“Just over half of U.S. teens say they have used chatbots for help with schoolwork, and 12% say they’ve gotten emotional support. More teens think AI will be positive for them than negative.”
“Clavicular is 6-foot-2, weighs 180 pounds and has a 31-inch waist. His biacromial width — basically the span of the clavicle, from which the 20-year-old streamer gets his name — is 19.5 inches. He has a midface ratio, which is derived by dividing the distance from the pupil to the mouth by the distance between […]
“That peek under the hood of her friend’s dating practice opened Elle’s eyes to a broader pattern. Not just how romantic relationships were forming, but where they were breaking down. As she talked with more peers and reflected on her own experience, a clear structure emerged. One that looks very different from the meet-cutes of […]
“48% of Americans aged 18–29 use Reddit—more than WhatsApp, X, and Threads. Reddit usage increases with household income and education level… It’s the third most visited website in the United States (behind Google and YouTube). People visit Reddit.com more often than Facebook.com, Instagram.com, or Chatgpt.com.”
“The experience of school has changed rapidly in recent generations. Starting in the 1980s, a metrics-obsessed regime took over American education and profoundly altered the expectations placed on children, up and down the class ladder. In fact, it has altered the experience of childhood itself… “What’s happening is, instead of saying, ‘We need to fix […]
“Civil War-era hand-clapping songs (“Miss Susie had a steamboat,” etc.), Gen-Xers’ graffiti-filled notebooks, and yes, six-seven shrugs in 2025 all fall into a part of children’s culture known as childlore. Childlore is a distinctive genre that includes all the games, rituals, stories, and other activities passed from child to child in playgrounds, classrooms, and now, […]
“For most of the 20th century, scores on IQ tests steadily increased. This trend was termed the Flynn effect, after James Flynn, who described it. But in developed countries, this increase appears to have stopped and even reversed for cohorts born in the latter decades of the 20th century.”
“In 2001, about 30% of young adults and middle-aged adults saw moderate drinking as harmful, while 21% of older adults agreed. However, by 2007, 18- to 34-year-olds had pulled ahead of both other age groups in their concern, including a recent surge to about two-thirds saying moderate drinking is harmful. Middle-aged and older adults’ belief […]
“No matter what AI becomes, this is what AI already is: a globally scaled virtual interlocutor that can offer morsels of life advice wrapped in a mode of flattery that we have good reason to believe may increase narcissism and delusions among young and vulnerable users, respectively. I think this is something worth worrying about, […]
“At Pasvik Folk High School, where the curriculum revolves around Nordic traditions and survival skills, cellphones are not verboten, but eventually their lure subsides… Students from around the world learn to hunt and build fires, to care for the Huskies and endure the monthslong polar night, all while navigating that poignant and charged phase on […]
“The vast majority—nearly 80%—of respondents said they have their own smartphone, and another 5% said they have a phone that is not a smartphone. About half the kids in the survey have phone with a data plan—which gives them constant access to the internet.”
“Thirty-three percent of teens use AI companions for social interaction and relationships, including conversation practice, emotional support, role-playing, friendship, or romantic interactions. Nearly half (46%) of teens view AI companions primarily as tools or programs.”
““Never again will there be such susceptibility to drill and discipline, such plasticity to habituation, or such ready adjustment to new conditions,” he wrote. “It is the age of external and mechanical training. Reading, writing, drawing, musical teaching, foreign tongues and their pronunciation, the manipulation of numbers and of geometric elements, and many kinds of […]
“A 2021 study of 10,000 young people from 10 different countries reported in Lancet found that about 60% were very worried about climate change. Additionally, 85% were at least moderately concerned. Second, more than 45% of the young people surveyed in the Lancet study reported their feelings about climate change adversely impacted their daily functioning. […]
“The course outline for Adulting 101 includes going to college and other pathways; getting a job; banking; budgeting; doing taxes; housing; home maintenance and safety; health, nutrition, and cooking; insurance; voting and community involvement; digital citizenship; and personal relationships and conflict. Adulting 102 covers travel, doing laundry, personal and mental health, tech or digital health, […]
““We’re seeing teens experiment with different types of relationships — being someone’s wife, being someone’s father, being someone’s kid. There’s game and anime-related content that people are working though. There’s advice,” said Robbie Torney, senior director of AI Programs at family advocacy group Common Sense Media. “The sex is part of it but it’s not […]
“Boredom has a purpose. To understand and harness it, we need to give our minds more opportunities to experience it. In the rest of this post, I will explore the many ways our efforts to conquer boredom through technology have produced unintended consequences, including the near-total capture of our attention, the death of daydreaming, and […]
“Americans share many common high school experiences, especially four that each are shared by more than three-quarters. These are having a crush on someone, having a group of friends, taking a class they loved, and taking one they hated.”
