore pornography, body shaming and cyberbullying, is encroaching on their wellbeing, while a relentless focus on academic high-achieving is turning up the pressure in the classroom. Youth, traditionally thought of as the most enviable time of life, can now look like a deeply challenging and sometimes unpleasant time of life.

But is the experience of adolescence – defined as the period after childhood, from puberty to maturity – any tougher now than it was for previous generations? And when does it stop, given that some experts argue that full intellectual maturity is reached at the age of 27.

Among the events planned for World Mental Health Day , an exhibition by a small but successful charity in London aims to unpick some of the issues around the “lived experience of adolescent development”. Open Door has helped thousands of young people with therapy and support with problems including depression, anxiety, self-harm, drug and alcohol misuse, eating disorders, psychosis, sexuality and gender identity issues since it opened in 1976.

The exhibition, Adolescence Then and Now, marks the charity’s 40th anniversary, and director Julia Britton, one of the capital’s leading consultant child and adolescent psychotherapists, says demand for its services is greater than ever. “We are operating with a constant waiting list of around 100, we can’t even meet local demand. Parts of the country have nothing at all for young people with mental illness. The lack of provision is a huge issue for now, and a huge issue being stored up for the future.”

She says many of the issues facing young people have not changed. “I look at myself as a teenager in the 1970s and so many issues were around: teen pregnancies, drug and alcohol misuse, psychotic breakdowns, financial and identity pressures. But there are many differences, too. The context certainly is different. I think there are far more pressures educationally, more sense that it’s all hinged on one exam, and certainly teachers are hugely concerned about the mental distress they are seeing. Then there’s cyberbullying where you can’t switch off and you can’t get away. Pornography, a normal part of development, is now very far removed from Playboy . A lot of young people are disturbed by what they see online.

“The internet is both helpful and not. If young people type in ‘self-harm’, they can either go to a Young Minds website where they will be offered help and support, or to a destructive group which is discussing how to self-harm and hide eating disorders. So it’s good and bad,” she says.

The sense of a struggling generation has undoubtedly taken on new dimensions. Last week a poll by the charity Young Women’s Trust found that “suspended adulthood” was affecting the mental health of one in three 18-to-30-year-olds who felt worried about the future and under financial pressures due to low pay and lack of work or opportunities. More than half of the 4,000 surveyed were having to live at home with their parents.

“Make no mistake,”says Dr Carole Easton, chief executive of the charity, “we’re talking about a generation of young people in crisis. It is not in any of our interests to write off an entire generation.”

Abena is 18. A former mental health service user at Open Door, she interviewed artist Grayson Perry in a video project for the coming exhibition. They discussed the contrasts in their teenage experiences. He told her: “My family was quite screwed up, it was quite a volatile household and quite scary.” In 1976 Perry was 16 and had already been thrown out of his home by his stepmother over his transvestism: “When I was that age you hung out on the village green and got bored with others. I had low impulse control, I was incredibly angry until I went into therapy.”

What most struck Abena, she says, was that, while his cross-dressing was a major taboo and so a pressure point for him as a teenager, “he doesn’t remember having any issues over his body image at all. He doesn’t remember having a conversation about body image. But he remembers trying to keep his dressing-up from his parents and how everybody thought transvestism was very strange and taboo. That identity didn’t exist.

“Now I think that would be far more acceptable and people would be quite relaxed about that. But I feel like there are very real pressures around body image now that he didn’t have. Having social media now, it’s real pressure around how you look, making sure every picture is perfect,” she says.

“So the pressure he had then isn’t what we have now, but we have other ones. And it all depends on where you go in the world. I’m a black woman, but that would be a very different issue if I was living in America, for example. As a young person now I don’t drink very much, but I’m going to university where there is a real culture of drinking heavily and I find that really daunting. I’ll be in a minority, and being in a minority can be very uncomfortable,” says Abena. “I don’t think I’d have gotten through my bad times, to be honest, if I hadn’t been able to access Open Door. I don’t know how I’d have coped on my own. All the worries I had which felt too big to say to teachers or even my family, I was able to say there. It felt like home.”

Leigh Wildman, a therapist and support worker for young people with special needs, is 54. “I often wonder about whether I’d be on computer games if I’d been a teenager now instead of climbing trees, kicking a tin can down the road and making camps as we did then. Then later on there was music, of course, counter-culture music and art which rescued me. I left school at 15, but in those days you could go round the industrial estate and get a job and I did lots of jobs before taking off hitchhiking round Europe when I was 18,” she says.

“My mum was pleased, but I feel young people today are much more fearful. They stay at school longer, at home longer, and the world looks very daunting. They have to knuckle down at school and there’s no space to be light-hearted or to drift a little, to find out who they are, what kind of people they like. I had time for that, and I’m very glad I did,” adds Wildman.

Another teenager, a client at Open Door, is Elena, 17. She says all her friends at school suffer panic attacks and anxiety: “If you drop grades a bit, you feel a failure, you feel the teachers immediately ignore you for the people who are high achievers.

“It’s like you have to be this robot. I think it’s harder now in terms of all the pressures to look a certain way and keep up with everything, and I think it’s harder in terms of trying to speak to your parents or people at school who are not trained because when they were growing up mental health was not something anyone spoke about.”

And she adds: “ I’d cry in the classroom a lot at school, but teachers would just be a bit uncomfortable and you’d not want to open up. I’d just say I was having a bad day. I feel a lot more hope for the future now than I used to. I never used to think there was a future for me.”

CHANGING TIMES

1976 Around 93% of homes own a television. 2016 Young people spend more time online than watching TV.

Pop scandals

1976 : Sex Pistols prompt a media storm by swearing live on Bill Grundy’s TV show.

2016 Kanye West faces a backlash after calling Taylor Swift a bitch in a song lyric.

1976 Around 14% of people go to university. 2016 Around 40% of England’s school-leavers go to university.

Youth unemployment

1976 9.1% of UK men and 8% of UK females aged under 20 are out of work. 2016 13.6% of UK 16-24-year-olds are unemployed.

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It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”

By Louis Menand

The discovery that you can make money marketing merchandise to teen-agers dates from the early nineteen-forties, which is also when the term “youth culture” first appeared in print. There was a reason that those things happened when they did: high school. Back in 1910, most young people worked; only fourteen per cent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were still in school. In 1940, though, that proportion was seventy-three per cent. A social space had opened up between dependency and adulthood, and a new demographic was born: “youth.”

The rate of high-school attendance kept growing. By 1955, eighty-four per cent of high-school-age Americans were in school. (The figure for Western Europe was sixteen per cent.) Then, between 1956 and 1969, college enrollment in the United States more than doubled, and “youth” grew from a four-year demographic to an eight-year one. By 1969, it made sense that everyone was talking about the styles and values and tastes of young people: almost half the population was under twenty-five.

Today, a little less than a third of the population is under twenty-five, but youth remains a big consumer base for social-media platforms, streaming services, computer games, music, fashion, smartphones, apps, and all kinds of other goods, from motorized skateboards to eco-friendly water bottles. To keep this market churning, and to give the consulting industry something to sell to firms trying to understand (i.e., increase the productivity of) their younger workers, we have invented a concept that allows “youth culture” to be redefined periodically. This is the concept of the generation.

The term is borrowed from human reproductive biology. In a kinship structure, parents and their siblings constitute “the older generation”; offspring and their cousins are “the younger generation.” The time it takes, in our species, for the younger generation to become the older generation is traditionally said to be around thirty years. (For the fruit fly, it’s ten days.) That is how the term is used in the Hebrew Bible, and Herodotus said that a century could be thought of as the equivalent of three generations.

Around 1800, the term got transplanted from the family to society. The new idea was that people born within a given period, usually thirty years, belong to a single generation. There is no sound basis in biology or anything else for this claim, but it gave European scientists and intellectuals a way to make sense of something they were obsessed with, social and cultural change. What causes change? Can we predict it? Can we prevent it? Maybe the reason societies change is that people change, every thirty years.

Before 1945, most people who theorized about generations were talking about literary and artistic styles and intellectual trends—a shift from Romanticism to realism, for example, or from liberalism to conservatism. The sociologist Karl Mannheim, in an influential essay published in 1928, used the term “generation units” to refer to writers, artists, and political figures who self-consciously adopt new ways of doing things. Mannheim was not interested in trends within the broader population. He assumed that the culture of what he called “peasant communities” does not change.

Nineteenth-century generational theory took two forms. For some thinkers, generational change was the cause of social and historical change. New generations bring to the world new ways of thinking and doing, and weed out beliefs and practices that have grown obsolete. This keeps society rejuvenated. Generations are the pulse of history. Other writers thought that generations were different from one another because their members carried the imprint of the historical events they lived through. The reason we have generations is that we have change, not the other way around.

There are traces of both the pulse hypothesis and the imprint hypothesis in the way we talk about generations today. We tend to assume that there is a rhythm to social and cultural history that maps onto generational cohorts, such that each cohort is shaped by, or bears the imprint of, major historical events—Vietnam, 9/11, COVID . But we also think that young people develop their own culture, their own tastes and values, and that this new culture displaces the culture of the generation that preceded theirs.

Today, the time span of a generational cohort is usually taken to be around fifteen years (even though the median age of first-time mothers in the U.S. is now twenty-six and of first-time fathers thirty-one). People born within that period are supposed to carry a basket of characteristics that differentiate them from people born earlier or later.

This supposition requires leaps of faith. For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations. (Do you have less in common with your parents than with people you have never met who happen to have been born a few years before or after you?) The theory also seems to require that a person born in 1965, the first year of Generation X, must have different values, tastes, and life experiences from a person born in 1964, the last year of the baby-boom generation (1946-64). And that someone born in the last birth year of Gen X, 1980, has more in common with someone born in 1965 or 1970 than with someone born in 1981 or 1990.

Everyone realizes that precision dating of this kind is silly, but although we know that chronological boundaries can blur a bit, we still imagine generational differences to be bright-line distinctions. People talk as though there were a unique DNA for Gen X—what in the nineteenth century was called a generational “entelechy”—even though the difference between a baby boomer and a Gen X-er is about as meaningful as the difference between a Leo and a Virgo.

You could say the same things about decades, of course. A year is, like a biological generation, a measurable thing, the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. But there is nothing in nature that corresponds to a decade—or a century, or a millennium. Those are terms of convenience, determined by the fact that we have ten fingers.

Yet we happily generalize about “the fifties” and “the sixties” as having dramatically distinct, well, entelechies. Decade-thinking is deeply embedded. For most of us, “She’s a seventies person” carries a lot more specific information than “She’s Gen X.” By this light, generations are just a novel way of slicing up the space-time continuum, no more arbitrary, and possibly a little less, than decades and centuries. The question, therefore, is not “Are generations real?” The question is “Are they a helpful way to understand anything?”

Bobby Duffy, the author of “The Generation Myth” (Basic), says yes, but they’re not as helpful as people think. Duffy is a social scientist at King’s College London. His argument is that generations are just one of three factors that explain changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The others are historical events and “life-cycle effects,” that is, how people change as they age. His book illustrates, with a somewhat overwhelming array of graphs and statistics, how events and aging interact with birth cohort to explain differences in racial attitudes, happiness, suicide rates, political affiliations—you name it, for he thinks that his three factors explain everything.

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Duffy’s over-all finding is that people in different age groups are much more alike than all the talk about generations suggests, and one reason for all that talk, he thinks, is the consulting industry. He says that, in 2015, American firms spent some seventy million dollars on generational consulting (which doesn’t seem that much, actually). “What generational differences exist in the workplace?” he asks. His answer: “Virtually none.”

Duffy is good at using data to take apart many familiar generational characterizations. There is no evidence, he says, of a “loneliness epidemic” among young people, or of a rise in the rate of suicide. The falling off in sexual activity in the United States and the U.K. is population-wide, not just among the young.

He says that attitudes about gender in the United States correlate more closely with political party than with age, and that, in Europe, anyway, there are no big age divides in the recognition of climate change. There is “just about no evidence,” he says, that Generation Z (1997-2012, encompassing today’s college students) is more ethically motivated than other generations. When it comes to consumer boycotts and the like, “ ‘cancel culture’ seems to be more of a middle-age thing.” He worries that generational stereotypes—such as the characterization of Gen Z-ers as woke snowflakes—are promoted in order to fuel the culture wars.

The woke-snowflake stereotype is the target of “Gen Z, Explained” (Chicago), a heartfelt defense of the values and beliefs of contemporary college students. The book has four authors, Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, and Linda Woodhead—an anthropologist, a linguist, a historian, and a sociologist—and presents itself as a social-scientific study, including a “methodological appendix.” But it resembles what might be called journalistic ethnography: the portrayal of social types by means of interviews and anecdotes.

The authors adopt a key tenet of the pulse hypothesis. They see Gen Z-ers as agents of change, a generation that has created a youth culture that can transform society. (The fact that when they finished researching their book, in 2019, roughly half of Gen Z was under sixteen does not trouble them, just as the fact that at the time of Woodstock, in 1969, more than half the baby-boom generation was under thirteen doesn’t prevent people from making generalizations about the baby boomers.)

Their book is based on hour-long interviews with a hundred and twenty students at three colleges, two in California (Stanford and Foothill College, a well-regarded community college) and one in the U.K. (Lancaster, a selective research university). The authors inform us that the interviewees were chosen “by word of mouth and personal networking,” which sounds a lot like self-selection. It is, in any event (as they unapologetically acknowledge), hardly a randomized sample.

The authors tell us that the interviews were conducted entirely by student research assistants, which means that, unless the research assistants simply read questions off a list, there was no control over the depth or the direction of the interviews. There were also some focus groups, in which students talked about their lives with, mostly, their friends, an exercise performed in an echo chamber. Journalists, or popular ethnographers, would at least have met and observed their subjects. It’s mystifying why the authors felt a need to distance themselves in this way, given how selective their sample was to begin with. We are left with quotations detached from context. Self-reporting is taken at face value.

The authors supplemented the student interviews with a lexical glossary designed to pick out words and memes heavily used by young people, and with two surveys, designed by one of the authors (Woodhead) and conducted by YouGov, an Internet polling company, of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in the United States and the U.K.

