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

iGen has arrived. 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.

That research culminated in my 2006 book Generation Me, updated in 2014,

Another name suggested for this group is Generation Z. However, that label works only if the generation before them is called Generation Y, and hardly anyone uses Generation Y now that the term Millennials has won out. That makes Generation Z dead on arrival. Not to mention that young people do not want to be named after the generation older than themselves. That’s why Baby Busters never caught on for Generation X and why Generation Y never stuck for the Millennials. Generation Z is derivative, and the generational labels that stick are always original.

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.

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?

I ask her what she does for fun with her friends. “Sometimes we make plans and go see a movie or something . . . or go out to dinner sometimes,” she says. But those are not parent-free outings. “Usually, like, one parent comes along, or two, depending on how many want to go,” she says. “It’s kind of fun—with parents and kids.” They find a movie everyone will like, she says, and the parents and children go together—just as they did when the kids were in elementary school.

1.1. Times per week 8th, 10th, and 12th graders go out without their parents. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.

Percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders who ever go out on dates. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.

The lack of dating leads to the next surprising fact about iGen: they are less likely to have sex than teens in previous decades

Percentage of high school students who have ever had sex, by grade. Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, 1991–2015.

The drop is the largest for 9th graders, where the number of sexually active teens has almost been cut in half since the 1990s. The average teen now has sex around the spring of 11th grade, while most GenX’ers in the 1990s got started a year earlier, by the spring of 10th grade. Fifteen percent fewer 12th graders in 2015 (vs. 1991) have had sex. Fewer teens having sex is one of the reasons behind what many see as one of the most positive youth trends in recent years: 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). Only 2.4% of girls aged 15 to 19 had a baby in 2015, down from 6% in 1992. So with fewer teens having sex, fewer are getting pregnant and fewer are giving birth at a young age. Parenthood, one of the more irrevocable milestones of adulthood, is less likely to be reached by today’s teens.

Teen birthrate per 1,000 population among 18- to 19-year olds in the United States. Centers for Disease Control, National Center for Health Statistics, 1980–2015.

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. Thus, half of the women getting married for the first time in 1960 were teenagers—unthinkable today but completely accepted then. These days, marriage and children are many years off for the average teen, something we’ll explore more in chapter 8 (along with another intriguing question: Does the trend toward less sexual activity continue into adulthood?). 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.

Figure 1.5. Percentage of 12th graders who drove at all in the last year and who have a driver’s license.

Juan, 19, said he didn’t get his license right away “because my parents didn’t ‘push’ me to get my license.” As a GenX’er, that sentence makes my jaw drop every time I read it. It used to be the other way around: you wanted to get your license, and your parents wanted you to wait. In the 1988 Corey Haim and Corey Feldman vehicle License to Drive, Haim’s character fails his driving test but takes his dad’s car out for the night anyway (his parents don’t notice because his mother is just about to give birth to their fourth child—a nice manifestation of life history theory). Feldman’s character delivers a rousing speech about the greater meaning of getting a driver’s license and what it means for one’s dating life and independence. “You’ve had to stand and watch as all of the pretty girls drove off in some older jerk’s car. Humiliation—I know, I’ve been through it,” he says. “But that’s all over now. That thing in your wallet—that’s no ordinary piece of paper. That is a driver’s license! . . . It’s a license to live, a license to be free, to go wherever, whenever, and with whomever you choose!” As he talks, patriotic music plays in the background, and he stands tall with pride. iGen’ers, on the other hand, think about getting their license and say, “Meh.”

The Retreat of the Latchkey Kids In 2015, a Maryland couple allowed their 10- and 6-year-old children to walk by themselves about a mile from a local park to their home. Someone saw the children walking alone and called the police, and the couple was investigated for child neglect by Child Protective Services. The story made national news, partially because many Boomers and GenX’ers can remember having free rein around their neighborhoods at what would now be considered young ages. 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. One GenX friend of mine remembers walking to kindergarten by herself on a route that included crossing train tracks. Now when her 6-year-old daughter walks to the end of the block by herself, neighbors often accompany her back, worried that she is lost. Another GenX memory is being a latchkey kid: walking home from school and using your key to enter an empty house, since your parents were still at work. Some kids did so as early as 2nd grade, and by middle school and especially high school it was taken for granted. Fewer iGen teens now have this experience (see Figure 1.6). Figure 1.6. Percentage of 8th and 10th graders who spend time at home after school with no adult present. Monitoring the Future, 1991–2015.

Percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders and entering college students who earned any money from paid work in an average week. Monitoring the Future and American Freshman Survey, 1976–2016.

So is it good or bad that fewer teens are working? It’s likely some of both.

Chloe is more typical of her iGen peers than you might realize; fewer and fewer drink alcohol. Nearly 40% of iGen high school seniors in 2016 had never tried alcohol at all, and the number of 8th graders who have tried alcohol has been cut nearly in half

Figure 1.10. Percentage who have ever tried alcohol (more than just a few sips), 8th, 10th, and 12th graders, college students, and young adults (ages 19–30). Monitoring the Future, 1993–2016.

The decline in trying alcohol is the largest in the youngest groups and by far the smallest among young adults. The decline is a steep black diamond mountain for 8th graders, a bunny hill for 12th graders, and a gently sloping cross-country ski course for young adults. Nearly all young adults have tried alcohol, and that has declined only slightly over the decades. What’s changed is the age when they first start drinking. In the early 1990s, the average 8th grader had already tried alcohol, but by 2014 the average 10th grader had not. That means most iGen teens are putting off trying alcohol until the spring of 10th grade or later; they are growing more slowly into the adult activity of drinking alcohol. Similar trends show up for alcohol use in the last month and in other surveys such as the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey of teens

That’s especially true for binge drinking, usually defined as having five or more drinks in a row. Binge drinking is the most dangerous kind of alcohol use, as it is the most likely to lead to alcohol poisoning, poor judgment, and drunk driving. The number of 18-year-olds who binge drink has been cut in half since the early 1980s, but binge drinking among 21- to-22-year-olds has stayed about the same

Percentage of 18-year-olds and 21- to 22-year-olds reporting binge drinking in the past two weeks. Monitoring the Future,

Percentage of 18-year-olds and 21- to 22-year-olds using any illicit drug in the past twelve months. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.

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

Is This Because Teens Are More Responsible? In a 2014 op-ed for the Washington Post, the sociologist David Finkelhor argued that iGen teens, with their lowered alcohol use, reduced crime rates, and more limited sexuality, are “showing virtues their elders lacked.” He concluded, “We may look back on today’s youth as relatively virtuous, as the ones who turned the tide on impulsivity and indulgence.” Today’s teens, he believes, should be praised for being so responsible. A 2016 Post article continued with this theme, trumpeting “Today’s Teens Are Way Better Behaved than You Were.”

Instead of longing to be older as many previous generations did—remember Tom Hanks in the movie Big in the 1980s?—kids like being kids. In a 2013 poll, 85% of 8- to-14-year-olds agreed “I like being my age,” up from 75% in 2003. When 7-year-old Hannah was asked, “Do you want to be older?” she replied, “No. I like being a kid. You get to do more things.” When I asked twenty iGen’ers why being a child was better than being an adult, almost all said that being an adult involved too much responsibility. When they were children, they said, their parents had taken care of everything and they’d just gotten to have fun. “I could take care of my own desires, more or less, without ever having to worry about the logistics or practicality of making them real,” wrote Elizabeth, 22. “Nor was I ever really forced to encounter the consequences of having fun or taking a day off. It was just something I would do.” In other words, as children they could live in a cocoon, with all of the fun but little of the work. Their parents made childhood a wonderful place with lots of praise, an emphasis on fun, and few responsibilities. No wonder they don’t want to grow up.

Their answers were a profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with their phones, putting them under their pillows, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed. They checked social media websites and watched videos right before they went to bed, and reached for their phones again as soon as they woke up in the morning (they had to—all of them used it as their alarm). Their phone was the last thing they saw before they went to sleep and the first thing they saw when they woke up. If they woke up in the middle of the night, they often ended up looking at their phones. They talked about their phones the way an addict would talk about crack: “I know I shouldn’t, but I just can’t help it,” one said about looking at her phone while in bed. Some saw their phones as a lifeline or as an extension of their bodies or like a lover. “Having my phone closer to me while I’m sleeping is a comfort,” wrote Molly, 20.

