Babies born from 2012-2025 are what many would call “Generation Alpha”. Ages ranging from 12 to unborn are set to run the world, but what have they been doing nowadays?

Through the use of statistics, Generation Alpha has shown to have technological knowledge beyond generations before, simply because they have grown up with it and needed to understand how to use it. Similarly, those involved are known to be accepting and diverse, partly because of the internet giving them more information and more perspectives of global issues. However, this generation has also had a decrease in general attention spans.

The use of social media has also spread awareness of the struggles with Generation Alpha. Many TikTok creators are talking about the generation’s academic performances, with many of them being teachers themselves. The teachers have explained the decline in literacy skills and general respect for their elders. @teresakayenewman on TikTok has a video of other teacher’s experiences with Generation Alpha, stating such things as “having to teach [Generation Alpha] has been the most traumatic experience of [her] life” and “[He] teach[es] seventh grade, they are still performing on the fourth-grade level”. 

This isn’t to say that only educators are concerned about these behaviors. Many employees of beauty companies like Sephora and Ulta have started to come forward with the rude nature of these children. The common story includes a mixture of Drunk Elephant (a skincare brand), verbally assaulting the employees, temper tantrums, and parents blaming the workers for their children. These stories are so common that it’s very easy to find videos of people mocking these children.

Many have questioned how these children have ended up this way, but the obvious and most commonly accepted answer is because of the parents. A majority of these parents are Millennials- who can warrant their own discussion, but the short answer for this conversation is their parenting. Many have c\ritiqued their parenting as “too gentle”, meaning that the children feel that they can do whatever they wish and won’t have any consequences. This is not a discussion of whether gentle parenting is effective, nor is it “parent shaming”, but the evidence does show that- to a certain extent- this parenting style strongly correlated with these children’s behavior.

Another explanation is the lack of “third places”, basically meaning that the children don’t have another place to go. With more pre-teen-focused places going out of business or closing more areas (i.e. Justice, Claires, and Aerie), that doesn’t leave a place for these children to go to. So, when these children scroll through TikTok and see that older people are going to Sephora and Ulta, they decide that is a place for them to go to as well. 

Whether any of these answers are true, it doesn’t show much of a solution, so these children (for now) don’t have a way to correct their behavior. Despite this article putting these children in a bad light, this is not supposed to villainize them, but rather educate and try to help these children grow and mature.