Where there is an awkward discrepancy between the survey results and what the college students say in the interviews, the authors attempt to explain it away. The YouGov surveys found that ninety-one per cent of all persons aged eighteen to twenty-five, American and British, identify as male or female, and only four per cent as gender fluid or nonbinary. (Five per cent declined to answer.) This does not match the impression created by the interviews, which suggest that there should be many more fluid and nonbinary young people out there, so the authors say that we don’t really know what the survey respondents meant by “male” and “female.” Well, then, maybe they should have been asked.

The authors attribute none of the characteristics they identify as Gen Z to the imprint of historical events—with a single exception: the rise of the World Wide Web. Gen Z is the first “born digital” generation. This fact has often been used to stereotype young people as screen-time addicts, captives of their smartphones, obsessed with how they appear on social media, and so on. The Internet is their “culture.” They are trapped in the Web. The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” emphatically reject this line of critique. They assure us that Gen Z-ers “understand both the potential and the downside of technology” and possess “critical awareness about the technology that shapes their lives.”

For the college students who were interviewed (although not, evidently, for the people who were surveyed), a big part of Gen Z culture revolves around identity. As the authors put it, “self-labeling has become an imperative that is impossible to escape.” This might seem to suggest a certain degree of self-absorption, but the authors assure us that these young people “are self-identified and self-reliant but markedly not self-centered, egotistical, or selfish.”

“Lily” is offered to illustrate the ethical richness of this new concern. It seems that Lily has a friend who is always late to meet with her: “She explained that while she of course wanted to honor and respect his unique identity, choices, and lifestyle—including his habitual tardiness—she was also frustrated by how that conflicted with her sense that he was then not respecting her identity and preference for timeliness.” The authors do not find this amusing.

The book’s big claim is that Gen Z-ers “may well be the heralds of new attitudes and expectations about how individuals and institutions can change for the better.” They have come up with new ways of working (collaborative), new forms of identity (fluid and intersectional), new concepts of community (diverse, inclusive, non-hierarchical).

Methodology aside, there is much that is refreshing here. There is no reason to assume that younger people are more likely to be passive victims of technology than older people (that assumption is classic old person’s bias), and it makes sense that, having grown up doing everything on a computer, Gen Z-ers have a fuller understanding of the digital universe than analog dinosaurs do. The dinosaurs can say, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” but Gen Z-ers can say, “You don’t understand what you’re getting.”

The claim that addiction to their devices is the cause of a rise in mental disorders among teen-agers is a lot like the old complaint that listening to rock and roll turns kids into animals. The authors cite a recent study (not their own) that concludes that the association between poor mental health and eating potatoes is greater than the association with technology use. We’re all in our own fishbowls. We should hesitate before we pass judgment on what life is like in the fishbowls of others.

The major problem with “Gen Z, Explained” is not so much the authors’ fawning tone, or their admiration for the students’ concerns—“environmental degradation, equality, violence, and injustice”—even though they are the same concerns that almost everyone in their social class has, regardless of age. The problem is the “heralds of a new dawn” stuff.

“A crisis looms for all unless we can find ways to change,” they warn. “Gen Zers have ideas of the type of world they would like to bring into being. By listening carefully to what they are saying, we can appreciate the lessons they have to teach us: be real, know who you are, be responsible for your own well-being, support your friends, open up institutions to the talents of the many, not the few, embrace diversity, make the world kinder, live by your values.”

I believe we have been here before, Captain. Fifty-one years ago, The New Yorker ran a thirty-nine-thousand-word piece that began:

There is a revolution under way . . . It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence. Its ultimate creation could be a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. This is the revolution of the new generation.

The author was a forty-two-year-old Yale Law School professor named Charles Reich, and the piece was an excerpt from his book “The Greening of America,” which, when it came out, later that year, went to No. 1 on the Times best-seller list.

Reich had been in San Francisco in 1967, during the so-called Summer of Love, and was amazed and excited by the flower-power wing of the counterculture—the bell-bottom pants (about which he waxes ecstatic in the book), the marijuana and the psychedelic drugs, the music, the peace-and-love life style, everything.

He became convinced that the only way to cure the ills of American life was to follow the young people. “The new generation has shown the way to the one method of change that will work in today’s post-industrial society: revolution by consciousness,” he wrote. “This means a new way of living, almost a new man. This is what the new generation has been searching for, and what it has started to achieve.”

So how did that work out? The trouble, of course, was that Reich was basing his observations and predictions on, to use Mannheim’s term, a generation unit—a tiny number of people who were hyperconscious of their choices and values and saw themselves as being in revolt against the bad thinking and failed practices of previous generations. The folks who showed up for the Summer of Love were not a representative sample of sixties youth.

Most young people in the sixties did not practice free love, take drugs, or protest the war in Vietnam. In a poll taken in 1967, when people were asked whether couples should wait to have sex until they were married, sixty-three per cent of those in their twenties said yes, virtually the same as in the general population. In 1969, when people aged twenty-one to twenty-nine were asked whether they had ever used marijuana, eighty-eight per cent said no. When the same group was asked whether the United States should withdraw immediately from Vietnam, three-quarters said no, about the same as in the general population.

Most young people in the sixties were not even notably liberal. When people who attended college from 1966 to 1968 were asked which candidate they preferred in the 1968 Presidential election, fifty-three per cent said Richard Nixon or George Wallace. Among those who attended college from 1962 to 1965, fifty-seven per cent preferred Nixon or Wallace, which matched the results in the general election.

The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” are making the same erroneous extrapolation. They are generalizing on the basis of a very small group of privileged people, born within five or six years of one another, who inhabit insular communities of the like-minded. It’s fine to try to find out what these people think. Just don’t call them a generation.

Most of the millions of Gen Z-ers may be quite different from the scrupulously ethical, community-minded young people in the book. Duffy cites a survey, conducted in 2019 by a market-research firm, in which people were asked to name the characteristics of baby boomers, Gen X-ers, millennials (1981-96), and Gen Z-ers. The top five characteristics assigned to Gen Z were: tech-savvy, materialistic, selfish, lazy, and arrogant. The lowest-ranked characteristic was ethical. When Gen Z-ers were asked to describe their own generation, they came up with an almost identical list. Most people born after 1996 apparently don’t think quite as well of themselves as the college students in “Gen Z, Explained” do.

In any case, “explaining” people by asking them what they think and then repeating their answers is not sociology. Contemporary college students did not invent new ways of thinking about identity and community. Those were already rooted in the institutional culture of higher education. From Day One, college students are instructed about the importance of diversity, inclusion, honesty, collaboration—all the virtuous things that the authors of “Gen Z, Explained” attribute to the new generation. Students can say (and some do say) to their teachers and their institutions, “You’re not living up to those values.” But the values are shared values.

And they were in place long before Gen Z entered college. Take “intersectionality,” which the students in “Gen Z, Explained” use as a way of refining traditional categories of identity. That term has been around for more than thirty years. It was coined (as the authors note) in 1989, by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. And Crenshaw was born in 1959. She’s a boomer.

“Diversity,” as an institutional priority, dates back even farther. It played a prominent role in the affirmative-action case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in 1978, which opened the constitutional door to race-conscious admissions. That was three “generations” ago. Since then, almost every selective college has worked to achieve a diverse student body and boasts about it when it succeeds. College students think of themselves and their peers in terms of identity because of how the institution thinks of them.

People who went to college in an earlier era may find this emphasis a distraction from students’ education. Why should they be constantly forced to think about their own demographic profiles and their differences from other students? But look at American politics—look at world politics—over the past five years. Aren’t identity and difference kind of important things to understand?

And who creates “youth culture,” anyway? Older people. Youth has agency in the sense that it can choose to listen to the music or wear the clothing or march in the demonstrations or not. And there are certainly ground-up products (bell-bottoms, actually). Generally, though, youth has the same degree of agency that I have when buying a car. I can choose the model I want, but I do not make the cars.

Failure to recognize the way the fabric is woven leads to skewed social history. The so-called Silent Generation is a particularly outrageous example. That term has come to describe Americans who went to high school and college in the nineteen-fifties, partly because it sets up a convenient contrast to the baby-boom generation that followed. Those boomers, we think—they were not silent! In fact, they mostly were.

The term “Silent Generation” was coined in 1951, in an article in Time —and so was not intended to characterize the decade. “Today’s generation is ready to conform,” the article concluded. Time defined the Silent Generation as people aged eighteen to twenty-eight—that is, those who entered the workforce mostly in the nineteen-forties. Though the birth dates of Time’s Silent Generation were 1923 to 1933, the term somehow migrated to later dates, and it is now used for the generation born between 1928 and 1945.

So who were these silent conformists? Gloria Steinem, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Noam Chomsky, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Martin Luther King, Jr., Billie Jean King, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Berry Gordy, Amiri Baraka, Ken Kesey, Huey Newton, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol . . . Sorry, am I boring you?

It was people like these, along with even older folks, like Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Pauli Murray, who were active in the culture and the politics of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from a few musicians, it is hard to name a single major figure in that decade who was a baby boomer. But the boomers, most of whom were too young then even to know what was going on, get the credit (or, just as unfairly, the blame).

Mannheim thought that the great danger in generational analysis was the elision of class as a factor in determining beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. Today, we would add race, gender, immigration status, and any number of other “preconditions.” A woman born to an immigrant family in San Antonio in 1947 had very different life chances from a white man born in San Francisco that year. Yet the baby-boom prototype is a white male college student wearing striped bell-bottoms and a peace button, just as the Gen Z prototype is a female high-school student with spending money and an Instagram account.

For some reason, Duffy, too, adopts the conventional names and dates of the postwar generations (all of which originated in popular culture). He offers no rationale for this, and it slightly obscures one of his best points, which is that the most formative period for many people happens not in their school years but once they leave school and enter the workforce. That is when they confront life-determining economic and social circumstances, and where factors like their race, their gender, and their parents’ wealth make an especially pronounced difference to their chances.

Studies have consistently indicated that people do not become more conservative as they age. As Duffy shows, however, some people find entry into adulthood delayed by economic circumstances. This tends to differentiate their responses to survey questions about things like expectations. Eventually, he says, everyone catches up. In other words, if you are basing your characterization of a generation on what people say when they are young, you are doing astrology. You are ascribing to birth dates what is really the result of changing conditions.

Take the boomers: when those who were born between 1946 and 1952 entered the workforce, the economy was surging. When those who were born between 1953 and 1964 entered it, the economy was a dumpster fire. It took longer for younger boomers to start a career or buy a house. People in that kind of situation are therefore likely to register in surveys as “materialistic.” But it’s not the Zeitgeist that’s making them that way. It’s just the business cycle. ♦

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The Biggest Problem Gen Z & Millennials Say They Are Facing in 2021

• Jul 06 2021

We asked young people to tell us the biggest problem their generation faces today. Here’s what they told us…

Each year, we ask young consumers what they think the biggest problems they face are to get a better understanding of what the top worries are for these generations. I n 2019,  climate change made the top of the ranking for the first time, underscoring these generations’ serious concerns about the environment. But in 2020, during a year defined by the pandemic and political upheaval, racism and discrimination topped the list, capturing the frustrations and fears of young people on the precipice of the Black Lives Matter movement and protests.

A year later, we’ve asked them again, and found their top concerns have remained the same: 

The Biggest Problem Their Generation Faces Now Among 13-39-year-olds

• Racism / Discrimination
• Technology addiction
• Financial concerns / Debt
• Unemployment / Low paying jobs / Job insecurity
• Economic issues
• Climate change
• Social media
• Mental health problems
• Too sensitive / Cancel culture
• Lack of motivation / laziness
• Hate / Intolerance
• Drug / alcohol / sex addiction
• Lack of morals / values
• Violence / Terrorism / Conflict
• Police Brutality

Our survey was fielded between May 5th, 2021 and May 12th, 2021, and COVID-19 topped the list for them this year. While we’ve documented how many young consumers are starting to get back to “normal” in the month since, fears around the pandemic are still strong. Many named the vaccine and social distancing as the solutions to the problem, and we also found that YPulse’s data showed that  over half of 13-39-year-olds planned to be or would be vaccinated before the summer . But the impacts of the pandemic are far reaching for them, and also affected Gen Z and Millennials’ milestones and finances—something many are most likely still trying to recover from. The fact that Unemployment / Low paying jobs / Job instability is in the top five this year is likely linked to the pandemic as well. 

But Racism/Discrimination was a close second place on the ranking—and COVID and Racism/Discrimination were far more likely to be named by Gen Z and Millennials than the other problems on the list. A year after the Black Lives Matter protests and amid the ongoing #StopAsianHate movement , awareness around racism and discrimination has only grown since we asked this question last year. And even though a majority (68%) of 13-39-year-olds believe that brands have been following through with their anti-racism promises , it’s clear that they think a lot of work still needs to be done. We recently told you how Gen Z and Millennials say that racism has actually gotten worse in the U.S .—with 60% saying it’s getting worse in 2021, compared to 46% in 2020

Interestingly, “Technology addiction” made their top five responses on the list. While it’s certainly been a concern in years’ past, the last year might have intensified their view of tech addiction as a problem. Young people spent more time on their phones, screens, and social media more than ever before in the last year and a half, it shouldn’t come as a total surprise that overreliance on their devices is a growing issue for them. Smartphones and the internet were most commonly mentioned technology they feel their generation is addicted to. Social media also came in the top 10 list, with “too much focus on social media” a variation of this response. According to one 15-year-old female, “Social media is a big thing. Since almost all our lives is “online” it can be hard for us to connect with the outside world. Plus social media also brings its negative impact and we can clearly see how that affects us teens these days.”

COVID, Racism, and Tech addiction were in the top five ranking for teens, twentysomethings, and thirtysomethings: 

While there were many commonalities between responses from these age groups, a few differences stand out. Gen Z teens were more likely than any other group to say that being too sensitive and Cancel Culture are problems for their generation. A 16-year-old female explained, “We are easy to judge and easy to cancel,” and a 17-year-old male told us “Extreme sensitivity against anything remotely offensive.” Is the biggest problem for his generation. Interestingly though, YPulse’s Not Waiting For the World to Change research found that 52% 13-19-year-olds agree that cancel culture has been effective at creating social change—so young people may be split on whether it is a problem. However, that research also found 59% agree, “My generation is too sensitive and creates issues that are not there.” Gen Z teens were also more likely than other groups to say that mental health problems are the biggest problem, another piece of evidence that mental wellness is a major driver for this generation.

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How Generation Z can help solve today's greatest challenges

Gitanjali rao, inventor and time kid of the year, beeline reader.

