As seen in Time USA TODAY The Atlantic The Wall Street Journal and on CBS This Morning BBC
PBS CNN and NPR iGen is crucial reading to understand how the children teens and young
adults born in the mid-1990s and later are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors
and from any other generation. With generational divides wider than ever parents educators
and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young
adults. Born in the mid-1990s up to the mid-2000s iGen is the first generation to spend their
entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other
activities iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps contributing to their
unprecedented levels of anxiety depression and loneliness. But technology is not the only
thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them they are also different in
how they spend their time how they behave and in their attitudes toward religion sexuality
and politics. They socialize in completely new ways reject once sacred social taboos and want
different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations they are
obsessed with safety focused on tolerance and have no patience for inequality. With the first
members of iGen just graduating from college we all need to understand them: friends and
family need to look out for them businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to
them colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen
also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their
views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes so goes our nation—and the world.
