#01Raising Alpha: Today’s kids need hopeful adults
Optimism might be getting harder, but parenting is never easy. We have to proactively seek hope
The oldest members of Gen Alpha are now around age 14. They were born in 2010, as was our eldest and the ipad, launched by Steve Jobs that very year and criticised for sounding like a massive sanitary towel that no one needed, only to go on and become a key device in our tech ecosystem, and one that would revolutionise children’s access to content forever. This device put streaming, the internet and youtube directly in their hands and made it so easy to use that even kids young as 2 or 3 could swipe to choose and watch.
Every generation has unique characteristics, and whilst it’s impossible to shoe horn millions of people under one labels, there are attitudes and behaviours that loosely run through us. Bound together by the period of time where spent our formative years it’s those moments which cause you to pause when you’re working or sharing a conversation with someone from another a generation and you pause and think ‘huh’ how can they not get that etc. Those are the moments which demonstrate that whilst it’s a wonky science no less, there is something that threads us together in someway.
For gen alpha their arrival timing is unique. It’s an intense time to join the human race and nothing says that louder than landing almost squarely in a global pandemic during their first few years on Earth. And sadly not the only one that has directly effected them. We could say that since they’ve been here they have bounced from one existential crisis to another, all uniquely marked by wide reaching global activism movements and watching it all on their screens in real time. It is the urgency to these events and the direct witnessing of them be it climate change, BLM, the women’s movement, war and genocide, that makes their comprehension and relatively to these events different to older generations who (depending on where and how they grew up) may have felt global events to be further away both in time and geography. For Gen Alpha they are thinking about these wider world issues and must carry with them either consciously or beneath the fabric of who they are, both the timeless inward struggles of puberty alongside the weight of outward issues they have little power to change, yet know will affect their future.
This is a tough parenting terrain.
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