A screaming child who had his iPad taken might come to your mind. Alpha Kids are reportedly not doing well in school and many are subject to the algorithms of today. They will have a front row seat to the future we are headed towards.
Do you have hope that Generation Alpha will live happy and fulfilling lives?
These generations are arbitrary and just lead to sweeping inaccurate generalisations.
Ok, I’ll rephrase it for you:
Do you have hope that people born after 2013 will live happy and fulfilling lives?
I’ll say probably yes, but the world will look very different for them than it did for us. There will be far fewer younger people than today on most continents besides Africa.
They’ll have far more power to shape and change society than most previous generations. Boomers will be almost entirely dead when they Alphas reach adulthood. GenX would be next on the death chopping block, but GenX is far smaller. So lots of jobs will be open and Alphas and Millennials will be holding those positions with GenX mostly in retirement homes. Millennials are saddled with debt and a lack of lifetime earnings while Alphas are looking like they’re skipping a good chunk of that debt burden.
Taxation on working Alphas and Millennials will be monstrous dealing yet another setback for then aging Millennials. Climate change will also wipe out lots of opportunities. Alphas I think might be the generation to finally give the finger to the generations prior that kicked the can down the road and simply let parts of society they don’t care about fall away. Part of that will mean not caring for multiple generations of aging parents and grandparents where the declining birth rate means a single Alpha may have 8 to 10 aging relatives still alive and in need of some kind of support exclusively relying on the Alpha. This would mean 16 to 20 aging relatives for a married Alpha couple. There’s just no way they can support that.
you should factor in climate change and further concentration of wealth into your analysis.
I covered both in my post. One explicit one implicit.
I agree. It’s such a Gen Generation thing to say.
I wish they were at least evenly spaced. Alpha should be 2013 to 2028 rather than ensing in the ‘mid 2020s’. Everything with a 15 year gap should be wider in line with Baby Boomers and those before them, or the baby boomers should be split into two different generations.
Also if their oldest members are 13 yo, then its way too soon for me to pass judgement onto generation alpha. A teacher, parent or healthcare worker might have some insight though
As far as I can tell they’re set for marketing reasons, but they actually represent meaningful epochs and how those events effected people in different stages of life.
World war, depression, postwar expansion, civil rights, cold war, internet, smartphone.
Making them all fifteen or twenty-five years doesn’t make sense.
Is this a “plans are useless but the act of planning is invaluable” kind of thing?
Like arbitrary 15 years increments is basically worthless but you end up with a collection of meaniful epochs inside of those limited frames that it has value again?
Yeah I think so.
These generations are arbitrary
They’re not arbitrary and that’s the problem…
Up to Baby Boomers a gender was defined around cultural/technological change and social events.
WW2 ending and a resulting baby boom fit that. But then capitalism wanted easy ways to categorize consumers.
So they decided every 15 years was “better” even tho it immediately led to “generations” meaning almost nothing.
“Generations” are still valuable demographics, it’s just boomers never understood it and made up their own definition. We need to go back to naming and determining generations once they’re adults and we already know how they’re different and where to draw the line
A whole lot of our current problems are because boomers took something that worked and “disrupting it” without understanding how it works or what it even was.
They’re gonna need all the help they can get.
I’m kind of hopeful that as we (xennials and millennials) properly seize the reins of power from the baby boomers that things might start to improve.
I actually do. Gen Z is lost. Social media, COVID, they got fucked.
In California schools have banned cell phones starting next school year. More laws blocking kids under 18 or 16 from using social media are popping up around the world. I think alpha is going to have a shot.
Yes, maybe not the older alphas because they’re too close to zoomers, but definitely the younger. Growing with an enshitified internet, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ll see social media as mostly bullshit their parents are addicted to.
I wonder how will they say “OK millenial”
I believe the new “boomer” term is “unc”
My daughter is Gen Alpha, 2014. It’s hard to believe she will be a teenager next year, I can’t believe how fast 12 years have flown by.
I really hope this country can start turning things around and Trump becomes a distant memory and women start getting the rights to their bodies back. Will be a long time before that happens in my state.
I think her generation is going to pay heavily for our failures but I believe they come out stronger in the end and more united against what will make their lives hard.
the education in america has been declining for decades, for public schools and many of us probably suffered from the participation grades which fast tracked you out of the school with “passing grades” only to severely struggle in community college even, ive seen so many in remedial courses taking grad school math, not even algebra. reading is a problem too, but writing essays is too advanced for remedial students.
yes
No, I’ll wait for the release version.
I will always have hope for the future. My country (no, it’s not the USA), our collective global future only truly dies when I (and all of us) stop believing in it
A good point of view. Someone, somewhere will fight the odds and carry on. Someone will love, hate, create art, suffer, exploit and be exploited, create new nonsense jokes and slang, and make the same mistakes. Quite literally until the the last lights go out.
