OTOH, it could be that modern kids are more risk-averse, conformist and acquiescent to paternalistic control; or it could be increasd neoteny, where independence of thought and action is being delayed until later.
I, for one, don't want youth to blindly accept the conventions of their elders and meekly conform to the way things are. I'd like to see more metrics around positive aspects of nonconformity rather than just the negative, and see if we're losing both ends of the spectrum here.
While I would also be interested in more data about conformity (or otherwise) today, when I look at statistics like lower drug use, etc. I don't see conformism. I see better critical thinking skills and perhaps more developed prevention programs in schools. I'd also be interested in looking at the rate of these actions under the care of parents who engage in them on a regular basis, to really identify whether there is a difference between positive social choices and conformism.
At a glance, it seems nice. Less hard drugs, less pregnancy.... But in the big picture, I'm not sure I want a generation full of wimps. It sounds like the beginning of enslavement to me.
Plus, what about soft drugs and prescription drugs? You can't tell me those numbers are down. Two other things that frequently lead to pacification!
>Less hard drugs, less pregnancy.... But in the big picture, I'm not sure I want a generation full of wimps. It sounds like the beginning of enslavement to me.
What? How does enslavement follow from lower rates of teen pregnancy? Perhaps it just mean higher usage rates of contraceptives, which is backed by evidence. It might also imply that young women are choosing to be more independent.
I worded the post poorly. I was saying that those things are great, but the overall thesis is one of pacified teens who are too fat, lazy, and unmotivated to go do interesting things.
For some, those interesting things are sex drugs and rock'n'roll, which you'll all agree are bad. For others, those interesting things translate to youth leadership, contact sports, and other things that make boys into men.
All I see when I am with American kids is a whole bunch of iGaming on iDevices and SnapChatting under the watchful eye of overprotective soccer moms who are doping them up with garbage food and SSRIs.
Good luck with all that in 20-40 years if China, Russia, or the Muslim world decide to make aggressive battle-tested men.
> For some, those interesting things are sex drugs and rock'n'roll, which you'll all agree are bad. For others, those interesting things translate to youth leadership, contact sports, and other things that make boys into men.
Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll are purely hedonistic. I don't know how you can see them helping build positive qualities.
I figure the next generation is always going to be different, whether it's more conservative or more liberal, or that they use weird apps on their iDevices. You have to make your peace with that.
Trying to paint everyone of a generation with the same brush is lazy just an excuse to be resentful.
I haven't spent that much time around teenagers in about ten years. Those that I knew then were rarely fat or unmotivated. The kids I see on the bus, including those going to what suspect is a mediocre high school, appear reasonably fit.
The soccer moms may be big on medication, but I think that garbage food is for a different economic stratum.
I definitely missed a connective thought in that comment. I am not saying hard drugs are good. I am saying the movement to soft and prescription drugs is just another form of weakness.
To me, (and this will grab more downvotes), the alarming part of that data is the idea that "less fighting" is good. There are certain behaviors that I feel are good for teenagers. Teens not fighting = teens not being teens, for whatever reason that may be.
I don't see why teens not fighting would mean teens are "not being teens".
Also what do you mean by fighting?
I don't perceive 'teens' to be being particularly passive? (Though, for around 3 more months the term applies to me, so that might change my perspective.)
Seems like survivorship bias to me. Just because kids used to fight, and turned out OK doesn't mean that fighting was a necessary part of their success.
Agreed, except smoking. Can we agree, smoking isn't a good idea anymore? I lost 20 years of healthy life for a wasteful addiction and it started in 1991 when I was 16.
>>I lost 20 years of healthy life for a wasteful addiction and it started in 1991 when I was 16.
Do you mean you smoked for 20 years, or that you lost 20 years of lifespan due to smoking?
If it's the latter, I remember reading in a medical study that the adverse health effects of smoking are mostly reversed several years after the person stops smoking. :)
Maybe it was the amount of money lost spending on cigarettes all those years? (Not just the money itself, but think of the possible investment returns if it had been invested instead of smoked.)
