Everyone’s been saying it, or at least thinking it: kids are getting more annoying. Anyone who worked at a summer camp over break will tell you that Generation Alpha is disruptive, weird and just plain irritating. Their memes are weird (what’s skibidi toilet?), their YouTube is straight-up ridiculous and they’re clearly experiencing some category five levels of “brainrot.” To top it all off, these iPad kids are exceptionally dumber.
But didn’t people say all this stuff about us, too?
Not too long ago it was Gen Z that was supposed to be the downfall of polite society. I can still remember article after article about how Gen Z was confusing, obsessed with instant gratification and dangerously reliant on technology. To be honest, these kinds of articles were written about millennials as well. And now it’s our turn with Gen Alpha.
It’s a pattern for older generations to automatically look down on younger generations, and it makes sense. Of course kids seem stupid, they’re kids! Of course we don’t understand their memes, we’re not on the same internet as them. To make a generalization, kids are just annoying. Gen Alpha isn’t particularly unique for it; it’s just their turn to be strange and ridiculous until they start maturing. We can try and insist that we weren’t as bad, but we were.
Trust me, we were.
But the issue isn’t just with kids supposedly becoming more annoying, isn’t their IQ going down too?
First, we must consider how valid the concept of IQ is. IQ is used as a general measure of intelligence, but it’s not faultless. For a long time, IQ was used as a tool for discrimination. IQ tests were used to bar immigrants’ entry to the country, to discriminate against different ethnicities or the mentally ill and as evidence in many eugenicist theories. Even so, IQ is still used as a method of tracking the general intelligence of a population, increasing proportionally to the quality of living.
When people talk about “declining IQ,” they’re referring to the flattening out of the Flynn Effect. The Flynn Effect is the observation that average IQ levels tend to increase every year. There are many factors for this, including improved nutrition, more education and better medical care. It’s important to note that, according to many studies, IQ is still rising, just more slowly than it was before. This doesn’t necessarily mean that kids are getting “stupider.”
It’s equally plausible that there are simply just limits to what the human brain can achieve (at least, across an entire population). Many experts think that this flattening of the Flynn Effect was bound to happen at some point. If we’re going to make the broad claim that Gen Alpha is solely responsible for sending us backward, we’re going to need a lot more evidence first.
But let’s say we did have this evidence. After all, there seem to be a lot of factors stacked against the kids of today. A lot of young people were caught in the pandemic at a critical point in their education (I know we can all relate, and we didn’t even have to learn how to ). Technology is on the rise and kids are gaining access to it at a younger age. Quite a few teachers have observed that kids are more reliant on technology nowadays than actually learning things for themselves.
However, this doesn’t change the fact that all this was also said about us.
Technology is always improving, and it’s doing so at a far more rapid pace than it ever has. Kids are getting cellphones earlier now, but most of us got cellphones earlier than millennials did. Yeah, kids are weird and annoying, but so were we.
My argument isn’t that there’s been no change between the generations, that would be impossible. I’m simply observing that we as Gen Z are not breaking the cycle: we’re still looking down on younger generations. No matter how justified we feel, it’s no different. I’m not an elementary school teacher, but I know a lot of kids, and to me, they don’t seem very different from how I remember being. The landscape they’re developing in is different — both from a technological standpoint and a pandemic standpoint — but they’re still creative, energetic and want to hear what my top three favorite Pokémon are.
Really, the kids are going to be alright.
Or at least, as alright as we are.
(Okay, but really, what IS a skibidi toilet?)
Grace Jungmann can be reached at [email protected].