We will discuss Jean Twenge’s iGen at our meeting on Wednesday, March 18th at 4:00p.m. in the GAHS library. Please post questions, comments, concerns, criticism, and the like on this blog prior to, during, or after our meeting (before March 25th if you want extra credit). All questions and responses should indicate an active reading of the text and function to move the conversation forward. (Note: surface-level or obvious questions and responses will not count as participation.)
Those of you unable to attend due to scheduling conflicts may participate in the discussion below by posting a discussion question and offering a detailed response, or by responding to two questions already posted. The note above applies here as well, so heed it!
This book appealed to me big time. I believe there is nothing better in a good argument than cold, hard facts, numbers, and statistics. This is because one cannot argue against them – they’re facts and cannot be denied or pushed away as someone’s personal thought… in other words, you cannot lose when stating good and relevant facts. This structure of story paired with the issues she discussed made this book easy for me to get into. Mainly, the most captivating issue she discussed was the idea of children delaying growing up and sort of staying in the period of emerging adulthood. This idea virtually states that many of today’s adolescents and older teens are delaying the time when they become a fully grown adult and take responsibilities for themselves. The statistics that she shows prove that a vast amount of today’s youth are doing this in fields such as dating, working for pay, or even running away; the latter is what convinces me of her argument the most. The idea of running away is simply the idea of a child seeing themselves better off as independent and free people without restraint from authority. The fact that this movement has declined with the iGen generation tells the whole story – we’re becoming more dependent and childish as a generation. I see it too. I’ve heard plenty of stories of people from Gen X or Baby Boomers who say they had to work hard and grind at their minimum wage job to get that car they wanted or to get that new music record. However, I don’t see or hear about many people living that same type of lifestyle today… it seems that the security and happiness we get from not only our technology usage, but also the way our parents have raised us is sparking a rapid decline in the independence of the iGen population. That leads me into another thought about the decline in becoming an adult for the iGen generation – how much of this is because of the way our parents raised us? The culture of one’s household is so important and impactful how that person will act so how are our parents making us this way? I think that parents are seeing the security we get from our extensive use of technology and with parents wanting the best for their children they could possibly be supporting it so their children can not only be happy, but also so that their children can be appreciative of them as well – this appreciation from their children can give them that security that they were never able to get from technology when they were young.
Despite the statistics shown, I believe that my personal experience has been quite different from the generation’s as a whole. My parents raised me in a somewhat “old-fashioned” household where nothing is given and everything is earned, whether by grades, showing good manners, doing a job well, etc. I have also never been a huge user of my phone and don’t communicate with people over my phone 24/7 like many kids that I know do. I also think of myself as quite independent and accept many responsibilities in stride, meaning I don’t seek a way to escape hard tasks like many kids do; the main way I see myself differing from others is in the advent of cheating or using other people’s work or answers… I usually choose to do things myself because I think it’s responsible to do it that way than to take the easy way out.
My main questions for this book are:
– How much of an effect do parents have on these trends?
– Are there any statistics to see if similar trends occurred with Gen Xer’s and Boomers? In other words, can the trends shown only be applied to our generation?
– Are parents afraid of their children leaving them? Is that why we are delaying adulthood?
– Are there any ways technology usage is changing our generation for the better?
When reading this book I was constantly comparing my sister and I’s habits to our brother. He was born in 1991 so unlike Maggie and I is not in the IGen generation. When Twenge talked about how our generation has friends all over who they are in constant communication with people all over and how our lives are mainly online I kept going back to my camp experiences. Similarly to Maggie and me, our brother went to sleepaway camp when he was younger. When Maggie and I got/get out of camp we instantly turn to facetime, house party, and group chats. We never were without an ability to have constant communication with our friends who lived states away. But my brother, who is only 12 years older than me, lived in a completely different world. When I mentioned this to him he said that he really didn’t email his friends or talk to them on the phone. His friends at camp were just that. It was crazy to me that it took reading this book to realize how we had such a big difference in the way we experienced our summertime activities.
The give and take with pregnancy, drug use, and overall safety and animosity, depression, and feelings of loneliness were very interesting to me. How although our generation is physically safer in what we do. Mentally our generation is on a slippery slope. I never through to connected though two thoughts. But their connection makes sense. Socially we have removed ourselves because we are social online, through this, we are alone more but not “alone”.
In Jean Twenge’s book, iGen, she discloses the growing body of evidence revealing the dangers of extensive smartphone use among teens in this iGen generation and how it’s affecting their mental health in a negative way. This generation has been shaped by the mobile digital technology industry where it is estimated that 96% of this generation owns a smartphone. Her data shows a generational shift in teen behaviors and their emotional state around the same time as smartphones. Her data revealed that more social media use led to lower well-being, but not the other way around. Lower well-being did not lead to more social media use indicating the link of social media usage to their mental health. She further discloses these super-connected kids are growing up more anxious, depressed, lonely, and unprepared for adulthood than previous generations. While she does share in her book that teens are more socially tolerant and safer than previous generations, it is at the expense of their mental health. Less young people are going to parties, drinking, and engaging in sexual behaviors because they are living their lives online, but they are also less likely to be working. One may think this trend is good, but it is being achieved by a decline toward community and relationships. She even goes on to suggest that many teens have friends online who that have never met in real life. This lifestyle means that this generation is not having many face to face interactions which is leaving them less prepared for adulthood. Young people are not as equipped to engage in meaningful conversations and are not entering adulthood with independence. Twenge explains how parents, educators, and employers must also understand this shift as these young people are the most mentally fragile generation and the future of our nation. This is my generation that Twenge is attempting to explain and there are definitely trends in her explanatory book that make me pause to think about what smartphones and social media are doing to us as a society.
One of the biggest questions that I had was, why are the parents of the IGeners so willing to accept that their children are so much different than they were as kids? Obviously parents want their children to be safe and around them forever, but when they see their children locked inside on a device that was non-existent 30 years ago, doesn’t it concern them at all? In the reading with I believe it talked about how drinking and sex decreased for teenagers of today’s generation, so parents should be happy about that since they aren’t making stupid decisions in life, but making those stupid decisions are a part of what helps people grow and develop in life. If I was a millennial and I went out and did things that I wasn’t supposed to do as a teenager, I would want my IGen children to experience those activities to gain a sense of freedom that would help in the future when they actually need to control their own lives.
Other comments about the reading:
–It was intriguing to see that many of the chapters were related to other chapters in some way, such as safety and how that later affected the people that they wanted to hang out with and the jobs that they were willing to take.
–Also, are there these types of books, similar to “IGen”, where data is collected, talking about previous generations and the differences that they are experiencing? While reading this book, there were many instances where IGen was compared to previous generations, but it just seemed that IGen people are completely separate from previous generations.
–With the idea of physical fighting and how the book now says that high-school children have less altercations with other students, I would say that age is a big factor that also plays into children fighting. There aren’t that many fights at our high-school, but when I was in middle-school, there was a fight every couple of days until the school implemented a special system where each grade level would be released at a certain time. So maybe when children are younger, they don’t think rationally until they get older, or maybe teenagers are scarred from seeing fights when they were younger.
–My favorite quote from this book was when Twenge said “‘Meet me behind the KFC after school'” (149) because I kept thinking that who ever lost the fight outside the KFC would have to buy the winner a 20 dollar fill-up inside the store.