“If the mainstream media isn’t bashing video games, they’re ignoring them entirely. In doing so they’ve missed one of the most powerful forces shaping the moral imagination of today’s youth. Young men, who are indeed in crisis, are left to absorb these narratives alone, unexamined and invalidated. Which is especially foolish since, far from being […]
“Associations with inadequate sleep are both wide-sweeping and profoundly negative… From all measures in this survey, there are no positive associations with greater time spent on social media, only negative…”
“Creating and understanding the purpose of rules”
“One in 8 young people aged 13 to 20—and 1 in 10 teenagers aged 13 to 17—said they “personally know someone” who has been the target of deepfake nude imagery, and 1 in 17 have been targets themselves.“
“In the rest of this post, I explore how social media platforms shape adolescent psychological experiences, the risks they present, and practical interventions for mental health professionals helping young people navigate this digital landscape.”
“On average, Americans first see online pornography at age 12, according to a 2023 survey of adolescents by Common Sense Media, and 73 percent of those aged 17 and under have seen it, a figure consistent with other research.”
“At least that is what they told researchers at U.C.L.A. The high popularity of romance plots in movies and shows suggests otherwise.”
“One data point educators find heartening: The vast majority of students—94 percent—want at least some media literacy instruction in schools. In fact, more than half of teens surveyed—57 percent—believe that schools should “definitely” be required to teach media literacy.”
“Younger consumers are also more likely to say they feel “more valued for their talents” online than offline, feel “more appreciated” online, and feel “more creative” online, than older consumers.”
“Dopamine can sometimes sound like the bad guy in this conversation, but all in all, it’s an awesome neurotransmitter. It’s what drives us to create, to learn, to build, to improve. Dopamine pushes us to boldly go where no person has gone before… The problem with our culture today is not too much desire but […]
“During 2023–2024, current e-cigarette use among middle and high school students declined from 7.7% to 5.9%.”
“These days, she thinks, students either want to do all of their work online, at their own pace, or they want everything to happen face to face. They don’t want to have to do both.”
“79% of Gen Z feel optimistic about their futures, but only 51% feel prepared for them. 68% plan to go to college, yet only 22% feel very prepared to succeed in college.”
“57% of students report that the best teacher they ever had was energetic and excited about what they were teaching. Nearly three-quarters (73%) of Gen Zers also say this teacher cared about them as a person — a factor that is more important than several substantive teaching qualities, such as making the content easy to […]
“The most recent survey, which is part of a larger body of research on Gen Z by the Walton Family Foundation and Gallup, was conducted online March 13-20, 2024, with 1,675 10- to 18-year-old youth and one of their parents or guardians via the probability-based Gallup Panel. It finds that, rather than being completely positive […]
“The statistics are starting to feel like their own cliché. Over a quarter of men under 30 say they have no close friends. Teenage boys now spend two hours less a week socializing than girls and they also spend about seven hours more per week than their female peers on screens.”
