Gen Z Is the First Generation Dumber Than Their Parents
vice.comNone of the comments so far are engaging with the OP, whose written testimony was included in the article:
https://www.commerce.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc...
It points to poorly designed and unproven "educational technology," or EdTech as the potential culprit. Rather than suggesting a luddite regression, it merely calls for proving the efficacy of EdTech prior to large rollouts.
Given the "reading wars" dragged on for over a century, I'm not optimistic this will be resolved anytime soon.
https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/the-science-of-reading-vs...
I actually took it out of my reply below, but agree that “curriculum format” is much to blame. Thankfully our school district largely did away with screens this year (last year there was a huge parent outcry regarding the policy). They used to do everything on screens, to the point where they had to log into portals at home to play garbage “learning” games. Mind you, I’m talking about grades k-3. It was abhorrent. A lot of that was driven by the curriculum program they adopted from what I understand.
Thankfully they only get 30 min/day on the laptops now. I’m sure the teachers still use their smart screens (considering the chalkboards are covered in static material now), but somehow that seems less bad.
Wow that’s a lot worse than I expected. I’m very fortunate enough to have been able to put my children in a Waldorf school, which is very low tech and embraces the chalkboards heavily.
> None of the comments so far are engaging with the OP, whose written testimony was included in the article:
Because of the extremely inflammatory title, perhaps? Replace "Gen Z" with a skin color or a religion and you'd get instantly banned from hacker news.
Also, from the article, it seems to directly contradict your comment:
> This conversation feels uncomfortable because it doesn’t offer villains or easy fixes. Horvath summed it up bluntly during his testimony. “A sad fact our generation has to face is this: Our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.” His recommendation focused on restraint, dialing back screens in schools, and restoring depth before the next generation is doomed.
> it seems to directly contradict your comment
No it doesn't. My comment was based on his findings.
Indeed - all the graphs in that link show lower test scores for longer "in school cpu use". But the longitudinal comparison (2012-2018) show almost no change (except for zero CPU use, which they didn't really explain.)
This link shows the longitudinal drop in 2022 for the US - almost assuredly pandemic related https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38. Otherwise the scores are higher than ever.
> almost assuredly pandemic related
But even in your link, you can see the plateau and subsequent decline prior to COVID.
The pandemic just exacerbated an already existing problem.
I don't know how much stock should be put in these numbers. Here in Atlanta there was widespread cheating organized by teachers and principals to game the results.
With NCLB test scores became very important. With Every Child Succeeds they became less so. The difference could simply be how much incentive is there to game the scores.
Gaming the scores is indeed a problem, but it too existed as a problem before the pandemic.
So once again, the pandemic was only an amplifier of problems that already existed.
Evidence based policies are something we need more of in general.
> proving the efficacy of EdTech prior to large rollouts.
Pretty much everything in education is fad-based, not evidence-based. And what's even more depressing is that the same failed fads, things like open-plan classrooms, keep coming back when the generation that saw them fail the first time retires and a new generation cottons onto the fad.
Outside of non-evidence-based health I can't think of any other field that's so strongly governed by fads.
The reading wars are a great example of founder effects distorting fields. Early educators supported whole word so it just “stuck” in spite of science and abundant real world evidence.
This article is a rehash of a New York Post article that quotes Dr. Jared Horvarth who testified before Congress. His testimony [1] references PISA, PIRLS and TIMSS scores.
Edit: His testimony concludes:
> This is not a debate about rejecting technology. It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works.
> Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.
> Federal policy can restore balance by demanding evidence, protecting children’s developmental needs, and ensuring that innovation serves learning rather than attention capture.
> Our responsibility is not to maximize screen exposure, but to maximize the cognitive capacity and long-term flourishing of the next generation.
[1] Written Testimony, Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, PhD, MEd, Neuroscientist and Educator Before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation https://www.commerce.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc...
Every generation says this. Example (Sep 4, 1977) https://time.com/archive/6849143/education-why-those-falling...
I’m sure this is true. Much of millennials, and I mean older and younger, have been starting to hit that inflection point in recent years where we are the leaders in the professional and familial worlds. We’re now sandwiched by adults who are both younger, without kids, and older, aging out. It affords one additional abilities to reflect and sometimes to come to perennial conclusions or faux wisdom; things that we think are now true but have always been (because we all have main character syndrome).
