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.
These aren’t large shifts, but the direction of the trend is surprising because more mothers in the 2010s worked full-time than in the 1990s. Given that, more teens—not fewer—should be spending time alone after school. (And it can’t be because more teens are working or doing extracurricular activities in the afternoon; as we’ll explore later, fewer of them work and time spent on activities has stayed the same.) Whether through after-school programs or some other mechanism, parents have arranged for fewer 14-, 15-, and 16-year-old teens to be at home by themselves in the afternoon. Thus teens are not just less likely to go out without their parents; they are also less likely to be at home without their parents.
The Decline of the Teen Job
Many Boomers and GenX’ers can remember the first time they bought something with their own money—maybe from mowing the lawn or babysitting. Or they might remember cashing their first paycheck from their job at the mall, using it to buy cool clothes or a music album they’d been saving up to buy.
iGen is less likely to have that experience. The decline in the percentage of teens working is considerable: in the late 1970s, only 22% of high school seniors didn’t work for pay at all during the school year, but by the early 2010s, twice as many (44%) didn’t (see Figure 1.7). The number of 8th graders who work for pay has been cut in half. These declines accelerated during the years of the Great Recession (2007–2009), but working did not bounce back in the postrecession years, when unemployment reached very low levels and jobs were easier to find. Among the youngest teens, the number working continued to decline even as the economy boomed. Teens also work fewer hours a week on average—for example, 12th graders headed to college in 2016 (vs. in 1987) worked about five fewer hours a week—about forty minutes a day less (see Appendix B).
Figure 1.7. 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.
Fewer teens work during the summer as well: in 1980, 70% had a summer job, which sank to 43% in the 2010s (see Appendix B). The decline in the summer job doesn’t seem to be due to the inability to find a job; according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the number of teens who want a summer job but can’t find one has stayed about the same, but the number who don’t want a job has doubled.
Maybe teens don’t have jobs anymore—and don’t go out as much anymore—because they are devoting more time to homework and extracurricular activities. Article after article declares that American students, especially young teens, are spending more and more time studying as schools become more academically demanding. There’s also a lot of talk about students piling on more and more activities in their drive to polish those ever-more-competitive college applications.
Except they’re not. Let’s look first at extracurricular activities. The most comprehensive measure is in the entering college student survey, exactly the group you’d expect to show the most pronounced upswing in extracurricular time. However, that didn’t happen. Time spent on student clubs and on sports/exercise as 12th graders changed little over time (see Appendix B). The one rise was in volunteer work, which is now often required for high school graduation; recent students did about ten minutes a day more volunteer work than those in the late 1980s. However, the rise in volunteering took place between the 1980s and the 1990s, well before the large drop in working for pay. So although volunteering has ticked up a little, the timing is wrong and the change is too small for it to account for the large drop in working for pay.
What about time spent on homework? As it turns out, iGen 8th, 10th, and 12th graders actually spent less time on homework than GenX teens did in the early 1990s, and high school seniors headed for four-year colleges spent about the same amount of time (see Appendix B). Between 2005 and 2015—the period when working for pay decreased the most—homework time was a mixed bag: 8th graders spent eight minutes fewer a day in 2015 than in 2005, and 10th and 12th graders spent about ten more minutes a day. These shifts are too small to account for the much larger drop in time spent working for pay—and for 8th graders they are in the wrong direction, with both homework time and paid work time decreasing.
We can also consider the total amount of time teens spend on paid work, homework, volunteering, and extracurricular activities. If that total has gone up or stayed the same, teens have shifted the time they used to work for pay into homework and extracurricular time. If that total has gone down, homework time has not filled in the hours teens used to spend at a job.
The trends in this total are clear: iGen teens are spending less time on homework, paid work, volunteering, and extracurriculars combined, not more (see Figure 1.8). For example, high school seniors heading to college in 2015 spent four fewer hours a week on homework, paid work, volunteer work, and extracurricular activities during their last year in high school than those entering college in 1987. That means iGen teens—even those heading for college—had thirty-three minutes more leisure time per day than GenX’ers did. Thus, time spent on homework and activities doesn’t seem to be the reason teens are now less likely to work during the school year.
