Growing Up Slowly

Here's an interesting result from a study of teenagers today, this according to psychology  professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, the lead author on the study published in the journal 'Child Development'. She says that compared to teens of the 70's, 80's and 90's, today's teens are not concerned as much about being adults. They are creeping rather than wild and crazy,  putting off risky behaviors like drinking and sex, but also delaying jobs, driving, dating and other of the usual developmental steps teens have long taken towards independence.

“The whole developmental pathway has slowed down,” she said, with today's 18-year-olds living more like 15-year-olds once did. The study relies on seven nationally representative surveys repeated with 8 million teens, ages 13-19, over several decades.  It documents and combines several trends often explained as separate phenomena. People in their early 20s now often act more like teens, young teens often act more like children, and I guess children act like children because there isn't a lower level of development for them. But why are kids maturing more slowly now?

Some of the changes recorded among younger teens surveyed in 2010-2016, compared to those surveyed in the early 1990s. Here are some of the study's conclusions, and they are seen among all economic groups in every part of the United Sates.

• 29% of 9th graders had sex, down from 38%.
• 29% of 8th graders drank alcohol, down from 56%.
• 32% of 8th graders had worked for pay, down from 63%
Among 12th graders, data on most behaviors goes back to 1976.  In 2010-2016:
• 67% drank, down from 93% in the earlier era.
• 55% worked for pay, down from 76%.
• 73% had drivers’ licenses, down from 88%.
• 63% dated, down from 86%.
• 62% had had sex, down from 68% in the early 1990s, the earliest that data was collected.

According to the study these trends are not explained by the demands of homework and extracurricular activities, which have not significantly increased. But the Internet is a different variable and the authors of the study feel it is a main driver of the crawl to adulthood today. The study also feels that more parents who are super protective of their kids also encourages the lack of rush to adulthood.  We now have a culture in which parents invest more attention in fewer children and life expectancies are longer. Perhaps the Internet shows kids today that being an adult is not the ideal fantasy previous generations thought it to be.

Growing up is undoubtedly harder to do today. There are more places to hide and more reasons to stay a child. The question that the study and no one knows at this point is whether growing more slowly as kids do today is a better or worse model for making them more competent and happy adults.