A New Jersey high school quietly confirmed what many parents and grandparents feared: Wall Township High School canceled its scheduled homecoming dance because too few students bought tickets and interest was low. What used to be a rite of passage — an evening of music, awkward courage, and real-life social learning — was shrugged off as unnecessary by a generation glued to screens.
Fox’s Gutfeld! turned the moment into a broader conversation about the decline of teenage rituals, with Greg Gutfeld and his panel mocking the idea that kids still see value in slow dances and real-world courtship. The show didn’t just lampoon the change; it pointed to a cultural shift where kids prefer curated, digital interactions to messy, character-building face-to-face experiences.
This isn’t an accident. Nearly every teen today has a smartphone and a constant online presence, which rewires how they socialize and choose where to spend an evening. When you normalize screens as the primary public square for your children, you shouldn’t be surprised when in-person traditions that teach manners, confidence, and courage fall by the wayside.
Add to that a generation shaped by pandemic isolation and well-documented mental-health disruptions, and you have young people who are more anxious in crowds and more comfortable in small, controlled digital groups than in noisy school gyms. The data on adolescent mental health post-COVID shows lasting effects on social development that schools are still scrambling to address. Conservatives who value resilience should see this as a warning: we’re raising consumers of content, not citizens who can face life’s awkward, formative moments.
The larger cultural rot is obvious: experts report that many teenagers are online almost constantly, and a large share even admit screens make learning social skills harder. That reality drains community life, shrinks courage, and hands over the upbringing of our children to algorithms that reward boredom, outrage, and isolation. It’s not just nostalgia to say this is bad for America; it’s common-sense alarm about what happens when kids no longer practice basic social rituals.
If we want dances, pep rallies, and real civic life to survive, parents and schools must stop treating phones as harmless appendages and start enforcing boundaries that bring kids back into the real world. That means phone-free events, rigorous encouragement of in-person activities, and an insistence that social skills are part of a good education. Conservatives should lead this fight for tradition, for manners, and for the kind of bold, awkward growing-up that made previous generations strong and free.
