Teenagers Aren't Racing to Grow Up. Should That Worry Me?

When I was a teenager, I changed schools because there was a subject I wanted to study. That meant applying, going through an interview, leaving familiar classmates, and starting again with people I did not know. I was accepted, and I got to study what I had wanted to study. I remember it less as a disruption than as an adventure I had chosen.

I do not think every teenager should have to make that kind of decision. Looking back, I was fortunate to have a choice worth making. But I still remember the feeling of having something at stake that was mine.

My son is not a teenager yet. Recently, I have been wondering what independence will look like when he gets there. Will it involve the same familiar milestones: a first job, a driver's license, hours spent outside the house with friends? And if those milestones arrive later than they once did, will that mean anything is wrong?

A 2026 survey of American teenagers made me both relieved and uneasy. It also made me reconsider the question. Maybe I should not be asking how quickly children grow up.

Maybe I should be asking where they get to practice being responsible for a life that is becoming their own.

Are teenagers growing up more slowly?

The American Enterprise Institute's Survey Center on American Life published A Digital Divide in American Adolescence on July 23, 2026. The findings come from an online survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago between January 20 and February 16, 2026. It included 782 U.S. teenagers aged 13 to 17.

A few figures are striking:

• Part-time jobs: 15% of all teenagers surveyed had one. Among 16- and 17-year-olds, the figure was 28%.
• Time with friends: 55% spent time with friends outside school at least once a week. Yet 14% seldom or never did so in their free time.
• Family meals: 37% ate with their family every day.
• Location tracking: 40% said their parents always tracked their movements through a phone or smartwatch; another 28% said this happened most of the time.
• Life satisfaction: Half said they were very or completely satisfied with their lives, and another 34% were somewhat satisfied.

Those numbers describe very different sides of teenage life. They do not support a simple story of a miserable, disconnected generation. Most of the teenagers in the survey reported having close friends, even if they did not always spend much time with them in person. Many were satisfied with life, while also worried about their country's future.

The report describes traditional teenage experiences such as dating, working part-time, and experimenting with alcohol as less common than in earlier eras. But we should be careful with the phrase growing up more slowly. A survey conducted at one moment cannot tell us whether the teenagers themselves are less mature than an earlier generation. It measures reported activities and views, not the age at which someone develops judgment, empathy, or self-control.

There is some longer-term evidence of later milestones. The Federal Highway Administration's 2026 overview of U.S. drivers, for example, reports a decline in the share of 16- to 19-year-olds with a driver's license between 2004 and 2024. That tells us something about licensing patterns. It does not tell us whether a young person can navigate a problem alone.

A teenager with no driver's license might be less independent than a peer who drives everywhere. Or the teenager may live somewhere that makes a car unnecessary. The milestone is visible; the skill underneath it is harder to measure.

Why some of these changes are a relief

Not everything we associate with teenage independence was good preparation for adulthood.

Alcohol, drugs, dangerous driving, and pressure to prove oneself through risky behavior do not become virtues simply because an earlier generation experienced them. Being available at home, keeping in touch with parents, and feeling generally content can be good things.

Sometimes adults mistake nostalgia for evidence. We remember roaming around with friends or making decisions without immediate parental input. We may forget the risks that came with some of that freedom, or how unevenly it was available to different young people.

I do not want my son to repeat the teenage years I happened to have. His life will not need to resemble mine to be a good one.

And yet, relief is not the whole answer.

A milestone is not just an event. It can be practice.

Consider a part-time job. Earning money is one outcome, but it is hardly the only one. A teenager may learn to arrive on time, answer to someone outside the family, cope with a difficult customer, ask a question without embarrassment, or recover after doing something badly.

Spending time with friends without an adult directing every moment can offer different practice: negotiating plans, dealing with boredom, deciding whether to join in, managing disagreements, and finding a way home.

Learning to drive may bring responsibility, but so can using public transportation independently, arranging a ride, handling a schedule, or figuring out what to do when a plan changes.

The argument is not that every teenager needs every milestone. It is that somewhere, the practice needs to happen.

A child can be busy and successful without getting much practice at making decisions. Adults may arrange the activities, monitor the calendar, supply the reminders, and smooth out the awkward conversations. The teenager performs well inside a life designed and maintained by other people.

I can recognize the temptation. When I can solve a problem quickly, allowing my son to struggle with an imperfect solution can feel inefficient. But efficiency may be the wrong measure. The difficult part might be the very part he needs to learn.

This is also why I keep returning to a question I raised in Fear of Failure in Children: What a Flute Exam Taught Me: what do our children learn when we make mistakes feel too costly? They may become careful, but careful is not always the same as confident.

Are parents part of the reason?

The tracking figure is hard to ignore. Four in ten teenagers said their parents always tracked their location, and another 28% said it happened most of the time.

It is tempting to see that and say parents are refusing to let children go. But I do not think the question is that simple.

Knowing where a teenager is can be responsible parenting. The CDC's guidance on parental monitoring associates informed, engaged parenting with lower levels of several health risks. Knowing where children are, whom they are with, and when they are expected home is not the same as controlling every choice they make.

Still, there is an important difference between using a phone as a safety tool and using it to remove every uncertainty.

If parents can see each location, remind children of every deadline, settle every disagreement, and step in the moment something goes wrong, we may be preventing the very experiences through which competence develops.

The 2026 survey does not prove that location tracking causes delayed independence. It cannot establish why any particular teenager is being tracked, or what parents and teenagers agreed to. It does, however, give parents a useful question to ask:

Am I using this tool to make independence safer, or to avoid giving independence at all?

A family may have good reasons for stricter boundaries in one situation than another. The point is to let the boundaries change as the young person learns, not to leave them in place by default.

