It’s 8 years in the future, and the oldest members of Generation Alpha are starting their first jobs. They get to their desk, sit behind their computer…and look at you totally confused when you ask them to find a file on the C drive. “The what?
” they say. Confused, you go over to their desk and tell them to just type in the name of the file in the “Finder” window. You look on in shock as they type at maybe eight words per minute, using one finger at a time on the keyboard like they’ve never seen one before.
How in the world are they going to work in an office? ! That’s not the only dumb thing you’ll come across when dealing with Generational Alpha, because it turns out, they believe in even dumber things than this, which we’ll be exploring today on the Infographics Show.
Fact 9 - Generation Alpha doesn’t believe in learning about computers Somehow, the most tech-obsessed generation of all time might be one of the least computer savvy as well, since Gen Alpha doesn’t believe in using traditional computers. The first Gen Alpha kids were born in 2010, the same year the iPad was released. Two thirds of them started using iPads by the time they were five years old.
And apparently never moved on to computers. Teachers have been shocked at the lack of typing and basic computer skills they see from their students. But that’s probably because schools aren’t really teaching any of that!
One study found that in 2019, only 2. 5% of high school graduates had finished a keyboarding course. Compare that to 2000, when 44% of high school graduates had done a keyboarding course!
Learning management system Canvas saw that 39% of assignments it was receiving had been submitted through mobile devices. So at least Gen Alpha can type on their phones? But their beliefs about that sound strange as well.
Of all the dumb things Gen Alpha believes, this might be one of the smallest but most ridiculous: Fact 8 - Texting with proper punctuation means you’re angry If you like sending texts with proper grammar, capitalization, or periods and exclamation marks - congrats, you’ve just pissed a Gen Alpha child off. As two middle school girls, Simone and Jorja, shared with a millennial reporter: “typing with capital letters and grammar is kind of like, weird. Punctuation and full sentences is a school thing.
” Her friend Jorja agreed, “I only text normal if I’m upset or mad. ” This leads to a lot of miscommunication between older and younger family members. So if you can’t text with any punctuation or proper grammar, what are you supposed to do?
Just send a bunch of emojis to Gen Alpha members? Turns out, you can’t do that either. Because you’re probably going to get an eye roll at best, or offend someone at worst.
See, Gen Alpha also believes that… Fact 7 - Most emojis are actively sarcastic and offensive Have you ever sent a “thumbs up” emoji to agree with someone via text? How about clapping hands, or the OK sign. Well, depending on which you send, you’re either sarcastic, cringe, or racist.
So use emojis with care. Gen Alpha sends thumbs up and clapping hands emojis sarcastically. You know that meme you sent to your niece that you thought was so hilarious and she responded with clapping hands?
Yeah, so sorry to be the ones to tell you this - she’s making fun of you. As far as the OK sign, more young people are aware that it’s linked to white supremacy hand symbols, so they’ve stopped sending it in their texts. What if you just want to let your Gen Alpha younger brother know you love him?
Better not send a red heart, because it’s low effort and out of fashion. See, the red heart is really overused, and since it’s the first option available when you search for heart emojis, it doesn’t show much effort. Put in the work, and pick a different color heart instead!
And if you tell him to be back my curfew and he sends a thumbs up? Yeah, he’s not getting in till 2 AM. Why is Gen Alpha so weird about writing correctly anyway?
Well, maybe it’s because they’re not all that good at reading either, and don’t seem to care much to do better. Fact 6 - Gen Alpha isn’t learning how to read A recent study by the National Association of Educational Progress - or NAEP - found that “67% of fourth graders aren’t proficient in reading”. This is a 3% increase since 2019, and it seems things are only getting worse.
If you can’t read, you really can’t learn anything else. You can’t get all of your history and science knowledge through podcasts - though people definitely try - you need to be able to read a textbook, a study, and articles on the subject instead. However, just because Gen Alpha doesn’t really believe in learning to read well, we can’t fully blame them for this one.
