‘Kids These Days Are So Sensitive’ and Other Misconceptions About Gen Z

Every time I give a talk on wellness, one question always comes up.

A faculty member, usually midcareer or above, asks me a version of “What’s wrong with kids these days? They are so sensitive!”

I get it so often that I even have a typical response: “They aren’t more sensitive, they are just more aware, and they don’t think they should put up with things just because ‘they’ve always been that way.’”

That usually leads to more generational frustration. But, as much as I believe my answer, I also know that my campus colleagues across the country speak of more student crises and more severe cases to begin with. It makes me wonder: Are students actually worse off, or are they just more help-seeking? Or is it both?

To answer this question and more, I turned to developmental psychologist Alexis Redding, the editor of the book Mental Health in College: What Research Tells Us About Supporting Students (Harvard Education Press) and the chair of the Mental Health in Higher Education program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Q: I’ve been hearing from counseling that this year is starting off hard already, with high levels of acuity and complexity. And we’ve long been hearing that campus mental health is in crisis. What do you make of the current state of college mental health?

A: What your counseling leads are seeing is real, and we don’t want to underestimate how much students are struggling. But the crisis narrative conflates two things that are happening simultaneously. There are students with clinical needs, like major depressive disorder or suicidal ideation, who need to be with trained clinicians. And there is a much larger group of students facing the typical developmental challenges that come with the transition to college, such as homesickness and feeling lonely.

We’re far more aware of mental health these days, which is a great thing, but we need to be cautious not to overpathologize the typical experiences in the process. We don’t want to overreact to the student who is having a typical bad day, and we don’t want to underreact to the student who needs clinical care.

Q: Is it really so different from college students’ experiences in years past?

A: That’s something so many people are trying to make sense of. In my research with Dr. Nancy Hill, we study a lost archive of interviews with students from the Class of 1975, and we have been stunned by the similarities in the stresses they described more than 50 years ago. I replicated the study with the Classes of 2025 and 2026. We expected to find the kind of generational difference everyone talks about, especially since these students were coming to college after the COVID pandemic. Yet it’s surprising how similar the emotional experiences of these two cohorts are.

When I share quotes from both datasets and ask my Gen Z students to guess which are from 1975 and which are from their contemporaries, they can’t do it. They’ll even build a confident case for the wrong answer and assure me that there is no way someone their grandparents’ age could have had a similar emotional experience. But it’s true. The only details that give the older transcripts away are the anachronisms, like a student asking for an ashtray during the interview or a reference to President Nixon. The emotional experiences are largely unchanged.

But what is different—and this really matters—is the intensity of those emotions. Students today are having the same core experience, but the temperature is dialed up. The key is to recognize that there is connective tissue across generations, because those connections are important for both understanding and building supports.

Q: I regularly hear from faculty that “students these days are not resilient and are too sensitive.” What would you say to that argument?

A: I don’t know anyone in higher ed who hasn’t said some version of this over the past few years. Indeed, when we started analyzing the 1975 interviews, our hypothesis was about generational difference. I spent a year coding those data using three different analytic techniques trying to find evidence of why kids today seemed so different, and what I found again and again was similarity instead.

So why does the “students today are so sensitive” story feel so true? There’s a principle in psychology known as the peak-end rule: Our memories of an experience fade except for the moment of peak intensity and how it ended. We lose the “messy middle” and the emotion of what happened in between. We remember being stressed, but the emotion of those memories gets overwritten by the reality that we know how things worked out and the uncertainty disappears. That’s why it’s so easy for all of us to think, “Wow, kids today are so sensitive!” We were that sensitive and emotional, too. We just don’t remember being that way.

When we played the interviews back to the original 1975 participants, now in their 70s, they were astonished by what they had forgotten. They remembered the tidy stories, not the emotional moments in between. And they recognized that they had been telling a simplified story to the young people in their own lives. We have to tap back in to the emotional moments ourselves and remember what it was like before everything worked out.

Q: Do you think increased awareness has anything to do with what we are seeing in students?

