{"id":15775,"date":"2019-03-20T00:58:58","date_gmt":"2019-03-20T00:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=15775"},"modified":"2019-03-21T12:25:29","modified_gmt":"2019-03-21T12:25:29","slug":"teens-have-less-face-time-with-their-friends-and-are-lonelier-than-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/teens-have-less-face-time-with-their-friends-and-are-lonelier-than-ever\/","title":{"rendered":"Teens have less face time with their friends \u2013 and are lonelier than ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jean Twenge<\/a>, San Diego State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Ask a teen today how she communicates with her friends, and she\u2019ll probably hold up her smartphone. Not that she actually calls her friends; it\u2019s more likely that she texts them or messages them on social media.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s teens \u2013 the generation I call \u201ciGen<\/a>\u201d that\u2019s also called Gen Z \u2013 are constantly connected with their friends via digital media, spending as much as nine hours a day on average<\/a> with screens.<\/p>\n

How might this influence the time they spend with their friends in person?<\/p>\n

Some studies<\/a> have found that people who spend more time on social media actually have more face time with friends<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But studies like this are only looking at people already operating in a world suffused with smartphones. They can\u2019t tell us how teens spent their time before and after digital media use surged<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What if we zoomed out and compared how often previous generations of teens spent time with their friends to how often today\u2019s teens are doing so? And what if we also saw how feelings of loneliness differed across the generations?<\/p>\n

To do this, my co-authors and I examined trends in how 8.2 million U.S. teens<\/a> spent time with their friends since the 1970s. It turns out that today\u2019s teens are socializing with friends in fundamentally different ways \u2013 and also happen to be the loneliest generation on record.<\/p>\n

Less work, but fewer hangs?<\/h2>\n

After studying two large, nationally representative surveys, we found that although the amount of time teens spent with their friends face to face has declined since the 1970s, the drop accelerated after 2010 \u2013 just as smartphones use started to grow.<\/p>\n

Compared with teenagers in previous decades, iGen teens are less likely to get together with their friends. They\u2019re also less likely to go to parties, go out with friends, date, ride in cars for fun, go to shopping malls or go to the movies.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not because they are spending more time on work, homework or extracurricular activities. Today\u2019s teens<\/a> hold fewer paid jobs, homework time is either unchanged or down since the 1990s, and time spent on extracurricular activities is about the same.<\/p>\n

Yet they\u2019re spending less time with their friends in person \u2013 and by large margins. In the late 1970s, 52 percent of 12th-graders got together with their friends almost every day. By 2017, only 28 percent did. The drop was especially pronounced after 2010.<\/p>\n