"iGen"

Christine Rosen writes in the Wall Street Journal a review of Jean M. Twenge's book “iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood.”

A psychology professor at San Diego State University, Ms. Twenge assigns the label iGen (her own coinage) to people born between 1995 and 2012. It is a group, she notes, that doesn’t know a world without the internet and smartphones and is now 24% of the U.S. population.

To judge by Ms. Twenge’s data, tolerance is their religion. Churchgoing and faith are in free-fall among iGen-ers, while their views on LGBTQ matters are more liberal than those of any previous generation. So, too, their views of sex. They are having less of it themselves but are less judgmental about the sexual habits of others. They “are just less willing to label anything as ‘wrong,’ ” Ms. Twenge writes.

Unless, that is, something is deemed an offense against tolerance itself. Members of iGen, Ms. Twenge says, are more likely than their predecessors “to support restricting speech.” She found that “more than one out of four students (28%) agreed that ‘A faculty member who, on a single occasion, says something racially insensitive in class should be fired,’ ” while 16% believed a student who did the same thing once should be expelled. In a rare moment of judgmentalism, Ms. Twenge adds: “This is the dark side of tolerance; it begins with the good intentions of including everyone and not offending anyone but ends (at best) with a reluctance to explore deep issues and (at worst) with careers destroyed by a comment someone found offensive and the silencing of all alternative viewpoints.”

More than any other influence, technology is central to understanding this generation’s experience. Across all races and classes, they spend, on average, six hours a day with new media. Ms. Twenge is not indulging in hyperbole when she tells us that this is the first generation that prefers virtual to real relationships. “With the advent of social media and smartphones, teens’ social lives shifted decisively away from in-person interaction. They spend much less time with their friends in person than teens in previous decades did.”

Thus they don’t date as much or hang out with their friends as often. Yet they don’t spend their time reading in any serious or systematic way either. Indeed, they are “much less likely to read books than their Millennial, GenX, and Boomer predecessors,” Ms. Twenge writes. Their academic skills lag behind those of millennials “by significant margins,” and they are “less informed” about current events.

Worse, living their lives online hasn’t made the members of iGen happy. On the contrary, the more time they spend online, the worse they feel. This generation, Ms. Twenge says, is “at the forefront of the worst mental health crisis in decades, with rates of teen depression and suicide skyrocketing since 2011.”

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