Here comes the sunshine generation Baby boomers turned out to be a self-centred lot, but they appear to have raised a kinder, gentler generation of kids. Their parents failed, but Generation Y just might save the world.
Published: The Globe and Mail, May 10, 1997, FOCUS
by Deborah Jones/Vancouver
COLD spring rain drums on the roof of a portable classroom at Point Grey Mini-School. Inside, amid the aroma of bubble gum and wet rubber sneakers, gifted teen-agers from throughout Vancouver discuss a subject that fully engages them: their generation's place in history. The discernment in the overheated room is startling. "We're totally different," says Rafal, a Grade 9 student. "We're the first to grow up with a lot of technology around us. It changes our perspective." Says his classmate Campbell, "We have much more information access. We're the first group to have sex education in Grade 3."
Aged 14 and 15, these teens feel the weight of destiny upon them. Their calling, they say, will be to fix problems left behind by older generations, principally by their baby-boomer parents. High on their mission menu will be stemming the degradation of the environment passed on so carelessly to them.
Researchers of demographic swings claim that the big cohort of North American kids born in the past 17 years -- which includes the Point Grey group -- will be a virtual troop of "good Scouts" who, as they mature, will fix the civic decay and social detritus left behind by their parents, the well-intentioned but me-first baby-boomers. These children are expected to be much more co-operative and socially involved than the boomers.
We are meeting members of a young generation of Canadians who are self-observing, techno born-and-bred, and who march to their own beat and know it. These are the oldest members of a demographic mini-boom of young Canadians who will soon wield great influence because of their sheer numbers and because they have been weaned on technological, social and economic change.
Variously dubbed the echo generation (the boomers' children), the millennials (they will start maturing about the year 2000) and Generation Y, the oldest are in their teens and the youngest are still toddlers. Born after 1980 and before 1995, there are nearly seven million of them in Canada.
Their numerical strength will never match that of boomers -- nearly 10 million in Canada now ranging in age from the early 30s to 50. While demographers disagree on precisely when the baby boom began and ended, all concur that these adults rule: From business to pop culture, there are examinations ad nauseam of the peccadillos and pension plans of the all-powerful age group that ranges from radical 1960s types to surly nihilistic lateboomers. Those who came after, the minority cohort of baby busters now aged 20 to 30, never found a strong voice. But the next generation, the echoes of the boom, are fast becoming a rising swell in North America's sea of humanity.
The wellspring of their awesome social conscience seems, at first glance, a mystery. It runs counter to the me-firstism of their baby-boomer parents. But the Point Grey students also give credit to those same parents for bringing up a generation of altruists.
Maya observes that kids' relationships with their parents are better today. "My mother tells me that my grandmother didn't talk about sex education, and she would read books in secret. Today it's a much more open world."
Neil Howe, a Virginia researcher and author who studies generations, credits periods of intense public interest in child-rearing for an upcoming generation that he describes as positive outward-thinkers who tackle challenges head on with confidence and eschew the emotional and material self-indulgence of the previous generation. He compares the millennial generation to the generation born before the Second World War. "The last generational trend we've seen like this was the G. I. generation," he says, "the generation of J. F. Kennedy" -- he of that famous quote, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."
Social historian Frank Gregorsky of Seattle's Discovery Institute predicts that "We're in for 20 years of positive pleasant surprises from kids and young adults."
Are these statements wishful thinking, wild hallucinations, dangerous whitewashes over the well-documented problems of today's youth? As a boomer, Mr. Gregorsky jokes he has a vested interest in the good Scout notion: "These kids have to pay for our retirement, so lets hope this optimistic scenario holds true." But the theories of Mr. Gregorsky and Mr. Howe are receiving a lot of attention in the American media just as Gen Y is attracting attention from marketing mavens because of its growing impact on entertainment (kids movies are the top box-office grossers), fashion and consumer goods. The Wall Street Journal published a series on Gen Y earlier this year while several magazines and other papers are investigating the trend.
Canadian observers are less effusive, but also report signs of change in the youth of today -- most famously personified by Canadian teen-age activist Craig Keilburger, who has waged a worldwide campaign against child labour, and in the fact that increasingly young children are becoming involved in environmental issues.