A: That’s a really important point. Young people today are definitely more aware of mental health issues and feel more empowered to talk about them, and we need to celebrate that. There’s decreased stigma, which also means more opportunity for earlier diagnosis and care.

But awareness has a limit that surprises people: It coexists with masking. In our current interviews, the majority of students described feeling lonely, but nearly all of them believed they were the only one struggling that way. We have roommate pairs in the study, interviewed privately, where each one told us the other had it all figured out. So, while students have this public language of mental health, they are still not telling each other the truth about the daily struggles.

The reduction in stigma when talking about clinical mental health is real, but I don’t see a corresponding ease when talking about the more typical feelings like loneliness. Open conversation hasn’t replaced the need for us to name and normalize what’s typical, because students aren’t always doing it on their own.

Q: What about social media and the desire for people to put diagnostic labels on their experiences? Are we overpathologizing normal responses?

A: Now that students are exposed to clinical vocabulary, they’re applying it in ways that can be confusing for campus adults. It’s a complicated position to be in, because you absolutely don’t want to ignore warning signs if someone is having a genuine crisis. But the label alone can’t tell you what’s going on. A student who says, “I’m having panic attacks,” may be describing ordinary stress or an emerging clinical condition, with the only vocabulary they have access to.

So instead of automatically referring to a clinician, I suggest five questions that we can ask first. Starting with “What does that mean to you?” and then asking, “How is that showing up in your life?” and “How long has it been going on?” and finally, “What supports do you already have?” and “How can I help?”

That’s a short conversation, yet it can help differentiate between what is typical and what might be a clinical concern. The student who answers, “I got my first bad grade and am worried about my next test” is likely having a typical struggle. But, the student who answers, “I can’t get out of bed. I stopped seeing my friends” is telling me something more serious might be going on. I’m walking them to the counseling center myself to make sure they get the help they need. This kind of differentiation matters. But, of course, when it isn’t clear, we make the referral anyway because the stakes are too high to get it wrong.

Q: Colleges have focused a lot on the emotional side of wellness, and particularly on crisis and counseling over the past decade. Based on your research, is that investment addressing the right problem?

A: Colleges should absolutely continue to increase funding for campus mental health centers. But that addresses acute mental health needs, and many students are likely to be struggling with typical developmental challenges. We need to focus on well-being generally as well.

One strategy I encourage is understanding and talking publicly about the W-Curve, which describes the predictable ups and downs of the college transition. Early on, students face a setback as they acclimate and try to build meaningful connection from scratch. Eventually they make friends and settle into their classes, but when they visit home during fall break, they often hit another setback, perhaps because home doesn’t feel the same as it used to. When campuses talk about the W-Curve and how normal it is, it sets the tone: students realize they’re not the only one struggling.

We can also design programming around these patterns, adding events and opportunities to connect later in the semester around that second dip. Ironically, we tend to do the opposite and front-load everything into orientation. That’s a mismatch we can fix by being more intentional with our programming.

And the W-Curve does one more thing: It helps us spot the student whose struggle is atypical, with dips that are more prolonged or extreme than we’d expect, which is exactly the student who may need clinical support.

Q: I know you believe that leaders and mentors should share their stories as one way to help students. What do you mean by that?

A: It’s enormously helpful for faculty and staff to share their own stories with students. Not just their successes, but also their failures. We know that this generation is becoming more perfectionistic, which means we need to do the work of showing them that no one has a path free of failure and setback. I always make it a point to tell my students about the C I got that I thought would derail my future (Spoiler alert: No one ever cared but me). We want to be honest with them and share the messy middle.

When we re-interviewed the participants from our 1975 study, they frequently told us that their most impactful conversations and advice came from single interactions. These were targeted, 15-minute conversations in which somebody focused on them, validated what they were experiencing and offered meaningful, tangible advice. Fifty years later, those were the conversations that mattered most; in some cases, they set the direction of a whole career.

This approach is an incredibly underrated form of mentorship that my co-author Dorie Clark and I call micro-mentorship. It’s empowering for all of us who work with students to realize that you don’t have to sign up for years of mentorship to have impact. Even taking the time for a 15-minute conversation can help someone see themselves differently and discover new possibilities.