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The High School: An Analysis of Yearbooks

Karen Sternheimer, Sociologist, USC| March 2026

Michael Messner’s new book, The High School: Sports, Spirit & Citizens, 1903-2024 is a great example of how artifacts of everyday life can become data for sociological analysis. As a scholar of gender and sports, Messner realized that yearbooks serve as a window to view past constructions of both sports and gender.

His own high school, Salinas High School, seemed like a natural fit, as he had about 30 years of books—not just his own, because his father served as a coach for nearly 30 years and other family members attended, he had decades of books. The book blends the author’s memories (and occasionally his niece’s reflections, who attended more recently) with content analysis of the number of pages spent on boys’ sports compared with girls’ sports.

He observes:

“Yearbook photos, with their captions and text, are a unique window into the ways that high schools in general, and sports in particular, have been key drivers of shifting gender, race, and class formations. Yearbooks, like all windows, can sometimes be clear, other times foggy. And windows are always bounded by frames that create vantage points that reveal some things while concealing others” (p. 17).

Listen to a conversation between Michael Messner and Karen Sternheimer here:

The High School Part 1

Yearbooks have photographers, writers, editors, and advisors who choose what goes into the books in any given year. Past yearbooks also likely shape the contents of future yearbooks, influencing what seems to “naturally” belong in one.

My fuzzy high school memories of yearbook involvement highlight something that might be lost on twenty-first century yearbook production: the use of film. I briefly worked as a photographer on our high school yearbook and remember that due to its cost, we were limited to a small number of rolls of film (which then had to be developed, at an additional cost). Color film was even more expensive to purchase and develop, so its use was even rarer.

This meant we had to be much more decisive about what, who, and where to photograph than the digital photographer would need to be today. High-quality cameras that took high-resolution photos were also a rarity. The school-owned cameras were signed out to a handful of students at a time; only rarely did a student own their own 35mm camera. It was a big deal when I got my own for my sixteenth birthday.

Additionally, appearing in a yearbook might have less to do with one’s accomplishments than with who your friends are. I happened to be friends with the editor-in-chief of our senior class’s yearbook, so I appeared in many of the snapshots that ended up in our book. I got roped into dressing as a mime along with a few classmates for one of the thematic pages, which probably wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been an easy ask for my friend.

This is all to say that yearbooks are by nature imperfect reflections of high school, but they can provide information into who holds status at any given time.

And it should come as no surprise that at Salinas High, Messner found that male athletes had an outsized role in its yearbooks, with far fewer pages devoted to girls’ sports for most of its history. But in his examination of more than a century of yearbooks, Messner found that the trajectory of girls’ sports did not have a consistent upward trajectory since the passage of Title IX in 1972—which made “the failure to provide equal athletic opportunity” illegal— as one might assume.

Instead, girls’ sports participation had been presented more in the first few decades of the yearbooks, and all but disappeared the mid-twentieth century before a post Title IX revitalization. “A half century before my own high school years of 1966-70,” Messner recounts, “the girls at Salinas High School enjoyed a vibrant interscholastic sports program, and their teams were treated respectfully in the annual yearbooks” (p. 6).

As with his research on gendered sports coverage on ESPN and local news, he also includes a qualitative analysis component. Beyond the page count, he observed how sports participation was racialized, with more students of color participating during the lull in the middle of the twentieth century. However, yearbook photos suggest that sports participation among white girls ticked up in the post Title IX era of the 1970s and 1980s (p.8).

These shifts weren’t just “natural” reflections of reduced female interest in sports but reflected historical events. Messner observes how yearbooks he reviewed “evidenced many ways that the militarization of school life had fused with sports” as part of military readiness (pp. 45-46).

Yearbook coverage specifically and female sports participation in general declined at Salinas after World War II, reflecting the larger regressive shift in gender ideology. “Women were central targets for containment in the postwar years,” he notes, as “women’s supposed physical frailties and emotional nature” reduced the availability of interscholastic competition (p. 108).

Female athletes were often mocked as the butt of jokes when they were included in yearbook photos, with captions suggesting that they were incompetent, or highlighting their bodies as attractive or unattractive (pp.110-111).

At worst, sports sections [in the 1950s] were sites of scorn over girls’ humiliating lack of athletic knowledge, and mocking derision for their physical incompetence; at best, they offered the viewer a source of voyeuristic pleasure in the grace, poise, and beauty of girls’ bodies in motion (p. 115).

The shifts in coverage of girls’ sports that followed in the decades that followed were not inevitable, but the result of resistance to their near exclusion of girls from competitive sports. Title IX did not create itself; it was the result of activism and advocacy for equal opportunity in education.

Towards the end of the twentieth and early twenty-first century, female athletes received more recognition in the Salinas High School yearbooks. But as one female athlete interviewed for the book recounted: “we never got as big of crowds as the boys. And the girls’ teams, we would always go support the boys, but the boys would never come and support us” (p. 175). When Messner recently visited his old school, he noticed the Athletic Hall of Fame included just one female athlete.

The High School reminds us that change isn’t simple or linear, but complex and shifting. The book itself has the look and feel of an actual high school yearbook, filled with pictures and captions. This encourages the reader to reflect on their own high school experience, through lenses of both nostalgia and the sociological imagination.

Perfect! Right and Left are rigidifying their superficial pet “explanations” for why a mass shooter did what she did

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| March 2026

Ideological bigots make ONE shooter the poster for Canada’s 100,000 transgender individuals and 5 million teens/young adults long before facts are known.

Back in 2020, 51-year-old alcoholic, arsonist, and police car enthusiast Gabriel Wortman carried out multiple shootings, killing 22 people in Nova Scotia in 2020 – the deadliest shooting rampage in Canadian history.

Strangely, no one argued there was something terribly wrong with middle-aged men, or blamed them for being straight or buying booze, accelerants, and used cop cars.

October 2017

The Canadian government since banned 2,500 types of assault weapons, including the dozens America’s worst mass shooter, 64-year-old heavy drinker and gambler Stephen Paddock, assembled.

Paddock fired more than 1,000 rounds from his hotel room perch at a Las Vegas music festival, killing 60 people, wounding at least 413, and causing 450 more injuries in the ensuing panic.

Recalls satirist Kinky Friedman’s tune memorializing 1966’s University of Texas Tower shooter Charles Joseph Whitman, whose rampage took a leisurely 96 minutes to gun down 45 people with his .36 Magnum, killing 14 (47 total casualties, adding two knife murders back home). No one suggested a crisis among ex-Eagle Scouts, ex-Marines, or men with flat-top crewcuts, though Friedman did warn, “There’s still a lot of Eagle Scouts around.”

