News that today’s teens are drinking and taking drugs less than ever can’t be anything but good news, right?
Yes, obviously the drop in teen substance abuse, as reported by the University of Michigan’s latest Monitoring the Future study, is a very good thing.
But the question remains, why? Are today’s adolescents more risk-averse? Are they making better, wiser choices? Or, might they perhaps be so engaged with technology that they’re less likely to rebel in the ways previous generations did?
Speaking with USA Today, Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said that media and technology may be keeping kids at home, where they’re less likely to have the opportunity to drink, smoke or do drugs.
Volkow frames this hypothesis in a positive light, saying, “There may be a protective effect brought about by the fact that they don’t have so many occasions to get together where the use of drugs would be facilitated. It’s wonderful to see, but understanding it will be very important because then we can try to emulate it, be proactive and try to sustain it.”
But Rolling Stone reporter Lilly O’Donnell suggests that the substitution of one risky behavior for another that’s more quietly addictive may not be such an unmitigated social boon. She writes:
But teens are still getting a fix; they’re just finding it somewhere else. A 2015 report from Common Sense Media showed that teens spend an average of nine hours per day consuming media online, and a CNN study showed that some 13-year-olds check their social media accounts 100 times per day. These extreme-sounding levels of interaction make sense when you factor in the results of the UCLA study published earlier this year, which found that ‘likes’ on social media activate the reward centers in teen brains that are also associated with sexual gratification and intoxication.
She adds, “… this replacement fix isn’t necessarily safer than the classics—social media is too new for us to fully understand its long-term effects, but it’s already been linked to depression and insomnia by several studies over the past couple of years, and has even been found to be more addictive than cigarettes. Parents are discussing ways to limit their teens’ screen time the way they used to discuss keeping them away from drugs.”
It will probably take more years of observation and research to know if this replacement hypothesis really holds water. But at least anecdotally, it definitely makes a certain kind of sense. And it highlights the changing issues and concerns that parents today need to focus on as we strive to raise healthy, emotionally well-adjusted children.
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