Figure 1.8. Total hours per day spent on work and activities, 8th, 10th, and 12th graders and entering college students reporting on their last year in high school. Monitoring the Future and American Freshman Survey, 1976–2015. (For entering college students, total includes homework, paid work, volunteer work, sports/exercise, and student clubs. For 12th graders, total includes homework, paid work, and volunteer work. For 8th and 10th graders, total includes homework and paid work.)
So is it good or bad that fewer teens are working? It’s likely some of both. Most teen jobs are low-skilled work that don’t necessarily prepare young people for the higher-level jobs they will have later. My students at SDSU tell me they have worked folding clothes at the Gap, stocking shelves at Target, and cleaning the bathroom at Bath & Body Works. Although they learned some customer service skills, such jobs are very different from the white-collar professions most will pursue once they graduate from college. Jobs can also keep teens from getting the sleep they need, especially if they are at work late at night and have to start school early in the morning. And although homework time doesn’t seem to be preventing the average teen from working at a job, teens who work long hours often find it difficult to complete their schoolwork.
However, even if teens don’t learn high-level skills from their jobs, they often learn the value of responsibility and money. Vicki, 22, was a student in my personality psychology class at SDSU. She says her parents didn’t want her to work in high school, so looking for a job when she entered college was a rude shock. “No one would hire me due to my lack of experience, and even when I finally did get a job, I wasn’t acting in a professional manner on the job and I ended up getting fired a few months later,” she wrote. “If I had worked in high school, regardless of where, I would have known how to behave on the job. In fact, if I had had a job I probably would have learned a discipline and work ethic that would have helped me in many areas of my life. I would have learned the importance of attendance, which is something I have a huge struggle with when it comes to school and appointments. I never learned what it was like to earn something.”
Jobs can also confer benefits on specific populations. One study found that disadvantaged teens randomly assigned to a summer jobs program were 43% less likely to be involved in violence. Most of the effect occurred after the eight-week job period was over, suggesting that employment had a longer-term beneficial effect than simply filling time. For teens bound for college, a part-time job can provide badly needed funds, especially in the current era of rising tuition costs and the large debt burden many students find themselves with after college graduation. Whether it’s good or bad, working is yet another adult activity teens are putting off
until later.
Taking Out Loans from the Bank of Mom and Dad
I meet Ellie, 16, at her high school; we sit outside her classroom and talk on a sunny fall day just before lunch. She’s a pretty junior with long light brown hair who tells me all about using geotagging to post to Instagram. She has put off getting her driver’s license but hopes to take care of that soon, since her parents still have to drop her off at the mall when she wants to hang out with her friends. I ask her if she has a job, and she says no; she also doesn’t get an allowance. “So do your parents buy you the things that you want—is that how it works?” I ask. “Yeah,” she says. “Like, usually if I need money they will, like, give it to me or something. Usually I just ask them. They don’t always, but sometimes.”
With fewer teens working, you might think that more would get an allowance to buy the things they want. However, fewer iGen’ers get an allowance. When teen employment began to drop in the 1980s, parents at first responded by giving more teens an allowance. But after 2000, fewer teens got an allowance and many fewer had money from a job, leaving 20% of these 17- and 18-year-olds without any money of their own to manage (see Figure 1.9; see Appendix B for the equivalent for 10th graders). When they need money, they must, like Ellie, ask for it from their parents. It’s yet another example of 18-year-olds now being like 15-year-olds: just like children and young adolescents, one out of five iGen high school seniors asks their parents for what they want instead of managing their own cash flow.
Figure 1.9. Percentage of 12th graders with money from jobs, allowances, or either. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
It’s hard to say whether this parental control of funds is the parents’ or the teens’ idea. If it’s the parents’, it suggests that parents think high school seniors aren’t ready to manage their own money. Or maybe teens have realized they’ll get more money out of their parents by asking rather than having a set allowance. Either way, the result is more young people graduating from high school without even the introductory money-managing experience of figuring out how much to spend on movies, gas, and meals out—a kind of training ground for the larger adult job of paying for rent, utilities, and food.
You Booze, You Lose
I reach Chloe, 18, on her cell phone just as school lets out on a mild spring Wednesday. She’s a senior at a high school in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, and has just decided that she’ll go to college at Ohio State (“I’m sooo excited,” she says). When she was younger, she thought she might pursue a career in fashion, but she now thinks she’ll major in psychology. When I ask her about her favorite TV shows, she admits with a tinge of embarrassment that she likes Keeping Up with the Kardashians—not for the drama, she clarifies, but because of the glimpse it provides into a posh California lifestyle. She also loves watching funny animal videos online.