BeeLine Reader , a 2021 Digital Inclusion Solver team , uses subtle color gradients to help you read more efficiently

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Inventor and TIME Kid of the Year Gitanjali Rao with Solver and Founder of Timeless Emma Yang at Virtual Solve at MIT 2020

A young boy in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya wakes up at 8am to go to school in the morning, and then walks 45 minutes to meet the rest of his classmates. After today’s lesson, he is planning to meet with an American technology company to discuss their latest developments in the industry. He brainstorms novel ideas around these new concepts, pitches them to the company, and eventually gets the opportunity to mass produce his products and receive real feedback from field testing. This is an example of the world in which we would all love to create and grow up.  

We have an opportunity for Gen Z students to approach modern issues more critically and creatively. I believe that Gen Z students can identify and tackle problems differently from previous generations. We are growing up in an era where massive, worldwide problems like climate change are occurring in real time. We’re experiencing them firsthand and viewing them through a student's perspective. Young people have the unique mindset to create solutions with more freedom than adults, but also face specific barriers that prevent them from reaching their full potential.    While working with students in refugee camps in Kenya and schools in Ghana, I was inspired  to look more broadly at innovation and problem-solving. I recognized that even if partnerships can be formed and connections can be made, the lack of experience with particular skills is what continues to hold youth back, like knowing how to conduct a feasibility study with the latest technologies.    Many of the challenges that students face revolve around a lack of access to resources, a dearth of mentors and experts, and the scrutiny of age versus ability. The processes of design-thinking and problem-solving must be supported by technological resources, funding, and further tools for marketing. K-12 students, who do not have the advantage of higher education and industry experience, lack access to these resources to develop their ideas further, keeping them out of conversations where they could make a difference.    In addition, students do not have access to a network of established tech and business communities, such as experts in the field and mentors that can guide their path with direct feedback.    In order to support the younger generation who is looking to bring its ideas to reality, those with more experience in the workforce can make a lasting impact by mentoring students. Mentorship can come in many forms: encouraging youth to use the tech available to them to solve issues, breaking down barriers to access, or even taking a couple of hours to collaborate on ideas. Guidance and encouragement early on is critical.  Initiatives like MIT Solve, which helps social good tech entrepreneurs scale their solutions and its new program for budding entrepreneurs 24 and under, and Solv[ED] give youth the opportunity to design, build, and elevate their ideas for a chance to create meaningful change. With the support of educators and mentors in the MIT Solve community, youth are able to develop their own ideas from scratch, foster them using the latest technology, receive funding, and gain access to a platform to pitch their ideas to the real world. Investing in new technologies and partnerships for Gen Z will make real change for the future of our society.  Solv[ED] is investing in a unique set of talent, viewpoints, and skill sets and expanding opportunities for Gen Z to solve some of the most pressing issues facing society today. Often the best solutions start small and local. Once proven to work, these solutions can be adapted and scaled to solve similar problems in other parts of the world. That is what the youth are able to do — come up with creative approaches locally that can eventually help solve problems worldwide. I can’t wait to see our young generation realize their full potential as changemakers.

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Generation Gap: Childhood, Adulthood, Old Age Essay

The relations between the generations were always complicated. The older people always indicate that it their time the situation was different and people behaved in the different way. At the same period, the younger generation says about the impact of the modern tendencies, changes of the way of life that give an opportunity to claim that the younger generation is more advanced.

However, as it clearly seen though the history, such attitude of the generations to each other was always the same. Therefore, although the technical facilities, cultural and economical changes impact the society, it is possible to claim that there are no significant changes in the relations between the generations, they are neither improving, nor getting worse.

Analyzing the cultural aspect within the conflict between generations, it is necessary to admit that such cultural issues as art, music, fashion have a tendency of the permanent change. Thereby, it is obvious that the different generations which do not have the same tastes and fashion, cannot understand each other’s needs. And especially this aspect is sharp within the relations between teenagers and their parents.

Today, the tradition hierarchy of family is different than two centuries ago. Elder members of family feel themselves as the intruders. From the other side, their children can easily send parents to the social houses. During the past century, the patterns of solidarity in friend and family relations had been changed (Allan 2008).

The transformation of the family and friendship aspects influences the Western communities since 1970s. People got more freedom and, as the result, the gap in the relations between young people and their parents increased (Thompson 1998).

From the other hand, the flexibility in the constructing of personal life and relations within the social groups is also increased. As the diversity in the priorization provided more facilities and made the personal choice more complex, the cultural changes of the past century can be considered as positive.

The relations between adult and old people can be also considered from the mentioned below position (Edmunds & Turner 2002, Huntley 2006). Thus, in the article Building Positive Relationships (2008) is written about the relations between 57-years old woman and her 89-years old mother.

As it understandable from the article, the conflict between the generations still exists, however, due to the physical disability of old mother, both woman try to find a solution and to rebuild their relations.

Being in the difficult situation, old people need more attention. For adult people, “the decline of a parent’s health, death of one parent or financial pressures often mean an aging parent will need increased social and emotional support or services from family – such as help with meals, cleaning, transportation or financial matters” ( Building Positive Relationships 2010).

In this context, it is necessary to admit the position of Klinenberg (2001) who indicates the tendency of increase of a number of old people who are estranged from their previous social circle and who live alone without a strong connection with their children.

Many old people have to live in the social establishments due to unwillingness of their younger relatives to care about them. This tendency demonstrates that the traditional cultural attitude to family, marriage and old parent is changed.

Obviously, the economic conditions influence generations. Wyn (2006) explores the rupture of the educational and employment outcomes as the peculiarity of the current situation of the young generation.

As it was normal order of things, today, such disbalance is widely spread that makes young people face with a number of problems while searching a job as “the transition processes for the majority of young people born after 1970 are different from those of the majority of their parents’ generation” (Wyn 2006, p. 6).

From this point of view, it is possible to notice that the younger generation has a significant reason to claim that the current situation on the labor market is more difficult than it was years ago.

According to the statistics provided by Wyn, “by the year 2000, at the age of 27, 68 per cent of the respondents had achieved permanent jobs, and 76 per cent were in full-time jobs” (Wyn 2006, p. 10). However, from the other hand, the elder generation has much more problems within this aspect. Although old people are more experienced, many employers prefer to accept a young person than the elder one.

Analyzing Mannheim’s essay The Problem of Generation , Pilcher (1994) indicates that “the notion of generation being widespread in everyday language as a way of understanding differences between age groups and as a means of locating individuals and groups within historical times” ( Mannheim’s sociology of generations: an undervalued legacy , p. 481).

Thereby, it is possible to say that the present problem existed during the history and never turned into the tendency of improvement or worsening. Different social models, tendencies, fashion and other issues dictate the rules of the relations between generations. Although a number of researchers indicate the increasing way of generation gap, history demonstrates that such tendencies were presented at all times.

Today, teenagers and young people feel themselves free and independent as the world is controlled by them. The number of old people is growing day by day as the result of the demographic characteristics. The present century requires more fast reaction, creative ideas and flexibility which are typical for younger generation. Wyn claims that today the process for becoming adult is different and emerging.

The typical issues of those changes are “an increasingly flexible labor market, dissolution of occupational boundaries, deregulation of labour, and increases in contrast, part-time employment” (2006, p. 12). At the same period, the cultural aspect also changes. Thus, the attitude of the young people to marriage and family is different while the level of fertility reduces.

Privatization of educational services diminishes the capability of young people to get better education. Changed attitude to the elder relatives led to a big number of the old people abandoned in the social houses. Generation gap is the key moment within the understanding of the relations between generations.

There is possible to say about the sharp conflict which is concerned with different parts of life and particularly with economic and cultural aspects. Young adults and elder people have the different possibilities to find a job, to increase their financial status according to the current tendencies in the society and they have different cultural tastes and traditional values.

However, although the cultural and economical changes impact the society and the generation gap is significant, it is necessary to claim that the relations between the generations are neither improving, nor getting worse. The historical knowledge provides the demonstration that such situation was always actual and topical.

Reference List

Allan, G 2008, ‘Flexibility, Friendship and Family’, Personal Relationships , 15: 1-16.

Building Positive Relationships 2010. Web.

Edmunds, J & Turner, B. S 2002, ‘Introduction: Generations, War and Intellectuals’, Generations, Culture and Society , Open University Press, Buckingham, pp. 1-23.

Huntley, R 2006, ‘From X to Y’, The World According to Y: Inside the New Adult Generation , Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, pp. 1-23.

Klinenberg, E 2001, ‘Dying Alone: The Social Production of Urban Isolation’, Ethnography , 4:2, pp. 501-531. Web.

Pilcher,J (1994), ‘Mannheim’s sociology of generations: an undervalued legacy’, BJC, Vol. 45, Issue 3: pp. 481-495.

Thompson, K 1998, ‘The Classic Moral Panic: Mods and Rockers’, Moral Panics , Routledge, London, pp. 31-56.

Wyn, J 2004, ‘Becoming Adult in the 2000s: New Transitions and New Careers’, Family Matters , 68: pp. 6-12.

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1. IvyPanda . "Generation Gap: Childhood, Adulthood, Old Age." December 22, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/generation-gap-childhood-adulthood-old-age-essay/.

Bibliography

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Essay on Problems Faced by Youth Today

Students are often asked to write an essay on Problems Faced by Youth Today in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Problems Faced by Youth Today

Introduction.

Youth today face numerous challenges that shape their lives. These problems range from social, emotional, to economic issues.

Social Problems

The rise of social media has led to problems like cyberbullying and online harassment. It has also increased peer pressure and created unrealistic expectations.

Economic Challenges

Youths struggle with unemployment and the high cost of education. These financial constraints limit their opportunities and growth.

Emotional Issues

Depression and anxiety are common among youth, often due to pressure from society, school, or family. Mental health issues are a significant concern.

Addressing these challenges requires collective efforts from society, parents, and institutions. It’s crucial to create a supportive environment for youth to thrive.

250 Words Essay on Problems Faced by Youth Today

The complexity of modern life.

The youth of today face a myriad of challenges, the complexity of which is amplified by the rapid pace of modern life. The digital age has brought about new opportunities, but it has also introduced problems such as cyberbullying and online privacy violations. Young people are constantly exposed to unrealistic standards of beauty and success on social media, leading to a surge in mental health issues like anxiety and depression.

Educational Challenges

In the realm of education, the youth are confronted with an increasingly competitive environment. The pressure to excel acadically is often overwhelming, leading to stress and burnout. Moreover, the traditional education system is struggling to keep pace with the evolving job market, leaving many young people ill-prepared for future careers.

Socioeconomic Disparities

Socioeconomic disparities pose another significant challenge. The wealth gap is widening, and many young people from disadvantaged backgrounds find it difficult to break the cycle of poverty. The lack of access to quality education and healthcare further exacerbates this problem.

Environmental Concerns

Finally, the youth are inheriting a planet fraught with environmental challenges. From climate change to pollution, these issues pose a threat to their future. However, they also present an opportunity for young people to drive change and create a more sustainable world.

In conclusion, while the youth of today face numerous challenges, they also have the potential to overcome these hurdles and shape a better future. It is our collective responsibility to provide them with the necessary tools and support to do so.

500 Words Essay on Problems Faced by Youth Today

The youth of today are the leaders of tomorrow. However, they face numerous challenges that can hinder their growth and development. These problems span across various aspects of life, including socio-economic, psychological, and technological factors.

Socio-Economic Challenges

One of the primary issues young people face today is unemployment. Despite being the most educated generation in history, many young people struggle to find stable, well-paying jobs. This problem is compounded by the rapid automation of jobs and the gig economy, which often offers unstable employment without benefits.

Another socio-economic issue is the increasing cost of education. Higher education, once seen as a sure path to a good job and a comfortable life, is now a significant financial burden for many young people. The rising cost of tuition, coupled with the uncertainty of job prospects after graduation, has put immense pressure on the youth.

Psychological Challenges

Mental health problems among young people are on the rise. Depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders are becoming increasingly prevalent. These issues are often exacerbated by social pressures, such as the need to succeed academically, fit in socially, and meet high expectations set by society and family.

Additionally, the fear of failure is a significant psychological challenge. In a world that increasingly values success and perfection, many young people fear making mistakes or failing, which can lead to stress, anxiety, and even mental health issues.

Technological Challenges

The rise of technology presents both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, technology has opened up new avenues for learning, communication, and entertainment. On the other hand, it has also led to problems like cyberbullying, online privacy concerns, and addiction to social media and online gaming.

Moreover, the constant exposure to idealized images and lifestyles on social media can lead to feelings of inadequacy and low self-esteem among young people. They often compare their lives to what they see online, leading to dissatisfaction and unhappiness.

The challenges faced by youth today are complex and multifaceted. They require concerted efforts from all sectors of society, including government, educators, parents, and the young people themselves, to address. By understanding these challenges, we can develop effective strategies to support the youth and help them navigate these issues. After all, the well-being of our youth is integral to the future of our society.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Mental Health Problems among Young People—A Scoping Review of Help-Seeking

Katrin häggström westberg.

1 School of Health and Welfare, Halmstad University, SE-301 18 Halmstad, Sweden; [email protected] (M.N.); [email protected] (J.M.N.); [email protected] (P.S.)

2 Affecta Psychiatric Clinic, Sperlingsgatan 5, SE-302 48 Halmstad, Sweden

Maria Nyholm

Jens m. nygren, petra svedberg, associated data.

Documentation on the database searches, the stepped screening process and the thematic analysis are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Young people’s mental health is a public health priority, particularly as mental health problems in this group seem to be increasing. Even in countries with supposedly good access to healthcare, few young people seek support for mental health problems. The aim of this study was twofold, firstly to map the published literature on young people’s experiences of seeking help for mental health problems and secondly to validate whether the Lost in Space model was adaptable as a theoretical model of the help-seeking process described in the included articles in this scoping review. A scoping review was conducted in which we searched for literature on mental health help-seeking with a user perspective published between 2010 and 2020 in different databases. From the 2905 studies identified, we selected 12 articles for inclusion. The review showed how young people experience unfamiliarity and insecurity with regard to issues related to mental health and help-seeking. A strong wish for self-reliance and to safe-guard one’s own health were consistent among young people. Support structures were often regarded as inaccessible and unresponsive. There was a high level of conformity between the model on help-seeking and the analysed articles, reinforcing that help-seeking is a dynamic and psychosocial process.

