argumentative essay about generation gap

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Essay on Generation Gap: 100, 200, 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Nov 29, 2023

Have you ever found it difficult to communicate your ideas and emotions to those who are either younger or older than you? Do you find it difficult to persuade your elders to take action? Do you ever feel that your priorities, perspective, and way of thinking are completely different from those of your own parents? Sounds relatable? You are not alone! This is what the generation gap looks like. The generation gap refers to the differences in our opinions, points of view, and perspectives about other people. The generation gap takes place due to developments and changes around the world. Adapting to a new environment has always been in human nature. In the beginning, we all struggle to adapt to new changes, but, with time we adapt ourselves and cope with the new conditions. Here are some sample essay on the generation gap for school students.

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay on Generation Gap in 100 Words
• 2 Essay on Generation Gap in 200 Words
• 3 Essay on Generation Gap in 300 Words

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Ans: The generation gap is a natural phenomenon where people with different values and perspectives clash. What one views as good might not be the same for someone from a different age group. The generation gap is caused due to factors such as technological advancements, the evolution of societal values and cultural norms, changes in communication styles, and other factors. The generation gap is a broader concept and it is essential for us to embrace and bridge this gap.

The generation gap can be bridged by fostering mutual understanding, education, putting yourself in other’s shoes, and emphasizing common values of respect, trust, kindness, etc.

Ans: Older generations can teach the value of time and respecting elders. They can encourage us to follow our passion, take care of our health, not to sweat small stuff, not to judge people, etc.

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Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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Essay on Generation Gap for Students and Children

500+ words essay on generation gap.

We all know that humans have been inhabiting this earth for a long time. Over time, times have changed and humans have evolved. The world became developed and so did mankind. Each generation has seen new changes and things that the older generations have not.

This is exactly what creates a generation gap. It is how one generation differs from the other. It is quite natural for a generation gap to exist. Why? Because it shows that mankind is evolving and changing for the better. However, sometimes this gap impacts our lives wrongly.

Generation Gap – Impact on Relations

It is always nice to have fresh ideas and points of view. It is a clear indication of how we are advancing and developing at a great level. However, when this clash of ideas and viewpoints becomes gets too much, it becomes a matter of worry.

The most common result of this clash is distanced relations. Generally, a generation gap is mostly seen between parents and kids. It shows that parents fail to understand their kids and vice versa. The parents usually follow the traditions and norms.

Likewise, they expect their children to conform to the societal norms as they have. But the kids are of the modern age with a broad outlook. They refuse to accept these traditional ways.

This is one of the main reasons why the conflict begins. They do not reach a solution and thus distance themselves because of misunderstandings. This is a mistake at both ends. The parents must try not to impose the same expectations which their parents had from them. Similarly, the kids must not outright wrong their parents but try to understand where this is coming from.

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How to Bridge the Gap?

As we all know there is no stronger bond than that of a kid and his parents. Thus, we must understand its importance and handle it with care. Nowadays, it is very disheartening to see that these precious relationships are getting strained due to a generation gap.

In other words, just because there is a difference of opinion does not mean that people give up on relationships. It is high time both parties understand that no one is completely right or wrong. They can both reach a middle ground and sort it out. Acceptance and understanding are the keys here.

Moreover, there must be a friendly relationship between parents and kids. The kids must be given the space to express themselves freely without the fear of traditional thinking. Likewise, the children must trust their parents enough to indulge them in their lives.

Most importantly, there is a need to set boundaries between the two parties. Instead of debating, it is better to understand the point of view. This will result in great communication and both will be happy irrespective of the generation gap.

In short, a generation gap happens due to the constant changes in the world. While we may not stop the evolvement of the world, we can strengthen the bond and bridge the gap it creates. Each person must respect everyone for their individuality rather than fitting them into a box they believe to be right.

FAQs on Generation Gap

Q.1 How does the generation gap impact relationships?

A.1 The generation gap impacts relationships severely. It creates a difference between them and also a lack of understanding. All this results in strained relationships.

Q.2 How can we bridge the generation gap?

A.2 We can bridge the generation gap by creating a safe environment for people to express themselves. We must understand and accept each other for what they are rather than fitting them in a box.

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• Essay on Generation Gap

What is the Generation Gap?

Generation Gap is a term given to the gap or age difference between two sets of people; the young people and their elders, especially between children and their parents. Everything is influenced by the change of time- the age, the culture, mannerism, and morality. This change affects everyone. The generation gap is an endless social phenomenon. Every generation lives at a certain time under certain circumstances and conditions. So, all generations have their own set of values and views. Every generation wants to uphold the principles they believe in. This is a problem that has continued for ages.

People born in different periods under different conditions have their views based on the circumstances they have been through. The patterns of life have been changing continuously according to time. Everyone wants to live and behave in his way and no one wants to compromise with his or her values and views. There has always been a difference in attitude or lack of understanding between the younger and older generations. This attitude has augmented the generation gap and it is becoming wider day by day. This gap now has started impacting our lives in the wrong way. 

It is always good to have a wide range of ideas, views, and opinions. It indicates how we are developing and advancing but sometimes this becomes worrisome when the views and ideas are not accepted by both generations. Parents create a certain image in their minds for their children. They want to bring up their children with values that they have been brought up with and expect their children to follow the same. Parents want children to act following their values, as they believe, it is for their benefit and would do well for them. 

Children on the other hand have a broader outlook and refuse to accept the traditional ways. They want to do things their way and don’t like going by any rulebook. Mostly, young people experience conflict during their adolescence. They are desperately searching for self-identity. Parents at times fail to understand the demands of this fast-paced world. Ultimately, despite love and affection for each other both are drained out of energy and not able to comprehend the other. Consequently, there is a lack of communication and giving up on relationships.

Different Ways to Reduce the Generation Gap

Nothing in the world can be as beautiful as a parent-child relationship. It should be nurtured very delicately and so it is important to bridge the gap between the two generations. It is time to realize that neither is completely right nor wrong. Both generations have to develop more understanding and acceptance for each other. Having a dialogue with each other calmly, with the idea of sorting out conflict amicably in ideas, changing their mindset for each other, and coming to a middle ground can be the most helpful instrument in bridging the gap between the two generations. 

Spending more time with each other like family outings, vacations, picnics, shopping, watching movies together could be some effective ways to build up a strong bond with each other. Both the generations need to study the ways of the society during their growing period and have mutual respect for it. To reduce the friction between the two generations, both parents and children have to give space to each other and define certain boundaries that the latter should respect. 

The generation gap occurs because society is constantly changing. It is the responsibility of both generations to fill this gap with love, affection, and trust. Both generations should have mutual respect for the views and opinions that they uphold and advance cautiously with the development of society.

Conclusion 

The generation gap is a very critical concept that occurs because of the different natures of every person. No one can end this generation gap but obviously, you can opt for some way in which it can be reduced. 

There should be efforts made by both sides to get a better relationship between two people. The generation gap may cause conflict between families but if you try to understand the thinking of another person and choose a path in between then you can get a happy living family.

No one wants to live in a tense environment and you always need your elders with yourself no matter what, they are the ones who care for you, they may have different ways of expressing their love and care for you and you might feel awkward but you need to understand them and their ways. Having your elders with you in your family is a blessing, you can talk with them and let them know your views and understand your ways to approach a particular situation.

FAQs on Essay on Generation Gap

1. What do you Understand by Generation Gap?

The gap between the old people and the young is called the generation gap. The generation gap is not only the age difference between young people, their parents, and grandparents, but it is also caused by differences in opinion between two generations; it can be differences in beliefs, differences in views like politics, or differences in values. Therefore a generational gap is a conflict in thoughts, actions, and tastes of the young generation to that of older ones. We can have a good relationship even with a generational gap. All we need to do is understand others' way of thinking.

2. Why Does the Generation Gap Occur?

The generation gap occurs due to differences in views and opinions between the younger and older generation. Both generations want to uphold the principles they believe in. The reason for the generation gap is not only age but it can be because of reasons like:

Difference in beliefs

Difference in interests

Difference in opinion

In today's time, the generational gap has caused conflict between many families. The generational gap occurs because of the following reasons:

Increased life expectancy

The rapid change in society

Mobility of society

The generation gap can be reduced if we work on it with patience and understanding. So whatever may be the reason for the occurrence of the generation gap it can be overcome and a happy relationship can be built between two different people. 

3. How Should the Gap in the two Generations be Bridged?

The gap between the two generations should be bridged by mutual respect, understanding, love, and affection for each other. They both should come to a middle ground and sort things out amicably. Here are a few tips to help children to improve the differences because of the generational gap between their parents and them:

Try to talk more often even if you do not have the time, make time for it.

Spend more time with your parents regularly to develop and maintain your relationship. 

Make them feel special with genuine gestures. 

Share your worries and problems with them.

Respect is the most important thing which you should give them.

Be responsible 

Have patience and understand their perspective in every situation.

4. How Does the Generation Gap Impact Relationships?

Generation gaps disrupt the family completely. Due to a lack of understanding and acceptance, the relationship between the older and the younger generations become strained. Most families can not enjoy their family lives because of disturbed routines either they are too busy with work or other commitments, they are unable to spend time with each other. This increases the generational gap between children and parents. The child is unable to communicate his or her thoughts because of lack of communication and parents are unable to understand what the child is thinking; this causes more differences between them.