Hope is a good thing to have.
i heard some people wanted to be influencers whent hey grow up, i dont see that much for people who graduate HS currently. not to blame them, but genz already have significant employment problems from getting a degree, as like millineals, even more so for genz. its only getting worst for gen alpha(unless u can afford private school for your children and hope the children isnt already set up to failure by the parents. i used to followed some asian yotubers they put thier child, toddler through private school, but they had to remove him because had behavioral issues due to combination of medication mental issues, the parents are extremely ill equipped to deal with the child, last thing i heard they just “sit at home and do nothing” because the mom is also “directionless in her life, so lazy”, and many of the old fans of thiers said he dint have a chance from the start, due to thier parents own problems, besides being magaty.
also besides that reading/writing, math comprehension is very low for people in HS and college, this isnt going to help them.
Influencer is just the new celebrity. How many of your peers wanted to be famous when they grew up? It is all the same.
Keep in mind, some of the children in Alpha had their schooling methodology switched up during the Covid-19 pandemic. They went from learning in a classroom environment to learning in an online environment for a couple of years.
The teaching strategies do not translate the same across those two mediums, and the teachers had to adapt to it as fast as they could, but they were not experienced online teachers.
Teachers with 10, 15, and 20+ years of classroom experience all of a sudden had to teach their classes online. They has to learn the system themselves, as well as teach their students how to use it.
Many schools were underfunded and were not able to offer adequate technology to accommodate for this change. Many families couldn’t even afford internet, so governments had to establish voucher programs to fund low-bandwidth tiers of internet for them (which develops at the speed of red tape government).
At least one adult had to be home with their children if schools were online-only, so they had one less income earning presence in the home, unless they were able to work online themself. That affects the longterm financial goals of each family, which they might still be recovering from to this day.
By the time children went back to a classroom setting, they were missing some key skills that they would have picked up normally. Now you have 3rd graders returning to a classroom in 5th grade, but they still have 3rd grade reading levels. They have to learn 5th grade level material, and take 5th grade level testing. The online material they learned online during the covid years were a completely different set of educational material versus whats used in a classroom, so now the students have to adjust AGAIN.
Anyway, thats just my thoughts on it.
Covid definitely had a strong immediate negative impact on kids’ education, but the trend of children struggling more in school over time is older than that. Until recent decades, there was an observed increase in children’s IQ over later generations, called the Flynn effect. Children were on average expected to be 3-5 points higher in measured IQ than those born a decade earlier. But we have reversed that trend after peaking somewhere around the 80s. There are likely a lot of contributing factors, but they should all be environmental rather than genetic. So hopefully later generations will be able to reverse the trend again and support their kids’ development in ways their own parents had neglected.
I wouldn’t worry too much about IQ numbers falling. It doesn’t fully capture human intelligence, and definitely has some biases (IYKYK).
The IQ test has had a profound impact on psychology and society, offering a standardized measure of cognitive functioning. Yet its limitations are significant. Cultural biases, reductionism, limited predictive validity, and a history of misuse all complicate its role as a definitive measure of intelligence. While IQ tests can be useful tools, they must be interpreted cautiously and supplemented with broader measures of human ability.
Ultimately, criticisms of IQ testing remind us that intelligence is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon that cannot be fully captured by a single number. The challenge moving forward is to balance the utility of IQ tests with a recognition of their limitations, ensuring that assessments of intelligence are both scientifically rigorous and ethically responsible.
https://simplyputpsych.co.uk/psych-101-1/criticism-of-the-iq-test
I’m worried about the world we’re leaving them
Honestly, they seem kind of dumb, which I’m not blaming them for.
But that could just be the typical “next generation sucks” vibe you get from every aging generation.
I really hope they aren’t actually dumb because that’s going to make my senior years a lot bleaker.
i think its bleaker, since reading and math comprehension is below what it should be when they reach high school. also aspiration of some gen A to be an “influencer” isnt going to help when they get disappointed, and then dont do anything.
I wish they did live happy, but seeing the world and how is it going I have strong doubts.
But I’m no blaming the kids for this. I’m blaming the parent thinking that an iPad is a great distraction to keep the kid busy and the rest of the society that has voted consistently to put in charge assholes who openly made education worse every time they could.
And yes, I do think that stupid iPad is to blame even though I grew up with a gameboy. My gameboy had games, it played tetris, it played mario or pokemon. My gameboy didn’t have tiktok or youtube. It’s not the same thing.
I’d argue games are significantly better for development than video. Solving problems, learning game rules, reading game dialogue, separating fiction from reality, etc.
Yes, cartoon and videos have their place, but get off the meaningless shorts and gambling games.
The iPad is just a PC tbh. Whether they install emulators or TikTok, VLC or YouTube, educational games or pseudo-gambling adware.
There are parental controls on every device, so this is just bad parenting.
Might as well blame the VCR for a parent buying inappropriate VHSs in the 80’s.
Yes, but: not falling into the slop machine takes willpower and learned skills. Modern social media is like a drug. Many adults use drugs responsibly to have good times, but we all agree that we should keep kids away from them.
Yep I think we agree, good parents should not give their children unrestricted access to social media, gambling, porn, drugs etc.
I swear. every time I see the bands the years have changed. now even lost gen is under 20 and for some reason greates is over 20.
My niece had 2 beautiful little girls. So far they’re both sweet and know of no phones and such at age 1
My brother also had a lil guy, he’s around 6 months old. Also taken care of and they plan to introduce him to tech as late as possible.
For them, I have really high hope they’ll be good kids. I’ll do my best to help. For any other gen alpha… I have no idea, and no expectations.
