iGen: Why Today's Super-connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy-and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood-and What That Means for the Rest of Us by Jean Twenge (review)

issn 0362-4021 © 2018 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 42, No. 4, Winter 2018 363 1 Correspondence should be addressed to Brunhild Kring, MD, Department of Psychiatry, New York University, Langone Medical Center, One Park Avenue, 8th floor, New York, NY 10016. Email: brunhild.kring@nyumc.org. Book Review iGen: Why Today’s Super-connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy— and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us. By Jean Twenge. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017, 333 pp. Reviewed by Brunhild Kring1 Most therapists have embraced the idea that there is a Millennial generation of young and optimistic people with a healthy sense of confidence and entitlement, posing specific therapeutic challenges. Now social scientists inform us of the recent emergence of a new cohort with radically different and surprising social and behavioral characteristics, called iGen. iGen refers to kids born in 1995 and after. They are a birth cohort of digital natives who grew up with the iPhone. The smart phone was released in 2007, when iGeners were teenagers. By 2015, three-quarters of adolescents owned a digital phone. This impressive market saturation did not just involve rich kids but youngsters of all socioeconomic strata. The initial i stands for “internet, individualism, in no hurry to grow up, in person no more, insecure, irreligious, insulated, income insecurity, inclusive,” and so on. Twenge is an excellent writer who crafts many a memorable turn of phrase. Of course, these epithets do not apply to every single individual but describe averages and social trends. Social change is inevitable and at first glance should not be judged as good or bad. It just is. However, Twenge, a psychology professor at the University of San Diego and author of 120 scientific papers and two books, grew concerned when she noticed several sudden, major changes in the survey data she had been following that coincided with the introduction of the smart phone. 364 kring Worrying about the respective young generation has a long tradition. “What’s wrong with today’s kids?” is a recurrent theme in any era. One may therefore feel tempted to dismiss Twenge’s warnings as needlessly alarmist. But the reader is reminded that the author’s description of the pending crisis of young adults born in 1995 and thereafter is not just a reflection of her personal idiosyncratic opinion but informed by an analysis of several large-scale surveys: Monitoring the Future is a database in use since 1976—every year it has queried 8th, 10th, and 12th graders; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been administering the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System since 1991; the American Freshman Survey pertains to students entering college; and finally, the General Social Survey has examined adults aged 18 years and older since 1971. These surveys are “comparing one generation to another at the same age” (p. 9) rather than relying on people’s retrospective recollections. They have been carefully designed to be representative of the U.S. population in terms of gender, race, socioeconomic status, and location. The publicly available data sets comprise 11 million subjects; nowadays, we consider a sample size of this scope to be Big Data. Some of the findings that Twenge highlights stand out for me as a psychiatrist working with young adults. We need to anticipate a changing racial mix in the young cohort: iGeners are the most diverse generation. Whites still have a small majority, at 53%, but among kids born after 2009, no one ethnic group predominates, and a significant minority will be multiracial, further challenging identity development and loyalty to a specific group. It is important for therapists to keep in mind that these teens are growing up more slowly: when they graduate from high school, they are less likely than previous young adults to have a driver’s license, tried alcohol, gone out on person-to-person dates, or held a paying job. They are initiating sexual intercourse at least one year later, which has resulted in fewer teen pregnancies and lower rates of sexually transmitted diseases. “The teen birthrate hit an all-time low in 2015, cut by more than...