High School Students Are Growing Incredibly Antisocial
(ANALYSIS) I’ve got two sons — one is 13, and the other is 10. I remember when my wife and I were thinking about having children, we talked all the time about the best type of birthing plan (I distinctly remember becoming intimately aware of something called the cascade of intervention).
Then it was breastfeeding versus bottle feeding and cloth diapers versus disposable diapers. It felt like it was consuming most of our conversations for a period of time. You just want to make sure that you are making the best decisions for your children so that they can hopefully grow up to be decent, productive human beings.
Then we went through the preschool stage. How often should we send them? What school is best for their needs? That was certainly a rousing debate in our household. Then, public school vs. private school — my wife is Catholic, after all.
It seems like there’s no end to all the decisions parents have to face, and every life stage gives way to another set of questions that don’t have any easy answers.
Now we are in the phase of cellphones, screen time and socialization. The best way that I can describe my goals for my boys is that they don’t become the weirdos who have no understanding of pop culture but are also not glued to their screens every waking moment.
Good luck finding that balance. There’s an empirical reason for my concern — the data about the social lives of high school students is incredibly bleak and honestly makes me very worried for the next generation.
Let me show you what I mean by generating a handful of graphs from this great dataset called Monitoring the Future. They’ve been asking questions of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders since the mid-1970s. What an amazing way to track what teenagers are doing with their time over the last couple of decades.
Let me start by focusing on a question that asks high school seniors how often they go on dates in a typical month.
In 1995, the vast majority of seniors were going on dates several times a month. In this data, just about one third of them said that they were going on zero or one date per month.
Between 1995 and 2010, the share who dated very little rose to just below 50%. Let’s call that an increase of 15 points in about 15 years. From 2010 through 2021, the share who barely went on dates rose to 72%. That’s an increase of 22 points in just 11 years. In other words, the rate doubled in recent years.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, please visit his Substack page.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.