Also, “Who are we to say the boy’s insane?” You see, nothing much changed in half a century except that Paddock used far more lethal AR10/15 bumpstocked riflery and took a mere 10 minutes to inflict 473 gunshot and 927 total casualties in Las Vegas.

Strangely, no one argued there’s a crisis among aging adults or called for older people to be banned from guns, drinking, and gambling.

No one, despite this unsettling fact: Paddock’s gunfire killed and injured more people in 10 minutes than are killed and injured in all school shootings in 5 years. That shocker is one gun-rights and gun-control lobbies alike absolutely ban from ever being mentioned in American media and political forums.

February 2026

Now, a mass shooting by Canadian 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar killing 9 and injuring 25 is generating the next predictable round of sweeping generalizations.

It must have been her “transgender identification” (right wingers, delighting in misgendering, called her “him”). Ban the 100,000 Canadians who identify as transgender, the large majority under age 25. They’re all guilty!

It must have been that she was “‘addicted to gore and violence web sites” (mainstream/liberal/Leftists). Surely blaming video games and “addictive” social media will be next. Ban 5 million young Canadians from everything: gender transitions, social media, Grand Theft Auto, whatever pops into aging heads must be “the problem.”

Fun for all!

Don’t bother us with details

The tragedy couldn’t have anything to do with the slowly emerging facts that Jesse’s family was bizarrely “nomadic” and moved every few months, that her parents were bitterly divorced and estranged, that authorities had seized firearms from her home and then for no apparent reason returned them, that she had dropped out of school years earlier and been repeatedly detained for mental health troubles, that her mother was a “conservative-leaning libertarian” who declared of anti-transgender bigots, “Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate?” … and more to be discovered.

Complications! No fun!

If everyone else can speculate, so can I. Citing neuroscience: the left-right opiners’ over-25 brains, far from being “developed” and “mature,” are deteriorating relics losing memory and learning genes and cognition by the day. You can tell I’m losing it.

I suggest that’s why the accusers after every tragedy involving a young person blare the same quick recitations before the facts are even nearly known.

Going Public “For Real”

Anthony Bernier, Project Director, YouthFacts.org | March 2026

White young people just walked in the front door of the Greenville, South Carolina, main library in 1959. Not so for 18 year old Jesse Jackson (1941-2026). The books Jackson wanted to read during his freshman Christmas break from University of Illinois took a lot more.

Jackson’s local McBee Avenue Colored Branch didn’t own what Jackson wanted to read. Instead, the McBee librarian used a favor and wrote a personal note to get him an appointment with the main Whites-only Greenville County library staff.

Even with his note, Jackson had to use the main library’s rear entrance. The librarian read his note and responded “It’ll take at least six days to get these books.”

Reasonably, Jackson replied, “Couldn’t I just go back in the shelves and look for them… where nobody else would see me?”

“You cannot have the books now…” the librarian answered, “that’s the way it is.”

A policeman, standing nearby (probably because of the advance appointment), joined in, “You heard what she said.”

Jackson, the future civil rights titan, reportedly stormed out the library’s back door. He circled around to the front of the building and read the inscription written in its granite entablature,

“That thing says public, and my father is a veteran and pays taxes.”

Greenville Eight and Two Unidentified Adults (Greenville County Library Website)

1960, The Greenville Eight (Greenville County Library Website). Jesse Jackson upper left.

Jackson vowed to return over the summer promising to make the library “go public for real.”

Jackson, good to his word, returned to Greenville later in the summer, and, along with 7 other young people, entered the main library and mounted a 45-minute sit in. They became known as the “Greenville Eight,” mostly kids from Sterling High School (5 girls and 3 boys).

The library director promptly called police who arrested them all for “disorderly conduct.”

According to the American Library Association, later that fall, Greenville became South Carolina’s first public library to desegregate in response to Black community activism. ¹

Among all of Jesse Jackson’s myriad civil and human rights campaigns, throughout his long and productive life of progressive activism, his career as an activist began as a teenager at his local public library.

Of course, this story also begs questions about the myths libraries continue to tell about being “free for all.” Today’s criticism of racist public policies targeting the Black community, and Black peoples’ often heroic struggles to overcome them, rather obscures legacies of how public libraries complied with racial segregation. Further, the story illustrates the American Library Association’s still unacknowledged complacency and silence in how the institution looked the other way for decades. ²

Such civic heroism also rests uneasily against the vision that public libraries generally hold of young people – as needy, skill-lacking, individual information consumers. Upon learning the history of reform and innovation young people initiated libraries would do well to revise their visions of youth.

But an equally pertinent story resides, especially for our YouthFacts readers, in how young people, teenagers (Jesse Jackson was a teenager himself in 1960) led the movement to integrate their public libraries. This story of young people at the forefront of the broader movement to integrate public services also documents the leading roles young people assumed across the nation. And, like so many histoires of social movements, it ignores the roles young people so often play in pursuing social justice, as I pointed out in my previous critique of Ken Burn’s new documentary of the American Revolution (see my December 2025 YouthFacts.org blog post).

¹ George M. Eberhart, “The Greenville Eight: The Sit-in that Integrated the Greenville (S. C.) Library, American Libraries, 1 June 2017.

² For a critique of public library reluctance to reconcile its complicity with racial segregation, see Wayne A. Wiegand, “Sanitizing American Library History: Reflections of a Library Historian, Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy 90, no. 2, pages 103-120. For specifics on Jackson’s Greenville library protest, see, Wayne A. Wiegand and Shirley A. Wiegand, The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018.

Generation Z’s real social media sin has nothing to do with “mental health”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| February 2026

Allied government/Big-Tech powers pushing censorship, mass surveillance, and repression target teenagers and online freedom. But those are just the beginning. Their larger goals are truly terrifying.

The emotional, trivial-effect anti-teen/social-media junk dominating legislative and popular media forums continues to be demolished by exhaustive research. The latest (December 2025) is a multi-year study of 25,600 teenagers by a University of Manchester team whose findings “do not support the widely held view that adolescent technology use [social media and gaming] is a major causal factor in their mental health difficulties.”

No matter. More than a dozen articles fronting today’s MSN news feed panic over teens and social media, what “parents can do” and what smartphone, under-16, and age-verification bans policy makers should legislate this week. None have the remotest connection to research reality.

