[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...
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.
I like to think that I learned to code as a kid. Well, really I didn't, but if you wanted your family’s Commodore 64 or Atari to do anything, you actually had to use some sort of commands and know basic programming language. This was back when Bill Gates was in his 30s, when Wham churned out holiday hits and we teased our hair until it defied gravity. I remember getting all giddy when I learned how to change the font color from fuchsia to lime green in Pascal – or was it Basic?
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.
Sorry Kitty is lead singer of the K-pop band Saccharine.
Her nickname is a blend of Super Junior's 2009 hit Sorry, Sorry and the still popular cartoon Hello Kitty, and influenced by the post-ironic cat-meme era she was born into. She earned it for her allegedly sad expression as a child, but later made it her legal name as a provocative statement of Asian pride. While Korean women in the entertainment industry undergo canthoplasties and other plastic surgeries to look “less Asian”, Sorry embraces her Asian features and is unknowingly signaling a new trend that will unfold after her career takes off in 2030.
Sorry grows up as an only child of a Korean PR professional / Tigermother and a British DJ / sound engineer who moved to Korea to work as an English teacher when the job market dried up in Europe.
I just read an article that called our youngest generation the "re-generation" (sorry, can't find the url), alluding to their familiarity with the reduce, reuse, recycle slogan and their attentiveness to environmental causes. I haven't found any hard statistics that actually support the idea that the Homelanders will be more environmentally conscious, but OK, I'll go with the idea that environmentalism is since environmentalism is gradually entering into our psyches over time a sense of urgency and importance might be greater among the young. One thing I learned from judging at the Texas Future Problem Solvers competition this weekend is that the fervent climate change deniers and "drill, baby, drill" knuckleheads are not making inroads into the mindset of the young. From my own experience it does indeed seem as if 'Reduce, Reuse and Recycle' resonate on a much deeper level and are more actionable and instinctive with our the youngest cohorts.
"Hey guys. I just wanted to ask - just a random question. Uhmm. Am I - like - ugly or pretty?"
- You don't have to dig deep into online archives to find a whole pageantry of kids as young as 10 years old unloading their most personal angst for complete strangers to comment on. And the more insecure they appear, the more likely they seem to attract trolls whose dubious netiquette allows them to filter through comments of this type: "DONT WANT TO SOUND MEAN BUT URE A F***ING DOG." (censoring added). In other words, the ones who most desperately need reassurance from their faceless peers are the ones who are the most likely get bulldozed by the 'Haters'. And rarely do any respondents care to unmask the more existential questions that simmer immediately underneath the Snow White narrative: “Am I likeable? Am I loveable?”
Lenore Skenazy, aka "America’s Worst Mom" and creator of the name and movement Free Range Kids is my favorite dispatcher of Onion type (but true!) news stories from Securistan. Yesterday she shared an article about the perceived threat of a sledding hill. “Paxton, a small town in Illinois, where the land is flat as flat can be, is about to lose its only sledding hill to the Abominable Insurance Man.”
Sledding hills are of course only one of many natural “dangers” we systematically eliminate from the overprotected lives of our Homelander kids. To quote Skenazy's sardonic remark: “Yes, and let’s hope kids forget that there was ever a time when they could play outside, walk to school, or meet up at the park, while we’re at it. Let’s hope they forget there was ever anything to childhood except Kumon and cat memes. What a glorious future.“
