I've mentioned psych-prof (and author) Peter Gray both recently (School and Mental Health) and further back (Rethinking School Motivations). Here's a 16-minute talk he gave in June about "the decline of play and rise of mental disorders" in children and young adults, over the past 60 years.
And he says that children and young adults are more depressed than in the Great Depression, more anxious than during the Cold War (with its elementary-school air-raid drills). Narcissism scores (as far back as we have them) trend upwards with later generations, empathy scores trend down. The effects are substantial, and they don't correlate well with economics or wars -- the trends are roughly linear. Here he's thinking of research like Twenge's Birth cohort increases in psychopathology among young Americans, 1938–2007: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the MMPI - Twenge et al (2010) [10-page PDF], summarized at USA Today, and Twenge's own Psychology Today summary of narcissism research at How Dare You Say Narcissism Is Increasing?
And he says that children and young adults are more depressed than in the Great Depression, more anxious than during the Cold War (with its elementary-school air-raid drills). Narcissism scores (as far back as we have them) trend upwards with later generations, empathy scores trend down. The effects are substantial, and they don't correlate well with economics or wars -- the trends are roughly linear. Here he's thinking of research like Twenge's Birth cohort increases in psychopathology among young Americans, 1938–2007: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the MMPI - Twenge et al (2010) [10-page PDF], summarized at USA Today, and Twenge's own Psychology Today summary of narcissism research at How Dare You Say Narcissism Is Increasing?
The research findings fall into 5 main areas: 1) narcissism, 2) positive self-views and other traits related to narcissism, 3) cultural products such as language use, 4) positive trends connected to individualism, and 5) the validity of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI)....It's not a cataclysm (yet?) but it's not a pretty picture, and of course Gray has an explanation. He's an evolutionary-psychology guy and he studies play in animals and in hunter-gatherer societies, and he notes that if you want to create high-anxiety depressed rats or monkeys with poor social skills and poor emotional balance, it's easy: just raise them without the opportunity to play. He believes that some or all of the negative trends he sees are due to the fact that self-directed play has been declining throughout those decades. Supervised "play" of the sort we see in gym class or in AYSO games is not a substitute. Well, I suppose that's obvious, or should be. We are raising our kids as if we want them to be emotionally crippled; it's surprising that the effect is not even greater than what we see.
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