Generation Alpha: Socially conscious, glued to screens and with far less focus on ‘ownership’
Many parents worry that their pre-teen is growing up in a frightening, screen-based world, but there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about Generation Alpha.
They’ll push back having family, may never own a car, remain glued to their digital devices and be as woke as Greta Thunberg – meet Generation Alpha.
That’s the label social research expert Mark McCrindle coined for those born between 2010 and 2024, an era so far crammed with rapid change and a barrage of information – good, bad and fake.
Given their predecessors are Generation Z, it was time to start again at the beginning of the alphabet, Mr McCrindle thought, as he penned a new book with fellow demographer Ashley Fell aimed at helping older folk understand and nurture these switched-on, 21st-century kids.
They spent years interviewing thousands of children, parents, teachers, business leaders, marketers and health professionals to get their heads around 11-year-olds and younger, discovering some surprising traits.
Born with a gadget in their hands
Well, not quite but pretty close. Generation Alpha is – unsurprisingly – incredibly digitally literate as they learn how to use gadgets very early in life, with their era beginning the same year iPads and Instagram was launched.
“What was really interesting was to look at the tensions that parents face today with this generation: a lot are going ‘I know that my kids need to be tech-savvy for the future of work and more machine-assisted workplaces’ but they also know they need to develop skills that come with time off-screen,” Ms Fell told NCA NewsWire.
Parents find they must tread the delicate balance of using technology as a reward, for formal learning, for play and for exposing children to the real world while at the same time sheltering them from dangers and adult content.
A key fear is that their children’s tech-heavy lives will prevent them from learning appropriate social skills.
“There’s heaps of benefits that come with technology … they save us more time, with COVID the ability to do school from home and work from home when they emerge in the workforce, and it brings us together,” Ms Fell said.
“But there are heaps of challenges as well.
“A lot of the parents we spoke to are scared their children are going to become addicted to devices, that they’re not going to have patience because of the instant gratification it brings and also what we call up-ageing where they’re getting maturer than previous generations because of what they’re exposed to online.
“They can’t sit still for long, then they’ve got bullying, which every generation has had to encounter but now it’s online and its harder to escape when you leave the school ground – it comes home with you.”
Missed skills
The book explores how children can learn to be “digitally intelligent” – having a healthy scepticism and critical thinking about what they view and read – and be safe online.
“When they are so young, it is the responsibility of parents to teach them those skills,” Ms Fell said.
“But it is hard, I think, because this generation is part of this unintended global experiment where they’ve had these screens from the youngest of ages.
“But we do hold optimism for them. Their parents are the Millennials, also known as Generation Y, so they’re a little bit more tech-savvy than previous generations.
“A lot of parents are also addicted to their devices and the kids are looking at them for behaviour to emulate and model.”
There’s also concern about how much Generation Alpha will commit things to memory or rote learn, given they can ask Siri almost anything.
“I remember being told at school ‘you’ll never have a calculator in your pocket so you must always learn these times tables’ and literally now we all carry on our phones a calculator,” Ms Fell said.
“This generation is going to be more materially endowed, more formally educated, have greater access to information … we are in that process losing some of those more timeless skills that older generations really value.”
Parents, grandparents and educators will have to try to cultivate in this generation “skills when you go camping or you disconnect … which they’re not going to get intuitively in the screen age”.
What will their homes and jobs be like?
While home ownership (along with travel) is still a strong goal for Millennials and Generation Z, members of Generation Alpha will either be daunted by the almost certain to continue housing affordability crisis and give up the dream entirely or go the other way and start saving early for that epic mortgage deposit.
Ms Fell hopes government incentives will continue to help them attain the worthy goal, assisted by their likely shared ambition with Millennials regarding remuneration: wanting to start their careers earning as much as their parents did at the end of their careers.
“We need to teach them the reality of what a deposit looks like,” she said.
“Yes it was easier for previous generations but it still took hard work.”
Generation Alpha will continue the shift towards “vertical communities” seen in Australian capital cities over the past few decades, Ms Fell says.
“Millennials, their parents … are locked out of the housing market so a lot of them are raising Generation Alpha renting or even in apartments without that backyard and Hills hoist, knowing the neighbours,” she said.
“They will probably be more OK with renting and apartments – for a lot of them, that’s how they’ve grown up.
“With the jobs they have, the homes they live in, I think they’ll be more mobile. A school leaver today will have 18 jobs across six careers because they’re moving jobs every three years on average.
“It’s moving away from that ‘job for life’ mentality that previous generations had towards more ‘skills for life’.”
So what skills do they need to work across multiple careers?
“We believe those transferable skills that are uniquely human characteristics like leadership and empathy and creativity, they’re the ones that will be future proofed because everything that can be outsourced through a computer will be,” Ms Fell said.
“But again it’s hard because some of those skills are being lost through use of screens. It does take a conscious effort for parents to instil those skills.”
She cited a World Economic Forum forecast that 65 per cent of children entering primary school today will end up working in new jobs that don’t yet exist.
That sounds futuristic, but consider how jobs such as app developers, cybersecurity professionals and data visualisation designers only emerged relatively recently.
Good news for Generation Alpha – they’ll probably live longer but that means they’ll have to work longer (frowny face emoji).
What will their family life look like?
The trend of delaying starting a family will also continue, the authors predict.
“They will be more formally educated – that’s a key reason why we see a lot of young people pushing back those life markers … even with the current generation of Millennials, wanting to have everything sorted before they start having a family because affordability (problems) at the moment we see is quite severe,” Ms Fell said.
Generation Alpha will accordingly stay in their parents’ home longer, and mum and dad won’t be able to complain because that’s exactly what they did, earning the label KIPPERS (kids in parents’ pockets eroding retirement savings).
Diversity in family composition – with many having children before marriage and some not marrying at all – will continue, with perhaps more choosing not to have children at all.
“I think they will still value family … I think it’s a real strength of this generation that they are growing up in times that are more diverse,” Ms Fell said.
“It’s going to look a little different to how it did in the past.”
The authors also suggest Generation Alpha may never own a wallet let alone a credit card, with digital and contactless payments becoming the norm today.
“And with transport … they may never own a car because it’s Uber, it’s rideshare, it’s the renting kind of economy or subscription model, which they’re used to with Netflix and Spotify,” Ms Fell said.
“The idea of ownership, again how they view housing, it may just be renting and that’s totally fine.
“Public transport, walkable communities – where they choose to situate themselves – will also impact that.”
Social consciousness
Even more than their predecessors, Generation Alpha will have social issues, particularly climate change and environmental sustainability, at the forefront of their hearts and minds.
They are already prompting their parents to be more conscious shoppers and will pave a progressive way forward, Ms Fell says.
“It’s cool. I think they have got some ownership of these issues,” she said.
“They are going to grow up expecting to have a voice. They are not just a generation who is going to be dictated to – they are going to contribute.”
With the challenges faced by this generation, including around their mental health and wellbeing amid screen-based ‘comparison culture’, some parents think it is “a terrible time to be alive”, Ms Fell said.
“But when we speak to young people, they’re like ‘this is a great time to be alive’.
“Building resilience is going to be key but we do think the future is bright for them and we’re optimistic about them.”
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