Most of the time, she and her friends hang out at the mall or go for frozen yogurt. She has a boyfriend, a part-time job, and a driver’s license, but other adult activities hold little appeal for her. When I ask about going to parties and drinking, for example, she’s skeptical of the whole scene. “People I work with will say, ‘I went down to the university this weekend and I got messed up or whatever and I hooked up with some guy’—it’s just, like, drunken mistake stuff,” she says. “And that doesn’t sound appealing to you?” I ask, somewhat teasingly. “No—I don’t understand why people would not want to be in control of themselves or their actions,” she says.
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 (see Figure 1.10).
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 (see Appendix B).
The steep decline in alcohol use for the youngest teens is especially encouraging; most people would agree that 13- and 14-year-olds drinking is not a good idea. When they get to 10th and 12th grade and drinking can be combined with driving, it’s also a big public health benefit that fewer young people are imbibing. These are huge, and encouraging, changes.
There is one downside to these trends: more young people arrive on college campuses or enter adult life without much experience drinking. Since drinking among college students and young adults hasn’t changed much, iGen is ramping up their drinking over a much shorter period of time than did previous generations. Many are going from zero to sixty in their alcohol experience in a short time.
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 (see Figure 1.11).
Figure 1.11. Percentage of 18-year-olds and 21- to 22-year-olds reporting binge drinking in the past two weeks. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2015.
The rapid increase in binge drinking from age 18 to age 21 can be risky. A study of this trend by the National Institutes of Health concluded, “Any increase in heavy drinking from age 18 to 21/22 increases the risk of negative consequences; it is likely that the faster the increase, the less experience one has with heavy drinking situations and the more risk is involved.”
This phenomenon is especially acute for those who attend college. High school students bound for college are less likely to drink alcohol than those who don’t plan on attending college, but once they get there they are more likely to binge drink than those who are not in college. For college students, the experience curve is very steep. As one college student put it, “I’m 21 and in my prime drinking years, and I intend to take full advantage of it!” This can be a challenge for student affairs professionals and others helping young people navigate their college years, as students are arriving on campus fairly naive about drinking but are quickly immersed in a culture of heavy alcohol consumption.
What about drug use? The heyday of illicit drug use among teens—the vast majority of which is marijuana—was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Use then plummeted in the early 1990s before going back up again through the 2000s and 2010s (see Figure 1.12). With drug use, there’s very little difference between 18-year-olds and 21- to 22-year-olds, and drug use ticks up a little in the transition to iGen in the early 2010s.
Figure 1.12. 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.
Why the different patterns for alcohol and drug use? Drug use, at least in most states, is illegal at any age. Any rule breaking is roughly equal for drug use whether you are over or under 21. Buying alcohol, however, becomes legal at 21—perhaps why this cautious generation is more likely to avoid it as teens yet still indulges after they turn 21. As more states legalize recreational marijuana for adults, this pattern may change. (We’ll explore more about these trends in chapter 6, on safety.) For now iGen drinks le
ss but smokes pot more than the Millennials who preceded them.
Growing Up Slowly
So: compared to their predecessors, iGen teens are less likely to go out without their parents, date, have sex, drive, work, or drink alcohol. These are all things adults do that children do not. Most people try them for the first time as teens—the transitional time between childhood and adulthood. As high school students, iGen’ers are strikingly less likely to experience these once nearly universal adolescent milestones, those breathtaking first experiences of independence from your parents that leave you feeling, for the first time, that you’re an adult (see Figure 1.13). Even iGen’ers who do reach these milestones during high school are doing so at older ages than in previous generations. That includes both the pleasures of adulthood, such as sex and alcohol, and the responsibilities of adulthood, such as working and driving. For good or for ill, 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.
Figure 1.13. Percentage of 12th graders who have a driver’s license, have ever tried alcohol, who ever go out on dates, and who worked for pay at all during the school year. Monitoring the Future, 1976–2016.
The full story of growing up slowly began long before iGen. The first changes in developmental speed appeared not among teens but among young adult GenX’ers in the 1990s, who began to postpone the traditional milestones of adulthood such as settling into a career, getting married, and having children. The average Boomer woman in 1975 married at 21; the average GenX’er in 1995 married at 25. Working at a full-time career was also postponed until later as more young people went to college.
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