“Even as educators see an uptick in misbehavior, nearly half of teachers and administrators say their schools are using restorative justice practices more now than five years ago, according to a recent EdWeek Research Center survey. But the purest version of the restorative justice framework is hard to come by, said Allison Payne, a professor […]
“Religion and its rites might be weakening, but we still need the psychology of rites of passage. If we want a healthy life and a healthy society, we must reclaim them. But simply to revive the rites of passage of days past won’t suffice. They are outdated; they have outlived their purpose. We need to […]
“There is a literature of at least 600 published papers suggesting that happiness is U-shaped in age and, conversely, that unhappiness is hump-shaped in age. In other words, when a person is young, they are as happy as they are going to be until old age (on average; individual lives vary)… That was then. And […]
“This video has nearly 30,000 comments, some from Gen Xers nostalgic for their ‘90s youth—but many from Gen Z, aching for a world they never experienced. Older generations might dismiss this as teens wanting to be different and reject modern culture, as they often do. But the comments reveal something deeper: “As someone who graduated […]
“How adolescents and young adults navigate education, work, and family will shape the rest of their lives… Passing key milestones between the ages of 14 and 24 increases the chances of passing subsequent milestones in a timely manner, but there is no single path to success… While missing a milestone does not lock in later-in-life […]
“None of this is lost on young people, and the shattering of the social contract has left them feeling rage and shame. Half of Americans older than 55 say they are “extremely proud” to be American; that number drops to 18% among 18- to 34-year-olds. This weakens the immunity system of America, allowing minor cuts […]
“In 2023, 46 percent of seniors said that they’d had a drink in the year before being interviewed; that is a precipitous drop from 88 percent in 1979, when the behavior peaked, according to the annual Monitoring the Future survey, a closely watched national poll of youth substance use. A similar downward trend was observed […]
“An issue of prime importance to teenagers across surveys is education. Asked an open-ended question by Common Sense about the most important thing that could be done to improve the lives of children, a plurality, one in five, said improving or reforming the education system.”
“Nicotine pouches are even less visible than vaping. Zyns come in two strengths in the United States, three and six milligrams. A single six-milligram pouch is a dose so high that first-time users on TikTok have said it caused them to vomit or pass out.”
“I see teenagers unintentionally becoming more unforgiving and judgmental rather than open-minded and compassionate. When we can’t or don’t talk freely, we lose the chance to find real common ground, acknowledge complexity or grasp that even our own opinions can be malleable. If we listen only to those who already agree with us, we won’t […]
“The main line of our work so far can be summarized like this: We have shown that there is an adolescent mental health crisis and it was caused primarily by the rapid rewiring of childhood in the early 2010s, from play-based to phone-based. It hit many countries at the same time and it is hitting […]
“Today’s hyperpartisan system, with its Manichaean mentality, can make parties even more unappealing for younger voters, said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, whose specialty is younger voters. “They are not willing to take that responsibility to have to defend one party and create an enemy […]
“In our recent study, we focused on the UK (where we both live), surveying 722 residents who ranged in age from 18 to 77. Our study had several main aims. One was to assess how ‘adult’ our participants felt, and how that related to their ages and life circumstances.”
“I wanted to put a face to the alarming headlines about teens and social media — in particular, girls. And to understand one tension: What happens when girls’ self-confidence, which has been shown to drop right around this age, intersects with the thing that seems to be obviously contributing to their struggle? The long-term effects […]
“Between 2016 and 2022, I spoke to around 10,000 children and young people aged between six and 22 about the impact of pornography on their lives. These children were from right across the UK and a range of backgrounds. I met children in classrooms, youth theatres and clubs.”
“The overall goal is for the seniors to provide guidance to their younger peers about day-to-day stressors and challenges, but also teach the incoming students important academic skills, including study habits and techniques, organization, time management, goal setting, conflict resolution, interview preparation, and notetaking. The curriculum is based on the book “Role Models: Examples of […]
“The age trends reviewed for this report show that the rate has declined 10 percentage points over the past two decades among younger adults, aged 18 to 34, falling from 72% to 62%.”
“By early afternoon, somewhere between 300 and 700 students were out of class. The bulk were at the sit-in, but a sizable number were milling around in groups, intoxicated by the intense emotions of the day and the sudden absence of restrictions. Outside, the news vans were lined up in front of the school. A […]
“He then shows how we have systematically deprived children of free play since the 1970s and shows that adolescents’ mental health has declined substantially over the same period. He notes that this is a correlation, not proof of causation, although experiments with animals support the claim that play deprivation causes anxiety and poor social development.”
“It’s a dark time for therapists treating adolescents in despair. But some things do work.”
“The unplanned event has strained the campus and kept the little chapel filled at all hours, prompting administrators to wind down the spectacle and disruption. Beginning Friday, the school said, there will be no more public events. Students said they were ready to return to their normal campus rhythms. Nascent revivals are now breaking out […]
“Data published by the CDC and analyzed by emergency pediatric psychiatrist Tyler Black show a clear pattern: children die by suicide at much higher rates on school days than they do on weekends or during summer months… Like many of his peers in pediatric medicine, he calls for later school start times, among other measures, […]
““I don’t know anybody my age who’s like, ‘Yeah, I want to have kids,’” said… a 15-year-old junior.”
