The post more or less writes itself. A list of the practical things a baby boomer could supposedly do by the age of twelve, mend a shirt, balance a checkbook, read a paper map, make change without a machine, and, hovering underneath it, the unspoken punchline that today’s young cannot. It is affectionate, it is often partly true, and it lands because it flatters a real and familiar feeling. The feeling is exactly where the trouble begins, because that particular feeling has been studied, and it turns out to be one of the most reliable illusions in the human repertoire.
The “kids these days” effect
In 2019, the psychologists John Protzko and Jonathan Schooler published a study in Science Advances with the plain title “Kids these days.” Across five studies of several thousand American adults, they confirmed the obvious first part, that people believe the youth of today are in decline, and then found something sharper. The belief tracked the believer. The more authoritarian a person was, the more convinced they were that young people had lost respect for their elders. The more intelligent, the more sure that youth were growing less intelligent. The more well read, the more certain that the young no longer read.
Two biases were doing the work. We tend to notice deficiencies in other people precisely in the areas where we ourselves excel, and we misremember our own childhoods, unconsciously projecting our current, competent selves backward onto the young people we used to be. The actual fumbling twelve-year-old each of us once was gets quietly overwritten with a more flattering figure. The complaint, the authors point out, is ancient, with versions of “kids these days” turning up in writing more than two thousand years old. A grievance that old and that consistent is not a measurement of anything. It is a feature of the observer.
Skills change by swap, not by fall
None of that means nothing changes, and it would be silly to pretend a modern twelve-year-old has the same skills as one in 1965. They plainly do not. But the change is mostly substitution rather than loss. Boomers learned to darn socks, handle cash, drive a manual gearbox and navigate by folded map because their world demanded those things every day. Today’s young have learned a different set of competencies that world never required, and let go of the ones it no longer rewards.
Against the story of steady decline sits an inconvenient fact. Measured cognitive test performance rose substantially across the twentieth century, at roughly three IQ points a decade, a pattern known as the Flynn effect, and it was driven not by better genes but by richer schooling, improved nutrition and more mentally demanding environments. It is hard to square a century of rising scores with a simple tale of each generation arriving less capable than the last. Honesty demands the other half, though. Over the last couple of decades that long rise has stalled and, in several countries, gone into reverse, with recent analyses finding declines in some reasoning scores among the youngest adults. What that reverse trend means is genuinely unsettled and much argued over, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed. But it is a recent and specific finding about test scores, not a vindication of the timeless notion that the young can no longer do anything.
What the list really is
Put the two together and the nostalgic list comes into focus. It is accurate as a snapshot of the particular things one era needed its children to know. It is affectionate. And there is nothing wrong with wanting to pass on genuinely useful practical skills, a good many of which are worth preserving for their own sake. What the list is not is evidence that something has been lost overall.
Every generation is handed one toolkit, sets down the parts it no longer needs, picks up parts its parents never had, and then, with remarkable reliability, mistakes the swap for a decline, remembering its own competence and forgetting its own gaps. The boomer who could make change at twelve could not, at that age, do a dozen things a modern child does without thinking, and would have found the reverse list, the one cataloging what the young can do that their elders cannot, every bit as smug.
What the evidence does and does not settle
A few honest limits belong here. The “kids these days” research is drawn from American adults and describes a strong average bias rather than proof that youth never decline in any particular skill. The Flynn effect and its recent reversal are both real and both incompletely explained, so neither one settles the larger question by itself. And none of this is an argument against teaching children practical skills, which is worthwhile regardless of any generational scorekeeping.
Within those limits, the conclusion is clear enough. The list of things every boomer learned by twelve is a fine piece of nostalgia and a poor piece of sociology. The skills were real, the affection behind the list is entirely understandable, and the quiet conclusion that today’s young are diminished is the oldest illusion in the book, felt just as keenly, once, by the elders who stood around shaking their heads at the boomers.