What does this huge teenage alone-time trend mean?

From the mid-1970s to 2002, the proportion of high schoolers spending an hour or more alone every day stayed at around 40%. Then, the proportion suddenly doubled to 80%.

Figure 1. High school seniors’ alone time

Source: Monitoring the Future (2025).

For a quarter-century through 2002, the proportion of high school seniors telling the Monitoring the Future survey they spend an hour or more alone nearly every day stayed remarkably stable at around 40%. At the opposite pole, around 25% rarely (less than once a week) suffered? delighted in? even an hour of alone time.

Then, from 2002 to 2023, the percentage of high school seniors reporting near-daily alone doubled to an astounding 80%, while the proportion reporting rarely being alone all but disappeared, plunging to 7%.

The only posted MTF reports I can find on gender show that from 2002 (and previous years) to 2012, as teens’ social media use rose dramatically, the proportion of girls spending time alone nearly every day rose from 36% to 50%, larger than the increase among boys (44% to 51%). By the 2010s, gender differences in alone time disappear, as do racial differences. The only disparity is that high school seniors going to college reported considerably more time alone.

At first, I thought maybe high school seniors were becoming more independent of increasingly troubled families in the 2010s and ‘20s. For example, 62% now report eating dinner with one or both parents 3 or fewer days a week, up from 56% in 2012.

However, 8^th graders and 10^th graders (surveyed beginning in 1991) reported nearly identical trends toward much more alone time (46% now report eating dinner with one or both parents 3 or fewer days a week, up from 38% in 2012). So, more aloneness is occurring at both older and younger ages.

Figure 2. 8^th and 10^th graders’ alone time

Traditional theories (ie, Erikson) tout alone time as vital to adolescent identity formation and independence. I suspect today’s massive uptick in teen aloneness is about something more than that.

This is a major lifestyle change

Social-media-blamers wildly hype anecdotal quips and poorly grounded research (or nothing at all) to blame the internet and social media for every adolescent problem, ignoring and suppressing contradictions and complexities. Yet, social media would seem a logical factor in more alone time – though the trends are peculiar.

Let’s look at companion trends. The proportion of high school seniors who reported getting together with friends nearly every day fell only moderately for three decades, from 52% in 1976 to 47% in 1995 and 45% in 2007. It then fell sharply, to 30% in 2023; 8^th-10^th grade trends were similar. Interestingly, this trend did not accompany more negative feelings about peers: 89% reported satisfaction with their friends in 2023, the highest percentage ever. Likewise, 78% reported satisfaction with how they got along with parents, also the highest percentage ever, even though diminishing fractions were eating dinner as families.

Maybe absence does make the heart grow fonder.

The halcyon pre-internet days

Key trends don’t match up. ‘Way back in 1997, just 18% of households had internet access, up from none in 1993. Social media did not exist. By social-mediaphobe dogma, those pre-1997 teens should have been wondrously happy, safe, and connected. They weren’t. Just about every teen ill, including suicide, was at or near record levels.

In 1999, teens reported spending just 0.7 hours a weekday online. Around 50% of households had internet access by then. Then, the cyber age rushed in. Remember the first primitive social media site, Six Degrees? It appeared in 1997, followed by Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Millennial teens

In 2002, 60% of American teens used the internet for school and personal activities; by 2004, 45% had their own cellphones. That year, 41% of high school seniors reported spending an hour or more alone just about every day (no change over the past quarter century), and just 27% reported sometimes feeling lonely (down sharply from past generations).

By 2007, 93% of teens went online, 62% every day, and 60% used social media, Pew Research reported. Millennial teens were fully “wired” by 2007. Therefore, if internet and social media trends were the culprits, the 1995-2007 period should have seen the biggest plummet in teens’ well-being. That’s not what happened.

Just the opposite. Teens of 2007 reported getting together with friends less than teens of 1976 (45% vs 52%), yet the proportion of teens who said they felt lonely fell massively, from 37% in 1976 to 22% in 2007. What? Why did “Bowling alone” Millennial teens report feeling dramatically less lonely than supposedly buddy-backslapping “Bowling together” Boomers and early Gen Xers?

