A generation ago, we were worried to death about teen pregnancy. Before that, we were panicking about teen drinking and driving. Before that, three generations back, we as a nation were collectively appalled when juvenile delinquents got matching leather jackets and roamed around drive-in diners calling themselves names like “the T-Birds.”
New times, new problems: Today it turns out that teens are going out less than ever. Partying less than ever. Getting pregnant less than ever. They are in fact spending the years of heedless, extravagant, ebullient youth holed up alone in their bedrooms.
And our response as oldsters? We’re worried sick as usual.
Fretting about what the teens are up to has been a permanent feature of American existence since the teenager was first invented — in the postwar period when affluence opened up to the masses a sizable temporal gap between childhood and the working life. Now our kids have found an obsession — smartphones — that has curtailed all kinds of risky adolescent behaviors. Surveys show that teens are even fighting with parents less than ever and spending lots more leisure time with the folks. The smartphone might be an acceptable price to pay for all of these benefits. Yet Jean M. Twenge sounds the alarm anyway in her book “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.”
Plowing through miles of surveys, Twenge builds a persuasive case that people in the 12-24 age group — the post-millennial generation — do less of virtually everything than any previous generation. They read much less print. They date less. They do much less in-person socializing of any kind. They do less homework and less paid work.
All of the time they accumulate from doing less of these things gets spent on the same obsession: screens. Texting, social-media apps, video games and TV absorb six hours a day for the average teen. Add in sleep and school time, and there isn’t really time for anything else.
More disturbingly, since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, teen suicide rates have jumped nearly 50 percent.
Kids can only get in so much trouble when they’re down the hall, but there are notable costs to the new mode of iLife. Having so little work experience means kids tend to be unready for the self-motivating challenges of college, much less a job. Twenge speaks to a longtime Stanford counselor who notes drily that even at long distance, parents are happy to take up the slack by, for instance, reminding their kids to go to class. College students have taken to checking in with their parents for guidance several times a day.
More disturbingly, since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, teen suicide rates have jumped nearly 50 percent. There is a strong correlation between suicidal thoughts on the one hand and heavy tech use on the other: Kids who spend five hours a day on screens are at far greater risk of suicidal thoughts and acts than those who spend two hours a day in the virtual world. Moreover, real-world actions (going to church, participating in sports, consuming print media and so on) are negatively correlated with depression, whereas virtual activities such as Instagramming and Snapchatting are correlated with higher rates of depression. In the same years, however, teen homicide rates have fallen — you can’t kill someone if you’re not in the same place. Twenge is worried about the former trend but dismissive of the latter. If you add up the two rates, though, you’ll notice that the rate of teens killing anyone including themselves is right around an all-time low.
When we talk about our kids’ flaws, though, aren’t we often just deflecting our shortcomings onto others? “We have the most complete and instant access to information in all of history, and we’re using it to watch funny cat videos,” Twenge writes. True enough, but if it’s slightly more true of young people, it’s only because they don’t have to work on those TPS reports that we grownups spend our days fussing with. If we oldsters were just handed money (as teens are — Twenge finds the concept of an allowance is being replaced with simply getting Mom and Dad to buy you stuff), we’d probably spend all our time watching YouTube too.
Our kids’ habits are ultimately the fault of their parents: Make them cover the cost of their phone plan, and suddenly your teens are going to have to get out of the house, get a job, learn life skills. Limit their screen time to a couple of hours a day, and they’ll be forced to discover the analog world. The reason adults aren’t nudging kids off their devices and into the world, though, is we can’t bear to have them out of our sight. If kids are growing up awfully slowly these days, walled off from reality in a garden of glowing screens, it’s because their co-dependent parents can’t stop treating them like fragile flowers.
Kyle Smith is critic-at-large at National Review.