Grandparents Think Kids Are Ruder These Days. Are They?

I’ve worked as a school librarian in New York City for over 15 years, and I love working with kids. I appreciate young people’s unvarnished communication style, even when their honesty can sting. Once, after returning from summer vacation, a student looked me up and down and said, “You look a lot older now.”

One of my former colleagues in education, who asked that I not use her name, shared her feeling of discouragement about young people’s manners. “My grandchildren are always on their iPads,” she said. “They just get ruder and ruder.”

This same colleague and I were having a meeting after school when a teenage boy burst into my room. “Yo, I lost my hat!” he said. “Is it here?”

“Excuse me, young man?” my colleague said. “Why are you speaking to an adult that way?”

“Dude, I’m sorry!” the boy replied as he slapped his forehead. “I know! I should have said, ‘Yo, Ms. Librarian, have you seen my hat?’”

This exchange made me laugh out loud, but my colleague was furious. Should I have been stricter with the student? And what am I teaching my own daughters about respecting adults?

Are kids ruder, or is something else going on?

Another grandparent, JoAnn Hawker, has a much more optimistic view of young people today, and not just because her granddaughter has “stellar” manners. As the founder and CEO of therapeutic gardening nonprofit Good Seed Growth, Hawker supports young people who struggle with social skills due to trauma. In the garden, children learn to respect adults over time. Children need to be nurtured just like her plants, which don’t grow overnight but take time and patience. When she and her students have their hands in the soil, they find a calm and focus that might otherwise be hard to access during our