The short answer is: a lot. iGen high school seniors spent an average of 2¼ hours a day texting on their cell phones, about 2 hours a day on the Internet, 1½ hours a day on electronic gaming, and about a half hour on video chat in the most recent survey. That totals to six hours a day with new media—and that’s just during their leisure time (see Figure 2.1). Eighth graders, still in middle school, were not far behind, spending 1½ hours a day texting, 1½ hours a day online, 1½ hours a day gaming, and about half an hour on video chat—a total of 5 hours a day with new media. This varies little based on family background; disadvantaged teens spent just as much or more time online as those with more resources. The smartphone era has meant the effective end of the Internet access gap by social class

As we saw earlier, girls usually spend more time on social media sites than boys do. So what are boys doing instead? Often, they’re playing video games—and so are many of the girls. Teens spend more time playing games on their computers than they did just a few years ago—12th graders spend about 1½ hours a day, compared to less than an hour a day in 2008. Girls have caught up quickly in video game time, perhaps due to less violent, more girl-friendly games on phones such as Candy Crush.

Hours 8th, 10th, and 12th graders spent watching TV on weekdays. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.

iGen teens also don’t go out to see movies as often. Going to the movies stayed fairly steady through the video rental era of the 1980s and 1990s and remained robust until the mid-2000s, when it started to slide (see Figure 2.8). So at least among teens, Blockbuster Video (which opened in 1985) didn’t kill going to the movies, nor did Netflix’s mail service (which debuted in 1997). But streaming video and other online activities did (and of course they also killed Blockbuster).

So: iGen is spending much more time online and texting and much less time with more traditional media such as magazines, books, and TV. iGen’ers are spending so much time on their smartphones that they just aren’t interested in or available to read magazines, go to movies, or watch TV (unless it’s on their phones). Although TV presaged the screen revolution, the Internet has hastened the demise of print. The printing press was invented in 1440, so for more than five hundred years words printed on paper were the standard way to convey information. We are living, right now, in the time when that is changing.

Kevin is not the most organized student: he initially neglects to have his dad sign the back of the permission slip, and when I talk to the class later, he forgets his question by the time I call on him. But when I ask him what makes his generation different, he doesn’t hesitate: “I feel like we don’t party as much. People stay in more often. My generation lost interest in socializing in person—they don’t have physical get-togethers, they just text together, and they can just stay at home.” Kevin is onto something. For example, iGen teens spend less time at parties than any previous generation (see Figure 3.1). The trends are similar for college students, who are asked how many hours a week they spent at parties during their senior year in high school. In 2016, they said two hours a week—only a third of the time GenX students spent at parties in 1987. The decline in partying is not due to iGen’ers’ studying more; as we saw in chapter 1, homework time is the same or lower. The trend is also not due to immigration or changes in ethnic composition; the decline is nearly identical among white teens.

Percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders who attend parties once a month or more. Monitoring the Future,

Why are parties less popular? Kevin has an explanation for that: “People party because they’re bored—they want something to do. Now we have Netflix—you can watch series nonstop. There’s so many things to do on the Web.” He might be right—with so much entertainment at home, why party? Teens also have other ways to connect and communicate, including the social media websites they spend so much time on. The party is constant, and it’s on Snapchat.

Percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders who get together with friends every day or nearly every day. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.

This might be the most definitive evidence that iGen’ers spend less time interacting with their peers face-to-face than any previous generation—it’s not just parties or craziness but merely getting together with friends, spending time hanging out. That’s something nearly everyone does: nerds and jocks, introverted teens and extroverted ones, poor kids and rich kids, C students and A students, stoners and clean-cut kids.

The college student survey allows a more precise look at in-person social interaction, as it asks students how many hours a week they spend on those activities. College students in 2016 (vs. the late 1980s) spent four fewer hours a week socializing with their friends and three fewer hours a week partying—so seven hours a week less on in-person social interaction. That means iGen’ers were seeing their friends in person an hour less a day than GenX’ers and early Millennials did. An hour a day less spent with friends is an hour a day less spent building social skills, negotiating relationships, and navigating emotions. Some parents might see it as an hour a day saved for more productive activities, but, as we saw in the previous two chapters, the time has not been replaced with homework; it’s been replaced with screen time. Teens also go out with their friends less. Chapter 1 showed the steep decline in the number of times a week teens go out without their parents. The flip side of this is those who don’t go out with their friends in a typical week—the ones who are at home on Friday and Saturday night on a regular basis. That used to be a very small percentage of 12th graders—less than 8%—but by 2015 nearly one out of five high school seniors did not go out with their friends during a typical week. The trend is even larger for 8th and 10th graders: in the 1990s, only one out of five rarely went out, but by 2015 that increased to one out of three.

Percentage of 8th and 10th graders who go to a shopping mall once a month or more. Monitoring the Future, 1991–2015.

