On any given Monday night, say, in the Midwest, the cars start arriving on the suburban street as the streetlamps turn on. Olivia Rodrigo belts out breakup lyrics from one car; Zach Bryan with his gritty country twang emanates from another. Teenagers pile out in ones and twos, sometimes a group of four, and do their thing on the walk into the house: girls hugging each other and boys pushing. Inside, a pile of shoes and more music. “It’s Tricky” by Run DMC thumps from the basement like it’s 1987.
In the basement, it’s already too warm. The noise doesn’t help. Groups of teenagers again, a clutch of girls talking, a group of boys together. But it’s not 1987. Some kids have their phones out. The girls and boys don’t look at each other. They’re not engaged in the rite of flirting. At least, not across the room: the phones are easier.
It’s Young Life club, but something is different than 40 years ago. Something has changed.
The Great Rewiring
Adults noticed this in the late teens, and then COVID accelerated the trends. Somehow, young people were different. Strategies that had worked for the last 20 years no longer did. Young people trusted less easily, were more wary and hesitant.
Young Life leader Tanita Maddox, in her book What Gen Z Really Wants to Know About God, puts it this way: “There was a shift I couldn’t put my finger on, but I knew something had changed. I saw panic attacks at events, students with too much anxiety to go to school, girls who would only meet with me one-on-one and not in groups.”
Maddox describes feeling out of touch, maybe she’d lost her ability to connect, until she realized: seemingly overnight, a new generation arrived. Generation Z. They’re now being followed by Generation Alpha, which comprises those born in 2012 and later. (One worries about the followers of Alpha, as who wants to be a Beta?)
Generation Z arrived with a new set of experiences and questions. And those experiences were shaped by smartphones.
All of society, adults included, has seen massive shifts in our daily digital usage. Ian Bogost, writer for The Atlantic, argues that, “Screen time is not a metric to optimize downward, but a name for the frenzy of existence in an age defined by screens.” That is, all of life is now screen time.
Everyone’s life has changed.
But not everyone’s life changed as they were asking essential questions about who they are, trying on new personas, and while their brains were literally maturing into something more stable. That was a unique challenge we placed on adolescents, plopping phones into their hands and seeing what happened.
Jonathan Haidt, psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, notes, “Between 2010 and 2015, the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities.”
Gen Z is “the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets” pulling them into an alternate, always-on world. Haidt coined the term “The Great Rewiring” to explain what adults did to the kids. He explains that childhood moved from play-based to phone-based, creating protected, sedentary, solitary, mediated experiences.
After all, what is social media if not something we’re no longer directly experiencing — like the closeness of a relationship?
The RELATE Project
The Great Rewiring isn’t finished. The oldest Gen Zers are now in the workforce learning how to manage email while their supervisors learn how to manage a new set of worker expectations; and so we’re seeing the rewiring continue.
As adults, we need to understand the environments and media we’re offering to young people, to ensure we drive the effects we want: healthy, flourishing adults who know how to navigate technology, but who see technology as a tool rather than a master.
Is this happening?
While we have ready data from various institutions — Pew Research looks at adolescence, or Barna reviews religious data — no organization sits at the confluence of culture and faith like Young Life. A Young Life leader knows the Zach Bryan lyrics and the faith questions a 16-year-old is asking.
Young Life’s RELATE Project is a deep dive into that confluence, measuring relationships, faith, and technology to help us understand what’s happening in young people today. It helps us understand what we can do to come alongside one of the most socially and personally complex experiences any of us ever undergo: adolescence.
Imagine, for instance, that each year you start a new job with six to eight new bosses. Each year, you need to prove yourself to these bosses. You have some new work friends, though some go from job to job with you. And, your body is changing rapidly: you look different year-to-year, or your friends do, and if you don’t look different, you surely feel different. You turn to your friends for help, but none has the answers. This might be an approximation of what adolescents experience, year after year, from sixth grade until they graduate college.
They desperately need — and want — adults who have gone through it before.
Add smartphones and artificial intelligence in this mix, and it’s no wonder we’re seeing that adolescence today looks and feels different. There’s been a rewiring. Young Life’s RELATE Project found data that the rewiring isn’t done yet:
- Doomscrolling is rising just in the last three years — from 34% of teens to 39% of teens who admit to doing it while they’re stressed. Nearly half of youth say they’re passively scrolling, not creating or engaging, while they’re online. Experts note the type of screen time matters significantly, and passive scrolling is the most potentially damaging.
- The average number of close relationships young people report is dropping: from 5.3 two years ago to 4.4 today. Real people are disappearing from teenagers’ lives.
