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A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone. 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. 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. Born between 19, 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.

T 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. But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent. 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. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them. 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 changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind.

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The allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens.Īt first I presumed these might be blips, but the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. In all my analyses of generational data-some reaching back to the 1930s-I had never seen anything like it. 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. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.Īround 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Why Self-Compassion Works Better Than Self-Esteem Olga Khazan I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.” “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. That’s just the way her generation is, she 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. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. 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. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Those mall trips are infrequent-about once a month. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.” I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them.

“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.

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We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. She answered her phone-she’s had an iPhone since she was 11-sounding as if she’d just woken up. O ne day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas.