The current generation of young Americans feels particularly apprehensive, new polling shows — anxious about their lives, disillusioned about the direction of the country and pessimistic about their futures.
Just one-third of respondents ages 12 to 17 said things were going well for children and teenagers today, in a survey published Monday by Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy group. Less than half said they thought they would be better off than their parents when they grew up — a downbeat view shared among teenagers in many rich countries, other data shows.
It’s not just about teenage angst. A different survey, by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation, the latest installment of which was also released Monday, has asked questions of young people over time and looked at how their responses have changed. Members of Gen Z, ages 12 to 27, are significantly less likely to rate their current and future lives highly than millennials were when they were the same age, it found.
Among those 18 to 26, just 15 percent said their mental health was excellent. That is a large decline from both 2013 and 2003, when just over half said so.
Together, the surveys offer an unusually detailed look at the perspectives of teenagers, who are rarely surveyed in high-quality polls.
“The data is pretty stark: Our kids are not all right,” said James P. Steyer, founder and chief executive of Common Sense Media.
These impressions among young people could be contributing to a challenge for the presidential campaigns with the country’s newest eligible voters: Youth turnout and engagement, which helped President Biden in particular in 2020, appear to be down.
“For young people, the options that have been available to you your entire lifetime have been either Trump or Biden,” said Kristen Soltis Anderson, a founding partner of Echelon Insights, a Republican polling firm, and one of the pollsters who conducted the Common Sense Media survey. “You may be looking at that and saying, ‘No thanks.’”
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