Exhausted and overworked teachers just can’t keep up with the demands of their classrooms, and many schools stopped teaching phonics. For any Gen Alpha people watching this video - phonics is just matching letters and letter combinations to sounds. The COVID lockdown also played a big part in interrupting students’ education.
News site Axios found that reading and math scores for 13-year-olds plummeted between the 2019-2020 school year and 2022-23. A study of 460 schools found that reading scores dropped 4 points on average. Plus, over the years, new local, state, and national laws have changed to make sure students graduate to their next grade no matter what, even if they’re not ready to, or, you know, don’t even know how to read.
Maybe that’s why Gen Alpha prefers to get information about almost everything from videos instead - no reading required. But maybe Gen Alpha believes a little too much of what it sees online. Fact 5 - Gen Alpha believes influencers way too much Marketing agencies found that “49% of Gen Alphas trust influencers as much as family with purchasing decisions”.
And while we’re not saying your mom has the best fashion sense and style recommendations, maybe the random person you’ve never met being paid to sell a product online isn’t that much better at telling you what to do either. But Gen Alpha is easily swayed by ads. Marketing communications agency Wunderman Thompson found that “the majority of alphas (57%) say seeing adverts on social media makes them want to buy those products.
” And influencers are targeting Gen Alpha more and more, because, despite the fact that they’re underage and mostly not working yet, they have a huge amount of say in their parents’ spending decisions. Weirdly enough, maybe it’s because they also like a lot of the same brands their parents do. Forget about kids’ toys and clothing - Gen Alpha likes to dress like they’re already worrying about mortgage rates.
Many Gen Zers online have noticed this in their younger siblings. One of them said, “back in my day, the cool girls wore sparkly sequined shirts. Now, everyone in that age group wants to wear the same things as teenagers and young adults.
” This isn’t just one person’s opinion - marketing agencies have found that Gen Alpha skips the usual kids’ and teens’ clothing stores and likes to shop exactly where their parents shop. Lululemon, Nike, Sephora, and Target are some of their favorite brands. Apparently, Gen Alpha thinks dressing and acting like someone worrying about their retirement fund is cool.
It’s also no coincidence Sephora is on that list. It brings us to their next weird belief: Fact 4 - Gen Alpha believes they need hundreds of dollars of skincare as preteens Maybe instead of the iPad generation, Gen Alpha should be called the “Botox generation”. Not so much because they’re getting it - most are still too young - but because they are very influenced by older peoples’ obsession with anti-aging.
Skincare brands like Drnk Elephant, originally designed for millennial women seeing the first signs of wrinkles and freaking out, are very popular with people who don’t even have teen acne yet. Parents have a term for it - the Sephora kid pandemic - while they’re acting like they’re not the ones actually buying these products for their middle school kids. TikTok and YouTube are full of teenagers doing hour-long nighttime skincare routines, showing off hundreds and hundreds of dollars of serums and anti-aging products, and generally acting way too old for their age.
Mark Elrick, the creator of skincare brand Byoma, said “the rise of the ‘shelfie”, a photo of what’s in your bathroom shelf, has been a game changer for our brand…. this demographic is collecting skincare and it helps if your brand is aesthetically pleasing and fun. ” For older generations who remember collecting baseball cards or stamps, collecting tubes of retinol may sound like a weird hobby.
If you were a teenager in the early 2000s, we guess your bathroom shelves in middle school only had toothpaste, face wash, and maybe Axe body spray if you were a teenage boy. We hoped that a generation as progressive as Gen Alpha wouldn’t have girls obsess over looking perfect all the time, but it turns out, that’s not the only weird, retro gender idea Gen Alpha has. Because here is a crazy fact about them: Fact 3 - Gen Alpha believes that there are alpha, beta, and sigma males Most dictionaries of Gen Alpha slang will include the phrase “sigma”, meaning sigma male.
