Harriet’s teenage sons were so sociable as small children that she wasn’t prepared for what she calls the “hermit phase”. Around the age of 13 or 14, both boys started holing up in their bedrooms. Although they were avidly gaming and chatting with their friends online, real-world socialising seemed to fade away.
“They weren’t at all interested in seeing their friends; they just wanted to be left alone. It’s as if something clicked,” says Harriet (not her real name), a hospice manager living in a small northern town. Though she tried not to make an issue of it, their withdrawal bothered her: a healthy teenage life, she feels, should involve at least a bit of adventurous pushing of boundaries. “I would rather they didn’t drink cider in the park or whatever, but that’s normal. I don’t think it’s normal for them to stay in their rooms.” When she suggested her sons go into town with friends, as she had done at their age, they balked. “The youngest wouldn’t because apparently ‘that’s not what mates do’, and he wouldn’t go on his own because that looks sad.” But mostly, she says, they were baffled by the idea of hanging around shopping malls with their friends when they could buy anything they want online. “Everything encourages them to be at home – phones, gaming, amazing TV, stuff being delivered to your house.” Though Harriet doesn’t think lockdown caused the boys’ behaviour, it may have prolonged the habit of socialising online, she says.
What she’s describing is a phenomenon many parents of teenagers will recognise: a seemingly more insular, home-based, slower way of growing up, persisting in some cases well into the late teens and early 20s. One in three younger Britons are socialising less, according to the struggling nightlife giant Rekom, which last month announced its intention to call in administrators.
In Australia, one survey found 71% of gen Zs – the mostly post-millennial babies now in their teens and early 20s – had cut back on going out. Concern about “reclusive youths” who rarely leave their homes recently prompted South Korea’s government to propose a monthly allowance of $490 in an attempt to reintegrate the depressed, hermit-like young. And while the prevalence of slumping on the sofa is partly driven by being broke, rocketing inflation doesn’t entirely explain why a poll in December by the campaign group More in Common found British under-24s were more likely than the middle-aged to support bringing back Covid restrictions such as nightclubs closing or the “rule of six” cap on socialising.
If going “out out” has lost some of its appeal to the young, perhaps that shouldn’t be so surprising. Dating apps and Snapchat flirting mean they don’t have to leave the house to find a partner, while Deliveroo, Netflix and TikTok can deliver a night’s entertainment to their doorsteps. Going out to get wasted isn’t the draw it was, either, for a generation less likely than their predecessors to drink or take drugs. More broadly, they seem less ready to sow wild oats than previous waves of teenagers. Long before lockdowns curbed their liberty, risk-taking behaviour expressed in teenage pregnancy and youth offending was steadily declining in both the US and the UK, as, more surprisingly, was the number of young people holding either a part-time job or a driving licence – both once regarded as keys to freedom. (Though teenage working hours have rebounded in Britain post-lockdown, possibly reflecting straitened finances.) In her 2017 bestseller iGen, the American psychologist Jean Twenge blamed smartphone immersion and over-protective parenting for what she dubbed an anxious generation’s tardiness in reaching adult milestones such as dating, driving, getting a Saturday job and generally embracing the outside world. Though the jury remains out on her theory that social media fuels teenage anxiety and depression, this idea is increasingly influential in British conservative circles, with Rishi Sunak reportedly considering curbs on under-16s using social media platforms.
In many ways, young people are merely doing what they have been endlessly nagged to do: be sensible, stay out of trouble, concentrate on their homework. Yet a steady stream of Mumsnet threads with titles such as “Why does my teenager stay in their room all day?” and “Is it normal not to go out?” betray a niggling anxiety that maybe this isn’t what being young ought to look like – or at least, that it isn’t what being young meant in the past.
Are teenagers really retreating, missing out on the formative experiences they’ll need in order to become sociable, well-adjusted adults? Or are the middle-aged simply misunderstanding, in time-honoured fashion, the complicated business of being young?
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It’s Saturday night and the club is rammed. The bass is thumping, lasers strobing, and you can almost feel the sweat dripping from the ceiling of this former warehouse hidden away behind Wapping docks. Almost, but not quite. Because in an effort to be down with the kids, I’m experiencing this rave at the east London superclub E1 just like some of them do: by scrolling clips of it on my phone from the comfort of my sofa.
