The forgotten success story of America’s teenagers

It’s been feeling very 1995 lately.

Oasis, whose last good song came out back when Macs were still see-through, was the second-biggest tour on the planet last year. Gen Z is snapping up the flip phones and digital cameras their parents had traded in for smartphones, and Y2K-era fashion is flooding the mall, in case you were wondering where all the rhinestones came from. Pop star Olivia Rodrigo just released a hit album heavily influenced by alternative rock recorded a decade before she was born.

Ask Americans directly and they’ll tell you: the 1990s are the decade we’re most nostalgic for, edging out even the boomer-beloved ’80s.

Speaking as someone who lived through the 1990s as a teenager and mostly enjoyed it (at least in retrospect), it makes total sense to me. Of course, it would — as a Washington Post analysis found, when Americans name the country’s “best decade,” the answer inevitably boils down to whichever decade they turned 11.

But personal experience also means that, with a little effort, I can remember what the 1990s were actually like to live through, and the reality was a different story than the myth — especially for teenagers of that era.

Take teen pregnancy. In 1991, the teen birth rate hit a record high of 61.8 births per 1,000 girls aged 15-19. In his 1995 State of the Union address, President Bill Clinton called “the epidemic of teen pregnancies and births where there is no marriage” America’s “most serious social problem.” A National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy formed the following year in direct response.

And the fear ran well beyond pregnancy: juvenile arrests peaked in 1996 at nearly 2.7 million, at the height of the so-called “superpredator” panic over a coming wave of remorseless teenage criminals. In 1995, as the writer Adam Mastroianni points out in an excellent new essay that helped inspire this piece, half of high school students drank alcohol, 35 percent smoked cigarettes, 40 percent had at least tried marijuana, one in 10 had brought a weapon to school at some point, and about 6 percent of teenage girls were pregnant in any given year. The teen suicide rate for boys hit a record high in 1990. Americans were terrified for their teenagers, and terrified of them.

So, no, the 1990s weren’t all teen boy bands, high school comedies, and endless economic growth. But what’s amazing, at a moment when everyone seems sure that kids today are not all right, is just how much those scary signs of teen dysfunctions from the 1990s have simply vanished.

This spring, the CDC reported that the US teen birth rate fell to 11.7 births per 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19 in 2025 — down 81 percent from its 1991 peak, and the lowest figure ever recorded. That has been the pattern for more than three decades now: the teen birth rate sets a record low, then breaks it, then breaks it again.

It’s not just teen pregnancy: nearly every risky teen behavior of the halcyon 1990s started collapsing almost at once, kept collapsing for 30 years, and is collapsing still. The teen birth rate dropped 7 percent in 2025 alone. And yet it’s hard to find anyone who planned this victory, and nearly impossible to find anyone who celebrated it.

Let’s start with teen births, which largely comes down to two factors working in concert: fewer teens are having sex, and those who are use much better contraception.

The share of high schoolers who have ever had sex fell from 54 percent in 1991 to 32 percent in 2023, and Guttmacher Institute researchers found that improved contraceptive use drove essentially all of the pregnancy decline in the late 2000s and early 2010s, including a sevenfold rise in teens using long-acting IUDs and implants. In the decade that followed, delaying sex became the biggest single contributor.

But contraception can’t explain why violence fell too. The best unified theory comes from psychologists like Jean Twenge and more recently writers like Mastroianni, whose “Decline of Deviance” essays argue that kids stopped taking risks of all kinds in part because their futures became too valuable to gamble. As lives got longer, safer, and richer, the expected cost of any given joint, fight, or pregnancy went up. Twenge called this the “slow life strategy,” and it shows up as much in data about taking good risks as it does in taking bad ones: the share of high school seniors with a driver’s license, for instance, fell from 82 percent in 2005 to 63 percent in 2023.

If you’re waiting for smartphones to enter the picture, you’re going to keep waiting — most of these trends began in the 1990s, long before broadband, let alone Instagram. And policy didn’t seem to do much either. England spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a national teen pregnancy strategy, and a comparative analysis found rates fell about as fast as they did in similar countries that spent nothing. (Researchers have found that one of the few interventions with credible causal evidence behind it, at least in the US, was MTV’s iconic 16 and Pregnant — a reality show that worked by making teen parenthood look as exhausting as it was in reality.)

Everything everywhere at once

The same collapse in dangerous behavior shows up everywhere you look. Half of high school students drank alcohol in 1991; 22 percent did in 2023. Seventy percent had tried a cigarette in 1991; under 18 percent had by 2021 — and no, they didn’t all just switch to vaping. E-cigarette use has also been falling since 2019. The share of high schoolers who’d been in a physical fight in the past year dropped from 42.5 percent in 1991 to 22 percent by 2019. And this year’s Monitoring the Future survey found that 66 percent of 12th graders — a record — used no alcohol, marijuana, or nicotine at all in the past month.

For me, no number stands out more than marijuana. When I was a teen in the 1990s… well, when I was a teen in the 1990s I was way too uncool to know anyone who had marijuana. (Honest, Mom.) But weed is now legal for adults in half the country, almost certainly easier for a teenager to obtain than at any point in American history, and generally regarded by young people as less dangerous than their parents ever believed. Yet even as marijuana use has spiked among adults, it has fallen among teens from its late-1990s peak.

All that caution shows up in the most basic stat there is: teenagers stopped dying so frequently. In 1990, 88 of every 100,000 Americans ages 15 to 19 died each year; by 2013 it was 45. The single biggest reason was the car: since 1975, teen road deaths have fallen 67 percent thanks to safer vehicles, the graduated licensing laws every state adopted starting in the mid-1990s, and all those teens who never bothered getting a license in the first place. At the 2013 low, an American teenager was half as likely to die as one in 1990.

That last stat is worth holding onto. Nostalgia isn’t just misleading; it also suffers from survivorship bias. Adults like myself may look back on their 1990s adolescence as a golden age, but there are tens of thousands of my peers who never lived to look back.

The problem with reducing risk-taking behavior across the board is that not all risks are bad. The same caution that might keep a 16-year-old from smoking or having sex might later keep her from founding a company, moving across the country, or writing a strange novel. In Mastroianni’s “Decline of Deviance” essays he documents falling cultural and scientific risk-taking right alongside fewer fistfights. “For the first time in history,” he writes, “weirdness is a choice. And it’s a hard one, because we have more to lose than ever.””

And if teens are so safe, why are they so sad? Forty percent of high schoolers reported persistent sadness or hopelessness in 2023, and the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued that we’ve overprotected kids in the physical world while underprotecting them in online spaces that didn’t even exist in the dial-up 1990s. The timing backs him up: when the CDC first asked the sadness question in 1999, about 28 percent of students said yes, and the number barely moved for nearly two decades until surging after 2017. Physical safety and psychological well-being may turn out to be more separate than we ever realized.

But our valid worries about the mental state and uncertain future of today’s teens shouldn’t blind us to just how remarkable the shift from the 1990s is as a whole. As Mastroianni writes, “We would have spent billions to solve all of these problems back in the 1990s… and yet when we got the thing we wanted so badly, we didn’t even notice.”

America wanted its teenagers to stop getting pregnant, stop smoking, and stop fighting — wanted it badly enough to put it at the center of a State of the Union address — and then got nearly all of it, mostly free of charge, from the kids themselves.

“Can we take a win?” Mastroianni asks. We can start by counting this one.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!