iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood
iGen is San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge's 2017 book arguing that Americans born from the mid-1990s onward are the first generation to spend their entire adolescence with smartphones, and that this coincides with a sharp, documented shift in teen behavior beginning around 2012. Drawing on large national surveys, Twenge describes iGen teens as spending markedly less in-person time with friends, sleeping less, and reporting higher rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness than Millennials did at the same age — trends she links to the rise of smartphones and social media rather than treating as proof of a single cause. The book also covers non-tech generational shifts, including delayed dating, driving, and paid work. TechKids Foundation cites iGen as the originating, most widely read statement of the smartphone-era generational mental-health argument this library documents, not as a clinical or diagnostic text.
Twenge, Jean M. iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood. Atria Books, August 22, 2017.