To be young and staying in on the weekend would once have spelled social death. But for gen Z increasingly “it’s the norm”, says E1’s senior operations manager Jack Henry resignedly, when we meet one December afternoon in his office. Still only 26 himself, Henry grew up watching his dad organise old school raves, and worked in provincial home counties nightclubs before joining E1. Its stellar lineups of techno, house, electro and drum’n’bass DJs have made it a London success story, but getting younger clubbers through the door, Henry says, is becoming harder. They’ll come out for something special – like the 30-hour marathon party he organised for New Year’s Eve – but maybe only once a month. E1 employs a videographer to film its events, producing promotional clips for TikTok and Instagram to whet clubbers’ appetites. But lately, Henry says, some seem to be watching these as a substitute for actually going out. “You don’t need to pay for a taxi or a ticket: you can sit at home, and if you’re feeling really fancy have a vodka and Red Bull, and watch it on your phone. And that’s something this generation has adopted.”
Though E1 is successfully targeting an older crowd, between 25 and 35, still happy to leave the house, Henry wonders what will happen when younger clubbers reach this age. “Are they going to change? Are they going to be like, ‘I don’t want to just be on my phone any more?’” Last summer, he says, was the toughest for London clubbing in years, amid a cost of living crisis in which the young have markedly less to spend; they may still have splurged on holidays and festival tickets, but that didn’t leave much for ordinary nights out.
In Manchester, boasting Europe’s highest student population, the effects of the change are tangible. “Rather than going out to those big events, they’re buying a bottle of vodka at Sainsbury’s and having a house party,” says Sacha Lord, night-time economy adviser to the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, who thinks students are clearly feeling the pinch. But he notes that even young people with money to spend seem more inclined to save it up for one memorable moment than be out every night. “It’s about what they’re wearing, what they eat, how many times they go to the gym. Partying every night isn’t seen as healthy.” For the first time last summer, he put a choice of alcohol-free beers on the bar menu at Manchester’s Parklife festival to cater for young non-drinkers who don’t want socialising to revolve around booze.
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Before she started university, 18-year-old Gi was primed to expect wild times. “At school it was like, ‘Everyone’s a drug dealer and they’re going to try to sell you everything,’” she says. But in reality, she and her flatmates at the University of Nottingham spend most evenings “chilling in the kitchen”, with just the odd trip to the pub. “I’m in halls where all the international students live, so there’s a lot of people who don’t really drink.” And for Gi, that’s a relief. She doesn’t really drink either – though she’ll happily go to pubs with people who do – and had initially worried about peer pressure. “People do go out, and freshers’ week was intense, but it wasn’t pressured – it was really lovely. It’s just more and more normal to be in those situations and not be drinking. It’s not that I don’t want to go to the pub, I just don’t have time to be hungover next day.”
The life Gi describes sounds happy, sociable and productive: she has made friends through her politics course and the climbing society, and is already planning for her post-graduation career. But if her parents weren’t helping with her £180-a-week rent, she’s not sure she would be able to afford even this modest social life.
Kyle, a cheerfully extrovert 19-year-old at the University of Greenwich, qualifies for the full means-tested maintenance loan and says his social life is definitely constrained by his finances. “I’d love to go out every weekend but I don’t have the money, and other people don’t either,” he says. His campus is on the outskirts of London and there’s not much nightlife locally, so if he and his friends go clubbing it’s usually to Dartford in Kent, but that’s too expensive to do every week. They’ve yet to venture into central London. “A lot of people don’t talk about the financial side. You kind of keep quiet about how much of a struggle it is.”
Though the cost of living crisis has hit school leavers, too, students have been particularly squeezed between soaring rents and maintenance loans that haven’t kept pace. According to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Students, six in 10 say the loan no longer even covers the basics, let alone a hedonistic party lifestyle.
“Going out was the first thing people cut. You’d rather not go out than not have a place to live,” says 24-year-old NUS vice-president for higher education Chloe Field over the phone from Liverpool, where she recently graduated. “We’re seeing a rising mental health crisis for students and part of that is isolation because people can’t socialise. It’s become all about being able to pay your rent and bills, and get your degree.” A shortage of accommodation at some universities, leading to students being billeted miles from campus, hasn’t helped. “If you’re not even living in the same city as your coursemates, you can’t stay out late because you’ve got to get the train back.” To make ends meet, she says, more students are taking part-time jobs.
