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

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

We have the most complete and instant access to information in all of history, and we’re using it to watch funny cat videos.

The results could not be clearer: teens who spend more time on screen activities (the black bars in Figure 3.5) are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time on nonscreen activities (the gray bars) are more likely to be happy. There’s not a single exception: all screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness.

If you were going to give advice for a happy life based on this graph, it would be straightforward: put down the phone, turn off the computer or iPad, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen. These

For parents, teachers, student affairs professionals, and businesses, the big question is this: Will the decline in in-person social interaction lead to iGen having inferior social skills? Some preliminary evidence suggests it will. In one study, 6th graders spent five days at an overnight nature camp with no access to computers, cell phones, or TV. A control group continued their usual technology activities. All of the kids then took two social skills tests, naming the emotion (happy, sad, angry, fearful) expressed in a series of photos of people’s faces or watching no-sound videotapes of social interactions. The kids who had spent five days away from screens improved their social skills significantly more than the control group did.

Just as playing the piano takes practice, so do social skills. iGen’ers are not practicing their in-person social skills as much as other generations did, so when it comes time for the “recital” of their social skills, they are more likely to make mistakes onstage when it matters: in college interviews, when making friends in high school, and when competing for a job. Life’s social decisions are still made primarily in person, and iGen gets less experience with such situations. In the next decade we may see more young people who know just the right emoji for a situation—but not the right facial expression.

Individualism also encourages people to feel good about themselves—not just as good as they should but even better than might be justified.

Many iGen’ers are so addicted to social media that they find it difficult to put down their phones and go to sleep when they should. “I stay up all night looking at my phone,” admits a 13-year-old from New Jersey in American Girls. She regularly hides under her covers at night, texting, so her mother doesn’t know she’s awake. She wakes up tired much of the time, but, she says, “I just drink a Red Bull.” Thirteen-year-old Athena told me the same thing: “Some of my friends don’t go to sleep until, like, two in the morning. “I assume just for summer?” I asked. “No, school, too,” she said. “And we have to get up at six forty-five.” Smartphone use may have decreased teens’ sleep time: more teens now sleep less than seven hours most nights (see Figure 4.12). Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night, so a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived. Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the three years between 2012 and 2015, 22% more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.

This is or ought to be a shot across the bow for all parents and schools

The embrace of safety and protection now extends to course readings, which must be sanitized to remove anything that might offend someone. In his piece “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me,” Edward Schlosser noted that many faculty members have changed their syllabi for fear of being fired if students complain about offensive material in the course readings. One adjunct professor, he noted, was let go when “students complained that he exposed them to ‘offensive’ texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate.” The focus, he says, is now on students’ emotional state rather than on their intellectual development, sacrificing challenging discussions for the possibility that a student might feel upset.

Other safety measures have met with mixed reviews. For example, today’s playgrounds are plastic, soft-surfaced, and—according to some—boring and not particularly interesting to children. Hanna Rosin argued in The Atlantic that the focus on safety has stifled children’s natural need to explore and learn by making their own decisions. She profiled an alternative playground in the United Kingdom, modeled after the once common abandoned lot or junkyard where children roamed freely. The kids roll tires down hillsides, ride a rope swing that occasionally deposits them in a creek, and set fires in a tin drum. “If a 10-year-old lit a fire at an American playground, someone would call the police and the kid would be taken for counseling,” she observed. A documentary about the playground features a shot of a child who looks about 8 sawing a wiggly board by himself. I am guessing I am not alone among modern parents in instantly thinking, “He’s going to cut off his fingers.” But he doesn’t.

The results are unequivocal: teens who spend more time on social media are more likely to value individualistic attitudes and less likely to value community involvement. Heavy users of social media are 45% more likely to believe it’s important to own expensive material things such as new cars and vacation homes, and they are 14% less likely to say they think about the social issues affecting the nation and the world (see Figure 6.13).

