Yet GenX’er teens didn’t slow down—they were just as likely to drive, drink alcohol, and date as their Boomer peers and more likely to have sex and get pregnant as teens. But then they waited longer to reach full adulthood with careers and children. So GenX’ers managed to lengthen adolescence beyond all previous limits: they started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later.
Beginning with Millennials and then going full speed with iGen, 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. The entire developmental trajectory, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, has slowed. Adolescence—the time when teens begin to do things adults do—now happens later. 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—not by being immature, necessarily, but by postponing the usual activities of adults. Adolescence is now an extension of childhood rather than the beginning of adulthood.
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.”
Other observers, such as the 20-year-old writer Jess Williams, have spun the same trends more negatively: Williams describes iGen as “boring.” Teens just aren’t any fun anymore, she says. One magazine agreed, headlining a recent article “Charting the Rise of Generation Yawn: 20 Is the New 40.”
In my view, these characterizations miss the point. Terms such as virtue, indulgence, better behaved, and boring focus solely on whether the trends are “good” or “bad.” This approach is incomplete, including only some of the generational differences while leaving others out entirely. For example, none of these articles mentions that iGen teens are also less likely to work at a job, have a driver’s license, stay at home alone, or manage their own money, activities not necessarily associated with being more (or less) “virtuous,” “responsible,” “better behaved,” or “boring.” As a whole, the trends do not unequivocally support the idea that adolescents have become more responsible, virtuous, or boring (and thus perhaps are more like adults). But the trends do nearly unequivocally support the idea that teens are growing up more slowly (and are thus less like adults). Only growing up more slowly explains why working, driving, staying alone, and managing one’s own money would also decline among teens. Neither “better behaved” nor “boring” captures what’s really going on with iGen: they are simply taking longer to grow up.
Instead, it’s more informative to employ the terms of life history theory, discussed earlier: teens have adopted a slow life strategy, perhaps due to smaller families and the demands wrought by increasing income inequality. Parents have the time to cultivate each child to succeed in the newly competitive economic environment, which might take twenty-one years when it once took sixteen. The cultural shift toward individualism may also play a role: childhood and adolescence are uniquely self-focused stages, so staying in them longer allows more cultivation of the individual self. With fewer children and more time spent with each, each child is noticed and celebrated. Sure enough, cultural individualism is connected to slower developmental speeds across both countries and time. Around the world, young adults grow up more slowly in individualistic countries than collectivistic ones. And as American culture has grown more individualistic from 1965 to the present, young adults have taken longer and longer to enter adult work and family roles (see Appendix B).
There’s another factor, too—several well-publicized studies of brain development have shown that the frontal cortex, the brain area responsible for judgment and decision making, does not complete its development until age 25. This has spawned the idea that teens are not quite ready to grow up and thus need more protection for a longer time. These findings about underdeveloped teen brains have generated numerous books, articles, and online parenting advice. Interestingly, the interpretation of these studies seems to ignore a fundamental truth of brain research: that the brain changes based on experience. Maybe today’s teens and young adults have an underdeveloped frontal cortex because they have not been given adult responsibilities. If brain scanners existed in 1950, I wonder what they would have shown of a generation that usually started work at 18, married at 21, and had children soon after. That interpretation of such studies is never offered, however, leaving parents believing that their teen and young adult children are biologically programmed to make poor choices. So, they think, it’s better to protect them as long as possible.
Partners, Not Prisoners
Here’s another key question: Are teens willing participants in growing up more slowly, or are parents strong-arming them into it? It would be easy to imagine teens chafing against being treated like children. But if growing up slowly is a natural adaptation to the culture, they might be more willing to go along with it.
Parents do keep a closer watch over teens these days. More teens say that their parents always know where they are and who they are with when they go out at night (see Figure 1.14). This surveillance is probably facilitated by phone-tracking apps that allow parents to see where their teens are. Yet the apps can’t tell parents whom their kids are with, and teens say their parents know that, too. It’s another sign of growing up slowly: like the mother at the playground who knows whether her 5-year-old is about to run in front of the swings, the parents of teens are more likely to know where their kids are and whom they’re with.
