There's a little debate raging among psychology researchers: Are kids today more narcissistic and self-centered than they were in the past? One side points to results from the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (a test designed to measure, well, guess) as evidence that this generation is both more conceited and more unhappy than people were in the past. They point to the emphasis on self-esteem building and the new technological avenues for self-promotion (like YouTube, Facebook) as part of an epidemic of kids who collectively say, "I'm all that." In fact, psych professor Jean Twenge has a book called "Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before" that summarizes this research, and many media outlets ate it up.
On the other side of the argument, researcher Kali H. Trzesniewski and colleagues will publish an article in Psychological Science "showing there have been very few changes in the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of youth over the last 30 years." They also cite evidence from that personality test, which some social scientists say fails to capture nuances in personality and therefore doesn't measure what it tries to measure. And many have pointing out that it is a favorite pastime of adults to bemoan the self-centeredness of the next generation.
Seems to me people haven't changed that much, and every generation or so there is some decrying of the current generation's parenting, with dire predictions as to how it will ruin the children of today. I like what Jeffrey Jensen Arnett says. He's publishing a critique of the Twenge book, and he comments, "It’s like a cottage industry of putting [young Americans] down and complaining about them and whining about why they don’t grow up." Yeah, young Americans, I say, "Alllllllright."
