{"id":7789,"date":"2017-12-06T08:38:15","date_gmt":"2017-12-06T14:38:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=7789"},"modified":"2017-12-06T09:20:32","modified_gmt":"2017-12-06T15:20:32","slug":"what-about-the-igen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/12\/what-about-the-igen.html","title":{"rendered":"What about the “iGen”?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"pokemon-1553995_960_720\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

So after spending enough time working through iGen<\/em> yesterday that I felt like I was writing a book report for homework, I\u2019m trying to take a step back and look at her observations in a big-picture sort of way, because if her generalizations are true, we\u2019re looking at a substantial cultural shift.<\/p>\n

And, about these changes, I\u2019m asking myself:<\/p>\n

Which of these are just continuations of ongoing trends, vs. something truly new?<\/p>\n

Which are blips based on short-term news-cycle developments?<\/p>\n

Which are general societal changes impacting the culture as a whole, not just the young \u2018uns?<\/p>\n

Of these, which are having particular impacts on this generation because they\u2019re coming of age (whether childhood\/teens\/young adulthood) during a period of transition?<\/p>\n

And which are Twenge seeing what she wants to see?<\/p>\n

I was hoping to check Gen Z @ Work<\/em> from the library, even though I found it fairly weak and lacking in data, to see if its conclusions lined up, but, as it turned out, it had been removed from the shelves, apparently because it was lost or damaged.\u00a0 So I guess it\u2019s just Twenge for now.<\/p>\n

Here are some generalizations:<\/p>\n

Teens and young adults are less eager to \u201cgrow up\u201d; they don\u2019t chafe at but welcome their parents\u2019 close supervision, and want care and safety in college.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Twenge suggests that, besides the \u201cnatural\u201d desire to be lazy if they can get away with it, they have had pleasant childhoods from which they don\u2019t wish to escape.<\/em><\/p>\n

Teens spend massive amounts of time on social media and on the internet and\/or playing video games in general, and less time working, reading, doing schoolwork, or socializing with friends in-person.\u00a0 This is to the detriment of their mental health, as they\u2019re less likely to report being happy than Millennials were.\u00a0 Are all of these changes due solely to the availability of social media?\u00a0 Is the desperate desire for \u201clikes\u201d a permanent feature of the teen and young adult years?\u00a0 At what age are they no longer susceptible to this?\u00a0 Besides this, around here at least, youth sports are tremendous time-sucks for the pre-high school crowd; how does this factor in?\u00a0 Certainly by the teen years these kids either move into high school or club sports or drop these activities entirely \u2014 what effect has the presence of a very scheduled pre-teen childhood had?<\/em><\/p>\n

All that lack of reading is making them dumb, and we\u2019ll have to compensate by making textbooks easier to read.\u00a0 But the reason for textbooks being difficult to read is not for textbook authors to show off their smarts, but to impart complex information.<\/em><\/p>\n

Teens are abandoning religion.\u00a0 To a considerable extent, this seems to be the result of their baby boomer parents, while not showing up as religion-rejecters themselves, choosing not to share that religion with their children.\u00a0 Is this actively a decision that these teens and young adults are making, or is this a decision their parents made for them?\u00a0 \u00a0Yes, anecdotally there are teens who declare that they discovered on their own that they don\u2019t believe in God, but it seems far more likely that parents who have a very weak attachment to Christianity yet still possess that identity, don\u2019t pass it on to their kids.\u00a0 Whichever case it is, though, it\u2019s a huge unknown what impact this\u2019ll have, particularly with the U.S. being so\u00a0divided and community bonds being fractured in so many other ways.\u00a0 Plus, Twenge connects up decline in religious belief with the rise in individualism, but she doesn\u2019t explain why there should be a religion-decreasing rise in individualism.<\/em><\/p>\n

Teens and young adults want safety.\u00a0 Their parents told them they need to be safe and they ate it up:\u00a0 they buckle their seatbelts, demand safe spaces in college, want \u201csafe\u201d jobs rather than the risk-taking of entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n

Teens have a more fatalistic, \u201cyou can\u2019t control your fate\u201d view of the world.\u00a0 The college protest movements might ostensibly be about changing things for the better, but underlying them is an attitude that things are really horrible and minority students and women can\u2019t possibly get ahead in the present circumstances.<\/p>\n

Looking at this constellation of traits, it seems as if a fundamental element of American culture is disappearing.\u00a0 It is characteristic of Europeans to be very secular, to demand protection (e.g., the narrow list of reasons for which one can be fired, the generous government benefits), to believe that the \u201csocial partners\u201d (e.g., government and labor unions), but not oneself individually, can make life better \u2014 not to mention the calls for free college.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

