Holley Sociology

When people in a named generation have children, these children will grow up in a new culture that is actually two named generations younger. Children learn about the world by being different both from their parents and from the intermediary generation that is closer to them in time. Generation using children will be helped by both these sources. They can afford to learn from the nearer and closest generation, while being materially supported by their family from two generations back. This mixture of family and adjacent young people offers a creative mixture of 30 year older parents and a 15 year or so younger generation that is closer in time to the current world.

Being around 30 years younger than their parents, and 15 years or so younger than their unrelated adjacent generation, a country with generations is gifted with many sources of learning about life and innovating in society. This system gives childhood and youth rich sources of copying and innovating about how to live.
Media using generations first began being supported by their families after 1950. The first generation was named the ‘Baby Boomers,’ and its next successor was ‘Generation X.’ What challenges faced the pioneers of these new arrangements? Each new generation carried original ideas. How did they get along with each other? Some descriptions of the earliest families will give us answers.

The first challenges were that everything was new. Author Ron Suskind (1998) presents a rare but revealing clash within one family whose members are in the two earliest generations. Their hostilities reveal challenges between family members born in different generations. We are grateful to Suskind for this account of how older family members brought up youths with new generational powers. Suskind describes an example of a parent and her child getting into a ‘different generations’ conflict. A ‘Baby Boomer’ mother, Bernadine Dohrn, was a peace activist in the 1960s, and later a law professor in Chicago. A family family conflict emerges when Bernadine and her husband, Billy Ayers, are on a weekend visit with their son Zayd, who is an undergraduate at Brown University.

Bernadine is proud of her son for his intelligence and creativity but she cannot accept some of his behavior in personal life. She and her son have strongly held commitments to different generations. As a ‘Boomer’ in the 1960s, Bernadine was fighting for larger causes. She was politically aware and wanted an end to wars. She embraced good causes that could improved society.

In contrast, Zayd had grown up as a ‘Generation Xer.’ Very much a member of his own generation, he put personal behavior in top importance. Bernadine’s perception was that Zayd looked for group identity, with everybody a one man show, displaying themselves through consumerism and fashion. Bernadine held on to her Baby Boomer beliefs, taking up good causes and fighting against the dehumanization of women. To his mother, Zayd’s current life in college appears narrow and frivolous. She sees Zayd as ‘using all his sexual sway to treat women like targets.’ Suskind catches Bernadine wanting to change her son; Bernadine is heard saying, “What Zayd needs is a beautiful, brilliant girl to kick his ass. A girl sort of like she was, at twenty.” Clearly, Bernadine is prioritizing her own ‘Boomer’ generation’s ideals. She is not thinking about how she might feel differently had she grown up in Zayd’s generation.

The flip side of this is family conflict is Zayd faulting his mother and her Boomer generation for having their own failings. Zayd tells his parents that they paid a price for ‘losing themselves in ideology,’ not ‘taking care of yourself” and your own fulfillment, ‘before you start saving the goddamn world.’ Zayd is a strong and valid ‘Gen Xer.’ When they meet as a family the two generations’ ideals turn into a clash. Bernadine gets exhausted by this. The two first generations have ideals that are totally out of sync. They are too new and different to be compatible.

It will take later generations and more time for grown up parents to accept their children as belonging to different and distinct generations.

Generations involve millions of people. They do more than help individuals and guide small groups. In countries where they exist they can rally portions of the whole population their same age. The power of a generation arises when millions are synchronized and decide to do something at the same time. We have seen that a few people won’t join in with their generation. This lesser group won’t participate in a new generational action. But a large group could easily include 80 percent of the population. This will be a very large number of people.

Researchers who look at this are doing ‘demographic’ analysis. One age group that is doing new things in large numbers is people in their twenties. In the later twentieth century, those who were going to marry usually made their choice of partner when they were between 25 and 30 years old. Here is a large group of people coming under the influence of a big new generation. Sociologist Orlando Patterson (1998) analyzed Americans of European descent who were at this marriage making age.

A little historical background is useful here. Earlier in the twentieth century European Americans usually married a partner descended from their own country of origin. Back then, descent from a different European country was disliked and a potential mate of different origin was disregarded as a marriage partner. For many decades, and because there existed no media generations before mid-century, Euro-Americans remained endogenous and married only with their own kind.