- Mental health is one of the top concerns for adolescents and their communities in every country we surveyed.
- And RELATE found that 45% of 13- to 15-year-olds report having an AI companion: a bot who offers empathy, relationship, and advice, all judgment-free.
Such data articulates what kids are experiencing, and it assures us: the change isn’t done. Expect more. We need to keep listening to what’s happening to adolescents.
Stepping Into the Confluence
In the midst of this, RELATE also uncovered what young people want in their faith. Time in nature is crucial, likely away from those smartphones and the pressure of being always on. “Touch grass,” as the saying goes. Opportunities to express what they think is also important, they tell us: they need space to articulate what they believe.
In other words, Young Life camp. Time away from phones, in nature, with room to ask questions and articulate thoughts in a safe space. The data, however, invites us to ask how we can create more of these spaces. Does a phone-free club or Campaigners work? For families, what about phone-free dinner times?
Or, how does doing something together release the pressure of an across-the-table conversation? This ties into the “touch grass” concept, and it’s exactly what Julie Clapp, vice president of WyldLife (Young Life’s ministry to middle schoolers), recommends: “We know it’s always been a challenge for many middle schoolers to sit down and have a deep conversation about what they think and feel. Some of that is developmental — they can’t always verbalize what’s going on in their hearts and heads. But now there is also a lack of experience with face-to-face conversations about much of anything.”
She explains how she encourages WyldLife leaders to do something while talking to kids, rather than sit across a table. “We’ve seen kids are more willing to talk when they are doing something with their leaders.”
The same goes in Campaigners, or Bible study. Imagine trying to get a group of 13-year-olds to talk about God in a way that feels safe and won’t get them made fun of. According to Clapp, it sometimes means “letting them write things down, even if they never share with the group.”
They need to process, but safety is always an issue: in a world of Instagram and TikTok, a moment of embarrassment can live on in the form of a post or text thread, Clapp explains.
In her club, while they allow phones, they’re careful to ask permission of kids before bringing them up for a game. And they’re asking whether they should allow phones at all — potentially creating a less-distracted environment that feels safer.
Dan Grieble, a senior area director in the Chicago suburbs, agrees. “Kids DO a lot less,” he shares. “They don’t hang out with friends as much. A lot of the world is more online than even 10 years ago. For this generation, this was the only way they could connect in their formative years due to COVID.”
He points out that the basement club room is much more gendered. “It’s like the boy-half of the room and the girl-half of the room. But the genders don’t mix. Ten years ago, being with the other gender was why you went to Young Life club!”
As a result, his club engages in fewer gendered games — “this generation didn’t get to grow up learning how to flirt and interact with each other,” he describes — and Campaigners becomes a time with smaller, safer groups so teenagers will share.
The Need for Relationship
In the end, however, both Clapp and Griebel noted that kids are kids. “They are still trying to figure out who they are,” Griebel notes, “if you like them, if they like you, what they think of the world, what they think of God, how they can make a difference.”
Adolescence hasn’t changed in that sense — the same essential questions are there. Clapp notes that middle schoolers have always been easily embarrassed and prone to feeling left out, but now the hurdles are higher.
The antidote becomes relationships. While close relationships are diminishing, they are more important than ever, and kids crave them more than even three years ago, preferring face-to-face interaction with friends by a higher percentage in RELATE’s most recent survey (from 54% in 2023 to 64% in 2026).
They may not always admit it, but they are hungry for real relationships.
It’s through relationship we find identity and discover who we are. The RELATE data makes this clear, tying the number and health of close relationships to flourishing, no matter other variables (economics, geography, age, etc.). We’ve yet to see how artificial intelligence will affect this, but early returns are that teenagers without close relationships are turning to AI to replace them. “Very few people show up for me,” a RELATE focus group participant shared. “After I trained my AI, there are times when I’m at my lowest that I use it to have deep conversations and work through things.”
The data remain murky on AI’s effect on adolescents, though RELATE points out that it does seem to be a substitute for personal relationships. We need to combine data with common sense in navigating this new environment: continuing to collect data about how technology is affecting young people, while not simply waiting where common sense steers us in one direction.
As the music thumps in basements and club rooms around the world, relationships are vital. And as adults in these relationships, we get to speak something good over the next generation. Maddox describes the need for this. “Gen Zers will not believe us when we say something good about who they are,” she says. They’ve been trained otherwise. Not only this, but they only trust what they see; they want to understand things experientially rather than proclamations. “We will have to repeat it over and over, and demonstrate it,” Maddox explains, “until our Gen Z friends pause and say, ‘You really mean that, don’t you?’”