In line with their delayed adulthood, young adults are marrying later and later, and, despite the increase in unwed parenting, they are on average having fewer children and at older ages.\u00a0 \u201cHookup culture\u201d and the rise of porn are changing attitudes toward sex, from the now-outdated \u201chow many dates should you go on before you have sex?\u201d to the new \u201chow many times do you have sex before you go out on a date?\u201d\u00a0 If you recall<\/a>, Lisa Wade in American Hookup<\/em> reported that at the beginning of the \u201chookup era\u201d graduates would settle into more-normal dating patterns after graduation, but that more recently, in her observation, even after leaving college, young people don\u2019t know how to \u201cdate.\u201d\u00a0 What happens next?\u00a0 Twenge\u2019s observations about the lack of social skills among teens and young adults accustomed to interacting virtually, would suggest that as this generation approaches the age where their somewhat older brothers and sisters would be marrying, at the now-normal age of 30, we\u2019ll be learning that there\u2019s more going on with this generation than just delayed adulthood.<\/p>\n

Her observation that teens\u00a0and young adults are far more willing to sign off on LGBTism (or at least LGB-ism) than prior generations, and to experiment themselves, may not mean anything much, or it may be quite important indeed, not as something to be celebrated but as an indiator of their loss of partnered relationships.<\/p>\n

Twenge notes that young people are less likely to have party affiliation, more likely to support libertarian causes and more likely to follow the news. But at the same time there\u2019s all this campus activism \u2014 how does that square? Is the lack of party affiliation a result of lack of community identification in general (other than with one\u2019s \u201cidentity group\u201d based on personal characteristics)?\u00a0 Is it simply due to the general screw-up-ness of the Democrats and the GOP at the moment, which has affected young people to a greater degree because they don\u2019t have a past history of identification?<\/em><\/p>\n

And what does this all add up to?\u00a0 To at least some degree, it appears to be a matter of ability, or lack thereof, to think at an abstract level.\u00a0 After all, the libertarian streak that Twenge identifies all relates to items the wrongness of which is not immediately clear and visceral.\u00a0 Accepting \u201cunsafe\u201d situations, as they\u2019ve defined it, also has a certain component of abstract thinking, to be able to understand that a campus speaker they dislike, for instance, or an alternate point of view in a classroom can be something to learn from.\u00a0 The ability to think into the future, to form relationships depends on this.\u00a0 Religion, of course, is abstract \u2014 and here it seems like there\u2019s a chicken-and-egg issue:\u00a0 are young people rejecting religion because it\u2019s too abstract for them, or have they not been raised to understand religion, and therefore don\u2019t have the tools for processing other intangible ideas?\u00a0 Is this level of abstract thinking really something that no 20-year-old processes, but in the past they weren\u2019t expected to because the norms of society pulled them along?<\/p>\n

And \u2014 in addition to all of the other ways that the internet and social media and the \u201ceasyness\u201d of electronic gaming is impacting the lives of children and young adults \u2014 perhaps here, too, the existence of this infinite information resource that promises \u201call answers are concrete and just a click away\u201d impacts one\u2019s mindset, especially if that\u2019s a part of one\u2019s growing up.<\/p>\n

Finally, you\u2019ll note that although I have three boys who are smack-dab in this age group, I haven\u2019t mentioned them once to confirm or object to Twenge\u2019s observations.\u00a0 Quite honestly, my boys fit some of these stereotypes, but not others, because of their personalities, and because of issues of their own.\u00a0 No, they\u2019re not Special Snowflakes, but I won\u2019t discuss further details in recognition of their privacy.<\/p>\n

Image:\u00a0\u00a0From Pixabay; https:\/\/pixabay.com\/en\/pokemon-pokemon-go-phone-game-1553995\/; public domain<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 So after spending enough time working through iGen yesterday that I felt like I was writing a book report for homework, I\u2019m trying to take a step back and look at her observations in a big-picture sort of way, because if her generalizations are true, we\u2019re looking at a substantial cultural shift. And, about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":6836,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[440,796,799,797,549,798],"class_list":["post-7789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boys","tag-generational-differences","tag-igen","tag-social-change","tag-technology","tag-teens"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat about the "iGen"?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"  So after spending enough time working through iGen yesterday that I felt like I was writing a book report for homework, I'm trying to take a step\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/12\/what-about-the-igen.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" 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