BONUS: Jean Twenge on Generational Differences

Summary

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Breakpoint BONUS: Jean Twenge on Generational Differences

Podcast: Breakpoint
Host: John Stonestreet
Guest: Dr. Jean Twenge
Date: July 15, 2026

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Episode Overview

This bonus episode of Breakpoint features a conversation between John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center, and Dr. Jean Twenge, a renowned psychologist and author specializing in generational differences. The discussion, recorded at the Colson Center National Conference, ranges from the origins of Dr. Twenge's research, to the seismic cultural shifts impacting American generations, with a special focus on the role of technology, mental health, family formation, and emerging concerns about artificial intelligence. The tone is candid, data-driven, and practical, with both host and guest sharing personal anecdotes and tangible advice for parents navigating the digital world with their children.

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Origins of a Generational Researcher

[00:53–04:03]

• Dr. Twenge explains how she “kind of stumbled into” generational research during her undergraduate studies, noticing differences between her subjects’ test results and older manuals.
• She was fascinated by how people were talking about Gen X without real data to back up generalizations:

  • “One of the books I read said, oh, Gen X has low self esteem. I'm like, that's an empirical question.” – Jean Twenge [01:54]

• Chose to pursue personality psychology to empirically answer these questions.
• Early publication efforts were often met with skepticism by academics unwilling to acknowledge generational change, despite public interest.

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The Technology Thesis: Beyond Economics

[04:03–06:38]

• Stonestreet highlights how generational cutoffs are “kind of rough dates,” but visible in social memory and photographs.
• Twenge challenges the view that economic cycles are the main cause of generational change:

  • “So many cultural changes have been building for decades. And that's not what economic cycles do.” – Jean Twenge [04:59]

• Instead, technological advancement is the major driver:
  • Technology fosters individualism and changes the “life strategy” of new generations (i.e., slower life transitions).

  • “It really does [come] back to technology...that organizing structure explains so much, so much more than big events or the economy or any of those other things.” – Jean Twenge [06:22]

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The Smartphone Era’s Disruption

[06:38–07:51]

• Pivotal years:
  • 2007 – Introduction of the iPhone and surge of social apps (Skype, Facebook).
  • 2012 – Majority smartphone adoption, shift to algorithmic feeds on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.
• This period marks dramatic shifts in self-esteem, mental health, relationships, and aspirations among young people.

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Relationships, Marriage, and Declining Family Formation

[07:51–10:59]

• Twenge and Stonestreet discuss the decline in marriages and birth rates; the desire for marriage is also waning in younger generations.
• Twenge references collaborative work showing that, contrary to some cultural claims, “single women are happier,” marriage (especially married mothers) is actually linked to higher happiness:

  • “There's this pervasive rumor out there...It's just this very strong perception and this cultural message that gets put out there, and it's not true.” – Jean Twenge [08:40]

• Increase in depression and pessimism, tied to tech and social media, indirectly and directly undermines optimism and family formation.

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Technology, Mental Health, and Causality

[10:59–12:49]

• Twenge narrates how data showed sharp increases in depression among teens beginning around 2012, affecting not just self-reported symptoms but clinical diagnoses and ER visits for self-harm.
• Initial difficulty in pinpointing the cause; then realizes it aligns with increased device/screen usage and reduced offline socialization and sleep.

  • “...it might be interfering with sleep. And then you put that together: more time on a screen...if it's displacing the time you spend with people in person and sleeping, automatically, that's going to be bad for mental health.” – Jean Twenge [12:25]

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Changing Markers of Adolescence

[13:03–14:36]

• Decline in classic milestones of independence (getting a driver's license at 16).

  • “Gen Xers, we had to get that license right away...” – Jean Twenge [13:24]

• Today’s teens experience independence differently, and digital connection both enables new forms of “independence” while fostering dependence (e.g., constant texting with parents, less solo exploration).

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Resilience, Parenting, and Blame

[15:14–17:29]

• Multigenerational discussion on resilience:
  • Millennials received messages of limitless optimism (“You can be anything!”), but adult realities proved challenging.
  • Gen Z faces more pessimism and isolation, less readiness for independent life skills.

  • “I really hate the blame game...You can, as a parent, do everything you can, and the culture still gets in under the door.” – Jean Twenge [15:36]

• Helicopter parenting and constant connectivity make it harder for young people to make decisions and develop resilience.

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Gender Identity & Adolescent Trends

[18:07–21:11]

• Notable increase in transgender identification, especially among adolescents and young adults—less so among older groups, which challenges the “just increased acceptance” explanation.
• Social stigma may have dropped faster among the young, but technology and online contagion also suspected, though Twenge emphasizes the need for more research:

  • “It's absolutely clear that there's been an increase in identifying as transgender, particularly among adolescent...” – Jean Twenge [20:17]

  • “And I think we just don't. We just don't know. I think there are several possible explanations, and we need to look into it more closely.” – Jean Twenge [20:45]

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Parenting in a High-Tech World: Practical Advice

[21:14–27:23]

• Stonestreet introduces Twenge’s upcoming book: 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High Tech World (out September 2025).
  • The book blends Twenge’s data analysis with her experiences parenting three teenagers.
• Key “rules” from the book:
  1. No phones in the bedroom overnight:
     • “Buy an alarm clock.” – Twenge [24:49]
     • Even the presence of a phone disrupts sleep.
  2. Loving but firm parenting style:
     • “You're in charge. It's about parenting style.” – Jean Twenge [25:38]
  3. Delay giving smartphones as long as possible:
     • “Put off giving them one as long as possible... Give them a flip phone at first.” – Jean Twenge [27:28]
  4. Monitor, but balance privacy and oversight for older teens.
  5. Beware of hidden app and social media use:
     Teens easily circumvent explicit rules; monitoring actual usage is key.

