Millennials/Generation Y discussion

So apparently the children of millienial parents have been decried as being chaotic and illiterate. Source is this LA Times article discussing Gen Alpha.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-03-22/generation-alpha-millennial-children

Edited by BigBadShadow25 on Mar 27th 2024 at 12:54:51 PM

I'll say for my part the headline raises eyebrows. "Millennials raised Generation Alpha. Are they already doomed?"

Not necessarily a strong criticism of the content, but getting some major clickbait vibes there.

Millenial headlines have always been clickbait, so im not surprised.

Edited by tclittle on Mar 27th 2024 at 6:27:48 AM

Do modern kids act like that though?

Generally people moaning on social media (which is the source used by the article) is a bad way to understand the behaviour of a whole generation.

We’ve had this before, back when half the millennials/gen X online convinced themselves that Gen Z were all fascists or something.

Living with a teacher, there are extra challenges with kids.

But it might be due to, oo, I don't know, missing 2 key years of social development and chaotic education for sooooome reason.

It'll flatten out eventually but you can very clearly see the effects on the Covid generation and it hits harder the younger they were.

Which is what you'd expect.

Yeah, someone pointed that out.

Honestly, it’s good to know this is just a small sample size. The entire generation can’t be like this.

I have to be honest, the idea of complaining that gen alpha is illiterate is completely rich, given the sheer number of older people who seem totally unable to read signs or who blatantly mouth words while they're reading and have to follow the sentence with their finger.

It just reminds me of the insane hysteria from some circles about how text-speak was ruining literacy and it turned out that most people have a concept of different types of writing for different contexts.

Hey, xkcd covered that one!

As for me, it was the other way around. I put Gen Z in a pedestal and lionized them to hell and back, believing they had an unrivaled sense of justice that would put sexists/racists/ableists/homophobes/etc in their places. Needless to say, now I know they're just as flawed as everyone else.

Re: the original article - yeah, I think a good chunk of the 'blame' has to go towards the literal pandemic at the start of the decade limiting... well, everyone's social development, but what I've heard from teachers of long careers (think decades) saying that Gen Alpha kids are indeed ruder than before... oof.

Re: Zoomers - as a Zillennial I was initially worried that Zoomers were going to be radicalised to the right in the Trump era but what ended up happening was that more of them were put off by his and his cohort's vulgarity (also unsurprisingly more Zoomers coming out as LGBTQ+ may have something to do with that). Then just as I pivoted to the opposite view of them being liberal/lefty angels, finding out that there's a problem of them [or at least the guys] being radicalised by Andrew Tate-like assholes sobered me.

It's almost like there's no meaningful difference between generations.

We're all fucked up overgrown monkeys trying to figure out life away from the trees.

Generational trend are a real thing, but they’re detected by looking scientifically at long-term trends, habits, voting patterns and attitudes, not taking a random sample from what happens to be on a particular bit of Social Media one day.