According to Jean Twenge, a professor at San Diego State University, people born between 1995 and 2005 are opting to ditch the dating scene in favor of spending their time liking each other's Instagram posts.
Basing her findings on surveys of 11 million people and several in-depth interviews, Twenge discovered 56 percent of 14 to 18-year-olds went out on dates in 2015, however, for Generation X and Baby Boomers, it was around 85 percent at their respective ages.
Considering this is the first generation to spend their entire lives in the presence of social media and smartphones — something prior generations came into contact well after their "prime dating years" — the researcher says it's becoming second nature to replace the once-normative social interaction.
"Teens are spending an enormous amount of time, primarily on their smartphones and communicating with their friends electronically," Twenge told BBC Radio 4's Today program. "What that [means] is they are spending less time interacting with their friends in person, hanging out with their friends."
So while technology is etching away at the awkward dinner dates, there's also another no-so-popular parent-child topic on the chopping block: sex.
Twenge found that since 1991, sexual activity in 14 and 15-year-olds dropped by nearly 40 percent, adding that the average i-Generation teenager didn't have sex for the first time until they were 17 years old.
The findings, published in her latest book, "iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood and What That Means for the Rest of Us," tackles an even wider range of topics from same-sex marriage to the legalization of marijuana.
