By now you’ve seen or heard about the APA study on millennials and civic-mindedness. Turns out that millenials are not as civic-minded as Howe and others have claimed. Fair enough.

But another thing caught my eye — all the stories tended to compare Millennial numbers to a baseline Boomer figure — leading to everyone to blame the self-focus on coddling parents and Barney songsmithing.

But if you look at the figure above, you’ll see the jump only continues the radical jump made by the Gen Xers. And the Gen Xers were the latchkey generation.

So all these explanations that finger a cause located in a 1990’s childhood? Think again. There’s definitely something interesting going on here, but it’s been going on a lot longer than most articles indicate…