Bob Couchman, 60, has spent a lifetime with children (his own kids range in age from nine to their 30s). He has been a teacher, a street-youth worker in Toronto, co-chaired the Canadian committee for the United Nations' International Year of the Family, and now works internationally as a consultant based in rural Atlin, B.C. It's Atlin, where he does volunteer work at his youngest son's elementary school, that gives him a window into modern education. Recently, he organized a three-day meeting in Ottawa of kids from high-school associations throughout Ontario. They met a few blocks away from Parliament Hill, and by the end of the session, Mr. Couchman says, he longed to invite MPs in to watch and learn from the kids.
"They resolved issues much, much better than their elders would have," he says. "These kids were quite different from groups I've worked with previously."
Greg Sullivan is a 15-year-old Grade 10 student in Ottawa who already has a part-time job working with computers. The quintessential "New Economy" kid, he's confidently nonchalant about his employment prospects. "Having a job at all is good, never mind if it's secure. If you do have the proper skills, you've little to worry about and even if your job does disappear, getting another one possibly wouldn't be all that difficult, depending on what line of work you're in."
Alexei Polischuk, a 15-year-old Grade Nine student at the Mini-School, says the kids of his age are more exposed to all aspects of their world than kids have ever been.
Social problems are "more in-your-face," kids have more freedom than their parents or grandparents, and their futures are freighted with much more competition for education and employment than in the past. And, like kids of every age, he says his generation is misunderstood because of negative stereotypes about teen-agers. "I go into the convenience store, and I get watched so much. The store operator never takes her eyes off me," Alexei complains.
In fact, the world Generation Y will populate is full of questions. Perhaps it always has been, but until now most North Americans grew up with at least some sense of the roles they would play as individuals, spouses, parents, workers and consumers. Everything now seems fluid, from job expectations to gender identification. Some of the students at Point Grey Mini-School say their generation lacks a unifying cause aside from a vague desire to improve the environment.
The upcoming generation knows more about big global issues but lacks a blueprint for life. "We're told to be diverse, and that is celebrated," says one teen-ager. "But we don't share a belief in anything in particular." In the face of uncertainty and vagueness, what would cause Gen Y kids to be optimistic?
One main answer, say theorists, is a shift to "family values" started by the religious right and now adopted across the political spectrum. In the 1960s and 1970s self-fulfillment was society's mantra. "By the 1980s people were saying, wait a minute, there's a cost to this, and the cost is being paid by kids," says Mr. Gregorsky, who characterizes children raised between 1961 and 1981 as "cynical and nihilistic." He cites their harsh music, dark fashions and body piercing as evidence.
Even though families seem more hard-pressed than ever to make financial ends meet and find time for one another, divorce rates have stopped climbing through North America, he says, and popular culture has turned away from demonizing children (as in the movies Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist )to sentimentalizing them ( Three Men and a Baby , Look Who's Talking Now ). Television shows like the one about a loving purple dinosaur named Barney who extols the virtues of co-operation, are gaining in popularity over programs such as Sesame Street , which critics say over-emphasizes differences and individual self-worth. Growing up in this atmosphere has produced a generation of kids who have been nurtured, protected and valued and who have strong values themselves.
The parents of Generation Y kids seem to be reaching new levels of aggressiveness in pursuing quality education for their children. Parents routinely shop around for good schools and in B.C. recently one high-school student and his father tried to sue the local school board because, they say, the son's Grade 9 teacher failed to teach the complete curriculum of a social-studies course.
But lest people think that Gen Y will usher in an age of sunshine and sweetness, skeptics point out the widening gap between the haves and have-nots throughout Canada and the United States, especially in inner cities. Youth crime is up (though there is much dispute about the statistics used; figures may reflect better reporting as well as the demographic bulge of youngsters). The number of children living in poverty throughout North America has increased. Even in relatively affluent families, many children lack adequate adult care because both parents work long hours and have not provided substitutes. The good-Scout generation will likely be confined to families with thoughtful parents, access to good education, health care and technologies like home computers.
Robert Glossop of the The Vanier Institute of the Family in Ottawa warns that nobody knows how positive even the fortunate kids will be once great numbers of them start hitting adolescence. "When they are 11 they may be principled, responsible, concerned about environmentalism. But my fear would be that something happens during adolescence when good vision, values reinforced by parents and the school system will evaporate and become an illusion, when they see that their prospects for living well are diminished, and they will go into an adolescent rejection of adult culture. Whether or not there will be remarkable difference between Gen X and Y, we don't know."