But around 1970, the first true generation, Baby Boomers, had enough cohesion to rethink this and came to a shared agreement to be exogamous. Rejecting the previous personal life, millions of Euro-Americans started intermarrying and brought about a social transformation. People from within all European countries now regarded each other as one unified group with no significant differences.

Patterson notes how much better this acceptance of intermarriage was for everyone involved. The couples themselves gained a diversity of new social ties. He says, ‘Imagine an Irish or Jewish American groom’s first Sunday dinner with his Italian or WASP fiancee’s family.’ What we are seeing here is people gaining ideas about how to live. For example, having a spouse from different kind of family may teach new ways of doing business and earning a living. Individuals may discover new possibilities through education, science and new technology. And new partnerships may gain expectations that drop old routines, and create space for wider freedoms of new sharing of responsibilities. Families working better and living with new possibilities made for better personal lives.

At the same time, families becoming more innovative, creative and prosperous, boosted the nation as a whole. The United States gained newly united Euro-Americans who were the first to use the shared perceptions and better lives that came from belonging to the first real media using generation – The Baby Boomers. This demographic had large numbers, shared converging perceptions, created better lives for themselves, and gave America increased skills. Was this, the first generation with electronic communicated skills, simply lucky in timing so that they gave their country better ways of doing business and gained wider connections via exogamous marrying?

Patterson has given us an example of how membership of a generation in large numbers has allowed growth of wealth, increased income and widened understanding between groups of people.

Parents may support their child’s activities in a generation. Most parents seem to have enjoyed growing up in their own generation. So with this understanding, parents usually recognize and tolerate their own children being in a new generation. They may be amused or puzzled by some the slang children use, but they will accept their children’s new games and different enthusiasms.

The majority view is supportive, but some parents oppose the children’s current culture. For various reasons, particular parents want to take control of what their children learn. A parent in opposition will discourage or even punish their children for belonging to the youth generation. Parents who oppose generational activities likely grew up without belonging to any generation themselves. As adults they may want to be the educators. Schooling may be compulsory but authoritarian parents can bring in after school extra lessons and homework.
Forcing children into extra hours of study has mixed effects; it may get children higher scores in school work, but the children will lose enjoyment of friends their own age and be cut off from learning through generational activities.

One widely read example of a parent who opposes children’s free choice is Amy Chau (2011) author of ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.’ This book’s big impact occurred in America where the family live, and was discussed in China. Amy Chau wanted her two daughters to learn from extra studying after school. Her girls had to study serious musical instruments like the piano and the violin. As a parent, their mother forced them into activities after school hours. Enjoying friends, a school drama or playing sports, she regarded as being idle and wasting time. The purpose of her strict education was to prevent personal life being from being fun with friends. Instead, Chau makes clear that her daughters had to received good educational grades and practice at length to gain skill in orchestral music. This mother believed that extra work after school would get her daughters admitted to high status universities. Other activities were seen as a waste of time and an embarrassing failure.

Chau reports that most of the parents at her girl’s school were modern ‘Western’ parents who opposed her authoritarian style of parenting. They thought it bad for children never to pick their own activities, play with other children, or choose their own friends. Without using the word explicitly, Chau tells us that most parents support the ‘new generations’ that come along with each cohort of children. In her book there exists a sociology of happier children and better living in society that has not been recognized or named.

Interestingly, the empirical evidence in ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’ does not entirely support the author. In practice it did not turn out that Amy Chau got her own way with everything. She admits that her daughters gave her ‘a bitter clash of cultures.’ Her younger daughter won concessions such as being allowed to play tennis. What Chau ends up telling us is that those supporting the use of modern media using generations will be a large majority. There will exist a few who, perhaps from having authoritarian traditions in their past, oppose youth generations but these won’t be more than 20% of the adults and will have trouble passing their methods on to future generations.
The deep question here is why the popular majority of families accept new media using childhood and youth, but seem unable to advocate for it against the small minority who come from generationless backgrounds.

We have seen how girls make their own choices when it comes to popular music. A lot has to go on to get the large number of people in a generation enjoying the same stars and performers. For example we must converge the desires of one age group. And a space needs to be created that has the permission of parents. A balance needs to be sustained between personal desires, same age peers, and parental supervision. Surprisingly, even at a young age, girls find ways to create and balance these different relationships. Lets look first at the children and then their parents.

