If you happen to be close 40, you are facing bigger turbulence as our children are of special breed – they are GEN Y or Z (born after 1995). And gap between us (GEN X) and them (GEN Y or Z) has widened. To understand my daughter better I tried to read few books about new generation and capture some important differences of our generations:
- They are much more technology immersed than us (24% of Gen Y consider on-line their core competence vs only 12% from Gen X).
- They feel more connected (to peers and society in general), yet, have fewer real friends. Competition is big for those few spots.
- They are receptive to cause marketing more than us.
- They are more likely to use Internet as a platform to broadcast their thoughts and experiences so contributing to user-generated content. My activity in this area in fact started as an effort to understand this generation better…
- They multi-task but have much smaller span of attention – you have to entertain them all the way to keep their attention.
- Interestingly, they are more responsible (teen drinking, smoking and sex pregnancies have fallen 44% since nineties!) than us. While exposed to more temptations (drugs, on-line scum) they see the value in responsibility as a way to get along in life.
And if you look for advice on parenting this new generation, look into http://www.dontfretthesweat.com
Next time some thoughts on “managing differences”. Waiting for your input dear X-ers!