A Rite of Teen Passage Has Gone Into Decline

Teen boy arrives at teen girl’s house to pick her up for a date. It’s a vignette we still see in many commercials, but it’s playing out less often in real life. Compared to a decade ago, 10th- and 12th-graders are more likely to say they never date and less likely to say they often date, according to a report from the Child Trends DataBank. Analyzing data collected by the Monitoring the Future project at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, the report says the shift “is more pronounced for 12th-grade students, where the percentage who did not date at all rose from 14 percent in 1991 to 22 percent in 2001.”