Psychologist Birgit Langenbartels worked with stern magazine to investigate how the Corona pandemic has changed the lives of young people. In an interview, she talks about the disappointments of Generation Z and explains what parents should be aware of now.
This interview appeared in stern on June 27, 2022.
Ms. Langebartels, you researched the situation of young people in Germany for stern magazine. What surprised you in particular?
I was surprised at how many young people rose above themselves during the pandemic. Many have learned to take control of their lives, what they need to develop, what is important to them in life and what they can do without. They have learned who in their environment and in society can be relied on and who cannot. Above all, many have learned how they can acquire strategies to survive in this world of crises. However, this does not apply to all young people. A significant portion of respondents have suffered during the pandemic. Many have developed physical and psychological symptoms. I was less surprised to find that this was especially true of those young people who were not having an easy time of it anyway.
What exactly do you mean by that?
The young people started the pandemic in different ways. Some had a secure base through family, friends and clubs. The more secure this base was, the less the pandemic affected them negatively. Those lacking this base suffered more from the pandemic. This was true for a significant portion of respondents, 61 percent of whom felt lonely during this time. Some developed physical and psychological symptoms, such as eating disorders and anxiety.
One teenager expressed her situation during the pandemic this way: "Everything was empty, I was empty, we lived in the time of masks." How strongly should such quotes and figures concern us?
When I look at how full the practices of child and adolescent psychologists are, how long many young people have to wait for a place in therapy, that should worry us a lot. We hope that many young people will now catch up and that the feeling of loneliness will disappear for many.
Half of those surveyed say they find it harder to approach people or meet new people today. Almost as many say they have fewer female friends than before the pandemic.
The picture actually worries me. In the pandemic, many teenagers were only allowed to date a single other teenager from another household. That meant they had to choose a single girlfriend or boyfriend. This constraint was perceived by many as another enormous slight. Friendships were on a knife's edge. Others were relegated to the digital space, especially the world of e-gaming.
Gaming as an excuse to chat in peace?
Parents like to accuse their children of just playing around. But during the pandemic, games played over the Internet with friends served as an essential substitute meeting place. For both boys and girls, they offered a way to stay in touch with their peers. For many, it wasn't primarily about the computer game; it was about the social exchange. That helped many young people through the pandemic.
How much did social media and influencers shape young people's lives during the pandemic?
For many, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram influencers in particular have become important figures and daily companions with whom they start the day in the morning and go to bed at night. For 16 percent, they are among the most important role models, ahead of club colleagues, activists or teachers, who are far behind. But young people have also become more critical when they look at the mostly cheerful-looking Insta-world with all its edited photos. They are looking for authenticity.
You just mentioned strategies that young people have developed to survive in the world of crises. What are they?
Many young people have learned how to pull themselves out of trouble by their own bootstraps. Many subjects told us how they learned with the help of YouTube videos when their teachers were once again unavailable. Learning how they learn best may be one of the most significant positive side effects of the pandemic. Many paid more attention to themselves and their diets, becoming vegetarians or eating less meat. Many, when forced to spend their time at home, also learned about their creative side, learning a new instrument or becoming more artistic.
That sounds romantic. But your study also paints a picture of a disappointed Generation Z.
In fact, many young people felt they had been working into nothing for the past two and a half years. They didn't really care whether they did their homework or whether they attended class at all. Many have felt a strong sense of being overwhelmed, by themselves, but also by the teachers. More than one in two felt left alone by the teachers. In addition, there was disappointment with politics. 80 percent of those surveyed complained that they were not listened to by politicians and that their concerns were not taken seriously.
During the height of the Fridays For Future movement in 2019, young people were seen as the more reasonable adults. It looked like society was finally taking young people and their concerns more seriously.
With the onset of the pandemic, that changed. Suddenly, young people were no longer in demand. In the perception of politicians, they fell away then, were no longer important. At first, it was all about the elderly and the at-risk groups, then it was about the parents in the home office, the young children in daycare centers, kindergartens and elementary schools. Young people, on the other hand, were the first to be sent home and the last to be vaccinated. That offended many very much.
What have the lockdowns done to the souls of young people?
A politically imposed shutdown is diametrically opposed to youthful experimentation and activity. The mental immune system needs a variety of skills - not just the sensible ones. For the youth, therefore, the lockdowns were hard work. One subject told us she had felt like she was losing her voice for two years. Another that there were days when she didn't want to wake up. One said, "I feel like I got stuck in the middle of my development." The teenagers had two years of their childhood stolen from them. It was like growing up under a bell. As if in a greenhouse. The war in Ukraine is now prolonging the young people's suffering. This is matched by the statement of another subject who said, "Climate change, Corona, Ukraine, there's no end to it, it's all so overwhelming."
