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%.
What happened since 2007 to spike teen loneliness? I'm going to suggest five big trends:
1. Increase in drug use among parents. You've mentioned this, but then the question is, "why did parents start using drugs more?"
2. The economic crash was "sticky." While the economy supposedly recovered by 2015, for lower class families, the effects didn't just "bounce back." People who picked up a bad habit in 2007 maintained that bad habit even in 2015. I'd also mention that most of the gains in employment since 2020 have been among women and immigrants, so native-born men are still stuck in 2020.
3. As education has exploded in importance, people who don't get into college get "left behind." In 2007, college was optional; you could still have a good life without it. In 2025, college is mandatory. If you act like an idiot at age 18 and don't go to college, it's harder to realize your mistake and "bounce back" at 22. In 2007, it was easier to "bounce back" from acting like an idiot as a young adult.
4. Decline in religiosity. Even if there are bad aspects to religion, there are good aspect too. Removing religion from people's lives left them more isolated, and could contribute to the Bowling Alone affect you point out here among young people. I would love to see this data on teen loneliness broken out by weekly church attendance. Also, lower fertility means smaller family sizes, so less siblings means a smaller social network (hanging out with your sibling's friends).
5. Identity polarization. This isn't exactly "political," but has some cross-over. In 2007, identities like LGBTQ became more pronounced among teens. This split teens into two tribes: pro-LGBTQ, and anti-LGBTQ. Previously, this split hadn't existed, and such issues didn't divide teens. But this became a much more important distinction than things like "jock vs nerd" which were perennial divisions. I'd argue that the pro- vs anti-LGBTQ division was more socially harmful than jock vs nerd, because it was a moral/tribal division rather than a status division. As a jock, you could be friends with a nerd, and vice versa, without facing social blowback. But to "cross partisan lines" on social issues was met with peer pressure, which shrunk teen social networks.
Tagging @Katherine Dee since I think you’ll be interested in this pro-tech outlook on mental health.
Fantastic points. I think the summation here is: "society is drastically, intractably more divided along harsh moral lines." That's true among adults and teens alike. Sure, online sites can enforce polarization by separations based on ideology, but so do offline media and institutions. You don't see a Ronald Reagan and Tipper Gore negotiating over Irish whisky any more -- and maybe good riddance, since Right-Left consensuses of those days produce incredibly damaging policy.
Demographically, smaller families means teens have fewer siblings to care for, and so they have more alone time. More varied communications modes reduce personal time, as the telephone did decades ago. Finally, Boomer and Xer generations have been more drug-abusing, crime-prone, education failures our whole lives, and I see why Zers (especially girls) are seeking more independence and achieving more as a result. Thanks for introducing more complexities!
Your point on siblings is huge, maybe bigger than all the points I made. I'd love to see these rates adjusted by family size. Families with 5 kids have 0 hours of alone time a day -- you can't get away! But if it's an only child? Plenty of opportunities for alone time. Social media fulfilling the role of the "sibling" because the siblings are less likely to be there. Not creating the condition, but simply interfacing with an already existing condition.
I think your comments made more sense. From 2002 to 2023, the average US family size stayed constant at 3.13 members, yet teen alone time doubled from 40% to 80%. If we go back to 1960, average family size, 3.7, probably did affect teens' opportunities to be alone. So, I think social media access along with more family difficulties to avoid may account for the alone-time trend. It's a fascinating trend, one we need to understand more about.
The other interesting thing to look into would be to see how divorce impacts how family size is counted. If a divorced man has 2 kids with 50% custody, is his family size 3? Is his ex-wife's family size also 3? So now there are 2 families with a size of 3 -- despite the fact that there are only 4 people involved.
If you look at only-child statistics, there has been an increase:
Several researchers and cultural observers have noted a rise in narcissistic traits in the West since at least the 1970s (though it's worth noting that research is disproportionately conducted on college students at bigger-name universities). Many parents today report that their Boomer and older Gen X parents are providing very little help with childcare compared to previous generations. There's a trend toward blaming youth mental health and developmental issues on young people using screens more, phones and social media ... but I suspect the bigger issue is that rates of neglect have increased, including more parents and grandparents being addicted to their phones and laptops. And perhaps longer work hours too, in particular at the high and low ends of the income distribution (high paying jobs requiring insane hours, low-paying jobs paying so poorly parents have to have more than one).