For those of you who haven’t kept up to date with what Andrew Tate and his followers are talking about since Tate’s arrest for, let’s see here…human trafficking…sigma males are apparently a step above alpha males. While alpha males are macho leaders, sigma males are so macho that they don’t even care if they’re leading someone or not. The totally accurate scientific definition of a sigma male is a “lone wolf” kind of guy, a person who doesn’t care what other people think and think getting help from others is a weakness.
If you’re wondering how this “lone wolf” type of male came about…the alpha and beta categories were first based on a study of wolves that determined that a pack would follow one “alpha” male most of the time. Something that has been proven completely untrue since then. In multiple studies after that first one, scientists watched wolves in the wild and saw that the animals are much more collaborative than they originally thought, without a single alpha anyone emerging to lead.
However, even after the first study’s author came out and said his research was flawed and he no longer stands by it, this hasn’t discouraged the thousands and thousands of TikTok and YouTube influencers convincing large parts of Gen Alpha that they have to decide if they’re gonna be alpha, beta, or sigma by the time they enter middle school. But along with these very old school beliefs, Gen Alpha has a very New Age belief as well. That’s really, really dumb.
Fact 2 - They think “there’s no such thing as failure”. Now, the rest of us know failure exists because we’re reminded of it every time our parents call us and ask when we’re planning on moving out of our studio apartment. But Gen Alpha has a different take.
Amber Shipman, a sixth grade math teacher, is worried about her kids - “they just don’t care about academics. They don’t care if they are failing…they want to be constantly entertained, and I have some students that struggle to work independently”. Obviously, being able to rebound from failure is a good skill to learn.
But that doesn’t seem to be Gen Alpha’s approach. An 11th grade teacher with 25 years of experience shared the differences they see in Gen Alpha compared to their past students. “Students in 2024 are much more apathetic than previous generations.
In the past, if a student didn’t complete an assignment on time, they would be upset and ask for an extension. Now, they simply shrug and accept the zero. ” Not caring about grades or doing well in school seems to be a trend.
Many parents, older siblings, and teachers complain that Gen Alpha doesn’t seem to care as much as other generations about good grades. One frustrated observer said “you’re not going to go anywhere if you don’t graduate high school. You can’t get a job or an internship if you don’t at least have a high school diploma.
Or maybe these kids really want to do nothing in life. ” Maybe because they see so many online influencers in their lives, they think that’s a good career plan. To be clear…for 99.
99% of people, it’s not. Or maybe it’s the fact that technology has made learning seem…pointless in general. Which brings us to the last, and perhaps most serious dumb thing Gen Alpha believes.
Fact 1 - “Why learn when I can just Google? ” Teachers are hearing questions like this in their classroom all the time. “Kids have trained themselves to think they can just cut and paste answers they find, and they think they’ve learned something….
Most of the time, they just click on the link at the top of their search. ” That may be why teachers are seeing students with less general knowledge. What’s the point of learning something when you can just ask ChatGPT at any time?
However, if you don’t have general knowledge, you can’t really judge if what you’re finding makes sense. You also need to be able to get around the world without using an AI app that’s wrong 5-20% of the time, depending on the subjects - actually, for some topics like programming, researchers found ChatGPT was wrong closer to 52% of the time. There are also skills you can’t learn from Google or AI, like fine motor skills necessarily for a lot of what humans do in every day life.
First grade teacher Jason Forbis explains the big difference he’s seen in students, with many not even being able to hold a pen or pencil correctly. . “We see a lot of letters that are backwards, or they don’t hold the pencil correctly.
Those are things that go back to early schooling and what they do at home…. they need to develop those fine motor skills. ” We’ve had our fun with Generation Alpha in this article, but the fact is, a lot of dumb things they believe are a result of either social media algorithms screaming at them, parents too tired or distracted to help them, and changing rules for education leading to public schools not teaching them things like reading properly.
Are you surprised at some of the things Generation Alpha believes? Let us know in the comments below! In the meantime, check out these other videos on fascinating facts about generations.
