High School Students Are Growing Incredibly Anti-Social

Dating, Hanging Out and Working Are All in Steep Decline

I’ve got two sons - one is thirteen and the other is ten. I remember when my wife and I were thinking about having children, we talked all the time about the best type of birthing plan (I distinctly remember becoming intimately aware of something called the cascade of intervention). Then it was breastfeeding versus bottle feeding and cloth diapers versus disposable diapers. It felt like it was consuming most of our conversations for a period of time. You just want to make sure that you are making the best decisions for your children so that they can hopefully grow up to be decent, productive human beings.

Then we went through the preschool stage. How often should we send them? What school is best for their needs? That was certainly a rousing debate in our household. Then, public school vs private school - why wife is Catholic, after all. It seems like there’s no end to all the decisions parents have to face and every life stage gives way to another set of questions that don’t have any easy answers.

Now we are in the phase of cell phones, screen time, and socialization. The best way that I can describe my goals for my boys is that they don’t become the weirdos who have no understanding of pop culture but are also not glued to their screens every waking moment. Good luck finding that balance. There’s an empirical reason for my concern - the data about the social lives of high school students is incredibly bleak and honestly makes me very worried for the next generation.

Let me show you what I mean by generating a handful of graphs from this great dataset called Monitoring the Future. They’ve been asking questions of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders since the mid-1970s. What an amazing way to track what teenagers are doing with their time over the last couple of decades. Let me start by focusing on a question that asks high school seniors how often they go on dates in a typical month.

In 1995, the vast majority of seniors were going on dates several times a month. In this data, just about one third of them said that they were going on zero or one date per month. Between 1995 and 2010, the share who dated very little rose to just below 50%. Let’s call that an increase of 15 points in about 15 years. From 2010 through 2021, the share who barely went on dates rose to 72%. That’s an increase of 22 points in just 11 years. In other words, the rate doubled in recent years.

But I know what you are going to say - COVID explains some of it. Yes, I agree with you - there was a noticeable decrease in dating frequency during 2021 and 2022. But in 2010, 48% of 12th graders were dating rarely. In 2019, it was 63%. That’s a fifteen point jump in just nine years. That cannot be explained by a global pandemic. Dating among high school seniors slowed significantly during the 2010s.

Now, what’s interesting about that to me is that between 1995 and 2021, religion among high school seniors also fell off a cliff. A very workable theory is that religious organizations can have a suppressing effect on romantic relationships between teenagers. If that hypothesis was true then we should see dating rise as we see religion decline. But we see the exact opposite.

I broke the sample into four levels of religious attendance to show you how little religion really matters in this context. In 1995, the type of high school student who was the least likely to date was one who never attended religious services - about 40% went on a date no more than once a month. That was no different than high school students who attended religious services weekly. In other words, religion didn’t matter at all - weekly attenders were no more (or less likely) to date than an 18 year old who never darkened the church’s door.

Over time the trend lines all move in the same direction at a very similar trajectory. It’s generally the case that those who never attended were the least likely to date. It’s also interesting that the rank ordering of the four attendance levels doesn’t really vary a whole bunch. The gap in dating is really between never attenders and those who reported attending church on a monthly basis. It wasn’t between the two ends of the religious attendance spectrum - which is really notable.

But maybe dating is just providing us a weird perspective on this question on socializing. There have to be other ways to assess just how much young people are hanging out with their friends. Another question in Monitoring the Future asks how often 12th graders go out for fun or recreation in a typical week. That’s about as generic as it gets.

This data points in the same general direction as the prior analysis. In 1995, just 22% of high school seniors were hanging out with their friends no more than once a week. That figure did creep up just a little bit in the next 15 years, but not by much. In 2010, it was up to 26% - an increase of just four points in fifteen years. Certainly a worrying trajectory but definitely a very slow moving trendline.

By 2012, that figure moved to 30%, and it was up to 35% by 2014 and only continued to climb from there. Even before the pandemic hit, it was just above 40%. In 23 years, the share of teens who barely hung out with their friend nearly doubled. In the data collected during 2020 and 2021, the figure was exactly the same - 46%. Yes, there was a noticeable decrease in socialization due to the pandemic, but it was only five percentage points.

