iGen

by Jean M. Twenge

  The decline in sexual experience also presents challenges for preventing sexual assault among young people on campus and elsewhere, as students with little experience may have more difficulty navigating the sexual fire hose that is college. The good news is that rates of sexual assault appear to be declining. However, they are still too high. Many incidents occur when students are taking those first steps into adulthood: college freshmen are two and a half times as likely as older students to be sexually assaulted. We now live in a culture where teens watch more porn than ever and start asking each other for nude pictures at 11—yet they wait longer to have sex. This combination of considerable fantasy experience and little real-world experience may be problematic.

  If you’re the parent of a teen and want him to learn more independence before he goes to college, there are a few things you can do. First, relax curfews and rules about going out with friends; he will gain social skills and independence from these experiences. Second, insist he get a driver’s license; stop driving him around. As much as possible, put aside your worries. Teens today are safer drivers than ever and are much less likely to get into accidents or even to get tickets.

  Other adult activities are more of a gray area. The data on after-school jobs are complicated. Teens from disadvantaged backgrounds seem to gain key benefits from working, but benefits for kids from middle-class families are less clear. Many teen jobs are unskilled, rote positions. However, they do teach valuable lessons about time management, responsibility, and social skills. With the cost of college these days, the money teens earn from jobs might help them pay some of their tuition and ease their student debt burden later on.

  Alcohol is an even more fraught issue, and there is no one solution. More young people are arriving at college without much experience with alcohol and then colliding with the college party culture of binge drinking. Should they have the experience of getting drunk at home while they are safe? Maybe, but it’s not always the best idea to condone alcohol use among underage young people. An alternative is to have a realistic conversation about what many college parties are like and how to stay safe. For some students, not drinking might be the best choice. Many universities now have substance-free dorms, and I expect even more will offer this option in the future. iGen’ers are more accepting of other people’s choices, so someone who chooses not to drink at college is not necessarily going to be ostracized. Sometimes “Just say no” really is the best advice, especially given the dangers of binge drinking.

  Some have suggested that a “gap year” between high school and college might be one solution to the mental health issues and lack of adult experience among college students. A gap year provides time to work, travel, volunteer, and generally grow up. Gap years were brought to national attention recently when Malia Obama decided to take one before attending Harvard. At least by their own reports, students who take gap years believe that the time helped them; in one study, 73% of those who took a gap year said it had helped them prepare for college, and 57% said it had helped them decide what to study. Gap years aren’t for everyone; they are most likely to benefit students who are already set on getting a college education but who need some time to grow up a little before hitting the semiadulthood of college (especially college away from home). Joe O’Shea and Nina Hoe, college administrators and researchers, examined the data on gap years and concluded that their benefits outweigh the risks for many students. “Expanding gap year education will help more high school graduates arrive at college equipped with skills they need to achieve both personal and academic success,” they concluded on Quartz.

  Safe but Not Unprepared

  Our kids are safer than ever, which is the best news imaginable. Yet, as often happens, this cultural trend has been taken to an illogical extreme. Concerns about safety might be one of the reasons teens are seeing their friends in person less, with parents afraid of car accidents and other perils.

  The word safety is now used to explain responses to incidents that don’t actually involve anyone’s safety. Last week, the principal of my children’s elementary school sent an email informing parents that someone, rumored to be some middle school students, had drawn “profanity and the image of a swastika” on the school building. “The safety of our students, staff and families is a top priority and I appreciate all of your efforts to keep our school and community free of this inappropriate and offensive behavior,” the principal concluded. Yes, it was completely unacceptable behavior, but framing it in terms of “safety” was pushing it. No one was threatened or hurt. Mentioning safety just inflamed the situation. The goal should instead be to educate those young people about what the symbol actually means and figure out why they would do something so stupid. Safety is cited as the reason for the most unlikely situations. When Bryce Maine wanted to bring his 69-year-old grandmother as his date to the prom at Eufaula High School in Alabama in spring 2017, the school principal said no, citing their rule that prom attendees must be 20 years old or younger. “Safety of students and staff is the first and most important of the many tasks of a school administrator,” he said in a statement. “We do not chance leaving any stone unturned when it comes to safety.” Bryce was told the rule was in place to prevent older people buying alcohol for underage students—an unlikely scenario in his grandmother’s case. In the current climate, not even grandmothers are safe.

  These are not isolated examples. Listen carefully, and you’ll hear “safety” used as an explanation or excuse for just about everything—by both administrators and students. I think school administrators should think more carefully about using safety as a reason or explanation, given its potential to escalate tensions and reinforce the idea that our children shouldn’t be let out of our sight. In such a climate, our kids will be terrified when they head to their first jobs or to college (and they often are). If we emphasize safety less, it might also make it less likely that students will flinch at the idea of talking to their peers about difficult issues. iGen’ers are so frightened of confrontation that they would rather tell an administrator that a fellow student said something that upset them than say a few words to that person themselves.