That being said there appears to be a difference in attention spans that I find unnerving, especially as a parent of a Gen Alpha. I could also be suffering the same inability to see my youth through the eyes I have now, but I definitely do not recall the lack of attention that they experience.
Millennials were the last boredom generation -- in that large parts of our formative years were boring.
It feels like big tech has leveraged personal mobile devices to monetize the interstitial moments that we used to be bored in.
And this doesn't seem like it's working out well for the next generations' attention spans.
Yeah but now the experts say it too.
And, sometimes, they are right.
Perhaps they were right then as well in some sense.
> The declines cut across attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive function, and general IQ.
Problem can be with the tests. Are they testing the correct thing? Are there any increases with other tests? Are there any functions they haven't tested?
Maybe they're faster, quick-thinking multitaskers. Their brains are augmented with always-online smart devices. They have constant access to knowledge and have better educational materials. They must be smart in a new way.
Why “must”? To accept your argument as written, it sounds like you would consider it impossible for the typical intelligence to decline from one point in time to a future point in time.
I tend to believe the argument made in the article because when I see someone young try to fact-find, the effort usually begins and ends with a Google AI overview. They then accept that unilaterally and are incapable of independently analyzing or verifying what it claims. Hell, they don’t even click its meager “citations”!
Multiple studies have found that Gen-Z is more gullible to scams.
All of this points to critical thinking weakness and learned laziness. A belief that everything should be easy and simple. I think it even explains some of their common political beliefs in both parties: absolutist opinions are more popular than ever, rejecting nuance.
> Multiple studies have found that Gen-Z is more gullible to scams.
Could it not be that they're, I don't know, generally younger? And have less experience?
The context of what I remember reading, sorry for not providing sources, was that Gen-Y was harder to fool than Gen-X, but that Gen-Z reversed the pattern, since Gen X and Boomers have the most years of experience.
Sure, the data isn't great since they didn't do the same survey 15 years ago, but it would be impossible to really do since the type of scams being run were so different 15 years ago.
Gen-Z just didn't get the advantages we millennials had. We programmed the VCRs or set up the PCs for our parents when we were 10 because we were there when things were pretty simple to understand. Gen-Z were kids when Windows 7 was out. Much tougher to gain mastery over stuff that's so complex. Windows or macOS (or even the fine details of iOS or Android) are to them what the television set itself was to (non-electronics tech) millennials -- something complex that we can only operate but cannot diagnose or understand its function at any deeper level. Functionally equivalent to magic.
I suspect the distribution is more lumpy, best case. Worst case, the progeny of the affluent are eating up those sweet gains.
My experience in higher education so far suggests the affluent are not immune to these same trends.
It's not "lumpy", but AI definitely made the spread (distribution) of scores wider. See the last chart from: https://infographics.economist.com/2026/20260822_WOC963/
What if, after few generations we realise that the test system we are using all along to test the intelligence were too technical and didn't consider the actual human intelligence?
P.S. Every generation thinks that next generation is dumber than the previous generation in some area and still we are making progress with every generation.
Can you support that last clause? I havent witnessed “progress” being produced yet by the cohort that grew up with tablets and Chromebooks. And I don’t hate them. I do feel bad for them, though. They didn’t choose their upbringing.
This article and ones like it will without a doubt be used against all of us Gen Zs to dismiss our opinions and sow hatred, no matter if the person in question is still in high school or pushing 30.
Talking about this in generational terms ("people who were born between years X and Y") and not causal terms ("people who were exposed to this and that type of education") is inflammatory and pins the declining test scores on all young people in general, as if it's their existence that's wrong. The generational divide isn't that good anyway, because one chunk of Gen Z has been exposed to studying in a post-COVID, post-AI world, while another chunk did basically the same thing as the Millennials, just with the internet being widespread.
I don't see a lot of "Gen Z sucks" out there, but there definitely is some. Most of what I see is articles blaming the Boomers for everything, and the Boomers having it easy. But AFAICT, my own Gen X is in a better position than Boomers were. For example, I bought my first house in 2000, so had similar appreciation as the boomers over a much shorter period.
American politics seems to be all about blaming problems on other groups. It's most obvious in the anti-immigration rhetoric, but the generational rhetoric is very similar.
Enjoy the ride? There was no shortage of "Millenials suck because XYZ" articles for the last few decades. Thousands of articles written accusing us of being child-like right up until we had grey hair and kids of our own.