The generation gap can cause conflict between a relation of child,  parent, and grandparent. Because of the generational gap, there is a huge difference in the living pattern and pattern in which a person responds to a difficult situation. Elder people often take every situation on themselves and try to seek out the things for others but in today’s generation they believe in working only for themself they do not get bothered by others and they don’t try to seek things for others. But if we work to understand the differences and get a path out in between then the conflicts can be reduced and so the generational gap will not be that bothersome.

5. Where can I find the best essay on Generation Gap?

The generation gap can have a different point of view. Each person has a different way of thinking. Vedantu provides you with the best study material to understand the topic well and write about it. Vedantu is a leading online learning portal that has excellent teachers with years of experience to help students score good marks in exams. The team of Vedantu provides you with study material by subject specialists that have deep knowledge of the topic and excel in providing the best knowledge to their students to get the best results. Visit Vedantu now! 

Generation Gap: Childhood, Adulthood, Old Age Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

The relations between the generations were always complicated. The older people always indicate that it their time the situation was different and people behaved in the different way. At the same period, the younger generation says about the impact of the modern tendencies, changes of the way of life that give an opportunity to claim that the younger generation is more advanced.

However, as it clearly seen though the history, such attitude of the generations to each other was always the same. Therefore, although the technical facilities, cultural and economical changes impact the society, it is possible to claim that there are no significant changes in the relations between the generations, they are neither improving, nor getting worse.

Analyzing the cultural aspect within the conflict between generations, it is necessary to admit that such cultural issues as art, music, fashion have a tendency of the permanent change. Thereby, it is obvious that the different generations which do not have the same tastes and fashion, cannot understand each other’s needs. And especially this aspect is sharp within the relations between teenagers and their parents.

Today, the tradition hierarchy of family is different than two centuries ago. Elder members of family feel themselves as the intruders. From the other side, their children can easily send parents to the social houses. During the past century, the patterns of solidarity in friend and family relations had been changed (Allan 2008).

The transformation of the family and friendship aspects influences the Western communities since 1970s. People got more freedom and, as the result, the gap in the relations between young people and their parents increased (Thompson 1998).

From the other hand, the flexibility in the constructing of personal life and relations within the social groups is also increased. As the diversity in the priorization provided more facilities and made the personal choice more complex, the cultural changes of the past century can be considered as positive.

The relations between adult and old people can be also considered from the mentioned below position (Edmunds & Turner 2002, Huntley 2006). Thus, in the article Building Positive Relationships (2008) is written about the relations between 57-years old woman and her 89-years old mother.

As it understandable from the article, the conflict between the generations still exists, however, due to the physical disability of old mother, both woman try to find a solution and to rebuild their relations.

Being in the difficult situation, old people need more attention. For adult people, “the decline of a parent’s health, death of one parent or financial pressures often mean an aging parent will need increased social and emotional support or services from family – such as help with meals, cleaning, transportation or financial matters” ( Building Positive Relationships 2010).

In this context, it is necessary to admit the position of Klinenberg (2001) who indicates the tendency of increase of a number of old people who are estranged from their previous social circle and who live alone without a strong connection with their children.

Many old people have to live in the social establishments due to unwillingness of their younger relatives to care about them. This tendency demonstrates that the traditional cultural attitude to family, marriage and old parent is changed.

Obviously, the economic conditions influence generations. Wyn (2006) explores the rupture of the educational and employment outcomes as the peculiarity of the current situation of the young generation.

As it was normal order of things, today, such disbalance is widely spread that makes young people face with a number of problems while searching a job as “the transition processes for the majority of young people born after 1970 are different from those of the majority of their parents’ generation” (Wyn 2006, p. 6).

From this point of view, it is possible to notice that the younger generation has a significant reason to claim that the current situation on the labor market is more difficult than it was years ago.

According to the statistics provided by Wyn, “by the year 2000, at the age of 27, 68 per cent of the respondents had achieved permanent jobs, and 76 per cent were in full-time jobs” (Wyn 2006, p. 10). However, from the other hand, the elder generation has much more problems within this aspect. Although old people are more experienced, many employers prefer to accept a young person than the elder one.

Analyzing Mannheim’s essay The Problem of Generation , Pilcher (1994) indicates that “the notion of generation being widespread in everyday language as a way of understanding differences between age groups and as a means of locating individuals and groups within historical times” ( Mannheim’s sociology of generations: an undervalued legacy , p. 481).

Thereby, it is possible to say that the present problem existed during the history and never turned into the tendency of improvement or worsening. Different social models, tendencies, fashion and other issues dictate the rules of the relations between generations. Although a number of researchers indicate the increasing way of generation gap, history demonstrates that such tendencies were presented at all times.

Today, teenagers and young people feel themselves free and independent as the world is controlled by them. The number of old people is growing day by day as the result of the demographic characteristics. The present century requires more fast reaction, creative ideas and flexibility which are typical for younger generation. Wyn claims that today the process for becoming adult is different and emerging.

The typical issues of those changes are “an increasingly flexible labor market, dissolution of occupational boundaries, deregulation of labour, and increases in contrast, part-time employment” (2006, p. 12). At the same period, the cultural aspect also changes. Thus, the attitude of the young people to marriage and family is different while the level of fertility reduces.

Privatization of educational services diminishes the capability of young people to get better education. Changed attitude to the elder relatives led to a big number of the old people abandoned in the social houses. Generation gap is the key moment within the understanding of the relations between generations.

There is possible to say about the sharp conflict which is concerned with different parts of life and particularly with economic and cultural aspects. Young adults and elder people have the different possibilities to find a job, to increase their financial status according to the current tendencies in the society and they have different cultural tastes and traditional values.

However, although the cultural and economical changes impact the society and the generation gap is significant, it is necessary to claim that the relations between the generations are neither improving, nor getting worse. The historical knowledge provides the demonstration that such situation was always actual and topical.

Reference List

Allan, G 2008, ‘Flexibility, Friendship and Family’, Personal Relationships , 15: 1-16.

Building Positive Relationships 2010. Web.

Edmunds, J & Turner, B. S 2002, ‘Introduction: Generations, War and Intellectuals’, Generations, Culture and Society , Open University Press, Buckingham, pp. 1-23.

Huntley, R 2006, ‘From X to Y’, The World According to Y: Inside the New Adult Generation , Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, pp. 1-23.

Klinenberg, E 2001, ‘Dying Alone: The Social Production of Urban Isolation’, Ethnography , 4:2, pp. 501-531. Web.

Pilcher,J (1994), ‘Mannheim’s sociology of generations: an undervalued legacy’, BJC, Vol. 45, Issue 3: pp. 481-495.

Thompson, K 1998, ‘The Classic Moral Panic: Mods and Rockers’, Moral Panics , Routledge, London, pp. 31-56.

Wyn, J 2004, ‘Becoming Adult in the 2000s: New Transitions and New Careers’, Family Matters , 68: pp. 6-12.

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IvyPanda. (2019, May 28). Generation Gap: Childhood, Adulthood, Old Age. https://ivypanda.com/essays/generation-gap-childhood-adulthood-old-age-essay/

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1. IvyPanda . "Generation Gap: Childhood, Adulthood, Old Age." May 28, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/generation-gap-childhood-adulthood-old-age-essay/.

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Essay on Generation Gap

Students are often asked to write an essay on Generation Gap in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Generation Gap

Understanding the generation gap.

The term ‘Generation Gap’ refers to the differences in opinions, values, and perspectives between individuals of different generations. It often causes misunderstandings and conflicts.

The Generation Gap is primarily caused by rapid social and technological changes. Each generation grows up in a different era, experiencing unique events and advancements.

The Effects

This gap can lead to conflicts, with each generation struggling to understand the other’s viewpoint. However, it also fosters diversity and innovation.

While the Generation Gap can be challenging, it is a natural part of societal growth. Understanding and respect can bridge this gap.

250 Words Essay on Generation Gap

The term “generation gap” refers to the chasm that separates the thoughts, behaviors, and attitudes of one generation from another. This gap is primarily due to the rapid pace of societal and technological change, which often leads to a disconnect between generations.

The Causes of the Generation Gap

The primary cause of the generation gap is the rapid pace of change. Each generation grows up in a different socio-economic and technological environment, which shapes their worldview and experiences. For instance, the advent of digital technology has significantly influenced the values, attitudes, and expectations of younger generations compared to their parents and grandparents.

Implications of the Generation Gap

The generation gap can lead to misunderstandings and conflicts, as different generations may have divergent views on issues such as politics, religion, and social norms. However, it also fosters diversity and innovation, as each generation brings unique perspectives and ideas.

Bridging the Gap

Bridging the generation gap requires empathy, open-mindedness, and effective communication. Understanding and respecting the viewpoints of different generations can lead to a more harmonious coexistence and facilitate the exchange of ideas and knowledge.

In conclusion, the generation gap is a complex phenomenon that reflects the dynamic nature of society. While it can lead to conflict, it also represents an opportunity for growth and innovation. By fostering dialogue and understanding, we can bridge this gap and harness the strengths of each generation.