Talking to academics, students and their parents, what many describe is a new kind of grind culture on campus that goes beyond simply being hard up. Itay Lotem, a senior lecturer at London’s University of Westminster, says when he started teaching a decade ago, students would roll into lectures clearly hungover. But increasingly, they don’t seem to see themselves as out to have a good time or even enjoy the course: it’s more about overcoming a necessary obstacle to getting a job. The cost of living in London means universities in the capital are increasingly attracting locals, who commute back to the family home at night to save on rent and aren’t living classic student lives: “You take the tube to Westminster, you have your old friends who haven’t gone to uni elsewhere, you don’t necessarily even think of this as a ‘university experience’ – you just plough through it.” Every year, Lotem organises free trips to France as part of the course. On the first, to Marseille, he noticed students stuck to the hotel bar night after night instead of exploring the city. “They just wouldn’t leave. We had a programme in the day and they had evenings off, and it was like, ‘Go, have fun!’ But they all just stayed in the hotel bar.” It wasn’t cheap, he says, but they didn’t seem keen to spread their wings.
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Thirty years ago, calling home from university meant queueing for payphones in a corridor, while gap year kids communicated via blue airmail letters that took weeks to reach home. Now, parents can track their offspring’s night-time cab home in real time via shared Uber accounts, and secretly stalk student children via Find My iPhone to check they’ve made it to lectures. If teenagers really are becoming more cautious and risk-averse, as Twenge argues, it seems fair to ask if their upbringing has anything to do with that. Today’s young adults were, as children, subject to furious debates about so-called helicopter parents micromanaging every move. Once their parents stopped organising playdates and started expecting them to make their own fun, were some simply unsure where to start?
“It’s like you put kids on a gurney their whole childhood, move them from activity to activity, and then suddenly they’re 16 and you’re like, ‘Why aren’t you standing up and running?’” says Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids, which argued for children to be allowed to take small risks such as walking to the shop alone. She has since co-founded the US-based campaign group Let Grow, which promotes projects in schools to encourage independence, even if it’s something as minor as making your own sandwich. “If an adult has always organised the game, and taken you where you are going; an adult has decided when the fun starts and ends; an adult steps in if someone is being mean … these are skills they’re going to need, how to get along with people, how to make things happen.” Like all skills, she points out, social skills take practice – and children who don’t venture outside their comfort zone when small may grow up to find the outside world daunting. Skenazy is fascinated by recent research from Yulia Chentsova Dutton, associate professor of psychology at Washington’s Georgetown University, asking college-aged young people of different nationalities to describe a risky situation. “In Russia it was being chased down a street by some guy who is drunk,” she says. “In America it was taking an Uber or sitting alone in a cafe.”
Her advice for rewilding hesitant teenagers is, unexpectedly, to give them chores: “Real-world stuff they have to do for you that you don’t supervise, like, ‘You have to make dinner for us Thursday nights now because I’m going to a class’ or, ‘I don’t have time in the mornings to take your little brother to school, so I’d like you to do it.’ These are things kids have always done and that kids crave, because they want to mature,” she says. If nothing else, teenagers may prefer it to the increasingly popular notion of confiscating their phones.
Next month, a law requiring written parental permission for under-18s to access social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and TikTok is due to come into force in the US state of Utah, with platforms required to block child users during night hours. Last year, in Britain, then education minister Nick Gibb urged schools to normalise “brick” phones without internet access, while China’s internet watchdog suggested limiting screen time to two hours a day for 16- to 18-year-olds. Yet when South Korea imposed its “Cinderella law” in 2011, effectively barring online access for teenage gamers between midnight and 6am, one analysis found they simply spent longer online during the day to compensate.
“Kids are kids. They will rebel,” says Pete Etchells, professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University, whose forthcoming book Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time argues that the moral panic over tech may be overdone. We are, he thinks, lumping together too broad a range of on-screen activities and blaming them for an equally broad range of ills, from poor mental health to delayed adulthood.
“A lot of these things are very poorly defined in public conversations,” Etchells explains. “People who don’t play video games always talk about gaming being quite an isolating experience. But from their inception, video games have been social experiences that bring people together.” Gamers form communities, he points out, while teenagers often game with friends, either physically side by side or remotely, chatting over headsets. Online chess, meanwhile, enjoyed such a surge in popularity during lockdown, fuelled by the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, that by January 2023 traffic to the popular chess.com site had doubled.
