Teenagers today are so glued to screens that they aren’t getting drunk or pregnant – how boring

The media alarms accentuating and reprimanding the antics of teenagers over their alleged excessive and dangerous behaviour is sensationalist. From teddy boys slashing cinema seats in the supposedly staid 1950s through to the invention of the pill, the “permissive society” and the era of free love (whatever that was) and doggedly on to the drugs scares of our own times, the media has traditionally envisaged that the young can’t be trusted with their own minds, bodies and health. And they make great copy for a newspaper editor looking to provoke some tut tutting among a hyper-hypocritical public.

Now look. Something called “sexting” has replaced hanky-panky, according to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, who know about this sort of thing. In the bloodless words of the BPAS report: “Social, romantic and sexual relationships are increasingly experienced online, and sexting is seen as an alternative as well as a precursor to intercourse”. Funny idea of foreplay, that.

Sex – actual body-on-body, physical shagging – is going out of fashion. The very future of the nation is endangered. We know this because, on the same day that the BPAS released its grim warnings about millennials’ and post-millennials’ sobriety and maturity, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) told us that the birth rate has fallen again. There were 679,106 live births in England and Wales in 2017, a decrease of 2.5 per cent from 2016 and the lowest number of live births since 2006. Fertility rates decreased for every age group in 2017, except for women aged 40 years and over.

The “teen mum” and even better a “single teen mum” was previously an ideal object for abuse, with both being pitifully unable to defend themselves against victimisation, with the media propagating that a wave of child mothers were ready to destroy the nation through their gross moral turpitude. Well, that’s over. Teenage pregnancy rates have fallen by 55 per cent in the last decade to their lowest ever level.

What on earth is going on? I suppose it’s not so surprising, on reflection. The kids of today are all online, with a significant chunk of them spending seven hours a day doing “non-work”, thanks to staring at some sort of screen. They don’t have friends any more. They don’t go out. They don’t go boozing. As BPAS’s report said: “Getting good grades or succeeding in their chosen career was the top priority for the young people surveyed, with 82 per cent of respondents stating this was of high importance, compared to 68 per cent who felt that spending time with their friends was of high importance.”

However, what’s so bad about wanting to get your end away?

The boring generation that has been growing up since Tony Blair was prime minister drink significantly less alcohol and see excessive alcohol consumption as a dangerous activity that “puts them at risk‎ of unwanted incidents”. Which I always thought was the point. My life has been a series of unwanted incidents, some shaming me internally for years. It’s all part of growing up. Or at least, it used to be.

A quarter of these modern teenagers never drink alcohol and of those who do drink, most do so at annoyingly sensible levels – half of that lot consume one to four units on a typical occasion. Which is nothing, frankly. Wimps.

One in five teenagers in relationships see their partner less than once a week. Significantly, BPAS’s report says that young people who socialised more face-to-face with their friends or partner were more likely to be sexually active, indicating that these low levels of face-to-face interaction may be linked to the decreasing rate of teenage pregnancies.

So they seem a cold, dull, passionless, moralistic, sensible, hard-working, conscientious, get-to-bed early, fun-free bunch this rising generation of Britons, who can’t even be bothered to reproduce. Maybe that’s just as well. Imagine having them for parents.