500 Words Essay on Generation Gap

Introduction, the essence of the generation gap.

The Generation Gap is not a new phenomenon. It has been present for centuries, but its prominence has grown due to the accelerated pace of societal change. The older generation, molded by traditional values, often finds it difficult to understand the perspectives of the younger generation, who are shaped by modernity and rapid technological advancements. This dissonance can lead to conflicts, misunderstandings, and a general sense of disconnect between generations.

Causes of the Generation Gap

One of the primary causes of the Generation Gap is the rapid pace of technological and societal change. The advent of the internet, smartphones, and social media has drastically altered the way the younger generation communicates, socializes, and perceives the world. This shift is often incomprehensible to the older generation, who grew up in an era of face-to-face interactions and traditional communication methods.

Impacts of the Generation Gap

The Generation Gap can have both positive and negative impacts. On the negative side, it can lead to misunderstandings, conflicts, and a lack of emotional connectivity between generations. It can also result in a lack of respect for the older generation’s wisdom and experience, and a disregard for the younger generation’s innovative ideas and perspectives.

On the positive side, the Generation Gap can spur societal progress. The younger generation’s fresh perspectives and innovative ideas, combined with the older generation’s wisdom and experience, can lead to societal advancement when these generations learn to understand and respect each other’s viewpoints.

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Essay on Generation Gap 500+ Words

The concept of a “generation gap” is like a bridge that connects people of different ages but often feels incomplete. It refers to the differences in opinions, values, and perspectives between different generations, such as grandparents, parents, and children. In this essay, we will explore the generation gap and why it’s essential to bridge it.

The Evolution of Society

Society evolves over time, and with it, people’s beliefs and values change. This evolution leads to differences in how different generations view the world. For example, our grandparents might have grown up in a world with different technologies, social norms, and political climates, shaping their perspectives in ways that differ from ours.

Communication Challenges

One major aspect of the generation gap is communication. Older generations often find it challenging to understand the language, slang, or technology used by younger generations. This communication barrier can lead to misunderstandings and even conflicts within families and society.

Shaping Values and Beliefs

Our values and beliefs are deeply influenced by the time in which we grow up. For instance, our parents may have experienced different historical events and societal changes that molded their outlook on life. These differences in values and beliefs can lead to disagreements and debates within families and communities.

Technology Divide

Technology plays a significant role in widening the generation gap. Younger generations are often more tech-savvy, while older generations may struggle to adapt to rapidly changing digital landscapes. This technological divide can lead to a sense of alienation and frustration.

The Importance of Perspective

Despite the challenges posed by the generation gap, it’s essential to recognize that different perspectives can be valuable. Each generation brings its own wisdom and experiences to the table. By bridging the gap, we can learn from one another and create a more balanced and inclusive society.

Bridging the Gap

To bridge the generation gap, open and respectful communication is key. Instead of dismissing each other’s views, we should actively listen and seek to understand where others are coming from. This approach can foster empathy and create a sense of unity among generations.

Conclusion of Essay on Generation Gap

In conclusion, the generation gap is a natural consequence of the evolving world we live in. While it may lead to differences in values, beliefs, and communication, it’s essential to view these distinctions as opportunities for growth and learning. By actively working to bridge the generation gap through respectful dialogue and understanding, we can create a society that values the wisdom of all generations and embraces the diversity of perspectives. Ultimately, the generation gap can become a bridge of unity, connecting us all in a tapestry of shared experiences and knowledge.

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It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations”

The discovery that you can make money marketing merchandise to teen-agers dates from the early nineteen-forties, which is also when the term “youth culture” first appeared in print. There was a reason that those things happened when they did: high school. Back in 1910, most young people worked; only fourteen per cent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were still in school. In 1940, though, that proportion was seventy-three per cent. A social space had opened up between dependency and adulthood, and a new demographic was born: “youth.”

The rate of high-school attendance kept growing. By 1955, eighty-four per cent of high-school-age Americans were in school. (The figure for Western Europe was sixteen per cent.) Then, between 1956 and 1969, college enrollment in the United States more than doubled, and “youth” grew from a four-year demographic to an eight-year one. By 1969, it made sense that everyone was talking about the styles and values and tastes of young people: almost half the population was under twenty-five.

Today, a little less than a third of the population is under twenty-five, but youth remains a big consumer base for social-media platforms, streaming services, computer games, music, fashion, smartphones, apps, and all kinds of other goods, from motorized skateboards to eco-friendly water bottles. To keep this market churning, and to give the consulting industry something to sell to firms trying to understand (i.e., increase the productivity of) their younger workers, we have invented a concept that allows “youth culture” to be redefined periodically. This is the concept of the generation.

The term is borrowed from human reproductive biology. In a kinship structure, parents and their siblings constitute “the older generation”; offspring and their cousins are “the younger generation.” The time it takes, in our species, for the younger generation to become the older generation is traditionally said to be around thirty years. (For the fruit fly, it’s ten days.) That is how the term is used in the Hebrew Bible, and Herodotus said that a century could be thought of as the equivalent of three generations.

Around 1800, the term got transplanted from the family to society. The new idea was that people born within a given period, usually thirty years, belong to a single generation. There is no sound basis in biology or anything else for this claim, but it gave European scientists and intellectuals a way to make sense of something they were obsessed with, social and cultural change. What causes change? Can we predict it? Can we prevent it? Maybe the reason societies change is that people change, every thirty years.

Before 1945, most people who theorized about generations were talking about literary and artistic styles and intellectual trends—a shift from Romanticism to realism, for example, or from liberalism to conservatism. The sociologist Karl Mannheim, in an influential essay published in 1928, used the term “generation units” to refer to writers, artists, and political figures who self-consciously adopt new ways of doing things. Mannheim was not interested in trends within the broader population. He assumed that the culture of what he called “peasant communities” does not change.

Nineteenth-century generational theory took two forms. For some thinkers, generational change was the cause of social and historical change. New generations bring to the world new ways of thinking and doing, and weed out beliefs and practices that have grown obsolete. This keeps society rejuvenated. Generations are the pulse of history. Other writers thought that generations were different from one another because their members carried the imprint of the historical events they lived through. The reason we have generations is that we have change, not the other way around.

There are traces of both the pulse hypothesis and the imprint hypothesis in the way we talk about generations today. We tend to assume that there is a rhythm to social and cultural history that maps onto generational cohorts, such that each cohort is shaped by, or bears the imprint of, major historical events—Vietnam, 9/11, COVID . But we also think that young people develop their own culture, their own tastes and values, and that this new culture displaces the culture of the generation that preceded theirs.

Today, the time span of a generational cohort is usually taken to be around fifteen years (even though the median age of first-time mothers in the U.S. is now twenty-six and of first-time fathers thirty-one). People born within that period are supposed to carry a basket of characteristics that differentiate them from people born earlier or later.

This supposition requires leaps of faith. For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations. (Do you have less in common with your parents than with people you have never met who happen to have been born a few years before or after you?) The theory also seems to require that a person born in 1965, the first year of Generation X, must have different values, tastes, and life experiences from a person born in 1964, the last year of the baby-boom generation (1946-64). And that someone born in the last birth year of Gen X, 1980, has more in common with someone born in 1965 or 1970 than with someone born in 1981 or 1990.

Everyone realizes that precision dating of this kind is silly, but although we know that chronological boundaries can blur a bit, we still imagine generational differences to be bright-line distinctions. People talk as though there were a unique DNA for Gen X—what in the nineteenth century was called a generational “entelechy”—even though the difference between a baby boomer and a Gen X-er is about as meaningful as the difference between a Leo and a Virgo.

You could say the same things about decades, of course. A year is, like a biological generation, a measurable thing, the time it takes the Earth to orbit the sun. But there is nothing in nature that corresponds to a decade—or a century, or a millennium. Those are terms of convenience, determined by the fact that we have ten fingers.

Yet we happily generalize about “the fifties” and “the sixties” as having dramatically distinct, well, entelechies. Decade-thinking is deeply embedded. For most of us, “She’s a seventies person” carries a lot more specific information than “She’s Gen X.” By this light, generations are just a novel way of slicing up the space-time continuum, no more arbitrary, and possibly a little less, than decades and centuries. The question, therefore, is not “Are generations real?” The question is “Are they a helpful way to understand anything?”

Bobby Duffy, the author of “The Generation Myth” (Basic), says yes, but they’re not as helpful as people think. Duffy is a social scientist at King’s College London. His argument is that generations are just one of three factors that explain changes in attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. The others are historical events and “life-cycle effects,” that is, how people change as they age. His book illustrates, with a somewhat overwhelming array of graphs and statistics, how events and aging interact with birth cohort to explain differences in racial attitudes, happiness, suicide rates, political affiliations—you name it, for he thinks that his three factors explain everything.

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Duffy’s over-all finding is that people in different age groups are much more alike than all the talk about generations suggests, and one reason for all that talk, he thinks, is the consulting industry. He says that, in 2015, American firms spent some seventy million dollars on generational consulting (which doesn’t seem that much, actually). “What generational differences exist in the workplace?” he asks. His answer: “Virtually none.”

