One of my clearest memories from high school in the late 1980s isn’t a specific party, but the hunt for one. A car full of friends, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” blasting on the stereo, driving through the suburbs with no real plan except to figure out where everyone else was headed. Inevitably, we’d end up at 7-Eleven—“Sleven,” as we knew it—where a dozen other cars were already parked, each packed with kids from different cliques, all chasing the same rumor.
Once someone finally got the scoop, we’d pile back into my station wagon and race off to a huge house party that, more often than not, had just been shut down by the cops. Then it was back to Sleven to regroup and figure out what came next.
That was the fun: the motion, the noise, the sense that anything might happen. Music blaring, windows down, shouting jokes to the car full of teenagers stopped next to us at a red light, laughing at absolutely nothing and everything at the same time.
Compare that to the lives of my own teenagers and their friends, and I can’t shake the sense that while they may be safer and getting into less trouble, they’re also missing out on something messier, more communal, and quietly formative. Teens today are not cruising for house parties or throwing keggers in the woods. Few have experienced the rush of fear, adrenaline, and euphoria that comes from scattering into the night when the cops show up, knowing you’ll find one another again eventually. They’re dating less, they’re not drinking as much, and they’re not having sex. According to the biannual MetroWest Adolescent Health Survey of middle and high school students in 25 communities in Boston’s MetroWest region, 12 percent of today’s youth are sexually active, down from 22 percent in 2006.
Sure, there are still some who party hard, but a growing share of teenagers are at home on Saturday nights scrolling through social media. When they do venture out, the parties are invite-only and usually involve a select group of kids. “There’s not a lot of mingling outside your friend group,” one 17-year-old admits.
The downside? What gets lost in the process: the chance to meet someone new—to try on a different version of yourself. At those big house parties from our youth, you’d end up talking to kids from different grades and social cliques. Today, kids are surrounded by the same people, “stuck being who everyone already thinks they are, instead of figuring out who they want to be,” a mom of two told me.
As today’s teens navigate a tightly controlled social life shaped by Snap Map, screens, and social anxiety, parents are concerned. “We raised our kids to be too good,” a mom of a 17-year-old says. “I want my daughter to mess up now, while she’s still in a safe environment, instead of at college, when I’m not there to help her out of a bad situation.”
Even the kids themselves seem a little nostalgic for an adolescence they never had—one that feels looser, louder, and less monitored than their own. After watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High recently, one of my 19-year-old twin boys asked, “Was it really like that when you were in high school?”
I couldn’t sugarcoat it: “Absolutely.” His wistful sigh said it all.
So what’s changed? Ask the kids, and they’ll tell you: There’s nowhere to go. And they’re right. Shopping malls, once the primary social hub for teenagers, no longer stay open late. Movie tickets are more expensive than ever. Tower Records, where you could hang out for hours listening to music and flipping through records and CDs, is long gone, as is Blockbuster. Arcades have been supplanted by at-home gaming.
Private spaces are harder to come by, too, as fewer kids are willing to host parties. Ubiquitous smart security cameras now alert parents to every arrival and departure. Massachusetts’ host liability law—widely promoted and enforced—carries real legal consequences for parents who knowingly allow underage drinking at their homes. And apps like Life360 let you track your children’s locations in real time. (Gone are the days when you told your parents you were sleeping at Jenny’s but were actually in a field somewhere doing keg stands.)
It’s not just the loss of third places that’s stifled how teens connect. The prevalence of the smartphone in the 2010s shifted hangouts from real to virtual. As their social lives have moved online, teens are increasingly likely to spend evenings scrolling or playing video games with friends—connected, but in ways that require little effort.
The shift hasn’t been entirely negative. Research shows that the later kids begin drinking, the less likely they are to struggle with alcohol-related problems as adults. There’s also less drinking and driving these days and fewer alcohol-related injuries, says Wayland school resource officer Shane Bowles. That’s no small thing.
Bowles has seen the change firsthand. When he started on the force nearly 25 years ago, he says, he was breaking up big house parties nearly every weekend. These days, it’s rare. “Kids today are smarter and safer,” he says. As a result, many are choosing to be more cautious. “We think more about the consequences of our behavior,” a 17-year-old told me, sounding far more grown-up than I ever was at that age.
Still, those benefits come with a tradeoff. “The sort of brain development that happens when we are in the same room as someone is very different than when we are on a screen,” says Emily Gordon, a Natick clinical psychologist who specializes in treating adolescents and young adults. Without the big moments like asking someone out, talking to someone new, risking a little embarrassment and surviving it, it’s harder for kids to develop the confidence and emotional resilience they’ll need later in life.
