Are kids today really worse at math, or does every generation just think so?

The feeling shows up around the kitchen table on a Tuesday night. The fourth-grade work looks foreign, the kid says she hates math, and the parent thinks, quietly, that her own generation was tougher and steadier and better at this. Most parents in most generations have thought exactly that. Most of them have been wrong.

A [2023 Nature analysis][2] pooled responses from roughly 12 million people across at least 60 countries and seven decades. On 84% of items, the majority said morality and character had declined. But when those same people rated their actual contemporaries, the ratings stayed flat. The year the survey was run explained less than 0.3% of the variance. The decline is real as a feeling. It is not real in the data.

Why the "kids these days" feeling is so reliable

The mechanism is mundane. In a 2019 Science Advances paper, psychologists Protzko and Schooler called it the "kids these days effect": adults reliably believe today's youth are in decline on the very traits the adult personally scores high on. The trick is memory. People take their current standing on a trait and impose it backward onto their younger selves. The teenager who actually did struggle with fractions in 1991 grows up into an adult who remembers being fine with fractions, and concludes that her daughter must be uniquely worse.

A different kind of evidence sits in a rediscovered archive of 1970s college-student interviews, reanalyzed in 2024 by Redding and Hill. The researchers had expected to find a generation gap. What they heard instead was students who sounded indistinguishable from today's: the same worries about loneliness, the future, not measuring up. The original 1970s investigators, it turned out, had launched the project for the same reason, to replicate a 1950s study they assumed would show how much "kids today" had changed.

Math really did slip. The narrative is still wrong.

The narrative version of "today's kids are worse" is mostly an illusion. The measured skill version, in math specifically, is not. The [2024 Nation's Report Card][3], released in January 2025, shows fourth-grade math up two points from 2022 but still below 2019. Eighth-grade math is flat and below 2019. Nearly 40% of eighth-graders are working below NAEP Basic. That is a real drop in measured skills, in the years that bracketed the pandemic.

Both can be true. The story that today's kids are a uniquely fragile, uniquely worse-at-math generation is the same illusion that has run on every cohort since the 1950s. And, separately, there is a specific skill gap in math that opened up and is measurable. That is the part a parent can actually find and work on.

Worth being clear about this: the second sentence is the one that matters for what a parent does next. The dread of a generation in decline is not actionable. A specific gap in a specific kid's multiplication or fractions or place value is.

What a parent transmits matters as much as the math

There is one finding that lands hardest on parents who say, half-laughing, "I was never good at math either."

In a 2015 field study, Maloney and colleagues tracked first- and second-graders across a school year. When parents reported higher math anxiety, their children learned significantly less math over the year and ended the year more anxious about math themselves. The link ran specifically through homework help: when math-anxious parents helped frequently, the effect was strongest. When they helped less often, the effect washed out.

That is a correlational field result, not a guarantee. But it points at the controllable part. The feeling a parent passes across the kitchen table is part of the curriculum.

The same lab ran a follow-up intervention with math-anxious families using a short structured daily practice habit at home. The kids' math achievement improved, and the benefit was still measurable three years after the families stopped. A calm, low-friction routine took the parent's anxious narration out of the loop and replaced it with the kid working steadily on her own.

There is a separate track worth naming, because the research above doesn't speak to it. Some struggles are clinical, real, and need help from someone trained to give it. The "kids these days" research is about the everyday narrative that this generation is uniquely fragile. It is not a claim that anxiety or depression are imaginary, or that a kid who needs support should be told to push through.

Keep the two stories separate

Most of what parents are reacting to when they say "kids today are worse at math" is the same illusion every generation has fallen for. None of that means the recent math results are not real. They are, and they are worth taking seriously.

The useful move is to keep the two separate. The generational decline story is not a parent's problem to solve, because it is not really there. The specific skill that wobbled in this kid, this spring, on this topic, is. It is ordinary, findable, and the work to close it looks like a quiet fifteen minutes a day, on the right thing, without a parent leaning over the table announcing she was never good at math either.

[2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10284688/ [3]: https://www.nagb.gov/news-and-events/news-releases/2025/nations-report-card-decline-in-reading-progress-in-math.html