Just because something happens to one group doesn't mean it should happen to another group. If you seek to improve the world, you can acknowledge wrongdoing no matter who it happens to.
I am as powerless to stop the gen-z slander as I was to stop it before for millenials. I never condoned it, only welcomed OP to the party.
I was gonna say, "first time?"
We were the bane of everything's existence for like 20 years, despite having the highest test scores, the best educations, working more hours than everyone, and making less.
Come on in, the avocado toast is delish...
Personally, I think Millennials are just as dumb, but we had the benefit of catching the tail end of analog and the last bit of actual reality in our formative years before technology took over our lives. Our behavior and habits just got worse after that.
Sounds like you agree with the article, but are just quibbling over what "dumb" means, interpreting it to mean raw biological brain ability rather than test results or academic achievement.
Since Gen Alpha is around, is there a turnaround or is the negative trend persisting?
The next generation will grow up where AI was always a thing. I do not think it the existence of that easy button is going to lead to cognitive capability improving (at population levels, individuals will of course vary). That more we can offload to machines, the more we will.
Gen Alpha will likely have a distribution like we used to have before mass schooling.
A few overwhelmingly smart people who had that as a hobby, and the very sad rest.
I find that the rare of smart vs dumb people in companies, even tech companies is also pretty scary nowadays. it wasnt perfect in the late 80-90 but execs usually could do the work of everyone, and also manage the workforce. nowadays most execs are placed and don't know of care how their products work, unless it's a startup.
the reason it's interesting is that the lack of understanding and skill results in a "bourgeoisie" class in the workforce, and that isn't correlated to skill, amounts of labor or even cognitivity.
This tends to reduce the utilization of 'overwhelmingly' smart people, who are put to crappy tasks just to make money and ends meet.
There’s already a turn around. It’s the Covid policies at play and refusal to hold back failing students. My local district is already starting to see test scores improve
They’re just adapting to be better at teaching to the tests. Those tests are the yardstick which grade the schools, and the school admins and teachers must pass them sufficiently or else they’ll be replaced with others who will. So there has always been shenanigans where they exploit their foreknowledge of the test contents to help kids be prepared for very specific things, instead of teaching them thinking skills.
Tests that legitimately are attempting to measure the thinking skills of individuals aren’t going to see improvements, I predict.
It's only getting worse. Just look at reading scores or the recent pisa report.
it's not their fault. they were given addictive smartphones or have parents addicted to them, bad teachers, etc.
Seriously, I have no idea why the onus is on the generation, the framing should be "education is massively underfunded, teachers are abandoned with ever increasing class sizes and ever decreasing agency, and kids are left with smartphones to fend for themselves in an environment where they may be shot and killed at any moment".
We, the older generations, have failed them.
Are you sure about the underfunding piece? Education funding is a larger share of GDP and higher in inflation-adjusted dollars than any time in the past. Maybe the funding is just poorly managed.
Bravo! We’ve collectively cannibalized our ability to vault our children to new highs so we can continue to subsidize billionaires’ nihilistic destruction of our planet under the guise of freedom and economic progress.
They sat at home for over a year during COVID doing busywork, during key developmental years, which probably had a bigger impact.
Edit for clarity: some states were fully remote for over a year, and I’m including partial remote weeks here.
Covid school closures lasted months in the worst cases, never years.
California still wasn’t all open in April 2021. So, over a year.
That's not true. Some of the biggest districts in the US stayed virtual over a year.
And even afterwards many went partially remote, which was just as disruptive.
Yes, some public health officials had trouble weighing the risks of COVID itself with the risks of implementing their mitigation strategies.
scores were dropping before
Perhaps, but there’s an explicit measurable link between weeks of school closure and loss of academic performance. It may not capture the whole picture, but COVID was a huge driver of the problem.
I am skeptical because while school was disrupted, it didn't last for that long. People are attributing ongoing problems to a cause that lasted about as long as summer vacation.
There were some studies that showed how length of closure affected academic impact: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095947522...
A year of half-assed online work could have a pretty big impact. Many schools weren’t well prepared to run classes online.
Thanks, I haven't seen this study before. In table 2, it seems like the biggest impacts were on people that didn't speak the test language well, and strangely girls. The duration of school closure was negative, but not as negative as those other factors. I am having trouble explaining that. The non-native speaker element seems quite logical, but the large difference across genders and the relative insensitivity to closure duration is strange.
