(New York Post)
Call them Generation Zilch.
No smoking, drinking, drugs or sex for today’s pre-teens and high schoolers.
According to a new study in the journal Social Science & Medicine, people born between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s are partaking in far less risky behaviors than their wild-and-crazy elders.
The change, the researchers believe, can be chalked up to a combination of school pressures, stricter laws and parental finger-wagging, among other factors.
Still, the study found that there is one commonality driving all of these buttoned-up behaviors: Today’s overly scheduled and phone-obsessed youths are less likely to engage in face-to-face hang time with their friends.
One possible reason Gen Z isn’t smoking or drinking as much is a reduction in “unstructured” social activities.Getty Images/iStockphoto
The findings deduced that drinking, which can then lead to cannabis use and sex, happens most at “unstructured” in-person social activities. And today’s kids are much less party-hearty than past generations: 80% of American 10th graders in the 1990s reported attending a rager with friends at least once a month. That number shrunk to 57% by 2017.
The review of data from numerous studies encapsulating the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain and 30 European countries paints a picture of youths, mostly 12 to 16 years old, behaving beautifully.
For example, adolescent cigarette smoking declined more than 80% from 1999 to 2019 worldwide.
In pint-pouring England, young people claiming that they’ve drank alcohol within the past week dropped from 25% in 2003 to 8% in 2014.