In fact, 2007 teens, nearly all of whom had access to an internet anyone from that time can attest harbored plenty of porn, hate, and depraved stuff – represent a 50-year apex of teenage happiness, satisfaction with friends, parents, and themselves. Everything about teens got better from 1995 to 2012 as teen internet access and social media use soared. 2000s Millennial adolescence, along with rapidly rising social media use and increased alone time, also featured rapidly declining loneliness and depression, plunging property crime and violence, sharply decreased shootings, plummeting numbers of teen mothers (both with teen and older-adult male partners), rising school reading and math scores, rising college enrollment and degree rates, rising happiness, and falling suicide rates.

That shouldn’t have been happening, according to culture warriors and social-media blamers. Not only did they ignore these trends, interest groups in the early 2000s concocted an entirely fabricated teen “mental health crisis” – as they do in every generation – to boost their funding and campus jobs.

Gen Z trends

The typical tactic of social-media blamers is to pick an arbitrary past year when the teen behavior they’re examining was uniquely low (typically 2007 to 2012), then cite the worst later year they can find (usually 2021), then blame social media use for the “increase” in teen problems. Media reporters love “kids getting worse” sensationalism.

From 2007 to 2023, teen internet use stabilized, but alone time erupted. Trends were distinctly mixed. After 2007, teens’ loneliness rose to 43% in 2022, then fell back to 39% in 2023. So – in yet another area social-media-blamers have misled us – “generation wired” (Z’s) loneliness is barely higher than their cellphone-free online-free pal-around grandparents’ half a century earlier.

Nor were Gen Z self-satisfaction and suicide rates significantly different than those of Boomers and Xer teens, though Millennial teens briefly had healthier rates during the economically-favorable interlude between the 1990s crime/drug epidemics and the post-2008 economic crash and opiate epidemic.

Social-mediaphobes selected certain teen problems (and ignored teen improvements) to blame on more teens going online, but this made no sense. Teen internet usage was already saturated at over 90% before Gen Z arrived in adolescence.

So, they had to find something new to blame. They landed on smartphones, crudely introduced by Nokia (1996) and Sharp (2000), which proliferated among teens beginning with Apple phones (2007) and Androids (2008). Smartphones are just cellphones with the same internet access teens already had on their personal computers and laptops at home, and computers at school. How is this a big deal?

Have the meanings of “alone” and “lonely” changed radically?

Interpreting these trends requires knowing what teens mean by their answers to MTF’s question: “How often do you… spend at least an hour of leisure time alone?” One could argue that being in the same room with other people is different in escalating degrees from (a) videochatting with others online; (b) talking by chat supplemented by written and video sharing with other people online; (c) talking on the voice telephone with another person; (d) texting, emailing, and posting by written word with other people; and (d) being completely alone. In all cases, the quality and intimacy of the interactions, regardless of communications mode, is paramount.

I suspect what 2023 teens mean by feeling alone and lonely is not what 1976 teens meant. But we don’t know how, let alone why. COVID played a role in the 2020-22 alone-time surge but was not the whole story; the surge continued in 2023. The broader, easier communications afforded by social media no doubt enabled online connections to replace personal get-togethers. Is that good or bad?

We don’t know. The Boomer and Xer rushing to trash Millennials and Gen Z because they don’t do things like we did should be humbled by two big caveats: Boomers and Xers, despite or because of all their personal comradery, were seriously messed up generations by multiple indexes and still are, while younger Millennials and Zers have spent three decades bringing down their elders’ bad trends.

Our best CDC surveys firmly tie Gen Z’s somewhat higher depression rates to the massively troubled behaviors of adults around them. Yes, that’s painful to admit. We Sixties and ‘70s idealists who thought we were saving the world now must fear our generations are instigating a new dark age.

The single biggest change Zers bring is more alone time accompanying less in-person time with parents and friends. I suspect these are umbrella trends for more significant changes. Social-media-blamers’ boundless, repressive paranoia toward everything digital is sabotaging serious generational analyses, including refining surveys and studies to understand what puzzling trends signify. We’re not going to learn anything useful as long as fear and hostility greet each new trend.