Hey Pandas, What's The Most Concerning Thing You Have Witnessed With The Younger Generation?

They get corrupted way too young and from what I’ve seen: they refuse to read and study. My gen Alpha brother has the vocabulary of a sailor despite not even knowing what half the words even are

I'm in my late 20s and I give English lessons to people of various ages (English is a 2nd language where I live). One day, I had some free time with one of my students, a 15-years-old guy, so we scrolled through his TikTok (which I don't use) for a moment.
Now I don't have this kind of "boomer mentality" and I'm DEFINITELY not conservative, but I could feel my braincells actively dying. I've heard about the horrors of TikTok content, but reality is somewhat even worse. Absolutely stupid content with no value whatsoever, borderline racist "jokes", obnoxious influencers, you name it. I'm seriously concerned about the mental state of anyone who's subjected to this for several hours a day.

I’m book lover and passionate reader. I often read, always wish for a book as a present, praise reading and share my impressions from the books i read. I began reading books to my kids since they were babies, and kept reading them until they could read books themselves. We have big bookshelf with many, different books for children.
My kids don’t read. Prefer to spend hours gaming or watching YouTube and TikTok. I beg them to read. Nope. And honestly, most young kids I’ve seen are the same- even if they read, that would be only manga.

the use of electronics and slang. they act like adults too, like sephora and stanley kids!?!? let kids be kids for gods sake. and limit the screens too! let them play outside!!

I'm a teacher since over 23 years. What I witnessed here in my country (at least in my area) is the steady decline of living healthy. A lot of fast and junk food. Sweet drinks, potato chips every morning and afternoon break. Parents at home cooking less and the kids just heading into the next fast food joint for lunch.

Less or no sports or even light activities in their free time. Average weight went up a lot with a lot more overweight kids already in their teenage years. Bad teeth are another issue. I wouldn't know a single kid in my class now that didn't already have to fix the teeth.

Some bounce back when they're grown-up. But I've seen many again years later with the same lifestyle still going on. That's gonna cost them somewhen.

I'm Gen Z, and both my generation and Gen Alpha are both way too obsessed with tech. I know I am, and I'm trying to disconnect some, but most of us don't even know how to spend time without a device. Also, my 8th grade English teacher spent every Friday the whole year re-teaching us how to use proper grammar and not texting grammar, so COVID messed up the reading comprehension/writing skills of a lot of us. I'm lucky enough to have escaped that, since I work well alone and have parents who could help me with stuff, but Gen Alpha seems to not. The only Gen Alpha kids who are remotely normal that I know are my cousins, and that's only because my aunt is SUPER strict about screen time and things like that with them.

How little hope they have for the future, and I can't say I blame them; I'm a millennial, and for a long time it really has felt like the narrative has been "nothing good is ever going to happen again". But what makes it worse for Gen Z and Alpha is that they've been getting that message from an even younger age, maybe even right out of the gate. I wish I knew what to do or say to help.

Lack ofpatience, they are so used to having everything on demand.

this sounds weird, but it's a little bit concerning for me.
that kids, lets say, 7-8 year old girls wear crop tops, really short shorts, etc. i feel like i am even younger than them, i'd never wear those things for reasons, and it just feels wrong that small(er) children wear teenage/grown up looking clothes. some also act like teenagers, they have a lot of things that even i don't have because of age limits (i'm 11), for example a 5-6 year old i know has tiktok, that's 12+, and younger children have snapchat which is 13+. i wouldn't DARE ask to download those apps (my parents have parental controls) because of the age limit. i asked my mum if i could download roblox, bc i said that i played it before (true) and you can pick the game type so you dont hav to play older children things, but no, it was 12+.

They have no resilience whatsoever and their parents have no interest in letting them build some.

But it gets even worse. They do believe they're suffering even when they have the best lives ever.
They create so much drama!

Every little thing is a catastrophe. They expect perfection at every turn. Someone not liking what they like is the harshest criticism. I sometimes feel like they live in the original story of the snow queen and they all got a splinter of the devil's mirror in their eyes that magnifies even the tiniest little flaw into a huge mess that just isn't there.

