You should resist the pull of the Two Demons of Aging. One will tell you things were much more difficult in your day and will bemoan that kids have it so much easier. The other will tell you things were so much better in your day and will bemoan that the kids don’t know how great things can be.
It’s very important you slay both of these demons as soon as you hit 30.
Yeah the world is getting worse, all our institutions are failing kids, they’re literally making things more expensive and lower quality, that’s all true. That can be discussed and criticized without getting into cranky territory where you blame younger people for this. And that’s giving you the benefit of the doubt that your concerns are poorly thought out and not outright reactionary fascist nonsense. Either way you should blame capitalism because it’s not the kids fault.
“Kids are such stupid illiterate iPad babies!” This framing blames children for what is a societal neglect in educational resources and excessive work demands on families going back decades.
Even blaming the parents doesn’t give the full picture. The amount of time and care a child needs is incompatible with capitalism’s requirements of 40 hour a week labor. One or both parents are going to be overworked at home and at their job. This incentivizes more neglectful parenting styles.
We should be asking why the demand and cost of childcare has increased while wages have stayed stagnant, why childhood education has been so throughly attacked, and how the capitalist nuclear family model creates unnecessary strains and unequal divisions of labor upon families.