Haley’s view is the famous couplet “Better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all” turned on its head: to her, it’s better not to have loved, because what if you lose it?

In a 2015 survey, 35% of college students believed that the First Amendment does not protect “hate speech” (it does) and 30% of liberal students believed that the First Amendment is “outdated.”

Gillman and Erwin Chemerinsky taught a college freshman seminar on freedom of speech, they were shocked by how often the students favored restricting speech protected by the First Amendment. It was a generational shift, they realized: the students had witnessed the harm of hateful speech but not the harm of censorship or punishment of dissent. The professors pointed out that restricting speech you dislike could easily lead to restricting speech you like. When officials have the power to regulate speech, they noted, “that power is inevitably abused. . . . Over the course of U.S. history, officials censored or punished those whose speech they disliked: abolitionists, labor activists, religious minorities, communists and socialists, cultural critics, gays and lesbians,” they wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “. . . Our students came to realize that there was no way to create a ‘safe space’ on campuses where students could be free from one set of offenses without engaging in massive censorship, and perhaps creating another kind of offense.”

“I’m a baby boomer. I think the natural order of things is to pay for music I like. Not to do so doesn’t make you a revolutionary—it makes you the person who goes to the bathroom when the check comes,” he says. “That . . . must be why there’s this proliferation of websites like Kickstarter and GoFundMe. Go fund me? Go fund yourself.”

iGen’ers are addicted to their phones, and they know it. Many also know it’s not entirely a good thing. It’s clear that most teens (and adults) would be better off if they spent less time with screens. “Social media is destroying our lives,” one teen told Nancy Jo Sales in her book American Girls. “So why don’t you go off it?” Sales asked. “Because then we would have no life,” the girl said.

many tech CEOs strictly regulate their own children’s technology use. When New York Times reporter Nick Bilton talked to Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs in late 2010, he asked Jobs if his kids loved the iPad. “They haven’t used it,” Jobs said. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” Bilton was shocked, but he later found that many other tech experts also limited their children’s screen time, from the cofounder of Twitter to the former editor of Wired magazine. So even people who love technology—and make a living off it—are cautious about their kids using it too much. As Adam Alter put it in his book Irresistible, “It seemed as if the people producing tech products were following the cardinal rule of drug dealing: Never get high on your own supply.”

Many parents wonder if we really need to worry about this stuff. Some argue that the flurry of concern over smartphones resembles the panic over previous advances in media, such as radio, music albums, TV, or even novels. That might be true, but it’s not particularly relevant. Social media and electronic device use is linked to higher rates of loneliness, unhappiness, depression, and suicide risk, in both correlational and experimental data. Novels and music are not. TV watching is also linked to depression, and sure enough, more Boomers (the first TV generation) were depressed than previous generations that had grown up without TV. Just because an argument has been made before does not mean it’s wrong; the “panic” over TV turned out to be somewhat justified. Thus an argument about whether a “panic” about media has happened before seems trivial—our kids need help now.

Another argument is that social media and texting are just teens interacting with one another just as they always have. Perhaps, but electronic communication is linked to poor mental health, whereas interacting in person is linked to goo...

Many teens communicate with their friends electronically far more than they do face-to-face, with as-yet-unknown consequences for their budding social skills. We already know that depression and anxiety have risen at an unprecedented rate and that twice as many young teens commit suicide as just a few years ago. It seems abundantly clear that screen time needs to be cut.

Stephen Ilardi, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Kansas, gave a TED talk titled “Depression Is a Disease of Civilization.”

If an activity involves a screen, it’s linked to less happiness and more depression. If it doesn’t—particularly if it involves in-person social interaction or exercise—it’s linked to more happiness and less depression.

