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NE DAY last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who

lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone

since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about

her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her

friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked,

recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-

free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than

adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

JEAN M. TWENGE

SEPTEMBER 2017 ISSUE | TECHNOLOGY

Jasu Hu

go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my

mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her

friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my

generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with

gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures

and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks,

which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other.

Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s

good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real

name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room

with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a

choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more

than we like actual people.”

I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a

22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come

to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and

behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for

instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been

increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had

grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys.

Then I began studying Athena’s generation.

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

gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many

of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In

all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had

never seen anything like it.

The allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens.

T

At first I presumed these might be blips, but the trends persisted, across several

years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in

kind. The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in

how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their

views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are

radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years

before them.

What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the

Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect

on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering economy. But it was exactly the

moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50

percent.

HE MORE I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and

the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became

that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the

concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012,

members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram

account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the

internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in

their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early

adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students

when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000

American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.

The advent of the smartphone and its cousin the tablet was followed quickly by

hand-wringing about the deleterious effects of “screen time.” But the impact of

these devices has not been fully appreciated, and goes far beyond the usual

concerns about curtailed attention spans. The arrival of the smartphone has

radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social

interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in

every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear

I

among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and

small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their

smartphone.

To those of us who fondly recall a more analog adolescence, this may seem foreign

and troubling. The aim of generational study, however, is not to succumb to

nostalgia for the way things used to be; it’s to understand how they are now. Some

generational changes are positive, some are negative, and many are both. 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. It’s not an exaggeration

to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades.

Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.

Even when a seismic event—a war, a technological leap, a free concert in the mud—

plays an outsize role in shaping a group of young people, no single factor ever

defines a generation. Parenting styles continue to change, as do school curricula

and culture, and these things matter. But the twin rise of the smartphone and social

media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time,

if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young

people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them

seriously unhappy.

N THE EARLY 1970s, the photographer Bill Yates shot a series of portraits at the

Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink in Tampa, Florida. 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 no older than 12 poses with a cigarette in his

mouth. The rink was a place where kids could get away from their parents and

inhabit a world of their own, a world where they could drink, smoke, and make out

in the backs of their cars. In stark black-and-white, the adolescent Boomers gaze at

Yates’s camera with the self-confidence born of making your own choices—even if,

perhaps especially if, your parents wouldn’t think they were the right ones.

Fifteen years later, during my own teenage years as a member of Generation X,

smoking had lost some of its romance, but independence was definitely still in. My

friends and I plotted to get our driver’s license as soon as we could, making DMV

appointments for the day we turned 16 and using our newfound freedom to escape

the confines of our suburban neighborhood. Asked by our parents, “When will you

be home?,” we replied, “When do I have to be?”

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.

Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen

Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic

choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens

have “talked” for a while, they might start dating. But 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 drop is the

sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has

been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. 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.

Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular

culture, from Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, has lost its appeal for

today’s teens. 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. For some, Mom and Dad are such good chauffeurs that there’s

no urgent need to drive. “My parents drove me everywhere and never complained,

so I always had rides,” a 21-year-old student in San Diego told me. “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 after her 18th birthday. In

conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something

to be nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to

previous generations.

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

that bottle of schnapps. In earlier eras, kids worked in great numbers, eager to

finance their freedom or prodded by their parents to learn the value of a dollar. But

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. The number of eighth-graders who work for

pay has been cut in half. These declines accelerated during the Great Recession,

but teen employment has not bounced back, even though job availability has.

Of course, putting off the responsibilities of adulthood is not an iGen innovation.

Gen Xers, in the 1990s, were the first to postpone the traditional markers of

adulthood. Young Gen Xers were just about as likely to drive, drink alcohol, and

date as young Boomers had been, and more likely to have sex and get pregnant as

teens. But as they left their teenage years behind, Gen Xers married and started

careers later than their Boomer predecessors had.

Gen X managed to stretch adolescence beyond all previous limits: Its members

started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later. Beginning with

Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only

because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating,

spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used

to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into

high school.

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. (High-school seniors headed for four-year

colleges spend about the same amount of time on homework as their predecessors

did.) The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and

exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working

for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not

less.

So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room,

alone and often distressed.

O NE OF THE IRONIES of iGen life is that despite spending far more time

under the same roof as their parents, today’s teens can hardly be said to

be closer to their mothers and fathers than their predecessors were.

