THE NINETIES CHILD

In today's climate of public opinion, a commentator invites ridicule by so much as suggesting that children and adolescents growing up during the Fifties enjoyed advantages over those growing up in the Nineties ("What? You want to bring back Ozzie and Harriet?").

To social psychologist Jean M. Twenge of Case Western University, the Fifties do, in fact, look like a much better era for young Americans than the Nineties. The comparison of available psychological data for college students and grade-schoolers from the two decades yields an astonishing pattern: within these two age groups, Twenge documents a shift "toward substantially higher levels of anxiety and neuroticism."

Twenge stresses that "increases in anxiety appear in all of the measures of anxiety and neuroticism included [in the study], and the results for college students replicate in child samples." Indeed, her calculations show that, "both college student (adult) and child samples increased almost a full standard deviation in anxiety between and 1952 and 1993."

For those mystified by the jargon of statistics, Twenge puts it in plainer terms: "The birth cohort change in anxiety is so large that by the 1980s normal child samples were scoring higher [in anxiety] than child psychiatric patients from the 1950s."

What has caused this dramatic erosion of psychological security?

It has not been adverse economic developments.

"Economic conditions," reports the researcher, "do not explain the rise in anxiety, even among the socioeconomically diverse samples." Instead, "strong, significant correlations" in the data do implicate "decreases in social connectedness and increases in environmental dangers."

More specifically, "changes in the divorce rate, the birth rate, and the crime rate are all highly correlated with children's anxiety."

Children's anxiety scores were also highly correlated with the percentage of people living alone. That is, anxiety levels among children skyrocketed as divorce and crime rates climbed, as birth rates dropped, and as an increasing number of Americans began to live apart from family.

"Apparently," remarks Twenge, "children are less concerned with whether their family has enough money than whether it is threatened by violence or dissolution." Poverty, it seems, holds fewer horrors for children than does parental divorce.

(Source: Jean M. Twenge, "The Age of Anxiety? Birth Cohort Change in Anxiety and Neuroticism, 1952-1953," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79[2000]: 1007-1021.)