I reach Jack, 15, after his busy day of school and track practice at his high school in suburban Minneapolis, where he’s a sophomore. We’ve met in person a few times before when I’ve visited Minnesota—he’s white, a serious young man with dark hair and a shy smile who is very close to his equally athletic family. When I ask what movies he’s seen recently, he mentions two he saw with his parents and sister. That made me curious about whether he ever sees movies with his friends. “Where do you like to hang out with your friends, and what do you normally do together?” I ask. “Most of the time we go on a run or something,” he says. “We have a pool at our house, and we go swimming, or I go over to their house.” I ask if he’s gone to any parties, and he mentions a summer party at a friend’s house where they played volleyball; his friend’s parents were there the whole time. His typical weekend usually involves a running event and doing something with his family. “Do you ever go places without your parents?” I ask. “Well, football games . . . but not really,” he says.
Priya and Jack are increasingly typical: iGen teens are less likely to go out without their parents. The trend began with Millennials and then accelerated at a rapid clip with iGen’ers (see Figure 1.1). The numbers are stunning: 12th graders in 2015 are going out less often than 8th graders did as recently as 2009. So 18-year-olds are now going out less often than 14-year-olds did just six years prior.
Figure 1.1. Times per week 8th, 10th, and 12th graders go out without their parents. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
These declines are not due to shifts in racial demographics: the trend is the same for white teens (see Appendix B). They also look the same for students from working-class and middle-class homes. Nor is the trend caused by the recession: even after the economy rebounded around 2012, the number of teens’ independent forays continued to slide. The more likely candidate is smartphones, used by the majority of teens since around 2011–12.
No matter what the cause, the result is the same: iGen teens are less likely to experience the freedom of being out of the house without their parents—those first tantalizing tastes of the independence of being an adult, those times when teens make their own decisions, good or bad.
Contrast this to the 1970s, when Boomer teens were growing up. Bill Yates recently published a book of his photographs of teens taken at a roller-skating rink outside Tampa, Florida, in the early 1970s. In one, a shirtless teen stands with a large bottle of peppermint schnapps stuck in the waistband of his jeans. In another, a boy who looks about 12 poses with a lit cigarette in his mouth. Several shots show couples kissing. As Yates describes it, the rink was a place where kids could get away from their parents and create a world of their own where they could drink, smoke, and make out in the backs of their cars. The photos feature the usual 1970s panoply of plaid pants, wide belts, and long hair, but what struck me the most was how adult even the youngest teens look—not physically but in their bold and insouciant independence. They gaze at the camera with the self-confidence born of making your own choices—even if your parents wouldn’t think they were the right ones, and even if, objectively speaking, they are not. These are the Boomers, raised in a time when their parents were happy for them to leave the house and economic success didn’t require a graduate degree.
Those kisses at the rink are also less common: iGen teens are less likely to date (see Figure 1.2). Only about half as many iGen high school seniors vs. Boomers and GenX’ers at the same age) ever go out on dates. In the early 1990s, nearly three out of four 10th graders sometimes dated, but by the 2010s only about half did.
Figure 1.2. Percentage of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders who ever go out on dates. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
The students I interviewed assured me that they still call it “dating,” so a change in wording is probably not the primary cause of the decline. The initial stage, what GenX’ers called “liking” (“Oooh, he likes you!”), iGen’ers now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation who prefer texting to talking on the phone. After a couple has “talked” for a while, they might start dating. Emily, 14 and from Minnesota, says some of her friends have gone on dates. I asked her what they usually did. “Maybe go to each other’s houses. Or they might go shopping together,” she said. “Normally it’s the girl that’s shopping and the boy is, like, following.” I laughed and told her that it’s about the same when you’re older.
Chloe, 18 and from Ohio, has had two romantic relationships. In both, she says that about a third of their “getting to know you” conversations were done via texting and social media (that was the “talking” part) and the other two-thirds in person. So it could be that young people are still pairing up but don’t see each other in person as often—with that in-person interaction necessary for it to count as a date. In other cases, parents may be more protective than they once were. “My dad always said that high school relationships were dumb, and that no one should date in high school,” wrote Lauren, 19. “I always thought that it was interesting he said this, because my mom and dad started dating their sophomore year of high school and have been together ever since. When I would mention this to them they said, ‘I know, we were stupid.’ ” Other teens, especially some boys, said they just didn’t have the courage to date. Mike, 18, wrote, “Nope. I ain’t got no game. It was a lack of confidence in myself which brought upon a female famine during high school.”
The lack of dating leads to the next surprising fact about iGen: they are less likely to have sex than teens in previous decades (see Figure 1.3).
Figure 1.3. 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.
Figure 1.4. 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.
An Interlude About Why Teens Act Less like Adults—and Why It’s Not All Good or All Bad
You might be wondering why teens are less likely to do adult things such as go out without their parents and have sex, and whether this trend of growing up more slowly is a good thing or a bad thing. An approach called life history theory provides some insights. Life history theory argues that how fast teens grow up depends on where and when they are raised. In more academic parlance, developmental speed is an adaptation to a cultural context.
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. That’s a good description of our current culture in the United States, when the average family has two children, kids can start playing organized sports at 3, and preparing for college seems to begin in elementary school. Compare that to a fast life strategy, where families are larger and parents focus on subsistence rather than quality. This fast life strategy involves less preparation for the future and more focus on just getting through the day. The fast strategy was a more common approach in the Boomer era, when fewer labor-saving devices were available and the average woman had four children—and, as a result, some of them ended up playing in the street. When my uncle told me about going skinny-dipping in the river when he was 8, I wondered why his parents had let him do that and why they hadn’t been with him. Then I remembered: his parents had seven other children and ran a farm, and it was 1946. The goal was survival, not violin lessons by age 5.