I used to be a reasonably heavy drinker, then I quit more or less cold turkey, didn't drink a drop for over 6 months, and even though I've now gone back to drinking a bit, I'm very careful now to limit my intake to well within the health guidelines (i.e. no more than one or two a night, no more than a couple of nights a week). Not only has this done good things for my health, it's done great things for my finances.
I seem to recall it being that one's risk of lung cancer due to smoking drops to being very close to a non-smoker's risk after refraining from smoking for 10 years.
Other damage is certainly done to the lungs that can cause other issues--emphysema, cardiovascular problems, etc--but the risk from the "scariest" threat out there is greatly diminished.
People are drinking way more to compensate for that. I prefer that people kill themselves instead of killing others (in traffic accidents related to alcohol, etc.)
>>People are drinking way more to compensate for that.
Very interesting. Are there statistics that demonstrate this? Specifically, are people really drinking more, and if so, how do we know it is to compensate for reduced smoking?
Keep in mind that the society they are conforming to is much more open-minded, tolerant, and freethinking. It is possible that earlier "rebellious" generations have done some work in toppling barriers, and those positive effects are long-lasting in such a way that future generations can simply benefit from and enjoy them.
When I was in high school, it was just hard to interact and hard to find stuff to do. We mostly didn't have cars, phones, or spaces of our own, so we had to sort of clandestinely squeeze our lives into grownups spaces. Have a friend over in our parents house, borrow our parents car, use the shared phone (that our parents could listen in on).
And we were limited to what little entertainment was in our hometown. For me there was a movie theater and a couple of coffee shops, but largely just a lot of empty space.
These days kids can create unlimited spaces in virtual reality* to connect with each other, and they have unlimited access to virtual spaces created by people all over the world. They can just pull out their phone and be endlessly entertained.
The idea of having a baby is much more appealing when you are bored as hell and have no other apparent future.
The article on apparent causes (http://www.vox.com/2014/8/20/5987845/the-mystery-of-the-fall...) also didn't mention feminism, which is an odd omission. More and more young women are able to imagine all kinds of futures for themselves. Girls have more to lose by getting pregnant than they ever have, and because of the internet I think they know it.
* When I say virtual reality, I'm talking about Instagram, Tumblr, etc, not Oculus. The metaverse has existed for a long time, Oculus is just helping us immerse our bodies in it.
I wonder if they're just more data-savvy, and understand that anonymous questions usually aren't, and are therefore better at going "me? Misbehave? Never!".
There's a hump in reported cannabis use in the UK drug use data sets from the brief period when it was decriminalised - not necessarily because more people were smoking, but because more were admitting it.
My god do I enjoy dynamic content. Having the reader choose one variable (age, in this case) massively improves how relevant the content is. There is another article where you choose your county or districts that massively rewrites after you pick where you born, but I can't find a link.
Any other examples of interesting dynamic content?
Self-reporting surveys are of questionable value in general, and especially now, when everyone understands that pretty much everything you ever do and say in public becomes part of your Google persona.
My point? It is at least possible that these teens are now wise enough to know admitting to any sort of nefarious behavior, no matter the setting, is just a dumb thing to do.
Could be but this study correlates with many other studies, some of which have factual data. e.g. things like teenage pregnancies are well-studied and can be observed without relying on self-reported data, and they indeed have gotten much better. Smoking is another one which has gotten much better.
On the whole it seems quite reliable, although some stats are not very meaningfuk. e.g. watching TV is a bit of a silly stat if you ask me, kids have just moved from traditional TV but they're probably 'wasting' as much time on media entertainment as before through other channels.
I recall taking these high school self-report questionaires about 5 years ago. These were always done on paper and "anonymously" (the self-reporter never explicitly identified themselves on the form, and you'd just insert your completed form into any random location on the stack of completed forms). I certainly didn't have any thought that the information might somehow be tagged to me.
Also, people in my high school were very open about their illicit behaviors. One guy even claimed he was part of a gang in the middle of our class. Further, before the surveys, there would always be at least one person who said something like, "hey guys, lets just answer 'every day' to every 'how often have you <x>' question. LOL". Obviously, those submissions get thrown out as outliers, but the point is I don't think teens are any wiser to know not to admit to any nefarious behaviors. Heck, just ask them if they know what the first (or second, or third...) amendment is - many teens (and citizens in general) are totally unaware of their rights and of the law. Yes, self-report metrics are always subject to loads of biases, but I just disagree with the bias being towards under-reporting in this case - I can't tell whether the metrics would be boosted or lowered as a result of these biases.
