👦 American teenagers are drinking, smoking, and fighting less and less

👦 American teenagers are drinking, smoking, and fighting less and less

An American teenager today is about half as likely to die as a teenager in 1990.

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  • In the early 1990s, half of American high school students drank alcohol, 35 percent smoked, and teen births reached record highs.
  • Since then, nearly all risky behaviors among teenagers have declined sharply, and the decline is still continuing.
  • An American teenager today is about half as likely to die as a teenager in 1990.

In 1991, teen births in the US reached a record high of 61.8 births per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19. President Bill Clinton called teen pregnancy America's most serious social problem in his 1995 State of the Union address.

This spring, the CDC reported that the figure for 2025 was 11.7 births per 1,000 girls. That is a decline of 81 percent from the 1991 peak and the lowest level ever recorded. In 2025 alone, the figure dropped 7 percent. That amounts to roughly half a million fewer teen births per year compared to the peak.

Fewer have sex and more use contraception

The share of high school students who have ever had sex fell from 54 percent in 1991 to 32 percent in 2023. Researchers at the Guttmacher Institute found that improved contraceptive use drove essentially the entire decline in pregnancies during the late 2000s and early 2010s, including a sevenfold increase in IUDs and implants among teenagers. In the decade that followed, delaying sex became the single biggest factor.

The decline shows up everywhere

Half of high school students drank alcohol in 1991. By 2023, the share was 22 percent. 70 percent had tried cigarettes in 1991, compared to under 18 percent in 2021. E-cigarette use is also declining, since 2019. The share of students who had been in a physical fight in the past year dropped from 42.5 percent in 1991 to 22 percent in 2019.

This year's Monitoring the Future survey shows that 66 percent of 12th graders used no alcohol, marijuana, or nicotine at all in the past month. That is a record. Marijuana use among teenagers has declined since its peak in the late 1990s, even though marijuana is now legal for adults in half the country and easier to obtain than ever.

Death rate cut in half

In 1990, 88 of every 100,000 Americans aged 15 to 19 died each year. By 2013, the figure was 45. The single biggest reason is traffic. Since 1975, road deaths among teenagers have fallen 67 percent, thanks to safer cars, graduated licensing laws that every state adopted starting in the mid-1990s, and fewer teenagers getting driver's licenses. The share of 12th graders with a driver's license fell from 82 percent in 2005 to 63 percent in 2023.

The future became too valuable to gamble away

Psychologist Jean Twenge and writer Adam Mastroianni argue that teenagers stopped taking risks of all kinds as their lives became longer, safer, and richer. The cost of a fight, a pregnancy, or a cigarette simply went up. The trends began as early as the 1990s, long before smartphones and social media. One of the few interventions with proven effect is the TV series 16 and Pregnant, which made teen parenthood look exactly as demanding as it is in reality.

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