Generations defined: who cares and why

SBS Australia

08-07-2025

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TRANSCRIPT
Mark McCrindle: Beta, if we think about it, when it's applied to products or software or launches, it's the 2.0 version updated for the context and relevant for the times.
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SB: The first of January, 2025. Delighted parents welcomed new babies into the world. Not only were their children the firstborn of the year, they were also the first of a new generation. But why do generations even exist? And are they helpful? I'm Sophie Bennett and this is the Beta Blueprint. In this episode, I'll be speaking with social researcher Mark McCrindle to answer those questions. He coined the terms for the newest generations Alpha and Beta.
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SB: Thanks for joining me, Mark. To get us started, could you explain what a generation actually is?
Sure. Well, the concept of a generation has changed over time. Traditionally, a generation was really the span of time from when someone was born to when they had their own children. And so people would say, this generation of children or this generation of parents. Now, if we applied that biological definition today, that would be 30 years, actually 31, because that's the median age of a woman giving birth in Australia. So to talk about a 30 year span as one generation obviously is too much. So what's happened over recent decades is that the definition of generation has shifted from a biological concept to a sociological concept. In other words, the brackets are a lot shorter and it just describes a cohort of people born which share a similar experience, a similar life stage, and a similar period in which they've come of age. And so we've settled on a 15 year span of time to define a generation today.
SB: Ok, so for the people wondering what generation they fit into, can you break down all the generations we currently categorise?
Well, the first generation given a label and having had that label stick through their life were the Baby Boomers. And clearly that label gives an indication that they were labelled at the start of their life because there was a baby boom post World War II and in Australia, it's defined by this Australian Bureau of Statistics, this birth rate increase that began in 1946, hit its peak in 1961 before levelling off and dropping precipitously in 1965. So, the baby boom demographic are those born from 1946 to 1964. So that's a circumstance of demographics, that's a definable reality, and that's why those years apply there. And the Baby Boomers obviously in their retirement years at the oldest edge, well into their seventies, and yet that is still the label that they have kept part of the Baby Boomers or for short, the Boomers. Now, there's been generations prior to that, but not that there's been a label that has stuck. In fact, the oldest generation in Australia are often called the Seniors or the Veterans or sometimes called the Silent Generation. We call them the Builders Generation because they have built the society they built after the Great Depression they built after the austerity years of World War II, and they built that next generation as well. But that's more a retrospective label that's been given to them. The Baby Boomers is the first that's really been an inherent label that has been maintained.
And after the Baby Boomers, it was actually in 1991, a Canadian writer, Douglas Copeland said, 'hey, we're a new generation'. As he wrote, we defy a label. We're not like the Boomers that went before, call us X. And so that anti label moniker of X became the label and labelled not only that generation, Generation X, but created therefore from the alphabet Generation Y and Generation Z. So that's where this alphabetised theme stemmed from, a Canadian writer in the early nineties writing a fictional book about his cohort. And as you could sort of tell from the year there, it was a label that emerged again retrospectively as he wrote of his generation, they were late twenties and early thirties when that label stuck. So, this idea of having a label at birth is really a newish thing other than the Baby Boomers. It has been slow in coming, but the Gen Xer therefore is 1965 to 1979, and if you've got X, you've got Y. And so from 1980 to 1994, you've got Generation Y. Now for a while there, the term Millennials got thrown around, and particularly in North America, that was the term, but largely in Australia, it's gone X, Y, and Z. And so as the Gen Ys came to an end in 1994, Generation Z flowed from 1995 through to 2009 again, the 15 year span. And so that has given us the Baby Boomers and Generations X and Y and Z as well.
SB: That's interesting that the naming convention stemmed from fiction - what do you personally think of those methods, does naming a generation retrospectively make more sense, or do you think it's useful to look forward?
I think the best thing is to give a label or a moniker to a generation that's sort of devoid of any meaning, where we haven't concocted some meaning and pinned it on a generation. But just given a simple identifier and their name, they can create themselves, the characteristics, what they're defined by, will be defined over time. I know that a lot of people have put forward different labels. In fact, the Gen Xers were first called the latchkey kids because they were sort of the first generation home alone with working parents. For a while there, the term buster was tried to be posited because we went from the boomers to the busters in the tough economic times of the early nineties or the slackers generation was a label. I remember pinned on the Gen Xer in the early nineties because it was the era of grunge rock and a time where we were seeing young people delay contributions to the workforce. Well now if we look at the Gen Xers they're, mild-mannered, middle Australians contributing much and moving right through their parenting years and having made great contributions and continuing to do so. Some of those early reactionary labels I think highlights the problem of trying to pin a label early on a generation. And more recently we've heard labels of what young people should be called the iGen or the Click and Go Kids or the Nextas these sorts of things. The AI generation, well that'll look very tired in 40 or 50 or 60 years. It just happens to mark the current period, but it is not advised to give a label to a generation. It'll move through different life stages and different eras and will probably, I think, be better off creating their own meaning. That's why I've advocated for the continuing of this more scientific nomenclature. And so if the alphabet worked with X, Y, and Z, let's shift it to the Greek alphabet from here. And so Generation Alpha following from Generation Z and the Alphas are those from 2010 through to 2024, the 15 year inclusive span of time there, and therefore Generation Beta from 2025 this year on.