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Harms of Social Media

[27:23–31:58]

• Social media offers little, if any, net benefit for teens:

  • “Nothing good for the most part, is there?” – Jean Twenge [28:57]

  • “Delete it.” – John Stonestreet, recounting advice to teens [29:14]

• The notion that social media helps maintain friendships is undermined by evidence; texting and in-person connection are better.
• Claims that social media aids at-risk youth (e.g., rural LGBTQ teens) are not backed by data; these groups’ mental health deteriorated faster post-2012.

  • “The argument people make is, ‘Oh, I'm using it to keep in touch with my friends.’...But inevitably then it becomes the influencers and watching the videos and so on.” – Jean Twenge [29:23]

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The Coming Challenge: AI and Youth Development

[32:02–33:27]

• Stonestreet and Twenge discuss uncertainties about AI’s impact:
  • Outsourcing thinking could erode cognitive skills in kids.
  • Concern about chatbots replacing real relationships:

    • “If you have an AI girlfriend, then what happens when you try to have a relationship with an actual human being who has needs and might not tell you you're right all the time?” – Jean Twenge [33:14]

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Glimmers of Hope: School Policy & Cultural Shifts

[33:27–35:56]

• More schools are instituting “no phones during the school day” policies, which Twenge (and Jonathan Haidt) recommend.
• Early results: students are socializing face-to-face again at lunch.
  • Students “playing cards, they're bedazzling...they're interacting in person.” – Jean Twenge [34:27]
• Twenge lauds work pushing back on the ed-tech revolution, arguing for a return to paper and reducing digital distractions in education.

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Notable Quotes

• On empirical questions:

  “Gen X has low self esteem. I'm like, that's an empirical question.”
  – Jean Twenge [01:54]

• On the role of technology:

  “Organizing structure explains so much, so much more than big events or the economy or any of those other things.”
  – Jean Twenge [06:30]

• On smartphones and adolescence:

  “2012... that's when we cross over from having the iPhone to everyone... it becomes a social norm.”
  – Twenge & Stonestreet [07:23]

• On blaming parents/kids:

  “I really hate the blame game... You can, as a parent, do everything you can, and the culture still gets in under the door.”
  – Jean Twenge [15:36]

• On mental health and devices:

  “If it's displacing the time you spend with people in person and sleeping, automatically, that's going to be bad for mental health.”
  – Jean Twenge [12:25]

• On resilience:

  “With Millennials, it was a lot of the individualism, the optimism... and then you get to adulthood, and adulthood smacks you in the face.”
  – Jean Twenge [16:12]

• On parenting and tech:

  “No phones in the bedroom overnight is the best place to start.”
  – Jean Twenge [24:19]

• On the social media trap:

  “The values or lack of values on these platforms is just mind blowing.”
  – Jean Twenge [27:06]

• On AI fears:

  “If you have an AI girlfriend, then what happens when you try to have a relationship with an actual human being who has needs and might not tell you you're right all the time?”
  – Jean Twenge [33:14]

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Important Timestamps & Segments

• Origins of generational research: [00:53–03:19]
• Technology as driver of change: [04:03–06:38]
• Impact of 2007/2012 smartphone adoption: [06:38–07:51]
• Marriage, family, and happiness trends: [07:51–10:59]
• Rising depression and screen time impacts: [10:59–12:49]
• Changing adolescence, driver’s license example: [13:03–14:36]
• Millennials vs. Gen Z resilience debates: [15:14–17:29]
• Trends in gender identity & social contagion: [18:07–21:11]
• Parenting rules for tech: [21:14–27:23]
• Social media critique: [27:23–31:58]
• Artificial intelligence concerns: [32:02–33:27]
• School responses & hopeful notes: [33:27–35:56]

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Final Reflections

Throughout the conversation, Dr. Twenge and John Stonestreet deliver clear-eyed warnings about the unprecedented nature of adolescence and family life in the smartphone era. Though the episode carries a tone of concern, especially regarding digital tech and its pervasive effects, it closes with some optimism—highlighting the growing movement among parents and schools for reform, and the practical steps every family can take toward healthier digital habits.

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Transcript

[John Stonestreet]

Today on Breakpoint, a special bonus podcast during this year's Colson Center National Conference. Colson center president John Stonestreet had a chance to sit down with Gene Twenge, one of the featured speakers at the conference to talk about America's various generations and their impact on culture. Twenge is an American psychologist whose research specializes in generational differences. We had several wonderful speakers at this year's conference, including Carl Truman, Os Guinness, Chloe Cole, Frank Turek, and more. If you weren't able to join us, here's your chance to hear all of the recorded sessions from this year's conference with a gift of any amount now through August 8th. Get your digital access today by visiting HolsonCenter.org July now here's John Stonestreet with Gene Twenge.

