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Among richer families, youth sports participation is actually rising. Among the poorest households, it’s trending down. Just 34 percent of children from families earning less than $25,000 played a team sport at least one day in 2017, versus 69 percent from homes earning more than $100,000. In 2011, those numbers were roughly 42 percent and 66 percent, respectively.

This isn’t a story about American childhood; it’s about American inequality.

In his 2017 book, Dream Hoarders, the economist Richard Reeves wrote that economic mobility in the U.S. has been declining in the past few decades in part because of “opportunity hoarding.” For example, rich parents may pull special levers to get their kids into hyper-select schools, or elite internships, or exclusive entry-level jobs. In so doing, they—in effect— snatch precious opportunities away from the less fortunate.

So Hall is watching with alarm as the Alabama legislature advances bills that would outlaw hormone treatment for him and other trans youth in the state.

Thinking of the bills' proponents, he says, "Why should some guy who has never met me ... why should he get to tell me what I can and can't do? Why does he get to decide what is right for people who just want to be happy?"

This year, state legislatures have proposed a record number of anti-transgender bills.

More than half of Chinese in their 20s express a desire to start their own business. Others will climb up the ranks of the ruling Communist Party

How they understand their country’s past and what they ask of its future are essential to understand how they might one day lead China.

Youth often stands for trendsetting and rebellion. In China, the young must navigate an authoritarian state and a bruisingly competitive education system. This is when big life decisions are made and adult identities formed.

E-mail addthis_pub = 'nybooks'; addthis_logo = 'http://www.nybooks.com/images/logo-150.gif'; addthis_logo_background = 'ffffff'; addthis_logo_color = '666666'; addthis_brand = 'NYRB'; addthis_options = 'favorites, facebook, twitter, tumblr, reddit, digg, stumbleupon, delicious, google, more'; Share Print Comments (function() { var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0], rdb = document.createElement('script'); rdb.type = 'text/javascript'; rdb.async = true; rdb.src = document.location.protocol + '//www.readability.com/embed.js'; s.parentNode.insertBefore(rdb, s); })(); Young Israelis: A Turn to the Right? Eyal Press Uriel Sinai/Getty Images Children at the local school in the village of Ghajar, on Israeli-Lebanese border, which was recaptured during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, November 10, 2010 Shortly after the democratic uprising began in Egypt, a group of young Israelis led by freelance journalist Dimi Reider launched Kav Hutz (“Outside Line”), a Hebrew-language blog devoted to covering the events across the border. Unable to enter Egypt on short notice with his Israeli passport—a predicament all Israeli correspondents faced—Reider chronicled the insurrection by posting minute-by-minute updates culled from an array of online sources on the ground: Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Egyptian bloggers. The tone of Reider’s blog was reportorial, but hardly detached. “Good luck,” he wrote on the eve of the huge “Day of Departure” rally in Tahrir Square—a sentiment rarely voiced in Israel’s mainstream media, which stressed the danger of a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood if the protesters prevailed. By the time Egyptians had succeeded in overthrowing Hosni Mubarak, Kav Hutz was getting up to 12,000 visitors a day and had been singled out in Haaretz for leaving the rest of the Israeli press “in the dust.” As the story suggests, Egypt’s uprising managed to inspire not only countless young Arabs but also some young Israelis. A contributor to +972, an Israel-based online magazine that features commentary and reporting by mostly young progressives—it is named after the area code shared by Israel and the Palestinian territories—Reider was deeply moved by the courage of the protesters in Cairo and dismayed by the patronizing reaction of many Israelis. “The line the establishment took was that it’s all very nice but they’re going to end up like Iran,” he recalls. “I didn’t take that line because I bothered to read stuff by Egyptians and it quickly became apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood was just one player. It also felt distasteful to me to judge the extraordinary risks Egyptians were taking solely by our profit—by how it would affect Israeli security and the policy of a government I don’t support anyway.” For observers troubled by Israel’s alarming recent shift to the right, the emergence of Internet-savvy liberal voices like Reider’s may seem heartening. But while such bloggers appear more capable of reaching a younger demographic than Haaretz—the venerable leftist newspaper whose aging readership seems likely to shrink in the years to come—it’s not clear how many of their contemporaries are listening to them. One reason is apathy. Increasingly cynical about politics and the prospects of peace, not a few young Israelis I’ve met in recent years have told me they’ve stopped following the news. When they go online, it’s to chat with friends, not to check out sites like +972. There are also growing numbers of young Israelis who simply don’t share Reider’s views. Against the 12,000 readers of Kav Hutz were countless others who didn’t question the alarmist tone of their country’s mass-circulation tabloids when the revolt in Egypt began, as NPR discovered when it aired a segment on what Israeli youth thought of the uprising. “For us it is better to have Mubarak,” one young Israeli said. “I kind of feel sad for President Mubarak,” said another. “For the last two or three years, we’ve been seeing a very consistent trend of younger Israelis becoming increasingly right-wing,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion analyst who also contributes to +972, told me. Last year, Scheindlin carried out a survey on behalf of the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative that showed eroding support for democratic values among Israeli youth, at least insofar as the rights of non-Jews go. One question in the survey asked whether there should be “Equal access to state resources, equal opportunities [for] all citizens.” Among Jewish respondents between the ages of 16-29, a mere 43 percent agreed.

