From sex to alcohol, American teenagers are in no rush to grow up | Jean Hannah Edelstein

Kids today: they just don’t drink and have sex like they used to. According to a new study, young people are defying the expectations of adults yet again by failing to accelerate themselves towards adulthood with the characteristic speed of their teenage predecessors.

A new study published in Child Development, drawing on longitudinal data from millions of American teens between 1976 and 2016, finds that ‘in terms of adult activities, 18-year-olds now look like 15-year-olds once did’.

By ‘adult activities’, the authors are referring to beloved past-times like drinking and sex, as well as dating, driving and having jobs. In other words: on average, American teens today are not growing up as fast as previous generations. And the degree to which this news has been received with surprise and concern reveals an ugly side of American culture: a collective belief that the teen years should be a period of debauchery.

For generations we’ve told kids to do as we say, not as we did: chortled over the tales of our own wild youths while urging those in the next generation not to replicate our mistakes.

Maybe I’m just jealous, since I don’t have any of those good stories. Perhaps the most rebellious thing about me is that I never had an illegal alcoholic drink. Growing up in a suburb in upstate New York in the late 90s, I too put off sex and drinking until I went to university, because I knew that my parents would get really mad at me if I indulged. I wouldn’t say that they were strict – their approach to parenting was more about being firm and fair, and also being very nosy.

My mom and dad always knew what I was up to, and in this they were ahead of their time: the authors of the study cite smaller families and greater parental involvement in children’s lives as a key reason for the decrease in the pursuit of vice by the young. This wasn’t cool at the time, but now I can see that it was a privilege that they had the resources to give my sibilings and me that level of attention.

I’m not sorry that I wasn’t studying for the SATs with a hangover or panicking about preventing pregnancy while learning my lines for the high school play (eight lines). I am sorry when I think about my peers who did have the opportunity to grow up faster than me: the ones whose early experimentation led to addiction or parenthood long before they were ready.

And yet there are inevitable questions about this upswing in good behavior by young people: whether it’s a sign that their lives are worse than their predecessors. Dr Jean Twenge, one of the authors of the study, notes that kids living their lives through smartphones may be a driver in the reduction of sex and alcohol use: if your friends are virtual, then it’s hard to get drunk and sleep with them.

Twenge has also pointed out that the decrease in these so-called ‘adult behaviors’ has broadly correlated with a massive increase in mental health issues within the same age group, which may be due in part to a different version of the same extra-engaged parenting that keeps kids away from sex and alcohol.

Is it possible to be a ‘helicopter parent’ who stops your children from smoking weed when they still live under your roof, but doesn’t make them feel crushed by the pressure to grow up to be successful capitalists? One conclusion may be that young people are better at making healthy choices for themselves, and parents need to follow their lead.