1. Introduction

Young people’s mental health is a major public health issue. Mental health problems among young people contribute to impaired physical and mental health extending into adulthood [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Promoting young people’s mental health is an integral component in ensuring their development and improving health and social wellbeing across their lifespan [ 3 ]. In light of the high rate of mental health problems among this group, a corresponding high rate of help-seeking and use of support resources might be assumed; however, few young people actually seek and eventually access professional help. Delays in looking for help can be lengthy and are prevalent even in countries with good access to healthcare [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ]. The process of searching for support involves barriers that relate to both individual and social context factors [ 8 , 10 ]. This contributes to the complexity involved in offering interventions to support them and highlights the need to understand the help-seeking process, whether online or in person, for young people with mental health problems.

Help-seeking is usually described as a rational, agency-based process where the individual plans, decides and acts on symptoms [ 11 ]. However, research also describes that help-seeking is not solely an individual act; rather, it is influenced by social factors throughout the process. Societal, organizational support structures set the limits and stipulate the opportunities to seek help [ 12 ]. Help-seeking thus depends both on factors at the individual level and structural resources for young people. Many studies that examine help-seeking for mental health among young people using cross-sectional designs on either the general community, or school populations [ 8 , 13 ] are based on descriptive data that is often generated through surveys, and focus on attitudes, rather than on experiences [ 14 ]. The main focus of previous literature has been on individual factors, such as mental health literacy, and less information can be found on the structural factors involved [ 8 , 13 ]. This calls for a deeper and more nuanced understanding of young people’s mental health help-seeking regarding contextual factors, with particular focus on their experiences and perspectives. An improved understanding of help-seeking for mental health problems can be used to improve practice and service delivery, and ultimately benefit young people’s mental health.

In this study, qualitative research exploring the help-seeking process in Sweden from the perspectives of young people with mental health problems was used as the theoretical point of departure [ 15 ]. Within this previous research, we produced a theoretical model of help-seeking, the Lost in Space model [ 15 ]. It showed how help-seeking was a long, non-sequential and dynamic process. In this research, young people described a process of moving in and out of the three help-seeking phases, Drifting, Navigating and Docking. Drifting was characterized by insecurity and unfamiliarity, with a lack of knowledge of mental health and the support system; Navigating was characterized by structural obstacles, a fragmented support system and wishes for help; while Docking was characterized by experiences of finding help. For the purpose of confirmability and usefulness, it is essential to validate and understand if the model can be applied to other settings and contexts—for example, whether the model is consistent with the experiences of help-seeking by young people in other countries. Therefore, the aim of this study was twofold, firstly to map the published literature on young people’s experiences of seeking help for mental health problems and secondly to validate whether the previously published Lost in Space model was adaptable as a theoretical model of the help-seeking process described in the included articles in this scoping review.

A scoping review was deemed the most preferable approach to responding to this broad area of interest [ 16 ]. Scoping reviews maintain a broad window for inclusion of studies of a range of types and levels of quality [ 17 ]. Our scoping review protocol was developed using the scoping review methodological framework proposed by Arksey and and O’Malley, entailing five framework stages. The framework was further developed by Levac, with a qualitative elaboration of the material [ 17 , 18 ]. These stages provide a clear sequential order in which to identify and collect studies, chart the data and report results, and the scoping review protocol was used for guiding the research.

2.1. Stage 1: Identifying the Research Question

A multidisciplinary research team with experience of health science research, including public health, nursing, and youth research was assembled to discuss and clarify the scope of inquiry and identify research questions. The target population of interest was defined as young people (ages 11–25) with experience of mental health problems, and experience of help-seeking in that regard. Mental health problems were defined as commonly experienced problems of depression or anxiety, as well as behavioural and emotional problems. Considering the concept of help-seeking, the term is used to understand the delay of care and to explore possible pathways for mental health promotion. For this study, help-seeking was defined as seeking and/or accessing professional help for mental health problems. Conceptually, help-seeking was regarded as a process influenced by social, psychological and contextual factors [ 12 ]. The research questions for this study were (1) to map general characteristics of published literature focusing on the young people’s experiences of seeking help for mental health problems, and (2) to explore how the previously published theoretical model Lost in Space could be further refined and complemented via an abductive approach, drawing the final set of categories and themes informed by the papers reviewed in this study.

2.2. Stage 2: Identifying Relevant Studies

A search strategy was developed in collaboration with a librarian to develop search terms using subject heading terms adapted to each of the three included databases: Medline/PubMed, PsycINFO and CINAHL. The search terms for the target population were adolescents, young and emerging adults; for the health outcome, they were mental health, depression, anxiety, and for the concept of interest, the term was help-seeking. Other criteria were limiting searches to studies written in English, and studies being published between 2010 and 2020 due to rapidly evolving research and policy changes in this area as well as the increased rates of mental health problems among young people. The searches were conducted during summer 2020. See Table S1 (Supplementary Materials) for the full search strategy.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

Studies were eligible for inclusion if they investigated help-seeking among young people with mental health problems aged between 11 and 25. Only studies that specifically investigated young people’s own perspectives of experiencing or having experienced mental health problems and help-seeking were included. Since the intention was to understand help-seeking among young people with common mental health problems, studies on particular target groups or populations were excluded, such as studies on specific treatment interventions. Likewise, studies focusing on help-seeking attitudes or potential help-seeking intentions of general populations without personal experience of mental health help-seeking were excluded. Studies had to specifically focus on adolescents or young people; thus, studies with a more population-based perspective, or encompassing wider age groups, were excluded. Theses were not included as it was assumed that any material within a thesis on help-seeking, that otherwise fitted the inclusion criteria, would appear as published articles. Comments, editorials, consensus statements and other opinion-based papers were excluded, along with studies solely exploring the perspectives of others, other than the help-seekers themselves (e.g., families, helpers, professionals, etc.).

2.3. Stage 3: Study Selection

All identified studies from the searches were imported to the management reference tool EndNote, version 20.1, and duplicates were removed. Screening was carried out with a sequential, stepped approach and an iterative process between the authors of the study [ 18 ]. In the first step of study selection, titles and periodically abstracts were screened by KHW, who discarded obviously irrelevant studies based on the exclusion criteria. In the second step of study selection, abstracts of the remaining studies were screened independently by three of the authors (KHW, PS and MN) to determine eligibility based on the defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. Disagreements between the authors were discussed with a fourth author (JN) until consensus was reached. The third step required KHW to examine the full-text of the remaining articles to determine eligibility, subsequently discussing the articles with all authors. A PRISMA diagram ( Figure 1 ) details the screening process with number of papers retrieved and selection of the included studies.

Article search and selection process—PRISMA diagram.

2.4. Stage 4: Charting the Data

Data charting was conducted in accordance with scoping review standards using a template that was developed for the extraction of information from each study regarding the following: authorship, year of publication, journal, source of origin, design, population and age group, aims of the study, methodology and important results [ 17 ]. A descriptive, numerical summarization was made, presenting the extent, nature and scope of included studies [ 18 ], see Table S2 (Supplementary Materials) for the full bibliographic information of the included studies.

2.5. Stage 5: Collating, Summarizing and Reporting Results

A qualitative thematic analysis was conducted to examine and aggregate the findings from the help-seeking process, as depicted in the included studies [ 18 ]. For the thematic analysis, an abductive approach was taken [ 19 ], based on the previous Lost in Space model [ 15 ]. According to such an approach, hypotheses can be explicated through deduction and verified through induction. Abduction thus means that new explanations are based on background theories and, whilst taking empirical material and restrictions into account, may lead to elaborated knowledge [ 19 ].

The analysis began with reading the findings in the included articles several times, then identifying and inductively coding text and quotes [ 20 ] in relation to young people’s experiences of seeking help for mental health problems. In this phase, data were inductively scrutinized to discover experiences, expressions and perspectives, keeping codes close to the data; for example, the text ‘Some young people reported that discussing uncomfortable emotions was unfamiliar’ was coded as the theme Unfamiliarity. The deductive process followed, in which the theoretical model Lost in Space was employed. It describes help-seeking among young people with mental health problems in a Swedish context [ 15 ]. A categorization matrix was developed based on the model, emanating from the original subcategories and categories, the themes within the subcategories and the properties of themes. The deductive process in the analysis involved going back to the data and placing the inductively derived codes into themes and subcategories of the theoretical model. All themes from the original model were found through coding the analysed articles. Codes from the new material that did not match the original theoretical model subcategories contributed with new aspects to existing themes of the model and, in some cases, generated new themes, thereby broadening the understanding of help-seeking. In one instance, the name of one subcategory was altered to reflect new material. KWH performed the data analysis and, to enhance the quality and validity of the analysis, the data analysis was discussed continuously with all authors.

3.1. Mapping the Characteristics of Published Literature

In total, 1540 articles were identified as potentially relevant records, after duplicates were removed through the database searches. After the first screening of title and abstract, 1207 articles were excluded on the basis of age, format type, content (i.e., not dealing with help-seeking), focusing on specific populations or not being based on a user perspective. In the second round of screening, another 243 articles were excluded due to the eligibility criteria. In the third round of screening, the remaining 90 articles were reviewed in full-text and of these 12 articles met the full set of eligibility criteria.

The characteristics of the included studies are described in Table S2 (Supplementary Materials) . Seven articles were published between 2010 and 2015, and five after 2016. The designs were mostly qualitative, with individual interviews ( n = 9) and focus groups ( n = 7). Seven articles employed a combination of methods (for example, mixed methods), and two articles included information from surveys. The focus of articles covered: social and organizational factors impacting help-seeking, functional concerns, attitudes towards computerized mental health support, attitudes to consulting primary care, perceptions and help-seeking behaviours in schools, exploration and identification of barriers and facilitators in general populations with and without previous experience of mental health support, barriers and facilitators in male groups, links between masculinity and help-seeking, comparisons of groups’ help-seeking strategies and descriptions of experiences, self-management and help-seeking. The recruitment of participants varied, utilising educational settings ( n = 4), youth mental health services ( n = 2), community websites ( n = 1), primary care ( n = 1), youth services ( n = 2), previous participation in longitudinal studies ( n = 2) and community samples ( n = 3). Four articles focused specifically on young males, and four on barriers to help-seeking. Three articles were set in the USA, one in Canada, three in Australia and five in Europe. The age range, 11–25, was seen in a variation of age clusters, with the smallest age range being two years (ages 20–22) and the largest 13 years (ages 12–25); the mean age range covered was six years.

3.2. Examination of the Help-Seeking Process from the Perspectives of Young People

The findings from this examination showed a high level of agreement with the theoretical model Lost in Space. Overall, the results showed that help-seeking was a dynamic and psychosocial process without sequentially fixed stages, where young people expressed an unfamiliarity with, insecurity about and lack of knowledge of mental health issues, a longing for self-reliance and, in some contexts, a presence of stigma. Young people did not consider the support structures to be responsive or accessible. Below, Figure 2 outlines the examination of the help-seeking process from the perspectives of young people. It includes confirmed content of the old model, new content derived from the analysed articles, and elaborations according to the abductive method. The ‘number of meaning units’ refers to coded material in the analysed articles. ‘Original’ refers to subcategories and themes from the Lost in Space model, where findings were corroborated by codes from the analysed articles (‘confirmed content’), other elements that emerged showed further dimensions of experiences that contributed to new perspectives of established subcategories in the model (‘new content’), and some themes that emerged in the analysis were not readily encompassed within the subcategories in the original model (‘new’) (see Figure 2 ).

Examination of the help-seeking process from young people’s perspectives.

3.2.1. Drifting

Drifting, the initial category of the Lost in Space model, encompassed a general feeling of unfamiliarity, lack of knowledge, trivialising oneself and problems due to insecurity often by normalizing and minimizing one’s experiences. Young people’s voices in the analysed articles corroborated Drifting well, through similar expressions and experiences.

Fumbling in Life

In the original model, Fumbling in life encompassed themes of unfamiliarity, insecurity and trivialisation. Likewise, young people in the analysed articles expressed unfamiliarity with both mental health problems and not recognizing oneself. Lack of knowledge was frequently described both with regard to communicating, distinguishing and assessing emotions but also regarding where and when to seek help, leading to a sense of insecurity. Because of this insecurity, young people practised trivialisation, trying to make their problems smaller or unimportant. They also had the impression and fear that their problems would not be sufficient to receive support. In some of the analysed articles, trivialisation was presented as a rational strategy, enabling young people to downplay their problems and rationalizing not actively dealing with them or approaching others for help, whereas, in the original model, trivialisation was carried out due to a sense of insecurity. In this section, no conceptual changes to the original model are suggested.

In the original model, Struggling was characterized by simultaneous descriptions of mental health problems and incessant attempts and strategies to feel better, ambivalence and a longing for self-reliance. These themes re-appeared in the included articles. Mental health problems were described by the participants as emotional problems, panic attacks, sadness, self-harm, anxiety and lack of motivation. Within Struggling in the original model, young people usually referred to mental health problems as being something “within” (internal) rather than originating “outside” (global). However, in several of the analysed articles, the mental health problems were attributed to something “outside”. Hence, young people also related mental health problems to relationships, stress and risk-taking behaviour.

Themes on endeavouring strategies trying to deal with mental health problems were common in the included studies, as was also the case in the Lost in Space model, pointing to the more-or-less continual and relentless attempts and strategies young people performed in order to deal with their problems. Although it was proposed by young people in individual studies that seeking help requires effort, lack of effort was not a dominant issue for young people in either the original model or in most analysed articles. In some articles, an in-depth exploration of the strategies employed was undertaken, according to having an ‘approach’ or ‘avoidant’ character, or gendered differences, adding to the variation in strategies, whereas in the model, an abundance of strategies was ascertained; however, the type of strategy was not explored. Denial was a common strategy in both the original model and in the included articles. In the Lost in Space model, this was described as “shutting off”, with the intent of ignoring feelings and problems. This strategy was directed towards oneself: wanting to manage things, being strong and coping. In some of the analysed articles, denial was presented as relating to a sense of embarrassment, or as being done in order to protect others. Several reasons were attributed to this phenomenon: that young people did not want to trouble others, did not want to burden or alarm others, and did not trust others. In the model, reasons for denial were differentiated by a sense of responsibility, enacted by, for example, not sharing information with family and friends. Withholding information thus seemed to relate to aspects additional to a sense of responsibility and self-reliance.

A frequent theme in both the original model and in the findings from the included articles was self-reliance. Statements of wanting to be strong, trying to cope on one’s own, not sharing information and an elevated sense of responsibility to manage one’s life and mental health problems were evident. Ambivalence as a theme recurred throughout the material, in both the included studies and the original model. Young people expressed simultaneous and contradictory feelings and thoughts towards both themselves and their problems, others and help-seeking per se. They were often hesitant to seek help, whilst at the same time expressing a need and a longing for help.

The analysis of the included articles suggested no major conceptual changes to the original model, although the themes Endavouring strategies and Mental health problems are both elaborated.

Reaching a Point of No Return

Within Reaching a point of no return in the original model, young people expressed deterioration and a reaching out for support, often with the help of others. In Lost in Space, others were called ’catalysts’, showcasing their importance in actually initiating a help-seeking process. Within the analysed articles, important others were consistently brought up by the young people, with examples of others coaching, supporting, guiding and, in some instances, taking control of the help-seeking process. A new perspective in the included articles was a negative perception of control, and how others exerted control over them, compelling them to seek help. While this aspect of negative control did not emerge in the original model, an elaboration of the model may expand on the various functions of the important others, e.g., by dividing them into controllers vs. supporters. The other theme in this subcategory, deterioration, was brought up in several articles, as in the Lost in Space model. This indicated a worsening of symptoms and a decreased ability to function. Young people described not leaving the house, escalated behavioural problems, self-harm and suicide attempts, or ‘having a melt-down’ as triggers for seeking help. Young people also described how their problems were ‘revealed’ and others became aware of their problems, which in turn led to seeking help.

The included articles emphasise that seeking help is often a long process that takes place during a prolonged time-span. Therefore, in this section, a change of title of the subcategory Reaching a point of no return, to Transitioning towards decision, is suggested.

3.2.2. Navigating

The category Navigating depicted attempts of trying to find support, personal reflections, hopes and longings and wrestling with structural barriers. Expressions from young people in the analysed articles conformed well with the subcategories Trying to dock and Wrestling with structure.

Trying to Dock

This subcategory in the Lost in Space model entailed descriptions of personal reflections, hopes, longings and disappointment when trying to seek support. All themes from the original model were exemplified in the included articles. Hopes for help, as well as being safe, noticed and understood, were common in the included articles, as were accounts of the opposite, feeling unsupported. Miscommunication while not being understood or listened to also appeared in both materials as did accounts of being treated like a child and not taken seriously, thus containing references to issues of power. Several analysed articles contained descriptions by young people on how support was perceived as impersonal and instrumental rather than person-centred. This added aspects of negative references to professionalism and reliance on medication. Young people expressed the importance of reframing negative and medical terminology in positive and informal terms. Both materials contained descriptions of young people feeling unsupported, which led to continued and continual efforts of seeking support. A new theme, trust, was identified in the thematic analysis from descriptions of lack of confidence in treatment, and how familiarity facilitated help-seeking. A lack of trust was depicted as arising from limited prior contact, from anxiety about seeking help, from concerns about professional competence and from negative perceptions of professionals. Within the theme of trust in the articles, concerns about confidentiality and parental involvement surfaced, whereas, in the original model, these concerns were interpreted as structural obstacles.

Common themes in the articles were stigma and shame, whereas in the original model, this was not pervasive. The included articles relayed young people’s strong sense of shame about seeking help. They perceived it as a display of weakness. Fear of social consequences, ridicule and a longing to fit in led young people to describe a feeling of shame or embarrassment, and to having thoughts of what others would think and say. They also made efforts to conceal both mental health problems and help-seeking. Articles focusing exclusively on males stressed the gendered aspect of this, claiming that this group was affected by masculine ideals of strength and autonomy, which hindered displays of weakness and prevented help-seeking. In the original model, some findings relating to this theme were described; however, the term stigma was never used. Instead, this was described in the subcategory Wrestling with structure, in relation to seeking support in school, with references of embarrassment and an undesirable show of weakness in front of peers.

In this section, the analysed articles provide more aspects on the Feeling unsupported and Miscommunication themes. The large presence of codes in the new material relating to Stigma and Trust suggests the incorporation of Stigma and Trust as unique themes into the model.

Wrestling with Structure

In both the original model and the analysed articles, there were multiple references to structural obstacles, such as access, waiting times, resources, continuity, inadequate chains of support, and lack of coordination between supporters. Young people voiced feelings of not being met by professionals in an appropriate and timely manner, and concerns about how they were passed on, being referred to other support structures, and how there was a perceived lack of resources, making access difficult. Help-seeking was described as inconsistent, with repeated attempts at initiating and discontinuing help. Young people in several articles, and the original model, expressed that primary care was not an option when seeking support. Primary care was regarded as handling physical health complaints and that its practitioners were not being skilled in mental health issues. Particularly for the ‘younger’ of the young people, expressions that primary care was not directed at their age group were voiced. The inadequate support services theme was thus corroborated by young people in other contexts.

Confidentiality and age issues were concerns for the young people, both within the original model and the thematic analysis, primarily relating to parental control and insight. Both materials contained descriptions of how young people assumed and were concerned that confidential information shared with professional supporters would be communicated to parents. In some articles, this was said to relate to the theme of trust; however, confidentiality was mainly related to being a minor lacking power. Young people also voiced that being a minor was as an obstacle for independently accessing help. Likewise, age was an issue for the ‘older’ young people, who reported feeling out-of-place at youth-specific services. In the original model, a sense of resignation, often related to difficulties accessing support and feeling unsupported, was evident. The included articles provided additional material relating to this, as a sense of powerlessness appeared in several subcategories, and in the process as a whole.

The analysis supported a clearer conceptual division between subcategories Wrestling with structure and Trying to dock in the model. The latter entailed primarily personal accounts and experiences, expressions of hopes, disappointments and recounts of feelings, and the former referred primarily to structural conditions. Recurring references in relation to powerlessness suggest this is elevated to a permeating theme, capturing young people’s experience of seeking help.

3.2.3. Docking

Docking in the original model contained references from young people to the subcategories Finding support and Changing as a person.

Finding Support

All original themes of the subcategory Finding support were found in the thematic analysis. In both the original model and the analysed articles, young people described experiences of being validated, accepted, recognized and listened to. The importance of the comfort of support and initial positive contact was stressed. Descriptions of good and bad supporters and preferences regarding, for example, gender and profession, were evident. Both materials contained descriptions of negative outcomes and unwanted consequences from having sought help; for example, in the original model, this was described as problems being exaggerated and social services becoming involved. In the analysed articles were descriptions of referrals to support services appearing as punitive rather than helpful. This subcategory also contained accounts in both the analysed articles and the original model of young people being disregarded and not being taken seriously.

In this section, no changes to the model are suggested.

Changing as a Person

In the original model, this subcategory described the consequences of successful help-seeking in the form of gaining knowledge and positive personal change. Young people in the original model stressed the positive aspects and changes after having experienced mental health problems. Some references were found in the articles with regard to this subcategory, with personal change depicted as finding a more positive outlook on life through one’s own determination and decisiveness.

In this section, the analysed articles provide more aspects on the theme Changing as a person, but no changes to the model are suggested.

Overall, the findings from the analysis aided in developing an elaborated model of help-seeking, Figure 3 . The overall notion of help-seeking as a fluid and dynamic process with the three categories Drifting, Navigating and Docking was reinforced.

Elaborated and further developed theoretical model of help-seeking among young people for mental health problems.

4. Discussion

This scoping review aimed to map published literature on young people’s experiences of seeking help for mental health problems, and to validate whether the previously published model Lost in Space was adaptable as a theoretical model of the help-seeking process. A high level of conformity was found between help-seeking as depicted by the original Lost in Space model and the analysed articles of this study. The analysis reinforced that help-seeking is to be regarded as a fluid and psychosocial process, often experienced by users as unfamiliar and obstacle-laden, tainted by feelings of powerlessness [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 ].

4.1. Discussion and Implications in Relation to the Original Model Lost in Space

After reviewing up-to-date literature on user perspectives of help-seeking for mental health problems among young people, it is clear that the depiction of the initial stage of help-seeking, as being characterized by a sense of drifting, was, to a large extent, corroborated from young people’s experiences described in the reviewed articles. Regardless of context, young people expressed a general feeling of unfamiliarity and a lack of knowledge, often coupled with a sense of insecurity, and trivialisation of experiences [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 ]. This was also supported by a large number of codes and expressions relating to the endeavouring strategies theme in an effort to be self-reliant [ 22 , 23 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 ]. This points to the more-or-less continual and relentless nature of the efforts of young people to deal with their problems. A strong wish for self-reliance was consistently stressed in the reviewed articles, with a large variation and number of strategies used to implement self-reliance and deal with mental health problems. Incorporating an elaboration regarding the characteristics of strategies—whether positive/negative, destructive/constructive or approach/avoidant strategies—would provide an additional perspective on how mental health is dealt with by young people. The reviewed articles confirmed that reaching a decision to seek help often takes place with the aid of others [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 29 , 31 , 32 ] and distinction between ‘controllers’ and ‘supporters’ in this regard may further elaborate the model. Re-naming of the subcategory Reaching a point of no return into Transitioning towards decision would reflect the transitional nature of the mental health help-seeking process.

The category Navigating, capturing both personal experiences and structural barriers, was well confirmed by the review. Reflections of not being met by professionals in an appropriate and timely manner, and observations of a perceived lack of resources making access difficult, surfaced in both the original model and the included articles [ 23 , 26 , 29 ]. Accounts of not being taken seriously, being treated like a child, not listened to and disregarded, indicating power-issues relating to the experiences of young people, as well as descriptions of inconsistent use of support, repeatedly initiating and discontinuing help, appeared in the original model as well as the included articles [ 22 , 26 , 28 , 29 ]. Stigma and Trust surfaced as new themes, and Stigma in particular appeared with a large number of codes in the analysed articles. Young people described a feeling of shame, embarrassment, thoughts of what others would think and say and various efforts to conceal both mental health problems and their help-seeking [ 21 , 22 , 23 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 31 ]. Several articles dealt exclusively with young men and boys, proposing that the reasons for not seeking help were strongly conditioned by gender, with masculine ideals of strength and autonomy acting as obstacles for help-seeking [ 21 , 23 , 28 , 31 ]. Similar findings emerged in the Lost in Space model, where issues of self-reliance, wanting to be strong, and shunning displays of weakness, were shared between participants, and were not gender specific. Cultural variations may account for this difference between studies and findings. This said, most participants in studies on help-seeking are female and the findings may translate poorly to other populations and contexts. Help-seeking is exceptionally low among boys and young men, which in itself calls for a focus on specific populations with particularly low help-seeking [ 33 , 34 ].

The latter part of the original model, Docking, was not as well corroborated through the analysis. There were few descriptions of actually finding support and even fewer of personal reflections on the effects of finding help [ 21 , 22 , 31 ]. It may be that research on the help-seeking process does not focus on support and is discontinued as soon as support is established, and aspects of this may be found in other literature on service utilization or treatment satisfaction. However, by dividing the help-seeking journey into smaller isolated fractions, focus on the process as a whole could be missed, resulting in a stunted model and less understanding of the help-seeking process. Overall, the included articles reinforced the model of help-seeking as a dynamic and psychosocial process, consisting of different stages but without being sequentially fixed.

4.2. Discussion and Implications in Practice

This review on help-seeking for common mental health problems included young people from the age of 11 to 25, thus also including young adults. The studies described in the included articles were based on varied recruitment strategies from different contexts. No specific patterns according to age or context could be discerned. The concerns voiced in the studies included themes on structural barriers of the support system, an unfamiliarity and lack of knowledge of mental health and the support system, and simultaneously, a wish for self-reliance, suggesting possible strategies for meeting the help-seeking needs of young people. Although this study aimed to include articles focusing on groups that were wide enough to be defined as population-based, the focus of the included articles tended to be on particular populations, stressing the vulnerability and poor help-seeking of one particular group. Thus, the research had ethno-centric tendencies, whereas there were large overlaps and resemblances of experiences by young people in the help-seeking process regardless of contexts. The attribution of non-help-seeking to stigma and cultural norms amongst Black, Latino and Chinese American youth was observed by others, pointing to this being a more general, rather than group-specific phenomenon [ 32 ].

Structural factors, and how young people experience the support system, play an important role in the help-seeking process. Despite different contexts, young people expressed similar concerns relating to issues of availability and accessibility. There were views that waiting times were too long, resources were too few, and in some contexts, that costs and distances posed problems [ 21 , 23 , 25 , 26 , 28 , 29 ]. Other research has shown that there is a perceived inaccessibility of the support system across different groups of young people regarding resources, entry requirements and coordination between services [ 13 ]. Structural obstacles stretch over different geographical and socio-economic backgrounds at the macro level, with high-income countries still showing substantial delays and poor help-seeking rates for young people [ 14 , 35 ]. Thus, even in favourable circumstances, young people perceive structural barriers, pointing to how the support system does not accommodate the fluid and changeable nature of help-seeking. Young people regard mental health as a complex social and relational matter [ 36 ]. They often present with diagnostically confusing symptoms, and support systems that are traditionally organized according to medical specialities may not meet the needs of young people with common mental health problems [ 37 ]. Integrated youth centres, focusing on meeting young people’s needs in one place through multidisciplinary support with consideration of the context, show promising results [ 38 , 39 ]. In comparison to traditional support, which is by definition siloed and often entails entry requirements according to diagnostic thresholds, integrated youth-friendly services seem to increase help-seeking and access to support, even among groups that are usually hard to reach [ 33 , 39 ]. Studies in a Swedish context have pointed out that youth health clinics providing services to build upon with multi-professional teams and expertise on mental health are available throughout Sweden [ 40 ].

Young people reported a lack of knowledge on mental health and the support system, leading to a sense of insecurity and possibly a delay of help-seeking. Improved health literacy among young people may facilitate help-seeking through mechanisms of awareness of service availability and symptom recognition [ 13 ]. However, improved help-seeking and mental health among young people may require more than only improved knowledge. Previous reviews have, for example, shown past positive experiences and outcomes of help-seeking and positive contacts with support professionals to be facilitators for seeking help [ 4 , 8 ]. At the same time, a preference for self-reliance when facing mental health problems is consistently reported, with this being particularly prominent in studies with participants having previous experience of mental health problems and mental health support, contradicting the findings of past experiences facilitating help-seeking [ 8 , 23 ]. Young women in particular seem to have poor expectations regarding therapeutic outcomes, signalling a lack of trust in professional supporters, with treatment being perceived as impersonal and protocol-driven [ 23 ]. The results of this study identified the importance of supporters’ ability to meet young people responsively, using a person-centred approach. Young people felt more comfortable when the supporters did not use medical language and emphasized the importance of using positive and informal terms for improving communication between the young person and the supporter. Other studies have confirmed this finding, underlining the importance of having young staff who are skilled, respectful, welcoming, and allow for participation and shared decision-making [ 39 ].

