Modern teens are healthy squares
???Welcome to What Could Go Right?, where we’re wondering if you’re feeling optimistic about 2023. Write to us and let us know why or why not. We have some answers from Canada already: in this January survey,?6 in 10 Canadians say they are optimistic about 2023—and an honestly surprising number, 45 percent, are optimistic about making meaningful progress on climate change.??
What Could Go Right? is a free weekly newsletter from?The Progress Network?written by our executive director, Emma Varvaloucas. In addition to this newsletter, which collects substantive progress news from around the world, The Progress Network is also home to an?anti-apocalypse conversational podcast also called?What Could Go Right?.
Modern teens are healthy squares
Teens these days are much better behaved than we were. In a new paper published in?Social Science & Medicine, the authors document dramatic declines in the kind of behaviors that have defined teens for generations: drinking, smoking, partying, and having sex. Over the last 25 years in various high-income countries like the United States, Australia, and England:
You can see exact statistics for each country and all charts?here.?
There’s more for the US in particular. Last month the nonpartisan research center Child Trends collated data from the National Center for Health Statistics on teen pregnancy. They found that?teen birth rates have declined 77 percent?in the past 30 years.
While Child Trends chalks up the drop to less sexual activity and more contraceptive use,?The New York Times?did a?treatment on the topic?that tied together the lower rates of teen births with the amelioration of child poverty—a 59 percent drop nationwide from 1993 to 2019. “Does cutting teen births reduce child poverty, or does cutting child poverty reduce teen births?” the article asks.
And doesn’t answer, as we don’t know. While it does seem clear that larger trends around teens having sex later would lead to fewer pregnancies, why teen behavior has changed so much as a whole is a second question that is, for now, unanswered.?
The?Social Science & Medicine?paper does devote time to examining it, though, coming up with several interesting threads to follow. Here’s what we do know: teens are definitely spending less face-to-face time with friends, which may help explain the lack of partying and its associated behaviors. That is potentially troubling. It is not, however, because teens are on their screens all the time instead of hanging out, as the common narrative goes. “Rather,” the paper authors write, “there is evidence that digital communication typically facilitates or complements in-person socializing among young people.” And there is also evidence that teens who are on the internet heavily are more likely to smoke and drink than those who aren’t.
So perhaps something more wholesome is going on. The paper goes through many other possible factors that could be influencing teen behavior in addition to less hang-out time, including older, better educated parents; more involved fathers; authoritarian parenting becoming less common; declining rates of child physical and sexual abuse; teens seeing the “party lifestyle” as incompatible with their academic and career success; better knowledge of health risks; and a lot more.?
We can't come to conclusions?without further research. But for now it’s safe to say that today's?teens are on the straight and narrow more than we?were. And they are likely on the road to longer, healthier lives, too.
Before we go
After a particularly violent 2020 and 2021, while the US was going slightly bonkers from the combination of the pandemic and politics, 2022 data from two dozen US cities is showing falling murder rates, due to a decline in gun violence. Substacker and data analyst Jeff Asher digs into the data?here?to see if this is a sign of a long-term trend or not.?
Pair that analysis with this?New York Times?op-ed on the?successes of reframing gun control as gun safety, and the public support of such. It will be a much-needed tonic for those feeling broken by shootings in the US.
And, Zambia has become the latest of 25 sub-Saharan African nations to?abolish the death penalty.
Below in the links section, asteroid-hunting spacecraft, legalized hallucinogenic mushrooms, a new battery with four times the energy storage capacity of lithium, and more.
—Emma Varvaloucas
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The political is not personal?|?Americans need to keep politics separate from ordinary life. | The Liberal Patriot
Why we picked it:?Politics has taken over our lives, and?a?lot of Americans are tired of it.?Here are three suggestions for how to counteract "politics creep."?—Emma Varvaloucas
Until Next Thursday
Were the?predictions made in 1923 about 2023?correct? See for yourself.???