The only other generational topic receiving as much attention as the young Generation Z or Homeland generation is the Millennial parenting cohort raising them. Still held back in life by economic setbacks and lengthy educations, Millennials are nonetheless a family-loving generation and will eventually go for the...
It's been a while since I wrote about gender issues so today I'll harness International Women's Day to give a few forecasts that will affect women of the Homeland generation, or Generation Z, which is a more widely used name. I chose to describe the...
[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...
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.
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.
"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.“
A little over a year ago American Heart Association made the a projection that the obesity epidemic would reach a level where 83% of American men and 72 % of women will be overweight or obese in 2020. The percentage today is 72 and 63 percent respectively. But recent news suggest that general obesity levels have stagnated. So has childhood obesity.
I think the key here is the word projection. Many forecasts are simply extrapolations of current trends, overlooking the possibility that trends may discontinue. Ironically gloomy extrapolations can actually in themselves prevent their own prophecy from materializing when they foster enough motivation to counteract the projected tendencies.
When I wrote the piece Generation Z - Forecasts and Formula in May of 2011 I predicted that the children of tomorrow are not automatically going to be plagued by higher obesity rates than the childhood generation or today and yesteryears. The reason is because with increasing attention to the problem, unhealthy foods and lifestyle patterns are on track to go the same way cigarettes did. Maybe even in spite of the powerful lobbyists and stakeholders who may lose from such a shift.
