In The Darkest Minds, generational conflict has gone far beyond older people complaining about kids these days. Bracken depicts a dystopian society where adults are so afraid of the potential power of young people that they have placed them in internment camps (or even targeted them for death). While it is true that the children left alive in the world in the novel do have dangerous powers, the novel also shows how quickly older Americans turn on younger generations when they prove a threat or inconvenient to them. Older generations, the novel suggests, can be profoundly unfair and cruel to the young. This is true even of members of some young characters’ own families; Zu and Jack, for example, were betrayed by parents who feared them. For young readers who may worry that older generations do not care about them or the world they grow up in, Bracken provides a fictional dystopian setting that ramps up this anxiety to an extreme.

The clearest example of how the young are mistreated is the Psi camps themselves, where young people are kept from their families, prevented from being educated, and detained with threat of violence.