For the moment, let us put aside the dismality and begin with the few hopeful developments.

University of Surrey criminologist Emily Setty’s research documents several crucial realities that young people understand but aging just-ban-teens officialdom can’t get through their deteriorating-memory, -learning, and -cognition cerebral cortexes mired in the past.

“Young people do not experience online and offline as separate worlds, but as a single, interconnected continuum,” Setty reports. “Social media is not an external danger that young people occasionally visit. It is woven into their everyday social worlds.”

For illustration, watch FX’s “Social Studies,” supposedly presented to raise alarms about young “digital natives.” In fact, it shows the opposite – how Los Angeles’s most-online teens merge active social media and vibrant public lives.

“By cutting young people off from the spaces through which they meet real personal, interpersonal and social needs, a ban risks leaving them unmoored,” Setty concludes. “A recent joint statement signed by more than 40 children’s charities, digital safety experts and bereaved families warns of the danger that blanket prohibitions may isolate vulnerable young people from peer support networks and crisis resources.

“Young people are not passive victims of technology but can identify problems and articulate the kind of digital lives they want… Policy must start from how young people actually live, not from adult fears about technology.”

Policy is going with the fears. In a transparent sham, UK officials are deputizing sycophant “consultants” whose bigotries against transgender students now will be directed to uphold the UK’s destructive anti-youth social media restrictions.

From another angle…

Socialprofiler’s new analysis of 756 million user profiles on Instagram, TikTok, and X, likewise “reveals that generational stereotypes often contradict observed data”:

· Gen Z [ages 19-25] “focuses on social justice issues like LGBTQ+ rights and climate change,” BLM, and “Palestine solidarity,” while

· “Older [ages 46-60] users are more likely to promote political polarization, and to embrace conspiracy theories about UFO, aliens, the Illuminati, the Earth being flat, ‘alternative knowledge’,” and like “right wing” ludicrosities.

This ain’t your (grand)mommy’s and daddy’s “generation gap.” It’s Margaret Mead’s and Alvin Toffler’s 1970s warnings of a future whose elder elites sink into baseless visceral horror at social/demographic/technological change and become societal wrecking balls. More below.

Socialprofiler’s study concludes: “While Gen Z shows higher engagement with progressive social issues and left-leaning political content, older generations demonstrate stronger engagement with traditional partisan politics and party-affiliated content… The left-leaning party category covers a younger demographic generation,” but “the Republican party category is much more represented across all platforms.”

Why are the repressors toward Gen Z so widespread and adamant?

… that all Republicans and 95% of Democrats in power (yes, including liberals who benefit from young people’s activism) spurred on by loud academics and Big-Tech profiteers are salivating to enact a barrage of terrible censor-media and surveil-users bills?

My first, simple explanation has been that ban-teens authorities – Republican and Democrat alike – are transparently furious at Gen Z’s techno savvy and politics, led by young people’s opposition to Israel’s genocide and activism over climate change. The rising frenzy in Congress, states, and countries to ban teenagers from “adult content” on social media and ramp up mass surveillance of internet users has nothing to do with anguished tears over teens’ “mental health.” It’s straight-up political oppression.

Analytical technomedia critics, led by Taylor Lorenz, warn that driving the “protect children!” crusade is government/Big Tech’s greed to harvest ever-more information on users (including children) via “age verification” subterfuges to cement their mass media control and profit. Their repressions are aided by authoritarian right-wingers like the Heritage Foundation and “stupid, stupid liberals” all too willing to succumb to the latest moral panic.

The resulting avalanche of national and state legislation to banish internet anonymity by requiring IDs, facial and biometric scans, and detailed personal information to access “adult content” (a codeword for narrowing accessible sites to those approved by government/Big Tech) are “terrifying” to Americans’ freedoms of expression and privacy, Lorenz declared in a highly enlightening 1/27 interview with Francesca Fiorentini.

Unfortunately, that compelling case appears just the interim. Even more sinister goals underlie today’s repress-youth/censor-surveil juggernaut.

The explosion of nihilism

Past moral panics over youth, including Democrat/Republican anger at 1960s youthful pro-civil-rights, anti-Vietnam-War activism leading the “generation gap” over social and political issues, bitter as they seemed at the time, were nothing like today’s nihilistic apocalysm.

Today’s nihilism is not good-old Sixties “burn-it-down-then-build-something-better” revolutionary spirit. It is “burn-it-all-down-and-let-‘em-die” destruction.

Philosophical nihilists of the past variously called for a reawakening to lead us to nirvana. The huge following of the Doors’ Jim Morrison, the “Age of Aquarius,” Greening of America, The Making of A Counter-Culture, etc., all brimmed with hope for a better world. Naive, simplistic, obnoxious, acidulated (in Morrison’s case, drunken) as these might have been, they were at least hopeful.

Today’s nihilists are nothing like that. They actively seek to abolish humanity’s future wholesale — and say so outright. Diverse, multicultural America in a multi-polar world is their idea of global dystopia. They see nothing to rescue.

Emerging, powerful nihilists are assuming dominance over the West’s discourse and future, openly advancing plans so destructive they stand ready to eliminate constitutional rights, traditions, education, and America itself:

· MAGA/racist-Right nihilists: President Donald Trump’s core “God is on our side” supporters earnestly believe liberal, immigrant, racial, and LGBTQ minorities who “are not like us” aim to exterminate and “replace” them. Their vision: End-of-Times destruction of human civilization, a few “Christian” raptures, everyone else dies horrifically to spend eternity hell-burned.

· Zionihilists: fanatic supporters of Israel, diagramming with MAGA “Christian Zionists,” who actively push to end the United States, UK, and Western democracies to eliminate all pro-Palestine activism. Something about Israel incites more destroy-everything frenzy than any previous cause. Their vision: Greater Israel; everyone else can die.

· Environmental nihilism: climate change and related Green activism threaten the profits and dominance of major corporate interests and demand sacrifices of aging generations who would rather sabotage all of humanity’s future than suffer any diminution in their opulence and convenience. Vision: living out their limited time in comfort; younger/future generations, especially Greta Thunberg, can go die.

· Botarchy nihilism: “freedom cities” (isolated fortresses, like Superman’s Solitude) ruled by a few AI-reconstructed billion/trillionaire behemoths; we 99.99999% excess meat-bodies can die.

