This hardly needs to be said, but loneliness and social isolation cause profound distress. Over the course of a week, they see their friends an hour less a day than their parents’ generation did, or than the early millennials did. “The number of teens who get together with their friends every day has been cut in half in just 15 years, with especially steep declines recently,” writes research psychologist and demographer Jean Twenge. So today’s teenagers feel lonely because they actually are alone more. Screen time is a zero-sum game: Social media, video games, online browsing, and other new media take the place of playing sports, going to parties, or just hanging out with their friends. Illustrating the blazingly obvious, research documents that the more time kids spend online and on their devices, the less time they tend to spend interacting with their peers (or adults, for that matter) in face-to-face encounters. My daughter couldn’t help but sit back and watch, compulsively checking her phone to see what she was missing. All the kids in attendance documented who was hanging out with whom and posted it for public consumption on social media. But what our whole family remembers are not the parties she went to, but the very few she did not.Įvery middle school party played itself out on Instagram and Snapchat. When one of my kids was in eighth grade, she was invited to a lot of bat mitzvahs and 13th birthday parties-it seemed like there was one every weekend. Why are they so lonely, even though they’re super-connected online? One reason may be that they have the ability to see what everyone else is doing at any given moment-so they know when they are being left out of something. A surprising 48 percent more girls and 27 percent more boys felt left out in 2015 compared to 2010. From the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being.Īlthough they seem fantastically connected socially-my teens are constantly communicating with literally hundreds of kids through text and social media and video chat-more teenagers now feel left out and lonely than ever before (or at least since we started measuring these things).

Lonely screen issues