  Concerns about safety now include not just physical safety but emotional safety. School programs now seek to protect kids from bullying—not just physical bullying but insults, taunting, and name-calling. Bullying has an undeniably negative effect—in fact, I coauthored some of the first controlled experiments on the effects of social rejection, a form of bullying.

  Taking steps to protect children from bullying by peers is, in my view, long overdue. On the other hand, I also agree with critics that such programs sometimes take things too far, teaching children that the normal ins and outs of childhood friendships are bullying or equating hurt feelings with physical harm. Many antibullying policies are so broad and vague that they may make students afraid of any interaction. Aiken Elementary School in West Hartford, Connecticut, defines bullying as any communication or physical act that “causes physical or emotional harm” to a student. The policy carefully defines everything from who is a school employee to which things are considered “mobile electronic devices” but does not define “emotional harm.” There is no denying that bullying causes emotional harm—but so do other, more ambiguous, childhood experiences, such as a friend deciding to play with someone else that day, common playground insults, or arguments over the rules of a game. The way the policy is written, any child who hurts another child’s feelings, unintentionally or not, is a bully. This may create a situation in which children are constantly aware of negative interactions, afraid they are the victim of this terrible thing they’ve heard about called bullying. Antibullying programs may, as a side effect, have shaped iGen children into kids who are constantly on the lookout for being harmed.

  As the psychologist Nick Haslam points out, the criteria for what is considered “trauma” now include just about anything bad that can happen to someone, creating a culture of victimhood that may exaggerate the emotions involve
d. As recently as 1980, psychiatrists used the word trauma to describe only events “outside the range of the usual human experience.” Now, however, many more events are included in the official list, and laypeople use the word trauma to describe experiences such as a bad hair day and seeing chalked words supporting a presidential candidate (as happened at Emory when “Trump 2016” was written on sidewalks and students protested, yelling, “We are in pain!”). In the Google Books database, the use of the word trauma quadrupled between 1965 and 2005.

  Many iGen’ers (and younger Millennials) appear deeply emotional when someone simply disagrees with them. Instead of treating such an experience as “trauma,” a better approach to a controversial opinion might be to discuss it, ignore it, or develop logical arguments against it. That goes even for opinions that are racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic: there are logical arguments against racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. If young people (and the rest of us) react to such opinions with tears and statements of feeling unsafe, things won’t change much. If we instead argue against such views, we can destroy them. The tide of history is against prejudice; the battle is being waged, and usually won, every day.

  iGen’ers in the Classroom

  iGen’ers are different, and college faculty and staff are beginning to notice. Millennials marched onto college campuses with optimism, confidence, and a strong sense of entitlement. Faculty encountered students who expected A’s just for showing up, who argued strenuously over grades, and who believed they deserved special treatment. The story is different for iGen’ers: growing up in the shadow of the Great Recession, iGen’ers expect less and display less narcissism and entitlement. iGen’ers are more pessimistic and less confident than Millennials, with students now more willing to work hard and less likely to vociferously question their grades. On the other hand, iGen’ers are more hesitant to talk in class and to ask questions—they are scared of saying the wrong thing and not as sure of their opinions. (When McGraw-Hill Education polled more than six hundred college faculty in 2017, 70% said students were less willing to ask questions and participate in class than they were five years ago.) It takes more reassurance and trust to get them to actively participate in class.

  As the first completely post-Internet generation, iGen’ers are used to finding information by themselves. But that doesn’t mean they won’t listen to lectures, because they are also very anxious about doing well in their classes. When I’ve polled my students about how they’d prefer to spend class time, most have said they are fine with lectures as long as they convey information that is helpful to doing well on the exams. They like discussion but don’t want it to take too much time away from learning the material they’ll be tested on. With that said, it’s important to keep class interesting. The videos iGen’ers watch online are rarely more than three minutes long, and i’Gen’ers skip between apps on their phones within seconds. Reaching them in the classroom often means catering to this short attention span, toggling among lecture, discussion, videos, and demonstrations. iGen’ers are more accepting of authority than Millennials but just as likely to fall asleep in class if they don’t participate or at least get to watch a few short videos.