One nihilism example of many amid these cheery scenarios: Trump’s energy policy is not about standard free-market maximization of capitalist production. It is harm maximization. Its dictatorial subsidize-coal/sabotage-wind goals are to hasten global warming, vastly increase diseconomies and pollution, ignite wars and chaos, and ramp up environmental and societal destruction. It seeks to assure no future.

Heritage’s Project 2025, the Trump administration’s playbook, codifies concrete, sequenced steps to nihilistic armageddon. End democracy. Embrace fanatic religious adventism. Wreck the economy. Create chaos. Burn it all down. Harm and destroy people’s lives to elevate Ayn Rand’s Superman.

Established Democrats (and the UK’s Labour Party) would seem the natural political counterweight to nihilism, yet their strategy and vision remain stuck in slower, disastrous corporate consensus. Corporate Democrats and Labour fear younger Democratic and Green Party challenges more than they fear Trump and have shown they will forge common ground with far-Rightists to suppress them.

The Democrats’ base of younger but increasingly broad ages (as Martha Stewart’s granddaughter showed, the young can be persuasive with their elders) plus growing mostly-young MAGA defectors are the only real opposition to rising nihilism, which is why Heritage and corporate Democrats prioritize their silencing.

Am I overstating the rising forces of nihilism we see frankly, openly intoning their seemingly insane – it sounds impossible – yet steadily advancing blueprints? Their hardwired no-future schemes – greased by the ID/censor/surveil state/“protect children!” edicts they push every day on CNN, CBS, Fox – can’t really happen… can they?

Election Lessons for Every Organization

Wendy Schaetzel Lesko, Co-Founder, Youth Infusion| January 2026

Profound lessons emerge from Zohran Mamdani’s victory even though NYC is unlike any other city. A historic turnout and a whopping 78 percent of those under age 30 voted for Zohran Mamdani. Sure, he is young, energetic, and charismatic, but I believe there is a broader conclusion that is relevant to any organization that recognizes the irreplaceable value of the rising generations.

“The language with which we speak to young people is truly one of condescension… If you treat young people with the respect that they deserve then they will not be a part of your movement but the heart of your movement.”

Mamdani’s insight isn’t just about politics—it’s a wake-up call to every institution, nonprofit, and company that seeks to stay relevant and innovate. His words expose a persistent gap between how adults talk about young people and how rarely they talk with them. This “Youthquake” (Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year in 2017), that powered his campaign did not happen by accident; it came from genuine listening, shared power, and the conviction that young people deserve to shape—not just support—the causes they believe in.

Cities have always been laboratories for democracy. In my recent article in the National Civic League’s magazine, I outline specific strategies for local government leaders to replace token youth engagement efforts. Read full article here. These lessons are magnified by Mamdani’s example. His victory demonstrates what becomes possible when young people are seen not as a “target audience” but as co-architects of civic renewal.

The election sharpens some of these approaches:

Demonstrate that young people are not too young to be critical thinkers
Amend the expression “meet them where they are” and instead meet their grievances and dreams head on
Make sure ideas emanating from “youth voice” does not continue to fall on deaf ears
Be relentless in learning from those young people who most impacted and unheard
Recognize the demand for urgency is not the negative stereotype of impatience that often sidelines young people
Replace empty rhetoric and broken promises with persistent and accountable action
Embrace “We are unstoppable, another world is possible!”

Before the November 4 election, pollster John Della Volpe validated that people feel most campaign messages sound like scripts from a Human Resources department. Young people detect condescension in a heart beat. Yet the responses from these young NYC voters offer a poignant counterpoint and a hopeful challenge: h

“We’re hopeful — and just ready for some new love and spaces.”
“We still care. We’re just not represented.”
“We’ve been through a lot. But we’re still trying to be part of it.”
“We are the generation that will be talked about for generations.”

These are not the words of apathy or disengagement. They are an invitation—a plea—to rebuild trust through authenticity, shared purpose, and visible collaboration. Whether the context is an election, a nonprofit boardroom, a classroom, or a city hall, the message is the same: young people are paying attention. They are measuring not our slogans but our sincerity, not our outreach but our willingness to share real power.

Mamdani’s landslide is more than a political milestone; it’s a generational mirror. It reflects what happens when young people are not merely courted during campaign season but centered in year-round decision-making. Every organization, regardless of mission or size, can draw from this moment a simple yet profound truth: when young people feel truly seen, heard, and valued, they don’t just show up—they show the way forward.

Photo credit https://www.thecivicscenter.org

Authorities are recasting young people’s concerns about climate change, Gaza, social justice, family crises, etc., as “mental illness”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| January 2026

Let’s start with the clueless condescension, because it gets scarier.

National Public Radio’s 1A (First Amendment)’s lengthy 12/18 “Navigating modern adolescence” managed to dodge ALL the family, community, economic, and global issues teenagers tell major surveys are their biggest worries.

Instead, NPR depicted teen concerns as mere “rabbit holes” social media companies cook up to “monetize” the adolescent’s “brain and a body that are changing dramatically.” “Their stress is not about you,” NPR’s clinical psychologist soothed parents and grownups.

Of course, no one mentioned the Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the big one everyone talks about but no one cites truthfully. Among teens who suffer depression, suicide attempts, gun carrying, fights, dating violence, etc., the biggest associates by far are parents’ and nearby adults’ psychological abuse (suffered by 62% of teens), violence (35%), “severe” mental health problems (35%), drug/alcohol abuse (30%), and criminal arrests (20%).

Nor did NPR’s experts and host mention the other big, definitive youth survey, Monitoring the Future, which shows poor relationships with parents, not social media use, are the biggest drivers of youthful unhappiness. Teenage girls concerned about climate change and social issues are unhappier than those who shrug them off, MTF’s latest survey finds.

Officials and big interests don’t like young activists; they prefer the shrug-offs. Just tell teens, “It’s not so bad,” NPR’s experts advised parents and clinicians.

Young people have no real problems… just social-media-created “phobias”

“Why ‘peniaphobia’ [fear of being poor] is exploding among young people (and why we should be concerned),” headlines The Independent, London’s liberal-left paper (except on youth issues).

Seven in 10 18-29-year-olds think their generation will not be better or as well off as their parents.

Sure, young people are being “brutally confronted with precariousness: student jobs lost, difficulties paying rent, and recourse to food banks” and “a feeling of economic vulnerability,” the article admits, alongside failing to refute young people’s well-founded fears of poverty. But those aren’t the real problem.