Dr. Gene Twenge, thanks for being a part of our podcast. What a terrific presentation you just gave. Covered an incredible amount of ground, and I want to get into a lot of that. We're not going to rehash all that ground because it would be impossible to do. But you love this stuff. And I'm always fascinated, you know, when someone loves something that I wouldn't necessarily love, which is kind of numbers crunching and that sort of stuff. So I don't know if you're, you know, for giving us kind of the personal thing, how did you get into this? Looking at generations, doing statistics and trying to kind of help us understand ourselves better?

[Gene Twenge]

I mean, like a lot of things in science, I kind of stumbled into it. So as an undergrad, I was doing my honors thesis on gender, which I'm still interested in. But I saw this big disconnect between the responses I was getting in the early 90s and what the test manual said they should be from the early 70s. And it was around the time the media was trying to understand Gen X. Wait, young people aren't boomers anymore? What are they? We have no idea.

[John Stonestreet]

Right.

[Gene Twenge]

And they're trying to put that together. So it just kind of came together of, hey, this is probably a generational difference. Hey, there's all these people writing about generations and I love this stuff. And I just devoured all of those books. But where's their data? It just wasn't there. They would make guesses. Like one of the books I read said, oh, Gen X has low self esteem. I'm like, that's an empirical question.

[John Stonestreet]

Right? We can know that.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah. By the next year, I was in graduate school in personality psychology and realizing we could figure that out. And of course they don't have low self esteem.

[John Stonestreet]

We're Gen Xers, we know better than that.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah.

[John Stonestreet]

We have low opinions of everybody else.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah. But you know, we grew up with individualism. It would have been really surprising if we had low self esteem. So just trying to put that together and just realizing, hey, this is something that just hasn't been studied that much. It's really interesting. It combined my interest in modern history, in social change, in understanding people in something that, you know, everyday people are interested in. I did not want to go into academia and do something obscure, do something where if I, you know, tried to explain it to my parents or my grandparents or the person sitting next to me on the airplane, they'd be like, I have no idea what you're talking about. That just wasn't interesting to me. I wanted it to be real, but I was lucky enough to find that and something where there hadn't been that much work on it that had its own challenges. It's been sometimes difficult to publish those papers.

[John Stonestreet]

Really?

[Gene Twenge]

Oh yeah. Especially early on.

[John Stonestreet]

Why is that? I mean, obviously people seem really interested, especially in the generational differences that you've worked on your book, Generations is the book. I mean, you've kind of written the book on Generations. So has it been difficult?

[Gene Twenge]

Well, publishing the books and doing media interviews and getting regular people interested in it has never been hard. It's convincing academics that social change exists and they have to keep that in mind. And that yes, the cutoffs for generations are arbitrary, but we can all agree that living now is different than it used to be. So there's these kind of petty disagreements. I don't know. I have some issues with academia even though I've been in it for a long time.

[John Stonestreet]

A lot of people have issues with academia, but that's the point. Today you gave us dates and we understand they're kind of rough dates. But you showed pictures, right? And the pictures just speak for themselves. I mean, we remember the free range childhood that we had. We remember parents maybe, maybe not knowing where you're at at any point in the day.

[Gene Twenge]

We remember the playground with the rocks.

[John Stonestreet]

Right? Yeah. The dangerous playgrounds. I mean. Yeah. How many of us have scars still from the metal of those things? And so the pictures are obvious, clear things have changed. What you introduced this morning, which was so helpful, is that there's also theories academically of why these social things change. And I mean, in a sense we're all kind of Marxists now, right? Where we kind of punt to economics as being the reason that these things change. And you don't think that's adequate?

[Gene Twenge]

I don't, I don't. So many changes, generational changes, cultural changes have been building for decades. And that's not what economic cycles do. You know, there's a boom, there's a bust, and just it's a cycle, it goes up and down. And even if you look at things like mental health, the Great Recession, many of us are old enough to remember that and how bad that was, and it was bad. And you get a little bit of a bump in poor mental health, but it's tiny compared to the effects of say the smartphone or just the overall decades long trend of people feeling more disconnected, feeling more lonely, not feeling as integrated with their communities. That's what has a big impact on people. And so when I wrote Generations, I'm not good with theory. That's always been the thing. I have not been as great. The data crunching, I always love that. It's like opening a Christmas present. It's really fun, but trying to put things into a theoretical framework. But I realized everything comes back to technology. It really does. When I realized that technologically complex societies lead to individualism, they also lead to that slow life strategy, I didn't come up with that theory. That's a revolutionary psychology. But realizing that technology has that, it's those three things that direct effect. The effect through individualism, the effect through slow life strategy, you know, that's my, like my one big theory and I'm done. Because I'm probably never gonna come up with another big theory again because it's just not my thing in general. But it was helpful there to realize that organizing structure explains so much, so much more than big events or the economy or any of those other things.

