Why Kids Today Struggle With General Problem Solving: What I’ve Seen As A 12-Year Classroom Teacher
Last Tuesday, I herded my 4th grade class out to the gym for our quarterly hands-on math assessment. The chipped blue coffee mug I carry everywhere was sweating through its koozie, and half the kids were still brushing granola crumbs off their shirts when I split them into groups and handed out 12-inch wooden rulers. The task was simple: measure the full length of our bleacher row, add up your measurements, and convert the total inches to feet. I stood back to watch, and within two minutes, half the groups were just leaning against the cold metal bleachers staring at me.
One kid raised his hand, “Mr. Torres, you didn’t write the steps on the board. What do I add first?” Another called over, “Can you pull up the example for us? I forgot what it looks like.” A third asked if he could just look the answer up on his chromebook. That moment is what all those thinkpieces about declining general intelligence feel like to me, not some abstract statistic. I’ve stood in front of 4th graders for 12 years, and I’ve watched this shift happen slowly, year by year.
Two weeks after that gym class, I had my 12-year-old niece Lila over to help me hang new floating shelves in my garage. We had the wood cut to 36 inches at the hardware store, and I handed her a tape measure to mark where the brackets needed to go, 8 inches from each end. She stared at the tape for 10 seconds, then pulled her phone out of her hoodie pocket. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I’m searching how to measure 8 inches from the end,” she said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
It’s easy to jump to “kids are dumber now” but that’s not what I see. General intelligence, as far as everyday life goes, is just the ability to work through an unstructured problem that doesn’t come with a pre-written prompt or a step-by-step tutorial. Twenty years ago, most kids helped cook dinner, fold laundry, mow the lawn, build pillow forts that didn’t collapse, all that unstructured stuff that forced you to problem-solve on the fly. Now? Most of their school day is fill-in-the-bubble worksheets or online modules that give immediate feedback if you get the answer wrong, and every everyday question can be answered with a 30-second TikTok search before you even have time to think through it. We haven’t lost raw brain power, we’ve just stopped practicing the messy, unglamorous skill of solving problems that don’t come with instructions.
I’ve been making small changes in my classroom the last three years, and none of them take extra time or cost any money. I swapped the 5-minute daily worksheet warm-up for one open-ended everyday question. One day it was “Our class is going on a field trip, and each bus holds 22 kids. We have 63 kids in 4th grade. How many buses do we need to ask the office for?” Another day it was “We need to stack all 28 of our reading textbooks on this shelf. Each book is 2 inches thick. The shelf is 4 feet long. Will all the books fit?” Kids grumble at first, but after a few weeks, they stop raising their hand to ask “is this right” before they even try.
For the parents I talk to at conferences, I give two tiny, low-effort changes they can make at home, no fancy curriculum required. First, when you ask your kid to do a chore, frame it as a problem instead of a direct order. Instead of “go get six soda cans out of the fridge for the cookout,” say “there are 5 adults coming and 3 kids, and everyone will have one drink. How many cans do we need?” Instead of “go put your clean laundry away,” say “you have 12 short sleeve shirts and 6 long sleeve. Your drawer has space for 15 tops. How do you want to split them to fit?” It takes 10 extra seconds, no prep, no lesson plan.
Second, pause 10 seconds before answering a question that asks how to do something. If they say “I don’t know how to wrap this birthday gift,” don’t jump in and show them the correct way. Say “what do you think you need to do first?” Most of the time, they already know. They just haven’t been asked to try before someone gives them the answer.
I’m not saying this is going to fix whatever long-term shift researchers are tracking when they talk about loss of general intelligence across populations. Last month, we did another open-ended activity where kids had to plan a class party with a $50 budget, and a quarter of them still asked me to tell them exactly what to buy. Lila still reaches for her phone first when I ask her a quick measuring question.
But I’ve noticed small changes. More kids now will take a guess, write down a wrong number, and adjust it, instead of freezing up and waiting for me to give the answer. Last week, Lila actually figured out how much wrapping paper she needed for my birthday present without pulling up YouTube. That’s not a big, transformative win. It’s just one small step, practicing the skill of thinking for yourself, one tiny problem at a time. I don’t know what the future holds for general intelligence as a whole, but for the kids in front of me, that’s enough to keep doing it.
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