An article on how Gen Z is coping with the lockdown caught my eye in the papers recently: innovatively, by all accounts. Born between 1997 and 2010 – they have grown up with the grim reality of looming climate change and now the pandemic has made life even more uncertain.
However, unlike the Millennials before them, Gen Z does not complain or blame the earlier generations for creating a mess. They get on with things.
University plans upset? Never mind; I am going to be an entrepreneur. No school? Bring on online education. Not meeting with friends? Let’s get on TikTok.
In fact, according to the article, Gen Z may be the first generation to exist online both socially and professionally.
This is not entirely accurate as millennials were the first generation to exist online socially -ask mums of millennials how many hours have been spent on The Sims, MSN Messenger and ICQ! Also, Gen Z has not yet reached the job market in the fullest sense and found (like the millennials) that they are the first generation in history to earn less than the preceding generation.
The long-term consequences of the lockdown and the other influences to shape Gen Z will take a long time to play out but what struck me were two important points. One, we are now thinking of generational differences in sociological terms instead of teenage rebellions and badly-behaved children.
Two, we actually anticipate change in attitudes and life goals in children every decade or so.
So, Gen Z (born 2000-2010) is actually expected to be different from the Millennials (born 1981-1996). This kind of thinking has a huge impact on parenting and helps bridge the generational divide.
Parents feel they are part of a cohort and the children… well each new generation goes ahead and does its own thing, but as they grow up, the children, too, realise they are not alone in their struggles.
Their peers broadly think and behave like them and have the same challenges. When I was being brought up there were no generational labels (I learnt too late that I am a tail-end baby boomer); there were just parents and children and a gap (read abyss) in between.
Children were supposed to behave well, which broadly meant replicate the behaviour of parents. Parents were supposed to discipline and ensure that children achieved what was expected of them (education, careers, marriage) with a minimum of fuss and absolutely no whiff of scandal.
I cannot imagine my parents thinking of me as part of a generational cohort or discussing how the lockdown is going to impact a whole generation.
If there was a phrase that defined my generation it was locked in. We were locked-in to a certain way of life and locked out of everything else! Laissez-Faire was a phrase buried in my economics text books; not something that was my parents’ style at all. Children were brought up according to an unchanging rule book from times immemorial.
No going out except to school or college.
No going on holiday with friends. Vacations were with family and at family. When I say at family, I mean we visited uncles and aunts who were dotted all over India – strangely in the hottest and most inhospitable places. It was not like we had an aunt in the snowy heights of Shimla or Mussoorie. But think Mancherial, Andhra Pradesh (now Telengana) or Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh and sure enough, we would spend the entire summer holiday there.
Our cousins became our best friends over the years and we did get up to some mischief now and then but it was all good, clean family fun. Imagine dragging two collegegoing kids on a four-week-long family holiday today! There would be negotiation, ‘ok, we will come but just for three days’ but more likely, negative responses ranging from ‘not again, never again’ to ‘sorry, I am going river rafting with friends’.
I try and imagine a conversation with my own mother if I ever brought up the subject of a holiday with friends during my college days. What friends? Who are they? Are there boys? What do their parents do? Who is accompanying you? Where will you stay? Is it safe? What is river rafting? Are there boys? How will we contact you? How will you travel? Are any of the other parents going with you? Are any professors going? Is college for studying or river rafting? Is it going to be graded? Is it compulsory? How much will it cost? Are there boys? Just to clarify, I never did have that holiday, or even that conversation.
It helped my parents and others of their generation that India was closed to the world while I was growing up. It helped preserve the status quo and sent occasional teenage rebellions scurrying.
Naturally, there were youth icons we admired and came to know about through books and films and music – Pink Floyd, George Michael, Germaine Greer, Che Guevara – but they remained distant, remote and inaccessible: just posters on the wall. Meanwhile reality – even youthful teenage reality in India – was dull. Television was black and white and beamed agricultural programmes about seeds and fertilisers.
There was no internet and no emails. Letters took ages to arrive and I remember being captivated by the snowy winter-scape against which my German penfriend posed in a little photograph she posted me.
I used to dig it out again and again to examine her blonde hair, her boots and her jeans. So beautiful I thought: the silver landscape, the golden-haired girl, the little gate she was standing against, the doll’s house behind the gate with its sloping roof, all of it was truly magical and totally different from what I had.
The world was not Friedman-flat in those days – going abroad was infrequent and expensive and communication between the magical world in the west and mine was limited. The advantage for my parents was that I never thought I had access to any other existence, so rebelling was minimal. It all contributed to the locked-in existence of my dull grey youth.
I remember decades later, one my children asking me what I did on weekends when I was young. And the honest answer was ‘oil my hair and wash it’.
My daughter who had just spent an hour on the phone planning her Saturday evening, thought I was joking. My own children are millennials; though I think the term was born after them and I certainly didn’t think of them as anything other than themselves. But I think parents do stand to understand the broad parameters of their children’s thinking better by reading about issues that shape a generation.
This is not to say that all children are the same; even as millennials, my two girls are totally different in terms of life goals and temperaments.
However, they both consider climate change and the environment to be key global issues. They both discarded conventional ‘Indian’ careers in favour of more socially useful ones, and they are both feminists in a selfassured way that I admire.
I certainly would have saved myself some arguments over career choices and been more politically correct in my motherly advice had I known what drives millennials the way I do now. However, my own parenting was also done before these generation labels became popular. I did though, get some things right.
Recently, as I switched off the kitchen lights behind her, instead of rolling her eyes, my daughter looked back and said, ‘Mummy, you are good – you never fly anywhere except to meet your parents, you have absolutely no sense of fashion and wear clothes from decades ago and you preserve and recycle everything that was ever given to you.
Somewhere in there was hidden the ultimate compliment from a millennial. ‘Yes my dear,’ I replied. ‘I have a very low ecological-footprint.’
The writer lives in London and is the author of East or West: An NRI mothers manual on how to bring up desi children overseas.