This seems really blind to what internet and personal life actually looked like to millennials. It seems crazy to me to say the youth were “fully plugged in” before 2007, the era of *checks notes* pre-Obama MySpace, right *before* the iPhone came out. We really, really weren’t online in the way we are now - algo driven feeds which constitute social media today didn’t exist. I don’t remember fully the timeline here, but this was the era of my youth, and the fact that YouTube wanted you to look at recommendations alongside a chronological list of videos dropped by channels you subscribed to was a big controversy back then. And you accessed it via computer at home. It was a different internet!
I guess undergirding this is that I assume the effect of online on our lives is more thru changing the way we interact than thru just being brain rot. Minute to minute human behavior changed w the phone in a way it had not before. The 2008 internet was one of techno optimism and feelings of reduced loneliness among me and my peers, hence why everyone was jazzed for the Arab spring. Then came a generation raised on cellphones, and they had a very different response.
I agree, though algorithms certainly did exist back then, admittedly cruder. What hasn't changed is that the internet back then was packed with porn, hateful content, and unregulated hazards that are least being (poorly, but at least) semi-regulated today. The best surveys are not showing the post-2007 generation is suffering more "brain rot" (every generation is accused of this) or using screen life vastly differently; what has changed the most is a drastic deterioration in the behaviors of parents and adults around teens. It's interesting that teens today are not responding with hostility toward more addicted and troubled parents and nearby adults (perhaps they think this is how adults are supposed to act), but appear to be avoiding them more. Changes in online habits may reflect these changes in the physical world, but I don't see evidence that they're driving them.
What happened since 2007 to spike teen loneliness? I'm going to suggest five big trends:
1. Increase in drug use among parents. You've mentioned this, but then the question is, "why did parents start using drugs more?"
2. The economic crash was "sticky." While the economy supposedly recovered by 2015, for lower class families, the effects didn't just "bounce back." People who picked up a bad habit in 2007 maintained that bad habit even in 2015. I'd also mention that most of the gains in employment since 2020 have been among women and immigrants, so native-born men are still stuck in 2020.
3. As education has exploded in importance, people who don't get into college get "left behind." In 2007, college was optional; you could still have a good life without it. In 2025, college is mandatory. If you act like an idiot at age 18 and don't go to college, it's harder to realize your mistake and "bounce back" at 22. In 2007, it was easier to "bounce back" from acting like an idiot as a young adult.
4. Decline in religiosity. Even if there are bad aspects to religion, there are good aspect too. Removing religion from people's lives left them more isolated, and could contribute to the Bowling Alone affect you point out here among young people. I would love to see this data on teen loneliness broken out by weekly church attendance. Also, lower fertility means smaller family sizes, so less siblings means a smaller social network (hanging out with your sibling's friends).
5. Identity polarization. This isn't exactly "political," but has some cross-over. In 2007, identities like LGBTQ became more pronounced among teens. This split teens into two tribes: pro-LGBTQ, and anti-LGBTQ. Previously, this split hadn't existed, and such issues didn't divide teens. But this became a much more important distinction than things like "jock vs nerd" which were perennial divisions. I'd argue that the pro- vs anti-LGBTQ division was more socially harmful than jock vs nerd, because it was a moral/tribal division rather than a status division. As a jock, you could be friends with a nerd, and vice versa, without facing social blowback. But to "cross partisan lines" on social issues was met with peer pressure, which shrunk teen social networks.
Tagging @Katherine Dee since I think you’ll be interested in this pro-tech outlook on mental health.
Fantastic points. I think the summation here is: "society is drastically, intractably more divided along harsh moral lines." That's true among adults and teens alike. Sure, online sites can enforce polarization by separations based on ideology, but so do offline media and institutions. You don't see a Ronald Reagan and Tipper Gore negotiating over Irish whisky any more -- and maybe good riddance, since Right-Left consensuses of those days produce incredibly damaging policy.
