iGen: Who’s on first?

I think that the constant generation bashing that is so prevalent today neglects to address a multitude of issues, but most importantly, it never asks the question of why people are a certain way.

First and foremost, I want to address the fact that generation bashing is not new. In two articles listed here:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/millennial-bashing-medieval-times-180964003/

and here:

https://qz.com/quartzy/1264118/the-2500-year-old-history-of-adults-blaming-the-younger-generation/

you can see that blaming young people has always been the go-to reaction for the aging populace as the status-quo continues to shift.

Whether it’s Geoffrey Chaucer fearing that young people are going to destroy language, or Boomers afraid that Millennials are going to destroy the napkin industry, young people drive trends, and thus, receive much of the blame for disruption of the comfortable.

In response to the accusations leveled at Millennials and Gen Z on Canvas, I would say that, according to the statistics in the iGen book, they are, for the most part false- I can’t really argue with the statistics that say iGen is generally harder working than Gen X and Boomers. However, there are elements of truth in the accusations directed at us. We are generally more adrift in the world and afraid to choose paths, for example.

However, It is important to note that the expectations and attitudes surrounding adolescence and are shifting.

In this article: https://growingleaders.com/blog/the-biggest-changes-generation-z-brings-to-the-adult-world/, it is pointed out that young people are entering adolescence and leaving it later. What this means for the iGeneration, is that at the ages that our parents and grandparents were essentially forced into adulthood, the iGen has much more time to develop, and thus may not be “as developed” as previous generations were at that age.

Another aspect to consider is the increasing life-expectancy- the longer you’re alive, the more time you have to become an adult. As people are living longer, their roles, and that what is expected of them is changing- elongating and stretching into the future. When you consider the average life expectancy of a US male in 1945, when my grandparents were born (63.7 years) and compare that to the average life expectancy of a US male in 1999, when I was born (76.58), you can see that at age 20, my grandparents would have been roughly 30% to the life expectancy of their time. However, if you extrapolate that percentage back over the life expectancy when I was born, you can see that the age conversion equals roughly age 24. Much like inflation calculators for money over time, I think it’s important to extrapolate age equivalency over time as well, to get a proper inter-generational picture of a developmental curve. In terms of developmental expectations, at age 20 it is fair to compare someone of the iGen not to what a Boomer had accomplished at age 20, but rather, due to the difference in expectations and valuews du to a longer life span, would be more accurate to be compared to that of what a Boomer had accomplished at age 16.5. (20 yrs/76.58 = 0.2611, which is the percent of life we have accomplished. multiply this times 63.6, and you get 16.61 yrs, the rough equivalency in terms of life span percentage.)

And lastly, I would like to point out that many of the problems pointed out in the Canvas page, when they are present in noticeable amounts, are almost always due to bad parenting present during the iGener’s formative years. Just as a reminder, poor parenting falls squarely on the parents, who would be Gen X :). So if Gen x and Boomers want to blame iGen and Milllenials for being raised poorly, they have to own the fact that they are the ones who failed that generation by “not raising them right”.