Are Kids Today Really Worse Off?

The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos

Pushkin Industries

Health & Fitness, Society & Culture

4.7 • 14.8K Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2026

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We hear a lot about rising rates of anxiety, depression, and fragility among kids today. But when Harvard researcher Alexis Redding uncovered a forgotten trove of interviews with college students from the 1970s, she found something surprising: their emotional struggles and developmental challenges sounded nearly identical to those of students today.

Dr. Laurie also talks with psychologist Adam Mastroianni about why our minds are so quick to believe that young people are getting worse over time. Together, they explore what we get wrong about “kids these days,” and how historical perspective can help us respond to young people with a little more compassion.

Experts Mentioned:

Alexis Redding, developmental psychologist and Co-Chair of Higher Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
William Perry, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
Adam Mastroianni, writer and social psychologist
Nancy Hill, Charles Bigelow Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education

Resources Mentioned:

Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students, by Alexis Redding (2026)
Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years: A Scheme, by William Perry (1968)
“The Illusion of Moral Decline” by Adam Mastroianni and Dan Gilbert (Nature, 2023)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
0:02.5	Guaranteed Human.
0:04.3	I've been hearing for decades that the markets can solve climate change.
0:08.9	Today, we have more incentives for market solutions than ever and emissions are rising.
0:13.7	On this season of drilled, Carbon Cowboys, the story of three market solutions colliding in one multinational boondoggle.
0:22.4	You got to give Bruce and the guy's credit.
0:24.3	They're Republican.
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0:26.8	It's now.
0:27.2	Listen anywhere you get podcasts.
0:41.2	Pushkin.
0:54.2	If you're a fan of my work or of this podcast, you've probably heard the story of how I got interested in happiness research in the first place. If not, here's a very quick version. Back in 2018, I was an Ivy League
1:00.1	psychology professor minding my own business when I started noticing that something was changing
1:05.1	on college campuses. The students I saw in my classes day after day, year after year, over time they seemed different.
1:13.0	They were more stressed, less joyful, more overwhelmed,
1:16.4	less happy, more depressed, way less resilient and way more anxious.
1:21.4	I got so worried about this generation of college students
1:24.1	that I decided to drop everything and fully retrained in the science of happiness
1:27.8	just so I could help them. As I worked with students more closely, I found myself thinking,
1:33.2	man, the kids today, what's up with them? Why are they so different than the generations that
1:38.6	came before them? Why are young people today so messed up? As I became more of an expert on the science of happiness,
1:45.6	I got asked a lot of these very same questions.
	...

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