The latest generation of young people has raised concerns about the future as their overuse of technology and internet trends come into the spotlight.
Children born between roughly 2010 and the end of 2024, known as ‘Generation Alpha’, now comprise the largest cohort of children to ever live on planet Earth.
But the more than two billion toddlers and teens are already being cited for their illiteracy and uncontrollable appetite for screens, raising fears about what’s to come.
“Everyone on the internet is really scared of Gen Alpha,” popular Gen Z influencer Rivata Dutta told the LA Times. “Gen Alpha is so weird.”
Millennial parents blamed for raising a doomed group of iPad-obsessed ‘Generation Alpha’ kids
Generation Alpha now makes up more than a quarter of the planet’s population, but it’s foolish millennial parents who are taking the blame.
They are cited for introducing such demoralizing trends as the ‘Sad Beige’ baby aesthetic, which replaces pale blue and pastel pink with a dull neutral palette.
Monochromatic daycares are also all the rage, fueled in part by the rise of millennial parents trying to raise “theybies” — babies who can apparently determine their own pronouns “when they’re old enough.”
But while older generations may not recognize this trend, the emerging crop of would-be teens is exhibiting much more worrying behavior.
Dozens of teachers continue to leave teaching as they struggle to keep illiterate children in check, with one expert telling the LA Times: ‘Teachers complain they have 14-year-olds who can’t read.’
“We hear people complain that (alphas) don’t have empathy — well, you learn that through literature,” says Shervaughnna Anderson-Byrd, director of the California Reading and Literature Project. ‘A lot of blame is placed on these babies, while it is the adults who determine the story.’
On social media, Generation Alpha have been dubbed ‘savage’ and ‘evil’ as they continue to make headlines, thanks in no small part to the presence of smartphones to capture every moment.
A childhood spent mainstreaming YouTube videos on iPads has also been attributed to a lack of social skills, evident in the manic rise of ‘Sephora tweens’.
Young girls go crazy in beauty stores like Sephora and test expensive skin care products for free without worrying about what they leave behind.
The youngest fraction of Generation Alpha children is characterized by the ‘sad beige’ trend
Generation Alpha tweens and teens go crazy at Sephora, trying out expensive skincare products and making a big mess
In January, an influencer shared her wild experience walking through the ‘Drunk Elephant’ section
In January, TikToker Cassandra Bankson, 31, investigated the rumor in Los Angeles and found the Drunk Elephant section – a beauty brand loved by Kim Kardashian – “disgusting” before sharing images of the destroyed department.
The model found “a lip balm with literally a hair in it” and that “someone had applied the bronzing drops over one of the moisturizers and not even bothered to put them back.”
Accusations that Gen Alpha has gone out of control are not helped by the presence of cameras in schools, capturing the worst moments and spreading them across the internet.
This week, cameras were at school when a sixth-grade girl was brutally attacked by another student in California.
Her fellow students stood by and watched, or took out their phones to film the fight – as her mother said KTL: ‘No one came to help my daughter; not a single student came to stop this. So she was left alone.”
While school fights may not be new, evidence permanently stamped online is.
Thanks to the rise of such unsavory moments and the attention they continue to attract, the demise of Generation Alpha has become a favorite topic of older influencers.
One of the main criticisms of Gen Alpha youth is that they are illiterate – a partly unfair trope, since there are still children in this generation.
It’s not entirely their fault either because of the impact the pandemic has had on education, forcing children in their key social learning years to learn alone behind a screen, and later behind a mask.
Anderson-Byrd emphasized that a large group of Gen Alpha Californians (there are already more than six million) are behind in school.
Generation Alpha children have been singled out for their lack of empathy, which one expert believes is due to the inability of many to master basic skills.
“(Generation Alpha) are among the hardest hit when it comes to reading,” he said. “Only 43 percent of our students are at the California level.”
He told the outlet that because today’s fourth graders were learning from home and reading online for years, they were significantly struggling at a time when they should be reading books.
“That’s why we have so many third graders whose scores look terrible (according to last year’s state assessments),” Anderson-Byrd said.
“We’ve created a whole generation of failure for these kids.”
While some are gloomy about the situation, Dutta put a positive spin on it: bad behavior is normal for young children, and this generation may be more online and have more access to knowledge than ever before.
“When I interact with kids now, they have so much energy and are so knowledgeable,” Dutta said. “They have all this information at their fingertips.”
“I definitely see a lot more chaos coming,” Dutta said, though she noted that “Gen Alpha is naturally against the grain.”