With this review showing how young people experience mental health help-seeking as a psychosocial and fluid process, often with lack of knowledge and a sense of insecurity, prompt consideration of the organization of present support systems is needed. Young people need to be met in a person-centred and flexible manner. Perhaps, this is where the greatest effort is needed, addressing issues of power from the perspectives of young people, improving opportunities for personal self-reliance and personalized support.

5. Methodological Considerations

This review has some limitations. The choice of databases and keywords was developed in accordance with an experienced health literature librarian; however, making a choice always entails the risk that some information may have been missed. Other databases and different keywords may have produced different results. The criteria for including articles were that they should deal with the direct perspectives of young people who had experienced mental health problems and/or help-seeking. Whilst excluding those who had no experience of help-seeking (thus all articles dealing with intentions to seeking help only) might have been a clear-cut and easy choice, that would also have meant that we excluded those with experience of mental health problems who had not sought help for various reasons; thus, avoidance is also a perspective that is worth taking into consideration.

We aimed to include studies focusing on groups wide enough to be defined as population-based; nevertheless, these still often utilized an ethnocentric perspective, such as having a particular ethnic descent. This automatically raises the issue of generalizability and transferability. It was evident that studies consistently focused on particular populations, stressing the vulnerability and poor help-seeking of this particular group. However, similar claims kept reappearing, regardless of which particular group was being studied. A noteworthy phenomenon is that all included articles were published in Western countries. This also limits the transferability of the findings, as young people around the world may be situated in significantly different contexts.

In order to limit bias, the work was conducted by alternating methods of individual and joint reviews. However, subjectivity is a relevant issue that the authors of this review could not completely avoid.

6. Conclusions and Implication

The field of help-seeking among young people for mental health problems is receiving growing attention in research and academic literature. However, this review shows that there is substantial heterogeneity among studies with regard to methods, populations and how help-seeking is investigated. In qualitative literature exploring user perspectives, help-seeking is depicted as a fluid, dynamic and psychosocial process, validating the theoretical model of Lost in Space. Important findings include the presence of stigma, a lack of knowledge of mental health issues, a longing for self-reliance and a sense of powerlessness expressed by young people in various contexts and countries. Paying attention to these findings would imply acknowledging young people’s sense of feeling lost, making support services more flexible and person-centred.

Acknowledgments

Caroline Karlsson greatly contributed with the graphical model.

Supplementary Materials

The following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/article/10.3390/ijerph19031430/s1 , Table S1, full search strategy, Table S2, characteristics of included studies.

Author Contributions

All authors (K.H.W., M.N., J.M.N. and P.S.) made significant contributions to the original paper. K.H.W., M.N., J.M.N. and P.S. together identified the research question and designed the study. The data search was conducted by K.H.W., and stepped screening was performed by K.H.W., M.N., J.M.N. and P.S. In addition, K.H.W. drafted the manuscript and M.N., J.M.N. and P.S. provided critical revision of the paper in terms of important intellectual content. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

This study did not require ethical clearance.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Who are the youth of today generation unlimited, we have approached several young people to understand their vision and how they look at the society they live in and make it their own, from each one perspective.

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Being young is a synonym of change, progress and future. Being young is, ultimately, facing challenges and creating or recreating a space for future full development. It means turning problems into opportunities and solutions and being the driving force of society. 

Today, on the International Youth Day 2020 , we celebrate their visions and their choices, we celebrate “Youth Engagement for Global Action”, a slogan that seeks to highlight the ways young people engage at the local, national and global levels. 

Global challenges, like the coronavirus pandemic or climate change, as well as local issues, will have an effect on the future. It is time to see the extent to which this affects the youngest population and to advance solutions. People aged 14 to 29 years represent the largest generation in history.

We reached out to several Cuban youngsters to know about their visions, their roles in society as individuals and part of the population. From their individuality’s point of view, these young people look at the society in which they have to live and how to make it their own. They were posed with two questions, to which they had shared responses. What do you think is the role of young people these days? What are you doing from your position to help young people?

The group of people that goes from 14 to 29 years of age constitute the largest generation in history

Magdany Acosta Gallardo, 18 years old

Young people not only represent the future of our country, we are one of society’s main agents of change and progress. We have a great effect on economic development too. In this stage of our lives, we build many social relationships and develop a personality that defines us as a new generation. What we do when we become adults depends on how we think and act today. 

Yaicelín Palma Tejas, 27 years old

Young people only have one role and is the same they have always had. It does not change, because their role is actually changing everything, doing things better than before and injecting them with joy and energy.  

Being a journalist, I think my contribution as a champion of young people is to highlight our role as agents of change. As a young citizen, I join every call for autonomy and emancipation, which are challenges for everyone across the globe.

Carlos Alejandro Sánchez, 22 years old

I think young people play a crucial role today no matter the society they live in. We are the ones transforming, consciously or not, our reality, either at the university, at our workplace or in other spaces, and we do it by contributing with a new and updated vision to daily activities. It is our responsibility to make society evolve and stand up for our opinions in the best possible way.   

The opportunity of appearing in the media through radio or television every day, in addition to my presence in social networks, which are so popular nowadays, has undeniably helped me to convey messages and show my way of thinking to many more people than usual. Being able to have a positive influence on my generation and on others through my words and actions makes me very proud. For example, hosting a news programme or a show aimed at a young audience is a huge responsibility, but it has allowed me to prove that no matter how young you are, if you want something and are willing to fight for it, you can do it because everything in life is about perseverance and attitude.

Roxana Broche, 25 years old

Young people are the cornerstone of society and represent a generational renewal. This is something that has been said so many times, but the reality is that young people are the ones in charge of building a legacy.

As an actress, I think I can share my life and professional experiences to help and inspire young people, without saturating them with the message. The more one talks about life experiences, the more knowledge one can offer, and I think that is a key element, sharing knowledge so that other people can reuse it.

Anthony Bravo, 20 years old

I am lucky to be a young singer, but you also have a big responsibility when you have a voice; that is why my work at this time has been focused on conveying messages of wellbeing and trying to reproduce behaviours that contribute to personal growth which, in turn, drives a collective creation based on principles that put the fate of society before the fate of individuals. The best way to contribute with something positive to the community is to ensure our own wellbeing; humanity starts with the family.

Through my music, my lyrics, also as a design student and even as an active subject in our country, I’ve taken on as my duty to be a spokesman for ideas that I think are useful. I have put my time and ideas at the service of my generation.

Luis Daniel del Riego Carralero. 16 years old

At our age, our role in the world is to carry out some important functions for our society and eventually become responsible adults, committed to our time. For example, there are young people who are leading and paralyzing the world in a long fight against the lack of action of some to avoid global warming. We have proven that we can offer a better future and that we are willing to fight against all odds to achieve that.

Leslie Alonso Figueroa, 27 years old

Young people have the challenge, without forgetting the past, to fight for a fair world. Phobias and discrimination, male chauvinism, gender violence and racism are some of the challenges to overcome. Young people, from their area of actions, study or workplace must fight together in the ultimate pursuit of societies of rights, with everyone’s help and for everyone’s good.  

My job as a communicator and a professor is marked by the challenges of the world’s youth which are our challenges as well.  We are all living and coexisting in the same place where forces such as climate change or the new coronavirus make us rethink our strategies and roles to build the future we need.

Harold Naranjo, 20 years old

In my opinion, the role of young people nowadays is to be very productive and, even though there are some who may not find a specific purpose, I’m sure there are many who are able to fulfil their dreams, accompanied by music, dance, performing, communication and other artistic manifestations. All that is what I can see in a place like the Centre A+ Espacios Adolescentes, a programme that provides the opportunity to explore creative capacities and to which I feel lucky to belong!

In my case I had the chance to host radio shows as a way to reflect the different concerns of boys and girls who feel identified with the contents because we address topics of interest and skills that are useful to adolescents, young people and families in general to build together the society we want.  

Randol Betancourt Milian. 16 years old

Young people represent an important human resource within society since they act like agents of social change, economic development and progress.

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Essay on Young Generation for Students (915 Words)

February 19, 2018 by Study Mentor Leave a Comment

Table of Contents

Young Generation Definition 

The words ‘young’ and ‘generation’ separately does not mean much but when we put these words together i.e., ‘young generation’, the meaning changes completely.

According to the Oxford Dictionary , young generation means – “the next or rising generation, especially viewed in contrast to one’s own, and often with (sometimes disapproving) reference to the attitudes and values associated with it”.

Young generation refers to the youth of our nation. In terms of human beings, by young generation we mean the people who are young or have not existed for that long or in other words teenagers.

The word ‘young’ means being in its early stage of life and the word ‘generation’ means people of approximately the same age.

Characteristics

The noticeable characteristics of the young generation can be divided into two types –

• Positive &

By positive characteristics we can say that as they are young they can be shaped in any way i.e., in terms of good and bad. They are also fiercely loyal to the people they trusts.

They are not afraid of speaking their mind and are very idealistic person. Now by negative characteristics we can say that they are quite immature and acts emotionally.

They are easily influenced by people and most of the times can not differentiate between good or bad people as well as things.

Another important negative characteristic is that they have limited knowledge of the world and they tend to act upon their emotions based on that limited knowledge.

Generation gap

Generation gap is the gap between today’s youth and their parents or in another words the difference between the thoughts and opinion of today’s youth with their parents.

Generation gap does not mean the difference in the age of two people; it means the difference in two people thoughts.

As time passes by, the rule and regulation of the world changes. The parents often cannot keep up with these changes.

The youth also refuses to understand their parent’s point of views and which lead to the misunderstanding between the parent and their child.

Another main reason for the generation gap is communication gap between parents and today’s youth as parents are busy working and the youth is busy with the electronic gadgets that are given to them by their parents.

This generation gap can be overcome by the respective parties if they communicate among themselves and try to understand each other point of views.

Moral values of today’s generation

Moral values are the ideals and principles that one follows to distinguish the right from the wrong. These ideals that one follows helps in building up that person’s character.

In today’s world the word moral have lost its meaning. The youth does not have the same moral values that their parents have.

Morals are what made these society and these morals only help the people to follow certain set of rules and regulations.

However, as the youth has almost forgot about the meaning of the word moral, they tend to act differently which sometime is not accepted by the society.

Morals also help people reach their goals. As the future of the world is in the shoulder of today’s youth, their lack of moral values can affect the future quite badly and the affect will be disastrous.

Moral values are the reason why people have self control and because of lack of morals in the young generation, the lack of self control is becoming more and more prominent because of which the youth fails to differentiate good from the bad.

Moral values are extremely important and the lack of it in the youth has became a matter of concern for the society.

To improve the society the youth should learn about their mistakes and take action against it and it cannot happen until and unless they have a set of morals.

Impact of social media on young generation

Social media is now an important part of young generation. Social media’s impact is huge on young generation as the young generation made social media their number one priority.

Most of the youth socialize everyday through the social media. Social media has both positive as well as negative affects on the young generation.

As positive affects, social media helps the youth in studies as all most all kinds of answers can be found here, it also helps in spreading awareness to the people, it helps people to communicate with each other, helps people to find jobs etc.

Just like the positive effect, social media has negative effects also like addiction to social media, lack of privacy, a waste of time, misinformation, falling in traps laid by people etc.

Social media has become useful as well as dangerous to the society. It depends on the youth that how they want to use the social media.

It has become a headache for the parents as most of the time they thinks that their children are misusing the social media which leads to misunderstandings between parents and their children.

The youth should learn about stuff before getting involved in them. It depends on the youth that how they want to use the social media.

Young generation or the youth is the future of the world. Parents should divert the youth’s energy into something useful so that they do not misuse that.

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Home — Essay Samples — Information Science and Technology — Internet — The Impact Of Internet On Younger Generations

The Impact of Internet on Younger Generations

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Mental health crisis among teenagers requires bold action, but experts say community support is vital in fostering resilience

Whether it's in the suburbs, out bush or on country, today's teens are grappling with a mental health crisis. Experts say big, bold changes are needed, but what do we all do in the meantime? (Spoiler alert: These stories have a happy ending.)

What do you really know about teenagers, apart from once being one?

As body and brain evolves (and hormones emerge) teenagers shed that smaller person.

They do this while facing a different sort of childhood today — one that's uniquely interconnected and often isolating all at the same time.

This also brings fears for the future.

But this is no snowflake generation. These kids are not all moody moments and dancing for a like on their phone. They also navigate a combination of challenges most of us have never experienced.

Public health data reveals a jump in rates of psychological distress for teenagers in the past decade — as well as self-harm.

The "C" word gets thrown around a lot these days, but in this instance, it's hard to deny. It's an alarming situation all experts we spoke to agree on: this  generation of teens is grappling with a mental health "crisis" .

No two stories (or teenagers) are alike, of course. For Pacey, Bathsheba and Katiana, where they live, their upbringing and even their gender impact their mental health.

Small city, big heart

Pacey lives in Devonport, in the north-west of Tasmania. It's a port city, and he's lived here his whole life.

He's only 19, but has already been through a lot.

Like almost half of all young Australians aged 15 to 25, Pacey has experienced psychological distress.

It's a term used to describe those broader symptoms of stress, depression or anxiety which can lead to mental health disorders.

We meet his dad Braden at an old fibro house in a quiet, elevated cul-de-sac.

Pacey's out of school now, working as an apprentice mechanic and living at home.

There's a real warmth about them. A vulnerability, too. They've been through stuff, and together.

We start with his childhood, where it often begins.

Nothing remarkably unique, but painful all the same: watching Mum and Dad split up and feeling caught up by all of that.

"It hurt, and as a kid, you open your eyes up to the world.

"Your home life is falling apart. You're growing up and seeing the divorce of two people you're looking up to. Your whole world falls apart.

"You hold these things on top of your shoulders … it becomes a burden."

At the age of nine or 10, Pacey says his mental health was "at its worst".

Not only was he grappling with the divorce, but his "best mate" and pop died.

"It was a good relationship, it was tight ... and his love for Holden was an undying love," Pacey says.

