Young people are struggling to adapt to growing up and sloughing off typical milestones teenagers and young adults accomplish as they age. They’re working less, if at all, making fewer friends, and some aren’t even embracing average teen goals like getting a driver’s license. In 1995, teens aged 16-19 had their driver’s licenses, by 2021, that number had dropped to 40 percent, per the Federal Highway Administration.
Young adults are struggling to live on their own too. In September 2020, Pew Research reported that for the first time since the Great Depression, a majority — 52% — of young adults lived with their parents. It has improved some since then. A 2023 National Association of Home Builders survey found that number has dropped significantly to 19%, though it’s not entirely clear if the metrics measured are exactly the same.
Overall, this demographic isn’t enjoying relationships either. Fewer men and women are married with children today than in the 1950s. Further, the median age at first marriage for men rose from 23 in 1950 to 30 by 2018. For women, the median age at first marriage rose from 20 to 28 over the same period.
Stunted growth among teenagers and young people isn’t an entirely new thing to observe, but it does seem to be objectively worse than previous generations. Even if, in theory, brimming on the cusp of adulthood should be delightful, a bit daunting, and of course equal parts scary and exciting. When else can you try new jobs, make new friends, and only have a handful of monthly bills for which to pay?
There’s a lot of reasons why this could be happening and it’s most certainly a mix of phenomena. The economy is in a tough spot right now, despite what President Joe Biden claims. Inflation is still higher now than it was before the pandemic. Groceries and other food-related costs like dining out have also increased — some items have doubled in cost in just a few years. This can make taking steps in life to be independent feel daunting. A teenager working 20 hours a week making $10 per hour only brings home roughly $800 a month. That doesn’t go as far as it used to just a few years ago.
Teenagers are also more dependent on social media and smartphones than a generation before. In fact, today’s young people are pretty much the first generation to grow up with a phone-centered life. Unfortunately, they struggle more with implementing screen-related boundaries than adults do (and even some adults struggle too).
In his new book, “The Anxious Generation,” author and psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests that the environment kids are growing up in today is hostile to human development, largely in part because of smartphones, but also because adults coddle kids too much. This is not unlike Abigail Shrier’s thesis “Bad Therapy,” wherein she asserts that too many anxious young kids are getting too much therapy talking too much about their problems — and not getting any better.
The more data we see that suggests kids are struggling with devices we bought them or because of the way we parented them, the more we must pay attention to the symptoms and present a cure before this disease metastasizes, if it hasn’t already. Based on the data, legislators should consider, or at least debate, bans on social media under 14, like the kind Gov. Ron DeSantis just signed for Floridians. It doesn’t solve everything, but it can help parents stem the tide that is the tsunami of smartphone use in the home. Schools can help too, by banning smartphones except in cases of emergencies.
As for coddling kids, this is much more vague and harder to solve, especially because it inevitably involves different personalities and styles of parenting. It’s hard for parents not to hover over their kids when all they see in the news is scary and negative. This too must be balanced, for the sake of the young people trying to grow up.
It’s not all doom and gloom — at least it shouldn’t be, for young people in America. In the end, young people over 18 must make different decisions for themselves, even if they’ve struggled through childhood with overbearing parents or smartphone addiction. To grow and thrive they must slough off routines and mechanisms that aren’t serving them, even if it means deleting apps, exercising instead of being on social media, and working an hourly service job rather than gaming. They must attempt to pursue purpose, rather than pleasure, for its purpose that gives true meaning and prompts motivation when getting out of bed seems hard.
