Generation Alpha
Based on Wikipedia: Generation Alpha
The First Generation Born Into Smartphones
Here is a strange fact: in 2018, for the first time in human history, there were more people on Earth over the age of sixty-five than children under the age of five. We crossed a threshold that year, and the children born on the other side of it have a name: Generation Alpha.
These are the kids born roughly between 2010 and the mid-2020s. They have never known a world without smartphones. They cannot remember a time before social media. Many of them learned to swipe a touchscreen before they learned to tie their shoes.
The name itself tells an interesting story. When an Australian researcher named Mark McCrindle realized in 2008 that he needed a label for the generation coming after Generation Z, he faced a nomenclature problem. The alphabet had run out. Going back to "Generation A" felt wrong—like rewinding the clock. So McCrindle borrowed from science, which routinely switches to Greek letters when Latin ones are exhausted. Alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet, seemed fitting for the first generation born entirely in the twenty-first century.
There was a precedent for this approach. In the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, so many storms formed that meteorologists ran through all twenty-one available names and had to start using Greek letters. The last six storms of that season were named Alpha through Zeta. Sometimes naming systems reach their limits and demand reinvention.
A Generation of Two Billion
Generation Alpha is enormous. By 2024, its ranks exceeded two billion people worldwide. To put that in perspective, the entire human population in 1950 was only two and a half billion. A single generation now rivals the total headcount of humanity from seventy years ago.
But this generation is not evenly distributed across the globe. Roughly three-quarters of all humans now live in Africa and Asia, and that is where most population growth continues to happen. Nations in Europe and the Americas are having too few children to replace their existing populations. The demographic map is shifting.
Consider the extremes. Niger has the world's highest fertility rate at about seven children per woman. South Korea has one of the lowest at 0.78—not even one child per woman on average. These numbers represent profoundly different futures. In Niger, the median age is fifteen. In South Korea, elementary schools are closing because there are not enough students to fill them.
Why People Are Having Fewer Children
The story of falling birth rates is really a story about education and economics.
The more educated a person becomes, the fewer children they tend to have, and the later in life they have them. This pattern holds across cultures and continents. A woman with a university degree in Brazil, Bangladesh, or Belgium will statistically have fewer children than her less-educated neighbor.
Urbanization amplifies this effect. When people move from villages to cities, birth rates drop. Urban life offers different constraints and possibilities. Apartments are smaller than farmhouses. Children are expensive rather than economically useful. Career opportunities compete with family time. People in cities, research shows, demand greater autonomy over their bodies and their futures.
In 2007, humanity crossed another threshold: for the first time, more than half of all people lived in urban areas. By 2019, that figure had risen to fifty-five percent. Current projections suggest two-thirds of humanity will live in cities by 2050.
Here is an uncomfortable truth that surveys in developed countries reveal: women generally want more children than they end up having. The gap between desired family size and actual family size has been widening. Stagnant wages and eroding social safety nets are major contributors. Having children has become expensive in ways it was not two generations ago—childcare costs, housing in good school districts, saving for college tuitions that have outpaced inflation for decades.
Governments have tried to reverse this trend. Sweden and Singapore have experimented with various incentives: parental leave, child subsidies, tax breaks, fertility treatments. The results have been modest at best. You can make having children slightly less financially painful, but you cannot easily manufacture the conditions that make large families feel natural and sustainable.
The Pandemic Generation
Generation Alpha has another possible name: Generation C, for COVID-19.
The pandemic arrived when most of these children were in their early formative years. Preschoolers spent months unable to see their grandparents. Kindergarteners learned to read through computer screens. Toddlers grew accustomed to seeing adults in masks, never learning to read the smiles of strangers.
Some commentators predicted a baby boom would follow the lockdowns. People stuck at home with nothing to do—surely birth rates would spike? The opposite happened, at least in developed nations. Economic uncertainty proved more powerful than boredom. When people worry about their jobs and their futures, they postpone having children.
The psychologist Jean Twenge has proposed yet another name for this cohort: Polars. She is thinking of two kinds of polarity. First, political: the children of Generation Alpha are growing up during an era of intense partisan division, particularly in the United States, where political polarization has reached levels not seen since the Civil War. Second, climatic: these children will inherit melting polar ice caps and all the consequences that follow from a warming planet.
iPad Kids and the Screen Time Question
Walk into any restaurant and you will see them: toddlers propped up with tablets, watching videos while their parents eat dinner. "iPad kids" has become both a description and a mild epithet.
Generation Alpha is the first full generation for whom portable digital technology is not a novelty or even an innovation—it is simply the texture of daily life. Streaming services have replaced scheduled television. YouTube algorithms select their entertainment. Social media platforms shape their understanding of the world and themselves.
The health implications are still being studied, but early findings raise concerns. Studies from the late 2010s suggest that problems related to screen time, allergies, and obesity became increasingly prevalent among young children. The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued guidance about limiting screen exposure, but implementation varies wildly across families and schools.
In 2018, the Academy released a policy statement about something that might seem obvious but apparently needed defending: the importance of play. Unstructured time—children messing around with blocks or sticks or each other—turns out to be crucial for developing social skills, cognitive abilities, and language. Between 1981 and 1997, time spent by children on unstructured activities dropped by twenty-five percent. The slack was taken up by structured activities and, increasingly, by screens.
The statement's lead author, Dr. Michael Yogman, made a point of noting that effective play does not require expensive toys. Common household items work fine. So does simply reading to children, which engages their imaginations in ways that passive video watching does not.
What Schools Are Trying
Educational systems around the world are adapting—sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes chaotically—to the realities of raising Generation Alpha.
