Gen Z is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents. Denmark has the solution.
Nearly every parent hopes their child will be better off than they are: smarter, more secure, and more well-adjusted. Many parents see this as a stamp of successful parenting, but something has changed for children growing up today. While younger generations are known for their empathy, their cognitive capabilities seem to be lagging behind those of previous generations for the first time in history.
Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a teacher turned cognitive neuroscientist who focuses on human learning, appeared before Congress to discuss concerns about cognitive development in children. In his address to the members of Congress, he says, "A sad fact that our generation has to face is this: our kids are less cognitively capable than we were at their age. Since we've been standardizing and measuring cognitive development since the late 1800s, every generation has outperformed their parents, and that's exactly what we want. We want sharper kids."
Student smiling in a classroom, working on a laptop.Photo credit: Canva
Horvath explains that the reason this happens is that each generation has gone to school longer than the previous generation. Gen Z is no exception to the longer duration of time spent in school, but they're the first ones who aren't meeting this normal increase in cognitive development. According to the cognitive neuroscientist, the decline is due to the introduction of screens in the classroom, which started around 2010.
"Across 80 countries, as Jean was just saying, if you look at the data, once countries adopt digital technology widely in schools, performance goes down significantly. To the point where kids who use computers about five hours per day in school for learning purposes will score over two-thirds of a standard deviation less than kids who rarely or never touch tech at school," Horvath reveals.
In most cases, the decline in performance doesn't result in better strategies. The neuroscientist shares that the standardized testing has been adjusted to accommodate lower expectations and shorter attention spans. This is an approach that educators, scientists, and researchers went to Capitol Hill to express wasn't working. But not every country is taking the approach of lowering standards to meet lowered cognitive ability. Denmark went in the opposite direction when it realized their students were slipping behind.
France24 recently interviewed educators in Denmark following their seemingly novel approach to students struggling with cognitive development. Since the beginning of the 2025/2026 school year, Denmark has not only been having students turn in their cellphones, but they've also taken tablets, laptops, and computers out of the classroom. No more digital learning for the majority of the school day. Danes went old school by bringing back physical textbooks, workbooks, and writing assignments. The results have been undeniable. Even the students can't seem to deny the success of the countrywide shift in educational approach.
"I think the biggest issue has been that, because we kind of got rid of the books and started using screens instead, that we've noticed that a lot of the kids have trouble concentrating, so it's pretty easy to swipe with three fingers over to a different screen and have a video game going, for example, in class," Copenhagen English teacher, Islam Dijab tells France24.
Now, instead of computers being part of every lesson, Denmark uses computers very sparingly and with strict supervision. One student says that it has been nice not having screen time at school because she loves to read and write. But it wasn't just the lack of attention span children were developing, they were also developing low self-esteem and poor mental health due to the amount of time spent on devices.
Students focused and ready to learn in the classroom.Photo credit: Canva
The data showing the negative impact of screens on teens' brains has prompted a nationwide change in Denmark that extends outside of the classroom. Afterschool activities are eliminating or extremely limiting electronic use. There is also a national No Phone Day that encourages everyone to put away their devices for the day, and Imran Rashid, a physician and digital health expert, is petitioning parliament to ban social media use for children under the age of 15. The no phone movement in Denmark is a nationwide effort that hopes to right the ship before another generation feels the effects.
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It's hard to date when you're fat, but not for the reasons you might think.
"You know what I like about you? You’ve got fat pride. I felt that way, too, until I realized I wanted anyone to fuck me ever."
We’d been talking online for weeks — he was funny, erudite, nerdy, kind. He’d told me he’d lost weight in the past. I’d done my due diligence of telling him how fat I was, working hard to avoid repeats of past hurt and disappointment. I’d weeded through dozens of profiles about wanting to meet "healthy," "active" women and several that pointedly instructed that fat women weren’t welcome. Many men had sent graphic, sexual messages, and when I politely declined or didn’t respond, they issued lengthy screeds. "U SHOULD BE GRATEFUL." "I wouldn’t even rape you."
In amongst all of that, I’d found someone who seemed like a gem. And then, on our first real date, this. It was frustrating, isolating, and made me feel so big and so small, all at the same time.
I gently pushed back. "You know you’re saying that about me, too, right?"
"What?"
"When you talk about no one wanting to fuck fat people, you’re talking about me, too."
He shook his head. "Don’t take it personally. It’s not personal."
I got quiet then asked for the check. He said he’d walk me out. When we got outside, he tried to kiss me then asked if I wanted to go back to his place.
Years later, I was falling for a new partner.
We’d been dating for several months, and she was extraordinary: full of life, wildly intelligent, absurdly beautiful. I’d tell her often — maybe too often — how stunning I thought she was. With equal frequency, she’d talk about my body. "You’re so brave to dress the way you do." "I want you to feel empowered."
At first, her responses sounded like reciprocity, but they always seemed to sting. I felt deflated every time she said it. Like that first date, she couldn’t see past my body. She valued me, but she didn’t desire me. When she spoke, she never spoke about my body — only about my relationship to it. She was amazed that I wasn’t sucked into the undertow of self-loathing and isolation that she expected from fat women. Those comments were a reminder of how frequently she thought of my body, not as an object of desire, but as an obstacle to overcome. She was impressed that I could. She could not.