[John Stonestreet]

Well, looking at the graphs this morning, you had a date. Two dates really. 2007, 2012, that where you see the bump become more than small. And 2007, it reminded me Thomas Friedman's thanks for being late, I think is the name of the book. But he opened no, the World is Flat. He opens that book by saying what happened in 2007. Now he's talking about technological change, Skype, Facebook, the iPhone, app stores. And it's interesting as you're looking at self esteem, independence, you know, positive mental health indicators, relational commitments, wanting to have children, all these things that you pointed out this morning. There's 2007. So 2012, that's the adoption date, right? That's when?

[Gene Twenge]

50. 50.

[John Stonestreet]

Okay. So that's when we cross over from having the iPhone to everyone.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, seemingly Everyone or the majority of people having one, it becomes a social norm. I mean, that's also a turning point. Like, that's when Facebook bought inst.

[John Stonestreet]

Oh, interesting. Okay.

[Gene Twenge]

That's also around the time that Facebook moved to a more algorithmic feed rather than chronological. Instagram did that later in 2016. But, like, that early 2010s period is when all of that stuff really changed.

[John Stonestreet]

Okay. All right, Now, I want to ask you about a couple things, because one of the things that always comes up in your line of work is the chicken and the egg question. Okay. Does this cause this or did this cause this? I've really appreciated, for example, the work of Brad Wilcox at the University of Virginia, the Institute for Family Studies. And he's looking at, you know, his. I don't know if it's his big theory, but he also notes these dramatic changes in relational arrangements, marital rates. You have the dramatic decline in birth rates, which you point out, but also the dramatic decline in marriage. And then wanting to be married, where you have that last generation that wanted to be married but didn't get married at the rates, and now fewer people actually want to get married. Where do you see family formation? Or. I mean, maybe that's beyond. When you look at his research, how do you put that together?

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah. No, and I've worked with Brad. I love the stuff that he's done, and I think he recognizes that that's one of our biggest challenges going forward is that so much research has looked at. For example, I've done this with Brad and the Institute for Family Studies in terms of happiness. There's this pervasive rumor out there that, particularly for women, that it's single women who are happier. It's not true, and it's never been true. And no data set has ever shown that. It's just this very strong perception and this cultural message that gets put out there, and it's not true. And then there's been even more debate back and forth about having children and whether that's linked to happiness. Now, that's an interesting one, because really, is that really why you're having children? To be happy? Well, maybe, but I would hope it would also be to have purpose and meaning and all these other things. And we know that. We know that. That parenthood is connected to purpose and meaning, but there's been debate about whether it's connected to happiness. And so in a recent project, that's one of the things that we found it was actually married mothers were the happiest.

[John Stonestreet]

Yeah, that, to me, has always Been just a fascinating thing because study after study seems to point to that same conclusion. And there's been such good work done on that. How do you see your work on technology and technological disruption of mental health and of the generations impacting the family?

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, in a lot of ways. So I mean indirectly and directly. So one thing that I get a chance to talk about is depression and what effect that ends up having on relationships. And it's across the board, because if you're depressed, you're probably not getting out of the house all that much. And when you are, you're not gonna have the courage to start dating, because dating can be bruising and uncomfortable and all of those types of things. And it's harder to do that when you're depressed. Also, people tend to want to have children when they're optimistic about the future and about the world, and we're seeing more pessimism and more depression. And so I think, you know, there's a lot of causes behind these trends, and I think one of them is that huge increase in depression that we've seen among not just adolescents, but young adults.

[John Stonestreet]

And you connect the increase in technology with the increase in depression. Absolutely. So talk us through that a little bit.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah. You know, so those increases in depression, when they first started to happen, and I first started to see them in these data sets, I had no clue why it was happening.

[John Stonestreet]

You knew it was happening, but I

[Gene Twenge]

first started to see that it was happening. It was in the surveys of the 8th, 10th, and 12th graders where I first saw it. Then there's an article in pediatrics showing it for clinical level depression. Then there was one on self harm. And I okay, something is clearly going on here, and it's clearly not. People are just being more willing to admit to symptoms because it's showing up in that clinical level depression with these really strict requirements. It's showing up in emergency room visits for self harm. That's an objectively measured behavior. So something is clearly going on. It's clearly real. Young people are struggling more with mental health. It's not just a perception or a being more comfortable to talk about it thing. So that made me wonder why it was totally misaligned with the economy. It was just tough to think of anything else that might explain this. But at the same time, I was seeing that I was starting to analyze data on teens spending less time with each other in person and that they were also sleeping less. And then I'm like, well, what explains all? What could explain all of this? And that then the answer Became obvious that it was the growth of the Internet and social media and phones, that if you're spending a lot more time on that, then you're not getting together with friends in person. You know, that causation seemed really clear right away and that it might be interfering with sleep. And then you put that together more time on a screen. Even if that. Even if you. And I don't believe this, but even if you say that's neutral, if it's displacing the time you spend with people in person and sleeping automatically, that's going to be bad for mental health.

[John Stonestreet]

Right.

[Gene Twenge]

And it's every day. It's not, you know, some event that happened or something that's happening to kids, parents. The way that teens spend their time outside of school is fundamentally different than it was a generation or two ago. And that's gonna have an impact.

[John Stonestreet]

You pointed to one of the indicators, driver's license. I mean, the day I turned 16, which is new Year's Eve, by the way, is when my birthday is. So I wasn't even sure the DMV

[Gene Twenge]

was gonna be my mom's birthday too.

