iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us

by Jean M. Twenge

No matter what the cause, the result is the same: iGen teens are less likely to experience the freedom of being out of the house without their parents—those first tantalizing tastes of the independence of being an adult, those times when teens make their own decisions, good or bad.

They gaze at the camera with the self-confidence born of making your own choices—even if your parents wouldn’t think they were the right ones, and even if, objectively speaking, they are not. These are the Boomers, raised in a time when their parents were happy for them to leave the house and economic success didn’t require a graduate degree.

Other teens, especially some boys, said they just didn’t have the courage to date. Mike, 18, wrote, “Nope. I ain’t got no game. It was a lack of confidence in myself which brought upon a female famine during high school.”

The lack of dating leads to the next surprising fact about iGen: they are less likely to

have sex than teens in previous decades (s...

the teen birthrate hit an all-time low in 2015, cut by more than half since its modern peak in the early 1990s (see Figure 1.4).

2.4% of girls aged 15 to 19 had a baby in 2015, down from 6% in 1992.

The low teen birthrate is also an interesting contrast to the post–World War II era—in 1960, for example, 9% of teen girls had babies. Back then, though, most of them were married; the median age at first marriage for women in 1960 was 20.

Overall, the decline in teen sex and teen pregnancy is another sign of the slowed developmental speed of iGen: teens are waiting longer to have sex and have babies just as they are waiting longer to go out without their parents and date.

An approach called life history theory provides some insights. Life history theory argues that how fast teens grow up depends on where and when they are raised. In more academic parlance,

developmental speed is an adaptation to a cultural context.

Today’s teens follow a slow life strategy, common in times and places where families have fewer children and cultivate ea...

The goal was survival, not violin lessons by age 5.

So the “bad”-vs.-“good” question depends a lot on one’s cultural perspective.

nearly all of the generational shifts in this chapter and the rest appear across different demographic groups. The samples we’re drawing from here are nationally representative, meaning the teens reflect the demographics of the United States. Every group is included. Even within specific groups, the trends consistently appear; they are present in working-class homes as well as upper-middle-class ones, among minorities as well as whites, among girls as well as boys, in big cities, suburbs, and small towns, and all across the country. That means they are not isolated to the white, upper-middle-class teens whom journalists often wring their hands over. Youths of every racial group, region, and class are growing up more slowly.

was too lazy to get around to it,” he says. “I was actually pretty nervous as well, because I have an older sister and she failed the [driver’s] test one or two times—and she’s really smart, so I thought if she failed it there’s no way I’m going to pass it.

“because my parents didn’t ‘push’ me to get my license.”

Are fewer teens driving because of ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft? Not likely. First, these services usually require that riders be 18 years old or older, so most high school students can’t use them alone. In addition, Uber debuted in 2009 and Lyft in 2012, and the decline in getting a driver’s license began long before that. The decline appears in suburbs and rural areas, where Uber is often unavailable. The most consistent decline appears among suburban teens—suggesting that the downslide has more to do with Mom and Dad driving Junior around (see Appendix B).

In a 2015 poll, 71% of adults said they would not allow a child to go to the park alone, but

59% of adults over age 30 said they did so when they were kids themselves.

Maybe teens don’t have jobs anymore—and don’t go out as much anymore—because they are devoting more time to homework and extracurricular activities.

And although homework time doesn’t seem to be preventing the average teen from working at a job, teens who work long hours often find it difficult to complete their schoolwork.

Whether it’s good or bad, working is yet another adult activity teens are putting off until later.

However, fewer iGen’ers get an allowance.

managing experience of figuring out how much to spend on movies, gas, and meals out—a kind of training ground for the larger adult job of paying for rent, utilities, and food.

Many are going from zero to sixty in their alcohol experience in a short time.

but binge drinking among 21- to-22-year-olds has stayed about the same (see Figure 1.11).

For now iGen drinks less but smokes pot more than the Millennials who preceded them.

So: compared to their predecessors, iGen teens are less likely to go out without their parents, date, have sex, drive, work, or drink alcohol.

iGen teens are not in a hurry to grow up. Eighteen-year-olds now look like 14-year-olds once did and 14-year-olds like 10- or 12-year-olds.

Adolescence is now an extension of childhood rather than the beginning of adulthood.

young adult children are biologically programmed to make poor choices. So, they think, it’s better to protect them as long as possible.