By Mike Males
Younger Millennials and Generation Z are astonishingly different in ways beyond usual generational disparities, as my previous article on California teenagers’ 90%-plus declines in crime argued.
Young people’s radically different behaviors and attitudes terrify conservatives into embracing fascism and discombobulate liberals into confused idiocy. If we oldsters want a glimmer of understanding of younger generation trends bearing down on us, we better quit lying about them.
YM/Z’s seeming contradictions – more depressed, yet less risky and more achieving – defy everything traditional authorities understand. How can today’s girls and young women in particular report both high levels of sadness alongside spectacular advances in education, relentless takeover of entire career fields, and dynamic global activism?
I focus on California youth because they reflect global diversity and clear, accessible statistical trends. Consider California youths’ criminal arrests:
- 1957: 145,000 (population age 10-17, 1.55 million, 10% of Color)
- 1974: 408,000 (3.22 million, 35%)
- 1995: 262,000 (3.67 million, 59%)
- 2019: 43,000 (4.18 million, 72%)
- 2022: 26,000 (4.19 million. 73%)
This looks crazy—but it’s true. Youthful violent and property crimes, including homicides, have plunged by 85% to 90+%. Today’s California teenager is just half as “crime prone” as a graying 50-ager. No expert can explain that. So, they ignore it, along with broader trends:
- In 1970, 62,000 teens gave birth, and 32% of 18-24-year-olds were high school dropouts.
- In 1990, 70,000 teens gave birth; 26% of 18-24-year-olds were high school dropouts, 36% were in college, and 6% held BA or higher degrees.
- Today, 12,000 give birth; 9% are dropouts, 44% are in college, 12% hold BA+ degrees.
Ignore the sensational headlines; teens today are a low-risk cohort . Californians ages 10-19, 15% of the population age 10 and older, account for 9% of homicides, 9% of violent crimes, 7% of gun deaths, 7% of property offenses, 6% of arrests, 5% of suicides, 4% of drug offenses, 3% of fentanyl deaths, and 1% of other drug and alcohol overdoses. And, betraying everything it once meant to be a teenager, just 13% of vandalism, 6% of car theft, 6% of shoplifting, and 5% of arson.
If this is how a teenaged generation acts when suffering a “mental health crisis,” we should wonder how they’d act if “sane.” Psychologist Jean Twenge, who won unmerited acclaim in 2006 with dire alarms predicting more teenaged “narcissism … aggression … shoplifting, fighting … unprotected sex … dropouts,” and other risky anti-socialities now wins unmerited acclaim in 2023 with dire alarms that teenagers don’t take enough risks.
If your eyes glaze over numbers, here’s the bottom line. There wasn’t much improvement, and even some deterioration, in teenage indexes from 1970 to 1990. But after the mid-1990s, and especially as Gen Z emerged after 2010, youthful improvements were so spectacular they constitute a revolution.
What could possibly account for these trends?
Progressives used to be stunningly right about fostering change, but now – at least those getting big grants and press – are abysmally wrong. A century after University of Chicago sociologists’ innovative mappings showed crime tracks dysfunctional neighborhoods, not the race occupying them, progressives have been right: conditions, not bad demographic groups, underlie social problems.
Unfortunately, modern progressives have retreated back into wrongheaded “teen brain” and “adolescent risk” myths to popularize their goals. However, research reviews invalidating thousands of brain-scanning studies underlying brain “science” as subjective fictions and real-life youth trends show 2000s biodeterminism demeaning adolescents embodies the same junk prejudices littering 19th-century racist dogmas Stephen Jay Gould demolished in The Mismeasure of Man.
Teen behaviors stagnated or worsened from the 1970s to the 1990s, then improved dramatically in the 2000s because of two key, interrelated conditions. First, an obscure 1990s welfare reform, increased Earned Income Tax Credits, sharply reduced youth poverty, as measured by the comprehensive Supplemental Poverty Measure, by 80% from 1993 to 2021. Second, Environmental Protection Agency regulations reduced high levels of neurotoxic lead from leaded gasoline, paint, and industrial emissions in children’s systems beginning in the late 1970s by 95% by the 2010s. That translated into improving teenage behaviors 15 years later, from the mid-1990s forward.
Analyses by ChildTrends researchers and by economist and former National Institutes of Health consultant Rick Nevin recently revealed these trends. For all the thousands of policings, bans, preventions, and every other intervention targeting teenagers, none of which showed results, what finally worked to massively reduce crime, violence, dropout, and other risks was massively changing external conditions. Progressives were right all along: it’s the environments, stupid.
That conclusion threatens major interests whose popularity and funding long have depended on fanning visceral fears that crime and other social crises are driven by young people whose innate immaturity renders them in need of restrictive interventions. These interests play on prejudices to evade the obvious. In Washington, DC, typical of the nation, the murder rate among poorer African American youth remains 25 times higher than among affluent White youth a few miles away, reflecting staggering disparities across many social indexes. Yet, authorities blather endlessly about “youth violence” and “teenage risk” while ignoring poverty and related hazards.
In 2022, poverty among youth rose due to congressional failure to renew the child tax credits that had helped reduced their 2021 poverty levels to a record-low 5.2%. In California, youthful crime rates rose by 35% in 2022, fortunately from such a record-low 2021 level that rates remain well below those of 2019 and all earlier years. Progressives should brand this the “GOP-Manchin crime surge” to credit Congress’s youth-poverty promoters, along with celebrating three unheralded entities – the EITC, the EPA, and youth themselves – as the nation’s top social-problem solvers.
Mike Males is senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, San Francisco, and YouthFacts.org .