In October, a poll conducted by New Wave Research asked, “If Palestinians and Israelis reach an agreement… and the Israeli government brings the agreement to a referendum, would you vote for or against?” Among voters over 55, 61 percent—nearly two out of three—said they would support a deal. Among those younger than 35, it was the opposite: only one in three (37 percent) would vote in favor of an agreement.

One reason tolerance may be less widespread among young Israelis is that they rarely interact with Palestinians or Arab-Israelis. “You don’t see Palestinians on the streets of Israel,”

The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that judges need not determine that juvenile offenders are beyond hope of rehabilitation before sentencing them to die in prison. The decision, concerning a teenager who killed his grandfather, appeared to signal the end of a trend that had limited the availability of severe punishments for youths who commit crimes before they turn 18.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, writing for the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling, said it was enough that the sentencing judge exercised discretion rather than automatically imposing a sentence of life without parole.

“In a case involving an individual who was under 18 when he or she committed a homicide,” he wrote, “a state’s discretionary sentencing system is both constitutionally necessary and constitutionally sufficient.”

Today, China is embarked on another campaign to re-educate its young people. The message is more blatantly nationalistic than anything in recent decades, with President Xi Jinping’s image often at the center. And it is far more sophisticated than anything Beijing has attempted in the past.

Pan Borui, a 19-year-old freshman at a Beijing college, got hooked last year on the cartoons, which he said will “shape the thinking of the next generation of Chinese.” He said he knew they were made with party support, but said most Chinese still considered them very accurate and more accessible than traditional news reports.

Beijing’s ambitions are laid out in a document published by the State Council, China’s cabinet, in November 2019, which said “patriotism is the most natural and simple emotion of the Chinese.

China’s young people are facing record high unemployment as the country’s recovery from the pandemic is fluttering. They’re struggling professionally and emotionally. Yet the Communist Party and the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, are telling them to stop thinking they are above doing manual work or moving to the countryside. They should learn to “eat bitterness,” Mr. Xi instructed, using a colloquial expression that means to endure hardships.

A record 11.6 million college graduates are entering the work force this year, and one in five young people are unemployed. China’s leadership is hoping to persuade a generation that gre

up amid mostly rising prosperity to accept a different reality

Perhaps the most debilitating consequence of the euro zone’s economic downturn and its debt-driven austerity crusade has been the soaring rate of youth unemployment. Spain’s jobless rate for people ages 16 to 24 is approaching 50 percent. Greece’s is 48 percent, and Portugal’s and Italy’s, 30 percent. Here in Britain, the rate is 22.3 percent, the highest since such data began being collected in 1992. (The comparable rate for Americans is 18 percent.)

The lack of opportunity is feeding a mounting alienation and anger among young people across Europe — animus that threatens to poison the aspirations of a generation and has already served as a wellspring for a number of violent protests in European cities from Athens to London. And new economic data on Wednesday, showing much of Europe in the doldrums or recession, does little to bolster hopes for a better jobs picture anytime soon

For many years, Mr. Lion interviewed soldiers about why they chose to enter combat units. “The answers,” he said on Israel Radio, “were always about the challenge, to show I could make it, the prestige involved.” That began to change in 2000, he said. “I started to get answers — not a lot, but some — like: ‘To kill Arabs.’ The first time I heard it, it was at the time of the large terror attacks, and since then it has not stopped.

Mr. Lion, head of research at the Ethos Institute, said he was troubled. “Today I can say, and everyone who works with youth will say it, Jewish youth in Israel hate Arabs without connection to their parents or their own party affiliation and their own political opinions.”

Fifty-seven percent of first-time voters, for instance, favor the chancellor, compared with 21 percent who prefer her Social Democratic rival, Martin Schulz, according to polling conducted by the Forsa Institute.

It also marks a change within Germany, where young voters typically have chosen the Social Democrats, and increasingly the Greens, in the postwar era. The first time Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union captured the largest share of the youth vote without the help of its Bavarian counterpart, the Christian Social Union, was in 2013. 

This generation came to political consciousness in the anxious aftermath of the 9/11 attacks but then watched their own country weather the financial crisis later that decade with relative ease. The European Union is suddenly no longer a given, and the United States, which steered Germany to political normalization, is looking inward under a president who promises “America first.”

That year, young voters turned out in historic numbers and were part of the coalition that helped to elect a Democratic House of Representatives. And with days until Election Day, signs have emerged that young voters are poised for another cycle of record turnout, particularly as young people are more likely than their older counterparts to vote in person and later in the election season.

A poll released Monday by Harvard University's Institute of Politics surveyed 18- to 29-year-olds and found that 63% said they would "definitely" vote in the election, which is the highest proportion of respondents in the 20 years that the poll of young voters has been conducted

More than 6 million voters under 30 have already cast early ballots, according to the Democratic data firm TargetSmart, compared with roughly 2 million early votes at the same time in 2016.