[John Stonestreet]

It was.

[Gene Twenge]

Do people come up to you at parties and say, you know, is your birthday always on New Year's Eve?

[John Stonestreet]

It's. Yeah.

[Gene Twenge]

Right. Cause they're drunk.

[John Stonestreet]

Right. Cause they.

[Gene Twenge]

Sorry to derail you. I just love that joke. But yeah, Gen Xers, we had to get that license right away immediately.

[John Stonestreet]

DMV was only open till noon that day, you know, because you were there

[Gene Twenge]

in the morning, weren't you?

[John Stonestreet]

And gone that night. Right. I mean, I was there that morning and I had the car somewhere that night.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah.

[John Stonestreet]

It is amazing to me. That's the thing that it just seems so odd that a teenager wouldn't want that kind of independence. And we also know, though, that the effect is both ways. So a teen having kind of access to this other world that's all by themselves and isolates them, that's gotta. May probably kind of create that sort of. This is my safe space. I don't need to go anywhere else.

[Gene Twenge]

Yes.

[John Stonestreet]

But isn't it also like, because they have it, parents are constantly in touch. Here's I struggle. I have two kids in college, Right. And we talk a lot. I talk with them, I text, we go back and forth. But we're in touch way more. And I was a boy there, a girl. That's probably part of it. But I mean, if I remember to call my folks once a week in college, it was a good thing.

[Gene Twenge]

Well, you probably had to go down the hall to use the phone.

[John Stonestreet]

Right. And it cost money.

[Gene Twenge]

Or even if it was in your room, long distance was expensive. If you went away to college, it's very different.

[John Stonestreet]

It is very different.

[Gene Twenge]

You know, so there's upsides. You know, clearly there's upsides that keeping in touch. But there's also these huge downsides.

[John Stonestreet]

You're listening to a Breakpoint bonus podcast with John Stonestreet and Gene Twenge. We'll get right back to their discussion, but first, I wanted to let you know that you can get Dr. Twenge's speech from this year's Colson Center National Conference and all of the other main speakers with a gift of any amount by visiting colsoncenter.orgJuly but hurry, this offer is only good through August 8th. That's colsoncenter.orgJuly now back to our interview

with the driver's license thing. You were talking about kind of independence. And we've heard a lot about the lack of resilience of millennials and Gen Xers. Millennials and Gen Zers. You know, the verdict, I guess, is still out on alphas since they're so young. But that, to me, is a fascinating trait. Are we to blame for that, or are they to blame for that?

[Gene Twenge]

I really hate the blame game. I really think that we talk about these cultural trends that impact generational differences. We're all in this together. It's these just huge things that are having an impact on all of us. You know, should we think about our parenting and try to be better? Of course. But you can, as a parent, do everything you can, and the culture still gets in under the door. But Millennials versus Gen Z in terms of the resilience is an interesting one because I think it took different forms. I think with Millennials, it was a lot of the individualism, the optimism. You can be anything you want to be, all of that, and then you get to adulthood, and adulthood smacks you in the face.

[John Stonestreet]

So it's like you got beat down by reality.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, exactly. It's like a rude awakening. And a lot of millennials say that I'm not a millennial, I'm a Gen Xer. But. But I've seen that over and over. Nobody told us it was going to be this hard. You know, it was a common theme.

[John Stonestreet]

In fact, they told them the opposite in many cases. Right?

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, absolutely. And I think Gen Z. Gen Z hasn't gotten that. I think they have heard maybe even too much, you know, that things are difficult and bad and so on. But that's actually been the problem. They have that plus that isolation that has led to depression. And that's. That's for them the challenge in having resilience and also just not having those experiences like the driver's license, like going out with their friends where they have to learn how to navigate the world without their parents in the real world. And then they get to college and wait, what do I do now? And, yeah, they text their parents. And I hear that everywhere I go, you know, college staff, they say I have more and more students who can't make even simple decisions without texting their parents. And Cool, that's cool that they're talking to their parents. But then they also need to cut those apron strings sometimes and learn how to navigate the world on their own.

[John Stonestreet]

Yeah. Oh, it's hard. I mean, this is so like immediate. Our daughter just flew in from another country last night late to JFK by herself and had to get from one terminal to the other.

[Gene Twenge]

Fantastic.

[John Stonestreet]

And she did it.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah.

[John Stonestreet]

And before this, I'd be. Here's how you do it, you know, and because I travel a lot and you kind of want to help, but it is. It's hard to do that yourself. Right. I mean, but college students used to

[Gene Twenge]

have to do that without phones. Ah, that's right.

[John Stonestreet]

We had a map.

[Gene Twenge]

Right. So it was. You couldn't even. You didn't even have anybody to call for help. And they did it. We did it.

[John Stonestreet]

We did it. We're still here.

[Gene Twenge]

Sometimes stuff went wrong, but then we learned from that.

