Move over, Generation Alpha. (And take your luxe skin care, skibidi slang and fancy tech with you.)
As of Jan. 1, 2025, there’s a newer, younger generation to contend with. And they’re called Generation Beta. Generation Beta, or Gen Beta for short, will be born from 2025 to 2039, according to Australian trends and demographic analysis company McCrindle, which also coined the previous cohort Gen Alpha (2010-2024).
These will be the children of young millennials and older Gen Zs, and McCrindle projects that by 2035 they will make up 16 per cent of the global population. Many will also live to see the 22nd century.
They will only know a post-COVID world. They’ll roll their eyes at old-fashioned slang like “rizz.” And they’ll ask us to switch off the oldies when we try to play Taylor Swift in the car (The horror!).
They will also be raised in an era of technological integration alongside Gen Alpha, McCrindle explains, which is the reason for the move to the Greek Alphabet back in 2010 — these are not just “new generations, but the first … that will be shaped by an entirely different world.”
“For Generation Beta, the digital and physical worlds will be seamless,” McCrindle explains on its website.
“While Generation Alpha has experienced the rise of smart technology and artificial intelligence, Generation Beta will live in an era where AI and automation are fully embedded in everyday life — from education and workplaces to health care and entertainment.”
The push to get kids off screens and into the real world gained a lot more traction this year thanks to the bestselling book The Anxious Generation. Author and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt tells CBC The Current host Matt Galloway about his research and how the smartphone profoundly changed consciousness and the human experience.
Labelling generations
While there’s no consensus on the years of birth and their assigned generations, broadly, they can be defined as:
It’s worth noting that in recent years, there’s been growing criticism regarding the naming and labelling of generations.
“Generational research has become a crowded arena. The field has been flooded with content that’s often sold as research but is more like clickbait or marketing mythology,” the U.S.-based Pew Research Centre wrote in 2023.
Pew points out that the existing generational definitions can also be “too broad and arbitrary” to capture all the differences between the cohorts.
“A typical generation spans 15 to 18 years. As many critics of generational research point out, there is great diversity of thought, experience and behaviour within generations,” Pew writes.
More tech, but less online sharing?
That said, here’s what we know about Gen Beta so far.
According to McCrindle, this generation of kids will likely be the first to experience “autonomous transportation at scale, wearable health technologies and immersive virtual environments as standard aspects of daily life.”
“AI algorithms will tailor their learning, shopping and social interactions in ways we can only begin to imagine today,” McCrindle writes.
But the company also notes that their Gen Z parents will likely take a different approach to technology and what they share about Gen Beta online.
CBC News has previously reported that there’s been a recent “sharenting” reckoning. A term that describes parents who share their children’s lives online, sharenting has existed since the 2000s, with the rise of so-called mommy bloggers and family influencers. But research suggests the trend increased dramatically during the pandemic.
A public health advisory says today’s parents face unique challenges that can impact their mental health. Some parents from older generations say raising children has always been, and always will be, a struggle. Can we really say which generation has had it the worst?
Now, some kids of parenting influencers are growing up and sharing their negative experiences.
“While many millennial parents used social media to document their children’s lives, Generation Z knows more about both the positives and challenges that come with social media use from a young age,” McCrindle notes.
This generation will also be the first to be born after the COVID-19 pandemic, but as generational researcher Jason Dorsey told the news site Today, their families and older siblings will have been “irrevocably shaped” by the school shutdowns and social isolation.