Everyone has heard “kids these days” and “when I was your age” – and chances are you’ve heard the concern over the differences between growing up in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, et cetera. Sex is an easy subject to bring up – now, instead of sneaking peaks at someone else’s playboy centerfold, you can just pull up a brower and type ‘porn.com’ – boom, blowjobs and anal. That worries some people, obviously, and maybe another phrase “when you’ve got a kid you’ll understand” would serve to satisfy my question, but here it is nonetheless: are kids really worse off for all this media exposure?

Here’s the thing – biologically speaking, things don’t change much between a generation. The kids are the same humans that their parents were several decades prior, as far as mental capability and physical capacity go. So indignant adults might point out that they used to whisper when talking about kissing and girlfriends while in school, while their kids talk explicitly about oral sex over AIM and on MySpace. The implication there is that the latter is somehow worse, or more challenging then the former. But I don’t think that it’s the right way to think about things – previous generations didn’t grow up with readily accessible pornography, so they can’t accept the possibility that current generations can handle it. In fact, it implies that they don’t think that their younger selves could’ve handled it – when I would argue that they totally could’ve, and they shouldn’t sell themselves short.

What do you think? Are children that are used to graphic sexuality and violence somehow worse, or just different from their parents? Is it something to be concerned about, or is it just the generation gap?