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September 17 - September 29, 2017
Born in 1995 and later, they grew up with cell phones, had an Instagram page before they started high school, and do not remember a time before the Internet.
The average teen checks her phone more than eighty times a day.
Teens are physically safer than ever, yet they are more mentally vulnerable.
young people are now quite different from young people in previous decades.
Today’s teens follow a slow life strategy, common in times and places where families have fewer children and cultivate each child longer and more intensely.
just because something has changed from previous generations does not make it bad (or good),
Mom is such a good chauffeur that there’s no urgent need to drive. “My parents drove me everywhere and never complained so I always had rides,”
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 becoming shortened again—at the lower end. Childhood has lengthened, with teens treated more like children, less independent and more protected by parents than they once were.
Thirteen-year-olds—and even 18-year-olds—are less likely to act like adults and spend their time like adults. They are more likely, instead, to act like children—
Adolescence is now an extension of childhood rather than the beginning of adulthood.
With fewer children and more time spent with each, each child is noticed and celebrated.
So iGen is not only kept on a tighter leash by their parents but also fight with them less,
Instead of resenting being treated like children, iGen’ers wish they could stay children for longer.
2014 emergence of the neologism “adulting,” which means taking care of one’s responsibilities.
The word adult is now used as a verb, and it seems to mean the end of all fun:
Recent years have seen a boom in products such as “adult coloring books” that invite full-grown humans to color with crayons like elementary schoolers,
Adweek noted that brands are tapping “into millennials’ anxiety about growing up.”
Their phone was the last thing they saw before they went to sleep and the first thing they saw when they woke up.
Another study of adults found the same thing: the more people used Facebook, the lower their mental health and life satisfaction
Social media give middle and high school girls a 24/7 platform to carry out the verbal aggression they favor,
many people post only their successes online, so many teens don’t realize that their friends fail at things, too.
Some students have taken this notion even further—beyond offensive or extreme speech to anything that makes them feel uncomfortable or challenges them to question their actions.
In this way of thinking, no one should ever say anything that makes a student feel bad,
The obvious answer is iGen’ers’ long childhood: they want college administrators to be like their parents, seen by children as all powerful.
the clear majority of students agreed with the protesters that the apology should come from the administration, not the person or group responsible.
iGen’ers’ interest in safety may be at least partially rooted in their long childhoods. When parents treat children as younger, they protect them more;
children are much more carefully protected than they once were.
“Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap—are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting.
we may have protected our kids into wimpdom.
A Nation of Wimps, Psychology Today
the perils of a non-organic grape.”
“Society has forced us to always consider the worst case first and proceed as if it’s likely to happen,”
they are less likely to be killed in car accidents or through homicide. Yet they are more likely to die through suicide,
They figure they need to focus on paying the bills, which include a staggering pile of student debt that may make it difficult for them to spend much time contemplating the meaning of life.
iGen’ers are more focused on getting a better job and less focused on getting a general education
Learning is less important.
college, they feel, is a place to prepare for a career in a safe environment. Not only are different ideas potentially upsetting and thus unsafe, but there’s no point in studying them
iGen’ers may grow into adults who are skilled at forwarding links about worthy causes but not as skilled at actually getting involved.
the always online iGen is actually less interested in news and current events than previous generations were.
Within that space, they are more likely to support the idea of helping others but less likely to venture out to actually provide that help.
iGen’ers are materialistic nonconformists, interested in using money to stand out instead of to fit in.
iGen’ers are just less willing to label anything as “wrong”—it’s all up to the individual.
After their first date went well, for their second date he decided “to upgrade to Olive Garden, a more fancy restaurant, a sit-down place, so we could really get to know one another.”
when the sociologist Lisa Wade interviewed more than a hundred college students for her book American Hookup, she found that most wanted a committed relationship. But many found that the only way to have sex on their campuses was through hookups, so they opted out.
College students told Lisa Wade that hookup sex was the norm and the only real route for entering a relationship. Hookups, they said, are ideally “emotionless or meaningless sex,”
In American Hookup, one college woman told Lisa Wade that the first step in hooking up is to get “shitfaced.” “When [you’re] drunk, you can kind of just do it because it’s fun and then be able to laugh about it and have it not be awkward or not mean anything,”
Wade concluded that alcohol allows students to pretend that sex doesn’t mean anything—after all, you were both drunk.
a generation without the social skills to know how to break up with someone.
