[Spectator] There’s never been an older generation that didn’t complain about the younger one. Parents tut and fuss over errant youth. That’s the way of it. But in the end the kids come around. Swingers grow into Karens. The wild child pays his bills.But kids these days... they do seem different. It’s not just that we, the older generations, are worried about them, but that they’re desperately worried about themselves. And according to Dr Jean Twenge, a psychologist at San Diego State University who studies generational changes, we’re right to worry. Almost 30 per cent of American girls have clinical depression and it’s the same across the Anglosphere. The suicide rate for ten- to 24-year-olds has tripled. ’Let that sink in,’ writes Twenge in the introduction to her new book, Generations. ’Imagine if nine domestic airline flights filled with ten- to 24-year-olds crashed every single year killing everyone on board. Airplanes would not be allowed to fly again until we figured out why.’
Twenge (51, Gen X) began looking at the differences between generations as a 22-year-old doctoral student. She documented the rise in individualism that began with the baby boomers and continued with millennials. But it wasn’t until 2012 that she noticed the data really beginning to change. ’There were abrupt shifts in teen behaviours and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs and many of the distinctive characteristics of the millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data — some reaching back to the 1930s — I had never seen anything like it.’
In 2017 she published a book about this distressed generation — ’iGen’, as she called them — and identified the smartphone as the culprit. Now, six years later, iGen is more widely known as Gen Z, and Twenge’s theories are as good as proved. In her latest book she has crunched the data from polls and surveys involving 39 million people both in the USA and in the UK. ’The datasets don’t reveal their secrets easily,’ she says. But when they do, it’s not pretty.
’There are some trends for young adults that are very strong and sudden that we have to start talking about,’ Twenge says. ’Two of those with Gen Z are the enormous rise in depression and self-harm, and that shows up in UK samples as well.’ Are you sure the smartphones are to blame, I ask — isn’t the world just a bleaker place?
The more hours a day a teen spends on social media, the more likely it is that he or she is depressed. Some of the best data on that comes from a cohort study in the UK, says Twenge.