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

Athena says she spent most of the

summer hanging out by herself in her room

with her phone. “I would rather be on my phone in my room watching Netflix than spending time with my family. That’s what I’ve been doing most of the summer. I’ve been on my phone more than I’ve been with actual people.” That’s just the way her generation is, she says. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or ...

Born in 1995 and later, they grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not r...

The oldest members of iGen were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced in 2007 and high school students when the iPad entered the scene in 2010. The i in the names of these devices stands for...

The complete dominance of the smartphone among teens has had ripple effects across every area of iGen’ers’ lives, from their social interactions to their mental health. They are the first generation for whom Internet access has been constantly available, right there in their hands.

The average teen checks her phone more than eighty times a day.

But technology is not the only change shaping this generation. The i in iGen represents the individualism its members take for granted, a broad trend that grounds their bedrock sense of equality as well as their rejection of traditional social rules.

They are at the forefront of the worst mental health crisis in decades, with rates of teen depression and suicide skyrocketing since 2011.

Contrary to the prevalent idea that children are growing up faster than previous generations did, iGen’ers are growing up more slowly: 18-year-olds now act like 15-year-olds used to, and 13-year-olds like 10-year-olds. Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.

Drawing from four large, nationally representative surveys of 11 million Americans since the 1960s, I’ve identified ten important trends shaping iGen’ers and, ultimately, all of us: In No Hurry (the extension of childhood into adolescence), Internet (how much time they are really spending on their phones—and what that has replaced), In person no more (the decline in i...

decline in religion), Insulated but not intrinsic (the interest in safety and the decline in civic involvement), Income insecurity (new attitudes toward work), Indefinite (new attitudes toward sex, relationships, and children), Inclusive (acceptance, equality, and free speech debates), and Independent (their political views). iGen is the ideal place to look for trends that will shape our culture in the years to com...

I’ve been researching generational differences for nearly twenty-five years, starting when I was a 22-year-old PhD student in personality psychology at the University of Michigan. Back then I focused on how my own generation, Generation X, differed from Boomers (more gender equality and more anxiety, among other things). As ti...

and

personality traits that distinguished the Millennials, the generation born in the 1980s and early 1990s. That research culminated in my 2006 book Generation Me, updated in 2014, a look at how the Millennials differed from their predecessors. Most of the generational differences that defined GenX and the Millennials came along gradually, building to a crescendo only after a decade or two of steady change. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like hills slowly growing int...

But around 2012, I started seeing large, abrupt shifts in teens’ behaviors and emotional states. All of a sudden, the line graphs looked like steep mountains—rapid drop-offs erased the gains of decades in just a few years; after years of gradual inclines or hollows, sheer cliffs sudde...

data—some of it reaching back to the 1930s—I had never see...

At first I wondered if these were random blips that would disappear after a year or two. But they didn’t—the trends kept going, creating sustained, and often unprecedented, trends. As I dug into the data, a pattern emerged: many of the large changes began around 2011 or 2012. That was too late t...

Then it occurred to me: 2011–12 was exactly when the majority of Americans started to own cell phones that could access the Internet, popularly known as smartphon...

Such broad generational shifts have big implications. A whole new group of young people who act and think differently—even differently from their neighbors the M...

Generational differences are larger and more broadly influential than ever. The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in worldview, with more focus on the self and less on social rules (thus the term Generation Me). But with the popularity of the smartphone, iGen’ers differ most in how they spend their time. The life experiences they have every day are radically different from those of their predecessors. In some ways, this is an even more fundamental generational shift than that which created the Millennials;

Lapidos was 19 in 2002, when texting required hitting the same key several times on your flip phone and surfing the Web meant sitting at a desktop computer. When the iPhone was introduced just five years later in 2007, all of that changed.

Until recently, most of the generational patter focused on Millennials, sometimes defined as Americans born between 1980 and 1999. Yet this is a long span for a recent generation: Generation X, immediately before the Millennials, lasted only fourteen years, from 1965 to 1979. If the Millennial generation lasts the same amount of time as GenX, the last Millennial birth year is instead 1994, meaning that iGen begins with those born in 1995—conveniently, that’s also the year the Internet was born. Other milestones fall close to 1995 as well. In 2006, Facebook opened up to anyone over the age of 13—so those born since 1993 have been able to live their entire adolescence on social networking sites. A cut in the mid-1990s also makes sense based on the hard data: in 2011, the year when everything started to change in the survey data, the 13- to 18-year-olds answering the questions were born between

1993 and 1998.

It’s anyone’s guess when iGen will end; I’d put my money on fourteen to seventeen years after 1995. That would mean the last iGen’ers were born somewhere between 2009 and 2015, with 2012 right at the middle of that range. That makes the birth year span of iGen 1995–2012. As time goes on, those bo...

I was the first to use the term iGen, introducing it in the first edition of my book Generation Me in April 2006. I’ve been using the term iGen to talk about the post-Millennial generation for a while; in 2010 I named my speaking and consulting business iGen Consulting.

