Generation Y

[fmwheel]

I am a Priest trying to understand how to communicate things of faith and morals to a generation Y that is so living in a world foreign to me.
Any books on the matter that might be helpful ?

 

[1ke]

Grown Up Digital by Michael Tapscott is very good. I just read it about 2 months ago when it first came out. It covers all aspects of this digital generation, not just employment as most books on the topic do.

He does have some liberal bias that shows up now and again in his assumptions and conclusions-- but his book is based on mountains of data collected over a period of years and is, on the whole, an excellent book.

Employing Generation Why by Eric Chester is also very good. It’s more geared towards HR/Managers, but still has good info.

Those are the only two that I’ve read so I will not recommend those I haven’t. However, you might search on Amazon.com for the term Millenial as well as Generation Y and read the reviews on the books listed there for other suggestions.

 

[Liberanosamalo]

Dear Fr. Mike:
The poor little dears are lost in a world of instant gratification, instant communication, refusal to obey just because someone says so, pagans to the right and pagans to the left.

God bless you for trying to reach out to them. As a mother, all I can say is they are actually INTERESTED in sermons where you SPEAK THE HARD TRUTHS. They are sick of “Love God. God loves you.” They got that **** from Barney.

They need to know HOW to love God and what God expects of them. They have a million possessions but a sense of emptiness and a lack of focus. Many of them come from homes where the parents are less than interested in them. They are brilliant when it comes to technology but absolutely clueless when it comes to theology.

They need priests who take a personal interest in them, bother to learn their names and make them see faith as relevant. By the way, they have the attention span of gnats. If you want to communicate with them, you have to txt them and spll lke this.

No books here. I’m still trying to figure them out and they’re my children!~

 

[survive]

First of all, be sure you have your generations straight.
The Depression Baby Generation was conceived between the Crash of 1929 and the beginning of WWII. I think we all know what their childhoods were like. Someone conceived in the middle of that time, around 1934, would be born in '35, five in '40, a few years too young to be the WWII Generation, and a bobby-soxer in the pre-rock-era.
The Silent Generation was conceived in the war itself. They are a brief and small generation. They grew up in a tight-lipped, spartan time and got less attention than most others did. Someone born in 1942 was in high school when elvis was on TV and a young adult when the style was to be married right out of high school.
The Older Boom was conceived between D-Day and 1954. They had the last of the spartan childrearing of the midcentury but the first of the “childhood as highly marketable protected separate world” treatment and were considered unusually innocent and well-cared-for, though they lived in a crowded world and some had to stand up in class for lack of seats. These are the ones who went to Woodstock and Haight Street.
The Younger Boom was conceived from about 1954 to the assassination of JFK. These are the kids who learned about rocket science in junior high school and incorporated disco steps into their cheerleading routines. They’re the ones who were starting to vote in the Carter/Ford or Carter/Reagan election cycles, and MTV was made for this generation at first.
I’m X. Generation X was conceived between the death of JFK and the resignation of Nixon. We grew up in constant change and were often treated as adults from the earliest days it was possible to be, sometimes as preschoolers, made our own lunches, discussed political theories with middle-aged people on the bus and were exposed to porn in the streets. We learned to try hard for what we want and let things roll past us if we don’t need to deal with them, and to take responsibiltiy for avoiding strangers ourselves. We’re often seen as bland and often oddly considered the younger generation even though some of us are grandparents. Someone born in 1965, an early X’er, would turn 44 this year. That’s older than some of my grandparents were when I was born, and neither I nor, I think, either of my parents is a firstborn. The youngest X people are going to turn 34 this year. Some people have grandkids at that age.
Generation Y was conceived between the resignation of Nixon and the re-election of Reagan as the 80’s recession began lifting, gangs went nationwide and the scare over missing children made a new crop of parents rethink the hands-off childrearing we had gone through. Remember flashcard babies? That’s Gen Y. Safety playgrounds, nursery monitors, Nintendo running pads, brain-stimulating abstract art toys, and paranoia. They were born from 1975 to 1985. Someone five years old in 1985 was 12 in 1992 when someone that young might have gone to a rave or several, had alien stickers on their skateboards and had the grunge sound in their classrooms form early days. Many went into collective mourning when Curt Cobain died. They turned 23 to 33 last year.
Then came the Millennial Generation. You might mean these folks. They were conceived between the re-election of Reagan and the Y2K panic, inclusive. An upswing from the Baby Bust, they looked like a new boom. Born as early as '85 or as late as 2000, they missed Y2K. They’re between fourth grade and 22. A child born in the middle of that period, 1992, say, would be in kindergarten in '97 when e-mail hit the daily comics pages, trying to learn the multiplication tables from a computer program at home when 9-11 happened, worrying about what to wear to middle school when the US entered Iraq again, too young to know it wasn’t our first war there, and envying kids with text features on their cellphones when Katrina, Sudan and a monsoon were all over the news. They grew up in a time when flashy books and DVDs were telling parents to regain control in the home; however lightly the parents took that advice, I have a feeling the kids didn’t mostly agree with it. Their school environments openly opposed parental authority in a lot of cases. Standards went from low, low, low to moderate suddenly when they were in school and shook some up. It’s likely many see authority and academic standards as something foreign and a power trip adults go on arbitrarily. They live without grammar, logic or rhetoric and certianly without history. That’s my observation. A way to get through might be exposure to examples of people who did exciting things and what it takes to achieve, and some may have a hunger for history and context. They’d have to be shown why they should try to do something hard or accept authority before learning other things.

