Zoomers are afraid of them. Boomers want more. Millennials will continue to make them for the rest of the year.
Generation Alpha, born between roughly 2010 and the end of 2024, is the demographic successor to Gen Z. The oldest members aren’t quite ready for a quinceañera, while the youngest will be conceived in the coming weeks.
When the last of them arrive in December, they will cut off the largest group of children to ever exist on Earth. There are already concerns that the children are not doing ‘well’. The vast majority have not yet completed primary school, and 1 in 5 are still in diapers, yet they are commonly referred to as ‘wild’, ‘illiterate’ and ‘doomed’ on YouTube and TikTok – where alphas themselves play a large and growing share of users.
Blame poor parenting on millennials or tech companies or both – but many of those responsible for bringing the discourse online agree that we should worry about them.
“Everyone on the internet is really scared of Gen Alpha,” says Gen Z influencer Rivata Dutta, aka Riv, whose content is popular with alphas on TikTok. “They say, oh my God, Gen Alpha is so weird.”
Despite decades of declining birth rates and years of hand-wringing over a pandemic baby crisis, there are now more than 2 billion alpha children worldwide — more than a quarter of the world’s population — and about 6 million in California alone.
And some aspects of their culture are causing backlash.
Baby decor in “sad beige”? That’s Gen Alpha.
Screen-obsessed iPad kids? Alfas again.
Barbarian Sephora tweens from the beauty store running down the skin care aisles slathering their baby faces with retinol? Alphas, reportedly.
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In recent months, the Alphas have emerged as TikTok’s newest supervillain, a designation that has followed them in mainstream media. If zoomers are delicate snowflakes, alphas are the opposite: a horde of marauders hunting Drunk Elephant’s beauty products.
But where did this reputation come from? And why is it ascendant nowwhen the last alphas are still in the womb?
‘There are more children today than ever before, [and] more than there will be in the future,” says Mark McCrindle, the demographer who coined the name “Generation Alpha” in 2008. “We have reached peak children.”
“I have to ask millennials: Why are your kids so terrible?”
Alphas are overwhelmingly the offspring of millennials (born between 1981 and 1996), who are known for destroying beloved American institutions like the department store, the housing market, and marriage.
According to much of the internet, millennials are now ruining their childhood for the next generation.
“I have to ask millennials: why are your kids so terrible, and more importantly, why do you find it so funny?” TikToker Alanna Dinh said in a viral video in November.
Many Gen X and Gen Z families also have alphas – the oldest zoomers have just reached the average age of first birth in the US, while the youngest parents defined the genre.
It starts with the sad beige baby.
This aggressive oatmeal aesthetic has dominated pediatric care since mid-Gen Alpha in 2017, desaturating high chairs, gyms, and diaper pails from electric green to subtle sage. Even Fisher Price has toned down its color palette in response to market demand for more muted, less gendered clothing, toys and gear.
When it comes to college-age alpha kids, the concern centers on the much-maligned “iPad kid” — a child who can’t eat at a restaurant or take a short ride on public transportation without following YouTube from a tablet in a plastic bag. case.
“The stigma is not having our kids on screen all the time, but I probably check my phone just as much,” says Chris Chin, 39, whose 8-year-old son Kaven is a YouTube star with half a million Gen . Alpha followers. “As long as he keeps his grades up, I let him do whatever he wants, and he usually chooses to hop on the iPad.”
Primary-school-aged viewers flock to Kaven’s channel to watch him navigate new games on Roblox, strut through lavish Disney vacations, and unwrap surprise eggs — entertainment that most teen and adult observers find baffling but off-putting.
Other facets of the Gen Alpha zeitgeist are more extreme. Case in point: Skibidi Toilet, the violent, vaguely scatological short video series that debuted in February 2023. It shares the market with popular horror games including Rainbow Friends and Poppy Playtime, which may shock some adults with their colorful cartoon – Creature Bloodshed.
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And yet the creations are understatedly mainstream, with Huggy-Wuggy dolls with tusks hanging from street vendor stalls and in the toy aisle at WalMart.
For a curious elementary school student, experts say YouTube works more often like Wikipedia, answering questions like: Where is the oldest tree on Earth? How do you beat Shy Guy on Level 4 of Paper Mario? What are boogers made of?