The word safety is now used to explain responses to incidents that don’t actually involve anyone’s safety. Last week, the principal of my children’s elementary school sent an email informing parents that someone, rumored to be some middle school students, had drawn “profanity and the image of a swastika” on the school building. “The safety of our students, staff and families is a top priority and I appreciate all of your efforts to keep our school and community free of this inappropriate and offensive behavior,” the principal concluded. Yes, it was completely unacceptable behavior, but framing it in terms of “safety” was pushing it. No one was threatened or hurt. Mentioning safety just inflamed the situation. The goal should instead be to educate those young people about what the symbol actually means and figure out why they would do something so stupid. Safety is cited as the reason for the most unlikely situations. When Bryce Maine wanted to bring his 69-year-old grandmother as his date to the prom at Eufaula High School in Alabama in spring 2017, the school principal said no, citing their rule that prom attendees must be 20 years old or younger. “Safety of students and staff is the first and most important of the many tasks of a school administrator,” he said in a statement. “We do not chance leaving any stone unturned when it comes to safety.” Bryce was told the rule was in place to prevent older people buying alcohol for underage students—an unlikely scenario in his g...

Taking steps to protect children from bullying by peers is, in my view, long overdue. On the other hand, I also agree with critics that such programs sometimes take things too far, teaching children that the normal ins and outs of childhood friendships are bullying or equating hurt feelings with physical harm. Many antibullying policies are so broad and vague that they may make students afraid of any interaction. Aiken Elementary School in West Hartford, Connecticut, defines bullying as any communication or physical act that “causes physical or emotional harm” to a student. The policy carefully defines everything from who is a school employee to which things are considered “mobile electronic devices” but does not define “emotional harm.” There is no denying that bullying causes emotional harm—but so do other, more ambiguous, childhood experiences, such as a friend deciding to play with someone else that day, common playground insults, or arguments over the rules of a game. The way the policy is written, any child who hurts another child’s feelings, unintentionally or not, is a bully. This may create a situation in which children are constantly aware of negative interactions, afraid they are the victim of this terrible thing they’ve heard about called bullying. Antibullying programs may, as a side effect, have shaped iGen children into kids who are constantly on the lookout for being harmed.

My friend Kate Catanese, who teaches psychology at Cuyahoga Community College, has noticed this generation’s reluctance to read. “I’ve had students complain that I’m making them read too much, that an eight-page popular press newspaper article is somehow too lengthy and can’t keep their attention,”

Many businesses that recruit young college graduates have begun to involve their parents in the recruiting and orientation process. I expect that this trend will continue and even get stronger as iGen’ers enter the workforce. iGen’ers are becoming adults at a slower pace than Millennials did and are products of colleges that are increasingly focused on safety and protection. Do not be shocked when your young employees consult their parents when they need advice or when they seem more like 18-year-olds than 22-year-olds. By Boomer and GenX standards, they basically are.

iGen’ers bring new attitudes about communication. Many don’t understand why anyone uses email when texting is so much faster. “For a while, I thought email was what people meant when they referred to ‘snail mail,’ ” wrote 16-year-old Vivek Pandit in his book We Are Generation Z. “Eventually I realized that snail mail was the paper stuff that [takes] days to reach someone. I call that ‘ancient mail.’ ”

In the three years I spent working on this book, making dozens of line graphs, reading campus newspapers, and listening to the stories and opinions of young people during in-depth interviews, I’ve realized this: iGen’ers are scared, maybe even terrified. Growing up slowly, raised to value safety, and frightened by the implications of income inequality, they have come to adolescence in a time when their primary social activity is staring at a small rectangular screen that can like them or reject them. The devices they hold in their hands have both extended their childhoods and isolated them from true human interaction. As a result, they are both the physically safest generation and the most mentally fragile. They are more focused on work and more realistic than Millennials, grasping the certainty that they’ll need to fight hard to make it. They’re exquisitely tolerant and have brought a new awareness of equality, mental health, and LGBT rights, leaving behind traditional structures such as religion. iGen’ers have a solid basis for success, with their practical nature and their inherent caution. If they can shake themselves free of the constant clutch of their phones and shrug off the heavy cloak of their fear, they can still fly. And the rest of us will be there, cheering them on.