Like Millennials, iGen’ers want to know that the job has a clear career path—that they can advance, preferably quickly. When considering the timeline of promotions, make them more numerous; instead of a big leap every two years, consider four smaller leaps every six months. To the Snapchat generation, six months feels like six years. Give feedback much more frequently than the annual review. With their short attention span and impatience, iGen’ers respond best to brief feedback on specific tasks, not lengthy reviews of performance over the long haul. Keep the feedback short and to the point. And although iGen’ers lack Millennials’ outsize self-confidence, they are still a highly individualistic generation that respond to personal attention and customization. They want to make a personal impact, not be just a cog in the wheel. Some companies have started to allow employees to choose their own job title and customize their career paths. These are options attractive to both Millennials and iGen’ers, who share a common interest in being treated as unique individuals.
Use the word safety or refer to your “safe environment.” iGen’ers have been taught to value safety more than any generation before them, and these words are not just comforting but expected. They want to know that they will feel safe and protected—not just physically but socially and emotionally. That doesn’t mean you have to coddle them—they should be brought up to speed on the realities of business—but they do need a more gentle touch than the Millennials did. Always emphasize that you want to help them, that you’re on their side and the feedback you’re offering is to help them succeed. (Specifically say “I want you to succeed.”) Frame criticism as the best path toward better performance.
Many businesses that recruit young college graduates have begun to involve their parents in the recruiting and orientation process. I expect that this trend will continue and even get stronger as iGen’ers enter the workforce. iGen’ers are becoming adults at a slower pace than Millennials did and are products of colleges that are increasingly focused on safety and protection. Do not be shocked when your young employees consult their parents when they need advice or when they seem more like 18-year-olds than 22-year-olds. By Boomer and GenX standards, they basically are.
iGen’ers bring new attitudes about communication. Many don’t understand why anyone uses email when texting is so much faster. “For a while, I thought email was what people meant when they referred to ‘snail mail,’ ” wrote 16-year-old Vivek Pandit in his book We Are Generation Z. “Eventually I realized that snail mail was the paper stuff that [takes] days to reach someone. I call that ‘ancient mail.’ ” Even texting may be on its way out: with the popularity of Instagram and Snapchat, much of iGen’s communication is visual rather than via words. iGen’ers speak in emojis, images, and video clips. Eventually organizations may adjust to the iGen way of communicating, but until then many iGen employees will need instruction about how to best communicate with older coworkers and clients; in other words, tell them to be careful with emojis, videos, and constant images. Many Boomers don’t know what every emoji means, and not all GenX’ers appreciate being sent a video instead of an email. iGen’ers will also need to adjust their attention span. Reading long passages of text and writing long reports will tax iGen’ers more than it did Millennials and GenX’ers. For their entire lives, communication has meant dealing with short snippets of information, not pages and pages of pure text.
iGen’ers will also bring their attitudes about trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions into the workplace. If you have a (perhaps older) employee who’s still a little clueless about race, gender, sexual orientation, or transgender issues, expect to get an earful from your new iGen employees about microaggressions. In the coming years, employees might begin requesting safe spaces at work. More and more will become emotional in meetings when they hear something they disagree with. iGen’ers will learn to adapt to the reality of the workplace as they age, but the workplace will also adapt to them—in still unknown ways.
What Lies Ahead for iGen?
In the three years I spent working on this book, making dozens of line graphs, reading campus newspapers, and listening to the stories and opinions of young people during in-depth interviews, I’ve realized this: iGen’ers are scared, maybe even terrified. Growing up slowly, raised to value safety, and frightened by the implications of income inequality, they have come to adolescence in a time when their primary social activity is staring at a small rectangular screen that can like them or reject them. The devices they hold in their hands have both extended their childhoods and isolated them from true human interaction. As a result, they are both the physically safest generation and the most mentally fragile. They are more focused on work and more realistic than Millennials, grasping the certainty that they’ll need to fight hard to make it. They’re exquisitely tolerant and have brought a new awareness of equality, mental health, and LGBT rights, leaving behind traditional structures such as religion. iGen’ers have a solid basis for success, with their practical nature and their inherent caution. If they can shake themselves free of the constant clutch of their phones and shrug off the heavy cloak of their fear, they can still fly. And the rest of us will be there, cheering them on.
Acknowledgments
Thanks go first to Jill Kneerim and Lucy Cleland, my agents and first readers, for your crucial and wise advice. I truly could not have done it without you.
Thanks to all of the great folks at Atria Books, especially Peter Borland, Milena Brown, Sean Delone, Tory Lowy, Leslie Meredith, and Daniella Wexler. You are my book-publishing home and thus my favorite place.
