The belief that each new generation of children is more troubled than the last does not hold up in four decades of data. A meta-analysis of 175 studies found that the overall level of emotional and behavioral problems in young people did not change between 1981 and 2019.
What did change was the mix. Aggression went down, while some reports of attention problems, unusual thoughts and teenage anxiety and depression went up.
The study, titled “Kids These Days!”, was written by Zsofia K. Takacs, Boglarka Vekety, Tamás Kói, Alexander H.N. Logemann, John Protzko and Heather Whalley. It was posted on PsyArXiv on August 14, 2025.
Forty years of the same questionnaire
The team looked only at studies that used the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment, a family of checklists completed by parents (the Child Behavior Checklist), teachers, or young people themselves. The questionnaire has been in use for 40 years and translated into 80 languages, and 114 of its items stayed the same across the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s versions, which makes comparisons over time possible.
The included studies covered 418,528 children and teenagers aged 1 to 18, drawn from population samples in 44 countries. Most came from Europe (91 studies), followed by the Americas (41), Asia (30), Australia (7) and Africa (3). The Netherlands, the United States and China contributed the most data points.
The researchers then tested whether average problem scores rose or fell with the year the data were collected, splitting the results by informant, age group, sex and continent.
Less aggression, a little more inner distress
Total problems showed no change over 40 years in parent, teacher or self-reports. Where the totals did shift after adjusting for survey response rates, they mostly improved, for example in early childhood based on parent ratings and among teenage boys based on their own reports.
The strongest finding was a drop in aggression, seen in both parent reports and self-reports. Parents also reported fewer externalizing problems, such as rule breaking and fighting, in middle childhood, for both boys and girls.
On the other side, parents reported small increases in attention problems and thought problems across all ages, and more anxiety and depression in teenagers. These rises came from one type of informant only and were less robust.
The authors sum it up this way: today’s young people “experience subtly different patterns of difficulties” rather than more of them.
What the numbers cannot show
The authors flag several limits. Heterogeneity between studies was very high, many subgroup analyses rested on few studies, and running so many tests means some significant results could be chance.
The rise in parent-reported attention problems may partly reflect a measurement issue, since that subscale became less reliable over the years, and teachers reported the opposite trend. The checklist also measures offline physical and verbal aggression and does not capture cyberbullying.
Most importantly, the data stop before the COVID-19 pandemic, so any change after 2019 is not covered.
The authors see the flat totals as support for the idea that rising diagnoses reflect greater awareness: if disorders were truly increasing, the problems that come before them in childhood should be rising too, and they were not.
Study Details:
- Title: Kids These Days! A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of Changes in Emotional and Behavioral Problems of Population-Based Samples Over the Past Decades
- Authors: Zsofia K. Takacs, Boglarka Vekety, Tamás Kói, Alexander H.N. Logemann, John Protzko, Heather Whalley
- Journal: PsyArXiv (preprint)
- Publication Date: August 14, 2025
- DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/63egm_v1