Life history theory explicitly notes that slow or fast life strategies are not necessarily good or bad; they just are. Keep this in mind as we explore the trends; just because something has changed from previous generations does not make it bad (or good), and I do not mean to imply that it does. For example, in some cultures, dating in early high school is considered good—it means a young person is popular with the opposite sex and will have no trouble producing the grandchildren the parents want, and quickly. In other cultures, early dating is considered bad—if she dates too soon, the thinking goes, she might focus too much on relationships and won’t finish college. So the “bad”-vs.-“good” question depends a lot on one’s cultural perspective. I suggest the same caution about seeing behaviors as “mature” or “immature.” Is going out with your friends mature or immature? What about having sex? They are really neither—or both. Such labels also miss the more complete, and more accurate, explanation that teens are now on a different developmental path. The key is not bad or good, mature or immature, but that these milestones of adulthood are now passed later.
Another crucial point: nearly all of the generational shifts in this chapter and the rest appear across different demographic groups. The samples we’re drawing from here are nationally representative, meaning the teens reflect the demographics of the United States. Every group is included. Even within specific groups, the trends consistently appear; they are present in working-class homes as well as upper-middle-class ones, among minorities as well as whites, among girls as well as boys, in big cities, suburbs, and small towns, and all across the country. That means they are not isolated to the white, upper-middle-class teens whom journalists often wring their hands over. Youths of every racial group, region, and class are growing up more slowly.
License to Drive
I reach Matthew, 19, by phone in his room at a small college in Pennsylvania. He’s originally from New England and wants to be a high school history teacher. In online pictures from his high school tennis matches, he’s a lanky young man with a graceful swing. His playlist on YouTube features videos by the band Imagine Dragons and a College Humor video called “Gluten Free Duck” (featuring a duck that won’t eat bread crumbs and asks for “a brown rice tortilla or maybe some quinoa crackers?”). When we talk, he is articulate and thoughtful, discussing the history books he likes and his views on social issues. He didn’t get his driver’s license until he was 18, two years later than he legally could have. For most of his senior year, he took the bus to school, or his parents would pick him up. “Why did you wait?” I ask. “I was too lazy to get around to it,” he says. “I was actually pretty nervous as well, because I have an older sister and she failed the [driver’s] test one or two times—and she’s really smart, so I thought if she failed it there’s no way I’m going to pass it. I guess I was nervous and afraid of failing.” Teens have always been nervous about passing their driving tests, of course, but the lure of adult freedom was usually strong enough to overcome it.
Matthew typifies an iGen trend: though nearly all Boomer high school students had their driver’s license by spring of their senior year, by 2015 only 72% did. That means more than one out of four iGen’ers do not have a driver’s license by the time they graduate from high school (see Figure 1.5).
Figure 1.5. Percentage of 12th graders who drove at all in the last year and who have a driver’s license. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
For some, 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,” wrote Hannah, 21. “By 18 most of my friends had a license and cars but I was still not in a hurry. I didn’t get my license until my mom told me I had to because she could not keep driving me to school.” She finally got her license six months past her eighteenth birthday. Other iGen’ers said similar things, seeing getting a license as something to be nagged into by one’s parents—a notion that would have seemed nonsensical to previous generations of teens, who were chomping at the bit to get their 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.”
Are fewer teens driving because of ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft? Not likely. First, these services usually require that riders be 18 years old or older, so most high school students can’t use them alone. In addition, Uber debuted in 2009 and Lyft in 2012, and the decline in getting a driver’s license began long before that. The decline appears in suburbs and rural areas, where Uber is often unavailable. The most consistent decline appears among suburban teens—suggesting that the downslide has more to do with Mom and Dad driving Junior around (see Appendix B).
It’s true that some states changed their laws on teen driving during the 2000s. That might account for shifts for younger teens, but it’s unlikely to explain the trends for high school seniors: they fill out the survey in the spring, when virtually all are at least 17 and most are 18. (And in fact, more are 18 than in previous decades—57% in 2015, up from 53% in 1992.) As of 2016, forty-nine states (all but New Jersey) allowed teens to drive alone after age 16½ (sometimes with restrictions such as on night driving or passengers, but still driving alone). Another way to get around the influence of the new laws is by examining trends in the western region, where the highest percentage of states (eleven out of thirteen, or 85%, including California) allow full, unrestricted driving privileges by age 17. There the decline in having a driver’s license was just as large or larger (see Appendix B).
Even apart from getting their license, fewer teens are driving at all. All states allow teens to get learner’s permits that let them drive with a licensed adult driver in the car, at minimum ages ranging from 14 to 16. That means virtually all 12th graders have been eligible to drive for at least a year by the time they fill out the survey, yet by 2015 one in four did not drive at all. The vast major
ity (84%) of states allow 15-year-olds to get learner’s permits, and all states allow permits by 16; with most students turning 16 before the spring of 10th grade, the vast majority of 10th graders are able to start driving. But in 2015, for the first time, the majority of 10th graders did not drive at all—not even on a learner’s permit. The decline in driving appears across all regions, ethnic groups, and socioeconomic classes (see Appendix B).
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).
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