What’s the real problem? You guessed it – “social media platforms,” whose materialistic images “play a major role in spreading this anxiety. On Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, the most popular content depicts idealized lives: dream vacations, luxury outfits, immaculate apartments, dazzling professional success… A lifestyle that seems out of reach for many, fueling feelings of failure or inferiority.”

Young people’s economic fears are really just an “insidious illness” driven by social media’s shallow “race for success… as if not being able to be first calls their entire life into question,” a child psychiatrist explains. “For some young people, this translates into a constant fear of ‘failing in life’ if they don’t quickly achieve a certain level of material comfort. The constant comparison, combined with fear of the economic future, makes peniaphobia a breeding ground for mental distress.”

“How can we allay (young people’s) fear of being downgraded?” the article asks. Not by leaders actually confronting wealth concentration, unaffordability, unemployment, housing and health costs, environmental degradation, Artificial Intelligence, etc. Perish the thought.

No; experts’ solution is for young people to disconnect from social media, do breathing exercises, and “seek professional help” for their “phobia” to “understand its origins and develop appropriate support.”

Socially conscious young people – especially liberal girls – are mentally ill

NPR’s and The Independent’s hosts and psychologists sound AI-programmed, like ordering, “Siri! Devise a sentence or two dismissing young people’s real concerns.”

However, they’re not the worst manifestation of growing mainstream-liberal pretend-sympathy campaigns that recast social-media “victimized” young people’s – especially young women’s – concerns over climate change, Gaza, social justice, and larger issues as psychoses treatable by counseling and online banishments.

U.S. psychologist Jean Twenge declares Gen Z liberal girls’ social-justice and climate-change concerns are frivolous; psychologist Jonathan Haidt ignores them altogether. Girls are depressed because they’re duped by social media’s shallow looks-and-popularity images and bullying by “mean” teenagers, Twenge says. Haidt insists liberal girls just need to get off social media and perhaps get psychological treatment. Teens only use social media for porn, cyberbullying, spreading bad values, and contact with predators, Haidt and Twenge say.

Both rely on their own prejudices against young people instead of evidence; they both ignore Pew Research, CDC, and other major surveys showing large majorities of teens use social media beneficially and encounter much more meanness from adults at home than online. No matter. Emotional calls to ban teens from social media are quotable and popular.

Right-wingers rejoice in these inchoate attacks on young people, but Democrats are leading the reprogram-youth crusade. Online analyst Taylor Lorenz condemns “dumb, dumb, dumb” progressives and liberals who lead the charge to internet-ban and age-restrict Gen Z teens, potentially crippling their global advocacy for progressive causes.

And it gets still worse

This banish/redirect-youth crusade gets scarier still, as if the bottom has fallen out of human beings’ long, painful struggle toward decency. You can plumb the darkest pits of the savage “manosphere” cave and not find anything approaching the evil expressed by the Obama presidency’s Hillary Clinton and Sarah Hurwitz and roomfuls of applauding billionaire-funded luminaries.

Hurwitz, Clinton and their top-level audiences are deeply upset… not at the “carnage” and “wall of dead children” in Gaza, their own words describing the mass-slaughter by Israeli forces armed by US, UK, and German governments.

No, Clinton and Hurwitz declare with shocking candor (they never thought their words would become public) to approving corporate, political, religious, media, and foundation elites, the villains are social media platforms like TikTok that are “smashing our young people’s brains” by showing real on-the-ground reporting, graphic videos, and embarrassingly direct quotes from the Israeli press and leaders’ openly genocidal statements on Gaza.

Clinton and Hurwitz yearned for a past when “responsible” Western media censored harsh realities from public view. The “constant exposure to graphic images from Gaza social media feeds filled with footage of dead and injured Palestinian children are creating an emotional shock that ‘makes it impossible’ for her to defend Israel’s actions in conversations with young people,” Hurwitz complained.* Jewish schools should ban smartphones and social media until senior year, she said, to — you guessed it — “protect students’ mental health.”

Hurwitz is outraged that young people, especially Jewish students, are “confusing… essential Holocaust education” with the logical ethical principle that “big powerful people hurting weaker people,” as Nazis did to Jews, is wrong, an inhumane atrocity.

No, no, no, Hurwitz insists, the overly-egalitarian claim that the Holocaust lesson is “never again” for all peoples is “anti-Semitic.” Rather, Jewish and other young people must be taught that “big strong Israelis… hurting emaciated Palestinians” (her words) is morally right.

An eye-blink ago,1980s and ‘90s authorities worried that violent movies, rap, and video games were de-sensitizing children and teens to violence and molding a generation of “adolescent super-predators.” All baloney, as it turned out, but now, authorities complain that real images of harsh brutalities from Palestine are over-sensitizing young people’s humanitarian empathies, interfering with official carnages.

More nihilist than the darkest “manosphere” pit

If Western culture retains a shred of the civilized decency we boast about, the likes of Hurwitz, Clinton, and like-minded elites would be ostracized from public discourse. Instead, the reverse is happening: more dictatorial censorship edicts across the West to suppress all dissent – especially by young people, and especially concerning Gaza, climate change, and social justice.

Congressmembers freely declare they forced the sale of TikTok to a pro-Israel mega-billionaire not for “national security” or other made-up subterfuges, but to suppress young people’s pro-Palestine views. The UK and German governments allied with Big Tech (which delightedly exploits government “age verification” mandates to gather users’ private information) likewise are decimating free speech principles to shut down advocacies officials broadly label as “anti-Semitic” and “terrorism.”

The 1984 metaphor is overworked, but still… it’s hard to imagine worse Orwellisms than Clinton’s denunciation of real-death videos from Palestine as “made up” because they challenge official narratives, or the coalescing of government, Big Tech, anti-youth, psychological, and established media interests around sweeping dictates to bar young people and dissidents from vital online resources in the name of preventing “mental illness.” We’re living a dystopian cliche.

*I’d love to see Hillary and Hurwitz debate political scientist Norm Finkelstein, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, or campus activist Simone Zimmerman on the “facts” of Israel-Palestine. Never going to happen. The elites hide in safe, billionaire-sponsored forums and controlled media like Fox News and Morning Joe.

Social media isn’t driving the teenage “loneliness epidemic”

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| January 2026

Americans of all ages suffer a “loneliness epidemic,” former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy announced in 2023, fostering health damage rivaling smoking “15 cigarettes a day.”

“In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness,” Murthy lamented. “Across many measures, Americans appear to be becoming less socially connected over time… Instead of coming together, we will further retreat to our corners—angry, sick, and alone.”