I agree, perhaps the gender effect has something to do with how girls are socialized and how that affects their learning process.
I also saw a separate Japanese study that showed more lasting effects in lower income families, with scores mostly bouncing back in others. But that’s Japan, hard to generalize with how they do schooling and out-of-school study.
I dunno, I think if the hypothesis is "School closing causes poor perforance due to learning loss", shouldn't the strongest explanatory variable be duration of closure? This weird inversion makes me think something else is going on. If gender is a bigger predictor than duration, then it is the fact of the schools closing at all more than the duration, which would point to another variable being dominant (duration was negative, so it is certainly part of the explanation).
One possible alternative explanation is that all the kids were stressed out of their minds because there was a killer virus on the loose and no one could focus in school or outside. If you want to guess at gender differences, one might be that girls care about other people more, and so were more stressed out by the thought of their parents or grandparents dying. I don't really think girls care that much more than boys though. There would need to be some kind of retrospective ethnographic study to figure out what the heck happened.
Another explanation could be that since the kids were used to distribute viruses to reopen the economy, their health suffered. There is ample documentation that women get long covid more frequently than men.
I’m comfortable assuming that both closure duration and gendered norms play a role. If closure duration plays no role, then we should just be able to go fully remote for all students with no adverse impact, right?
From speaking to parents during this time, many were unhappy with the rigor of remote work and the quality of instruction during this period.
The big question is what is school for? Creating obedient workers? Creating good citizens? Job training? To lead a richer and fuller life?
There are many things to point at and blame without evidence. Is it increased class sizes, or teachers having to move from teaching to managing classrooms, or lack of arithmetic skills built on rote learning of multiplication tables replaced with “methods”, or maybe, just maybe, it’s all the Teletubbies fault.
This isn’t directly related to the article but if Jared Cooney Horvath argues that learning “depends on sustained attention and interaction with other people”, where would that place some of the newer schools that rely a lot on AI to teach and hire human guides or coaches instead of teachers?
Didn't Flynn effect reverse in the early 90s?
I can't speak for others, but I do know that my screen time is filled with this news feed and engineering or other STEM videos. I could never study, it just didn't work for me. But I have a good memory so watching videos tangential to my field helped. I ended up with straight As in my last years of uni, supported by 40+ hours/week of YouTube. Still not sure if that's accounting for 2x speed.
There's a lot of nuance to this. They should consider what we're "staring" at. Is it AI slop content like our parents seem to enjoy? Or more than that? Likewise for social media: maybe consider why in a society where it's prohibitively expensive to do anything and there's a loss of third spaces people are turning to online connections. And beyond that, connections to people from different backgrounds and locations. I can talk to somebody from the other side of the planet online without effort. We can learn of eachothers' hardships and experiences instantly. I think this got shown very well when rednote happened and American + Chinese teens/young adults mixed together en masse for the first time.
I worry that as a smart person you are too optimistic about what your fellow youths are staring at. TikTok and its copycat short vertical video sites are primarily full of content designed to make you dumber, whether it’s prurient content, simplistic and stupid political/cultural takes, or fads. And it of course comes with a joke of a promise that if you waste your own time making the same garbage, then you too can have a career as an “influencer”! I don’t think any of this is giving the benefits your YouTube viewing has.
"The Stare" is IMHO not the stare at a phone, but the response to a question.
Other people have mentioned this to me — that Gen Z and younger millennials are likely to fix you in a stare when answering a question.
Bit of a rant incoming:
This is a Gen X teaching failure. As kids we were taught to face front and look at the teacher when they were teaching, and in the era of fears of poorer attention, "attention-focussed" teachers have mistakenly extended this idea that looking the teacher in the eyes when answering is better, when it is worse.
The teacher thinks they have the pupil's attention: they do! But the pupil is supposed to be answering the question: that is where their attention should be.
Kids who do now have trouble directing their attention are not going to do better at answering the question this way, because they are wasting it. As long as the kid is making an attempt to answer the question, teachers should let them stare at the ceiling or a blank wall.
> half of it is spent staring at a screen
That's what I was referring to. Not the Gen Z stare.
Right, sry
Blame the parents.
Some of it seems to be education-related though, and parents had insufficient influence there. The Chromebook generations are just handed a device and told this is how we do school.
But I’m not really sure how much is education and how much is everything else. We don’t have a control group of kids who have EdTech educations but don’t have brains addled by TikTok (etc) into having no attention span and manipulated by algorithms into having whatever beliefs best optimize “engagement.”