Honestly? The rise of misogyny and the likes of the Tate bros. Gen Z boys are being fed more dehumanizing content and gen Z girls are understanding earlier and earlier that they live a society created for their male peers...

This is coming from the newer generation where what I see in school is just annoying, slang all the time and I would think it would be in another language at times, the disrespect and entitlement, the 5 year old mentality when they are much older than that, there is so many things gone wrong and it is starting to effect me too.

Their obsession with photographing themselves. This happens non-stop at my gym and is very disturbing for a couple of different reasons. First, it's a serious invasion of privacy as most of it happens in the locker room, yes, seriously. Second, the constant posing, photo taking and posting disturbs me greatly. Why would someone take so many photos of themselves and what do they do with them? Do they post them all and who do they think is looking at them? I suspect there's a lot of dirty old men who like to look at little girls bums. I wonder if these youngsters think about who is looking at them, surely they don't think that their settings stop people doing it? As well as taking photos they are constantly looking at themselves in the mirrors, fixing their make up, checking their hair to make sure it's just right, even before they go work out! The obsession with their looks, especially their butts is disheartening. I thought we were moving beyond being totally appearance driven. I can only speak for the young women/girls I see as I have no access to the men's locker room. Please chime in men, I'd love to hear if this type of thing happens in there also.

How incredibly spoiled rotten Gen Alpha is. I'm Gen Z, and looking at the Christmas list my cousin (She's 11) made makes me cringe. She asked for a BRAND NEW iPhone, Lululemon clothes, Drunk Elephant skincare products, Stanley cups, and a bunch of other things. When I was 11, I wanted a 2DS and Pokemon cards.

The generations that have grown up with fulltime electronics cannot be alone with their own thoughts for 10 minutes.

Honestly, lots of these are just the modern version of "kids these days, get off my lawn!". Are there issues? Sure! Every generation had its issues. Real issues, and issues made up by older people. I am supposed to be a brain-dead illiterate, because I read comics. I seem to remember that Gen X are all deaf because of the walkman. And the 90s kids were all 'too sensitive to ever make it in life'.

Can't do math. a tween gave me a 20 on a five dollar purchase and asked if that was enough.

They take for granted the fact that they are not entitled to so many things that previous generations used to get from their employers as a matter of course, fully paid health insurance, paid vacations, profit sharing, etc. We used to get a certain number of paid sick days each year. We got time off for lunch. We got breaks. And minimum wage was enough to pay rent on a shared apartment. Young people are barely compensated for their work today and then berated and told they are lazy for not doing even more for less! Wrong!

The first one is not exactly new, but the inability to read an analog clock.
The second is, in addition to all writing with devices, that when teaching cursive writing was stopped (in many countries) it is easier to forge a signature. Writing by hand, also researched, would make learning things more effective and keeping them in memory.
Intimidation of young people with anger and fear of the unknown increases the growth of the right wing, at least in Europe, and young immature brains do not know how to think so objectively yet. They do an unfortunately successful job on social media. I'm still thinking about how stupid and gullible I was myself, and it's horrible, because young people are still the same, but it's easier to get carried away in a social bubble that contains distorted values. Nothing scares people more than the fear of the unknown, a close relative of that fear of the dark. A good and useful fuel for hate speech, then.

I have a couple of concerns that I have for pretty much anyone, not just folks who are younger than me.

There's a lot of folks who don't know how to tend to basic needs, like cooking, cleaning, holding down a job, running a budget, and just making sure their life is not on the verge of collapse. I was required to take courses in high school about this stuff, but I'm not sure the schools do much to prep people for the world outside of school anymore. I think that responsibility has fallen to the parents, but what if they don't know either?

The other is civility. The simple rule of treating people as you would like to be treated seems to have fallen by the wayside. Also, I think social media has taught us to interact with our filters off and say the most terrible things. Out here in the wild, you don't get clicks for acting like a jerk - you get shunned. I think the lines have become blurred on that, though.