Demographically, smaller families means teens have fewer siblings to care for, and so they have more alone time. More varied communications modes reduce personal time, as the telephone did decades ago. Finally, Boomer and Xer generations have been more drug-abusing, crime-prone, education failures our whole lives, and I see why Zers (especially girls) are seeking more independence and achieving more as a result. Thanks for introducing more complexities!
Your point on siblings is huge, maybe bigger than all the points I made. I'd love to see these rates adjusted by family size. Families with 5 kids have 0 hours of alone time a day -- you can't get away! But if it's an only child? Plenty of opportunities for alone time. Social media fulfilling the role of the "sibling" because the siblings are less likely to be there. Not creating the condition, but simply interfacing with an already existing condition.
I think your comments made more sense. From 2002 to 2023, the average US family size stayed constant at 3.13 members, yet teen alone time doubled from 40% to 80%. If we go back to 1960, average family size, 3.7, probably did affect teens' opportunities to be alone. So, I think social media access along with more family difficulties to avoid may account for the alone-time trend. It's a fascinating trend, one we need to understand more about.
Family size stayed constant, but fertility decreased, so I think this means adult children were living with their parents after 18 more often:
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2015/07/kids-these-days-why-we-shouldnt-worry-if-they-dont-leave-home-early/
The other interesting thing to look into would be to see how divorce impacts how family size is counted. If a divorced man has 2 kids with 50% custody, is his family size 3? Is his ex-wife's family size also 3? So now there are 2 families with a size of 3 -- despite the fact that there are only 4 people involved.
If you look at only-child statistics, there has been an increase:
https://amyandrose.com/blogs/parenting/only-child-statistics/
This doesn't contradict your account of family difficulties, since divorce is a cause for only children.
Several researchers and cultural observers have noted a rise in narcissistic traits in the West since at least the 1970s (though it's worth noting that research is disproportionately conducted on college students at bigger-name universities). Many parents today report that their Boomer and older Gen X parents are providing very little help with childcare compared to previous generations. There's a trend toward blaming youth mental health and developmental issues on young people using screens more, phones and social media ... but I suspect the bigger issue is that rates of neglect have increased, including more parents and grandparents being addicted to their phones and laptops. And perhaps longer work hours too, in particular at the high and low ends of the income distribution (high paying jobs requiring insane hours, low-paying jobs paying so poorly parents have to have more than one).
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/the-lost-girls-and-boys
This seems really blind to what internet and personal life actually looked like to millennials. It seems crazy to me to say the youth were “fully plugged in” before 2007, the era of *checks notes* pre-Obama MySpace, right *before* the iPhone came out. We really, really weren’t online in the way we are now - algo driven feeds which constitute social media today didn’t exist. I don’t remember fully the timeline here, but this was the era of my youth, and the fact that YouTube wanted you to look at recommendations alongside a chronological list of videos dropped by channels you subscribed to was a big controversy back then. And you accessed it via computer at home. It was a different internet!
I guess undergirding this is that I assume the effect of online on our lives is more thru changing the way we interact than thru just being brain rot. Minute to minute human behavior changed w the phone in a way it had not before. The 2008 internet was one of techno optimism and feelings of reduced loneliness among me and my peers, hence why everyone was jazzed for the Arab spring. Then came a generation raised on cellphones, and they had a very different response.
I agree, though algorithms certainly did exist back then, admittedly cruder. What hasn't changed is that the internet back then was packed with porn, hateful content, and unregulated hazards that are least being (poorly, but at least) semi-regulated today. The best surveys are not showing the post-2007 generation is suffering more "brain rot" (every generation is accused of this) or using screen life vastly differently; what has changed the most is a drastic deterioration in the behaviors of parents and adults around teens. It's interesting that teens today are not responding with hostility toward more addicted and troubled parents and nearby adults (perhaps they think this is how adults are supposed to act), but appear to be avoiding them more. Changes in online habits may reflect these changes in the physical world, but I don't see evidence that they're driving them.