In the ‘latency’ phase of life (around 6 to 11 years old) girls and boys both want to play with their own sex. Boys play sports and games and parents typically support these activities. Since girls want their own activities, they happily let boys do their own thing. The big challenge for girls is dealing with their parents. Girls have their own dynamics in school but also at home. One form of play at home is ‘dare games.’ These involve collectively doing something daring, that parents normally forbid, and get away with it. The challenge here involves deciding what to do as the dare, creating a space where participants do something normally forbidden, and keeping secret within the group of girls something that is forbidden by adults, and then getting away with it. Dare games involve getting all these steps done in secret.

Sharon Lamb (2001) gives us a revealing example of how girls as young as six create a space for play despite the supervision of their parents. Lamb interviewed a girl called Madeline who talked about a game she played with a group of her girl friends. The dare game provided a thrill by, among themselves, doing something their parents said was wrong. This wasn’t something serious like a crime, but it was a deliberately ‘transgressive game.’ Its collective power was to make all the girls keep it secret from adults. This kind of game strengthens their shared belonging to their generation.

One day Madeline decided that she and her friends were going to wear their underpants over their pants. This was started in her bedroom. When they had all changed clothes, the next part of the dare was so rush out of the bedroom and do a little dance in front of Madeline’s father. This was significant not just from the girls being ‘daring’ with each other but also due to the father being unable or unwilling to talk to this group of girls. Would he tell them to stop what they were doing? He didn’t. The father displayed silent embarrassment at this game. The girls were having an adventure that converged the different parts of their lives.

The involvement of the father was a predictable calculation by the girls; they could be pretty sure that an adult man would not want to take responsibility for this whole scene. He would not want to be a disciplinarian over girls from other families. The girls guessed, correctly, that he would remain mostly silent, perhaps saying no more than it was time for them to go home. Embarrassing the father was another transgressive thrill. The girls correctly saw that men were a different category of person in their lives. Madeline showed how young girls can have fun. In this activity, girls are using a range of knowledge of men, women, and private life.

We can imagine how different would this have been had Madeline’s mother been at home at that time. The girls would not have attempted to do this when a grown up woman was present; she would have disciplined them as well as offering no chance for fun. Their dare game showed the girls how they could exercise personal power. They would save this knowledge for some time when they were older. Madeline gave them a good entertainment. The girls were strengthened by what could do now, and prepared themselves for future entertainment with their whole generation. Madeline’s leadership of this ‘dare game’ prepared girls for their older years of using their membership of a generation

Generations, the kind that provide young people with helpful media, are controlled by young people themselves. Unlike large institutions that aim to make their owners rich, generations grow successfully when they supply young people with the right information. Young members of a generation like stars who provide entertainment and information that is relevant and useful. Support for good information comes from turning members of the generation into fans. From a young age, members have the power to reject whatever generational messaging they consider bad and, if they want to, cease to be fans.

Einerson (1996) was one of the first researchers to discover how young people evaluate the entertainment they get. Let’s look at how music comes to youngsters from electronic media. A good performance may be seized on by girls and agreed that it is good. Einerson studied a voluntary organization of pre-teen girls who had just discovered the boy band, New Kids on the Block. The girls took up this band with enthusiasm. They enjoyed its music, discussed the attractiveness of its boy performers, and bought fan merchandise to discuss with each other and show their love. The New Kids quickly found that they had young girl fans.

Einerson saw an example here of how girls agreed on what was an attractive object. Girls met in person to person groups and converged into one agreed perception of what was good. Shared across millions of fans, the New Kids found their performance had rallied enough support to make them a phenomenon. Here was an example of two component parts of a generation, its fans and its stars, creating something they both wanted.

But what happened next changed all this around. The New Kids decided to behave exceedingly badly off stage. Reports in the press said that they set fire to their hotel, and wore shirts with swear words on them. In effect the band turned against their fans. The girls in Einerson’s group responded quickly. Young fans were shocked by the band’s objectionable private life which they found repulsive. The girls reversed their support for the New Kids, turning fandom to rejection. Some girls in the group had difficulty ending their former love and enjoyment, but a majority quickly gave up idolizing this band. It’s members were no longer likable. This shocked and repelled young fans. A large number of former fans felt the same way. What we are seeing here is the power of a generation’s members to change their feelings and reverse into the opposite. The New Kids were no longer a phenomenon and their career was reduced.