Still, one difference between Generation Y and those that came before is the unprecedented globalization of society and the economy. For many kids, this seems most obvious in individual awareness of themselves as part of a larger community and their responsibility to improve it. A scan of Kidlink, a children's forum on the Internet, shows the concerns of virtually every participant, living anywhere from Holland to Oklahoma, fall into the Scout camp (see sidebar on D1).
Such big ideas cannot be merely chalked up to technology, says Randy Morse, head of an educational multimedia firm and Web-site developer in Edmonton. "At the end of the day, technology on its own changes nothing. But the more bright, thoughtful young people know about their peers, the more conscious they'll be of the implications of their actions in an increasingly crowded world."
The children at Point Grey Mini-School are vivid examples of this. They are at the leading edge of change driven by technology. Their school was the first in Canada to have an Internet Web site, and is now part of a well-funded program organized by the City of Vancouver, Simon Fraser University and Rogers Communications to pioneer multi-media education in high school.
The children do research on the Internet and have progressed into a whole new way of scientific research, says teacher Mike Denos. Instead of simply writing essays, as previous generations did, they "web out" from a central idea to create web pages, make videos and write magazine-style articles for school projects. "I think that's a really, really different way of thinking," says Mr. Denos.
They also carry out self-directed research on the Internet on topics of their choice. Kristin and her friend Kelsey, both 15 and in Grade 9, for instance, are working on a magazine article on dreams. "We're looking at what dreams are and what they mean," says Kristin.
Partly because of a global perspective, unlike recent generations of introverted people who have reacted in surprise and anger at their lot, Generation Y is much better prepared for the future. As well as being positive, they're well aware of the buzzing global economy, more able to get along with different people and quite comfortable with the lack of job security.
At Kitsilano Secondary School in Vancouver, teacher and guidance counsellor Lisa Duprey eyes two teen-agers lounging on couches in her office. One boy is a clean-cut Asian in a T-shirt and pressed jeans, the other a Caucasian boy with blond hair dyed black, and baggy black clothing, and a ring through his nose. The difference in their appearances is purely superficial, says Ms. Duprey, pointing out that the two are chatting and laughing happily with each other on a break. Problems exist, she says, but increasingly today's kids are able to relate to one another without the barriers -- like racism and sexism -- that plagued earlier generations. "I'm not trying to be Mary Poppins, but basically kids now are colour blind."
She says personal issues faced by children as they mature -- how to find themselves, how to meet a mate -- are consistent through the ages, "but the world will be different for them. Job-wise they'll never be like me, with one job for life. They're going to have to be much, much more assertive, more self-confident. They're probably going to have to have a broader variety of skills. They will need to be quite eclectic and flexible.
"That's a challenge, but you know, I think they're up to it. They've known since they were little kids that this would be a fact of life for them."
KIDS FOR A BETTER WORLD
Shannon, an 11-year-old from Oklahoma, plans to go to university and become a doctor. "I hope that my generation takes better care of our environment than in the past," she says earnestly.
Matt, a 13-year-old from Harlem, New York, chimes in with his desires: "One united nation. Under democracy. It would have to be careful not to hurt people."
Says Simon, 10, of Jutland, Denmark, "I wish, that all wars must be stopped, and all people will live in peace together. Also I wish that no people are living a life as poors." To increase the possibility of his wish coming true, Simon says he is "an active member of society in discussions against the Nazi peoples."
Says Sara, 13, from Bahrain: "I want to write a letter to the United Nations and try and help them show the world that life isn't all war, and that nations have to try and somehow communicate and solve their problems. I would like to start helping the poor and needy, by giving out anything I can to help. I would like to write letters to all big factories and companies to show them how their junk is polluting our world.
10-year-old Marina of St. Petersburg in Russia: "I want that there will be no wars, no borders and there will be less pollution."
12-year old Madeleine in Taby, Sweden, says she plans to develop a new kind of energy to eliminate pollution from cars.
Source: Kidlink, a non-profit Internet service for children.
Copyright Deborah Jones 1997
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