Since my post Scenario's With Children - How a Class of First-Graders See Life in 2026 has received some interest, I thought I would share another piece from another scenario session with a girl scout group. This group too consisted of very young elementary school age...
During most of the years that I have covered parenting trends there has been a growing tendency to overprotect children. This phenomenon has in the United States and some other countries been dubbed helicopter parenting. Other places the tendency to micromanage ones progeny is known...
It's that time of year again when we sum up the progress of the old year and speculate the future events of the next. As a futurist who spend my time gazing at the youngest generation I can't let this opportunity pass me by. So...
[caption id="attachment_2582" align="alignright" width="296"] The Great Depression - the last time life was particularly tough for poor families[/caption] Our youngest generation, the Homelanders is defined by the Great Recession. According to generational expert Neil Howe, this was the pivotal historic moment that allowed one generational archetype to be...
Climber Dallin Smith and his girlfriend are depicted chilling out in their self-made lawn chairs that they attached 350 feet high on a cliff wall in Utah. You can look at the amazing pictures here. Smith weaved his own lawn chairs and explains "the springs aren’t bolted in. They just rest nicely in a crack." Did someone say "death wish"?
It might be one of the biggest paradoxes of our generation of parents and fits Generation X to a tee. Generation X'ers are rough and tough pragmatists born into the cultural chaos of a new social operating system. Many of us have made it our life project to create order out of disorder, of which a great part goes through over-protecting our children from various harms. At the same time we have established and popularized leisure time activities and entertainment concepts that have far more in common with roman gladiator shows than with Yo Gabba Gabba. Pretend for a moment that you are a martian witnessing the bizarre behavior of a middle-aged guy who is imposing on himself the trauma of a 10-mile military training circuit carrying a 35 lbs rucksack, military boots, going through mud, ice baths, barbed wire and electric shocks. Upon returning home all bloody and sweaty, he reunites with his little princess whom he never lets out of sight lest she stumbles and skins her knee while he turns his muscular back for a split second. You will catch him carefully examining her Halloween candy for poison and razor blades which she received at her neighbor's doors while his watchful eyes followed her trick-or-treating from the safe distance of the sidewalk curb. "You just never know." And after dishing out his hard earned money to earn whipping commands from his ruthless bootcamp instructor at 5 am, God forbid if his children's coaches ruffle their feathers or fails to hand them a trophy at the end of the season, regardless of performance.
I keep turning back to a scenario project I did with a group of 1st graders in 2011. This was a regular class at a public school in Austin where the goal was to inspire the children to think creatively about their own future and...
Future graduation attire?[/caption]
Appealing to the hearts and minds of the Homelander kids (post-millennials) happens by addressing their taste for technology and modern communication devices. Growing up with touchscreens as the main window to the world, these kids are seriously steeped in a lifestyle and educational agenda that revolves around digital - where technologies are used as learning devices (educational platforms), often through gamified experiences, as well as study objects (coding, programming). For-profit university Ashford University does a good job at mining this sentiment in a commercial featuring children caressing their devices like they did their teddy bears a few years earlier. The message is clear: To be relevant and effective with the class of 2025 education needs to live in the tablets and smart phones, or soon bionic lens projections. The commercial revolves around catchwords like "smart" and "bright", words recent surveys show cling well in the ears of kid today. So much in fact, that smart as an aspirational goal is overpowering any other superhero power that previous generations of kids used to idolize.
From Left: Lenore Skenazy, Dan Coates, Neil Howe, Mary-Leigh Bliss and Jake Katz[/caption]
Last week I had the opportunity to attend a conference about the generation after the millennials. This entailed the latest stats and survey results from this youngest group of Americans on and an effort to (re)name the youngest generation - the one that is currently called the Homelanders. This event was part of the annual YPulste Mashup and located in New York.
I want to see The Great Gatsby. And then I hope Hollywood will churn out ‘Grapes of Wrath’ and ‘Death of a Salesman’ soon after. History rhymes, and once again we’re at this junction in time when the younger generations are reexamining the validity of...