But here’s something else to consider: Kids may be glued to their phones on Friday nights because they’re overscheduled, overstressed, and sleep-deprived—and by the end of the week, they’re exhausted. Their lives are far more structured than ours ever were, packed with school, homework, clubs, jobs, volunteering, and sports, leaving them little time or energy to hang out with friends. “It takes effort to make plans,” a high school junior tells me. “It’s easier just to FaceTime.”
Consciously or not, we’ve conveyed to our children that achievement should take priority over social connection. The stress only builds with today’s high-stakes college application process, especially when kids are constantly seeing their peers’ achievements online. For many teens, that comparison quietly reinforces the fear that they’re not enough. “The pressure they are under is exorbitant,” Gordon says, “and adolescence has become sort of a professional activity.”
The consequence of such a regimented lifestyle? Our kids have never been given the opportunity to experience boredom and what comes of it: curiosity, creativity, and, yes, maybe even a little mischief. I caught a glimpse of that firsthand in 2020, when my ninth-grade boys and their friends decided it would be fun to ding-dong-ditch our neighbor’s home. While the other boys clustered nearby on the street, one of them scampered up to the front door, buried his face in his jacket, rang the doorbell, and sprinted away. I know exactly how this went down because my neighbor posted the Ring camera video on my neighborhood Facebook page, asking, “Anyone know whose kid this is?”
To me, this was just a harmless teenage prank. They were bored, and they just needed to press someone’s buttons—literally. And yet they were called out in a public forum. I remember thinking, We’re lucky—they could be doing so much worse.
As parents, we need to recognize the role our own anxiety plays—and how it shapes the way we raise our children.
Here’s the thing, though: These are exactly the kinds of missteps kids should be making—and yet many teens are afraid to make them because, as this incident shows, their mistakes live on. (That video is still on Facebook six years later.) No wonder they’re hesitant to put themselves out there. I recently saw a meme that read, “We survived the ’80s and ’90s because nobody documented our worst decisions.” It’s funny because it’s true.
But as parents, we also need to recognize the role our own anxiety plays—and how it shapes the way we raise our children. When our gut response is to say “no,” when we’re reluctant to let kids out of our sight, we undermine their confidence and autonomy. “We have to understand that our kids are not perfect and risk-taking is not a flaw; they need to try things and make mistakes,” Gordon says. “It doesn’t mean they’re bad kids. It just means they’re kids.”
And that’s really what we want, right? For our kids to be kids—with all the messiness that comes with it. We need to tell them it’s okay that they’re not doing a varsity sport, volunteering, editing the school newspaper, and getting straight As all at the same time, and more important, we need to believe that’s true.
Otherwise, teens end up with fewer real relationships and less practice handling social situations. Gordon believes that one of the reasons kids are struggling in college—with everything from anxiety and depression to substance abuse and eating disorders—is that they haven’t had enough of these social experiences in high school. Indeed, the 2024 World Happiness Report found that in North America, young adults are reporting significantly lower levels of happiness than other age groups, and rates of loneliness are highest in younger age groups. The takeaway is clear: No group chat or FaceTime call can replace the real thing.
The encouraging news is that schools and communities are beginning to acknowledge the problem and act on it. With 96 percent of kids now having a smartphone by age 14, parent-led efforts like the national Wait Until 8th campaign ask families to pledge to delay smartphones until at least eighth grade. The idea is that when parents act collectively, no child feels singled out for being the only one without a phone.
Additionally, a growing number of schools in the Boston area have banned smartphones outright, requiring them to be stored in phone “hotels” or locked pouches during the school day. By taking phones off the table, schools are hoping to create more opportunities for students to interact in person. That could really make a difference during lunch and breaks, when screens often become a social crutch—especially in middle school, the teenagers I spoke with said. Without smartphones, “Kids will actually talk to each other,” a high school junior told me.
School administrators have also brought back school dances—a staple of American adolescence and the setting for so many cringeworthy yet formative moments—after nearly a decade of dwindling attendance and concerns over grinding. At the first-ever homecoming dance at my daughter’s high school in 2024, students danced nearly the entire time, sweat-soaked and grinning ear to ear. By any measure, it was a hit—for the kids, and perhaps even more so for parents. “It was so fun seeing all of them just let loose together,” one of the chaperones told me.
But in the end, maybe we care more about all of this. “It’s a different generation, different world, and they’re just doing it the way they do it,” Bowles, the school resource officer, told me. “I don’t think they’re missing what they don’t know.” And maybe we’ve romanticized some of our own adventures along the way. When I told a group of teenagers about the parties we used to have in the woods—picking our way along rock-strewn paths in the dark—they weren’t impressed. “Sounds cold,” one of them said. She wasn’t wrong. But we were never bored.