I explored a similar tension in Parenting Styles in the Digital Age: What I Changed. Digital tools can make parental involvement easier; deciding when to step back remains a human judgment.

What I noticed about fathers in the survey

One figure has stayed with me.

When teenagers were asked whom they usually turned to first with a personal problem, 40% named their mother, 24% named a close friend, and only 6% named their father. Another 10% said they had no one to turn to.

It is a surprising number, but I do not want to turn it into a verdict on fathers. First is not only. The survey does not tell us how many fathers were trusted as a second source of help, what kinds of problems teenagers had in mind, or how family arrangements differ.

It does make me think about what my son chooses to tell me.

He does not often begin a conversation by describing something that has made him unhappy. He is more likely to tell me about a new ability he has imagined for a game character, or a special level he is working on.

I could treat those stories as small talk, something to get through before a more important conversation. But perhaps the important thing is already happening: he is inviting me into a world that matters to him.

Listening does not guarantee that a child will someday bring me a painful or embarrassing problem. Nothing does. But dismissing the ordinary conversations seems an especially poor way to make the difficult ones more likely.

I want to be someone he can approach without assuming that I will take control of the situation. Part of helping a child grow independent is making it safe for him to come back for help.

How can parents help teenagers become more independent?

The answer cannot be to hand a teenager a list of adult milestones and demand that they catch up. Nor can it be to withdraw support and call the resulting struggle resilience.

I find the CDC's advice on encouraging teen independence more useful: keep expectations clear, remain emotionally available, and let teenagers take an increasing role in decisions and activities outside the home.

For me, that suggests a gradual change in who does the thinking.

Start with decisions that matter but are safe to get wrong. A child can compare options for a purchase, plan part of a family outing, decide how to divide a project into steps, or take responsibility for a recurring household task. The aim is not a perfect result. It is the experience of thinking ahead and living with manageable consequences.

Offer support without immediately taking over. Instead of solving every difficulty, a parent can ask what the child has tried, what choices remain, and which kind of help would actually be useful. Some problems call for adult intervention, especially where safety is involved. Others are opportunities for the child to discover that a mistake is survivable.

Increase freedom as judgment develops. Responsibility and autonomy should grow together. A younger child might plan a short errand with a parent nearby. An older teenager might organize transportation, handle an appointment, budget money, or resolve an ordinary scheduling problem independently. Age, ability, safety, and the particular situation all matter more than any universal checklist.

Stay connected while stepping back. Independence should not require a child to hide trouble in order to prove maturity. The parent can still be available to listen, offer perspective, and step in when genuinely needed. The relationship changes from directing every move toward being a dependable place to return.

This is not a novel theory of parenting. It is the ordinary, difficult work of giving someone responsibility before they have become perfect at handling it. It connects to something I wrote about how feeling progress changed my son's flute practice: confidence grows from noticing what one can do, not merely from being told to feel confident.

When should slower independence worry a parent?

I would worry less about the absence of one traditional milestone and more about the absence of opportunities to develop the abilities beneath it.

Not dating at 16 is not, by itself, a sign of immaturity. Neither is waiting to get a driver's license or not holding a part-time job. These decisions depend on interest, access, finances, safety, transportation, family responsibilities, and countless other circumstances.

More meaningful questions are whether a teenager is gradually able to make choices, follow through on responsibilities, maintain relationships, seek help when needed, and recover from mistakes.

If a child is persistently distressed, isolated, unable to manage ordinary tasks, or losing interest in activities that used to matter, that deserves care and attention on its own terms. It is not simply a case of being late to adulthood. A parent may need to start with a conversation and, when concerns are substantial or ongoing, ask a qualified health professional for guidance.

The milestones themselves are not the diagnosis.

What the research can and cannot tell us

The AEI survey used NORC's probability-based AmeriSpeak panel and was weighted to reflect U.S. population benchmarks. Its 782 completed online interviews have a reported overall margin of error of approximately ±4.8 percentage points at the 95% confidence level; estimates for smaller subgroups are less precise.

It is a useful snapshot, not a longitudinal study of the same teenagers as they mature. It also cannot establish that social media, parental tracking, school pressure, or any single parenting style caused the patterns it describes. Some figures about changes across generations require other sources and carefully comparable measures.

AEI is a policy think tank whose interpretation should be read as an interpretation; the survey methods and questions are worth examining separately from the conclusions drawn from them. None of the statistics can tell a parent exactly what a particular child needs.

That uncertainty matters. It leaves room for a parent's own observations, without pretending those observations are a substitute for evidence.

I do not need him to grow up faster

I still remember changing schools to pursue a subject I cared about. I remember the interview, the unfamiliar faces, and the satisfaction of having made a decision that led somewhere.

What made that experience valuable was not the age at which it happened. It was that I had a reason to try, a choice to make, and enough room to discover what followed.

My son does not have to collect the same milestones, on the same schedule, in the same order.

But I do want him to have experiences that belong to him: something he plans, something he tries, a mistake he can repair, a conversation he begins, a responsibility that is genuinely his rather than quietly managed by me.

Maybe the question is not whether this generation is growing up more slowly.

Maybe it is whether we are helping them practise independence, or simply waiting for adulthood to arrive and expecting independence to appear with it.

I do not need my son to race toward adulthood. I want him to have room to learn how to get there.

Sources and further reading

• Daniel A. Cox, A Digital Divide in American Adolescence (Survey Center on American Life, AEI, July 23, 2026)
• Federal Highway Administration, Our Nation's Highways 2026: Drivers
• CDC, Tips for Encouraging Independence
• CDC, Parental Monitoring