To really understand what’s unique about this generation—what is actually new about it—we need to compare iGen to previous generations when their members were young. We need data collected across time. That’s what the large, over-time surveys I analyze in this book do: they ask young people the same questions year after year so their responses can be compared over several generations.

I draw primarily from four databases.

(MtF), has asked high school seniors (12th graders) more than a thousand questions every year since 1976 and queried 8th and 10th graders since 1991. The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS, administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has surveyed high school students since 1991. The American Freshman (AF) Survey, administered by the Higher Education Research Institute, has questioned students entering four-year colleges and universities since 1966. Finally, the General Social Survey (GSS) has examined adults 18 and over since 1972. (For more details on these surveys and their methods, see Appendix A.) These surveys can show us how Boomers...

own waves in th...

By comparing one generation to another at the same age, we can observe the views of young people about themselves, rather than relying on older...

We can see differences that are due to cultural chang...

These data sources have three other distinct advantages. First, they are large in sample size and scope, collecting data on thousands of people every year who have answered hundreds of questions anonymously. All told, they have

surveyed 11 million people. Second, the survey administrators were careful to ensure that the people answering the questions were representative of the US population in terms of gender, race, location, and socioeconomic status. That means that the conclusions can be generalized to American young people as a whole

Third, all of these data sets are publicly available online— they are not hiding behind paywalls or fees, so the data are transparent and ope...

of Big Data, providing a glimpse of the lives and beliefs of Amer...

For a preview of some generational differences, take the quiz on the next page to find out how much your experiences overlap with those of iGen. Regardless of when you were born, how iGen are you?

Take this 15-item quiz to find out how “iGen” you are. Answer each question with “yes” or “no.” ______ 1. In the past 24 hours, did you spend at least an hour total texting on a cell phone? ______ 2. Do you have a Snapchat account? ______ 3. Do you consider yourself a religious person? ______ 4. Did you get your driver’s license by the time you turned 17? ______ 5. Do you think same-sex marriage should be legal? ______ 6. Did you ever drink alcohol (more than a few sips) by the time you turned 16?

7. Did you fight with your parents a lot when you were a teen? ______ 8. Were more than one-third of the other students at your high school a different race than you? ______ 9. When you were in high school, did you spend nearly every weekend night out with your friends? _____ 10. Did you have a job during the school year when you were in high school? _____ 11. Do you agree that safe spaces and trigger warnings are good ideas and that efforts should be made to reduce microaggressions? _____ 12. Are you a political independent? _____ 13. Do you support the legalization of marijuana? _____ 14. Is having sex without much emotion involved desirable? _____ 15. When you were in high school, did you feel left out and lonely fairly often? SCORING: Give yourself 1 point for answering “yes” to questions 1, 2, 5, 8, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. Give yourself 1 point for answering “no” to questions 3, 4, 6, 7,

9, and 10. The higher your score, the more iGen you are in your behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs.

The Demographics—and the World Using the birth years 1995 to 2012, iGen includes 74 million Americans, about 24% of the population.

The generation after iGen—those born in 2013 and later—will be the first majority nonwhite generation.

With her fixation on Taylor Swift, her love of Harry Potter, and the rides she’s getting from her mom, you might guess that Azar is 14. But she’s not—she’s 17. Azar is growing up slowly, taking longer to embrace the responsibilities and pleasures of adulthood. It’s tempting to think she’s the exception: with

porn on the Internet, sexy Halloween costumes for young girls, 7th-grade boys requesting nude pictures of their classmates, and other adults-too-soon trends gaining attention, many people believe that children and teens are instead growing up more quickly than in the past. “Childhood is gone. They have access to this world of adults they feel they have to participate in,” lamented a Brooklyn middle school principal recently. Many believe that teens are barreling toward adulthood faster than ever. But are they?

Ebook readers did seem to briefly rescue books: the number who said they read two or more books for pleasure in the last year bounced back in the late 2000s—but then it sank again as iGen (and smartphones) entered the scene in the 2010s. By 2015, one out of three high school seniors admitted they had not read any books for pleasure in the past year, three times as many as in 1976. Even college students entering four-year universities, the young people presumably most likely to read books, are reading less (see Figure 2.4).

Books are not the only print media in decline for iGen. The 8th- and 10th-grade surveys ask about reading magazines and newspapers, and the declines are steady, large, and breathtaking (see Figure 2.5). Newspaper readership plummeted from nearly 70% in the early 1990s to only 10% in 2015 (and this is reading a newspaper once a week or more, a fairly low bar). Magazine readership fared little better.

(As one librarian in a cartoon puts it as she hands a book to a teen, “Just think of it as a long text message.”)

To paraphrase the cult classic movie The Princess Bride, print is not dead—it’s

it’s just mostly dead. Or perhaps on life support. With smartphones taking up so much of teens’ time, there is little left for other leisure pursuits. As one teen put it in a Chronicle of Higher Education interview, “My dad is still into the whole book thing. He has not realized that the Internet kind of took the place of that.”

Unfortunately, iGen’ers’ academic skills lag behind their Millennial predecessors’ by significant margins.