It's odd that sexual matters are discussed at length but pornography is not mentioned. There are certainly pros and cons to being (or raising) a teenager in the internet porn era.
I'm sure the researchers responsible for analyzing the data from this survey were familiar with the concept of an outlier and how to deal with them when publishing their findings. High school students have been goofing off instead of doing what they were supposed to for as long as high schools have been a thing.
I took this survey in 2011. Teachers were not allowed to be present while we took it. There was no moral pressure to be honest beyond "answer to the best of your abilities" so as not to alienate the group. The entire room openly read the questions and people answered with varying degrees of absurdity. Whatever the results of that room were, they were not representative of the group's risk taking behavior.
Take this anecdote as you will, but it will take me a lifetime to be convinced that a faceless government form can poll the group of cards closest to a teen's chest with any aggregate accuracy.
Well, it may be that the numbers are under / overreported, but the test could still be valid, in the sense that shifts in reported behavior are correlated with shifts in actual behavior. In other words, if you assume today's kids are no more likely to lie on a survey than in the past, you can get a sense of the direction of trends, if not the absolute values.
Missed the most important survey question, that being something along the lines of "Do you think your personal individual answers to this survey are going to be kept forever and used against you by everyone in a position of power such as college admissions and the job hiring process and security clearances, just like your complete internet access record and all social media use?"
You'd have to be pretty paranoid in '92 to assume they're out to get you, you'd have to be pretty ignorant in '16 to assume they're not.
I took this survey about 18 years ago, a year or two after it was introduced. The rather-small class, on the whole, answered with completely made-up information and joked about it afterward. I can't say that fear of retaliation was the reason for everyone, but it certainly was for me. IIRC the survey was technically anonymous, but the N was very small in our case, and everyone handed it over to teachers in the clear.
From the government's point of view, lowering the degree to which people are upset about what the government is doing is a feature of the education system, not a bug.
This article is mostly good but it distorts the issue of teen pregnancy. According to the government, teen pregnancy in the USA peaked in 1958, which was the peak year of the Baby Boom. Teen pregnancy has been in decline since 1958 (there was a brief surge around 1990, and then the downward trend renewed).
Please see the first chart in this National Vital Statistics Report from the Centers Of Disease Control:
It's not very surprising that teen pregnancy has declined since it has been declining for most of the last 60 years.
Of course, there is the separate issue of unmarried teens getting pregnant. The unmarried rate has risen from 12% to 79%, as the chart in the CDC report makes clear. Although even this trend seems to be now slowing, which is an interesting thing the article could have focused on, but didn't.
ETA:
Also, the USA is not homogeneous, and the report mentions this:
"Birth rates for teenagers vary substantially by State. In 1999, the most recent year for which State-specific birth rates are available, the rates for ages 15–19 years ranged from 24.0 for New Hampshire to 72.5 in Mississippi."
Teen pregnancy in 1958 does not even come close to measuring the same thing that "teen pregnancy" does today. Today, almost all teen pregnancies are unwanted -- which was emphatically not the case in 1958.
I'm not sure that delayed childbirth is really such a good thing for society. If you delay too long, you increase the risk of complications and birth defects, hence the US's increasing infant mortality rate. But more importantly, it weakens families by not having as many generations around for as long. My grandmother was 45 when my older brother was born. Now, our parents will be over 60 at their grandchild's birth. Our great-grandparents were around until our teenage years, but our children won't have the same privilege, because our grandparents are all dead.
I think this will self correct within a generation, on some more or less optimal value.
Because I think this is not primarily about grandparents, it is about female fertility on one hand and fear of "can I provide"/"I don't want such obligation yet".
I.e: my aunt had her first born when she was over 40, and knows this will be her last one.
I know several of my older peers that had their fistborn roughly at 30, and they attempted the second one already within two years.