Figure 1.14. Percentage of 8th and 10th graders whose parents always know where they are and whom they are with when they go out at night. Monitoring the Future, 1999–2015.
Most adults can remember being a teen and chafing against this kind of parental meddling: “Who’s going to be at the party? I dunno—people?” Or upon your return from downtown, possibly but not definitely maybe having had a drink or two: “We went bowling. Yeah, bowling.”
Given the teen tendency to resist restrictions, you’d think teens and their parents would get into more fights. The easiest way to get into a fight with a teen is to take her car keys away, right? (And that’s effectively what’s happened to iGen en masse.) If iGen teens don’t like the restrictions, they should fight with their parents more than previous generations did. However, iGen teens fight less with their parents; the number who had a serious fight with their parents more than three times a year fell from 66% in 2005 to 56% in 2015 (see Appendix B). So iGen is not only kept on a tighter leash by their parents but also fight with them less, bucking the Boomer and GenX assumption that teens will automatically battle parental restrictions. iGen teens and parents are on the same page—the page of growing up more slowly.
In the most extreme cases of resistance to parents, teens might consider running away. Since running away is virtually never a parent’s idea, it gives a view into what teens are thinking on their own—their deepest feelings unfettered by parental guidance. As it turns out, running away is less common among iGen: the number of teens who say they’ve tried to leave home plummeted in just the five years from 2010 to 2015 (see Figure 1.15). Thankfully, teens are less likely to consider making a break for independence.
Figure 1.15. Percentage of 8th and 10th graders who have tried to run away from home in the last 12 months. Monitoring the Future, 1999–2015.
So apparently, teens are along for the ride of growing up more slowly; they are willingly staying children for longer. A recent study found that iGen college students (vs. students in the 1980s and 1990s) scored markedly higher on a
measure of “maturity fears.” iGen’ers were more likely to agree “I wish that I could return to the security of childhood” and “The happiest time in life is when you are a child.” They were less likely to agree “I would rather be an adult than a child” and “I feel happy that I am not a child anymore.” Instead of resenting being treated like children, iGen’ers wish they could stay children for longer.
Many people now seem to associate being a child (as opposed to being an adult) with less stress and more fun; witness the 2014 emergence of the neologism “adulting,” which means taking care of one’s responsibilities. The Adulting School in Maine now offers classes for young adults teaching them how to perform tasks such as managing finances and folding laundry. The Twitter hashtag #adulting features posts such as “One thing I hate about adulting . . . Paying bills,” “I’m just gonna lay in bed . . . I don’t feel like adulting today,” and “Remember when you were a kid and counted the number of days until school was out? #adulting needs something like that.” The word adult is now used as a verb, and it seems to mean the end of all fun: “When you’re drunk at 4am and realize you have to get up and #adult in 5 hours” or “When everyone’s all snuggled in bed and I’m walking out the door to go to work. I’m done adulting.” Many echo the idea that growing up is no fun. Wrote one Twitter user, “HOW ARE PEOPLE EXCITED TO TURN 18???? IM VERY SCARED OF ADULTING!!!!” Another posted, “I miss the trivial and juvenile concerns I had as a child, things like crayon sets and cute play dates. Adulting sucks. I want to quit.” How, exactly, can you quit being an adult? That’s not explained.
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, touting the activity as “relaxing.” A 2016 article in Adweek noted that brands are tapping “into millennials’ anxiety about growing up.” When I interviewed Josie, a 17-year-old high school senior in the midst of applying to college, I asked her what her favorite movies were. Her answer? Tangled and Frozen—both children’s movies by Disney.
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.