“From 2001 to 2003, an average of 35% of U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 29 said they smoked cigarettes, compared with 12% in the latest estimate… Between 2019 and 2022, an average of 26% of young adults indicated they smoked marijuana, up from 17% between 2013 and 2015.”
“The truth is that campus protests, not just in recent years but going back for decades now, bear only a cosmetic resemblance to those of the 1960s. The latter represented a rejection of the authority of adults. They challenged the very legitimacy of the institutions at which they were directed, and which they sought to […]
“They reason they’ll be fine is built right into the biology of early adolescence, explained Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University and the author of “Age of Opportunity,” the influential 2014 book on adolescent brain science. The fact that middle schoolers are going through a “critical period” of heightened brain flexibility, instability and […]
“Teens who bully, harass, or otherwise victimize their peers are not always lashing out in reaction to psychological problems or unhealthy home environments, but are often using aggression strategically to climb their school’s social hierarchy, a University of California, Davis, study suggests. These findings point to the reasons why most anti-bullying programs don’t work and […]
“Data from the most recent annual Monitoring the Future survey, conducted by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, show that from 2017 to 2019, the percentage of teens who said they vaped nicotine in the past 12 months doubled: 7.5% to 16.5% among eighth graders; from 15.8% to 30.7%, among 10th graders; and […]
“Many schools and programs, from elementary to graduate level, take their honor codes seriously. And for good reason. Empirical research has repeatedly found that schools that are committed to honor codes have significantly reduced cheating rates compared with schools that are not.”
“As the pandemic has upended school, summer plans, and daily life for millions of teenagers, many are turning to a podcast to cope. “Teenager Therapy,” hosted by five rising seniors at Loara High School in Anaheim, Calif., has become a lifeline for kids and a breakout hit.”
“Juul is almost old school … It’s no longer the teen favorite, says Meredith Berkman, co-founder of the advocacy group PAVE, Parents Against Vaping E-cigarettes. Among the disposables [that] are most popular, there’s Puff Bar, there’s Stig, there’s Viigo, Berkman says. They’re designed for one-time use. Then, they’re tossed, she explains. These have just flooded the […]
“Parents shouldn’t worry about peer pressure or peer influence… They should worry about who the peers are that their kids are hanging around with. When kids hang around with students who get better grades, their own grades go up over time. Teenagers can also pressure one another not to use drugs. Of course, the reverse […]
“While 71% of parents believe video games may have a positive impact on their teen, many parents also reported that gaming interferes with other aspects of daily life. Almost half of parents say gaming “sometimes” or “frequently” gets in the way of teens’ activities with family, and 46% of parents think gaming takes time away […]
“Don’t tell us technology has ruined our inner lives. Tell us to write a poem. Or make a sketch. Or sew fabric together. Or talk about how social media helps us make sense of the world and those around us. Perhaps social-media selfies aren’t the fullest representations of ourselves. But we’re trying to create an […]
“The number of people sickened with a severe lung illness linked to vaping has more than doubled to 450 possible cases in 33 states, including three deaths and a possible fourth… The patients were typically healthy, young, with a median age of 19 years and a majority have been men.”
“There isn’t a linear relationship between screen use and mental health. On most surveys, teens who use their phones up to two hours a day appear healthier than those who don’t use them at all. This doesn’t count other reasons for technology use, such as homework or listening to music.”
“Playtime. Downtime. Family time.”
“Twenty percent of students between the ages of 12 and 18 were bullied during the 2016-2017 school year, according to the report from the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the U.S. Education Department. Among those students who faced bullying, 15 percent said they were bullied online or by text, a 3.5 […]
“Include psychological abuse, and these numbers rise significantly. More than 60 percent of adolescents who date (both boys and girls) said they had experienced physical, sexual or psychological abuse from a partner.”