Japan, facing a demographic crisis with one of the world's lowest birth rates, introduced sweeping education reforms in 2019. Preschool became free for all children between three and five. Childcare became free for children under two from low-income families. University entrance fees and tuition were waived or reduced for students from struggling families. The goal was to make having and educating children less financially crushing.
Vietnam took a similar approach, recommending the construction of more daycare facilities and kindergartens in urban and industrial zones, along with housing subsidies for couples with two children in areas where the birth rate had fallen below replacement level.
China announced an unusual initiative in early 2021: increased investment in physical education specifically to make young boys "more masculine." The policy reflected anxieties about the legacy of the one-child policy combined with the traditional cultural preference for sons. Many parents, having only one child who happened to be male, were perceived as coddling their boys excessively. State media subsequently published pieces attempting to soften the gender-role messaging, but the underlying concern about youth fitness and resilience remained.
France introduced a mandatory civic service program called the Service National Universel. Starting in 2019 for volunteers and planned to become compulsory for all sixteen to twenty-one year olds by 2026, it requires young people to spend four weeks at a camp learning practical skills, personal discipline, and civic engagement. The explicit goals are promoting national cohesion and encouraging interaction among young people from different backgrounds. France also announced a two-billion-euro plan to promote bicycling, including an initiative to ensure all primary school children learn to ride.
In Quebec, psychiatrists launched a campaign advocating mental health education for primary schoolchildren—specifically targeting those born after 2010. The idea is to teach young children how to handle personal and social crises and to cope with the psychological effects of growing up in a digital world. Multiple medical associations backed the initiative.
The Cursive Controversy
Here is a small educational battle that reveals larger tensions.
In 2010, the Common Core standards in the United States eliminated the requirement that public elementary schools teach cursive writing. The reasoning was practical: children need keyboarding skills more than they need flowing penmanship. Screen time was rising; time spent holding pens was falling.
But by 2019, lawmakers in multiple states—Illinois, Ohio, Texas, and others—had introduced legislation to bring cursive back. Neuroscience research suggests that handwriting, whether print or cursive, offers benefits for cognitive development, motor skills, memory, and comprehension that typing does not replicate. One 2012 study found that the physical act of forming letters by hand activates brain regions involved in thinking and working memory in ways that tapping keys does not.
The debate continues. Is cursive a quaint relic or a cognitive tool? Generation Alpha may be the last cohort where this question is still contested.
The Literacy Gap
For all the concern about screens and smartphones in wealthy countries, a more basic problem persists in much of the world: children who cannot read.
According to the World Bank, large numbers of children in developing countries could not read a simple passage in their own national language by age ten. The statistics are stark. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Philippines, and Ethiopia, over eighty percent of ten-year-olds could not manage this basic literacy task. In India and Indonesia, the rates were around fifty percent. Only in places like China and Vietnam did the corresponding numbers drop below twenty percent.
These gaps will shape Generation Alpha's future. Children who cannot read at ten rarely catch up. They struggle through school, struggle to find decent work, struggle to participate fully in civic life. The investments that wealthy nations are making in preschool enrichment and mental health education are luxuries that much of the world cannot yet afford.
The Class Divide
Wealth inequality, which has been intensifying across much of the world since the 1980s, casts a long shadow over Generation Alpha.
In the United States, children from families in the highest income quintile are overwhelmingly likely to live with married parents—ninety-four percent in 2018. For middle-class children, that figure drops to seventy-four percent. For children in the bottom quintile, it is thirty-five percent.
This is not a moral judgment about family structure. It is an observation about resources. Two-parent households typically have more income, more time, and more stability to devote to children. The correlation between parental income, parental education, and children's outcomes is well established and seems to be strengthening. Generation Alpha will inherit these disparities and likely amplify them.
Religion and Demographics
Between 2010 and 2015, about a third of the world's babies were born to Christian families, even though Christians made up only thirty-one percent of the global population. Muslims, representing twenty-four percent of humanity, gave birth to thirty-one percent of the world's babies. The math implies that Islam is growing faster than Christianity, a trend demographers expect to continue.
Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated—a category that includes atheists, agnostics, and people who simply do not identify with any organized religion—made up sixteen percent of the global population but gave birth to only ten percent of babies. Secular populations tend to have lower fertility rates. The religious landscape of Generation Alpha's future will be shaped by these differential birth rates.
What Comes Next
Generation Alpha is still being born. The youngest members of this cohort do not yet exist. We are talking about children and trying to predict adults.
Some things seem likely. This generation will grow up with artificial intelligence as a daily presence in ways their parents could not have imagined. Voice assistants, recommendation algorithms, and AI tutors will be as ordinary to them as television was to Baby Boomers. Some have proposed calling them "Generation AI" to capture this reality.
They will also grow up in a world that is demonstrably warmer than the one their grandparents knew. Climate change is not an abstraction for Generation Alpha. It is the weather.
The demographic transition underway—fewer children, more elderly, populations shrinking in rich countries while still growing in poor ones—will define the political and economic landscape they inherit. They will argue about immigration and automation, about who will pay for aging populations, about what obligations wealthy nations owe to poorer ones.
But the most distinctive thing about Generation Alpha may be something harder to measure: their relationship to physical reality. Previous generations grew up with clear boundaries between the digital and the analog. For Generation Alpha, those boundaries barely exist. Their friendships, their entertainment, their education, their understanding of themselves—all of it flows through screens and networks in ways that were simply not possible before.
Whether this produces a generation that is more connected or more isolated, more informed or more confused, more capable or more dependent, remains to be seen. We are conducting a vast experiment on human development, and Generation Alpha is the experimental group. They did not consent to this experiment. Neither, really, did anyone else.
The results are coming, ready or not.