This chart has been floating around, and I find it interesting to speculate about the reason for this shift.
Have attitudes changed this much? Do teens have less independence or fewer places to go to do these things? Are parents more involved in teens’ lives? Was vaping excluded in the study?
This is from 2015 showing rates of smoking in adults:
So I’m guessing there are lots of reasons we’re seeing similar patterns in high school seniors. The most obvious from the data above is that they’re mirroring the behavior of adults that are largely eschewing smoking. Smoking/drinking/drugs were or are also acts of rebellion and experimentation in the youth. I’m guessing those definitions are changing too. Rebellion may be taking on slightly different forms and much of the taboo of smoking/drinking/drugs is being removed if the adults around them are also using less or none at all.
Too busy with other addictions. Video games. Social media. Etc.
3.2 beer which 18-year-olds could legally buy was a thing. Looks like 1984 was when the federal government mostly put an end to it.
I don’t understand the downvotes; I’m pointing out that many states legally sold beer to 18-year-olds, many of whom would be high school seniors, during at least the first part of the chart.
I think a growing number of high schoolers are just not going out as much. They’re at home socializing on discord. I don’t think there is a rise of “straight-edge” as much as just fewer organic opportunities for a larger swathe of young adults.
My brother teaches. He tells me that post-Covid, his students in general seem shyer, more pessimistic, and less confident with taking risks.
It’s also increasingly expensive to go out. That also applies to drinking and doing drugs lol. Something like staying home and going online or playing video games is cheap.
It’s ties in with why younger generations aren’t having kids. Everything is too expensive.
Also the world has grown increasingly hostile to young people. There is a constant trend towards there being fewer places for them to hang out, and it being harder to get around.
In the US, often the only option to get around is a car and there really aren’t many options of affordable places to go even if you have one.
This wasn’t as much the case 30 years ago.
So the percentage of highschool seniors lying about drinking and smoking is on the increase. But seriously, I’ll bet the rise in social media addiction might have something to do with that trend. You can’t really trust self reporting stats tho.
My first inclination is always to be suspicious of self-report too, but presumably any biases would also be present in the older data. If anything, I’d guess kids 50 years ago might have felt more social pressure to not admit to alcohol/substance use.
Edit: to your point, I bet you’re right about social media addiction. If most kids are just going home and spending time online, they’re probably not doing these things as much. I bet it’s also the root cause to those studies showing that young people are having less and less sex.
On a positive note there is also less pressure to have sex you are not ready for or just do not want, less virgin-shaming, and more awareness of asexuality and people who fall under that umbrella. By the time I was a high school senior there were plenty of opportunities where I could have had sex but I just did not want it as an asexual person and people actually respected that instead of telling me I’d be lame if I didn’t, or that I had to put out for my partner.
If anything i would guess the opposite. In the past smoking and drinking were considered cooler than it’s viewed today, so in the past more kids would’ve lied that they did use when they actually didn’t. But i would guess that the amount of lying about it on an anonymous survey has remained relatively constant
