(2017-08-04) Have Smartphones Destroyed A Generation

Jean Twenge: Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states

it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.

I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones

More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.

Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011.

twin rise of the smartphone and social media

But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.

only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.

The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity

The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a full year later than the average Gen Xer. Fewer teens having sex has contributed to what many see as one of the most positive youth trends in recent years: The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67 percent since its modern peak, in 1991

Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school.

My parents drove me everywhere and never complained, so I always had rides

In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents

Independence isn’t free—you need some money in your pocket to pay for gas

iGen teens aren’t working (or managing their own money) as much. In the late 1970s, 77 percent of high-school seniors worked for pay during the school year; by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did.

These declines accelerated during the Great Recession, but teen employment has not bounced back, even though job availability has.

Why are today’s teens waiting longer to take on both the responsibilities and the pleasures of adulthood? Shifts in the economy, and parenting, certainly play a role. In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.

If today’s teens were a generation of grinds, we’d see that in the data. But eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s

So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.

The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. That’s something most teens used to do

You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data suggest that it does not.

Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.

Of course, these analyses don’t unequivocally prove that screen time causes unhappiness; it’s possible that unhappy teens spend more time online

One study asked college students with a Facebook page to complete short surveys on their phone over the course of two weeks

The more they’d used Facebook, the unhappier they felt, but feeling unhappy did not subsequently lead to more Facebook use.

Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.

What’s the connection between smartphones and the apparent psychological distress this generation is experiencing? For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out.

This trend has been especially steep among girls. Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys

Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today’s teens. Boys’ depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls’ increased by 50 percent

It may be a comfort, but the smartphone is cutting into teens’ sleep: Many now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived

Again, it’s difficult to trace the precise paths of causation. Smartphones could be causing lack of sleep, which leads to depression, or the phones could be causing depression, which leads to lack of sleep. Or some other factor could be causing both depression and sleep deprivation to rise.

What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience adolescence. The constant presence of smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood.

Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities to practice them.

No, Smartphones Are Not Destroying a Generation

The problem with both the article and the resulting attention is three-fold:

1) the data the author chooses to present are cherry-picked

2) the studies she reviews are all correlational

3) the studies she reviews largely ignore social contexts and how people differ

Nowhere is Twenge’s bias more obvious to me than in some research that she actually does review but then casts aside as seemingly irrelevant to her thesis — namely, the vast counter-evidence to the “destroyed generation” thesis contained in her headline. In the introduction to the piece she notes that this generation has sharply lower rates of alcohol use, teen pregnancies, unprotected sex, smoking, and car accidents than previous generations. This is what a destroyed generation looks like?

Ignore The Bullshit: iPhones Are Not Destroying Teenagers

Today's teens also have a lower suicide rate than teens in the 1990s

Consider one of those examples: teens today are going out unsupervised less. There are explanations for this other than teens being ruined shells of human beings — such as increased participation in extracurriculars and organized activities — that could account for this.

It’s even more biased than it sounds. Twenge drew her conclusions from an even more rarified set within U.S. college students: those who attend four-year residential institutions

But while consumer media ate up Twenge's sky-is-falling take on millennials, her peers in academia and the scientific community began to call bullshit

she brings up a study suggesting more unhappiness among 8th graders who are heavy use social-media users, but doesn't mention that the same study found no effect for 12th graders

Writing in the journal Emerging Adulthood in 2013, Arnett cautioned Twenge's conclusions are also marred by her reliance on samples of college students. College students "are not representative of emerging adults more generally,"

These books pandered to the same complaints old people have been making about young people since time immemorial, with just enough techno-scare to make them seem fresh and relevant

The Atlantic has a particular affinity for this kind of trendy worrying dressed up as somber big-think

Twenge has been on the youth-scare beat for a while, and it’s notable that she has now turned to post-millennial fearmongering. I first encountered her work back in the mid-2000s

Her first major foray into millennial thinkery was her 2006 book Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—And More Miserable Than Ever Before. Twenge expanded on the theme in 2009 with The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement.

Yes, Smartphones Are Destroying a Generation, But Not of Kids | JSTOR Daily

It’s not that Twenge’s got her story wrong; on the contrary, it’s precisely because she’s onto something that we need to be so careful about drawing the right conclusions from the evidence she cites. Even more crucial—and missing not just from Twenge’s work, but so many of these alarmist pieces—is the so what: what, exactly, are parents supposed to do about the problem?

Teens didn’t get their hands on smart phones en masse until a few years after the iPhone was released. But that’s ok, because if you look at Twenge’s trendlines, it’s more like 2010 when all the delayed adulting starts to kick in.

*So what happened between 2007 and 2010 to tee up a shift in teen lifestyles?

Social media happened. But it didn’t happen just—or even mainly—to teens. It happened to parents.

you know what smartphones and social media are really great at? Tuning out your children (Raising Kids)

As a friend warned me when I first got pregnant, “children are simultaneously overwhelming and under-stimulating.” Why wouldn’t we want to be distracted from that?

Parents are, indeed, influenced by competing activity. They resort to a level of behavior that might be called “minimal parenting.”

Fostering independence takes work: someone has to teach the kid to drive, show them how to get to the mall, maybe prod them to make some friends and get outside. We may parody the work of parenting as a set of rules and consequences, but the work of encouraging positive behavior is just as (if not more important) than sanctioning the negative.

Zussman’s experiment suggests that when parents are distracted—as today’s parents are, perpetually, by our online lives—it’s the encouragement that suffers, more than the control. The result? Kids who stay inside their semi-gilded cages, because they don’t get the support they need to spread their wings.

So what’s a parent to do? Well, I think we can do better than Twenge’s suggestions of instilling “the importance of moderation,” or “mild boundary-setting.” The off switch has its place, but if that’s all we have to offer our kids, we aren’t helping prepare them for what it means to live in a digital world.

Nor, for that matter, are we preparing ourselves: if we’ve let smartphones run roughshod over our lives, it’s not just because they offer respite from our annoying kids, but because they offer respite from our annoying selves.

Mentoring your kids means letting go of a one-size-fits-all approach to kids’ tech use, and thinking instead about which specific online activities are enriching (or impoverishing) for your specific child. Mentoring means talking regularly with your kids about how they can use the Internet responsibly and joyfully, instead of slamming on the brakes.