In the middle school of the American collective imagination, packs of filthy-minded boys stalk the halls, snapping bras and howling at the cliff’s edge of puberty. The sex-obsessed adolescent girl is a rarer breed. More often girls are positioned as victims of raging male hormones, or else they are styled as preternaturally mature, rising above […]
We closely followed the emergence of multiple social networks within a cohort of 226 undergraduate university students. They were strangers to each other on their first day at university, but developed densely knit social networks through time. We show that functional studying relationships tended to evolve from informal friendship relations. In a critical examination period […]
Digitally observing a prospective love interest, or an ex, online is yet another way that people are confusing each other romantically.”
“The study also outlines new theory, called sensory curation theory, that posits people use media devices to construct temporary “environments within environments” to create a comfortable sensory space for themselves… “Children for the most part do not get to choose where they eat, sleep, play, or learn. These are some of the only tools they […]
“JÜV Consulting is staffed entirely by young people who range in age from 14 to 22. “I was honestly quite skeptical when I found out they were teenagers,” Mr. DeLeo admitted. “After the first call, they blew me away. They could walk into a regular business setting with people in their 30s and 40s and […]
“A lot of people my age (not to sound like I am some uniquely sophisticated teen who is above such stupidity) are really enamoured with the surface level aesthetics of Gatsby — for instance, Gatsby themed parties where everyone dresses up in flapper dresses and suits are super common.”
“We expected boys to complain, but most say that they welcome it as they appreciate having the break and not feeling the social pressure to read and reply to messages instantly. They think it improves their sleep.”
“For each additional math or science course required of high school students, the probability they drank or binge drank fell 1.6 percent. The results are a bit larger for males and for nonwhite students.”
“We know students benefit from dedicated staff and faculty who care about their individual success. We know students benefit from timely and frequent interactions with advisors. We know students need help with goal setting, navigating our complex structures, and reflective practice. We know students come to us with backgrounds, experiences, goals, and identities that are […]
“As teenagers begin to disentangle from their folks, they inevitably sort a parent’s every behavior and predilection into one of two categories: those they reject, and those they intend to adopt. Unfortunately for the peace of the household, each of these categories creates its own problem for teenagers intent on establishing their individuality.”
And experts say that rather than being shocked to find that kids are sexting, we should instead be talking about it from an early age, just as we should about other aspects of their developing sense of their sexual identities.”
Students who have a mentor are more likely to stay in school, attend college, volunteer, hold positions of leadership and become mentors themselves.”
It turns out that teens are yearning for these lessons. They’re looking for more guidance from parents on emotional aspects of romantic relationships — everything from “how to develop a mature relationship” to “how to deal with breakups.””
But for around two hours each week, for five weeks, the students — sophomores, juniors and seniors — take part in Porn Literacy, which aims to make them savvier, more critical consumers of porn… Porn education is such new territory that no one knows the best practices, what material should be included and where to […]
More than one-third of 10th-graders (35 percent) have been physically or verbally abused by dating partners, while a similar percentage are perpetrators of such abuse.”
The team found that while the older volunteers performed better in the high stakes rounds, the younger ones didn’t – their performance didn’t change in line with whether the stakes were low or high. And the older the volunteers were, the more improved their performance was.”
“Exposure is the best way to conquer fear but only when it’s done incrementally. Without practice, gentle nudging, and guidance, kids never gain confidence that they can face their fears head-on.”
Mental health centers on campuses around the country are stretched thin—after all, it’s hard to imagine a well-staffed counseling office being more of a sell to prospective students and their check-signing parents than a state-of-the-art climbing facility. As an emergent “solution,” faculty development programs are offering classes on handling students in distress or in mental […]
I know students have seen or expressed controversial opinions on political and social issues on social media, and I’m not privy to the details. This makes those controversial topics hard to cover in my classroom for a number of reasons. First, we’re not all starting from the same point. In terms of what’s been posted, […]
The analysis found adolescents were more likely to take part in adult activities if they came from larger families or those with lower incomes. This mirrors so-called “life history theory,” the idea exposure to an unpredictable, impoverished environment as a kid leads to faster development whereas children who grow up in a stable environment with […]
She said both parents and children may be uncomfortable talking specifically about the content but can talk about the ways that sex is part of a relationship, the ways that people should treat one another or the ways that pornography is not an accurate representation of sexual behavior.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/09/11/noah-short-film-tiff-video_n_3908782.html