SB: Yeah that seems logical but I guess I'm still wondering about the why. What's the point of defining generations at all?
What's helpful in giving labels to generations in defining them by years and even helping us understand the multitude of generations gives us a sense of context, as humans. We're not just a current people, we're not just born in this particular year, but we sit within a structure with many generations that have gone before that we can even label and understand. And it implies that there are many generations to come. If someone is part of generation Alpha or that just implies that there's Generation Beta and Gamma and Delta to come. And I think the sense of context, the sense of humility in that, the sense that we're not the last generation, we're just the latest generation with more to come, gives us even a sense of a future of foresight and hopefully of planning for what's next. We're not the peak generation, we're not the end of it, we're not the start of it. We're just in a long lineup with more to come.
SB: Speaking of those to come, I think this is a good segue into our more specific topic of parenting. Would you say each generation also has its own unique parenting style?
Yeah, definitely. Our first perspective of parenting and our first view of it, and I guess approach to it comes from our own reflection of how we were parented. It's very personal in that sense and not just to necessarily adopt how we were parented in some ways to react against it. And we find this in generational analysis that every generation in so many ways is a reaction to the one that went before. They're a product of their times. They're not just a generation by way of their life stage, but the times that shaped them, the events, the experiences, the technologies that were coming of age as they were that shaped them, that left, if you like an imprint on them, the social markers or the technologies do shape us in those early years. And so they shape our parenting perspective. And we have found a difference even in the use of technology with the very latest parents to those that went before.
For example, if we think about Generation Alpha, those that are now hitting their teenage years, born since 2010, the parents of the Gen Alphas were the Millennials or Generation Y, and they were growing up in an era of tech optimism. It was the start of Facebook and social media, it was the start of the smartphone. This was the generation that in their teenage years saw apps come along and saw some of these digital platforms and streaming services. And so they were wide-eyed about this world of technology and devices and the world in their pocket and being a few clicks away from any piece of information on the planet and being able to talk to these devices and have them give answers back. I mean, what an incredible world. But what we have with the latest generation of parents, parents of Generation Beta just being born are the Gen Zs. They've grown up in a different world, a world that has shifted from tech optimism as the previous parents had to tech skepticism where the big tech companies are viewed with more cynicism, where they're often discussed in the way that we talk about the tobacco companies of old, where they're selling products that are addictive, where there's nefarious purpose, where the product is actually the user and where they're slicing and dicing the user and making money off that data where you've got geopolitics at play, who's behind the platforms and what really is their intent.
So the whole world has changed, and what we have now are parents as they raise their children in not just a world of devices but now a world of AI where there's even questions around that and the use and they're saying, you know what? I'm not just totally all in on technology and let's teach the kids robotics and automation and get them into coding as the previous generation of parents did, give them devices because that's their future, they're saying the opposite. I want to delay the use of devices. I want to question it a little bit. I want to put guardrails in place because I'm not sure being all on in a tech saturated world is what I want for my child. Maybe more holistic learning and education is important and putting some constraints in place. That's been a big shift in a decade from the previous generation of parents to the current ones. And that's an example of how the times our upbringing and our experience and the technologies will even shape something like parenting.
SB: Aside from technology, what are some of the other things that are going to shape the incoming generations?
Parents are well aware now that wasn't so much their experience, that their children will be global in opportunities. Maybe they will travel and study overseas, but maybe they'll stay local, but pick up a global education. That wasn't possible to do some courses from Harvard when you're sitting in Sydney or Melbourne, but now that's mainstream. It wasn't possible to work for a company based in Asia and operate from the spare room at home or from a shared work environment in a city. But that is now possible and that's the global connection that we have. We've seen it's not just global in terms of the west exporting culture to the east, Hollywood movies, now it's a world of Bollywood, not just American music now it's K Pop or it's music emerging from other parts flowing around the world. It's tech platforms coming out of China like TikTok, not just Silicon Valley exporting products around the world. We've seen globalisation in terms of flows from east to west as much as west to east. And this is a different world, but it's a global one. And so we've got a generation of parents that recognise the global generation that their children are part of more than we've ever seen. The technological foundation, that's a key part of that as we discussed growing up in a world of AI where their teachers, of the newborns of today, will be informed not just with human intelligence but artificial intelligence where there's a seamless world between the technology and the human one and where even the devices in the homes as the youngsters of today grow up will be AI connected and the children will be monitored through AI, maybe even through health diagnoses and work out when it's important to see a doctor because the technology will be monitoring vital signs even from the wearables of the children. This is a new world and it's changed quite quickly. So that's impactful.