 

[Liberanosamalo]

Survive… you are so right! I have a relative who is a military officer. We’re X babies. But the Millennial kids are very different. They don’t follow orders, even in the military. You have to sit and explain to them why they need to follow the order. Even if not following it can get someone killed or maimed.



This generation grew up with Clinton talking about oral sex when they were in grade school. Morality has a very different meaning to them.

Many of them have us hyper responsible Xers as parents. But a lot of them have leftover Boomers who finally had kids before the bioclock ran out, and so they are hippie babies whose parents don’t know how to parent and they didn’t grow up with rules.

The problems occur when an Xer’s kids go play with the Boomer’s kids and the Boomers think doing weed with their kid is cool, because they want their kid to be with a parent the first time they have that experience. It’s surreal.

 

[Sarabande]

First of all, be sure you have your generations straight.​

Generation Y was conceived between the resignation of Nixon and the re-election of Reagan as the 80’s recession began lifting, gangs went nationwide and the scare over missing children made a new crop of parents rethink the hands-off childrearing we had gone through. Remember flashcard babies? That’s Gen Y. Safety playgrounds, nursery monitors, Nintendo running pads, brain-stimulating abstract art toys, and paranoia. They were born from 1975 to 1985. Someone five years old in 1985 was 12 in 1992 when someone that young might have gone to a rave or several, had alien stickers on their skateboards and had the grunge sound in their classrooms form early days. Many went into collective mourning when Curt Cobain died. They turned 23 to 33 last year.

Wow! That was certainly an interesting lesson!!! I always thought my husband and I were Gen X-ers. Well, we’re most definitely Gen. Y. We’re not old enough to be Gen X. Thanks for the lesson!

 

[PaulinVA]

I prefer the 1955 to 1965 group being called Generation Jones. As Wikipedia says:

The name “Generation Jones” has several connotations, including: a large anonymous generation, and a “Keeping up with the Joneses” competitiveness borne from this generation’s populous birth years. The connotation, however, which is perhaps best known stems from the slang word “jones” or “jonesing”, which means a yearning or craving. Jonesers were the people who as teens in the 1970’s made this slang word popular, but beyond this historical claim, many believe the concept of jonesing is among this generation’s key collective personality traits. Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the optimistic 1960’s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the pessimistic 1970’s, leaving them with a certain unrequited, jonesing quality.

In demographic terms, Generation Jones was part of the baby boom which ended in the early 1960s. However, the events stereotypically associated with generational discussion of Boomers, including protests over civil rights and the Vietnam war and the emergence of rock music took place while the members of Generation Jones were unborn, still children or early teenagers. This is the situation described by Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious, who said that he had missed the Summer of Love because he was too busy playing with his Action Man. Thus the early life experience of this group was more similar, in many respects, to that commonly imputed to Generation X. Generation Jones is thus associated with pop icons such as Pong, Rubik’s Cube, and MTV.

 

[Nepenthe]

As a full-on genXer, yeah, I do notice some differences. They WERE marketed to for instant-gratification at a criminal level, but a lot of them have gotten wise to those tactics. There are also much more of them than there were of my generation, and actually seem to listen to us - they know they’ve gotten a raw deal, but they are working hard to make it less raw than the one we got!

As they are hitting adulthood, I’m seeing a lot more unwillingness to get into debt, for one thing, and serious concern over their financial futures, as well they should be concerned! Gens X and Y work together pretty well when we examine our common interests and discuss life issues (like rejecting corporate culture, etc), and I hope we continue to support each other. I saw this coming, oh, 20-25 years ago, and slowly, it’s coming together better than I feared. So, here’s hoping!