Einerson’s important insight is that generations can respond not only to lovability but will, in their millions, switch to rejecting entertainers if their moral norms and feelings disappoint the generation’s members. It is clear that girls can discuss and converge their ideals and feelings. But they are not simply passive followers. If an entertainment shifts into something unacceptable, a generation’s members have the power to steer society in a better direction. Media using generations can freely switch, making even young fans more powerful than money, advertising and self-important innovators.

Hey’s research showed us that girls become more mature and look more capable of improving the next generation. Einerson has added that girls are capable of finding consensus and shifting society in desirable ways.

Revealing the Structure of Generations

Boys enjoy playing sports and games. When a game ends, a particular boy to boy relationship ends, so they must move on to something else – possibly a new game or a change of location. In contrast, girls see person to person as on-going friendship. For girls the person is more important than the activity. In ‘latency phase’ (6 to 10 years old) girls and boys play separately. At this age, the two genders want different things.
Boys’ desires turn out to be fairly simple. They want to win at games and sports, so boys learn the rules of each game, and devote time to practicing and increasing their skills. Since the rules of games don’t change much and its popularity is sustained, boys typically don’t dig deep into the meaning of what they are doing or worry about their future. Boys can play on different teams and focus only on the game.

In contrast, girls in school get together in cliques and see things personally. Sociologist Valerie Hey (1997) tackled the problem of understanding girls’ ways. Girls do not learn fixed rules; they interact and talk in long term relationships of friendship and commitment. The focus is on each different girl and their differences. Hey gained access to girls in their schools and listened to 11 and 12 year old girls as they talked to her. A particularly interesting pattern was when four or more friends created a clique just for them. The girls had to get along with each other and disagreements that occurred had to be kept as secrets within their group. No girl could be a tattle tale. Different kinds of relationships gave rewards or posed challenges. For example, there was status to be gained from having a ‘best friend’ in the clique. This was a reward of pleasure. In contrast, a girl might have to put up with the punishment of ‘being iced out’ for a week to test of her loyalty and commitment. The biggest hazard was having to deal with a ‘Queen Bee’ bossy girl who, as leader of the clique, used her power to turn all the girls in the clique against each other.

The facts Hey discovered showed girls were learning new and distinctive skills. They understood each other as individuals. They thought about themselves and their future life. Hey describes all girls’ ambitions as ‘desires.’ These provide girls with pictures of their future, recognizing good and bad relationships. Girls’ activities in groups teach them choices about personal life, from absolute necessities to what should not be tolerated at all. Does the different youth of girls turn out to be better or worse than that of boys? Unlike boys with their games, girls do seem to be more future oriented and serious.

Is there one of the sexes we can expect to grow up more likely to lead the next generation? Hey’s research shows how girls in their youth become more mature and look more capable of improving the next generation. We have seen that girls use such things as attraction and rejection signaling. Will knowing what relationships you want guide girls into becoming a new adult generation that shapes a better society?

Attraction and Rejection Signaling

Before the mid 20^th century, people could only select a marital partner with a lot of guesswork and hoping for the best. Meeting in person was limited and, what is more, how to evaluate other people and understand your own needs received very little discussion. Personal life was limited. Books and commentary were tied to people’s experiences in the past. There was nowhere to go to discuss the present or what might be more desirable in the future. There existed no discussion of how to evaluate good qualities in a potential partner or how to express your own romantic feelings.

All this changed after 1950 when the first media-using generation came into existence. People began to share their experiences and discuss how to find romantic partners. Your own generation could now supply you with useful information. People learned how to evaluate future partners from such things as their stance, gestures and sociability. All these things spoke about us. Media using generations opened up a huge change. The activities of courtship after 1950 were wrapped around with relevant information that became unstoppable.