Well, that’s dark. We’d better remedy why we’re lonelier.

One big “socially isolating” factor Murthy cites, among several (after all, Robert Putnam’s [in]famous “Bowling Alone” essay first appeared in 1995, when primitive PC dial-up howled at 16 slow Mhz), is our devices: “social media, smartphones, virtual reality, remote work, artificial intelligence, and assistive technologies, to name just a few.”

Psychologist Jean Twenge argues that’s too wimpy: social media, particularly smartphones, are the villain. Severely truncating charts (i.e., chopping off the lower and upper 60 points on a scale of 100 to make trends look wildly more terrifying), she declares: “There’s something about being around another person – about touch, about eye contact, about laughter – that can’t be replaced by digital communication. The result is a generation of teens who are lonelier than ever before.” [Correction 1: online videochats do transmit eye contact and laughter; imagine the panic if they also transmitted “touch.”]

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his After Babel disciples agree. They insist their own generations that grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s before social media were happy, well-adjusted, and never lonely or anxious (“Phones?” one boasted. “No. We had each other.”) [Correction 2: teens of the 1950s-1990s logged plenty of phone time, along with hours of television and radio.]

Haidt sold at least one young core follower on his nostalgia of past adolescent bliss: “a time we never knew,” Freya India laments: now, her psychically tortured Generation Z suffers “anxiety (in) a phone-based world” of “loneliness, yes, but also the grief. The loss. The feeling of wanting to be free from the only world we’ve ever known.”

[This view has always puzzled me. If you feel so terribly oppressed by cellphones and social media, solutions abound: (a) don’t get a cellphone and online connection; (b) use the “off” button; and/or (c) click online tabs to block sites causing loneliness, grief, loss, anxiety, and entrapment (controls so easy even this 75-year-old regularly works them); then (d) go outside and frolic with friends in the soccer field sun and froyo fern patio. Look around. There’s no gun to your head! You don’t have to spend dark lonely months hunched over porn, Nazi, bullying, pro-ana, hate-your-body sites!]

Of course, there would be downsides, the same as if past generations had dumped their televisions, radios, Princess phones, arcade gaming, etc. (which likewise were lambasted as “addicting”). Still, a vocal fraction really seems to feel compelled to use technology to self-destruct.

Haidt also fails to mention that cities, malls, downtowns, etc., were so terrified of the teens of his day that hundreds of jurisdictions enacted juvenile bans and anti-cruising ordinances, culminating in the Clinton (yes, that Bill Clinton; ironic, huh?) administration’s mid-‘90s push for daytime/nighttime curfews so strict that teens would be allowed in public only a few hours most days of the year. And to stop the “touch” Twenge celebrates, thousands of schools, youth organizations, workplaces, etc., adopted “3-foot” personal separation rules.

All this leads to the final irony challenging the massive campaign berating us (and teenagers) that social media (especially smartphones) has horribly rewired today’s youth, the ultimate shocker…

TEENS’ LONELINESS HAS NOT RISEN OVER THE LAST HALF-CENTURY

I graphed all 48 years of Monitoring the Future’s survey, the only one to ask the same question (“a lot of times I feel lonely”) of a consistent number (around 2,000) of high school seniors under the same selection process every year.

The change in high schoolers’ reporting loneliness – using a standard regression trendline to incorporate all years in the series instead of just cherry-picking the years that show what I want – is far below even tiny significance levels (d = 0.047, nothing), as the figures illustrate.

Sources: Monitoring the Future, 2025; Pew Research, 2007-2025.

Demolishing Haidt’s nostalgia, Twenge’s celebration, and India’s illusion of joyous warm-body togetherness prior to the social media/cellphone era, teens’ self-reported loneliness was high in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s – long before social media and cellphones “destroyed adolescence.”

· When Haidt was 17 in 1977, 0% of youths had social media or cellphones, yet 37% of his teen peers reported to MTF feeling “lonely… a lot.”

· In 2024, 95% of teens use social media and cellphones, and 38% report loneliness to the same survey.

Not exactly the Four Horsemen. In fact, teen trends have been better on loneliness and many other indexes than those for both young adults and all adults.

How to rig your advocacy

Note how easily “trends” can be rigged to show whatever an advocate desires by cherry-picking which “before” and “after” years to compare – a disgraceful subterfuge routinely used in pop-academics’ and media discussions of social media:

· Want to show teenage loneliness has skyrocketed due to social media? Compare 2021 (46% reported being lonely) to 2007 (22%).

· Want to show teenage loneliness has plummeted due to social media? Compare 2007 (22%) to 1995 (36%).

Both comparisons are bogus. The first ignores that teens’ social media and cellphone use were already well entrenched by 2007, with only small increases afterward (see first figure). The second comparison tracks true growth in teens’ internet and cellphone use but then picks an arbitrary cutoff year (why 2007? Why not another year?)

Twenge’s exaggerated graphs fixated only on 2007-2019, a period when social media use stayed the same at over 90% and cellphone use rose only from 60% to 80%. By comparing two years in which a lot of teens used social media, Twenge actually shows social media is not the cause of the rise in loneliness she deplores.

Twenge obsesses over smartphones, whose popularity escalated in the post-2013 period. However, treating smartphones as somehow cataclysmic is also puzzling, since a smartphone is just a portable phone with internet capability, both of which teens already had. Further, teens’ loneliness had already increased from 22% in 2007 to 31% by the early 2010s before smartphones proliferated.

It would be interesting to study why (a) teens’ loneliness plunged in the early 2000s (my best guess is Millennials’ aforementioned froyo and soccer, replacing Gen-X mosh pits, mood rings, and pet rocks); and (b) both teens’ and adults’ loneliness rose in the 2010s before the COVID-19 pandemic, got worse during the pandemic, and now may be falling. Authorities’ blinding obsession with social media has quashed investigating more promising explanations for teens.

Perhaps teens’ definition of “lonely” have changed over time

How would a teenager of 1975 who talked on the phone for hours with friends, or a teen of today who videoed, gamed, messaged, and chatted with friends online, answer the open-ended question: “a lot of times, I feel lonely”? Has the rise of broader communications technologies in the internet era – sophisticated videochats and messaging supplanting the waxed string/tin cans, walkie-talkie, post-it note, and voice telephone of the past – changed the standards for describing oneself as “lonely”?

The next substack deals with nuances no one, amid the emotional panic over teens, social media, and mental health, seems interested in exploring.

