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

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.