[John Stonestreet]

That's right. No, it is. And that is a challenge, I think, for all of us. We talk about the helicopter parenting and the lawnmower parenting and all that. Let me jump to another issue. There's a theological work from an Anglican, a guy named Oliver o'. Donovan. This could be. Sorry, it may be a little lengthy of a setup here, but I'll try to make it quick. He wrote on the various sexual issues from a theological and moral perspective 25 years ago. One of the chapters is on transgender, but it was even tells you when he wrote it, he called it transsexualism. Right. Because this is way back then. He's a British guy writing in the early 80s or mid-80s, something like that. In it, he makes an observation that says basically what we're talking about here are middle aged men who have a sexual fetish. What we have just gone through in terms of the gender confusion question as a. And not through. I mean, we're in it is a dramatic increase in Young girls. Abigail Schreier has written about this and others that you're talking about adolescent. Many times pre adolescent girls. We're not talking about a sexual fetish. We're talking about something else. Something else that led them to a great discomfort and even to the case where the reports are almost five to one. That's who we're talking about, I think, Tavistock, that report. So we look at the graphs, and you really have done this tremendous job of showing increase in cell phone use. You know, boom, 2012. Everything spikes, and then various levels of struggle, mental health struggles, feeling lost, isolated, lonely. And you could put that other graph on there of this growth, particularly in young people. But young girls in particular, it wasn't that long ago, five or six years ago. You get a lot of trouble for even suggesting something like this. So I don't know if you want to go down this line with me, but I would love to know, because it seems like those three charts just lie on top of each other. Like they're, you know, I don't. Again, causation, correlation, what's the chicken, what's the egg? But what do you do with that data? Or am I just making stuff up?

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, I mean, so it's absolutely clear that there's been an increase in identifying as transgender, particularly among adolescent. Well, I don't have a lot of data on adolescents, but young adults been able to trace that much more than the older generations. And so that's interesting, because if it was just broad acceptance, you would think it would be among all age groups.

[John Stonestreet]

Oh, so the social stigma argument, saying that now. Okay, got it. Yep.

[Gene Twenge]

But as I think some people pointed out, which I think is a good point, well, maybe that has been more. Maybe the social stigma has dropped much more among young adults. Plus, they're not as far along in their lives. It's easier to make that type of change. So I can see that argument, too. And then there is the argument that it's technology. And I think we just don't. We just don't know. I think there are several possible explanations, and we need to look into it more closely.

[John Stonestreet]

Yeah, yeah. Is anybody looking into it more closely than.

[Gene Twenge]

I have no idea.

[John Stonestreet]

Okay. I mean, it's a tough question. And it's also, I think, you know, we're seeing a tough question coming out of them. Even the medical community that are. We kind of ran into some of these treatments and are backing off, going, you know, we were told this is the way forward. It's not the way forward. And so that's why one of the reasons I appreciate your data driven commitment to data, you know, so very, very much. Let me jump to your new book. And you admitted this morning that you have now gone into parenting advice, which is a big step. It's a different kind of book. But I started reading Sherry Turkle's work on technology years ago and her first two books, dealing with computers and then the Internet, were very optimistic. She felt like even these technologies were would do for our humanness was very positive. And then her third book was all the optimism was gone. And it was funny because I asked her once in an interview, what happened to your optimism? And she said, I had a teenage daughter that'll do it. It'll do it to both of us. Yeah, right. But she had some really, I thought in her recently she said such wonderful advice, you know, just like turn it off. And it seems pretty simple. But your new book released in September of 2025. Right. Is kind of offering some of 10 things, I think. So what are the 10 things? Or at least give us a handful of them.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah. And so it's called 10 rules for raising Kids in a High Tech World. So it's the collision between the research I've been doing on the effects of technology and having three teenagers.

[John Stonestreet]

You have three?

[Gene Twenge]

I do.

[John Stonestreet]

Oh, wow, that's awesome.

[Gene Twenge]

19, 16 and 14. So just trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. And you know, I've been lucky to give a lot of talks to parent groups and I've been doing that for about 10 years, even before this book came out. You know, here's what's actually going on, you know, here's how their childhood and adolescence actually are different in terms of technology and growing up more slowly and so on. And just trying to think about, so what do we do about it? How do we introduce tech to kids when they're ready? How do we keep tech from taking over their lives? Because that's the thing. You know, technology is not all bad by any means, but we've clearly gone too far with this, especially for children and adolescents.

[John Stonestreet]

And it's inescapable. I mean, it's just ubiquitous.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, it is. But I don't think that means we should give up.

[John Stonestreet]

Right. Good for you.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, you know, I mean, I think it's just a matter of doing what you can and you're not going to be able to get rid of all technology. You probably wouldn't want to. And yes, there's going to be slip ups and mistakes and one of my favorite phrases Is don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Do what you can. I've certainly made mistakes, and I tried to share that in the book and talk about, you know, workarounds that my kids have found, you know, other parents have told me about.

[John Stonestreet]

Okay.

[Gene Twenge]

But I just don't think you can say, oh, that ship has sailed. And that's just the way kids are now. Well, if they were mentally healthy and they were sleeping enough and they were still hanging out with their friends, I would believe that argument. But they're not. And so given that, I think we have to try to do something about it.

[John Stonestreet]

So what are the basics? What are the givens? Like? Like, at bare minimum, do this.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah. So no phones in the bedroom overnight is the best place to start.