I had my first daughter at 26. (Similar to my parents and parents of my wife first-borns were a kind of a happy accident :)
And I can understand these trade offs. Heck, sometimes even I have an argument with my wife how much easier would some things have been if we have been slightly more careful for one or two more years :-)
But I understand the sentiment about grand-parents :)
Teenagers today are 31 percent less likely to binge drink than teenagers 20 years ago
I am not convinced[1]. Experience and endless media items about health impacts of alcohol, increased binge drinking, etc over the last decade simply do not support it. Seems like they drink far more when they do binge too.
every two years, the federal government asks thousands of teenagers dozens of questions about whether they are all right
Teenagers today are 31 percent less likely to admit binge drinking than teenagers 20 years ago
Is a FAR more likely interpretation. Perhaps that's as a result of all that media coverage!
[1] Or perhaps the UK and Europe experience of alcohol over the last 20 years is the inverse of the US.
There was an article in the UK recently which claimed my generation (i.e. roughly 20 years ago) was "peak booze" in the UK and it had been declining ever since. So St least on that stat UK and US seem to be in accord.
It's because kids are using social media on their phones instead of going outside to play. Going outside to play is a precursor to all kinds of trouble. Trouble leads to more trouble which eventually leads to conflict and heroin.
This old dude I once knew was shaking his head at complaining about how teens nowadays are just playing with their phones all the time. Come on! This is a good thing! The precursor to all physical conflict is having your hands free to form a fist or hold a weapon. If teens are holding their phones more than they are less likely to fight.
The Kids Are All Right
written by Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard
Loudly chomping on a stick of gum, Emily finished the last few words of her barely comprehensible text message: “BTW..that shit was cray. WTF!! : )” She laughed, and slid back into her seat to listen. The professor droned on about some dead playwright named Shakespeare. Who cares? The monotone began to recede as she opened her laptop and checked her Instagram, eagerly eyeing the number of “likes” her latest selfie had obtained. One thousand and twenty two! This thrilled her. However, her cheer temporarily soured as she remembered that her BMW was in the shop. How unfair. Now she had to ride home with her roommate Rebecca, a nerd who would force her to listen to pretentious “indie” bands on the drive home. Ugh. Her aged, out of touch, and pedantic professor finally ceased speaking of something called Hamlet and dismissed the class. Excitedly, Emily stood up, pulled down her pink “I love me” shirt, and walked out of the classroom. As she entered the hall, she quickly turned up the volume of her iPod, humming along to the lyrics of her favorite pop song: “I’m so fancy/can’t you taste this gold/Remember my name/bout to blow.”
If you believe that society is deteriorating as traditional values and moral verities decay, Emily is your worst nightmare: vain, selfish, impulsive, and dismissive of anything of transcendent value. You are also not alone. Many moral theorists, from Hesiod to Russell Kirk, have warned about the selfishness and moral vacuousness of the next generation. Recently, researchers have put forward data that seem to at least partially support such pessimism about Millennials. In fact, Jean Twenge’s excellent and entertaining book about these Millennials is tellingly entitled Generation Me.¹ She and W. Keith Campbell followed this book with the more ominously titled, The Narcissism Epidemic.²
Yet in this essay, we will forward a more optimistic perspective, arguing that although some of the data Twenge and her colleagues have advanced are correct, their interpretation of them is not. Some indicators of self-regard and even narcissism have increased from the 70s through to the 2000s, but these increases don’t reflect increasing narcissism; rather they reflect increasing humanism–a general emphasis on the value of all individuals, including the self.³
The kids are not only all right; in many ways, they are better than we are.
This article is based on self-reporting by teenagers. How can it be used for concluding, well, anything? If you want to see how things like pregnancies are decreasing among teenagers, you would have to get that data from hospitals or such.
The only thing this tells me is that teenagers have become less comfortable about revealing anything about their sex life or smoking. In an age where Facebook photos and Tweets can cause you to lose your job, that is entirely unsurprising.
"In 2011, 18.1 percent of teenagers smoked. Now, 15.7 percent do. That’s a 13 percent decline." I don't know about that one slim. Them numbers seem funny to me.
I, for one, don't want youth to blindly accept the conventions of their elders and meekly conform to the way things are. I'd like to see more metrics around positive aspects of nonconformity rather than just the negative, and see if we're losing both ends of the spectrum here.