What can I say, I’m 40 years old and still a wild-eyed idealist!

 

[survive]

I prefer the 1955 to 1965 group being called Generation Jones. As Wikipedia says:

The name “Generation Jones” has several connotations, including: a large anonymous generation, and a “Keeping up with the Joneses” competitiveness borne from this generation’s populous birth years. The connotation, however, which is perhaps best known stems from the slang word “jones” or “jonesing”, which means a yearning or craving. Jonesers were the people who as teens in the 1970’s made this slang word popular, but beyond this historical claim, many believe the concept of jonesing is among this generation’s key collective personality traits. Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the optimistic 1960’s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the pessimistic 1970’s, leaving them with a certain unrequited, jonesing quality.

In demographic terms, Generation Jones was part of the baby boom which ended in the early 1960s. However, the events stereotypically associated with generational discussion of Boomers, including protests over civil rights and the Vietnam war and the emergence of rock music took place while the members of Generation Jones were unborn, still children or early teenagers. This is the situation described by Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious, who said that he had missed the Summer of Love because he was too busy playing with his Action Man. Thus the early life experience of this group was more similar, in many respects, to that commonly imputed to Generation X. Generation Jones is thus associated with pop icons such as Pong, Rubik’s Cube, and MTV.

Thanks – I was trying to fit the Sex Pistols in with G-Jones:thumbsup: but I couldn’t come up with a reference off the top of my head – quote or birthdate or any such thing. Disco was for them, but so were early metal, guitar rock, 70’s punk etc. They invented the 80’s New Wave and hip-hop-club style. They were often seen as the cynical half of the boom, whereas their elders were the idealistic half. We were something in between cynical (how sick I got of the party-dominating 55-65 babies in the mid-80’s assaulting us while we tried to talk and dance ) and idealistic (don’t remind me how naive 45-55-borns looked when anyone in a trailing white robe came to town "accepting donations for enlightenment). We were trying to find the idealism level that wouldn’t equal being used by movements and gurus and con artists so much. We sought a practical way to live so we could live.

 

[ChristIsTheWay]

First of all, be sure you have your generations straight…Generation Y was conceived between the resignation of Nixon and the re-election of Reagan as the 80’s recession began lifting, gangs went nationwide and the scare over missing children made a new crop of parents rethink the hands-off childrearing we had gone through. Remember flashcard babies? That’s Gen Y…They were born from 1975 to 1985.

Actually, the precise definition of years for Generation Y is by no means certain or set in stone. Some estimates place them as late as 2001. The range I normally see when reading about this generation is 1976-2001.

 

[LeonBloy]

Father,
Do you have a facebook page? Would you be interested in having one? I think it is an awesome social networking tool, and there are tons of pro-life Catholic groups.

You could start by having a facebook page and asking kids to “friend” you. Then you can post anything–from blogs to other websites of interest to Catholics. Kids can comment on them, and it is a great tool for discussing things and making new connections.

On the topic of generations: there isn’t a huge difference between Gen X and Gen Y. I am technically born in the Gen Y, but relate to Gen X more (maybe because of my older siblings?)… anyway, there isn’t a hard and fast line between the two.
Gen Y is just another name for millennials–it is the same generation. I think of it as millennials are the kids of the boomers. I don’t consider myself a millennials or Gen Y because my parents are older and not boomers. I identify with Gen X in a positive sense.

Also, I think the media coverage of millennials is a brilliant PR campaign on the part of Boomers to make their kids seem better then Gen Xers (you know us, just a bunch of slackers…).

One thing about Gen X vs. millennials is that millennials just accept technology as a great thing, where as Gen Xers remember the time before technology and the internet, and sort of view technology with some suspicion… (With ideas of Blade Runner, etc. in mind).