  iGen’ers also come to college with much less experience reading books or even long magazine articles. To bridge the reading gap, publishers are turning to e-textbooks with videos, interactive figures, and built-in quizzes—excellent ways to reach iGen. I believe textbooks also need to stop covering so many topics in so much detail. My friend Kate Catanese, who teaches psychology at Cuyahoga Community College, has noticed this generation’s reluctance to read. “I’ve had students complain that I’m making them read too much, that an eight-page popular press newspaper article is somehow too lengthy and can’t keep their attention,” she told me. I’m not suggesting that faculty give in to such complaints; students will need to learn to read long passages eventually. However, we also have to meet them where they are, and covering a little less is often the best compromise. Kate takes this approach in her classes. “I really go for depth over breadth, and I think the students are better off that way anyway. Cover the cool stuff and leave everything else out,” she says. I think textbooks should take a similar approach, covering the most important topics in enough detail that students can understand the different sides of the issues, but without the lengthy list of topics and fine-grained detail that end up boring them to tears. It is also essential that the books be updated frequently, at least every three years. For example, high schools update their books only every ten years (if that), which leaves iGen’ers believing that books can’t be trusted because they are so out of date. In many fields, ten years is enough for the whole field to change. That sends iGen’ers online, again, and they still don’t learn how to read long passages of text. One solution to this is electronic textbooks, which can be updated more frequently.

  Given how much iGen’ers learn online, one of the most important lessons is how to judge content. As the impact of “fake news” during the 2016 election showed, many people have a difficult time figuring out what’s real online and what’s not. iGen’ers need to be taught about sources and evaluating evidence. Many high schools are beginning to do that, but this type of critical thinking needs to be emphasized throughout iGen’ers’ education and within specific areas. For example, students in the sciences and social sciences can be taught about the standard for publication in a peer-reviewed journal and how it differs from a publication by someone who does a few analyses in a blog post or polls a few hundred people. Students need to be taught about the importance of control groups and representative sampling, issues that arise in marketing, human resources, journalism, and politics, not just in academia.

  iGen has continued the Millennial tendency to focus more on extrinsic values (the concrete outcome) and less on intrinsic values (the inherent pleasure in the activity) than previous generations. iGen students are afraid they will not make the cut in a competitive world and will end up on the “have-not” side of the increasing divide between the haves and have-nots. They are practical, serious, and anxious, focusing more on the exam grade and less on the joy of learning. They go to college to get a better job and make more money, not necessarily to improve their minds. This is a tough pill to swallow for many Boomer, GenX, and even Millennial faculty members, who love the material they teach and want their students to enjoy it as well. In my classroom, I try to balance this by devoting at least some class time to discussion—usually by asking students about their own experiences and how they relate to the material. Even though I know that many of them just want the grade, I’m hoping they will also see how the material can help them understand their world. Most students also recognize that the discussions help them remember the material—a win-win.

  Hiring iGen’ers—and Getting Them to Stay

  iGen’ers already dominate the cohort of students graduating from college. Businesses that were just coming to understand what Millennials want in the workplace now have to figure out iGen. Fortunately, the data in chapter 7 provide a good way forward to understanding iGen’ers—and in a much more conclusive way than the early one-time polls and confusing rumors did about Millennials fifteen years ago. This time, we know what this generation looks like, with definitive data from the beginning, as they’re entering the door to their careers.

  The first managers to hire iGen’ers were those in service industries such as restaurants and retail. Many quickly discovered that iGen’ers had no idea how to write a résumé—but were very good at making videos (which makes sense, given how little they read and how much they use social media). Some businesses use apps such as JobSnap, which ask potential iGen employees to make a brief video of themselves in lieu of submitting a résumé. Employers can then screen applicants based on the videos, which for many entry-level service jobs might better capture the attributes necessary for the position (such as good language and social skills). And since iGen’ers can apply using only their phones, managers should have m
ore good applicants to choose from.

  Overall, iGen is good news for managers: iGen’ers are more focused on work and more realistic about what that entails than the Millennials just before them. iGen’ers want good, stable jobs and are eager to prove themselves. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t want to be entrepreneurs—in fact, they are less likely than previous generations to want to own their own business or be self-employed. That means iGen talent is ripe for the picking for the right businesses. iGen’ers are also less entitled and narcissistic than Millennials and have more moderate expectations. They are less likely than Millennials to expect to be CEO of the company in five years and less likely to expect more pay for less work. They are not as overconfident, and they have a stronger work ethic. The downside is that more young employees are anxious and uncertain; they are eager to do a good job but are scared of making mistakes. iGen’ers are more likely to put in extra work to get a presentation finished in time but less confident that it will be successful. Whereas Millennials needed praise, iGen’ers need reassurance. Given their slow upbringing, many are also less independent. Give them careful instructions for tasks, and expect that they will need more guidance. Managers who learned to be cheerleaders for Millennials will find they are more like therapists, life coaches, or parents for iGen’ers.

  How do you sign them up? Compensation is key. Income inequality has ingrained iGen’ers with the fear of not making it, and they are even more likely than Millennials to say that “becoming well off financially” is important. They often carry staggering student loan debt. They are also interested in flexibility and vacation time, though not quite as much as Millennials were a few years ago.