Twenge, whose book plotted longitudinal studies tracking teenagers’ social media habits over a decade against mental health trends, has argued that she considered 13 other possible causes for rising teenage distress but none offered as convincing an explanation. Her critics, however, argue that two things happening simultaneously don’t conclusively prove one caused the other. (One study found eating potatoes had about the same effect as screen use on adolescent wellbeing.) Though some studies have found a link between social media and greater risk of self-harm, depression and low self-esteem for girls in particular, even after adjusting for prior mental health problems, a recent landmark study of Facebook use around the world by the Oxford Internet Institute found no evidence of widespread psychological harm.
And while the under-24s are more likely than the middle-aged to say they feel lonely, it’s unclear whether that’s because they’re genuinely more isolated or simply because they’re teenagers. “There’s not a huge amount of data on the young going back years and years, so it’s difficult to know exactly how things have changed,” says Lily Verity, a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Manchester specialising in teenage loneliness. And loneliness, she argues, isn’t just about how much social contact you have: it can stem from feeling that people don’t understand you – common in young people whose identities are still forming and whose friendship groups are in flux. “It might be that you’ve got a group of friends who you really get on with but there’s just one element missing, you can’t talk to them about things you’d like to.” Whether online socialising is as satisfying as the face-to-face kind may depend on exactly what teens are doing. “Where you’re talking to your friends, it can be a positive experience but if it’s more lurking behaviour, where you’re just scrolling and looking at what other people are doing, that can be where the negative aspects creep in.”
Frustratingly for parents, research on how tech affects children’s development moves much more slowly than the tech industry. Etchells admits he can’t say that screen time has no downsides: more that we simply don’t know enough about it yet. “The way we interact is shifting. It’s not necessarily a good or a bad thing, it’s just different.” Asking how much social media is too much for teenagers may be the wrong question, he argues: “What we should be doing, in both research and public debate, is thinking about why it’s the case that some people thrive online – they might come across stuff that’s not good for them, but they’re able to brush it off – and others really struggle.” There is some evidence, he says, that teenagers use social media mostly to maintain existing social relationships – much as gen Xers chattered interminably on landlines to friends they’d seen all day at school.
Dan, a father of two boys aged 14 and 12, says while he often gets frustrated by the hours they spend on screens, he’s noticed that the eldest in particular mostly uses his phone to stay in touch with friends. “It made me think back to when I was that age – I was on a landline, not a mobile, but we used to have all the same issues, my parents yelling, ‘Why are you on the phone?’” he admits. “The oldest will be gaming and his friends will be on a joint call, and they’ll all be chatting away, so in that sense it is socialising.” He worries, however, that they’re not really learning how to entertain themselves. “At their age we were bored a lot, so you’d have to read a book or find something to do. Now you can’t really compete with a phone, there’s nothing else that’s going to be as interesting.” The missing piece of the jigsaw, perhaps, is offering more appealing things for kids to do than lurk in their bedrooms.
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Last August, a branch of KFC in Sittingbourne, Kent made national news for banning unaccompanied teenagers on evenings and weekends after an outbreak of what the chain politely called “behaviour the colonel would not be proud of”. As boisterous teens emerged from lockdown, a spate of shopping malls and fast food restaurants, from California in the US to West Lothian in Scotland, all imposed similar temporary curfews, bans or rules requiring a “parental escort”. Some British cinemas banned teenagers wearing suits from screenings of the children’s film Minions: The Rise of Gru, after a 2022 TikTok craze for dressing up like its supervillain hero led to rowdy older kids allegedly spoiling it for little ones, while last summer the Cornish seaside town of Polzeath installed CCTV on the beach to deter teenagers congregating for the annual post-GCSE ritual of lighting bonfires and getting illicitly drunk.
Though antisocial teenage behaviour can’t be dismissed lightly, what’s striking is that fast food joints, shopping malls, cinemas and beaches were all once spaces for younger teens newly embarking on independent social lives to hang out away from adults. If not here, then where? Even the council youth clubs of 80s memory, offering wobbly pool tables and Panda Pops, plus the prospect of furtive snogging behind the scout hut, are now an endangered species (a 70% real terms cut in youth service budgets since 2010 saw 750 centres close within a decade). Yet arguably they have never been more needed: one in four younger teens has had to give up a sport or hobby they enjoyed because their families couldn’t afford it, according to research by youth charity OnSide last year for a report bleakly titled Generation Isolation, which found three-quarters of the children questioned said they now spent most of their free time on screen. This is a state of affairs that OnSide is now trying to change.
