I recently did an opening keynote in Bergen, Norway for an organization called Norwegian Audience Development. I will write more about audience development in light of generational change in subsequent posts. In my presentation I discuss the works of historians William Strauss and Neil Howe and try to put their findings into a Scandinavian context….
Although type of content varies between older and younger users in the same cohort, we see that the mobile screen is taking over as the electronic time killer of choice, while the big screen TV will eventually reduce to a – not irrelevant, but increasingly distant – number two. It is also common for children to use…
Are you mesmerized by a generation of post-millennials who figure out their new electronic gadgets faster than you can install child safety settings? Do you think this must be unique to the generation growing up today, also dubbed the digital natives? Do you think younger generations are more tech savvy because their brains are ‘wired differently”? They might indeed be…
When I worked with forecasting infant and family trends back in the 2000s there was a noticeably growing interest for nutrition among parents. Food was no longer only food, it had to be healthy, fresh, local organic, tasty and sometimes even “nutraceutical”. Mothers started breastfeeding their babies again, and for longer intervals. Busy parents turned even busier carefully…
45 % of today’s jobs will disappear by 2035. Sure, job titles have come and gone over the centuries as we progress technologically, but this time we’re dealing with an entirely new animal. Computers are starting to replace us in jobs we thought were only human and pressing down the marginal cost in production…
There is much chatter these days about the next generation of workers and whether they are technologically better equipped to face the changing job market. Many seem to think that by growing up with touch-screens, Siri and social media, the iGeneration will have a leg up in the future workforce compared to their less digitally native predecessors. This…
They play iPad games during potty training. They learn computer coding before they can read. Their mothers’ smartphones become their first object of jealousy. Their sonograms are shared with the world before they see the light of day. In fact they are born into a digital panopticon that will track their every movement, every milestone…
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 developed and the developing world in two different paragraphs. This…
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 girls. The format is a little different. We talked about…
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 as curling parenting and the term hyper parenting has also…