“I’ve seen my friends with their families—they don’t talk to them,” Athena told me.

“They just say ‘Okay, okay, whatever’ while they’re on their phones. They don’t pay

attention to their family.” Like her peers, Athena is an expert at tuning out her

parents so she can focus on her phone. She spent much of her summer keeping up

with friends, but nearly all of it was over text or Snapchat. “I’ve been on my phone

more than I’ve been with actual people,” she said. “My bed has, like, an imprint of

my body.”

In this, too, she is typical. 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: nerds and jocks, poor kids and rich kids, C students and A students. The

Jasu Hu

roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all

been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.

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. The Monitoring the

Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be

nationally representative, has asked 12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every

year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks

teens how happy they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend on

various activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person social

interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such as using social

media, texting, and browsing the web. The results could not be clearer: 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.

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and

all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. Eighth-graders who spend 10

or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re

unhappy than those who devote less time to social media. Admittedly, 10 hours a

week is a lot. But those who spend six to nine hours a week on social media are still

47 percent more likely to say they are unhappy than those who use social media

even less. The opposite is true of in-person interactions. Those who spend an

above-average amount of time with their friends in person are 20 percent less likely

to say they’re unhappy than those who hang out for a below-average amount of

time.

The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.

If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it

would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do

something—anything—that does not involve a screen. Of course, these analyses

don’t unequivocally prove that screen time causes unhappiness; it’s possible that

unhappy teens spend more time online. But recent research suggests that screen

time, in particular social-media use, does indeed cause unhappiness. One study

asked college students with a Facebook page to complete short surveys on their

phone over the course of two weeks. They’d get a text message with a link five times

a day, and report on their mood and how much they’d used Facebook. The more

they’d used Facebook, the unhappier they felt, but feeling unhappy did not

subsequently lead to more Facebook use.

Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the

portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated

generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends

in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of

times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more

good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high

since.

This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time

online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online. Teens who spend more

time on social media also spend more time with their friends in person, on average

—highly social teens are more social in both venues, and less social teens are less

so. But at the generational level, when teens spend more time on smartphones and

less time on in-person social interactions, loneliness is more common.

So is depression. Once again, the effect of screen activities is unmistakable: The

more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report

symptoms of depression. 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.

Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent

more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s

W

much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.) One piece of data that

indirectly but stunningly captures kids’ growing isolation, for good and for bad:

Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has

increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become

less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for the

first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.

Depression and suicide have many causes; too much technology is clearly not the

only one. And the teen suicide rate was even higher in the 1990s, long before

smartphones existed. Then again, about four times as many Americans now take

antidepressants, which are often effective in treating severe depression, the type

most strongly linked to suicide.

HAT’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. Today’s teens may go to fewer parties

and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they

document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those

not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens

who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups. Like the increase in

loneliness, the upswing in feeling left out has been swift and significant.

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 use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to

feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together

without them. Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well,

as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. When Athena posts

pictures to Instagram, she told me, “I’m nervous about what people think and are

going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don’t get a certain amount of likes on a

picture.”

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—more than twice as much. The rise in suicide,

too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes,

three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007,

compared with twice as many boys. The suicide rate is still higher for boys, in part

because they use more-lethal methods, but girls are beginning to close the gap.

These more dire consequences for teenage girls could also be rooted in the fact that

they’re more likely to experience cyberbullying. Boys tend to bully one another

physically, while girls are more likely to do so by undermining a victim’s social

status or relationships. Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform

on which to carry out the style of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding

other girls around the clock.

Social-media companies are of course aware of these problems, and to one degree

or another have endeavored to prevent cyberbullying. But their various motivations

are, to say the least, complex. A recently leaked Facebook document indicated that

the company had been touting to advertisers its ability to determine teens’

emotional state based on their on-site behavior, and even to pinpoint “moments

when young people need a confidence boost.” Facebook acknowledged that the

document was real, but denied that it offers “tools to target people based on their

emotional state.”

I N JULY ����, a 13-year-old girl in North Texas woke to the smell of something

burning. Her phone had overheated and melted into the sheets. National news

outlets picked up the story, stoking readers’ fears that their cellphone might

spontaneously combust. To me, however, the flaming cellphone wasn’t the only

surprising aspect of the story. Why, I wondered, would anyone sleep with her phone

beside her in bed? 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 at San Diego State University what

they do with their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a profile in

obsession. Nearly all slept with their phone, putting it under their pillow, on the

mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed. They checked social

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