Despite a legacy of low turnout, college students — and young people in general — could be a decisive voting bloc in this election. Already, nearly 5 million Americans, ages 18 to 29, have cast early votes, a far higher number than at this point in 2016.

College students more than doubled their rate of voting between the 2014 and 2018 midterm elections, according to research from Tufts University.

In the 2016 presidential election, 48% of college students voted. Experts predict that percentage will grow this year. A poll on Monday from Harvard University's Institute of Politics found that 63% of 18- to 29-year-olds said they would "definitely" vote in the election. In 2016, that number was 47%.

Here’s a chart showing how opinion among 18-to-29-year-olds has shifted on those issues, according to data that the Harvard Youth Poll crunched at my request:

numbers — which come from the Harvard Youth Poll of 18-to-29-year-olds released each spring — all suggest that today’s young voters are substantially more progressive on these issues than young voters were even five or 10 years ago. Sizable majorities now reject the idea that same-sex relationships are morally wrong (53 percent), support stricter gun laws (63 percent) and want government to provide basic necessities (62 percent).

support for government doing more to curb climate change soared to 57 percent in 2020 before subsiding to 50 percent this yea

Each year, it’s no surprise that Finland tops the annual World Happiness Report. And this year was no different, marking the country’s seventh consecutive year doing so

Americans — particularly those under 30 — have become drastically less happy in recent years

the latest data point in what some researchers have described as a crisis among America’s youth.

there is in fact a growing gap for today's young adults between materialism and the desire to work hard.

“Compared to previous generations, recent high school graduates are more likely to want lots of money and nice things, but less likely to say they’re willing to work hard to earn them,”

Compared to Baby Boomers graduating from high school in the 1970s, recent high school students are more materialistic — 62 percent of students surveyed in 2005-07 think it’s important to have a lot of money, while just 48 percent had the same belief in 1976-78.

In response to growing concerns over head injuries in football, Pop Warner, the nation’s largest youth football organization, announced rule changes on Wednesday that will limit the amount of full-speed collisions and other contact allowed in practice.

The issue of brain injuries sustained on the football field has forced a reckoning at all levels of the sport in recent years. Pop Warner’s new rules, which will affect hundreds of thousands of youth football players, some as young as 5 years old, were seen as the latest acknowledgment that the nation’s most popular sport poses dangers to the long-term cognitive health of its athletes.

Under its new rules, effective for the coming season, which starts in August, contact will not be allowed for two-thirds of each practice — a move prompted by research showing that most of the hardest hits in youth football occur not in games, but in practice. The organization is also forbidding all drills that involve full-speed, head-on blocking and tackling that begins with players lined up more than three yards apart, as well as head-to-head contact.

interviews with dozens of Afghan youth paint a picture of a new generation bound to their society’s conservative ways, especially when it comes to women’s rights, one of the West’s single most important efforts here.

“These young men grew up in a war environment. They don’t know about their own rights; how can we expect them to know about their sisters’ rights, their mothers’ rights or their wives’ rights? If they wear jeans and have Western haircuts, that doesn’t mean they are progressive.”

Censorship, particularly when it comes to religious offenses, summons little ire. Many consider democracy a tool of the West. And the vast majority of Afghans still rely on tribal justice, viewing the courts as little more than venues of extortion.

A couple of years ago, the city of Chicago started a summer jobs program for teenagers attending high schools in some of the city's high-crime, low-income neighborhoods.

Students who were randomly assigned to participate in the program had 43 percent fewer violent-crime arrests over 16 months, compared to students in a control group.

Researcher Sara Heller conducted a randomized control trial with the program, in partnership with the city. The study included 1,634 teens at 13 high schools. They were, on average, C students, almost all of them eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Twenty percent of the group had already been arrested, and 20 percent had already been victims of crime.

For the many high-school and university-age students who flooded the streets, the issue is much bigger than extradition alone. As they see it, they are fighting a “final battle” for some semblance of autonomy from the Chinese government.

young people in Hong Kong feel less affinity with mainland China and are more likely to see themselves as having a distinct Hong Kong — as opposed to Chinese — identity. Beijing’s efforts to grapple with this have backfired; when officials tried to impose a patriotic education curriculum in schools in 2012, young people led the protests against it.

Many young protesters see the extradition bill as hurting the territory’s judicial independence — in their view, the last vestige of insulation they now have from Beijing’s influence.

it’s increasingly obvious to me that the teenagers and 20-somethings who have mastered these platforms — and who are often dismissed as shallow, preening narcissists by adults who don’t know any better — are going to dominate not just internet culture or the entertainment industry but society as a whole.

as social media expands its cultural dominance, the people who can steer the online conversation will have an upper hand in whatever niche they occupy — whether that’s media, politics, business or some other field.

“The way to think of influencers or creators is as entrepreneurs,” said Chris Stokel-Walker, the author of “YouTubers.” “These people are setting up businesses, hiring staff, managing budgets. These are massively transferable skills.”