When you and I talk about dating, dear friend, we have a lot of overlapping experiences because dating can be difficult and awkward for anyone.
It’s a strange auditioning process: all artifice to find someone who can respect your uncrossable lines, and failed auditions usually mean those lines get crossed. It’s easy to feel judged, stalled, alone in the process. It can get exhausting, exciting, frustrating, exhilarating.
But dating as a fat person means contending with so many added layers of challenge.
You told me once you imagined it was impossible to date as a fat person. It’s not; it’s just a lot of work. Lots of people are willing to sleep with fat people. Many are willing to date a fat person.
Few are willing to truly embrace a fat person. Almost no one, it seems, really knows what that means.
That first date, dear friend, is such a frequent moment.
My sweet, funny date was abruptly overthrown, overtaken by years of the same anti-fat messages all of us hear. He couldn’t reconcile being fat and being loved. All of that, suddenly, was visited upon me, as it so often is.
I only bring up my feelings about being a fat person after knowing someone for some time. But, with startling regularity, new acquaintances, dates, and strangers offer diet advice, trial gym memberships, and, even once, a recommendation for a surgeon. My life as a fat person is a barrage of weekly, daily, and hourly offers of unsolicited advice. At first, the detailed answers, the constant defense, the explanation of my daily diet and medical history are ineffective — no answer is sufficient. Over time, it becomes burdensome, then exhausting, then frustrating. And it doesn’t seem to cross the minds of most people I meet that I’ve heard what they’ve said before — not just once, but over and over again, in great detail. I have a forced expertise in diets, exercise regimens, miracle pills, and the science of weight loss.
That may not be your experience, dear friend, because people may approach you differently.
You might not know what it’s like to feel your face flush or your heart race when your body so reliably becomes a topic of conversation during dinner parties, work events, first dates. There’s a familiar wave of frustration, hurt, and exhaustion. It’s all the visceral, invisible consequence of unintended harm because few of us — even you, my darling — have unlearned the scripts we’re expected to recite when we see a body like mine.
As a fat woman, I just want what anyone else wants: to be seen, to be loved, to be supported for who I am. To be challenged and adored. To be worth the effort for who I am.
When I meet people whose first response to me is about my fat body, I learn something important about that person. Whether their opening salvo is "Fat bitch" or "I’m concerned about your health" or "Have you tried this diet?" or "I think you’re beautiful," they all send the same message: that I am invisible. Rather than seeing me or getting to know who I am, they can only see my fat body.
It’s true of so many people I meet. They’ve got this deep-seated block: They can’t see fat people as individual people with individual stories because no one expects them to. Nothing in our culture indicates that fat people might have individual experiences, different stories, life experiences as rich and varied as anyone else. Instead, we’re met with diagnosis, prognosis, quarantine: an anthropological impulse to demand to know why we are the way we are and to figure out how to stop us from having the bodies we have. We’re reduced to figures in an equation, a puzzle to solve. But truthfully, we’re so much messier than that. We’re just as contradictory, real, and human as anyone else you know, and loving us is just as complicated.
When we have conversations like this, you often say, "I had no idea."
It’s heartening, dear friend, and it’s also hard to hear. It’s a harsh reminder that even those closest to me are subject to all those same influences and impulses.
There’s so much work in just working up the mettle to date at all. Building your own confidence and battling your own doubt enough to date at all can be difficult, in part because there’s no template. Media representation is seriously lacking for many communities; seeing thriving fat people in media is nearly nonexistent. Being fat means not seeing yourself reflected anywhere as being happy, healthy, or affirmed.
Being fat means taking on the Sisyphean task of creating your own world, one in which you can declare a truce with yourself and learn to feel OK or feel nothing at all about yourself when the entire world seems to be telling you that is not possible.
It means finding whatever you can scavenge to build yourself some makeshift shelter of thatch and driftwood. It’s brittle and dry, and it’s something. You try to build something that can withstand the gale-force winds of seeing an episode of "The Biggest Loser" or hearing a stranger offer unsolicited diet advice that you’re already taking. You build it slowly, painstakingly — testing methods and gathering rare, essential materials over time. It’s precious and fragile, a labor of love and a means of survival.
And finding a partner means opening that hard-fought home to someone else, over and over again, knowing that person might destroy it.
Usually, they do.
You’ve mourned it a hundred times. Your skin has thickened. Sometimes that person burns it to the ground, setting a fire to watch it burn. But more often, they just forget to extinguish their cigarette. Yes, when we look for love, some of us are hurt intentionally, cruelly, because of our bodies and because of overt fatphobia. But usually, we’re hurt without malice, through rote scripts about who we’re allowed to be and an expectation that we’ll devote our lives to meeting those expectations.
Often, when looking for friends and partners, I search for those who will be gentle with the home I’ve built, ramshackle though it is.
What made such an impression on my partner from years ago was that I didn’t stop there: I wanted someone who would help build that home, someone who would protect it, someone who would call it their home, too. Because a lack of harm isn’t love.
I want love. And as a fat person, there’s audacity in that.