What a year! 2020 will be the one to remember, not only due to current fashion trends like the Gucci Ophidia brown beige snake evening bag or the retro aesthetic of Kust. But for the resilience of those who keep seizing the best of each day despite the pandemic that changed our lives.
Precisely, in this article I would like to talk about some social tendencies involving teens during these last six months. To do so, I checked what the Pew Research Center has told about it; thus, here you have a review of how this 2020 has affected the youth.
In the last semester the Pew Research Center has published 7 articles focused on teen-related affairs in 2020, so here they are divided in the following 3 topics:
1. Trends in Education
OnJuly 29, 2020, Richard Fry and Amanda Barroso published: Amid coronavirus outbreak, nearly three-in-ten young people are neither working nor in school on the Pew Research Center website. As you can presume for the title, this article is about how lots of young people from 16 to 24 years old lost their jobs after the pandemic outbreak, and most of them were not even attending schools.
The authors affirm this year that rate was 28% bigger than the year before. To make you see how bad that percentage was, it is translated into more than 10 million of young guys who run out of two of the most important activities in our society.
Hope things get better!
This October 29, 2020, Juliana Menasce Horowitz and Ruth Igielnik made public their article: Most Parents of K-12 Students Learning Online Worry About Them Falling Behind. In this paper they talk about how some parents are happy to see how schools stood up to avoid the widespread of the COVID 19, but not so happy when they realized their children up to 18 years old might be learning less than they should or do when attending schools in person.
Even so, 63% of those parents are concerned about the amount of time their kids spend in front of a screen. We still do not know if their worries are totally unbiased or we are just experiencing an educational change taking over our status quo to be the new normal, and some adults are just stuck on what they know.
2. Trends in Media
On July 28, 2020, Brooke Auxier, Monica Anderson, Andrew Perrin and Erica Turner released their study: Parenting Children in the Age of Screens. The authors conclude in the United States 66% of the American parents consider parenting to be harder than it was 20 years ago, and technology is one of the reasons.
It looks like social media and smartphones are the nemesis of some parents.
On the other hand, Emily A. Vogels, Lee Rainie and Janna Anderson published on June 30, 2020 the article: Experts Predict More Digital Innovation by 2030 Aimed at Enhancing Democracy. They interviewed more than 600 experts, including technology innovators, developers, researchers and activists. And guess what? 84% of them firmly believe social media is helping with concerns about representation, diversity and equity, so in ten years from now we should have a better world; at least in those areas.
More recently on October 21, 2020 the article: 8 facts about Americans and Instagram was published by Brooke Auxier.
According to Miss Auxier studies, seven-in-ten American teenagers are Instagram users, while TikTok and Snapchat are apps more popular among those whose ages are under 11. The most interesting fact is: unlike adults, teens do not use Instagram to get informed on the news. Nor they should, come on!
3. Trends in Religious activities
On September the 10th, this year, the Pew Research Center published one article that involves teens and religious activities: 10 key findings about the religious lives of U.S. teens and their parents, was written by Jeff Diamant and Elizabeth Podrebarac Sciupac. They had more than 1800 teenagers who answered their survey; with it they proved most of them affirm to feel identified with the same religion their parents profess.
Even though most of them attend religious services once or twice a week, only 40% claim to believe in God and only 27% pray every day. Therefore, according to the study, for most of the American teens going to church is a social family activity.
The seventh and final article, Hispanic teens enjoy religious activities with parents, but fewer view religion as ‘very important’, was published by Elizabeth Podrebarac Sciupac.
The author of this article talks about how Latins (ages 13 to 17) are the fastest growing ethnic group in the United States, but also the most religious because they tend to relate moral issues with religion, and contrasting their non-Latin or non-Hispanic peers, 89% of them affirm to believe in God.
Before we go
Certainly 2020 brought us some difficult times and changed several of our past daily activities; the world keeps changing, trends come and go. We know we will not remain forever this way, but let us look on the bright side and let us try to make those experts’ presumptions a real thing, let us start making a more inclusive and diverse world where every person has a place to love and be loved.
Let us be that generation.
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