The reason young people aren't dating, according to a psychology expert

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Harriet Pavey12 September 2017

Young people are going on fewer dates than their parents’ generation because they spend too much time on their phones, a major study has found.

The i-generation, which includes those born between 1995 and 2012, are less interested in romance and more concerned with interacting online, according to a new book by a psychology professor.

Teenagers are less likely to meet up in person because they spend so much time chatting on messaging apps. This decline in dating also corresponds with decreasing sexual activity among young people.

Teenagers in currently in their final year of school are going out less than 13-year-olds did in 2009, according to Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University.

The popularity of messaging apps like Snapchat among young people is thought to be why they are dating less
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Drawing on surveys of 11 million young people and a series of in-depth interviews, she found that 56 per cent of 14 to 18-year-olds went out on dates in 2015, compared with 85 per cent of generation X (those born between 1965 and 1984) and Baby Boomers.

Sexual activity among 14 and 15-year-olds has dropped by almost 40 per cent since 1991. The average teenager now has had sex for the first time by the time they are 17-years-old, a full year later than the average in generation X.

As a result, teenage birth rates are decreasing, hitting an all-time low in 2016, down 67 per cent since the modern peak in 1991.

“Teens are spending an enormous amount of time, primarily on their smart phones and communicating with their friends electronically,” Prof Twenge told BBC Radio Four’s Today programme.

“What that’s meant is they are spending less time interacting with their friends in person, hanging out with their friends.”

Her latest book, titled 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 analyses a series of nationally representative surveys of American youth.

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