That is at least one reason why so many malls across the country have closed. There’s even a Buzzfeed collection of photos of abandoned malls, capturing images such as the dying plants around a mirrored escalator at the Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio, shuttered in 2013. At the former Cloverleaf Mall in Chesterfield, Virginia, a popcorn cart sits abandoned, the neon “Food Court” sign over it no longer lit.

Activity after activity, iGen’ers are less social than Millennials, GenX’ers, and Boomers were at the same age. As we saw in chapter 1, iGen’ers are less likely to go out or to go on dates. They are also less likely to “drive around in a car just for fun”—the activity at the center of teen movies of previous eras such as Dazed and Confused and American Graffiti (see Appendix D). A night at the movies has been a standard teen social activity for generations (what would adolescence be if it didn’t involve some immature throwing of popcorn?), but, as we saw in chapter 2, iGen’ers are less likely to go to movies. iGen teens are less likely to go to bars and nightclubs—even since 1988, when the drinking age was raised to 21 nationwide, the number of high school seniors who went to bars or nightclubs has been cut in half. In 2006, the New York Times documented the new trend of nightclubs for teens (called “starter clubs”), with some for teens under 18. By 2016, however, the Times and other newspapers noted that many dance clubs were closing.

Perhaps there are still some benefits to social media. At least in theory, social media sites are about connecting with others. Maybe using social media doesn’t lead to happiness, but it might still help teens feel more included, more surrounded by friends, and less alone. That’s certainly what social networking sites promise. A recent commercial for Facebook Live advises, “If you have more to say, take out your phone and press this [Facebook icon], tap this [video camera icon] and go live. Now you’re not alone. Your friends are here to listen.” In other words, social media can help us feel less alone and surround us with friends at every moment. If that’s true, teens who spend a lot of time on social media should be less lonely, and social media should be just as good as in-person social interaction when it comes to feeling less lonely.

Googling “Facebook and depression” brings up a long list of pages, including a chat board titled “I think Facebook makes me depressed.” MissingGirl, who gives her age as 16 to 17, writes, “Definitely it makes me depressed. All my friends share the fun details of their glamorous lives and it makes me feel like ****. Kinda hate FB.” A poster on Reddit wrote, “Scrolling through my feed, seeing [my friends] being happy makes me sad. Also because . . . I get no messages . . . . The sight of a message box with no notifications gives me a really sad, gut wrenching feeling of loneliness. Facebook depresses me, so I’m going to stop using it.”

There’s one last piece of data that indirectly but stunningly captures the move away from in-person activities and toward solo, online interaction. Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. The steady decline in teen homicide from 2007 to 2014 looks very similar to the decline in in-person social interaction (see Figure 3.12). As teens have spent less time with one another in person, they have also become less likely to kill each other. In contrast, teen suicide rates began to tick up after 2008. The rise looks small on the graph because of the scale, but it’s not—46% more teens killed themselves in 2015 than in 2007. The rise occurred just as new-media screen time started to increase and in-person social activities began to wane. In 2011, for the first time in twenty-four years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate. The gap grew larger from 2011 to 2014, with the suicide rate 32% higher than the homicide rate by 2014—the largest gap since records have been kept (the gap remained high, 30%, in 2015).

The astonishing, though tentative, possibility is that the rise of the smartphone has caused both the decline in homicide and the increase in suicide. With teens spending more hours with their phones and less with their friends, more are becoming depressed and committing suicide and fewer are committing homicide. To put it bluntly: teens have to be with each other in person to kill each other, but they can cyberbully each other into suicide through their phones. Even if bullying is not involved, screen communication can be isolating, which might lead to depression and sometimes suicide. Of course, there are many causes of depression and suicide—too much technology is clearly not the only cause (after all, the suicide rate was even higher in the 1990s, long before smartphones existed). At the same time, it is distressing, and unacceptable, that so many more teens are killing themselves than did just a few years ago.

iGen’ers score lower in narcissism and have lower expectations, suggesting that the outsize entitlement displayed by some Millennials might be on its way out. Because overly positive self-views are mostly Millennials’ story, not iGen’ers’, those trends are discussed in the appendix instead

This suggests that two forces are working simultaneously to pull iGen’ers away from religion: more iGen’ers are being raised in nonreligious households, and more iGen teens have decided not to belong to a religion anymore. That seems to happen sometime between 8th grade and young adulthood, when adolescents begin to ask more questions and make decisions for themselves.

5.3. Percentage ever attending religious services, 8th, 10th, and 12th graders (Monitoring the Future) and entering college students (American Freshman Survey),