On a cold dark night in Gorton, east Manchester, a gaggle of teenage boys are wheeling their bikes inside one of the few buildings blazing with light. It was the lights that caught 15-year-old Aaliyah’s dad’s attention as he drove past, she remembers: “He was like, ‘I can see a gym inside – go there instead of just sitting at home on your phone!’”
The building was HideOut Youth Zone, a former swimming baths reopened by OnSide in 2020 with a sizeable donation from the former Betfred CEO Fred Done – who grew up nearby – as a £6.6m youth centre complete with climbing wall, music studio and boxing ring. It’s £5 to join and after that every visit costs 50p, for a revolving menu of around 20 nightly activities ranging from art to rollerskating. (OnSide quietly ensures those who can’t afford even this much can still come.)
At first Aaliyah was too shy to go in, but now she’ll happily experiment with sports she wouldn’t have tried at school. “You’re out, you’re doing things, you’re trying to get to know friends,” she says with satisfaction. Her favourite place is the wellness space, designed as a hair and beauty salon for relaxed conversations – everyone instinctively offloads in the hairdresser’s chair, explains Kerin Morris, the centre’s deputy head of youth work. Staff gently steer conversations about anything from relationship choices or bullying to the war in Gaza, while encouraging young people to listen to others’ viewpoints in a way social media doesn’t. “We teach them to challenge someone’s argument without battering each other,” says Morris, a bundle of energy in sweatshirt and jeans who admits she could be a handful herself as a teenager.
Max, 17, a talented rapper, prefers the music studio. “Before I came to HideOut I was a lot more introverted,” he says. “I’d make a song in my room and send it to a few of my friends and say, ‘Don’t show it to anyone.’” Now he’s come out of his shell enough to perform for the centre’s sponsors. “Seeing people show an interest has really helped my confidence.”
HideOut feels like an oasis in what could easily be a teenage desert. The nearby fast food chains don’t like kids hanging around, Morris says, and some retailers are equally wary. “You go into a shop and it’s two at once maximum, or you can’t go to McDonald’s after 6. There are no welcoming environments and when they’re out on the street they’re moved on.” Sometimes kids plead for their youth workers to come and vouch for them, just so they can buy snacks.
But HideOut offers much more than just somewhere to go. Manchester’s high Covid rates meant it faced months of tougher restrictions even between lockdowns, and young people emerged from that period noticeably introverted, Morris says. Some wouldn’t even eat in front of others. But now every passing teenager offers a fist bump, eye contact and willingness to engage. More unusually, I don’t see anyone on their phone: there’s too much else going on.
Founded by the businessman Bill Holroyd and based on the Bolton Lads & Girls Club whose board he chaired, OnSide’s model of tapping into local philanthropists has helped it get around the lack of public funding for youth services. With 14 centres already open, it’s planning seven more by 2026, from Bristol to Grimsby. Chief executive Jamie Masraff explains that, while the facilities draw kids in, it’s the relationship with trained staff that keeps them there: youth workers build their confidence, a sense of responsibility for younger children and a willingness to leave their comfort zones. In other words, they help them grow up.
Apart from boosting mental health, the aim is to equip young people with the social skills employers want. “It’s things you gain from being out in an environment outside school: meeting new people, taking on responsibilities,” Masraff says. “This is the age when you’re finding your identity and the only way to do that is by testing things out.” Teenagers travel to HideOut from all over Greater Manchester, suggesting that if the offer is right, they are more than willing to leave the house.
Walking out into the dark, past the boys playing football under the floodlights, I remember something Sacha Lord mentioned: that the boom in music festivals suggests gen Z still crave big social experiences, just in a slightly different way. “We were all ‘whoa’ when Glastonbury went over £300 a ticket, but it sold out faster than ever. They’re waiting for that one big moment, and they’re happy to put their hands in their pockets for that.” Given enough appealing things to do, enough money with which to do them and some parental encouragement, might this generation eventually spread their wings just as teenagers always have, if perhaps a little later?
That’s certainly been true for Harriet, whose sons are now 15 and 17. Though nothing in their lives changed that she could discern, in recent months they have started going out more – to the gym, with friends, to parties, into the wide world. In retrospect, she wonders whether the time holed up in their bedrooms was a natural developmental stage: a way of pulling away from their parents, as teenagers trying to forge independent identities have always done, except that the space they carved for themselves was in a virtual rather than real world. Meanwhile, Harriet is trying to train herself not to make a fuss when they’re off with friends and fail to answer the phone to their mother. As she puts it, “I’m just grateful they’re out.”