The school closures were particularly controversial. What have these done to young people according to your stern study?
When schools were closed, adolescents were deprived of an important creative space. This is where they spend most of their time and gain many experiences that are essential to life and development. In addition, school rhythms the course of the students' day through fixed rituals. During the pandemic, many experienced a stressful loss of structure in their daily lives due to the absence of school. It became formless and disintegrated. The daily and nightly rhythms dissolved for some.
What did this informal everyday life look like in concrete terms?
Many missed online classes, did not study, did not get out of bed. There were hardly any checks, some teachers didn't even notice whether students were present or not. Some teachers completely disappeared, others overburdened students with too many incomprehensible assignments sent by e-mail.
The study speaks of a particular moral burden: young people always ran the risk of endangering their own grandparents through careless behavior.
For a long time, little attention was paid to this factor. The study shows that very many young people suffered from this burden of responsibility. They experienced a discrepancy: On the one hand, they were perceived as unimportant, as a group that was more of a nuisance because they were conspicuous in public with illegal parties. On the other hand, they were given tremendous power, which frightened almost all the young people. For example, if they forgot to wear masks once, they endangered their families at home. Many were disturbed by the fact that they were continuously told by the media that they could kill grandma and grandpa with their mere presence.
You interviewed 30 subjects in long in-depth interviews. How much did the young people like to talk about their lives during the crisis?
Many young people were very happy to finally be able to talk about their experiences. One young woman thanked us after the interview that someone had listened to her for once, something that had not happened in the two years before. The woman had tears in her eyes. She was not the only test person who cried during the interview.
For which questions did the subjects react particularly emotionally?
This happened when the young people told that they had no one to confide in during the pandemic. In addition, many were annoyed that they could hardly use what they had taught themselves during homeschooling on their own initiative and with the help of Internet videos or other sources after the openings in their schools. That's when we encountered a lot of incomprehension. One young man told us that he got angry when others, especially teachers, were not interested in what he had done at home, how he had organized himself, what he had had to do without, and what fears had arisen as a result.
So are young people being taught to be less independent in schools?
That seems to be the case, at least according to the interviewees in the study. One young man had taught himself complex math, physics and chemistry while homeschooling, as he recounted in the interview. Back at school, he is being re-educated to be a clerk, as he put it. Many teachers are reverting to the old frontal teaching of yesteryear, forgoing digital instructional content. One student in the study said, "Teachers think they can just keep doing what they were doing before, but they can't." I think this is an important point that has received little attention from faculty, parents, and policymakers.
How did the young people interviewed react to Russia's invasion of Ukraine?
Many young people have retreated further into their emotional shells as a result of the war. In the interviews with us, the young people were almost unwilling to talk about the war on their own initiative. We scientists had to bring up the subject of the war on our own initiative.
How do you explain that?
The topic of war is perceived by many as so burdensome that they block it out and hardly follow any media reports about it. They do not want to let the subject get to them. The war increases the feeling of insecurity that has prevailed since the pandemic and adds to it the feeling of an acute threat. In the first days of the war, this still led many young people to come together in expressions of solidarity or to put together aid packages. Back then, even the young people we interviewed could hardly get away from the news. That has changed a lot. Now they try to keep the war away by distancing themselves. Some reassured themselves by pointing out that the war was a thousand kilometers away.
Which is roughly equivalent to the distance from Flensburg to Füssen.
There is filtering among the young people. That means that they no longer watch all the news as they did in the beginning. In one discussion, I heard a young man say that what happened in Ukraine was terrible, but that his high school prom was cancelled - that was bad, too. It seems banal, but such events are important, like rites of passage that usher in a new phase of life.
In the study, you write that many young people increasingly have to comfort their own parents, along the lines of "Dad, there won't be a nuclear war. Doesn't the hypersensitive adult generation expect a lot from its children?
Yes, that's an incredible demand for 18- and 19-year-olds. But this development was already apparent before Corona. The family system, which is supposed to stabilize children, is perceived as increasingly unstable. Children sense that their parents are overtaxed by the many social and technological upheavals. The danger that the family could break apart is internalized. Now the world outside is also becoming more insecure.
How do youth distract themselves from crisis permanence?