Duffy is good at using data to take apart many familiar generational characterizations. There is no evidence, he says, of a “loneliness epidemic” among young people, or of a rise in the rate of suicide. The falling off in sexual activity in the United States and the U.K. is population-wide, not just among the young.

He says that attitudes about gender in the United States correlate more closely with political party than with age, and that, in Europe, anyway, there are no big age divides in the recognition of climate change. There is “just about no evidence,” he says, that Generation Z (1997-2012, encompassing today’s college students) is more ethically motivated than other generations. When it comes to consumer boycotts and the like, “ ‘cancel culture’ seems to be more of a middle-age thing.” He worries that generational stereotypes—such as the characterization of Gen Z-ers as woke snowflakes—are promoted in order to fuel the culture wars.

The woke-snowflake stereotype is the target of “Gen Z, Explained” (Chicago), a heartfelt defense of the values and beliefs of contemporary college students. The book has four authors, Roberta Katz, Sarah Ogilvie, Jane Shaw, and Linda Woodhead—an anthropologist, a linguist, a historian, and a sociologist—and presents itself as a social-scientific study, including a “methodological appendix.” But it resembles what might be called journalistic ethnography: the portrayal of social types by means of interviews and anecdotes.

The authors adopt a key tenet of the pulse hypothesis. They see Gen Z-ers as agents of change, a generation that has created a youth culture that can transform society. (The fact that when they finished researching their book, in 2019, roughly half of Gen Z was under sixteen does not trouble them, just as the fact that at the time of Woodstock, in 1969, more than half the baby-boom generation was under thirteen doesn’t prevent people from making generalizations about the baby boomers.)

Their book is based on hour-long interviews with a hundred and twenty students at three colleges, two in California (Stanford and Foothill College, a well-regarded community college) and one in the U.K. (Lancaster, a selective research university). The authors inform us that the interviewees were chosen “by word of mouth and personal networking,” which sounds a lot like self-selection. It is, in any event (as they unapologetically acknowledge), hardly a randomized sample.

The authors tell us that the interviews were conducted entirely by student research assistants, which means that, unless the research assistants simply read questions off a list, there was no control over the depth or the direction of the interviews. There were also some focus groups, in which students talked about their lives with, mostly, their friends, an exercise performed in an echo chamber. Journalists, or popular ethnographers, would at least have met and observed their subjects. It’s mystifying why the authors felt a need to distance themselves in this way, given how selective their sample was to begin with. We are left with quotations detached from context. Self-reporting is taken at face value.

The authors supplemented the student interviews with a lexical glossary designed to pick out words and memes heavily used by young people, and with two surveys, designed by one of the authors (Woodhead) and conducted by YouGov, an Internet polling company, of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in the United States and the U.K.

Where there is an awkward discrepancy between the survey results and what the college students say in the interviews, the authors attempt to explain it away. The YouGov surveys found that ninety-one per cent of all persons aged eighteen to twenty-five, American and British, identify as male or female, and only four per cent as gender fluid or nonbinary. (Five per cent declined to answer.) This does not match the impression created by the interviews, which suggest that there should be many more fluid and nonbinary young people out there, so the authors say that we don’t really know what the survey respondents meant by “male” and “female.” Well, then, maybe they should have been asked.

The authors attribute none of the characteristics they identify as Gen Z to the imprint of historical events—with a single exception: the rise of the World Wide Web. Gen Z is the first “born digital” generation. This fact has often been used to stereotype young people as screen-time addicts, captives of their smartphones, obsessed with how they appear on social media, and so on. The Internet is their “culture.” They are trapped in the Web. The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” emphatically reject this line of critique. They assure us that Gen Z-ers “understand both the potential and the downside of technology” and possess “critical awareness about the technology that shapes their lives.”

For the college students who were interviewed (although not, evidently, for the people who were surveyed), a big part of Gen Z culture revolves around identity. As the authors put it, “self-labeling has become an imperative that is impossible to escape.” This might seem to suggest a certain degree of self-absorption, but the authors assure us that these young people “are self-identified and self-reliant but markedly not self-centered, egotistical, or selfish.”

“Lily” is offered to illustrate the ethical richness of this new concern. It seems that Lily has a friend who is always late to meet with her: “She explained that while she of course wanted to honor and respect his unique identity, choices, and lifestyle—including his habitual tardiness—she was also frustrated by how that conflicted with her sense that he was then not respecting her identity and preference for timeliness.” The authors do not find this amusing.

The book’s big claim is that Gen Z-ers “may well be the heralds of new attitudes and expectations about how individuals and institutions can change for the better.” They have come up with new ways of working (collaborative), new forms of identity (fluid and intersectional), new concepts of community (diverse, inclusive, non-hierarchical).

Methodology aside, there is much that is refreshing here. There is no reason to assume that younger people are more likely to be passive victims of technology than older people (that assumption is classic old person’s bias), and it makes sense that, having grown up doing everything on a computer, Gen Z-ers have a fuller understanding of the digital universe than analog dinosaurs do. The dinosaurs can say, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” but Gen Z-ers can say, “You don’t understand what you’re getting.”

The claim that addiction to their devices is the cause of a rise in mental disorders among teen-agers is a lot like the old complaint that listening to rock and roll turns kids into animals. The authors cite a recent study (not their own) that concludes that the association between poor mental health and eating potatoes is greater than the association with technology use. We’re all in our own fishbowls. We should hesitate before we pass judgment on what life is like in the fishbowls of others.

The major problem with “Gen Z, Explained” is not so much the authors’ fawning tone, or their admiration for the students’ concerns—“environmental degradation, equality, violence, and injustice”—even though they are the same concerns that almost everyone in their social class has, regardless of age. The problem is the “heralds of a new dawn” stuff.

“A crisis looms for all unless we can find ways to change,” they warn. “Gen Zers have ideas of the type of world they would like to bring into being. By listening carefully to what they are saying, we can appreciate the lessons they have to teach us: be real, know who you are, be responsible for your own well-being, support your friends, open up institutions to the talents of the many, not the few, embrace diversity, make the world kinder, live by your values.”

I believe we have been here before, Captain. Fifty-one years ago, The New Yorker ran a thirty-nine-thousand-word piece that began:

There is a revolution under way . . . It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions, and social structure are changing in consequence. Its ultimate creation could be a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. This is the revolution of the new generation.

The author was a forty-two-year-old Yale Law School professor named Charles Reich, and the piece was an excerpt from his book “The Greening of America,” which, when it came out, later that year, went to No. 1 on the Times best-seller list.

Reich had been in San Francisco in 1967, during the so-called Summer of Love, and was amazed and excited by the flower-power wing of the counterculture—the bell-bottom pants (about which he waxes ecstatic in the book), the marijuana and the psychedelic drugs, the music, the peace-and-love life style, everything.

He became convinced that the only way to cure the ills of American life was to follow the young people. “The new generation has shown the way to the one method of change that will work in today’s post-industrial society: revolution by consciousness,” he wrote. “This means a new way of living, almost a new man. This is what the new generation has been searching for, and what it has started to achieve.”

So how did that work out? The trouble, of course, was that Reich was basing his observations and predictions on, to use Mannheim’s term, a generation unit—a tiny number of people who were hyperconscious of their choices and values and saw themselves as being in revolt against the bad thinking and failed practices of previous generations. The folks who showed up for the Summer of Love were not a representative sample of sixties youth.

Most young people in the sixties did not practice free love, take drugs, or protest the war in Vietnam. In a poll taken in 1967, when people were asked whether couples should wait to have sex until they were married, sixty-three per cent of those in their twenties said yes, virtually the same as in the general population. In 1969, when people aged twenty-one to twenty-nine were asked whether they had ever used marijuana, eighty-eight per cent said no. When the same group was asked whether the United States should withdraw immediately from Vietnam, three-quarters said no, about the same as in the general population.

Most young people in the sixties were not even notably liberal. When people who attended college from 1966 to 1968 were asked which candidate they preferred in the 1968 Presidential election, fifty-three per cent said Richard Nixon or George Wallace. Among those who attended college from 1962 to 1965, fifty-seven per cent preferred Nixon or Wallace, which matched the results in the general election.

The authors of “Gen Z, Explained” are making the same erroneous extrapolation. They are generalizing on the basis of a very small group of privileged people, born within five or six years of one another, who inhabit insular communities of the like-minded. It’s fine to try to find out what these people think. Just don’t call them a generation.

Most of the millions of Gen Z-ers may be quite different from the scrupulously ethical, community-minded young people in the book. Duffy cites a survey, conducted in 2019 by a market-research firm, in which people were asked to name the characteristics of baby boomers, Gen X-ers, millennials (1981-96), and Gen Z-ers. The top five characteristics assigned to Gen Z were: tech-savvy, materialistic, selfish, lazy, and arrogant. The lowest-ranked characteristic was ethical. When Gen Z-ers were asked to describe their own generation, they came up with an almost identical list. Most people born after 1996 apparently don’t think quite as well of themselves as the college students in “Gen Z, Explained” do.

