Why Kids Today Seem Less Generally Capable: A Teacher’s Observations And Practical Tips
Last Tuesday, I stood at the back of my 7th grade homeroom watching groups huddle around their tables for our end-of-term budget activity: plan a class picnic for 12 people with a $20 budget. Half the kids were hunched over their phones, typing the prompt into ChatGPT instead of talking it out. One boy raised his hand halfway through, waved me over, and asked, “Do we need plates? Like, actual plates? I don’t even know how much a pack of plates costs at the grocery store.”
Two days later, I sat across from a grandma at parent-teacher conferences who brought this exact question up. She’s a retired 4th grade teacher, reads all the education thinkpieces, and she leaned in and said, “You see it too, right? All these studies saying general intelligence is dropping in the whole population. What’s happening to these kids?”
I’ve been teaching 12 years, and I do see it. It’s not that kids can’t ace a multiple choice test or code a robot in after-school club. It’s the unstructured, messy, small problems that throw them. Last semester, I watched three 8th graders stand around a full classroom trash can for 10 minutes waiting for someone to tell them how to change the bag. No one thought to just dump it out and tie a new one on themselves. When I was their age, I did that chore every week at home. It wasn’t a big deal, it was just something I did.
I used to buy into the old line that parents are softer now, kids just don’t do chores. But that’s too simple. I’m a parent to a 10-year-old myself, and I catch myself doing the same thing: I’ll solve his argument with a friend over a math homework answer, I’ll dig his lost cleats out from behind the dryer, I’ll look up a random question before he even has time to guess. Why? Because it’s faster. It avoids the whining, it avoids the 10 extra minutes it takes for him to work through it on his own. We’re all busy.
The whole “loss of general intelligence” conversation gets framed as this big, scary cultural decline, but from where I stand, it’s just a thousand small daily shifts. General intelligence, the kind that lets you solve new problems you’ve never seen before, isn’t some innate gift you’re born with. It’s built from hundreds of tiny, boring problem-solving practice runs. Figuring out how to tie your shoe, how to divide a bag of candy between your friends, how to get the kink out of a garden hose, how to remember what you need to pack for camp without a list written by your mom. All those little jobs add up to the ability to connect what you already know to something new. When all those little jobs get done for you, or you get the answer immediately from a screen, you never get that practice.
A couple of months ago, my son came flying down the stairs 10 minutes before soccer practice, yelling that he couldn’t find his cleats and we needed to order him a new pair on Amazon right now. Three years ago, I would have sighed, dropped what I was doing, and hunted through the house for them. That day, I leaned against the wall and said, “Tell me the last three places you wore them.” He stared at me, then said, “Saturday’s game, then the ice cream shop after, then I came home and changed.” I said, “What did you do with your soccer bag after you changed?” He huffed, rolled his eyes, and trundled down to the laundry room. Two minutes later he walked back out, cleats in hand, and ran out to the car. That’s two minutes of problem-solving practice he wouldn’t have gotten if I’d just done it for him.
I’ve started doing the same thing in my classroom, and small changes actually shift how kids show up. If a kid asks me a question they can work through on their own, I don’t give them the answer. I ask them one question to get them started. Instead of telling them how much plates cost for the picnic, I ask “When you go to a cookout at your house, how many people are there, and how much does your mom say a pack of plates serves?” That’s enough to get them moving, instead of waiting for someone to give them the right answer.
For parents, I share three easy, low-friction changes they can try this week. First, swap one structured chore a week for an open-ended one. Instead of “take out the trash,” which is one step, tell them “get the kitchen ready for dinner tonight.” That means they have to figure out clearing the table, wiping it down, getting out silverware, filling water glasses – no step-by-step required. Second, hold off on Google for five minutes when your kid asks a random question. If they ask how far away the next town is, or how many nuts are in a peanut butter jar, don’t pull up the answer immediately. Ask them to guess first, talk through what you both already know, then look it up. That five minutes of thinking is the practice they need. Third, if they lose something, don’t hunt for it. Ask them to walk through their steps out loud, just like I did with my son’s cleats.
I’m not going to say this fixes everything. Last week, I watched a 7th grader pull out a calculator to figure out how to split a $12 pizza between three people. I still see kids freeze when I give an assignment that doesn’t have a single correct answer. I don’t know if the global drop in IQ scores researchers are seeing is going to reverse itself any time soon, and there are bigger systemic issues at play too, from poverty to underfunded schools that no amount of small chores can fix. But for the kids we have in our homes and classrooms, this isn’t some inevitable decline. It’s just hundreds of small choices we make every day. We don’t have to fix it all at once. We just have to let them fix the small stuff, one problem at a time.
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