Even once they get to college, students’ parents continue to treat them like children. Parents register their adult children for classes, remind them of deadlines, and wake them up in time for class, observed Julie Lythcott-Haims, the former freshman dean at Stanford. Cell phones made that easy. “These students weren’t mortified when their parents did all of this—as my generation and the ones before it would have been—they were grateful!” she notes. “Grateful to be able to communicate with a parent multiple times a day, in the dorm, in the dining halls, in the student union, going to class, going to another class, going somewhere after class, in the lobby of the advising office. Even in my office. Or they tried to. ‘It’s my mom,’ they’d say, sheepishly, with a small shrug. ‘Do you mind if I just . . . get this? I’ll just . . . Mom?’ ” Over her decade in the job, Lythcott-Haims says, students began referring to themselves as “kids.”
Thus the generational sweep is complete: never having known another parenting style, iGen doesn’t rebel against their parents’ overprotection—instead, they embrace it. “We want you to treat us like children, not adults,” one college student told a startled faculty member. Some suggest that this cocoon mentality is behind recent campus trends such as “trigger warnings” to alert students that a reading or lecture material might be disturbing and “safe spaces” where students can go if they are upset by a campus speaker’s message. One safe space, for example, featured coloring books and videos of frolicking puppies, neatly connecting the idea of safe spaces with that of childhood.
No matter what the reason, teens are growing up more slowly, eschewing adult activities until they are older. This creates a logical question: If teens are working less, spending less time on homework, going out less, and drinking less, what are they doing? For a generation called iGen, the answer is obvious: look no further than the smartphones in their hands.
Chapter 2
* * *
Internet: Online Time—Oh, and Other Media, Too
The New York Police Department’s 33rd Precinct recently warned residents about a danger lurking in their beds: their phones. Several had caught fire when people kept them under their pillows while they slept, creating click-bait pictures of scorched phones and beds with large brown burn marks. A similar incident happened in Texas, where a 13-year-old girl woke to the smell of something burning. Her charging phone, tucked under her pillow, had overheated and melted into the sheets.
It turned out that some Samsung phones had a spectacular issue with spontaneously combusting batteries. But to me, the flaming cell phone wasn’t the only surprising thing in these stories. Why would anyone have her phone under her pillow? my GenX self wondered. It’s not as though you can surf the Web while you’re sleeping. And who could slumber deeply inches from a buzzing phone? Curious, I asked my undergraduate students what I thought was a very simple question: “What do you do with your phone while you sleep? Why?”
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.
Smartphones are unlike any other previous form of media, infiltrating nearly every minute of our lives, even when we are unconscious with sleep. While we are awake, the phone entertains, communicates, glamourizes. Azar, the high school senior we met in chapter 1, is a good example. When I ask to take her picture, she sweeps her long dark hair to the front and chirps, “Have to look pret-ty!” I ask what her favorite apps are; she names Instagram, Snapchat, and one I hadn’t heard of called iFunny. When I ask if she can show me how iFunny works, she gets visibly excited and says, “Really? I can take out my phone?” and proceeds to show me all of the areas of the site, keeping up a constant patter about all of the funny memes and videos. When the wireless signal starts to waver, she sighs in frustration. “Where is it? My Internet—noooo!” Her phone plan, she tells me, has unlimited data and texting but only one hundred minutes of talk time a month, “because I never call people.” She keeps her phone out for the rest of the interview, showing me pictures and apps.
It seems obvious that teens (and the rest of us) spend a lot of ti
me on phones—not talking but texting, on social media, online, and gaming (together, these are sometimes labeled “new media”). Sometime around 2011, we arrived at the day when we looked up, maybe from our own phones, and realized that everyone around us had a phone in his or her hands. But maybe what we see in the coffee line or at the dinner table isn’t representative, and the endless parental and media hand-wringing over screen time isn’t necessary. Maybe the smartphone obsession is pronounced only in middle-class and affluent communities, or maybe we just don’t notice the teens who aren’t always on their phones. Fortunately, we can turn to the large, nationally representative over-time surveys, since they ask teens how much time they spend online, gaming, and texting. So how much time is it?
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 (see Appendix C).
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