In any case, “explaining” people by asking them what they think and then repeating their answers is not sociology. Contemporary college students did not invent new ways of thinking about identity and community. Those were already rooted in the institutional culture of higher education. From Day One, college students are instructed about the importance of diversity, inclusion, honesty, collaboration—all the virtuous things that the authors of “Gen Z, Explained” attribute to the new generation. Students can say (and some do say) to their teachers and their institutions, “You’re not living up to those values.” But the values are shared values.

And they were in place long before Gen Z entered college. Take “intersectionality,” which the students in “Gen Z, Explained” use as a way of refining traditional categories of identity. That term has been around for more than thirty years. It was coined (as the authors note) in 1989, by the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. And Crenshaw was born in 1959. She’s a boomer.

“Diversity,” as an institutional priority, dates back even farther. It played a prominent role in the affirmative-action case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, in 1978, which opened the constitutional door to race-conscious admissions. That was three “generations” ago. Since then, almost every selective college has worked to achieve a diverse student body and boasts about it when it succeeds. College students think of themselves and their peers in terms of identity because of how the institution thinks of them.

People who went to college in an earlier era may find this emphasis a distraction from students’ education. Why should they be constantly forced to think about their own demographic profiles and their differences from other students? But look at American politics—look at world politics—over the past five years. Aren’t identity and difference kind of important things to understand?

And who creates “youth culture,” anyway? Older people. Youth has agency in the sense that it can choose to listen to the music or wear the clothing or march in the demonstrations or not. And there are certainly ground-up products (bell-bottoms, actually). Generally, though, youth has the same degree of agency that I have when buying a car. I can choose the model I want, but I do not make the cars.

Failure to recognize the way the fabric is woven leads to skewed social history. The so-called Silent Generation is a particularly outrageous example. That term has come to describe Americans who went to high school and college in the nineteen-fifties, partly because it sets up a convenient contrast to the baby-boom generation that followed. Those boomers, we think—they were not silent! In fact, they mostly were.

The term “Silent Generation” was coined in 1951, in an article in Time —and so was not intended to characterize the decade. “Today’s generation is ready to conform,” the article concluded. Time defined the Silent Generation as people aged eighteen to twenty-eight—that is, those who entered the workforce mostly in the nineteen-forties. Though the birth dates of Time’s Silent Generation were 1923 to 1933, the term somehow migrated to later dates, and it is now used for the generation born between 1928 and 1945.

So who were these silent conformists? Gloria Steinem, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Noam Chomsky, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, Martin Luther King, Jr., Billie Jean King, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Berry Gordy, Amiri Baraka, Ken Kesey, Huey Newton, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol . . . Sorry, am I boring you?

It was people like these, along with even older folks, like Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Pauli Murray, who were active in the culture and the politics of the nineteen-sixties. Apart from a few musicians, it is hard to name a single major figure in that decade who was a baby boomer. But the boomers, most of whom were too young then even to know what was going on, get the credit (or, just as unfairly, the blame).

Mannheim thought that the great danger in generational analysis was the elision of class as a factor in determining beliefs, attitudes, and experiences. Today, we would add race, gender, immigration status, and any number of other “preconditions.” A woman born to an immigrant family in San Antonio in 1947 had very different life chances from a white man born in San Francisco that year. Yet the baby-boom prototype is a white male college student wearing striped bell-bottoms and a peace button, just as the Gen Z prototype is a female high-school student with spending money and an Instagram account.

For some reason, Duffy, too, adopts the conventional names and dates of the postwar generations (all of which originated in popular culture). He offers no rationale for this, and it slightly obscures one of his best points, which is that the most formative period for many people happens not in their school years but once they leave school and enter the workforce. That is when they confront life-determining economic and social circumstances, and where factors like their race, their gender, and their parents’ wealth make an especially pronounced difference to their chances.

Studies have consistently indicated that people do not become more conservative as they age. As Duffy shows, however, some people find entry into adulthood delayed by economic circumstances. This tends to differentiate their responses to survey questions about things like expectations. Eventually, he says, everyone catches up. In other words, if you are basing your characterization of a generation on what people say when they are young, you are doing astrology. You are ascribing to birth dates what is really the result of changing conditions.

Take the boomers: when those who were born between 1946 and 1952 entered the workforce, the economy was surging. When those who were born between 1953 and 1964 entered it, the economy was a dumpster fire. It took longer for younger boomers to start a career or buy a house. People in that kind of situation are therefore likely to register in surveys as “materialistic.” But it’s not the Zeitgeist that’s making them that way. It’s just the business cycle. ♦

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Old Versus Young: The Cultural Generation Gap

Younger, more diverse generations promise to change all aspects of American society.

In this Issue:

• Winter 2018 View All Other Issues
• Generations: People are living and working longer—changing the world
• Six Generations Moving Forward Together
• Crunch: Definining Generations
• Foreword: How Are Generations Named?
• The Generation Gap
• Getting More From a Longer Life
• Five Questions: Teaching the Next Generation
• Lessons From the Greatest Generation
• As the World Ages
• Generation X and the American Dream
• Millennials Aren’t Kids Anymore
• View All Other Issues

If demography is destiny, the United States—much more than its peers—is on the cusp of great change. That change is due to a deep cultural generation gap at play, which will alter all aspects of American society within the coming decade.

Driving this generational gap is a “diversity explosion” in the United States, which began in 2011 when, for the first time in the history of the country, more minority babies than white babies were born in a year. Soon, most children in the U.S. will be racial minorities: Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and other nonwhite races. And, in about three decades, whites will constitute a minority of all Americans. This milestone signals the beginning of a transformation from the mostly white baby-boom culture that dominated the nation during the last half of the 20th century to the more globalized, multiracial country that the United States is becoming.   

As the younger, more diverse part of the population reaches adulthood, clear gaps will develop between its economic interests and politics and those of the whiter, older generations . This divide will result in contests over local expenditures—for example, over whether to spend money on schools or senior health facilities—and those contests may evolve into culture clashes. Yet if demography is truly destiny, America's workforce, politics, and place on the world stage will soon be changed forever.

Data Points

America's “new minorities”—particularly Hispanics and Asians —are becoming an increasingly strong thread in the social fabric of the United States. While this has been growing clearer for some time, recent information from the census and elsewhere shows how quickly these minorities are transforming the character of the nation’s youth. Consider the change in the U.S. population under age 18 in the first decade of the 2000s: From 2000 to 2010, the population of white children declined by 4.3 million while the child population in each of the newer minority groups—Hispanics, Asians, and people of two or more races—increased. Hispanics registered the largest absolute increase in children , 4.8 million. Were it not for Hispanics, the nation’s child population would have declined. And in 2010, slightly more than half of children under age 5 were white, while the oldest age group—those 85 and older—was 85 percent white. This diversification of the U.S. population from the bottom up holds more than just demographic significance. It reflects an emerging cultural divide between the young and the old as they adapt to change in different ways. Different age groups represent different generations, which were raised and became adults in specific eras and may be more or less receptive to the cultural changes brought about by new racial groups. 

When viewed broadly, there is a sharp racial distinction between the baby boomers and their elders, and the younger generations—the millennials and young members of Generation X and their children, who constitute the population under the age of 35. Baby boomers and seniors are more than 70 percent white, with blacks representing the largest racial minority. In con-trast, millennials and young Gen Xers (largely under the age of 35) and their children are more than 40 percent minority, with Hispanics constituting the largest share of their minority population. A 2011 Pew Research Center poll shows that only 23 percent of baby boomers and seniors regard the country’s growing population of immigrants as a change for the better and that 42 percent see it as a change for the worse. More than one-half of white baby boomers and seniors said the growing number of newcomers from other countries represents a threat to traditional U.S. values and customs. 

The resistance of baby boomers to demographic change may seem surprising. This much-celebrated generation came to embody the image of middle America during the second half of the last century. Conceived during the prosperous post−World War II period, they brought a rebellious, progressive sensibility to the country in the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond. With the help of the programs of the Great Society, they became the most well-schooled generation to date and the epitome of America’s largely white, suburban middle class, with which most of today’s adults now identify. 

Yet the baby boomers also came of age at a moment when the United States was becoming more insular than it had been before. Growing up in mostly white, segregated suburbs, white baby boomers had less exposure to immigrants and foreign wars than their parents did. Between 1946 and 1964, the years of the baby boom, the immigrant share of the U.S. population shrank to an all-time low (under 5 percent), and the immigrants who did arrive were largely white Europeans. Although baby boomers were interested in righting domestic wrongs, such as racial discrimination, and busting glass ceilings in the workplace, they did not have much interaction with people from other countries. The cultural generation gap continues to appear when baby boomers and seniors are compared with the younger segment of the U.S. population, whose members are more likely to be first- or second-generation Americans of non-European ancestry and to be bilingual.

Between 1946 and 1964, the years of the baby boom, the immigrant share of the U.S. population shrank to an all-time low (under 5 percent), and the immigrants who did arrive were largely white Europeans.

Underpinning the generational divide are shifts in what demographers call old-age dependency (the population age 65 and over as a percent of the labor force–age population) and child dependency (the population under age 18 as a percent of the labor force–age population), which now have a distinct racial dimension. Both historically and internationally, the number of children dependent on the labor force–age population has been larger than the number of dependent retirees. However, in quickly aging countries where birth rates are declining and life expectancy is rising, seniors are increasing the numbers of the “dependent” population. That is of concern in the United States, given that government programs aiding the elderly, including those for medical care, cost substantially more than those aiding children. The cultural generation gap between the young and the old can exacerbate the competition for resources because the rise in the number of senior dependents is occurring more rapidly among whites than among minorities, for whom dependent children is a larger issue.