Everyone can see that GenZ isn’t all right, everyone knows that children shouldn’t be raised by makeup tutorials, Jake and Logan Paul, and now ChatGPT, but we as a society are doing little to stop it. And what little we do (social media bans for example) are incomplete and have to be questioned on whether they have bad consequences for adult freedom and privacy.
Their parents are mostly Millennials, yes?
Parents, no. Mostly Gen X.
Their early-years and kindergarten teachers and teaching assistants are a bit more likely to be Millennials, and I suspect that is a factor.
If you assume that the slow drift in poor teaching started with Gen X teachers, then what Millennials would have lost first was some of the communication of the the joy of learning and metacognition, which matters when you are the first generation whose attention span is taking a battering.
It is perhaps harder to teach what you had fewer opportunities to learn.
They are like:
it's really stupid, and people shouldn't use it (flag the article!).Gen X -> Millennial -> Gen Z -> Gen Alpha 1965-1980 1981-1996 1997-2012 2013-2024Say "people born between YY and YY" or "people aged between YY and YY" instead.
Gen X
No, mostly Gen X. Gen Alpha's parents are more likely to be Millenials.
Story from February OP;
Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46947424
Perhaps schools should return to pencils and paper, teach the basics and create strong foundations, focus on academia instead of football.
The amount of hours devoted to sports in US schools is unbelievable. I have friends who are ALWAYS busy with either training or leagues, including holidays. Most of these kids will not be athletes. I understand the team building skills, maybe the monetary benefit of scholarships, but investing so much time and money in something of so little value for 99% of kids once they become adults, doesn’t make sense. I will certainly not be doing that with my kids.
I have experience as a coach in middle and high school in the US. I can say emphatically that school sports are relatively low impact in terms of time opportunity cost and individual family spending. The "club" or "travel" team private organizations are where the money and time really go.
I am also a parent of a kid who participated with a soccer club team for many years. She is a multi-sport athlete who loved several sports and we found the club experience in soccer actually quite good for her emotional and physical health. I will say that family experience with club sports varies based on the quality of the organization. She also played with her club in falls and her other sport in the spring at high school, so she got to do both. This was fun for her and us.
Assume a kid just wants to get better at some sport. I'm a player development nerd and believe most kids would be better served with 1-1 training with a much lower time investment that just joining a club or travel team. I do 1-1 sessions with players for 30 minutes 2x/week for 6-8 weeks in the fall. Players, of all natural athletic levels, will make about two years of progress compared to just participating on the spring team. That's with one whole hour per week of time invested. I love working with players this way because I am measurable-metric driven, so a kid can see their progress. I'm also a little bit qualitative about it too, because sometimes, the goal is just to build confidence and comfort.
The approach I'm describing looks like lots of hobbies. Imagine a kid wants to learn piano or guitar or drums. It's basically the same abstract approach. Work with an experienced teacher, commit to a regular+reasonable practice schedule, repeat for 6-8 weeks, and see if it fits and feels good.
The social aspect of being a good club or travel team is nuanced, but I will just say that my kid was incredibly well-served by having a good group of friends not connected to her school. And she had a great group of friends in school.
Follow the money. It's because the schools have figured out a way to monetize spectator sports but not spectator academics. The only spectator events that I recall was a spelling bee that only the parents came to, and if they charged for a ticket, even the parents wouldn't have shown up. If the schools could get money out of the program, they would put money into it.
> The amount of hours devoted to sports in US schools is unbelievable... Most of these kids will not be athletes.
The same could be said for a lot of other subjects too.
Physical activity/sports has far, far more benefits than just team building and scholarships. Given that a lot of the conversation seems to be implicating screentime in the decline, I'd guess that if we swapped 10% of school screen time for 10% more sports, we'd probably have a better outcome as a society.
I say this as someone who has done lots of computers and screentime my entire life, and very little sport.
I'm not sure what you mean by "school screen time" ? Smart board?
Sorry, I meant general-lone-focus-on-a-screen-during-school-time, in contrast to engaging with what's going on in real life in the classroom (e.g. listening to teacher teach, or interacting with other students etc.)
Not to mention football results in head injuries and degradation of intelligence and brain function.
Texas would finally pass it's yearly vote to secesed.
