When I was your age…: Or, what is it with kids these days?

Scientific American:

When I was your age, children knew to respect their parents. We didn’t give anyone any lip. We owned up to our responsibilities. We took advantage of our opportunities. We knew what was what. Kids these days have gotten everything all messed up. Kids these days just aren’t what they used to be. Kids these days.

Or, this version, if you’d prefer. When I was your age, we had to walk to school ten miles. In the snow. Uphill. Both ways. And let me tell you a thing or two about the meaning of hard work. You think what you’re doing is working hard? Well, you just take a good listen.

…

In what’s known as the reminiscence bump, we tend to recall events that occurred between the ages of 10 and 30 more than we do events from any other age. Many explanations for the phenomenon have been offered—Twentysomething explores the possibilities that “young adulthood is when so many events occur that will have consequences for a lifetime” and that youth is “when people’s emotions tend to be running at full throttle,” which means we’ll be better at encoding events and better able to retrieve the created memories at a later point—but one in particular stands out as most probable for Connie Svob and Norman Brown.

Read the whole story: Scientific American