We have seen that people send out messages from the meaningful objects they wear and display. Seen in person or through media, people can evaluate others while getting evaluated themselves. The first sociologists to study youth and young adults recognized how important generational information was in people’s lives. Original research by Monica Moore, in 1989 to 1998 publications, has revealed how people, with the help of media skills, now use objects to communicate. Moore makes a number of discoveries. For example, objects may communicate sufficiently without talking to people face to face. For example, a boy may wear cheap flip-flops to a party rather than good but expensive sneakers. Clothing objects like these use nonverbal communication.

It is not just fashion, hair and clothing that speak for us. Moore’s research describes how body stance and gestures support a kind of ‘silent courtship.’ Our bodily stance, gestures and facial expression do the talking for us. They are part of the physical person, but ‘body language’ sends out messages as clearly as direct speech. What is more, communicating by silent gestures can be less embarrassing to people. It may fit in with traditional priorities such as letting the man make the first approach and being the first to speak to a woman. A woman may initiate a romantic connection by sending an unspoken ‘attraction signal.’ Moore’s research shows that, in real life, men rarely make an approach until the women has first signaled, by silent body language, that she is interested.

Generations and objects have shown us that women hold the power to initiate romantic relationships. The unspoken knowledge of a generation is expressed through both ‘attraction signaling’ to potential mates and deliberate ‘rejection signaling’ to repel unwanted approaches. Moore reminds us that pre-teen girls get together in groups to perfect their use of silent communication by gestures. Whether adult or younger, body language becomes powerful when it expresses knowledge gained by people of their own generation.

What is the youngest age people start getting help from a ‘generation’? People start caring about the tasks they face at a young age. What is the youngest age people start getting help from a ‘generation’? People start caring about the tasks they face at a young age. Girls quickly need more help. Their desires become ‘relational’ starting in the ‘tween’ years of 6 to 11. Soon after, they call on their generation even more in their ‘teen’ years from 12 to 20. Girls’ first chosen relationships are those with friends at school. Girls’ own needs may start by being rewarding but often become contentious. Girls find that they need help. Their parents will not be able to show them what is current and attractive. Their own generation must give them what is lacking. People their own age are best placed to give good advice. Examples include guidance on what is most attractive, looking forward to grown-up life and, by teen years, including romantic love.

Boys at this age face different needs and challenges. For them sports and video games take up their time. Boys’ activities require learning rules of games and demand a lot of time practicing. Unlike the girls, boys need to learn fixed skills to play particular games. In contrast, girls need very different skills in personal relationships. Girls need more help because interaction with their own age group is subject to change as a whole new generation. Participating in this change keeps girls up to date as the leading edge of new meaningfulness. This extra work in a changing generation will, as they grow older, elevate girls into taking the lead for their whole generation in many different matters.

How do girls start this new activity? Appropriate objects are possessed in order to send out messages about the person who wears them. Interpreting these owned objects involves everyone in a generation accepting or rejecting new meanings. Agreeing on new messages binds together the active members of the same generation. Top communicating objects include items of clothing and foot ware. For girls, their style must be appropriate and fit in with current fashion.

For example, how might young girls deal with the message sent by a new pair of shoes? How the object here, shoes, is evaluated connects the person with the girl who wears them. Shoes and fashion will circulate through the current generation as a process of evaluation. Advertising may appear in print magazines, public signs, television, and fashion displays, and be modeled by fashionable and famous women. Photographs and videos will provide commentary on the style and be food for thought. The current media-using generation will display new foot ware and groups of girls will decide what they like and what they reject. Current discussions by groups of girls will keep what is deemed fashionable up to date. The fashion sense girls gain comes from their experience of girls’ activities in their own generation. Here is a skill that helps evaluate other girls and oneself.

Consider the case when a girl going to a new school might use by her generational knowledge of shoes. Unfashionable shoes suggest that a girl is under the control of her mother. Generational tools deplore un-stylish shoes but will admire a good style choice. For example, a girl coming to a new school might approach another girl and say “Nice shoes.” These two words may be enough to bring a girl a new friend. The two girls here can recognize each other’s skills in generational awareness and quickly evaluate each other as skilled equals in their fashion sense.

Generations start young and operate in complicated ways. Is this time-based generational knowledge useful to young girls? Evidence suggests that girls bring evaluation tools into their earliest chosen relationships. They keep this going as they grow up. This could help girls take the lead in changing our generation based society.