[John Stonestreet]

Yeah. I used to live not too far from here in Tennessee, and we're filming this, and there's an old dude in my church who, whenever anybody would say something obvious, would be like, yeah, it ain't rocket surgery. You know, this falls into the. It ain't rocket surgery. That should be an obvious one, right? Like interrupting their.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, it's not. The number of people who have their phone in their bedroom is astronomical. And it's because of the alarm clock thing.

[John Stonestreet]

Sure.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah. You know, oh, I have to have a smiley alarm clock. Buy an alarm clock.

[John Stonestreet]

Buy an alcohol one.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, exactly. Buy two or three. But yeah, just preserve the sleep time. You know, start there, because the stuff during the day is going to be harder. This is a really clear rule. The research is crystal about how having that phone, even off, even on do not disturb, can disrupt sleep. And it's just. It's so tempting to grab it and it's right there and your brain knows it's there. Scrolling in bed, right before bed. So screen time before bed. There's been some back and forth in the research on that. It depends on what you're doing and where you're doing it. But if you're sitting in bed, scrolling right before you go to bed, that definitely has an effect on sleep.

[John Stonestreet]

Really?

[Gene Twenge]

People of all ages, that's the worst. Okay, so do not do that. And then don't have it in the bedroom overnight. So I think that's rule number two in the book. The first is you're in charge. It's about parenting style.

[John Stonestreet]

That's good.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah. So loving, but firm. We know from decades of research in psychology is the best parenting strategy. And I go through details of that and conversations have with kids, all that stuff.

[John Stonestreet]

Well, just on that point, the number of Parents that have expressed to me, well, I don't want to violate their privacy. I shouldn't know their passwords. I'm watching your facial expression here. Like, you gotta be kidding me, right?

[Gene Twenge]

Well, if they're an 18 year old high school senior and they're responsible, that's different. Even at 16, I'm actually not an enormous fan of reading every single one of your kids text messages because they should have a space to be able to communicate with their friends within reason. Again, as long as they're doing well and there's not alcohol or drug use or leaving school and they're not supposed to journey in this type of stuff, then all bets are off. Then read every text message.

[John Stonestreet]

Yeah, right, right.

[Gene Twenge]

But I don't think that's the most important piece. I think the most important piece is that they're not spending three hours a day on Instagram without you knowing it. And it's so easy for that to happen. It's so easy for them to download that app. Even when they're explicitly told they're not supposed to have it. They'll go and do it because they're teenagers, they want to do what their friends are doing. They want to do something that's forbidden and they'll go and try to do it and then it ends up taking up an enormous amount of time having a really negative influence on them. I mean, the values or lack of values on these platforms is just mind blowing.

[John Stonestreet]

Astonishing.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, it's lowest common denominator. It's just terrible. So we know that we don't want our kids to be exposed to that. A lot of parents will worry about their kids having friends who are bad influences or what they're watching on tv and then their kid might have those apps on their phone and they might never know it.

[John Stonestreet]

Yeah. What do you think about the dumb phone idea for a while or whatever?

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, absolutely.

[John Stonestreet]

Yeah, keep going. What are the other basics? Sorry.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, yeah. So I think a lot of parents give their kid a phone because they want to be able to get in touch with them. I get it. But the problem is you solve that problem and you create 100 others. Because I don't know my experience with my kids, most parents I know that is the one thing that the kids do don't do is call you on the phone. They do everything else on that phone, but they rarely do that. So put off giving them one as long as possible. Most of the time they don't really need one. I mean, Gen Xers, we didn't have phones, we didn't. And we did pretty well. And there were some situations where, yeah, it would have been good, especially once you get that driver's license to have a phone. But before that you don't really need it. And these days everybody else has a phone, so you can use one of their phones if you really have to. So just try to put that off as long as possible. Give them a flip phone at first. Kids hate the flip phones though, because they stand out. So that's why one of the reasons why I like the basic phones, they look like a regular Android phone.

[John Stonestreet]

Okay. But they know social media apps.

[Gene Twenge]

That's right, exactly.

[John Stonestreet]

Talk a little bit about the social media side of this because you have the smartphones, you have the devices and I mean, it tells you a little bit, right, that I mean, we almost kind of think social media use and smartphone ownership are the same. Right, because if you're gonna do this, you're gonna do this. But specifically on the social media side of things, what kind of impact is that having on teenagers specifically?

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, nothing good for the most part, is there?

[John Stonestreet]

Legitimately nothing good? Well, I mean, I mean, I've said that because I believe that. And I teach a Sunday school class and there's a 15 year old girl in there and she talks about Instagram and I'm like, delete it. I just tell her, delete it.

[Gene Twenge]

Now I know, delete it.

[John Stonestreet]

It's terrible. It's not good, it's bad for your health. But am I overselling it?

[Gene Twenge]

Not really.

[John Stonestreet]

Okay, good, thanks. That makes me feel better.

[Gene Twenge]

The argument people make is, oh, I'm using it to keep in touch with my friends. Well, there's lots of other ways you can keep in touch with your friends. It doesn't have to be algorithmic social media. You can call them, you can go to their house, you can even text them. If it has to be electronic, not in real time communication, it doesn't have to be on Instagram. And the problem is what happens is they'll go into Instagram or Snapchat and it's supposed to be with friends, but then inevitably then it becomes the influencers and watching the videos and so on. And one of the most popular apps is TikTok. And that's not used for communication with friends for the most part. Hardly at all. I mean, rarely, but it's just endless video content. So that's where I think that argument falls apart. And the other piece is if social media had benefits. And every time I've read, oh, it has benefits, there's Hardly ever a citation or any research to back it up.

