New generations and violence

Lack of listening and inability to express fragility fuel youth discomfort

Schools must invest in psychological counters and teacher training. Blaming social media and video games is a cop-out from addressing more serious structural problems

by Camilla Colombo and Camilla Curcio

19 April 2026

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

4' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

Fragility unheard and misunderstood. A personal malaise that degenerates in the face of a society that gives few certainties about the future. And an age without an instruction manual, complicated to inhabit and manage. It is in this puzzle that, in recent years, data in hand, the violence among the new generations has increased. Evidence to which scholars, parents, teachers, headmasters, parish priests have tried to find one or more triggers. And which the newspaper and television news have often photographed in all its crudeness.

The Unfulfilled Promise of Adults

"Looking at the phenomenon in a general key, I think the central theme is that of the enormous difficulty young people have in putting their emotions into words and expressing them," explains Matteo Lancini, psychologist, psychotherapist and president of the Minotauro Foundation. "The great promise they had been given by adults, who had assured them of attentive listening and the freedom to grow and live being themselves, was resoundingly broken. Fathers, mothers, professors, educators, society as a whole, politics were not able to listen to them and relate to them, they only thought about their needs and silenced any emotional element that might interfere in the life project they had designed. These children could never say that they were afraid because it risked annoying their parents' fears. They could never confess sadness because they had no right to complain. They could never channel their anger because today, at the first conflict, they think of the measure to stop it'.

The impossibility of giving a dimension to this lump of emotions labelled by others as 'uncomfortable' and the confrontation with a selfish interlocutor or one who wants to impose a way of thinking is likely to result in disproportionate reactions. "Adolescence is a phase of life in which, if you fail to verbalise suffering, you inevitably end up escalating into violence. Against yourself or against others. " Because, alongside a public dimension, which sees 15-year-olds wielding knives and attacking their peers, there is an equally alarming private one, with eating disorders on the rise among girls, social isolation among boys, self-harm and suicide.

Socials as scapegoat

"In this Italia young people don't count as they should, everything is increasingly elderly-friendly, and while all around us there is war and children lose their lives and we are almost anaesthetised in front of news of death, there are adults who continue to see the cause of youth violence only in social addiction, in gory video games or trapper songs," Lancini concludes. "All this, in the end, is just a way of washing one's conscience and not taking action, reforming the school, accepting the effort to change society and learning to read them. Avoiding prevaricating or bullying attitudes. If we really have to ban social networks, which have certainly done some damage, then let's ban them from the age of 0 to 80. Banning only teenagers will not achieve the desired result. On the contrary: we risk increasing their influence and alienating them from adult credibility'.

What the school must do

Openness and empathy are the keys to a virtuous approach not only in the family but also in the school environment. "Schools must always set out to recover and not punish children. And the regulations must also be written in this direction," notes Antonella Parisi, headmaster of the Liceo scientifico Raffaele Lombardi Satriani in Petilia Policastro and Cotronei and of the Liceo delle scienze umane e linguistico in Mesoraca (Crotone). "We need to understand what lies behind their experience and educate them in effective relational and emotional management. More and more frequently I see young people who are too adult for their age and parents who have not yet grown up. The axis has shifted: teachers are left alone to educate, children are left to their own devices, and adults do not take responsibility. From this mix of social, family and digital factors, discomfort results in aggression and the school has to cushion the shortcomings'.

For Parisi, therefore, what is needed are preventive strategies rather than counteracting them: 'Active listening, an effective psychologist desk, proper teacher training, a critical use of technology and, as in my school, entrusting a specialised team with raising awareness of respect for the individual. We must prevent rather than punish'.

Aiming for free spaces

Different codes, incommunicability and social background are the elements on which Chiara Saraceno, a well-known Italian sociologist, relies. "When adolescents, who rightly have to identify themselves in relation to their parents, do not find limitations or recognition from adults or context, they look for it among peers, on and offline," she comments. "They need free spaces that together contain and allow them to expand, to experiment safely without being judged, as has been happening lately in classrooms."

Parents themselves, on the other hand, are exposed to greater complexity: they are the first generation of adults who are learning how to parent with social media. "One only has to think of the TV series Adolescence where language is a ground of deep misunderstanding between parents and children".

According to the sociologist, the securitarian response does not solve the problem, 'also because there is a widespread fatigue of living in many families, where there is a physical lack of energy and time for educational accompaniment'. To this is added the social discomfort of the new generations of Italians who experience a lack of recognition and a difficulty in integrating, also dictated by the fact that they do not feel accepted as Italians, just because of the name they bear and the colour of their skin.