Sociologists still talk about how they think kids today are so much more mature than kids were in earlier generations. What a load of nonsense. Kids today may know more about the perversions of this world than kids did back then, but they know today almost nothing about hard work, responsibility, and sacrifice.
Amen....I would love to hear from someone in the know as to why our youth suffer from so many anxiety disorders when life is so easy for them????
They've been bombarded with so much sexual material by the time they exit 8th grade, there isn't much room for them to imagine anything they haven't already seen or heard about.
Of course those sociologists taught from the same trough will call that 'advanced'.
Sadly, a lot of kids have lost significant conversational skills, work ethic, and a sense of reality. But then, people and their expectations have a way of shaping reality, for good or ill, and I think that train is headed down the wrong track, too.
With the exception of where urbane ideas have been imposed by regulation or otherwise on rural areas, though, the kids are not so bad. Unfortunately, television and the internet have been used to spread the paradigm far into areas where it will not work, where you still just might have to skin dinner before it is ready to cook. As long as society can exist within its constructs, the urbane will do okay, possibly even better than rural kids, but once outside that--as in natural disasters, the 'zombie apocalypse', or other situations where nature takes over, the rural kids are more likely to come out on top.