While I agree with you, it's so far and away from anything that could actually happen that I despair over what could be done. It seems like my children's schools change their evaluation criteria every other year to some "new" and "evidence-based" criteria. Do the kids do any different work? No. Do that get evaluated by different standards? Not really. I wouldn't call changing "pass" to "meets expectations" and fail to "not on track for success" to be a substantive change. Forcing equilateral, rectilinear wooden dowels into orifices of constant radius doesn't change the fact that we're playing a stupid game.
Yeah, we fucked this one up. No shade but older US millennials (I am one) are the worst parents. TERRIBLE. Idk why but we are. It’s like none of us born in the 80s learned from the everyone before us how not to be:/ But we were the TV generation & it’s interesting to see how our version of social media has impacted our parenting.
The worst parents how?
How is difficult to know but the GenZ numbers is also about their parents
Their parents are mostly not millennials though...
One example is optimizing for the short-term satisfaction of the child. More bluntly: not saying no. Not being critical.
I tend to find all sorts of generalizations like this so useless. Like, this thing you said seems totally random to me. I know lots of "elder millennial" parents and lots of parents of other ages, and I see lots of variation between parents in "not saying no", but I don't see any correlation by age... Regional and political cultural differences are way more correlated with things like this IMO.
The very concept of generations is a generalization.
Yes, but of a different kind than this "people of this generation do xyz thing".
Millenials spend time with their kids, way more than previous generations. Especially fathers.
I don't know if you've met people, but most people are terrible! And now these poor role models are spending extra time with young impressionable minds! /s
Impossible to argue with this!
This is an inauthentic, non-genuine, biased, and mean spirited article.
An entire generation is not "dumber" due to some test with an invalid sample size.
I was told as a millennial we were lazy, have no initiative, are dumb, spend money on lame things, etc. I have two master's degrees, you can shut up.
This data is just wrong.
Another in a long series of such articles over the thousands of years. One must assume these are written to compensate for the nearly universal experience of the older people being unable to operate all the stuff the kids do as easily as breathing. Totally plausible than a digital and networked society changes the way highly smart people develop the gifts of intelligence; not plausible that all these damn kids are dumb.
But in this case it's actually backed by evidence. PISA scores have been edging down since the mid 2010s and took a further dip in the 2020s.
Handwringing over standardized test scores dropping due to societal changes altering the shape of intelligence has been a thing since the 1970s. Back then it was the SATs.
western "mass" schooling started in 789, over a thousand years ago, not "thousands".
actual decline started last century (that's for a hundred).
Older people aren't actually "boomers with everything handed to them", it's just you in 30y - more experience, more depth, and slight drop in cognitivity.
for computer science, I find it interesting that almost every Gen z can use and talk about concepts but does not understand how a computer works (be it transistors, kernel, or memory allocation for example).
With AI we all know this will get worse, and it already does. it's not just the prompting - AIs can and will return information with the upmost confidence, even if wrong. A lot of critical thinking is needed, which cannot be found by re-querying or using a search engine (that does the same thing) - information isn't cognitivity.
> older people being unable to operate all the stuff the kids do as easily as breathing
Can you give an example of that?
"Kids These Days" don't even know how to operate a perfectly standard smartphone without help.
It takes effort and work to un-dumb ourselves atleast in that domain.
I would argue that its a function of raw effort in varying domains.
>Generation [...] Their
Hope for grammar is fast fading, anyway.
Did you intend to point out that "generation" is a singular noun while "their" is a plural pronoun? If so, I'd say that "their" is actually correct and the best way to write this. I think you could also say "its" and that would also be technically correct, but it would be significantly less clear. The current construction is the clearest way to say that the individuals that make up the group, in aggregate, are dumber than their parents, in aggregate.
In at least one case...
Their. possessive. Gen Z and their parents is correct. Referring to the parents of Gen Z.
For reference,
they're. contraction. Gen Z and they are parents. Is not what was intended.
there. location. Over there.
bluebarbet meant it should be "Gen Z and its parents".
Both "Gen Z and their…" and "Gen Z and its…" are fine. I personally prefer to treat a group as a plural.
"The class tossed their graduation caps in the air" strikes me as less clumsy than its alternatives.
No, it shouldn't. It's perfectly valid to refer to the members of a group rather than the group itself.
Well, considering Gen Z is a group of people who has parents, their works just fine. "my Mom" "my Dad" ... parents are usually referred to as entities the child has. And Gen Z is a plurality of people.