I just don’t know how you can look at this graph and not think that this has a lot to do with the rise of the smartphone. It took 18 years to go from 22% to 32%. Then it took five years to go from 32% to 41%. What else could explain this increase? Anyone who says that social media has connected us more is just not facing the facts. Young people are not using all their messaging apps to arrange opportunities to hang out in real life, they are just seemingly content to digitally communicate.

I don’t want to shoehorn religion into every part of this, but let me just show you the prior question broken down by religious attendance.

The one big takeaway for me is that those who never attend religious services are also the least likely to do other types of socializing. That makes sense, logically. One type of socializing is related to another type of socializing. Going to church means you are often given the opportunity to hang out with other kids in the youth group on another day of the week. That happened a lot when I was a teenager. But I do want to highlight the fact that never attenders really became an outlier on this metric around 2014 or so. It seems like there was a clear “socializing gap” that began to emerge about ten years ago. As I’ve written a dozen times - dropping out begets dropping out.

One more look at this, though. It’s a question about having a job. High school seniors were asked, “on average over the school year, how many hours per week do you work in a paid or unpaid job.” I am just going to show you the share who say that they worked zero hours.

I was surprised to see that a majority of high school seniors have been in the workforce for the entire time period. In the mid-1990s, only about 1 in 5 12th graders didn’t have a job at all. It’s wild to think that 80% of kids that I went to school with were working some kind of job. Now, that figure did creep up a little bit in the next decade, but not by much. It was still below 30% even through 2008. However, there was a clear inflection point in the data, can you spot it?

It was the Great Recession. Between 2008 and 2011, the share of high school seniors who did not have a job of any kind rose from 29% to 38%. I just can’t find any other plausible explanation than that. It was really before cell phones took off in huge numbers among high school students. And I think it created a new normal. Unemployment among 12th graders has really stuck around 35% since that point. It did briefly shoot up in 2020, but then it settled right back to that new equilibrium.

Let me throw all three measures together into a single metric. I am calling this the “anti-social” share of young folks. It’s the percentage of 12th graders who:

• Go on a date no more than once a month.

• Socialize with their friends no more than once a week.

• Have no job.

In 1995, that was just 3.5% of the sample. It was an incredibly small portion of high schoolers. 97% were social on at least one of these metrics. However, it didn’t stay at that level for very long. It had effectively doubled by 2008 or so and it continued to rise from there. In the 2022 data, nearly 16% of high school seniors were effectively non-social - a nearly 5 fold increase from just 27 years prior. And, this is another case in which we can’t blame this on COVID-19. In 2018, the share who were anti-social was 15%, too. Yes, the pandemic drove this number up a bit, but it’s definitely reverted from those highs in the 2022 data.

Now, I do need to emphasize this point - this isn’t completely about smartphones. It’s just not. That doesn’t explain at all what happened between 1995 and 2010, when the share of antisocial 12th graders went from 3.5% to over 9%. But it is also the case that the past dozen years have seen this trend accelerate. I am pretty convinced that the “it’s the phone” thesis is a part of this phenomenon, but it certainly can’t explain the whole thing. High school students were moving away from socializing long before the iPhone, albeit at a slower pace.

But what impact does religion have on all this?

I want to point two things out that I think are crucial about this graph. The first is that the average high school senior is just incredibly less social in 2022 compared to a 12th grader from the 1990s. It’s at least 3-4 fold increase in the share who are completely antisocial. Kids aren’t hanging out. But the other thing is that religious attendance does make a difference here. The 12th graders who are the least social are those who never attend religious services. The ones who are the most social are those who attend religious services on a monthly basis. Hanging out begets hanging out. I am going to be clear on this - church is not some type of panacea to get kids to be more social, but it certainly doesn’t hurt.

I’ve got to say that this whole life stage is a whole lot scarier to me than the previous ones. My son's ability to be social, engage in good conversation and build strong relationships is absolutely essential for them to lead a productive, fulfilling life. I feel pretty powerless to make that happen for them. I can certainly encourage them to stop looking at their screens and ride their bikes to a friend’s house. But what if that friend just wants to spend all their time watching YouTube and playing with their Oculus?

The kids aren’t alright.

Code for this post can be found here.