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.