The Red Line Is Falling - And It’s Our Kids
The Skinny With Ginny #12
Who remembers their parents’ worrying about television?
Those summer afternoons when you’d settle in to watch reruns of The Brady Bunch or Gilligan’s Island, and your dad would shake his head and say something about your brain “turning to mush” - tell me I’m not the only one? It felt dramatic. Maybe even silly. Television was just part of life. We all watched it here and there. We all turned out fine… right?
That memory keeps coming back to me lately, because what once sounded like hyperbole has quietly turned into science. And the findings are not silly. They are not overblown. They are deeply unsettling.
What we are seeing now isn’t just “kids on their phones too much.” It’s not even just about attention spans or screen time limits. What’s emerging is evidence that something far deeper is shifting, like personality itself, and it’s happening faster than anyone expected.
Recently, the Financial Times analyzed data from the Understanding America Study, looking at how core personality traits have changed over the last decade. One chart from that analysis has gone somewhat viral, and once you see it, it’s hard to unsee:
