I have a memory that I’ll bet many of you share. I’ll see if I can get the details right. It was early spring 2021, right in the middle of the covid restrictions. We had spent the winter holed up with our family and it was great in some ways and difficult in others. And then, finally, there was this first really beautiful day to go outside, so we were eager to take a walk as a family. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones. It seemed like the whole world was outside. People were walking down the sidewalks, riding bikes or scooters, sitting on porches, or just hanging out on their lawns. We stopped to talk to neighbors, we waved at everyone as we passed by. And as this was all happening, I had a striking realization: I remember this feeling!
The feeling I remembered was evenings in the nineties as I roamed the streets with friends. Outside was always populated. People sat on porches. My neighbor frequently played catch with his boys in the yard. Kids ran from house to house and played games in each other’s yards. And I’m sure that my memory of that time is colored by nostalgia, but the sense of familiarity that spring day was real. Walking down the street, I felt like I was in the wrong decade of my life.
And I’ll bet that many of you went outside on that exact same day, took a walk down your street, saw all the people outside, and then remembered what it was like to be in a neighborhood that felt populated.
Since that time we’ve seen the proliferation of cell phones, then smartphones, then 3G, no 4G no, 4G LTE, no 5G internet on phones. MySpace was founded in 2003 (the year I graduated from high school). Facebook came shortly after in 2004. When I returned home from my LDS mission in 2006 my sister told me about this really interesting website called YouTube. Video game systems became vastly more capable as I grew up. The PlayStation (then PS2, then PS3, etc.) made Super Nintendo look like a relic. First person shooter games like Call of Duty and Halo became popular. Then, as internet speeds increased exponentially, massive multiplayer online role playing games like World of Warcraft became popular. Those were followed by megahits like Minecraft and Fortnite. And as those games spread to near ubiquity, social media giants struck gold with Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikToks as they figured out the incredible attractions of extremely short form content and infinite scroll. And then right at the tail end, we’ve seen the incredible explosion of highly capable AI models and rapid integration into our academic, entertainment, and even social lives.
And precisely how much which development has caused which outcomes is difficult to say, but the world is definitely different now than the world I grew up in. And technological advancements and shifting interactions with technology are definitely involved.
This new world has benefits. We wouldn’t have accepted this world if it didn’t. But on the negative side of the ledger, one of its pitfalls is loneliness. A study published this year in the journal SSM-Mental Health reported an increase in self-reported loneliness in 8th, 10th, and 12th graders from 2011 to 2024. The increase came in how much these teens agreed with the statements, “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” The increase hasn’t been earth shaking, but it has been steady and significant and it tracks with what I’ve seen in my students and teens generally. Not different enough to mean that my students aren’t living good lives, but different enough to be concerned.
In a similar vein, another study published in 2020 in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology found, using data from the American Time Use Survey, that Americans aged 15-25 spent approximately twenty-two fewer minutes per day on non-digital social interactions between 2003 and 2017.
On the positive side of the equation, many parents no longer have to deal much with a certain set of anxieties. Do you remember how Spin the Bottle used to bedevil parents in the nineties? There was a pretty good reason. My junior high could have been reasonably described as a cheap soap opera. But as teens have become more siloed in their individual lives, the concern about teens getting involved in romantic relationships too deeply and too quickly has decreased.
That isn’t to say that parents and other adults don’t currently need to be concerned at all. Thoughtful and responsible parents will always be helping their teens have experiences that don’t outpace their maturity. But the reality of the situation is that the average parent today needs to be at least as worried that their child will never develop any romantic relationship with another human ever as they should be worried that their child will get too deep into romantic relationships too quickly..
The statistics confirm what we’re all seeing. In 1991 86% of high school seniors reported ever having gone on a date. By 2017 that number was 51%. As in half of high school seniors had never been on a date at any point. And the data isn’t available for 2026, but I can’t imagine the number has bounced back up. And what’s just as worrying as the decrease in teen socializing and dating is what, in many instances, is replacing it.
Common Sense Media reported in 2025 that approximately one third of teens reported regularly using an AI as a social companion and eight percent use an AI companion for flirtatious or romantic interactions. In layman’s terms, about a third of teens have an AI friend of some sort and about eight percent of teens have an AI girlfriend or boyfriend of some sort. Eight percent isn’t a huge number, but it isn’t a small one either.
What’s just as important is why teens use AI for companionship. Google has a habit of making insulting assumptions about what I’m interested in purchasing (I spent about three months being regularly shown ads for adult diapers). And apparently it spent a while thinking “this guy probably is really interested in an AI girlfriend.” So I saw plenty of ads. But what I saw in the ads was as unexpected as it was illuminating.
The advertisements said some of the normal things that you would expect, but the heaviest theme wasn’t trying to convince young men that an AI girlfriend would be exciting or fun. The most common hook that I saw used was that an AI girlfriend isn’t a risk. In other words, the AI girlfriends in the ads didn’t say “Look at how beautiful I am.” They said, “I’m here for you,” “I can listen to you anytime,” “I won’t judge you,” “I understand how hard it is for you.”
I was floored. But as I’ve remembered how intimidated I was by girls in school, I’ve thought that maybe I shouldn’t have been. Everyone wants relationships, but relationships carry real risk. And that’s what AI companions sell: relationships without risk. And relationships without risk are one of the primary reasons that teens use AI companions. Again from Common Sense Media, the top three reasons that teens use AI companions are because it’s entertaining, because they are curious, and because they are looking for advice. But the next four most common reasons for using AI companions are:
- They’re always available when I need someone to talk to
- They don’t judge me
- I can say things I wouldn’t tell my friends or family
- It’s easier than talking to real people
So, considering my experience with ads for AI girlfriends, it’s easy to see that AI companies have been doing their homework. They know what teens are looking for. Most kids would automatically find social interactions risky. But kids who didn’t grow up roaming the streets in prepubescent street gangs and playing Spin the Bottle really, really find social interactions risky and many prefer to simply opt out.
And those choices as a teen reverberate into adult life as adults today are also more socially isolated, date less, form fewer relationships, and push back family creation back further, or opt out of family creation entirely when compared to previous generations.
So as I’ve looked at the landscape that my own children and my students are operating in, I’ve spent a deal of time considering how to encourage them to make choices and live lives that will set them up for strong relationships in the future. Because, if there is one thing I’ve learned over my time as a parent and teacher, if you want positive change in the lives of children and students, it will take active, positive, enthusiastic, and persuasive leadership.
So, in that spirit, I would like to humbly submit to you a framework for thinking about how to offer that active, positive, enthusiastic, and persuasive leadership. I call it “the ramp.”
The ramp is, simply put, a set of benchmarks for social skills. They are simple, doable, build on each other, and put teens on a trajectory to reach adult life as people who prefer risky human relationships to the alternatives.
Before I get into details, a couple of caveats. First, the ramp deals with teen years only, but helping kids navigate social relationships is certainly something to consider in earlier years as well. Second, I understand that teens deal with a variety of personal circumstances that can complicate issues like making friends and dating. So adaptation would be appropriate. Actually, given that the ramp is a framework and not an enduring truth, that’s just basically true about the idea from the word go. Third, I’ve provided concrete ages for each step up the ramp. Different people may disagree about the ages that best apply. I’m ok with the idea that different people may have different ideas about what constitutes an age appropriate activity. Finally, I’ll talk about the ramp in the context of dances. I’ve made a decision to provide six dances this school year for the homeschooling community to give teenagers opportunities to practice creating social groups and dating. And conceptually, these dances give me an easy substrate on which to build the concept of the ramp. But I invite you to consider how it would apply to social opportunities generally. I don’t think it will be difficult to see how the idea would work in a more general sense.
With that out of the way, on to the details!
The ramp is a simple framework for addressing the question: is my child on track to be able to form strong social and romantic attachments in adulthood? It provides specific benchmarks that would help answer that question. The first set of benchmarks are for ages 12-13.
Ages 12-13
Half of our dances allow for twelve and thirteen year olds to attend. So let’s imagine that one of these is approaching. The question is, can a child take a social risk? The dance is a great chance to take that risk. Of course, if a child is going to attend, a parent could drop the child off at a dance and hope they navigate it well. Or they might attend with a friend. But I think that would be a lost opportunity. Before teens are going to get to the point where they are able to build a strong teen social community (which often ends up being different than their child social community) or work up the nerve and capability to ask someone out on and execute a date, they will need to be able to engage in the simple act of inviting people to do something. They need to learn how to identify people they think they might get along with. They need to learn how to take the risk of trying to expand their social circle to include those people.
So step one on the ramp is for the child in question to ask people if they want to go to a dance as a group. And, importantly, they should take a chance on periodically increasing the people who they would feel comfortable asking.
It’s a really simple idea. You just ask some people to go hang out with you at a dance. You identify some people you want to get to know better and make sure you include them in the invitation. And then you just spend time with them at the dance. But it isn’t really simple to the average twelve or thirteen year old. To someone being thrown into new social situations and just beginning to navigate the imaginary audience, the risk is huge. And the mechanics aren’t necessarily intuitive. Getting contact information, making a timely invitation, thinking through a carpool. It’s all pretty normal stuff for adults. But often that sort of thing is really foreign to a twelve or thirteen year old, and the risk of whether one will be rejected or whether the activity will come off well can be pretty overwhelming.
But it definitely isn’t as overwhelming as what we hope our children to be able to do in creating deep, meaningful, adult relationships. So it’s a good start. An incremental step in learning risk and navigating relationships. A simple benchmark that a parent can help a child navigate. Can my child identify people they want to get to know better? Can my child put themselves out there enough to invite them to spend some time together?
Of course, helping a child navigate that sort of thing will land some burden on a parent. Parents would have to do some coaching, teaching, and encouraging. They would have to do some communicating, figuring out a carpool, etc. But I envision a robust homeschool community in which lots of parents take on those tasks and lots of children learn to take that first step and have strong and growing social communities.
Ages 14-15
Once teens have spent a couple of years getting comfortable inviting people to spend time with them and expanding their social circles, they are ready for the next step up the ramp.
In this step, with a dance upcoming, teens again invite a group to come with them to the dance. But to the skill of inviting friends to do something together, they add two additional skills. The first skill is making sure that their invitations include both boys and girls. Ideally, if a teen is getting together a group for a dance, they would roughly balance the group by gender. Not because anyone is on a date, but because it gives everyone plenty of opportunities to make connections with intimidating people. But not too intimidating. Because, again, no one is on a date. Again, it’s an incremental step. A risk that is manageable.
The second additional skill is that the teenager plans an activity and a dinner for the dance. Preferably not complicated or expensive. Again, not something too difficult for a parent to pull off, but maybe you can consider how many kids and young adults who just decline the dating experience altogether just aren’t sure whether they can actually plan and pull off a fun activity or a meal. How many young adult males perpetually squirreled away in a video game really love the idea of taking a specific girl out, but have no confidence in their ability to put something together that would make that girl think better of him instead of worse?
And again, this benchmark would land a busy parent with some extra to do in life. They would likely need to help their teen come up with good activity ideas, help them understand how to coordinate a group, remind them to send messages in a timely way, work on carpooling, and would likely end up cooking a meal for a good sized group of hungry teens.
But in contemplation of young adults not really prepared to launch into real relationships, maybe the effort is worth it.
Again, I envision a robust teen community, aided by their parents, frequently meeting new people, growing their social circles, and preparing themselves to take the risks necessary to establish serious relationships.
Ages16+
And now, the next step is simple. It’s what we often hope teens will do, but often don’t prepare them to do. A dance is coming up and the social benchmark is that a teen forms a group with friends, they agree to get dates, they get dates, they plan an activity and dinner, they execute their plan, and they have a great time.
At first, kids will likely still need some support, but once teens can drive and they’ve been on the ramp long enough and have gained enough skills, mostly parents sit back and watch in satisfaction as their children head on a trajectory to form meaningful relationships as an adult. Which means that parents can get back to worrying about teens getting too close too quickly, just like the good old days.
But until that point, parents with teens on the ramp will hopefully have the opportunity to help their kids think through what kind of people they enjoy being around, how to find good friends and be good friends, how to find their people, how to be ok with the fact that not everyone will end up being their people, how to handle risk, and how to handle social interactions that don’t go well.
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I’m writing this article as a parent as much as I am as a teacher of teens, and as a parent, and as a parent who has worked hard to get my children on the ramp both with regard to dances and with regard to social interactions generally, I’ve given myself and my wife some extra work. Jessica and I have cooked a lot of meals for teenagers. We’ve done some driving. I’ve proofread lots of texts and helped work out the details for a lot of activities. But one conversation demonstrates the value of the tradeoff and the general point I’m making at the same time.
One of my boys (who is ok with me sharing this experience) was thinking about inviting some peers to go to a dance with him for the first time. But he couldn’t get himself to pull the trigger. After some hemming and hawing he finally told me the truth. He didn’t want to make the invite because he wasn’t sure the people he wanted to ask were really his friends. He thought of them as his friends, but he didn’t know if the kids he wanted to invite thought of him as a friend. It’s a relatable sentiment if you remember much of anything about being a teenager. I could have tried to relieve the anxiety by telling him it was safe, and it was ok, and definitely they did, and it was no problem. But I want him to be willing to take chances to make social connections. So I thought it would be better to ask him if the risk was worth it. I asked him if he wanted to find out whether or not these people he liked were friends or would he rather perpetually not know. He considered, said he wanted to know, made the invitations, and he found out. I count that as one of the pivotal moments of his growth to this point.
We live in a world that makes social interactions for our kids difficult just to start out and then promises them that they can have risk free solutions to that problem. In contrast I have a vision of a strong homeschool community that is rich in social interactions, risk taking, and connection among its members. I think it’s up to us to teach the children in our community the value of that vision and the value of the relationships they might gain, even at the cost of real risks. And all of us might accomplish that by differing but entirely legitimate means. However, if you are looking for ideas, I hope you’ll consider the ramp.