A look at the total U.S. population helps illustrate this. The growth of the senior population is affected by increased life expectancy and, more importantly, the aging of the baby boomers. From 2010 to 2030, the senior population is projected to grow by 84 percent. In contrast, the labor force–age population (ages 18 to 64) will grow by only 8 percent and the population under age 18 will grow by just 3 percent. Therefore, although new minorities and immigrants are driving the increases in the younger and labor force-age populations, the growth of the senior population is driven by the mostly white baby boomers. The dependency ratios show the shifts expected by 2040. Youth dependency was almost twice the level of old-age dependency in 2010 (38 versus 21) and will increase only slightly during the following three decades, while old-age dependency will rise by well over one-half—making seniors a substantial portion of the non-working-age population.

Yet this shift is far more dramatic for whites than for minorities. The comparison of dependen-cy ratios for whites and Hispanics shows their likely relative priorities with regard to spending on children versus seniors. For whites, youth dependency is lower than the U.S. total and is not much larger than white old-age dependency in 2010 (32 versus 26). In fact, by 2020, the old-age dependency ratio for whites will exceed the child dependency ratio, and for the two decades that follow, white seniors will outnumber white children. That stands in marked contrast to Hispanics, whose 2010 youth dependency ratio was 56 and whose old-age dependency ratio was only 9. Moreover, Hispanic youth dependency will remain well above 40 through 2040, even as the old-age dependency ratio inches up to 22. In other words, for at least the next three decades, Hispanic children will sharply outnumber Hispanic seniors. Although black and Asian youth dependency is not as marked as it is for Hispanics, it remains higher than senior dependency through at least 2030. Therefore there is no question that the primary concern of working-age Hispanics—and to a lesser extent Asians and blacks—will be their children rather than the older dependent population. For working-age whites, elderly dependents will be a primary concern as well as their own future well-being as they enter their retirement years. This demographic framework provides a concrete basis for considering the cultural generation gap and competition for government resources allocated to children and the elderly.

In discussing the long-term political ramifications of the generation gap, political writer Ronald Brownstein has framed it as a divide between “the gray and the brown,” wherein older whites, including aging baby boomers, favor smaller government investment in social support programs except for those, such as Social Security, that directly affect them. For these older voters, big government is associated with higher taxes, which primarily benefit younger demographic groups whose needs they do not fully appreciate. In contrast, surveys show that more diverse youth, particularly millennials, tend to support greater government spending on education, health, and social welfare programs that strongly affect young families and children. 

It is important for retiring baby boomers to understand that the solvency of government-supported retirement and medical care programs is directly dependent on the future productivity and payroll tax contributions of a workforce in which minorities, especially Hispanics, will dominate future growth. There is a well-recognized challenge in providing these future workers with the skills needed to make these contributions, and meeting that challenge requires public investment in education and related services. The dilemma, however, is that the largest government programs that directly benefit the elderly, such as Social Security and Medicare , are mostly financed by the federal government and are considered politically sacred by many. In contrast, programs for youth, such as education, are largely funded at the state and local levels and are far more vulnerable to economic downturns and budget cuts given that states, unlike the federal government, are required to balance their budgets annually. Therefore efforts to muster support for child-oriented programs require grassroots support across an often frag-mented political terrain. In the future, more young minorities will enter their prime voting years and both national political parties will need to balance the needs and concerns of new and old voters, particularly in regions of the country where the cultural generation gap is emerging.

"The cultural generation gap between the young and the old can exacerbate the competition for resources because the rise in the number of senior dependents is occurring more rapidly among whites than among minorities, for whom dependent children is a larger issue."

Although this gap is forming throughout the nation, the growth of the young new minority population and the steadier gains of the aging white population are occurring at different speeds in different regions. The most racially diverse and youthful populations are in states and met-ropolitan areas in the Southwest, Southeast, and major urban immigration centers where new minorities have had an established presence. A shorthand measure for what is happening in a state or metropolitan area is the difference between the percentage of seniors who are white and the percentage of children who are white. In 2010, 80 percent of the U.S. senior population and 54 percent of children were white, so the national gap was 26 percent. But among states, Arizona led the way, with a gap of 41 percent (83 percent of seniors and 42 percent of children were white). Nevada, California, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida were not far behind, with gap measures greater than 30. Among major metropolitan areas, the largest gaps were in Riverside, California; Phoenix; Las Vegas; and Dallas.

In contrast, large—mostly white—swaths of the country, including the noncoastal Northeast, Midwest, and Appalachia, are observing slow growth or even declines in their youth popula-tions while remaining home to large numbers of white baby boomers and seniors. The demo-graphic profiles of these regions, along with those of metropolitan areas such as Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis, will eventually converge with those of more diverse parts of the country. But in the interim, they will be adapting, often fitfully, to the changes occurring elsewhere. 

Still, the places where the cultural generation gap has generated the most contention are those where the gains in new minorities are large and recent. Arizona is emblematic because of its large gap and recent Hispanic growth of 175 percent from 1990 to 2010. In 2010, the state passed one of the strictest anti-immigration laws ever enacted, though it was later amended and portions of the law were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Provisions included requirements that residents carry papers verifying their citizenship; if they did not, they would be subject to arrest, detention, and potential deportation. 

A statewide poll taken at the time split along racial lines: Sixty-five percent of whites but only 21 percent of Hispanics were in favor of the new law. Similarly, the law was favored by 62 percent of those 55 and older (across all races) but only 45 percent of those under 35. Later, other states with recent Hispanic or new immigrant population gains, including Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Utah, proposed similarly strict immigration laws. 

As young new minorities continue to disperse outward from traditional gateways, the cultural generation gap will appear in communities of all sizes, but it will be widest in states where the growth of young minorities is new and the racial demographic profile of the younger generation differs most from that of the older generation.

Thus, on a variety of levels, the continuing spread of new minorities from the bottom up of the nation’s age distribution creates important opportunities for the growth and productivity of the nation’s population and workforce. But that spread also presents challenges in light of the sharp cultural shift that is taking place. The divide will require adaptation on all sides, and policymakers and citizens alike will need to approach these changes with a long view. Rather than seeing the inevitable changes as damaging to the American way of life, it will behoove the nation to consider the future of the country and prepare now for a country that will be majority-minority. 

William H. Frey is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and research professor with the Population Studies Center and Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. He is author of Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America, from which this essay is adapted.

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Parent, Adolescent, and Managing the Generation Gap

How to work toward mutual understanding with your teenager..

Posted July 9, 2018 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

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A college student in Thailand sent me some good questions about how to manage the generation gap between parents and teenagers.

What follows are the questions asked and my responses, not based on psychological research, but only expressive of my personal opinions as a practitioner.

Some people say the generation gap is a myth. What is your opinion on that?

The “generation gap” between parents and adolescents is real to the degree that each grows up in a different historical time and culture—imprinted by the tastes and values and icons and events that define that formative period in their lives when the impressionable adolescent begins the process of growing up.

What is the cause of it? Do we blame the parents, the children, or something else?

The generation gap is not to be “blamed” on anyone. It is a function of normal social change. Change is that process that constantly upsets and resets the terms of everyone’s existence all their lives.

Cultural differences between generations are emphasized when parents identify with the old, similar, familiar, traditional, and known, while their adolescent (at a later time) becomes fascinated and influenced by the new, different, unfamiliar, experimental, and unknown.

In most cases, the parents are culturally anchored in an earlier time and the adolescent in a later time. To some degree, social change culturally differentiates the generations. That is just how life is.

Obviously, in socially simpler, stable, low-change cultures where the young identify with parental roles they expect to imitate and occupy when grown-up, there is very little generation gap. Compare this to growing up in a very complex, rapidly changing culture where the old world of the parent stands in marked contrast to that of their adolescent.

For example: The parents grew up before the Internet revolution in one world of experience only—offline. However, their adolescent is growing up in two worlds—offline and online. Thus a profound generation gap can be created, even though parents have acquired online skills in their adulthood.

How does the generation gap affect the relationship between parents and children?

To the degree that parents can bridge the generational difference by showing an interest in the new, this can reduce the gap's potentially estranging influence.

For example, they can encourage a very powerful and esteem-endowing power reversal in their relationship if they treat the adolescent as an “expert” and themselves as "unknowing," with their adolescent as teacher and themselves as students.

For example, the parent might ask: “Can you help me learn to appreciate the music you love—it is so different from what I grew up with and became used to listening to?”

Or, the parent might ask: “Can you show me a little how to play the video game you and your friends so enjoy, because I would like to learn?”

Parents who can’t bridge cultural, generational differences with interest, but ignore or criticize them instead, are at risk of allowing these differences to estrange the relationship.

What should a teenager do when they feel that parents don't understand them?

Once children start separating from childhood , around ages 9 to 13, and start redefining themselves on the way to young adulthood, two avenues for growth are pursued. One is detaching from childhood and family for more freedom of action and independence; the other is differentiating from childhood and parents for more freedom of personal expression and individuality.

