What Is The iGen Generation And How Are They Being Affected By Smartphones?

They spend most of their time online and devote less energy to hanging out with friends, sleeping or reading. That's how many of the young adults and teens born after 1995 are.

The "iGen" is a generation that is more home-bound, more immature and more prone to mental health problems.

That is how psychologists and specialists describe young people and adolescents born after 1995. This generation is the result of the combination of smartphones and social networks.

Super-connected kids are growing up less rebellious, more tolerant, less happy and completely unprepared for adulthood. This is based on the results of a study of 11 million young Americans and in-depth interviews.

Here is an excerpt from the psychologist's view of this population.

What is the iGen generation?

It is the first generation that will have lived their entire adolescence in the smartphone era, and this has many consequences for teenagers' lives.

They spend their free time in ways that are essentially different from previous generations.

They spend much more time on the Internet, on social networks, playing video games, watching videos, and spend much less time doing activities away from the screen such as reading, sleeping or seeing their friends.

They grow up more slowly: at 18 they are less likely to have a driver's license, a job, dating, drinking alcohol, going out without their parents.

This trend had started earlier, in the late 1990s, with the 'millennials,' and while technology doesn't explain everything, the smartphone seems to have accelerated some trends in recent years, probably because since teens can communicate with their friends by staying home, they don't feel the need to have a driver's license or go out alone.

So the iGen is probably the safest generation ever and teens love that idea.

But they also feel like they're missing something and that being connected to their phone all the time may not be the best way to live. They also hate, when talking to a friend, that the friend is constantly looking at their phone.

What have specialists observed?

When we study generational changes over long periods, we see that they take longer to become visible, for example, one or two decades.

But starting in 2011-2012, we began to see more sudden changes, such as large increases in the number of adolescents who said they felt lonely or excluded or that they believed they couldn't do anything right, that their life was worthless, all classic symptoms of depression.

Depressive symptoms have increased 60% in just five years, with rates of self-harm doubling or even tripling in girls, and teen suicide doubling in just a few years.

Just as smartphones have become commonplace, when the proportion of Americans who own one has surpassed 50%, these mental health problems began to manifest.

Arguably, this is just a coincidence, but there was no other event at this time to explain these changes and their acceleration.

And we know, after decades of research, that sleeping or seeing friends is critical for mental balance, but spending hours and hours in front of a screen is not.

It's not the screens themselves that are the problem, it's the fact that they have replaced other things, which seems to have led to these mental health problems.

What do specialists advise parents?

Ultimately, this is good news because many of the things that happiness and mental health depend on are now under our control.

We can't change the genes we were born with or solve poverty with the snap of a finger, but we can control how we occupy our free time and we can help our children do so.

Studies advocate limiting social networking to a maximum of two hours per day for teens.

It's a good balance to take advantage of social networks and the smartphone without the downsides, which are considerable.

For the younger ones, if we think our child needs a phone, we can give them a phone without the Internet and therefore without all those temptations.