I was angered after hearing that the Millennial generation’s new cut off was being born in 1995 and not 2000. The whole point to being called Millennials is that certain important dates like graduation and schooling and of course births would be over the millennium. That is why this generation was called Millennials. And it’s an easy boundary to remember unlike 1995.
Well I found this offending site by The Center for Generational Kinetics that puts this new 1995 end date on Millennials. They say such enraging things about proponents of other generational boundaries – “frankly, a lot of people don’t do actual research, so they’re just guessing”.
Well I’m not going to do research and get sucked into their little trap. Instead I’m going to harp about the definition of “generation”. A generation is separated from another generation by the child/parent relationship. Of course there is no guaranteed age to be a parent. And this is going to have to ignore the fact that men can have children at age 60 – so we’ll focus on the women.
The average generation is about 25 to 30 years. All the social scientists wishing to define a generation err on the young side for parents. Presumably they mean by generation the difference between the first born’s age and the parents. You can see it quite clearly when we go through the generations given by The Center for Generational Kinetics.
The Baby Boomers were born in the years 1946 to 1964 or about 19 years, Millennials were born in the years 1977 to 1995 or about 19 years and Gen Xers were born in the years 1965 to 1976 or 12 years. WTF?! 12 years? That means the mother of this generation was 12 years old when she had her first baby. Which means she was likely impregnated at 11 years old.
Shame on you would-be-definers-of-generation! How could you? Maybe you were actually searching for a name for Gen X at long last. How about “The Statutory Rape Generation”? Is that your new idea?
Another simplification of generations would be the idea that the male parent is about the same age as the female parent. Which would mean that the new generation would have an 11 year old father as well.
For both sexes 11 years old is just barely into puberty. To be fertile it is unlikely that a mating between two 11 year olds would result in a baby.
Maybe Gen X ought to be called “The Unlikely Generation”. Or how about “The Improbable Generation”.
Thank you The Center for Generational Kinetics. You have introduced the idea of statutory rape in the generations. Even though I like a couple of the new names for Gen X, I am still ashamed of you.