In one sense, having parents “not understand” the young person as well as they did in his or her childhood confirms that this adolescent transformation is underway. This is both affirming and lonely , so the adolescent is often ambivalent—wanting and not wanting to be understood by parents.

When young people feel that their parents don’t understand and would like them to, they can take the initiative. Being brave, they can say to parents: “There is something about my growing up that I believe you do not understand, and I would like you to appreciate. Could you listen while I try to explain, and then we can talk because this is important to me.”

When there's conflict, how can we make a compromise acceptable to both sides?

Where intergenerational conflicts arise over what is enjoyable to youth and offensive to adults, like cutting -edge media entertainment, treat conflict not as a power struggle over who will prevail, but as an opportunity to use discussion over a difference to increase communication and understanding in the relationship.

For adults, no authority is sacrificed by listening. Instead, valuable understanding can be gained when parents treat the adolescent not as a stubborn opponent to defeat, but as a valued informant who can help them know their teenager and her or his world more fully. Sometimes giving a hearing and fully listening is enough to ease parental concerns, and sometimes being given a hearing is enough for the adolescent to honor the parents' wishes.

Parents can explain: “We will be firm where we have to be, flexible and willing to compromise where we can, and in either case always want to give a complete hearing to whatever you have to say.”

Is there a way to minimize the effect of the generation gap?

I believe the best way to minimize the potentially estranging effects of the generation gap is for parents to treat their adolescent as a guide who can help them understand a time of growing up that can be quite culturally different from their own youth. When rearing adolescents, parental interest and willingness to listen count for a lot, while those parents who are more fully informed are often less fearful than parents who forbid discussion of what they don’t understand.

In addition, it can help parents and teenagers stay close when they share companionship doing what they still enjoy in common—whether participating in some traditional interests that still hold, eating out together, helping each other, going to movies, or just joking around about what both find funny.

This is the challenge of relating across the generation gap for them both: remaining communicatively connected as adolescence drives them apart—as it is meant to do.

Carl Pickhardt Ph.D. is a psychologist in private counseling and public lecturing practice in Austin, Texas. His latest book is Holding On While Letting Go: Parenting Your Child Through the Four Freedoms of Adolescence.

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• How to write an argumentative essay | Examples & tips

How to Write an Argumentative Essay | Examples & Tips

Published on July 24, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on July 23, 2023.

An argumentative essay expresses an extended argument for a particular thesis statement . The author takes a clearly defined stance on their subject and builds up an evidence-based case for it.

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Table of contents

When do you write an argumentative essay, approaches to argumentative essays, introducing your argument, the body: developing your argument, concluding your argument, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about argumentative essays.

You might be assigned an argumentative essay as a writing exercise in high school or in a composition class. The prompt will often ask you to argue for one of two positions, and may include terms like “argue” or “argument.” It will frequently take the form of a question.

The prompt may also be more open-ended in terms of the possible arguments you could make.

Argumentative writing at college level

At university, the vast majority of essays or papers you write will involve some form of argumentation. For example, both rhetorical analysis and literary analysis essays involve making arguments about texts.

In this context, you won’t necessarily be told to write an argumentative essay—but making an evidence-based argument is an essential goal of most academic writing, and this should be your default approach unless you’re told otherwise.

Examples of argumentative essay prompts

At a university level, all the prompts below imply an argumentative essay as the appropriate response.

Your research should lead you to develop a specific position on the topic. The essay then argues for that position and aims to convince the reader by presenting your evidence, evaluation and analysis.

• Don’t just list all the effects you can think of.
• Do develop a focused argument about the overall effect and why it matters, backed up by evidence from sources.
• Don’t just provide a selection of data on the measures’ effectiveness.
• Do build up your own argument about which kinds of measures have been most or least effective, and why.
• Don’t just analyze a random selection of doppelgänger characters.
• Do form an argument about specific texts, comparing and contrasting how they express their thematic concerns through doppelgänger characters.

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An argumentative essay should be objective in its approach; your arguments should rely on logic and evidence, not on exaggeration or appeals to emotion.

There are many possible approaches to argumentative essays, but there are two common models that can help you start outlining your arguments: The Toulmin model and the Rogerian model.

Toulmin arguments

The Toulmin model consists of four steps, which may be repeated as many times as necessary for the argument:

• Make a claim
• Provide the grounds (evidence) for the claim
• Explain the warrant (how the grounds support the claim)
• Discuss possible rebuttals to the claim, identifying the limits of the argument and showing that you have considered alternative perspectives

The Toulmin model is a common approach in academic essays. You don’t have to use these specific terms (grounds, warrants, rebuttals), but establishing a clear connection between your claims and the evidence supporting them is crucial in an argumentative essay.

Say you’re making an argument about the effectiveness of workplace anti-discrimination measures. You might:

• Claim that unconscious bias training does not have the desired results, and resources would be better spent on other approaches
• Cite data to support your claim
• Explain how the data indicates that the method is ineffective
• Anticipate objections to your claim based on other data, indicating whether these objections are valid, and if not, why not.

Rogerian arguments

The Rogerian model also consists of four steps you might repeat throughout your essay:

• Discuss what the opposing position gets right and why people might hold this position
• Highlight the problems with this position
• Present your own position , showing how it addresses these problems
• Suggest a possible compromise —what elements of your position would proponents of the opposing position benefit from adopting?

This model builds up a clear picture of both sides of an argument and seeks a compromise. It is particularly useful when people tend to disagree strongly on the issue discussed, allowing you to approach opposing arguments in good faith.

Say you want to argue that the internet has had a positive impact on education. You might:

• Acknowledge that students rely too much on websites like Wikipedia
• Argue that teachers view Wikipedia as more unreliable than it really is
• Suggest that Wikipedia’s system of citations can actually teach students about referencing
• Suggest critical engagement with Wikipedia as a possible assignment for teachers who are skeptical of its usefulness.

You don’t necessarily have to pick one of these models—you may even use elements of both in different parts of your essay—but it’s worth considering them if you struggle to structure your arguments.

Regardless of which approach you take, your essay should always be structured using an introduction , a body , and a conclusion .

Like other academic essays, an argumentative essay begins with an introduction . The introduction serves to capture the reader’s interest, provide background information, present your thesis statement , and (in longer essays) to summarize the structure of the body.

Hover over different parts of the example below to see how a typical introduction works.

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its critical benefits for students and educators—as a uniquely comprehensive and accessible information source; a means of exposure to and engagement with different perspectives; and a highly flexible learning environment.

The body of an argumentative essay is where you develop your arguments in detail. Here you’ll present evidence, analysis, and reasoning to convince the reader that your thesis statement is true.

In the standard five-paragraph format for short essays, the body takes up three of your five paragraphs. In longer essays, it will be more paragraphs, and might be divided into sections with headings.

Each paragraph covers its own topic, introduced with a topic sentence . Each of these topics must contribute to your overall argument; don’t include irrelevant information.

This example paragraph takes a Rogerian approach: It first acknowledges the merits of the opposing position and then highlights problems with that position.

Hover over different parts of the example to see how a body paragraph is constructed.

A common frustration for teachers is students’ use of Wikipedia as a source in their writing. Its prevalence among students is not exaggerated; a survey found that the vast majority of the students surveyed used Wikipedia (Head & Eisenberg, 2010). An article in The Guardian stresses a common objection to its use: “a reliance on Wikipedia can discourage students from engaging with genuine academic writing” (Coomer, 2013). Teachers are clearly not mistaken in viewing Wikipedia usage as ubiquitous among their students; but the claim that it discourages engagement with academic sources requires further investigation. This point is treated as self-evident by many teachers, but Wikipedia itself explicitly encourages students to look into other sources. Its articles often provide references to academic publications and include warning notes where citations are missing; the site’s own guidelines for research make clear that it should be used as a starting point, emphasizing that users should always “read the references and check whether they really do support what the article says” (“Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia,” 2020). Indeed, for many students, Wikipedia is their first encounter with the concepts of citation and referencing. The use of Wikipedia therefore has a positive side that merits deeper consideration than it often receives.

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An argumentative essay ends with a conclusion that summarizes and reflects on the arguments made in the body.

No new arguments or evidence appear here, but in longer essays you may discuss the strengths and weaknesses of your argument and suggest topics for future research. In all conclusions, you should stress the relevance and importance of your argument.

Hover over the following example to see the typical elements of a conclusion.

The internet has had a major positive impact on the world of education; occasional pitfalls aside, its value is evident in numerous applications. The future of teaching lies in the possibilities the internet opens up for communication, research, and interactivity. As the popularity of distance learning shows, students value the flexibility and accessibility offered by digital education, and educators should fully embrace these advantages. The internet’s dangers, real and imaginary, have been documented exhaustively by skeptics, but the internet is here to stay; it is time to focus seriously on its potential for good.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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An argumentative essay tends to be a longer essay involving independent research, and aims to make an original argument about a topic. Its thesis statement makes a contentious claim that must be supported in an objective, evidence-based way.