Part 3: One more – really bad – emblem of progressive podcasts’ grotesque hate speech toward young people

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| December 2025

On Tuesday, Saager Enjeti, the self-described “conservative” co-host on Tuesday’s Breaking Points podcast, declared that the “really sick” emails from Harvard University’s uber-economics professor Larry Summers showing “no moral standards,” seeking pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s advice on “exploiting his relationship” to win sex from a reluctant young female mentee, were “literally like teenage behavior.”

This is utterly appalling. If Breaking Points had any normal respect for stopping hate speech, Enjeti would be apologizing profusely to save his job. Hate is not acceptable simply because the group one attacks can’t fight back — some would consider that even more egregious, as evidenced by the Epstein case itself.

Yet, Enjeti got no pushback from co-host Krystal Ball. I can only assume that Enjeti and Ball must regard the teenagers they associate with in their personal lives as sick, depraved, exploitative sex criminals. They certainly couldn’t justify such bigotry with scientific research.

Summers, age 70, former Democratic U.S. Secretary of the Treasury serving President Bill Clinton (!), university president, and holder of a stellar Beltway-Eastern-elite resume, indeed was acting depraved, immoral, crude, pathetic, and criminal.

Not that Epstein wasn’t the ideal choice for such advice. At the time (March, 2019) of Summers’ buddy-buddy emails pleading for Epstein’s “wingman” counsel on how to exploit young women, Epstein’s own resume included a publicly known conviction for sex-trafficking middle-school girls and was continuing his depravities right up to his soon-to-arrive second arrest.

Summers’ execrable behavior was in no way “literally… teenage,” just as it was in no way “literally Jewish” (Summers’ ethnicity) or “literally Indian American” (Saager’s ethnicity) or “literally White suburban middle-aged” (Ball’s).

Imagine the enraged backlash if Enjeti had cited ethnicity rather than “teen” age as the demographic feature characterizing Summers’ and Epstein’s predations.

I worked with hundreds of teenagers over 15 years. What I saw is confirmed in studies, surveys, and statistics. Teenagers, like adults, act in all different ways – something media stereotypers can’t seem to get through their primitive, hate-driven cerebral cortexes.

Of course, there are small fractions of teens who are rapists and exploiters, just as there are fractions of every demographic group who use power and violence to leverage sexual advantage. The 17-year-old alpha richie cynically seducing an outcast 13 year-old, the billionaire “teen model” executive exploiting his older-male privilege to score middle-schoolers, the celebrity director and his casting couch, the 70-year-old topline professor forcing his institutional power on harassed mentees, the politician chasing interns… all are part of a long history of grotesque sexual predators wielding illegitimate personal power, not representatives of their demographic groups.

Why can’t the progressive brain, or the conservative brain on progressive podcasts, grasp this simple, scientific, egalitarian fact?

Note that Enjeti accords older ages individuality. He never stereotypes Epstein’s or Summers’ behaviors as typifying “old men.” To the contrary, he declared – even amid the large numbers of aging elites who participated in and/or continued associating with convicted pedophile Epstein – that it’s “weird” for older people to behave that way. Yet, he turns around and, citing the behavior of older men, mass-trashes all teenagers as depraved sex criminals. Whenever they and liberal-left colleagues don’t like an adult’s behavior, they transfer blame by calling it “juvenile,” “teenage,” etc.

It’s an irony that many men achieve pinnacles of power and prosperity in advanced age when (to paraphrase elder Kurt Vonnegut), “I look like an iguana.” But I think we can buck up and accept the compensating advantages without turning coercive.

You, Enjeti, are the sick one. Ball should be ashamed of her silence letting you get away with anti-youth hate speech day after day and indulging it herself. Why, progressives, do you hate young people – your staunch allies on the left – so relentlessly?

Progressives’ brainless disdain for young people, Part II

Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| December 2025

They’re at it again. Consider this my self-therapy.

A day after posting my complaint about progressives’ post-election return to trashing the young people who most vigorously support progressive causes, I made the mistake of listening to Bitchuation Room’s Francesca Fiorentini (age 42) and Majority Report’s Emma Vigeland (age 31) prove once again, with the latter’s nasty quips, why I ended my subscription to Majority Report a year ago.

Sabotaging their progressive takes, Vigeland’s and other leftist podcasters’ rants against young people are as crazed and bigoted as any MAGA ranting against transgenders, inner-citians, and dark-skinned immigrants.

(Vigeland is just one mooer in the herd, as I’ve pointed out. Breaking Points’ sorta-conservative Emily Jankowski demeans the young as suffering “undeveloped brains;” sorta-conservative cohost Saager Enjeti berates them as criminals and online degenerates; definitely-leftist cohosts Ryan Grim and Ball dismiss the young as social-media-duped groypers; Kyle Kulinski constantly sneers the young are “black-pill” 4chan morons; Hysteria’s Erin Ryan and Alyssa Mastromonaco demean young adults’ “undeveloped frontal lobes” and “not-good ideas;” Bitchuation Room’s Francesca Fiorentini berates the young as social-media brain-rotted Nihilistic Violent Extremists; on and on.)

Vigeland’s two dumbest comments this week (after she and Fiorentini admitted young people are the vanguard of liberal-left causes like Palestinian rights) were to insist that young people have “undeveloped brains,” and that older progressives such as herself enjoy the privilege to graciously expect “young people,” namely “young men,” to “apologize” for supporting Trump.

Let me repost – again, wearily – the networks’ definitive 2024 election exit poll of 23,000 voters the Vigelands and other progressive podcasters of the world should damn well know about or have the decency to shut up if they don’t:

Table 1. Who voted for Trump in 2024?

Source: CNN (2025).

The claim that “young men” are Nazi/MAGA/rightists whose repenters need “forgiving” by progressives (who Vigeland gave attention to after complaining that “young men” get too much media attention) is conceited, anti-youth hate speech.

Now, it is true that men ages 18-29 did vote for Trump by a whopping 1 point (more recent polls and elections show young men moving rapidly to the left), while Vigeland’s female age eschewed Trump by 15 points. However, young Whites voted against Trump more than older Whites, including Vigeland’s own 30-44 age group.

But if Trump-voting is the sin requiring penance, look at the ages/sexes from which Vigeland should be demanding apologies: all Whites over age 30; men age 45-64 (the age of Vigeland’s co-host, Sam Seder), men age 65+, men age 30-44, Latino men age 45-64, women age 45-64, and only then, men age 18-29… along with 41% of her own cohort.

