Like that uncle who shows up at the family dinner and reduces the conversation to uncomfortable glances between other family members, Prof. Michael Shayler suggests that today's children are lagging in their intellectual development.
The professor of applied psychology at King's College, University of London, recently published his research that somehow concludes that 11- and 12-year-old children in Grade 7 are "now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago," in terms of cognitive and conceptual development.
Faster than Donald Trump can insult a political opponent, opinion pieces in British dailies began to lament the rapid decline in the intellectual abilities of England's (and for that matter all) teenagers.
Here in Canada, when the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released its international student-achievement rankings last year, the numbers indicated that Canadian student achievement rankings had slipped to 13th place in math.
That prompted big news and much hand-wringing in the media about the dire need for more math in our public schools, with one now-retired federal politician even claiming the results were "on the scale of a national emergency."
Bad news about today's kids seems to be just the thing to guarantee headlines: They watch too much TV, play those violent video games, eat junk food, don't play outside, are too fat and are just plain dumber than we adults used to be.
Media observers talk about the fact that "negative superlatives," words like "worst" and "never" work much better for getting readers' attention than words like "always" and "best."
One marketing researcher found that the average click-through rate on website headlines with negative superlatives was a staggering 63 per cent higher than that of their positive counterparts.
That might be one reason why you haven't read about James Flynn, the political scientist at the University of Otago in New Zealand whose research found that over the past century, in every nation in the developing world where intelligence-test results are on record, IQ test scores had significantly risen from one generation to the next.
In his 2012 book, Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century, Flynn expands upon his original findings and explains the causes of this widespread increase in IQ scores, including teenagers' expanded vocabularies and deeper, more sophisticated knowledge about the needs of the world around them.
That should be good news about today's kids, but other than making it into Time magazine's "Top 30 Under 30," I did not read much in the national dailies about a delightfully typical teenager, Brittany Wenger, who in 2012 was 17 when she won the grand prize in the worldwide Google Global Science Fair with her "Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer."
Let's change the subject when that tiresome uncle insists that "kids ain't what they used to be."
Although, on second thought, he might be right about that.
