America Was Built on Taking Risks. Today's Teens No Longer Do

When you think of the United States of America’s greatest achievements over the past 250 years, what comes to mind? Chances are, your answer will feature daring, risk-taking endeavors. The risk of starting a revolution for the founding of a new nation, against all odds. The risk of landing on the moon and reimagining the possibilities of technology. The classic Western, which depicts the risks and conquests of living on the American frontier. 

For 250 years, America has been the land of adventure and fearlessness. Notwithstanding Elon Musk’s dream of a colony on Mars, there seem to be few frontiers left for America to tame. So what is the status of our land of adventure, and what does it portend for the next 250 years of American life?

Being the patriotic citizen that I am, earlier this week, I played for my kids “American Pie,” Don McLean’s lament of the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper in a tragic plane crash. Over more than eight minutes, the dramatic song suggests that their deaths precipitated the death of music, and perhaps of America as a whole. The chorus is iconic:

So, bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey and rye
Singin’, ‘This’ll be the day that I die
This’ll be the day that I die’

It’s a memorable image, and one that triggers nostalgia even in those who did not personally experience anything like it. At this point, most everyone has heard those famous lyrics, even younger generations unfamiliar with the song’s subject matter. 

Yet the lyrics also describe a situation that is simply inconceivable today: Teenagers hanging out at the levee—a popular venue for drag races and other youthful shenanigans—drinking underaged and unsupervised. 

This is not just idle speculation. At the Institute for Family Studies, we’ve been analyzing  new data from the Monitoring the Future Study, a long-term survey of American youth, and the results are sobering. Teenagers are far less social than in decades past, with precipitous drops in the percentage of high school seniors who ever go on dates, visit friends weekly, and go to parties monthly. Meanwhile, the number of teenagers who spend an hour each day on isolated leisure activities has shot up. 

To put an even finer point on it: Drinking and trespassing, specifically, have collapsed among teenagers over the past few decades. The number of 12th graders who have ever consumed alcohol dropped from 92% in 1976 to 47% in 2024. The number of 12th grade boys who say they have trespassed is down from 31% to just 15 percent. That’s far fewer unauthorized levee parties, with far fewer good old boys drinking whiskey and rye. Young people today certainly don’t seem vocal about contemplating the day that they’ll die, either. 

Data from the American Time Use Survey similarly finds that the number of hours young adults report socializing with friends has dropped by more than half in the last 20 years, from 12.3 hours to 5.1. Likewise, the General Social Survey finds that fewer young adults are having sex. Our own landmark survey of 24,000 parents conducted in collaboration with Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation Project finds that most American kids aren’t even allowed by parents to venture far from home, even as teenagers. 

Risk aversion is not the foundation for a flourishing, or even self-sustaining, society.

The IFS survey reflects a broader phenomenon across American childhood: low parental tolerance for risk-taking in the real world, yet increasing amounts of time spent in unsupervised digital worlds. Denying children the ability to channel their curiosity and adventurousness into real-world pursuits, while allowing them to explore the online frontier in ways that are anti-social can easily become unhealthy.

Now, I am far from the right ambassador for Team Young Adult Risk Taking. I was too busy with cross country practice and orchestra rehearsal to even realize that some of my classmates spent their weekends drinking and partying. 

Of course, in isolation, many of these teenage behavioral trendlines are positive. It’s definitely good that fewer kids are trespassing, for instance. The effects of alcohol on developing brains—not to mention any unwise actions performed while under its influence—are not good. The decline in teenage sexual activity has coincided with plummeting levels of teen pregnancy, a social issue that was once a major point of discussion.

But taken together, what these trends signal is more worrying. As psychologist Jean Twenge has convincingly shown, this teenage risk aversion appears to extend to longer-term life choices as well. Fewer high school boys expect to attend college than in years past. Fewer high school boys and girls expect to get married. 

Already, IFS demographer Wendy Wang finds that falling fertility is primarily the result of fewer women in their 20s having children. If the trends among teenagers are any indication, delays in marriage and child-rearing will only continue as young adults enter adulthood lacking in major life experiences.

Do these troubling youth trends make Don McLean a prophet? In some sense, clearly yes. His lament for a frontier America that was dying has come true to an alarming extent. 

Risk aversion is not the foundation for a flourishing, or even self-sustaining, society. A cursory glance at the milestones of American history makes clear that risk-aversion has not been the foundation of our society over the past 250 years. 

Risk-taking has been essential for a nation whose first 250 years have re-made the world. Forming families, upholding religious communities, building cities and towns, developing new industries and technologies, expanding American democracy, preserving hard-won liberties, creating new forms of art and culture, maintaining timeless traditions, stewarding our natural beauty, and protecting the Constitutional order—these all require risk-taking over sustained periods of time.

But the future is not yet written, and we do have a chance to rekindle that spark of American greatness. As with the first American revolution, it will not result from a saccharine nostalgia for a bygone time that will never return. 

Instead, it will result from saying “yes” to some risks like those great Americans who came before us did. Some of these risks may be large projects and civilizational undertakings, the likes of which America is still capable of achieving. The Artemis II mission conducted earlier this year, NASA’s first lunar flyby in a half-century, is a remarkable testament to our continuous capacity for bold projects. 

But most of these risks will be small and personal: asking a girl out on a date, getting involved at church, saying yes to a marriage proposal, starting a new company, having kids, moving to a new town. These are real risks and accepting them often feels quite scary. But it’s the stuff life is made of, and it’s what America has been made of for 250 years. 

America can become a land of risk-takers again, if we rebuild the courage piece by piece. It might start with letting some teenage rebellion happen in real life instead of through digital worlds.

Happy 250th, America! Let’s prove that the levee isn’t dry. There’s no time like the present.

Carter Skeel is Executive Director of the Institute for Family Studies.