Are Today’s Youth Different?
It was Thanksgiving of 2017. I was sitting at the dinner table with my family. As we chatted about past family vacations and events, my brother Victor began reminiscing about our older cousin Camille’s recent wedding.
“Camille’s wedding was so fun. I can’t believe she was only 22 when she got married,” he said.
“I know; it’s crazy. Especially in this day and age,” my sister responded.
“Yeah, Camille may have settled down with the love of her life, but I’m definitely not getting married before I’m 30,” I chimed in, warning my family not to expect a wedding from me anytime soon.
“You know, three of your uncles were married by the time they were your age, Sarah,” my grandmother interjected, looking at each one of my siblings with loving sternness. (For reference, I am almost 22 now.) “And there’s nothing wrong with that. And who knows, you might end up married much sooner than you think.”
“Trust me, there’s a lot of things I want to do before I get settled and get married,” I muttered to myself. I didn’t say it out loud to avoid sparking heated discussion about marriage.
Just as I don’t want to commit to marriage as early as my parents’ generation, there are other life milestones that I have set back compared to when my parents accomplished them. According to a 2011 New York Times article titled “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” young adults across several generations have sought to achieve the same five milestones for several decades. These include completing school, leaving home, becoming financially independent, marrying, and having a child.
Back in the 1960s, 65% of men and 77% of all women had completed all five milestones by the time they were 30 years old. 50 years later, in 2010, only 10% of men and 13% of women had achieved all five milestones. From these statistics, it might seem that over time, young adults have become less interested in achieving these milestones. But that’s not quite true. According to Scott Hess, the president of Insights for TRU, a global youth research firm, the life road map toward these milestones is still completely intact, “but to the road map, [today’s youth] apply the road trip mentality.” So it’s not that today’s young adults aren’t achieving these milestones — it’s just that they are taking more time to do so.
Perhaps the most salient reason why today’s youth are delaying achieving these five milestones is education. Today’s youth are more educated than ever and devote an unprecedented amount of time and money to preparing themselves for the 21st-century labor market. Especially in the United States, where the most expensive undergraduate schools cost upwards of $69,000 per year, today’s young people have delayed marriage and having kids, and they have oftentimes had to postpone becoming financially independent from their parents due to the cost of education. Because of the high cost of education, today’s youth are also poorer, more precariously employed than their parents and grandparents, and have much less of a financial safety net to rely on. So much for achieving one’s life goals at an early age.
Even though today’s youth are achieving major life goals later in life than their parents, we have figured out how to masterfully extend our years of young adulthood to our benefit. As Scott Hess explains, this notion of adolescence or young adulthood hasn’t always existed. At the start of the 20th century, there was only childhood and then adulthood. Later, as the century progressed, recognition of adolescence, a new period between childhood and adulthood, arose. And in this day in age, we now have even another in between phase: young adulthood. During these years, individuals begin to think much more seriously about the five milestones and begin to actively pursue them, without necessarily rushing to reach them.
Today’s youth are not only in less of a hurry to achieve the five milestones, but they also pursue these milestones in very different ways than their predecessors of Generation X.
Take the goal of becoming financially independent, for example, an ambition that is primarily fulfilled through seeking employment. In the work place, today’s young adults function quite differently than their older counterparts. Patrice Thompson, a TED speaker and proud member of the millennial generation, provides an excellent hypothetical example of generational differences in the workplace. She brings to life two characters: Tom, a Gen-X-er, and Eva, a Gen-Y-er.
Tom believes in a top-down hierarchy in which you have to work your way to the top. He believes in long hours and company loyalty. Eva, on the other hand, believes that a workplace should be inclusive, and that good performance should be rewarded. In her last few months at the firm, she has made a name for herself and built many new connections in a short period of time.
Naturally, tensions arise between Tom and Eva, as Tom becomes frustrated with Eva’s rapid visibility, and “thinks she should focus more on developing her work ethic and maturity than caring about professional advancement.” He nicknames Eva, “Eva the Diva.” Eva, however, is proud of her professional advancement, and claims that it is not worth pursuing a role in which “her ideas and career growth prospects are limited, and [she] considers resigning.” Check out the entire video here:
Thompson’s story of Tom and Eva shows that even though today’s youth do maintain the same life-long ambitions as their predecessors, they operate quite differently and value different environments than older generations. And unfortunately, since current societal systems are dominated by members of the older generations, they are not necessarily adapted to the needs or desires of younger generations. For this reason, Kelley Williams Brown, a New York Times bestselling author, claims that millennials and members of other younger generations “aren’t really entitled as everyone claims they are — they are are just distrustful of the system that doesn’t really match their values and are therefore devoting themselves to what they can actually control in their lives.”
So, yes, millennials and Generation-Y-ers are different than older generations. For other reasons why today’s youth differ from older generations, read this:
Our current societal systems are not adapted to younger generations. The result of this mismatch between young people and their environment is that today’s youth are not reaching their creative potential. In fact, a recent study about creativity and cognitive skills among millennials found that one of the main traits employers seek when hiring younger employees is diligence. One important measure of diligence is the Cognitive Reflection Test, for which achieving a high score depends more on effortful thinking rather than intuition. The scientists carrying out this study, however, discovered that effortful thinking often comes at the expense of creativity, and thus many employers hire people who think too much while creating too little. So not only do our systems inhibit creativity in the way they are structured, but the recruiters, those who are shaping the future of our system, are hiring at the expense of creativity. Yikes.
For more information, please contact me at sfd9@georgetown.edu. To read more, you can purchase my book, “When Birds Swim” on Amazon in paperback or Kindle.