 

[pentecostbaby]

I’m a solid Gen Yer, as is my husband. And both of us teach Millenials at a university, and hang out with lots of them at our university parish.
Here are my suggestions:
Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. Especially Twitter (this is too young even for me!). Get a cell phone, and txt wo spllng stff. It’s easy - just be lazy and drop all your vowels.
Don’t water down the faith! So many people make that mistake. Tell them about it straight; reach back into tradition. Kids really want Adoration, meditative prayer like the Rosary and the Divine Mercy chaplet, a way to offer up their suffering. But they DON’T KNOW HOW. You have to teach this stuff from the basics, and start small. For example, try 5-10 minutes of Adoration at a time, with specifics of what to do (read the Bible, pray this prayer, etc.). Start with the Divine Mercy chaplet rather than the Rosary; they have short attention spans, and starting meditative prayer demands a longer one. They need to get used to the act of it before they can sustain it (this is from personal experience).
Blog. Blog about all kinds of stuff, from popular culture to religion. Relate it all to God.
Get to know the world they live in.Listen to their music. Watch some of their TV, even though it’s pretty bad (in the US, we have the-N channel, which airs Degrassi). You need to do this so you can realize the terrible pressures, the lack of respect for life, and the insane materialism they live with.
Encourage them to move away from that materialism. Be an example of it. They know that stuff isn’t the end of existence, but they’ve never seen anyone who lives that ideal.
Most of all, you need to live for Christ. You need to be that example of someone who gives up all for Him, who strives to live in holiness. Christ can speak for Himself .
Preach about obedience. They need to learn obedience to the Church and how to submit their wills to God’s. No one talks about this, and our world is in sore need of it.
Give them the saints!
And wear your clerics. There’s a certain authority that comes from it.
I’ll keep you in my prayers.

 

[Nepenthe]

Now that’s not necessarily so. I was messing around with electronics and computing hardware (dumpsterdiving behind any Radioshacks I could, and one glorious summer in Silicon Valley ), machine languages, LISP, Assembler, Forth and so on by the age of eleven to thirteen. I didn’t mistrust technology - I wanted to truly understand it intimately and not just accept it as magic. And Blade Runner was and probably remains my favorite movie - I saw it in the theater, and instantly recognized that this would be the defining aesthetic for much of my generation, and have probably watched it hundreds of times. I was and am very scholarly with surrealistic and speculative fiction as well - Philip K **** and JG Ballard influenced me as much as Calvino, Borges, and Kafka, all this in third grade!

Perhaps I was just a quirky visionary, but there were a LOT of genXers a lot like me, and musically, the first album I bought with my own money (I had saved my quarters for years, since I also had to buy my own ragged clothing from garage sales and such) was The Ramones’ Rocket to Russia when I was still prepubescent, and you bet it changed my life…and I knew I had become an elder when Joey, Johnny and DeeDee passed away, and I mourn them still. By the way, Lux Interior passed away from a heart condition just last week, and the Cramps were every bit as important to underground, independent and punk music as the Ramones were - and poor Ivy, hope she’s holding on okay.

But I remain an audiophile and futurist to this day, constantly searching out new and obscure music from all over the world. I remember learning to use a mostly-analog soundboard when I was twelve, and I’ll always be fascinated by arts and technology.

Yeah, I’m tooting my own horn here, but more, I’m praising the vision and hard work of the Post-Boomer generations. Calling us ‘Slackers’ was not only cruel, but just plain wrong.

 

[ChristIsTheWay]

Here is an interesting article that discusses Generation Y, its experiences, etc.: oberlin.edu/stupub/ocreview/2006/12/08/features/Understanding_Generation_Y.html

College admissions offices, employers and marketing companies are going into a frenzy over Generation Y, a cohort of individuals characterized as Generation X on steroids. Generation Y includes those born between the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1990s, although some experts believe these dates to be debatable. Several other terms for this group have been tossed around, including Echo Boomers, Millenium Generation, iGeneration, Einstein Generation and Google Generation.

Such names define the world in which Generation Y has grown up, a world with diverse Internet resources, iPods, MySpace and intense multi-tasking — simultaneously chatting on AIM, finishing a problem set, watching television and listening to music. These kids are the kids of the Baby Boomers, heavily immersed in a digital world.

Some demographers view the 1986 Challenger explosion and the fall of the Berlin Wall as the first major events that older Generation Yers will remember, separating them from Generation X. The fall of the Soviet Union and the First Gulf War serves as the midpoint and the 9/11 terrorist attacks as the endpoint. The current Iraq War is the war this generation will likely identify with along with other recent occurrences such as Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean Tsunami and the Columbine High School shooting.

 

[LeonBloy]

y.

Yeah, I’m tooting my own horn here, but more, I’m praising the vision and hard work of the Post-Boomer generations. Calling us ‘Slackers’ was not only cruel, but just plain wrong.

Have you actually seen the movie Slacker? It is quite good. I think folks take the title and think they know what the movie is about. But it is actually about questioning everything–and a kind of existential anxiety born of a society that is too complacent, too comfortable. And the Gen Xers are NOT comfortable with it… they are invisible to the world and appear as Slackers, when they are actually engaged in difficult, philosophical work.

