I feel mildly -- but only mildly -- reassured that a study supports my anecdotal feelings.[A] new study show[s] that teenagers are increasingly delaying activities that had long been seen as rites of passage into adulthood. The study, published Tuesday [today] in the journal Child Development, found that the percentage of adolescents in the U.S. who have a driver’s license, who have tried alcohol, who date, and who work for pay has plummeted since 1976, with the most precipitous decreases in the past decade.
The declines appeared across race, geographic, and socioeconomic lines, and in rural, urban, and suburban areas.
Onward into the new, increasingly-insipid, feudalism.
I left home at 17, just to have a place to get laid without parental interference.
ReplyDeleteInteresting study. Lengthy abstract is available.
ReplyDeletehttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.12930/full
Agree the conclusion seems anecdotally true, if trivial or a bit too obvious.
Lots of missing questions and issues.
As with many studies in the social sciences the conclusion seems forced to meet the hypothesis.
Perhaps in the future the data collected can be used to present a more accurate picture of childhood development in Westernized countries circa the early part of the 21st century.