An expository essay also aims to be objective, but it doesn’t have to make an original argument. Rather, it aims to explain something (e.g., a process or idea) in a clear, concise way. Expository essays are often shorter assignments and rely less on research.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

The majority of the essays written at university are some sort of argumentative essay . Unless otherwise specified, you can assume that the goal of any essay you’re asked to write is argumentative: To convince the reader of your position using evidence and reasoning.

In composition classes you might be given assignments that specifically test your ability to write an argumentative essay. Look out for prompts including instructions like “argue,” “assess,” or “discuss” to see if this is the goal.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

Caulfield, J. (2023, July 23). How to Write an Argumentative Essay | Examples & Tips. Scribbr. Retrieved August 26, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/argumentative-essay/

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We always say that there is a generation gap and there always will be. What causes generation gap? Is there no way to strike a balance in the relations between two generations?

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To get an excellent score in the IELTS Task 2 writing section, one of the easiest and most effective tips is structuring your writing in the most solid format. A great argument essay structure may be divided to four paragraphs, in which comprises of four sentences (excluding the conclusion paragraph, which comprises of three sentences).

For we to consider an essay structure a great one, it should be looking like this:

• Paragraph 1 - Introduction
• Sentence 1 - Background statement
• Sentence 2 - Detailed background statement
• Sentence 3 - Thesis
• Sentence 4 - Outline sentence
• Paragraph 2 - First supporting paragraph
• Sentence 1 - Topic sentence
• Sentence 2 - Example
• Sentence 3 - Discussion
• Sentence 4 - Conclusion
• Paragraph 3 - Second supporting paragraph
• Paragraph 4 - Conclusion
• Sentence 1 - Summary
• Sentence 2 - Restatement of thesis
• Sentence 3 - Prediction or recommendation

Our recommended essay structure above comprises of fifteen (15) sentences, which will make your essay approximately 250 to 275 words.

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The governments should give each citizen a basic income so that they have enough money to live on, even if they are unemployed. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

The mas below show the happy valley shopping center in 1982 and 2012. summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant., many people around the world use social media everyday to keep in touch with people and get new events. do you think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, some people think that the most important function of music is to help people relax. to what extent do you agree or disagree, during a recent plane journey, you sat next to a businessman who owns a chain of restaurants. you talked to him and he suggested that you should contact him about a possible job in one of his restaurants. write a letter to this businessman. in your letter • remind him when and where you met • tell him what kind of job youaare inter,sted in • say why you think you would be suitable for the job.

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Essay On Generation Gap: How to Write It?

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Taking the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) exam is a critical step for students and professionals wanting to go to study or work in an English-speaking country. However, for non-native English speakers, some parts of the test can be challenging. 

Ordinary essays can land you a 5-6 band score, but with a little more practice, you can get to an 8-band essay. Here is a sample essay on ‘Generation Gap’.

Table of Contents

Write an essay on generation gap in your family and how it impacts your life, describe the impact of generation gaps on your family, frequently asked questions, more resources to read about essays topics:.

Modern families are a curious mix of new and old relationships. At the intersection of traditional beliefs and skepticism lies the generation gap. This gap is the difference in beliefs, mannerisms, and culture that emerges naturally between the two generations. However, it is not always a curse as one would imagine. My family is one such example. 

My parents and I form a nuclear family. I followed my parents’ religious and cultural beliefs as a child. Although as I grew in age and cognitive functioning, I began to question their beliefs and practices. While my parents did not respond kindly, my questions never ceased. 

My worldview became increasingly modern with the intake of social media and pop culture. On the other hand, my parents still found it challenging to navigate technology. One would expect the generation gap to pull people apart in such a case. Except with my family, it did not quite go that way.

Regardless of the different worlds my parents and I were growing into, we never stopped communicating openly. It was one of the first and most essential rules established in our house. The second was always to respect people around us, irrespective of age. So, even when we had differing opinions, we would take the time to listen and then reason what the logically or morally right stance was. We would understand where the conflict stemmed from and each compromise to meet the other halfway.

My parents, owing to their age and experience, helped me resolve many problems that otherwise seem unsolvable. In exchange, I help them understand the technology and modern lifestyles. So, while generation gaps exist, we must not let them alienate us from the people we love. 

Tentative Band Score: 6.5

Word Count: 285

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A generation gap is a distance in cultural and moral beliefs between two separate age groups. Every generation holds onto its own value sets and social sensibilities, creating disparity when these generations live together. 

I live in a joint family with my paternal grandparents, parents, uncle, aunt, siblings, and cousins. This paves the way for the existence of multiple generation gaps and the ensuing struggle. 

My grandparents are orthodox in their values and traditions, which means that some of their beliefs and prejudices are age-old and problematic in the modern world. On the other hand, my parents belong to the technological generation. They understand the modern lifestyle better and identify with my daily struggles. However, their belief systems are not entirely liberal due to their parental influences. All of this often becomes a cause for dispute in the family.

No matter how modern or traditional, all parents have a mental image of how they want their child to be. They are usually uncompromising about their stances and end up using their age as a factor to have their way. This creates a lack of understanding and communication in the family, causing one or both sides to feel alienated and side-lined. Over time, the generation gap widens and leaves no room for repair. 

It is natural to want to live your life by your principles. However, it should not come at the price of essential relationships. Having diverse views, ideas, and opinions can instead add to the family and help everyone grow individually. There will always be misunderstandings, but listening to people with empathy and cultivating a broader outlook can offset the generation gap and re-establish peace. 

Word Count: 276

Should the tone of an essay on the generation gap always be positive?

Let the points that you have to offer to decide the tone of the essay. It is crucial to be authentic in your answers. Write an honest account if the question demands an answer from your personal experience. 

The examiners are going to base their scores on the following parameters:

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• Lexical resources
• Grammatical range and accuracy
• Task achievement

So, the tone of your answer essay will not impact your scores. The examiners will assess how well you can put your views into words and how you develop your arguments.

Does an essay on the generation gap have to be personal?

Once you receive your topic, read it multiple times to understand what is being asked. If your essay question asks for an expository essay, then your essay can be more general with some personal insights. 

However, the IELTS writing test usually consists of opinion essays. So, when asked to shed light on a personal experience, you can cite examples and instances from your personal life. 

Just remember to keep the language formal and professional.

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Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Generation Gap — The Gap Between Three Generations: Mine, My Parents’, And My Children’s

The Gap Between Three Generations: Mine, My Parents’, and My Children’s

• Categories: Generation Generation Gap

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Published: Mar 18, 2021

Words: 651 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

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Generation Gap

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• Nancy Mendez  

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Generation gap is a difference in values and attitudes between one generation and another, especially between young people and their parents. These differences stem from older and younger people not understanding each other because of their differences in experiences, opinions, habits, and behavior.

History has always seen some degree of generational differences. For instance, women in the 1920s shocked their elders by wearing short skirts and bobbed hair. However, the term “generation gap” came into wide use in the United States and Europe during the 1960s. It described the cultural differences between the baby boomers and their parents. During this era, the differences between the two generations were exaggerated in comparison with previous times. There were major differences in many things such as music, fashion, drug use, and politics. Experts suggest that this situation may have been created because of the extraordinary size of the baby boomer generation, which in turn gave them a...

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Suggested Readings

El Nasser H, Grant L (2005, June 9). Diversity tints new kind of generation gap. USA Today, pp A4

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Harms W (2000) Survey: generation gap closing. University of Chicago Chronicle, 20(4) (online journal)

McGraw J (2001) Closing the gap: a strategy for bringing parents and teens together. Simon & Schuster, New York

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School of Medicine, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio

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Mendez, N. (2008). Generation Gap. In: Loue, S.J., Sajatovic, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Aging and Public Health. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-33754-8_195

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The Gender Gap Among Gen Z Voters, Explained

Claire Cain Miller spoke with eight young women supporting Harris, and eight young men backing Trump. Here’s what she learned.

By John Otis

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

There is a significant gender gap in the political preferences of Gen Z voters in the United States, as evidenced by New York Times and Siena College polls conducted this month in six swing states.

Young women — those ages 18 to 29 — favored Vice President Kamala Harris for president by 38 points. And men the same age favored former President Donald J. Trump by 13 points. That is a whopping 51-point divide along gender lines, larger than in any other generation.

Claire Cain Miller, a Times reporter who covers gender, wanted to better understand those numbers. And she was especially curious about a specific group:

“I really wanted to hear from young men who were voting for Trump,” she said in an interview on Monday.

Ms. Miller recently published a pair of companion pieces for The Upshot, a Times section that focuses on explanatory and analytical journalism. For one of the articles, Ms. Miller talked to eight young women who said they planned to vote for Ms. Harris; for the other, she spoke with eight young men who support Mr. Trump.

Over the last few years, Ms. Miller has become increasingly interested in exploring how shifts in gender roles and societal trends have affected boys and men, some of whom feel they’ve fallen behind economically. Today more women earn college degrees than men , and are increasingly the breadwinners in their households. Over the past few decades, jobs traditionally held by men — especially those without college degrees — have dwindled.

Though Gen Z men are still somewhat more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans, the men Ms. Miller spoke with described feeling unvalued in a shifting landscape of gender norms — and they saw Mr. Trump as a pillar of traditional masculinity.

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