But liberal/left commentators do not collectively vilify older ages and their “deteriorated brains” for right-wing proclivities. By Vigeland’s logic, every cohort, including her own, requires forgiveness by women ages 18-29, the most anti-Trump age demographic.

NO! The problem is NOT “undeveloped brains”

Leftist FDR said young people’s ideals were the key to improving the world. Conservative Churchill said the young have hearts but not brains. By today’s liberal/left “development” dogma, the young have no heart and no brains, yet vigorously support leftist causes.

Why do so many progressives flock to the “brain development” argument (a throwback to 19^th century biodeterminism) when youth rights and socioeconomic arguments are vastly more liberal and fact-based?Do progressives listen to their own podcasts? Are they saying progressives have “less developed brains” and are unable to understand consequences? Are they saying progressive ideas are “not good”?

The “brain development” myth (originally concocted 30 years ago to win lighter sentences for a handful of juvenile murderers) was refuted in the 2010s by the demise of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) brain-scanning on which the 1990s-era “science” was based, and the massive improvements in Gen Z behaviors demolishing the myth of the “risk taking” adolescent. Unfortunately, it still hangs on among interests like the Sentencing Project that should know better.

In fact, there is no “developed brain;” the brain changes throughout life. Biodeterminists could blame podcasters’ anti-youth bigotries on their over-30-age loss of memory and learning genes and decline in cognitive capacity. But that would be unfair.

Now, the big question prompting current idiocies

Are Jeffrey Epstein and ilk evil, depraved exploiters? YES.

Not because the brains of the teenaged females he recruited lacked the “developmental” capacity of his mature, 50-aged male brain to make reasoned decisions – that’s as ludicrous as it sounds.

Rather, Epstein’s criminality derives from gross power imbalance. Society arbitrarily awards his aging-male status vast resources, rights, and power that are denied to young people. Epstein’s recruiters made the imbalance even more exploitable by targeting impoverished, abused girls with few options rather than, say, trolling middle schools in toney Palm Beach (median income, $175,000). I once taught at an upscale alternative high school. The students there would never be sex-trafficked; they enjoyed far better choices.

A real progressive argument for youth

Brain development is not the problem, as the vast differences in risk by teens of differing poverty levels and family abuses show.

The real reason American society has no right to punish teens like adults for similar actions is because American society accords teens vastly fewer legal rights, control over their environments, economic wealth, and independence than adults – a crucial, ignored point Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy made in his famous Roper v Simmons opinion restricting the juvenile death penalty.

The best analyses show there is no “developmental” hierarchy, at least not between ages 12 and 70 or so. Adolescents have more flexible brain physiology with more open synapses affording broader ranges of thinking, while over-25 grownups have more efficient, “pruned” neural pathways promoting specialization. These types of thinking – general tendencies, not hard wirings – ideally work together to fashion societies able to meet changing conditions with innovation and focus.

Traditional wisdom and experience were vital to survival in tribal cultures. Now, expanded thinking is crucial to survival across global, long-term dimensions. Diverse ways of thinking are needed – the experiences of immigrants adapting to new cultures, of young people more adept with emerging technologies and ways of living together, and older people who bridge past and present. To call one kind of thinking “inferior” or “undeveloped” (as right-wing biodeterminists and too many progressives do) sabotages the diverse perspectives globalizing future-facing societies demand.

Human societies have been proving for millennia that they will not protect young people against predation, other than by ineffective supervision regimes restricting mainly girls’ lives. The confused, belated, repressed response to Epstein is only the latest example, and only among the rare cases that become known.

The remedy is for young people, whose behaviors in Gen Z are now healthier than those of older ages, to assume the power and resources to protect themselves. That remedy is sabotaged by progressives’ baseless insistence that young people have inferior “undeveloped” brains and bad thinking.

Progressives’ rising contempt toward young people is very disturbing. It shows that even among those professing respect for science and egalitarian values, the liberal-left simply indulges self-flattering myths to demean a young constituency whose support they depend on. That truly is bad thinking.

What Ken Burns’ The American Revolution Gets Wrong: Youth

Anthony Bernier, Project Director, YouthFacts.org| December 2025

Ken Burns’ new 12-hour PBS The American Revolution examines the War for Independence. As viewers with formal education, we might question some of Burns’ choices and narrative style. I certainly do.

But adding Native Americans, Black Americans, and women as part of the grand story taught to us in grade school – about a dashing General George Washington and his brave patriot troops – deploys, on its face, a laudable aspiration. The effort also deserves praise for including real historians instead of the media commentators pervading previous Burns films.

Still, there’s more to consider. First, among the eminent historians included in the film, Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood – both Pulitzer Prize-winners – published their classic works on the history of the revolutionary period decades ago (Bailyn in 1967 and Wood in 1991). I read them in grad school in, 1992.

However, the groups Burns now claims to finally include, in fact, have appeared in serious historical accounts for nearly a half-century!

Why are there always new books about Abraham Lincoln? Because historians constantly ask new questions, revisit and reinterpret old evidence, and uncover new evidence.

Conversely, Burns does not challenge with new questions or pose fresh inquiry in pursuing the contradictions, virtues, and the social complexities (even hypocrisies) among the founders and patriots, and between them and those loyal to England’s King. Instead, he delivers what is now a very conventional, if not old, interpretation.

For our YouthFacts.org purposes, and our focus on truths about young people, Burns misses a clear opportunity.

Young people’s contributions appear sprinkled throughout The American Revolution. But only in passing. The ranks of the Continental army were constituted of this 15-year-old, that teen girl’s diary reflections, that 16-year-old, another 14-year-old. Youth left their families, farms, and took up arms against the Red Coats and their cannons.

How much effort would it have taken to recognize youth, along with the other diverse groups, Burns highlights? And what would acknowledging their sacrifices in that bloody episode of American history mean for our current perceptions and assumptions of today’s youth?

Nearly every day brings another claim, another frantic panic, another prohibition – another layer of how technology brainwashes young people, how their unformed capacities produce anti-social behaviors, expose them to one mental disorder after another and worries about their growing up tranquilized by computer screens.

Unless we argue that the unchanging neurobiology and undeveloped brains of 18th century young people recklessly led them into battle against the world’s most powerful army, we must question today’s pervasive assumptions about youth development theory and young people’s inherent incapacities for becoming “thriving adults.”

We owe those teenagers thanks for helping to establish the nation; yet today we rarely ask or expect anything from them.