Adults Have Been Complaining About Teenagers Since Before Teenagers Were Invented

Let's start with a quote. See if you can place it:

"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything."

If you guessed a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, a 1990s culture war pamphlet, or a congressional hearing on video games, you'd be wrong on all counts. That quote is attributed — loosely, scholars debate the sourcing — to Peter the Hermit, circa 1274 CE. The sentiment, however, is so perfectly generic that it could have been written yesterday, last decade, or, as we're about to establish, literally before the wheel was in common use.

The 'kids these days' complaint is not an observation. It is a psychological reflex so consistent across time, culture, and geography that its presence in the historical record should be treated the same way we treat any other recurring data pattern: as information about the system producing it, not the thing it claims to describe.

The Oldest Known Receipt for Moral Panic

Somewhere around 2000 BCE, a Sumerian scribe pressed a stylus into wet clay and recorded what appears to be a teacher's complaint about his students. The tablet, discovered in the ruins of ancient Nippur and now studied by cuneiformists who have my complete respect for choosing that career, describes students who won't apply themselves, disrespect their elders, and generally seem to be ruining civilization.

This is the oldest known written complaint about young people. It is five thousand years old. The students being complained about are, presumably, also dead.

Civilization, for what it's worth, continued.

Hesiod, writing around 700 BCE, lamented that the youth of his era lacked the virtue of previous generations and that things were generally going downhill. Socrates — yes, that Socrates, the one we teach children to admire for questioning everything — was reported by Plato to have complained that Athenian youth had bad manners, contempt for authority, and no respect for their elders. Socrates was executed, but not for this particular opinion, which was apparently shared by everyone.

Aristophanes wrote comedies lampooning the decadent, philosophy-obsessed youth of Athens. Roman writers from Cicero to Livy produced variations on the same theme with impressive regularity. The complaint didn't take a break during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or any other period that we now look back on as a golden age of culture and human achievement.

The Industrial Revolution Did Not Help

If you want to watch the 'kids these days' genre really find its stride, the 19th century is your era. Industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of mass literacy meant that adults who were anxious about young people now had newspapers to be anxious in, and they used them enthusiastically.

The 1800s produced a spectacular volume of literature about the moral corruption of youth by: novels (too stimulating), cities (too stimulating), music halls (too stimulating), and the general pace of modern life (you can see where this is going). A British parliamentary report from 1843 on juvenile delinquency reads like it was written by someone who had just discovered Twitter. The children were distracted, disrespectful, and consuming entertainment that was rotting their moral fiber.

The entertainment in question was, largely, street performances and penny pamphlets. The children survived.

The 20th Century: A Golden Age of Panic

The 20th century is where this genre really hit its stride, because technology kept providing new things for children to be corrupted by on a reliable schedule.

Jazz music was going to destroy American youth in the 1920s. Comic books were going to destroy American youth in the 1950s — this concern was serious enough to generate a US Senate subcommittee hearing in 1954, where psychiatrist Fredric Wertham testified that comics were causing juvenile delinquency. His book, Seduction of the Innocent, was a bestseller. The resulting Comics Code Authority suppressed the industry for decades.

Then rock and roll. Then television. Then Dungeons & Dragons (Senate hearing, 1985). Then heavy metal (Senate hearing, 1985, same week, Tipper Gore era). Then video games. Then the internet. Then social media. The technology changes. The hearing format stays remarkably consistent.

Each of these panics shared a structure: experts testified that the new medium was uniquely dangerous, that the current generation of children was more vulnerable than any previous generation, and that without intervention, the consequences would be severe. Each panic eventually subsided, usually because the children in question grew up and turned out more or less fine, and a new technology appeared to redirect the concern.

So What Is 'Kids These Days' Actually About?

Here's the part where the pattern becomes interesting rather than just funny.

If the complaint is this consistent — if it appears in Sumerian, Greek, Latin, medieval French, 19th-century English, and 21st-century American English with essentially the same content — then it cannot be tracking actual changes in youth behavior. The signal-to-noise ratio would have to be zero. You cannot have five thousand years of continuous generational decline and still have civilization.

What the complaint is actually tracking, with remarkable consistency, is adult anxiety about cultural change. When the world is changing in ways that feel threatening or disorienting, that anxiety gets projected onto the most visible symbol of change: young people, who are visibly different from what adults were at that age, because the world is different.

The 1950s comic book panic wasn't really about comic books. It was about postwar urban anxiety, changing family structures, and the first generation of American teenagers with significant disposable income and cultural independence. Fredric Wertham's data, it turned out, was fabricated — a fact that emerged when his research notes were finally made available to scholars in 2012. The panic was real. The threat was not.

The current screen-time panic is probably not really about screens. It is almost certainly about the genuine disorientation of watching children navigate a social and informational environment that adults don't fully understand, combined with legitimate but diffuse anxieties about economic precarity, social fragmentation, and the pace of change.

This doesn't mean every concern about youth media consumption is wrong. Some of them are right! The research on adolescent social media use and mental health is real and worth taking seriously. But the 'kids these days' genre — the sweeping, civilization-is-ending, this-generation-is-uniquely-corrupted version — has a documented false positive rate of approximately 100% over five thousand years of data.

The Actual Takeaway From Three Millennia of Complaints

The Sumerian teacher whose tablet has survived four thousand years almost certainly believed, genuinely, that his students were worse than students had been before. He was probably wrong. The students probably grew up, had children, and complained about those children in turn, in words that haven't survived but were almost certainly familiar.

What the historical record suggests is this: 'kids these days' is less a cultural critique and more a psychological weather report. When you see it intensify — when it starts generating Senate hearings, bestselling books, and prime-time news segments — you're probably looking at a society experiencing significant stress about something that has very little to do with children.

The children are, as usual, going to be fine.

The adults producing the literature are the ones worth studying.