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The forgotten success story of America’s teenagers

Today’s teens are much safer than 1990s teens. Why doesn’t anyone talk about it?

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.

The teen birth rate hit another record low in 2025 — down 81 percent from its 1991 peak, or roughly half a million fewer teen births a year.

It’s not just pregnancy: teen drinking, smoking, fighting, and drug use have all collapsed since the 1990s.

The best theory: teen lives got longer, safer, and richer — and their futures became too valuable to gamble.

A teenager today is about a third less likely to die than one in 1990.

The price: teen sadness has surged since 2017, and the good kinds of risk-taking declined too.

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.

Stop romanticizing the 1990s. The data shows today is better.

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........

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