Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? by Jean Twenge in The Atlantic, September 2017

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.

"[T]heirs 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..."

Electronic devices and social media seem to have an especially strong ability to disrupt sleep.

social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out.

Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide

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

But at the generational level, when teens spend more time on smartphones and less time on in-person social interactions, loneliness is more common.

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.

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.

Today’s teens are also less likely to date.

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.

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

More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been.

The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health.

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.”