[John Stonestreet]

It's almost like they're saying it because they feel like they have to or something.

[Gene Twenge]

And then if it is so great, then why has mental health gotten so much worse? And I hear that argument in particular say, for. I don't know, I've heard this a lot for, say, lesbian and gay kids in rural areas. You know, then they have a place to get information and connect with people like them. So that's a very common argument. Their mental health has gotten worse, too, at an even more accelerated rate than for straight kids. That's where that. It just falls apart really quickly.

[John Stonestreet]

It does. You know, again, I. I appreciate you measuring the response, saying, we don't have the data on this yet. We don't have the research on this, but the anecdotal research of kids may be bullied at school, maybe starting on social media, and then Covid happens, they all go home on their devices on social media, and then suddenly they start to question who they are. I mean, it just. That's the data that I want to know because it feels like not only is it not getting better, but that might. Social media in many cases maybe has been an influence, a cause in some of this. But I know you don't want to go there because the data doesn't say that. But I just, you know, it's hard to. Hard to ignore anything else.

[Gene Twenge]

I will add one more thing on that, which is, you know, for kids especially, you know, over, say, 14 or 15, if they do want to learn about people like them, no matter what that identity is, they have the rest of the Internet. It doesn't have to be social media. So that's the other piece where I

[John Stonestreet]

think that's all the bad stuff that comes along with that.

[Gene Twenge]

I think that's the other place the argument falls apart.

[John Stonestreet]

Yeah, that's fair. Just quickly here, we just got a minute or two. I asked you this on stage, but I'd like to ask you again and give you a chance. Any idea of what AI is going to do to this whole conversation? Because it almost feels like as much attention in the last six months has been given to AI. Oh, yeah. We still need to care about social media and smartphones and kids. So yesterday, but it's still a problem. And then what's AI going to do in this mix?

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah. And we don't know. We don't know.

[John Stonestreet]

Are you hopeful or no?

[Gene Twenge]

Okay.

[John Stonestreet]

Okay, fair enough.

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah. I mean, so there's the cognitive issues of if it's. We're outsourcing our thinking for adults. That might be a convenience for kids and teenagers, and they're not developing the thinking skills that they're going to need to even evaluate what the AI is telling them. And then my biggest worry is with relationships, the chatbots that are supposed to be, you know, girlfriends or boyfriends or even friends, that's gonna make it even worse in terms of kids and teens interacting with people face to face. They're so psychophantic. You know, if you have an AI girlfriend, then what happens when you try to have a relationship with an actual human being who has needs and might not tell you you're right all the time?

[John Stonestreet]

Exactly. Are you encouraged a little bit? Last question. Are you encouraged a bit little? Because it does seem like schools, you know, that your work in particular, I mean, I think there's others, but your work in particular seems to have made a dent, a real dent in terms of schools rethinking their policies, not giving, you know, devices to everyone, coming up with smartphone bands and all that. It does seem that more people are buying into that sort of thing. And I think we should owe you a thanks because you've been a. I mean, not just you, there's been others, but you've been as big of an influence, I think, as anyone. Are you encouraged by that movement?

[Gene Twenge]

Yeah, I definitely am. And, yeah, I have to give a shout out to some other folks in this space that for no phones during the school day. Bell to bell. Jonathan Haidt has also really been behind that message and that's really started to catch on, which is great to see. I visited a school recently where they had just inserted instituted yonder pouches, so putting the phone in the pouch for the day and the principal's like, yeah, they're talking to each other at lunch again. So it's not just the classroom that's wonderful. You know, they're talking, they're playing cards, they're bedazzling. I'm like, I don't even know what that is. But I guess they're putting little gems on everything, but they're interacting in person, in the real world, and that's fantastic. So there's that as well as the fact that test scores have started to go down, even pre pandemic. They started to go down in 2012. Is that a familiar year? It is to me. That's again, when smartphones became common. And that's the other piece that schools are dealing with now is the tablets and laptops that we thought this was going to be a great idea, and it was not a great idea. Jared Horvath has been somebody who's been really behind this. He wrote a book called the Digital Delusion. He testified to the Senate. He was right next to me. And I could not have been more impressed with his message and his research and how he got it across. Just that, you know, this ed tech revolution has been a failure, and we really need to dial that back. Back to paper, back to textbooks, just back to the fundamentals so our kids aren't distracted all the time. Because it's not even just. We don't have proof that these are working for education. We know that they're watching YouTube and they're watching streaming and they're doing all this stuff, sometimes even in class and definitely at home. And I know that because my own kids have done that when they're supposed to be doing their homework. And I can't put parental controls on the school laptop. It is the bane of my existence.

[John Stonestreet]

That is wild, isn't it? It just seems wild. I'm grateful for your work and I'm grateful for your contribution to the Colson center conference here. You did a great. Just a great job pulling together an enormous amount of information that helps us understand the world better. So thanks for being a part of this.

[Gene Twenge]

Thank you for having me.