You seek to understand the technology and build it. Gen Y doesn’t. That is the difference–you are questioning it and engaging it as you use it and seek to create new things. Gen Y (of course this is a gross generalization) doesn’t question it, doesn’t test it, they just embrace it and use it. But they don’t really care what is going within it, they just use it.

 

[Sarabande]

You seek to understand the technology and build it. Gen Y doesn’t. That is the difference–you are questioning it and engaging it as you use it and seek to create new things. Gen Y (of course this is a gross generalization) doesn’t question it, doesn’t test it, they just embrace it and use it. But they don’t really care what is going within it, they just use it.

I think that does depend on what part of Gen Y you are in - and as you pointed out you were making a gross generalization. My husband and I, as well as my brother, are earlier in the Gen Y category. I find that many of our friends and other people in our generation do question the new technology and have similar thoughts about this. I think because although we were young, we were still old enough to remember what it was like not to have those things. In fact, I was one to fight any kind of new technology. Spending half my childhood in our family mountain home and with family who loved everything about our forests, fields and ponds which we were fortunate enough to own, I thought that technology took us away from being close to nature.

In gradeschool I did not like “progress”. I wanted to do everything in the “old-fashioned” way, mostly because I was really into reruns of Little House on the Prairie, and reading books like Little Women, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens’ novels, Mark Twain, etc. and all the books by Lucy Maude Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables - remember the “Wonderworks” movie of it on PBS?). I wanted to learn how to be as self-sufficient as possible and was very enamored by a more simple way of life. I thought that new technology would make us lazy, and by the time I was 12 through 22 was really depressed at how fast life was moving by and how much people took our own youth for granted.

My parents were not really into new technology so much, so we never had a computer when we were growing up, (I didn’t get one until my junior year of college), we didn’t have cable my entire childhood through college, whereas all of my friends had it and they grew up with MTV, Nickelodian, etc., we didn’t have a microwave until I was 17, we were one of the last families to own a VCR, etc.

Our young sister, on the other hand, who is also in Gen Y is a bit different with this. She was still a little girl when my parents finally got all the things I mentioned above that we didn’t have. She immediately embraces any and all new technology that comes along. Many of her friends are fairly similar with this.

That all said, I’ve grown to like and accept some new technology. I had to learn how to use a computer once I got to college and now, I’m proficient in it. I love email, but I lament the fact that so many of my friends no longer write real hand-written letters - including myself. All this new technology has just made our lives even busier… and I suppose that is one thing which I totally fit in with Gen Y. I am a super-multi-tasker. But I think most women, no matter what generation, are really good at multi-tasking. My husband isn’t good at it all.

 

[LeonBloy]

I would put you in Gen X because of your experience of this both with and without computers.

 

[PaulinVA]

When I started work, I had a favorite pen, and I would use legal pads to create documents (I worked for a government contractor) that I would send to the typing pool and then correct the result with red pens. We would literally cut out different parts of the document and paste them on new pages to make the final document.

I think I feel really old.

Hey - you kids get off my lawn.

 

[Liberanosamalo]

Generation X can write cursive.

Generation Y can’t.

 

[Nepenthe]

Bloy, of course I have watched Slacker, Linklater’s very first movie (he’s the kid off the bus at the beginning), right when it was first limitedly released (one of the plusses about living in Berkeley/Oakland was the incredible indie and artfilm scene!

I love that flick and pretty much all his work. And to an extent, I agree with you about gens X and Y…but genY really does seem to be, of their own accord certainly with no encouragement, to be clueing up. This isn’t a case of genXbeing entirely altruistic…there are so few of us and we are so poor that we NEED them, as badly as they NEED us to share our experience and tactics.

We make excellent allies, and I would be omitting the truth if I said many of us in genX didn’t see this coming and prepare for it - but not as any kind of evil plot - rather to help refoster unity and idealism. This is what freedom and foresight are all about.

Also, ack, you should see my handwriting. Slight natural left-preference,but since my chirality didn’t show any preference for a few years and not much at all ever, I just got taught to be a dextral for practicality. Result = Mongolian Cluster—ah–group sex? Sure, I’ll go ahead and mangle Carlin in an attempt to avoid punitive action! But I can wrench, hammer, lowlevelcode and logicprobe like nobody’s business to this day, dated though I am. There will always be a need for people who know it isn’t magical and know C++ (although picking the machine up a couple feet and dropping it often works surprisingly well…but that takes wizard skills.