24 Quotes by Jean M. Twenge

Nearly 40% of iGen high school seniors in 2016 had never tried alcohol at all, and the number of 8th graders who have tried alcohol has been cut nearly in half.

No matter what the cause, the result is the same: iGen teens are less likely to experience the freedom of being out of the house without their parents--those first tantalizing tastes of the independence of being an adult, those times when teens make their own decisions, good or bad.

Adolescence--the time when teens begin to do things adults do--now happens later. Thirteen-year-olds--and even 18-year-olds-- are less likely to act like adults and spend their time like adults. They are more likely, instead, to act like children--not by being immature, necessarily, but by postponing the usual activities of adults. Adolescence is now an extension of childhood rather than the beginning of adulthood.

Yet GenX'er teens didn't slow down--they were just as likely to drive, drink alcohol, and date as their Boomer peers and more likely to have sex and get pregnant as teens. But then they waited longer to reach full adulthood with careers and children. So GenX'ers managed to lengthen adolescence beyond all previous limits: they started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later.

Some suggest that this cocoon mentality is behind recent campus trends such as "trigger warnings" to alert students that a reading or lecture material might be disturbing and "safe spaces" where students can go if they are upset by a campus speaker's message. One safe space, for example, featured coloring books and videos of frolicking puppies, neatly connecting the idea of safe spaces with that of childhood.

...social media is not real life. Her photos, which looked like casual snaps, actually took several hours to set up and up to a hundred attempts to get right...

Every time I went to the library, it felt like a treasure hunt: somewhere amid those dusty books was the answer, and all I had to do was find it.

The purpose of school is for children to learn, not for them to feel good about themselves all the time.

Fewer teens having sex is one of the reasons behind what many see as one of the most positive youth trends in recent years: the teen birthrate hit an all-time low in 2015, cut by more than half since its modern peak in the early 1990s.