"As a kid, it was a grounding more than anything."

Pacey credits these difficulties — or as the experts call it, childhood adversities — as the catalysts for his downward spiral.

As the Murdoch Children's Research Institute's Harriet Hiscock explains, things that happen in our younger years — and the way we're supported or deal with them — can be "very complex", and can have a huge impact on teenage mental health and wellbeing.

"There's going to be separation and divorce … but how it's done, and the support for parents and families to do it, is often the key ingredient," the paediatrician and researcher says.

The loss of someone close  — and not always a parent — has a huge effect on a child's resilience, she adds.

Pacey says watching his parents' relationship fall apart and losing his pop was a "big change of tides".

"It shot me down heaps as a kid," he says.

"It all got tied up into one: depression and anxiety and anger."

Pacey was stuttering at this point, but the real red flag came when he started feeling physically sick every day.

"What made me think about things was spewing before going to school. Bottling up certain things," he says.

"Realising emotions that you should only realise as an adult."

In grade eight, the depression kicked in. Pacey saw a psychiatrist who monitored his brainwaves.

He says "one side was peaking, and the other wasn't," which explained the chronic anxiety that ultimately led to depression.

"Understanding what was going on helped," Pacey says.

And with the latest HILDA data suggesting that mental health improves with age, experts are saying there's something going on at this stage of a teenager's life that we need to help them with.

"I think we're facing a genuine mental health crisis in children and young people in Australia and in other developed countries," says Professor Ian Hickie, a global expert on mental health from the Brain and Mind Centre.

"We don't quite understand how all these things are at play. But we do see worsening mental health for young people, and we need to take action right now."

What we noticed about Pacey was his vulnerability, a tug-of-war between the kid he's always been and the new adult he's becoming.

And despite the unconditional love and support from his dad, his fight wasn't over yet.

He had some "good" friends in high school. But some, he says, weren't so "true".

"It was a big scene of substance abuse: codeine, weed, alcohol, anything you could get your hands on," he says.

Passed around at school, and "adventuring" with it himself, he says he started "just acting like a dickhead" and "lost a bit" of himself in the process.

"It was a dark place, with depression and anxiety," he says.

"I didn't want to do talk therapy. I thought I'd cop it on the chin, do it in my own time.

"Drugs took the edge off. Overthinking stopped when I was on the drugs.

"I go [to a party], I crushed up some pills -- it was codeine — downed 16 lines of it. And I just thought, 'f*** it'."

Pacey says he didn't think about how many pills he took, or the bottle of vodka he drank, only the "numb effect" it created.

"And yeah, I woke up in a hospital bed with Dad to the side of me, bawling his f***ing eyes out, and that's when it all changed.

"What I also realised is that I had people that I classed as best mates, taking photos of me 'dead' on the chair. So that hurt.

"It did end up on the socials that night."

Pacey learnt something valuable — who you surround yourself with can make all the difference.

"Big thing is your peers. You've gotta protect your energy, watch who you're around," he says.

"When my mates posted it online it made me feel very hollow… very f***ing hollow. Very lost.

"It had me thinking about a lot of things … about who's the real mates and who's gonna care at the end of the day.

"When that stuff happened, it was a massive f***ing backstab."

Today, Pacey tries to stay off the "big platforms with all of the bullshit" (i.e. most social media) because it "just floods your head".

"I just got into psychology, and seeking things deep within the brain, how you can actually change things: food, meditation, anything," he says.

Making music helps.

It's what experts refer to as "mastery" — something we can do (no trophy required) to feel good about ourselves.

"I was putting down art, it wasn't just words," Pacey says.

"It wasn't slam poetry, it was rap. It had a rhythm."

"That's when I really started to open my heart up I guess, and find that love for myself."

He also bought an acoustic guitar, and he's been slowly building up the confidence to freestyle in front of anyone.

But more than that, it's the people in his world — his "true" friends, his family and those people in his life who build him up.

This sense of connection is described by Professor Hickie as key.

He says it's everyone's responsibility to take care of teenagers.

"Part of coping and part of the role of distress is to engage others and to make it clear to yourself, 'OK, I've got to do something here. I've got to take action, not just sit here in helplessness'," Professor Hickie says.

Whether it's mucking around in the backyard with his dad and his little brother Rory, or on a joy ride with his mates, Pacey says he can open up more now about his mental health because his dad was honest and open to him about his own struggles in life.

Dad's advice to Pacey wasn't simply about hanging out with the "right" kids. It was about being there for his mates who might be in trouble one day: just to talk to them.

"[Anxiety and depression] can destroy a lot, but having Dad there to express [it] was a big thing. Dad would pick up on things," Pacey says.

"It made me closer to my mates. Gave me a different outlook on the world."

There might not be too much to do around the area, but Pacey says the gravel pit is their favourite local spot for a regular meet-up.

The boys will ask around, and someone — "whoever is up for it" — will be there.

"Most arvos we go for a drive," Pacey says.

"It builds your confidence.

"Community is always around — it's the culture. You've gotta feel it, right?"

We often hear of a young person's story "just beginning", but it feels like Pacey has already lived through a lot.

Resilience, connection and a sense of mastery or purpose in our lives — whatever that looks like — makes kids stronger.

"If I had just one message for adults, it would be to listen. Sit back, take a breath, listen. No matter what your kid's done," he says.

Young and proud

Katiana is only 16. Starting her senior year this year, and at a much different place in her life than Pacey. Katiana carries a quiet strength about her.

She lives in a small place called Fryerstown/Djaara country in Victoria's Goldfields region, just outside of Castlemaine.

She says it's a town "where everyone knows everyone, and with social media, everyone knows everyone".

She's also a proud Wadawurrung woman, which forms the backbone of her story.

For someone so young, this is a special relationship that means everything to her.

She feels the power and connection to this place when she's here.

We were lucky enough to meet Katiana in Ballarat on her country.

It's an important day for her, as she's preparing for a women's cleansing ceremony with her mob as part of the Treaty Day Out festival.

We ask if she's nervous.

"Not really, I'm more excited," she says.

She's been doing this since she was a little girl: preparing her body and her spirit with her mum and mob.

"[There's] a lot of excitement, and I feel very proud, too," she says.

"Like I always feel proud, when I do this. Because I know that some of my family couldn't do it, back in the day. Because of the Stolen Generation.

"So it does make you feel a little bit emotional, because I feel so privileged to be able to do it now."

We can see her confidence and enthusiasm build as the night goes on.

Katiana says that this connection to her culture, to her country, is also an "escape" from the difficulties she experiences at home — and the anxiety she's struggled with since she was a kid.

"It was hard to talk about how you feel, so many things were going on," she says.

"You couldn't just be the focus.

"Too much was happening around me."

In those moments of need, Katiana relied on her nan, her safe place. Someone she could receive "motherly affection" from.

"My mum was not too busy that she didn't care, but too busy that she literally couldn't give me that affection that I needed, that nurturing," she says.

Sometimes, the loss of her nan feels raw. Even six years on.

By the age of 12, Katiana says she was skipping school, smoking weed and drinking with some older cousins.

Life felt overwhelming, and it was at the height of lockdown, during the pandemic.

She knew she had to make changes.

"It was tricky. I just tried to spend as much time with my friends as I could without going into a trap where I was [still] smoking weed and doing all those things," she says.

"I just tried to really understand myself deeper. But even then, I'll still like doing other things because…I just hated everything about my life in that moment."

It was then that she was told she'd be heading off to an all-girls Indigenous boarding school. At first she was angry at her mum.

But today she is grateful she had a chance to prove to herself that she could cope with her feelings of fear, and achieve things she never thought were possible.

When she landed a leading role in the school's production and screening of the Sapphires, Katiana was in shock.

"It made me feel like I was top of the world and made me feel like I could do anything," she says.

"From thinking I was like, nothing, you know? Really bad mentally, useless. And then this was like, wow, look. I've done all this in the span of one year when I was very low."

Performing reminds Katiana that she isn't alone.

Spiritually she is part of something that has been around for thousands of years, and that's a comfort to her.

The next day, we meet Katiana back at her home on Djarra country. She talks to us about how she uses her love of country and the memories of her worst days to stay strong.

"If I have had a moment with my little sister, I'll go on a walk and just breathe and listen to music and just walk around the block, because there's a lot of trees around," she says.

"I like looking at the trees and having the wind and the breeze in my face."

Her relationship with her mum has improved too, especially since being back at home from boarding school and starting at the local high school nearby.

"My great-great-grandma was stolen. Our women were taken away. My mum didn't grow up with her mum around," she says.

"And then I can really understand why her and I can be distant. She never had that mother."

Katiana is like most other teenagers — she spends a lot of time on her phone. About six hours a day.

While she often uses the "do not disturb" function and knows that "constantly staring at my phone is horrible", she doesn't think that is unusual at her age.

There's some Indigenous content she follows. The problem with that, she says, is there can be "a lot of hate" in the comments, and that "really hurts".

And she knows how easy it is to get sucked into the body comparison trap online. She's been there before.

"I'm a bigger girl. I don't really care. I'm healthy, I know I can run and exercise. I don't want to be dieting. I don't like commenting on other people's bodies, it makes me mad," she says.

We wanted to know what Katiana saw in her future, if she had it all figured out yet?

Not quite. But there was a lot of hope.

"I've had a thought of what I want to do when I'm older. I want to be a social worker, I could help young people. I really want to work with Indigenous kids. And multicultural kids. To understand them and not just my own culture.

"[But] for now, I feel so proud.

"I've grown into, like, who I want to be at the moment.

"I'm a woman now."

Coming home

First child born into a family with seven kids. First of her relatives to graduate high school in Australia.

First chance to make the family proud.

These firsts count for a lot in Bathsheba's story.

WARNING: this story documents experiences of self-harm.

We meet her at her family home, where she's living with mum and six siblings in a small brick house in outer western Sydney.

It has been a modest upbringing. Bathsheba came to Australia as a toddler from a refugee camp.

Her parents had lived there for 11 years, fleeing conflict as members of the minority Karen community on the Thai-Myanmar border.

They carried the trauma of conflict, but with it, incredibly high hopes for their future children in a new country.

Bathsheba, 17, has learnt a lot in the past year, and she's experienced considerable pain at a young age.

It didn't help that her relationship with her father was strained at best.

Suffering symptoms of depression early in high school, it was easy to grab a beer from her parents' fridge when she came home.

Easy to say yes at parties when weed was handed around.

Especially when there was so much pressure from her parents to achieve at school.

She knows now they just wanted the best for her, but it took its toll.

"I did everything, but still didn't feel 'accomplished'. I'd do more. Reach more standards.

"I wanted to come first at subjects, to tell my mum. It wasn't for me, it was for my family.

"It's only recently that I started realising it's my life, not theirs."

These expectations on young teenagers, particularly from a cultural perspective, can be overwhelming.

"If they have a problem, it's seen as the whole family's problem. So it's the shame of that," Associate Professor Harriet Hiscock says.

"And if I've got a mental health problem, not only am I letting myself down, but I could be letting down the whole extended family."

Associate Professor Hiscock says when talking to young people, particularly from Asian families, they spoke of the high expectations at home and a need to thrive academically. Suffering from, or talking about, poor mental health was often not an option.

"That's a lot of pressure to bear," she says.

And with her close friend already self-harming, Bathsheba tried that too. Just to feel something different.

"Looking back now, it was a very difficult time in my life. Especially being the oldest," she says.

"[My parents] couldn't understand me, and they didn't know what to do. So I had to try to find my own way."

"I wanted to feel something. I wanted to feel normal. I didn't want to feel sober.

"It helped to focus my pain on something else. I'd rather feel physical pain than emotional pain."

The gendered data on how girls and boys deal with their mental health is quite alarming.

The latest national figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) show rates of self-harm for girls aged 15 to19 have nearly doubled since 2008.

And for girls aged 14 and under, it tripled.

Things started to turn around thanks to a cry for help and a concerned teacher.

But in the end, Bathsheba says it was "much more about [my parents] telling me they're proud of me. That little bit of support kept me going".

Bathsheba says she decided to forgive her father for not being there.

Today, she looks at the mistakes she's made as valuable lessons she's grateful for.

Her family responsibilities, her role as the eldest daughter and her dedication to her church and tight-knit Karen community aren't stifling her sense of freedom and excitement for the future.

She's started a dual degree at university, and for the first time in her life, the future looks promising.

Not because she has it all figured out, but because she is "excited for the future, for what's ahead".

"But it's going to take a lot of hard work. I feel like I have such a clean slate, high school is gone, I have a brand new life canvas," she says.

Reporter: Gemma Breen

Photography: Brendan Esposito

Digital production: Gemma Breen and Dinushi Dias

Digital editor: Heidi Davoren

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The Morning

A fresh approach to a crisis.

A group of researchers posited another explanation for the youth mental health crisis: too much discussion.

By Ellen Barry

She covers mental illness.

For years now, policymakers have sought an explanation for the mental health crisis among young people. Suicide attempts and psychiatric hospitalizations were rising even before the pandemic. Then the rates of anxiety and depression doubled worldwide.

Why is this happening? The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points to smartphones, and the algorithms that draw kids away from healthy play and into dangerous, addictive thought loops. No, his critics say. The real problem is a grim social landscape of school shootings, poverty and global warming. Or academic pressure. Or insufficient health care.

A group of researchers in Britain now propose another, at least partial, explanation: We talk about mental disorders so much. I cover this notion in a story The Times published today .

This hypothesis is called “prevalence inflation.” It holds that our society has become so saturated with discussion of mental health that young people may interpret mild, transient suffering as symptoms of a medical disorder.

This is a problem, they say, because identifying with a psychiatric diagnosis may not be helpful. Students who self-label as anxious or depressed are more likely than similar students who don’t self-label to view themselves as powerless over the disorder, recent studies have shown. They may respond by avoiding stressful situations like parties or public speaking, which could make their problems worse.

One of the psychologists behind the prevalence inflation theory, Lucy Foulkes of the University of Oxford, traces her skepticism back to 2018, when she began teaching undergraduates. They were “bombarded” with messages warning that they might be in crisis, she said. “It seemed like the more we were trying to raise awareness about it, it wasn’t getting better, and in fact, it only seemed to be getting worse.”

She grew critical of curricula that teach children to recognize and manage their emotions, sometimes referred to as social emotional learning. Schools have introduced an array of programs, teaching children the basics of techniques like mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy, which have proved beneficial in adults.

Several recent studies have found lackluster or negative effects for students who received trainings, especially those who started out with more severe symptoms. That evidence has done little to dampen their popularity, Foulkes said.

An urgent need

Many experts in the field of adolescent mental health defend awareness campaigns and school-based trainings. “Especially with teens, we need more universal interventions, not less,” said Zachary Blumkin, a child psychologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

The main reason, they say, is that traditional, one-on-one therapy and psychiatric care is not easily available. Teenagers in crisis can wait months to see a clinician. They often land in emergency rooms as a last resort.

For that reason, the field has gravitated toward preventive models. These teach all students — not just the troubled ones — to manage distressing emotions. A 2023 meta-analysis of 252 such programs concluded that, generally, children benefit from them. There is also promise in a more tailored approach , one that lets schools focus on kids with the most acute needs.

Some experts also disagree that over-diagnosis is a problem.

Andrew Gerber, a child psychiatrist, says we should think of mental illness as a spectrum: Disorders like anxiety or depression occur in a bell curve distribution, so they’re more like hypertension than appendicitis. And like hypertension, he said, they’re worth treating early in their progression, with medication and therapy. “Anyone who tries to define a sharp line between ‘real’ illness and what is not real, no matter where they put the line, is doomed to get it wrong and do damage in the process,” said Gerber, the president and medical director at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Conn.

Foulkes disagrees. Even when we have good treatments, we’re bad at identifying whose disorder is likely to deteriorate, she said. And some children struggle because something is wrong at home, like domestic abuse or poverty or bullying. Mindfulness trainings are unlikely to help these kids.

“A lot of the time, what’s causing the problem is not something that’s going to improve with medication or therapy,” she said. “You’re running the risk of just telling people they have a problem without helping alleviate it.”

A generation is growing up fluent in the language of mental health, something that will benefit teens who badly need treatment. But others may apply medical diagnoses to the painful, normal adversity of growing up.

The “prevalence inflation” hypothesis asks us to keep an eye on those excesses. People hurt after breakups and struggle to adjust to new schools; negative feelings aren’t always a sign of mental illness. They can even teach us resilience.

Rates of mental health disorders are rising among American adolescents. Read one 13-year-old’s story .

There aren’t always enough resources to support teenagers’ mental health. As schools search for solutions, some student-led clubs step in .

Are smartphones driving teenagers to depression? It’s complicated , writes David Wallace-Wells in Times Opinion.

THE LATEST NEWS

Israel-hamas war.

The Israeli military said it was asking tens of thousands of Gazans sheltering in eastern Rafah to temporarily evacuate to what it described as a humanitarian zone.

Hamas claimed responsibility for a rocket attack that Israeli officials said killed three soldiers and left three more critically wounded.

Israel moved to shut down local operations of Al Jazeera , a Qatar-based news outlet.

Cease-fire talks between Israel and Hamas are at an impasse. The main obstacle is the duration of a pause.

Four children from Gaza arrived in the U.S. to receive urgent medical treatment . They were greeted at Kennedy Airport with toys and balloons.

Campus Protests

U.C.L.A. said that it would resume in-person classes today and that it had created a new campus security office .

New York Magazine and the Columbia student newspaper surveyed the campus about the protests . More than 60 percent of respondents said they had views on the conflict they avoided saying publicly.

More college professors — many of whom came of age during the era of Vietnam War protests — are joining student demonstrations , The Wall Street Journal reports.

More International News

Around Shanghai, women gather in bars and bookstores to debate their place in a country ruled by men.

Panamanians elected José Raúl Mulino, a former public security minister, as their next president .

Paris committed to making the Olympics more accessible for people with disabilities. Advocacy groups are concerned that the city remains unprepared .

In the 19th century, Belgian troops decapitated a Congolese leader and took his skull as a trophy. The leader’s descendants are struggling to have his remains returned .

Kim Godwin, the first Black woman to run a broadcast news division, said she would step down as president of ABC News after a tumultuous tenure.

Sony and the private equity firm Apollo are in talks to acquire Paramount .

Other Big Stories

New York City’s congestion pricing program aims to generate $15 billion for the mass transit system, but lawsuits threaten that windfall .

In Florida, Chinese residents expressed frustration with a new law that prohibits many Chinese citizens from buying homes in the state because of national security concerns.

We should welcome the emergence of this year’s cicadas with wonder, Margaret Renkl writes.

Ross Douthat suggests books and essays that could improve the intellectual diversity of university curricula.

Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discuss campus protests and Donald Trump .

Here are columns by Maureen Dowd on the three faces of Trump and Thomas Friedman on Israel and Saudi Arabia .

MORNING READS

Community: For generations of immigrants, Sunday soccer in a park in Queens is more than a game .

Health: Ultraprocessed foods are linked to poor health. But what are they exactly?

Loneliness: Social connection experts offer advice on cultivating a sense of belonging .

Ask Vanessa: “How do I know if my untucked shirt is too long?”

Kocktails: As nonalcoholic cocktails become a staple on American menus, some children have begun to partake .

Metropolitan Diary: A necklace rescue in Midtown .

Lives Lived: Bernard Hill was a British actor who incarnated humble masculine leadership as Capt. Edward J. Smith in “Titanic” and as Théoden, the king of Rohan, in two “Lord of the Rings” films. He died at 79 .

Formula One: McLaren’s Lando Norris secured his first victory at the Miami Grand Prix .

No punches pulled: At a live Netflix comedy roast, former Patriots players and Kevin Hart among others roasted Tom Brady about his divorce and Deflategate.

N.H.L.: The Dallas Stars eliminated the defending Stanley Cup champion Las Vegas Golden Knights in a thrilling 2-1 Game 7 win .

N.B.A.: Donovan Mitchell’s 24 second-half points led the Cleveland Cavaliers to a comeback win in their own Game 7 against the Orlando Magic.

ARTS AND IDEAS

The artist Frank Stella, who helped usher in the Minimalist movement of the 1960s, died on Saturday at 87. His career began during the Eisenhower era, when artistic tendencies — much like ideas about gender and sexuality — fell into fixed categories: one was either a figurative artist or an abstract one. Things changed, the critic Deborah Solomon writes, but Stella did not. “He never stopped insisting on the inherent superiority of abstract painting,” she adds. Read her full appraisal of Stella .

More on culture

Madonna ended her retrospective Celebration Tour with a free show in Rio de Janeiro, which was attended by an estimated 1.6 million people .

Trying to find your own song of the summer? Vulture has published a bracket to sort through this year’s pop deluge.

The HBO series “The Sympathizer” is a rebuttal to a Hollywood staple. It is its own Vietnam War movie and a detailed work of film criticism , James Poniewozik writes.

Over the weekend, “The Fall Guy,” starring Ryan Gosling, earned only $28.5 million . It is Hollywood’s lowest start to the summer box office season since 1995.

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …

Make Dolester Miles’s famous coconut pecan cake .

Watch the Met Gala red carpet tonight.

Stargaze with a telescope for beginners .

Clear your phone’s camera roll .

Take our news quiz .

Here is today’s Spelling Bee . Yesterday’s pangram was maypole .

And here are today’s Mini Crossword , Wordle , Sudoku , Connections and Strands .

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow.

Correction: Yesterday’s newsletter named two different Kentucky Derby winners. The winner was Mystik Dan, not Sierra Leone.

Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox . Reach our team at [email protected] .

Ellen Barry is a reporter covering mental health for The Times. More about Ellen Barry

Bangor Daily News

Maine news, sports, politics, election results, and obituaries

Being a young adult is hard, no matter what generation you’re part of

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The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on  bangordailynews.com

Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

America has had a generation gap from the very start, and generational warfare for almost as long. But in at least one area, I believe a cease-fire is possible: We can end the war over which generation had it worse when they were young.

With soaring rents , high mortgage rates , student loans  and a ballooning national debt  to pay for entitlements, Generation Z and many younger millennials say they are getting a raw deal. Older Americans, meanwhile, are sick of all the whining from entitled young co-workers who they see as slackers.

The truth is somewhere in between. It is getting a little easier for young people, at least economically. But that does not take away from the fact that getting a start in the world is hard. All sides have a point — and we’d be better off if we had more realistic expectations for ourselves and empathy for each other.

In that spirit, and speaking as a very late Gen Xer — so late I don’t feel part of any generation — here goes: If you grew up watching shows such as “Friends,” you might expect your 20s to be the best time of your life. You get a fun job in the city, a great apartment and close friends. And it’s true that the first years of adulthood, free from responsibility and surrounded by your peers, is a special time. It is also a challenging time — and always has been.

It’s not easy to establish a career. You don’t have any skills yet — except if you’re on the social media team, which wields a scary amount of power in every organization — so you are expendable, and must work many hours doing thankless tasks. But this is how you get good at what you do. It’s how you learn an industry and make connections. I am not going to argue that it is a pleasant process, though technology has made it a little easier.

Young people complain about this state of affairs not only because it is genuinely unpleasant but because they have an exaggerated sense of their own worth. This is not unique to any generation. There always have been, and always will be, people who declare that they are opting out for an easier, lower paid career. Technology may give these people a louder megaphone, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there are more of them, or that they are representative of their generation. Sorting out who will be successful is never a fun process.

Being young usually means you also have no money. Even if you are lucky enough to have a professional-track job, you might be in an expensive city and have to live in a small apartment or a sketchy neighborhood or with bad roommates. (Of course, you could decide to forgo adulthood and live with your parents, but that comes with its own set of problems.)

It is also true that Gen Z faces difficulties other generations didn’t. The U.S. economy and culture put a premium on living in a big metropolitan area, at least when you are learning a trade and finding a partner. This may explain why living in big cities has become more common despite their higher cost of housing. Wages are also higher in cities, though not high enough.

At the same time, it’s worth pointing out that earlier generations weren’t living like the characters on “Friends,” either. Young adulthood has always been a financial struggle. In fact, despite today’s high rents, today’s young people have more savings than their predecessors. And while they have more student-loan debt, they also have higher and faster-growing wages — because they had more education.

Also worth remembering: Living in a city is fun and makes a prolonged adolescence possible. Those good times may be why older people tend to assume young people have it easy. They tend to forget that people in their 20s are free from many of the responsibilities and hardships of adulthood, but also have anxieties about their careers, relationships and money. Romanticizing this time of life does no one any favors.

I spent most of my 20s convinced I should be having more fun than I was, and feeling utterly inadequate as a result. I can’t imagine how much worse it must be today, with social media constantly reminding you how much better your life should be.

So my advice and wish for the kids today — I use the phrase affectionately! — is this: Every phase of life has its pleasures and its challenges. I have confidence you will make it through these anxious years. And I hope that you will grow old enough to complain about the ingratitude and laziness of the younger generation.

More articles from the BDN

Gen X can add one more financial problem to its list

• Social Security funds are set to begin depleting when today's 58-year-olds retire.
• Gen X is already struggling financially, with high debt and financial insecurity.
• It's another blow for the small, forgotten middle generation.

A storm is brewing for Gen X .

The forgotten generation has already been quietly contending with economic headwinds , and now they might end up bearing the brunt of the looming retirement crisis.

That's because, taken together, the two primary Social Security funds are set to only be able to pay out full benefits through 2035; the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund, one of the main funds comprising Social Security, will start getting depleted in 2033 .

That's bad news for the Gen Xers currently ages 56 to 58: Come 2033 and 2035, they'll start turning 67, making them eligible for Social Security — and they might end up with reduced benefits.

In other words, the moment that today's older Gen Xers are ready to retire, their Social Security benefits could start to shrink. That could be a real problem for a generation that was already suffering in silence. Gen Xers — born from 1965 to 1980 — have been deemed the country's "neglected middle child" by the Pew Research Center .

Gen X is deeper in debt and more worried about finances than other generations

You might be able to chalk up Gen X's invisibility to the fact that, per the Library of Congress, they're the smallest generation population-wise. Their plights have been dwarfed by millennials ' massive ranks and prominent woes, and the huge peak boomer population that's about to settle into retirement.

Related stories

But Gen X ers have already been quietly dealing with some financial insecurity. In July 2023, Business Insider — in partnership with YouGov — surveyed over 1,800 Americans spanning five generations, asking about work, money, and relationships. And among the different generations, Gen Xers were the most likely to report that they were feeling financially insecure.

Experian consumer data shows that the total average debt for Gen X has been near or over $150,000 in the third quarters of 2021 to 2023, higher than both their younger and older counterparts. The generation also had over $9,000 in average credit card debt, based on data from the third quarter of 2023, which was not only a rise from their average credit card debt a year prior but far above the national average of $6,501 or the average for other generations.

"Generation X is the generation most likely to have the richest credit mix," the Experian post stated. "That may sound like a flex, but in practical terms it means these consumers are likely to have multiple monthly payments to service—think student loan, mortgage, credit card and car payments."

That's not to say other generations aren't encountering similar challenges. According to a new TransUnion study based on credit bureau data and a December 2023 survey of just over 1,200 Gen Z and millennial consumers, the youngest generation is disproportionately struggling to balance a range of credit products amid high inflation.

Specifically, Gen Zers are seeing higher levels of delinquency on products like credit cards and auto loans compared to millennials 10 years earlier, with 75% of Gen Z respondents saying the pandemic negatively influenced their finances.

"Gen Z consumers have seen their finances significantly impacted by the pandemic and its aftermath, even more so than the challenges faced by Millennials as a result of the Global Financial Crisis," Michele Raneri, vice president and head of US research and consulting at TransUnion, said in a statement.

An AARP Financial Security Trends Survey from January showed that around a third of those aged 50 and over — that is, the results include part of Gen X — are somewhat worried about having enough money to feel financially secure in their retirement. Plus, around a quarter of them said they were very worried.

In addition to those concerns, how much older Americans have in retirement savings varies — from 20% of older respondents in the survey, excluding those who don't know about their savings, who aren't retired saying none to 7% saying at least $1 million.

That all comes as " peak boomers " stand poised to unleash a retirement tsunami. Those are the final boomers to retire, and they're facing similar challenges — over half will be mostly relying on Social Security for income to get by, according to a report from the Alliance for Lifetime Income's Retirement Income Institute. That could set the stage for the new crop of Gen X retirees to arrive in an already-precarious retirement economy.

Are you a Gen Xer worried about affording retirement? Contact these reporters at [email protected] , [email protected] , and [email protected] .

Watch: Millions of homes could flood the US housing market thanks to boomers

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