Has Generation Y overdosed on self-esteem?

For some, a new study validates concerns of too much positive reinforcement of the young. Others say it lacks needed nuance.

from the March 2, 2007 edition

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That makes "current college students more narcissistic than baby boomers and Gen-Xers," its authors conclude. (Data points between 1982 and 1990 are few, says Professor Twenge, also the author of "Generation Me.")

That quality can be amplified when school's out.

"Gen-Y is the most difficult workforce I've ever encountered, because part of them are greatest-generation great and the other part are so self-indulgent as to be genuinely offensive to know, let alone supervise," says Marian Salzman, a trendspotter and senior vice president at JWT, the global advertising agency.

Millennials themselves don't completely reject the new label. But they offer some modifications.

"I know people who are attention- seekers and only think about themselves," writes Jessica Riggin, a sophomore at California State University, Monterey Bay, in Seaside, Calif. In an e-mail, she attributes the behavior mainly to overconsumption of low-brow media, which leads to crass celebrity-emulation among many of her peers. She doesn't buy in. "I don't care who Anna Nicole's baby's father is," she writes, "and I don't care who's admitting themself [sic] into rehab."

Ms. Riggin prefers another kind of social participation: She volunteers at the Marine Mammal Center near her school and at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

"We live in a society that emphasizes the power of the individual," notes Zach Samson, a senior studying journalism at Northwestern University near Chicago. "So it is very easy to see why my generation would be considered so narcissistic." Growing up, he was told he was "special," he says, and that he could accomplish anything he worked for (and he ended up interning with Oxfam, the antihunger group, last year in Thailand).

"But my parents were not emphasizing that I was this grand person who was better than everyone else," Mr. Samson says, "just that I was unique, as was every other person."

That kind of parenting is in line with the positive aspects of the self-esteem movement – success tied to relationships and the development of empathy, the inverse of narcissism, says Janis Keyser, coauthor of "Becoming the Parent You Want to Be," the parenting bible of the '90s.

Some of the Twenge-study answers meant to indicate narcissism ("I like to be the center of attention," for example) actually strike Ms. Keyser as "signals of somebody who is feeling insecure."

Self-esteem today is often approached in terms of "personal worth" – feeling good about oneself, says Chris Mruk, professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. But feeling good about oneself without demonstrating competence, he adds, does lead to narcissism.

"Our society tends right now to be a little more lopsided toward the feeling-good end, the individual end," says Professor Mruk. "You really do need to have both competence and worthiness. The middle point is where the balance would be," he says, "and where well-being would occur, both socially and individually."

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