Spending unsupervised time online with friends encourages delinquency and drug and alcohol use among teenagers

The rise of digital communication through smartphones and other devices in the past decade has transformed the way in which adolescents communicate with one another; friends are now essentially always present and available. In new research, Jim Clark and Ryan C. Meldrum find that this connectivity – when unstructured and unsupervised by adults – is linked to adolescent delinquency and substance abuse.