“A child who might not have access to art classes, we have a creator who does just that,” says Amanda Klecker of pocket.watch, which represents blockbuster child creators such as Ryan’s World and Art for Kids Hub. “They will show you a really cool illustration, and the father and daughter will work it out side by side,” so that the child watching can learn to draw it too.
Others, including Gen Z influencer Dutta, agreed with that assessment.
“When I interact with kids now, they have so much energy and they are so knowledgeable,” Dutta said. “They have all this information at their fingertips.”
That information translates into influence on busy and relatively tolerant millennial parents: children now increasingly determine what their family buys, where they go on vacation and even what they watch on TV, research shows.
“Our kids are so intelligent these days,” says Agnes Hsu of Hello, Wonderful, whose six-year-old son has read hundreds of digital books despite growing up in a house full of physical books. “This will be one of the smartest generations of our lifetime.”
But not everyone is so optimistic.
‘A whole generation of failures
Illiteracy is one of the most common and devastating criticisms leveled against Gen Alpha online. Empirically, this also applies to a demographic group whose average age is 6.5 years.
In California, children are expected to be able to read by first grade around December, meaning the majority of liberal arts students should be literate by New Year’s Day.
Yet thousands of people are still struggling, making reading one of the clearest reminders of a pandemic that most teens and adults would rather move past.
Alphas “are among the hardest hit children when it comes to reading,” says Shervaughnna Anderson-Byrd, director of the California Reading and Literature Project. “Only 43% of our students are at the highest level in California.”
The average LA Unified fourth grader spends half of kindergarten and all of first grade at home, learning the basics of reading on a Chromebook. By the time the same student returned to the classroom as a second grader in August 2021, they had effectively reached the end of formal phonics instruction.
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“That’s why we have so many third-graders whose scores look terrible [on last year’s state assessments]Anderson-Byrd said. “We’ve created a whole generation of failure for these kids.”
Reading is essential for all academic work from late primary school onwards, she said. Yet even English teachers are not trained to teach phonics and other remedial skills beyond the early grades. That means fourth-grade students, who were slightly behind when the pandemic hit in 2020, are still functionally illiterate in eighth grade.
“Teachers complain that they have 14-year-olds who can’t read,” Anderson-Byrd says.
These complaints are echoed on TikTok and Reddit, where teachers cite a lack of reading skills as one of the reasons they are leaving the profession.
The “kids can’t read and that leaves them out of control at school,” one teacher wrote in a February post on the r/Teachers subreddit titled “They don’t know how to read. I don’t want to read. don’t do this again.”
Local librarians are a little more optimistic, noting that while circulation is still low since the pandemic, digital loans of popular series like Dogman, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Desmond Cole Ghost Patrol remain strong.
“The ebooks and audiobooks, they’re selling like hotcakes,” said Grisel Oquendo, children’s fiction selector for the LA County Library system.
Younger liberal arts students are also likely to benefit from the nationwide shift from balanced literacy to the phonics-based science of reading, which could soon become mandatory under California law.
But for the older half of the generation, that step may be too late.
‘We hear people complaining [alphas] lack of empathy – well, you learn that from literature,” Anderson-Byrd said. “A lot of blame is placed on these babies when it’s the adults who are driving the story.”
‘There’s a lot more chaos to come’
Over the past six months, we’ve seen the rise of the latest Gen Alpha stereotype: the Sephora tween. These serum-obsessed 12-year-olds have been filmed raiding beauty stores – spoiling samples, terrorizing adult shoppers and hoarding expensive products formulated for mature skin.
Experts say it’s no coincidence that the wave of doomed predictions about Gen Alpha emerged just as the oldest ones were entering puberty, the developmental peak of obnoxious behavior and bad taste.
They argue that speeding through the skincare aisle at Sephora or binge-watching Skibidi Toilet says less about an era than it does about an era.
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“The Sephora phenomenon, that’s a timeless hallmark of aging,” says McCrindle, the demographer. “We are talking about children who are still developing their social skills and their behavior. Children who leave behind makeup testers, a mess is part of their stage of life.”
Dutta, the influencer, agreed.
“Those are phases,” she said. “You want to be cool when you’re ten.”
Still, she thinks alphas will remain strange.
“I definitely see a lot more chaos coming,” Dutta said. “Gen Alpha is naturally against the grain.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.