A psych professor asks: Have smartphones destroyed a generation?

Jean Twenge has been researching generations for 25 years, and while millennials may have spawned a thousand think pieces, it's now time to talk about the next group. That's iGen.

Twenge's new book delves into the particulars of this new generation. The full title? "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."

Less rebellious. More tolerant. Less happy.

In an excerpt of the book published in The Atlantic — "Have Smartphones destroyed a generation?" — Twenge takes on the question of happiness in particular, and its connection to technology.

For Twenge, who is a psychology professor at San Diego State University, the iGen begins around 1995. It's composed of young people who have never known a world without social media and smartphones.

"Around 2012 or so I started seeing some pretty big shifts in teens' behavior, in their attitudes, in how they spent their time and also in their mental health," Twenge told MPR News host Tom Weber. She realized later that 2012 was also the year when the percentage of Americans who owned smartphones surpassed 50 percent.

"Right around 2012, the teens in these large surveys — there started to be a pronounced increase in symptoms of depression, in anxiety, loneliness. Happiness, which had been going up for teens for quite a while, started to go down," Twenge said.

A big national screening study finds 50 percent more teens in 2015 versus 2010 have clinical level depression; there's a very similar pattern for suicide rates among 12- to 18-year-olds. All these signs of these mental health issues start to go up right around the time the smartphone comes on the scene.

The studies, of course, can't confirm any correlation between technology and mental health, Twenge emphasizes: "Just because things happen at the same time certainly doesn't prove that one causes the other. But it is suspicious. It makes you think maybe there's a connection here."

It raises concerns for parents about when, or even if, they should buy their children a smartphone.

Troy Wolverton, a father and senior tech editor at Business Insider, struggled with this question for years.

Initially, he refused to give his middle school-aged son a phone. Then, this May, he published an article: Here's why I changed my mind and finally let my kid have a smartphone.

He still has his concerns: When his son entered middle school, he reported back that his friends with phones would spend their lunch hour watching videos, lost in their devices, rather than hanging out and talking. But as his son's schedule got busier, Wolverton recognized that logistically, he needed a phone to keep in touch with his parents and coordinate practices and pick-ups.

They had an old smartphone lying around the house, so that's what he gave his son.

"I did try to take some precautions," Wolverton said. He limited his son's ability to install new apps. And while he acknowledges that social media is built to "encourage a kind of addiction," he also sees that his son's behavior isn't that much different than his own at that age.

"He uses his smartphone in much the same way I used a landline in middle school and high school, to communicate with friends. I used to spend hours chatting on the phone."

Wolverton sets other tech boundaries for his kids, based on what he's heard from childhood development experts. His kids don't have their own computers; they have to use the family computer in a common space. The iPads in the house are family iPads, not personal iPads, and they are kept in the kitchen at night, instead of in bedrooms.

Twenge was curious about how members of iGen themselves felt about the ubiquity of smartphones, tech and social media. In addition to the data she took from nationwide surveys, she talked with young phone users.

She said the biggest surprise was "how many of them were fully aware of the downsides of this technology."

Smartphones, she said, seemed almost like something that happened to the iGen.

It was almost, she said "like they didn't really want to spend that much time on their phones, but it felt mandatory to them."

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