It’s a scary time to be a teenager, blares the Washington Post. “51 percent of teens said they felt this is a bad time to be growing up … and 62 percent of parents said the same.” Why?
There are plenty of reasons both generations might feel this is a particularly difficult time to be a kid in high school: the prevalence of gun violence, the persistence of systemic racism, the specter of police brutality, the pressures of social media, the volatility of contemporary politics and, of course, the still enduring stress of the coronavirus pandemic.
Then there is the existential threat of climate change, which loomed especially large for parents and teens interviewed by The Post.
OK, some bad stuff there. But the article doesn’t seem even to mention any past era. Yet it’s clearly framed that “now is a challenging time for teenagers … a bad time to be growing up … a particularly difficult time to be a kid in high school.” I’m trying to think about when was a better time to be a teenager. Let’s consider some past eras. We’ll leave aside the tens of thousands of years before the Enlightenment, liberalism, and capitalism, when life for most of people was hard and short, ever vulnerable to famine, disease, and injury. Queen Anne of Great Britain and Ireland (1665–1714) lost 17 children – several were still-born, while the child who lived the longest, William, died in 1700 at the age of 11. Edward Gibbon, born 1737, had six siblings, all of whom died in infancy. So let’s move on to more modern times.
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