Those Phone-Obsessed Teenagers Aren’t As Lonely As You Think

NPR:

A recent dinner with my friends went something like this:

“Wait, who is going to take a Snapchat of all of us when our drinks arrive?”

“Oh no, I can’t! My phone is dying.”

“Guys, this is such a stereotypical millennial conversation. I am totally tweeting about this.”

So I guess I understand why older folk fret that youngsters these days are losing out on authentic social connections because of social media.

But it looks like the kids are going to be all right, researchers say. High school students in 2012 reported lower levels of loneliness than their counterparts in 1991, according to a studypublished Monday in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia arrived at that conclusion after analyzing data from the Monitoring the Future Project, which surveys about 50,000 American high school students annually. The survey gauged loneliness by explicitly asking students how lonely they felt, and by assessing how included and supported they felt among friends.

Read the whole story: NPR