Many try to find a counterbalance. One young woman said she always watches a "nice movie" on Netflix after bad news. But the war is not gone for people even then. What is repressed is still effective. The fear of war is like tinnitus. An unpleasant sound that is sometimes more, sometimes less perceptible.
What do you say to those who now object that young people should not be so sensitive, but should appreciate how well they are doing?
Many young people are grateful. For example, most respondents did not complain about the rules of the Corona measures and mostly followed them, even if they sometimes did not understand them. Many said they learned to appreciate small things, like going out for coffee with a friend. When it came to their 18th birthday, some were happy to celebrate it with ten guests.
What role did anything addictive play during the pandemic?
Of course, young people want to get carried away from time to time, but overall, their desire to keep life under control and their bodies in good shape dominates. Many stated in the interviews that this is why they drink little alcohol. But there is a countermovement here as well. Many young people told of friends who already reached for a joint in the morning. Some reported that all they did was gamble. "What else could I do?" said one. Another said, "I was getting stoned and bluntly watching some YouTube videos." In the quantitative survey, 58 percent said they spent more time on the Internet than before the pandemic. Only about one in four have cut back on screen time since the lockdowns ended.
You have identified six types of how young people deal with permanent crises. Which one has it the hardest?
This is probably true of the "baseless escapists". During the pandemic, they fled into a parallel world that is often digital in nature. And those who already had difficulties in the social context of letting people get close to them or maintaining friendships often retreated even more into the digital world during the pandemic. For them, it is now particularly hard to find their way back to the analog. A second type to worry about is the "nest-feeder." He nestled himself in at home during homeschooling in such a way that he finds it difficult to get back into the real world.
What's so bad about chilling at home?
In adolescence, you don't have to party all the time, but it's still part of this age to have such experiences, to go out and experience exuberance. Even the nestlings now have to venture back into life with all the uncertainties.
In the study, you use the image of a greenhouse where young people were locked up during the pandemic. What is meant by this?
Yes, development is not possible under permanently controlled conditions like in a greenhouse. Children need to be let out of this greenhouse. Parties, falling in love, maybe getting drunk, offending others, laughing together, getting into arguments. Young people need the random, the incalculable.
Ten years from now, will today's young people realize that their development was stunted by the Corona pandemic?
In any case, all young people will remember that time. But I don't believe that a destroyed generation will grow up. The young people learned a lot during the pandemic from which they will benefit throughout their lives.
About a hundred years ago, after the Spanish flu, many survivors are said to have developed phobias towards fellow human beings and avoided physical contact with strangers. Is this threatening us again?
Many of the young people interviewed have developed insecurities in dealing with new situations and strangers, in some cases even social phobias. Others have become depressed. We should support this part of the young people much more. I remember the statement of a young woman who already found it disgusting when she sees someone "breathing." I am not a therapist, but I know from colleagues that usually most people can overcome such fears with time.
Another result of the study surprised many: only eleven percent of those surveyed considered environmental protection to be "particularly important," and almost a quarter even considered it to be "rather unimportant" or "unimportant. How do you explain this result?
Other issues, especially the pandemic and the war, have completely overshadowed the topic of environmental protection. The study shows this quite clearly. Worries about the family, that someone might fall ill, or about lack of fitness as a result of Long Covid override the still largely abstract fear of global warming or species extinction. Personal health is particularly important to many young people.
The described disenchantment of young people with politics acts as an invitation for extremists.
This insecurity is felt across the board, not just among teenagers. However, I did not get the impression that the young people surveyed could increasingly fall prey to extremists.
What do the young people want now?
It may come as little surprise, but one desire of many young people is to let it rip again, go out partying and enjoy life. Most have a great longing for community. But that now has to be rehearsed again.
What do you think is the mandate for adults from the stern youth study?
They should listen to the young people and involve them. You should let them do what they want and support them where they need it. What young people seem to need most urgently now is confidence and trust in their abilities, as well as the opportunity to allow things to go awry and to make mistakes. This applies to hardly any generation as it does to this one.
But how do you as an adult want to convey that everything will be all right when, in view of the world situation - from climate change to price shocks - you hardly believe it yourself?
It is not a matter of pretending that the world is a perfect place. We all have to cope with the shock that "higher, faster, further" will no longer continue. The above-mentioned crises force us to realize that we live in an uncertain world. This is not a new thought, but one that many people have long suppressed. This causes uncertainty, but also leads young people to become more aware of their strengths. We should support them in this, give them the message: "You don't have life completely in your hands, but you can make a difference in this world." There is a great opportunity in this.
The interview was conducted by Stephan Seiler.
