In 1997, 36.4 percent of teenagers smoked. Now, 15.7 percent do. That’s a 57 percent decline.
Teenagers today are 38 percent less likely to binge drink than you and your classmates were. In fact, they’re 16 percent less likely to have ever tried alcohol at all.
47 percent fewer teen girls have babies now compared to you and your high school classmates. Teens today are also 22 percent less likely to have had sex before they turned 13.
Techdirt also has a writeup.
This brings a question that folks like the EFF, ACLU, Video Games Voter Network etc have been saying for two decades now. If violent media creates violent kids, where are all the violent kids at?
The world is getting safer and less violent. Fewer people are dying before puberty, more people are living long enough to at least think about retiring. And the kids coming in after me are smarter, more cynical, more skeptical, and this makes me happy.
Do you guys think Smartphones and the Internet had something to do with this? Teenagers these days seem to be a lot less involved with outdoor activities as they now like to hang out online on their social media sites or play their Xboxs. When you're online with nobody in front of you, you can't actually hit someone in a moment of anger. I mean you could leave your house to go to someone else's house to fight them but on the way, you might think it might not be worth it as you clear your head. If no one's around you while you're online, who is going to pressure you to drink? I don't think a lot of people like to drink alone. I sure don't. Teenagers like to impress their peers. Who do you have to impress when you're online drinking alone? No one. More and More teens are on their social media apps and online and an online social experience is so much more different than a real life experience. You might not be reckless by yourself as opposed to when you are with a group of people. Also being on the Internet, you are exposed to so much. Watching videos of people getting drunk or people smoking a lot might make one think it's not that cool after all. Also are these type of commercials actually working?
Eh, I know a lot of teenagers that do. Those I know who drink at parties tend to drink alone too. I think this might be a result of the circles I run in though, who tend to be higher performing academic students with societal, academic, and familial pressure to preform well. We tend to drink because many of the reasons you mentioned as why we might not, I think. If that makes any sense. Basically, as our parents cut us off from our peers (I think kleinbl00 is 100% right about that), we just get more stressed and end up turning to more dangerous pastimes like drinking alone. I think a lot of parents and teachers of younger kids instill the idea that peer pressure is going to be a circle of kids chanting "Drink it, drink it, drink it," or a shady, but cool upperclassman offering you free weed or pills. But, as one of my favorite Reddit jokes pointed out, I'd be very happy if as many people offered me free weed as I thought as a 10 year old. Maybe it's just because I'm not a hot girl. In reality, the peer pressure is more "well, everyone else gets drunk and that seems to help them unwind, so maybe I should too." At the same time, in my circles, there's huge respect for the people that don't "turn up"—the ones who can mother hen everyone at parties, switch out the vodka for water when people get too drunk, drive people home, pick up the trash. If we know they have as much stress as we do, our respect goes even higher. I think you've got some good points about the smartphones and internet, but I think you also missed the other side to it. Teenagers I know don't use the internet to replace physical socializing, they use it to enhance it. There are about half a dozen different ways to reach me on my phone. So, if there's a party, or any sort of "move" for the night, I know about it, and so do basically all of my friends. The question then is just what lie to tell the parents to get out of the house. The internet also changes what we know about the drugs we are apparently using less. There are people who are incredibly knowledgeable about the substances they and other use. So, I'd say yes, we do see some of the things alcohol and other drugs can do to you. People I know are incredibly cautious about prescription drugs. Driving drunk will kill your social life, if it doesn't kill you. So, some of the propaganda is working, and I am very glad it is. But at the same time, the internet has also opened while new worlds of drugs to us. The psychedelics in my region are largely brought in through mail orders from the deep web. Kids are learning to make some of their own drugs, or improve the ones they already have (e.g. making hashish or "Green Dragon"). We also share readily. Kids who 20 years ago would probably have never touched drugs are today hooked on Adderall because it helps them preform better at school. They don't even need to buy it black market, just get it from a friend who has a script but doesn't like taking it. Maybe my experiences and views are more of a result of where I live rather than how old I am. Drugs are cheap and easy to find in this city of aging hippies. I don't doubt the stats in the article, but I also fear that looking at them without regard for specific situations can lead to poor conclusions. I know the rates of drug use and sexual activity at my high school are way higher than the stats for now, and probably higher than the stats for 20 years ago. Thew are also highs schools in my area with serious hard drug problems that need to be addressed, and in this I know my area isn't unique. Sure, maybe less kids are doing drugs, but this isn't occasionally popping molly, this might be being hooked to heroin or coke. So, while I'm happy about many of the stats this article points out, I'm also wary that it can be taken the wrong way as saying everything is getting better, when teenagers still fucked up.I don't think a lot of people like to drink alone.
I could point to two books by Sherry Turkle, one by danah boyd, another by Lenore Skenazy and still another by Bill McKibben that demonstrate that teenagers these days are far less likely to be allowed in the company of other teenagers. Are kids somehow less hormonal? So they're having less sex why? Well, porn's free and unlimited, for starters. For another thing, to have sex you need two people unsupervised and that's getting trickier and trickier every single day. Lenore Skenazy would look at this same data and throw study after study after study to indicate that the guy you need to thank is John Walsh: The world is vastly safer but parents are vastly more terrified and the end result is cloistered kids. Teenagers like to impress their peers. Who do you have to impress when you're online drinking alone? No one.
Access to violent media may provide an outlet to violent thoughts and behavior If you can kill people in Counter Strike and Call of duty, maybe you don't go and do harm to people in the 'real world.' Note that this is all very, very speculative and should not be taken as gospel at all. The plummeting of the crime rate from 1991 has been linked to the removal of lead in gasoline, abortion and birth control, the college graduation rate, the rise of minimum wage rates, clean air laws, greater incarceration rates and I bet someone is trying to link crime to global warming as well. The reality is that over the last few hundred years we as a people have been trending towards less violence and less warfare and less crime.
I doubt it. I had a vague idea what I was looking for (violence per capita over time) and found one that went back far enough. Most sources will point out that warfare has gone down a bunch since 1945 but nobody has any good data before that. This is from something called "the violent death project" which sounds metal as fuck but probably isn't.
One of the criticisms Pinker got from the first run of Better Angels of Our Nature was his classification of the Rwanda genocide as a 'minor' event that 'only' killed 500,000 people. This was before the death counts in Iraq hit the 100,000 and above levels. Even with those two wars, going only by body count we have been almost three generations without a major war. WWI wiped out a whole generation of men in Europe, WWII and its related war crimes, genocides, mass murders and battle deaths wiped out another whole generation 30 years later. The Smithsonian Mag has a chart, but it looks like they are under-counting Iraq deaths which is to be expected considering the source. The big thing that is making the world safer, in my opinion, is that the 'wars' are more low-key, precision munitions, and guerrilla wars where thousands of non-combatants are rounded up and killed or who die in the big epic battle fronts. I am fairly confident that Iraq is going to be one of the last, old school, "mass troops on the border and roll to the capital" wars. The specter floating over the heads of the guys who want to fight these wars is nuclear weapons. That and a war of that scale is bad for trade and business. I'm convinced that China and the US won't fight a war for at least a generation; same thing the US and Russia. There will be small-scale stuff like Crimea and Ukraine, but no Kursks or Stalingrads. As an aside, yea, the "Violent Death Project" would be a kick ass metal band name. The only thing close I could find was Death Project which, as a sound mixer, will hurt you to listen to.