The impact of the peers and the social influence will continue. You only have to go back two generations, really, the world of the Gen Xer as parents where the experts and the authority figures had say and would guide careers or courses of study. But now it's the peer groups and the influence on social media. The centre of knowledge and influence therefore has shifted to the peer group and to the platforms and to the social media. How they consume content has changed from a written form to a visual form. In a world of TikTok and Instagram and posts, we definitely consume content in a visual sense and a video sense rather than a written or auditory sense. And that's been a profound shift in learning and students again, in the period of a decade or so.
And in terms of how they'll work and where they'll work, obviously work from home and learn from home has emerged in the last few years. But beyond that, there'll be multiple job holders. They'll work across shorter tenures across more industries and sectors. They'll therefore have not just multiple jobs, but multiple careers. We estimate six separate careers in the lifetime of school leavers across an estimated 18 separate jobs. And some of those employment positions won't just be as employees, but will be even with their own business or as a contractor in charge of their own employment. And so the shift from, if you like, looking for a job to creating one's own job.
SB: You said, 18 jobs there, that's a lot. It's interesting that you say this incoming generation will be lifelong learners. Do you think that will also impact the way they address environmental issues like climate change for example?
Yes. This is a generation that by nature of the concept of generations is inheriting a world from those that went before and is looking to the future because they recognise that even if they're part of Generation Beta, there'll be Generation Gamma and Generation Delta, those coming after them that in the second half of this 21st century will be just coming of age.
And if previous generations have built certain things and done well and passed on a legacy, but maybe in other areas there's more to do, this generation will pick that up hopefully with a sense of gratefulness of what has been provided this world of material opportunity and sophisticated employment and global connections and technology, but from an environmental sense more to do. And they'll pick up any areas of slack there and add their own contributions. But I think that that sense of the future, they will hold strongly as they look at the generations to come. They have more of that global connection. And of course, environmental challenges are global, not just local ones. And so it's not just a sense of my community or my nation, but my world that is very much instilled in this global generation and they're bringing more education.
I think they'll use technology to solve problems in this 21st century that we haven't been able to in the past. One thing we've noted with generations and really history is that it's not a one way street where things head further and further in a set direction, but it's more like a pendulum where something will swing to a certain direction and then people will reflect on their own upbringing, on their own experience and say, well, maybe there's some areas there where because of how we were treated, we need to bring the pendulum the other way, or because of the downsides of what we saw, we will shift it up. And so each generation does act as a corrective measure to sometimes the overreach of what they saw or sometimes the lack of response to what they saw. And I think that's helpful in society. It does help, I guess, society grab what was important and conserve that for the future, but recognise areas that need to change and adapt to that. And I think each generation brings the parenting sense in a world where the understanding, the experience, the knowledge, the education has shifted, and so their parenting will look different.
SB: Yeah it'll definitely be interesting to see where things head over the next couple of decades. Before we wrap up though, in just a couple of sentences how would you describe the incoming Generation Beta?
Well, there's even something there in the name. Yes, they follow Alpha, but Beta, if we think about it, when it's applied to products or software or launches, it's the 2.0 version, updated for the context and relevant for the times. And I think that's what we'll see with Generation Beta far from being secondary or in the shadow of the Alphas who have been the first generation of this 21st century. I think the Betas will shape a new, they'll adapt in appropriate ways. They'll respond to their particular types. I mean the world of AI that they will know from day one of their existence and they'll bring about some solutions in a 2.0 world relevant for their times. I think I have high hopes for them. I think their parents', Generation Z, are well educated, informed, and bring a clear eyed sense of the future, not idealistic in a pure sense, but bring a sense of balance and perspective and guardrails even around technology, as I mentioned. I think that's a good way to raise children. So I have high hopes for these Gen Betas, the generation to bring us into the 22nd century and the generation to steward well, what they've received, but to change it importantly for the new times in a new and informed way.
SB: That was Mark McCrindle, I'm Sophie Bennett and you've been listening to the Beta Blueprint.