A special thanks to the teens and young adults who generously gave their time to answer my questions about your generation and tell me about your experiences. I am grateful for your honesty and your insight; you brought iGen to life. I’d also like to thank the friends, family, and high school teachers who introduced me to the teens I interviewed; your help must stay anonymous, but it was invaluable. Thanks as well to the online survey participants and SDSU students who told me more about iGen’ers’ thoughts and opinions. I wish you success as you stride out into the world.
I’d also like to thank the dedicated, tireless people who administer the large over-time surveys I draw from in this book (Monitoring the Future, the American Freshman Survey, the General Social Survey, and the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System). Somehow, despite the sometimes insulated world of academia, I have yet to meet any of you personally, but I clearly owe you a drink. On behalf of many, please keep doing what you are doing. Your data sets are national treasures. Without them, people would still be stumbling around in the dark making wild guesses about generational differences. With them, we are in the light, able to see clearly how the generations have changed. May your funding be perpetual.
Thanks to my good friend W. Keith Campbell, my partner in crime on many papers and two other books, for always helping me stay sane. Angela Beiler-May, Stacy Campbell, Nathan Carter, Malissa Clark, Kristin Donnelly, Julie Exline, Joshua Foster, Patricia Greenfield, Joshua Grubbs, Garrett Hisler, Nathan Honeycutt, Thomas Joiner, Sara Konrath, Zlatan Krizan, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Gabrielle Martin, Heejung Park, Radmila Prislin, Megan Rogers, Ramya Sastry, Samia Shaikh, Ryne Sherman, Brian Spitzberg, Yalda Uhls, Hannah VanLandingham, and Brooke Wells were outstanding collaborators on the journal articles based on this data, filling in gaps in my expertise and generally being cool, smart people. I count myself very lucky to know you. May your universities treat you well and give you raises.
Thanks to my friends and family who were nice enough and patient enough to listen when I talked about the book: Ken Bloom, Kate Catanese, Kim and Brian Chapeau, Lawrence Charap, Jenny Crowhurst, Jody Davis, Eli Finkel, Jeff Green, Nick Grossman, Curtis Hall, Chris Harris, Brandelyn Jarrett, Malhar Kale, Sarah and Dan Kilibarda, Marta Kolthoff, Ron Louden, Erin Mitchell, Bill and Joan Moening, Bud and Pat Moening, Darci and Brad Olsen, Shruti Patkar, Trinty Perry, Steven Siu, Marilyn Swenson, Drew Sword, Amy and Paul Tobia, Anna and Dusty Wet
zel, Jud Wilson, May Yeh, Ashley and Mike Zahalan, Alice Zellmer, and Jennifer and Matt Zwolinski. Special thanks to my parents, Steve and JoAnn Twenge, for babysitting on those random nonschool days when I really needed to write, and the vacations when I really needed to not write.
Thanks to my husband, Craig, for all of the times when I talked about line graphs at dinner and the times when I stayed back from family fun to work on this book.
And finally, thanks to my three iGen daughters, Kate, Elizabeth, and Julia. You are the light of my life, my everything. I have just one question: If I name your generation, will you listen to me when I ask you to comb your hair? Thanks, girls. I love you.
About the Author
Jean M. Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is the author of more than 120 scientific publications, the books Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable than Ever Before, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (coauthored with W. Keith Campbell), The Impatient Woman’s Guide to Getting Pregnant, and the textbooks Social Psychology (coauthored with David G. Myers) and Personality Psychology: Understanding Yourself and Others (coauthored with W. Keith Campbell). Her research has been covered in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, and the Washington Post, and she has been featured on Today, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, Fox & Friends, NBC Nightly News, Dateline NBC, and National Public Radio. She holds a BA and MA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from the University of Michigan. She lives in San Diego, California, with her husband and three daughters.
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Appendix A
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Sources, Methods, and Separating Cohorts and Time Periods
Most of the data in this book come from four sources, all of which are publicly available online:
1. The Monitoring the Future (MtF) Survey of 8th, 10th, and 12th graders (administered by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, and funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services). The 12th-grade survey has been done every year since 1976, 8th and 10th grades since 1991. The total number of survey participants is approximately 1.4 million.
2. The Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) of 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th graders (administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Every other year since 1991. Total number of survey participants is approximately 175,000.
3. The American Freshman Survey of entering college students (administered by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA and funded by the college campuses that participate). Every year since 1966. Total number of survey participants is approximately 10 million.
4. The General Social Survey (GSS) of adults 18 and over (administered by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and funded by the National Science Foundation). Every year or every other year since 1972. Total number of survey participants is approximately 60,000.
These surveys are nationally representative, meaning that their administrators take careful steps to make sure that the sample represents the US population as a whole (for the GSS) or the population of high school students as a whole (for MtF and the YRBSS). The AF college survey includes those who enroll as first-time freshmen at four-year colleges and universities, with the data weighted to be nationally representative of that population.
These surveys have another big advantage: High response rates, meaning that the majority, and usually the vast majority, of the people asked to participate in the survey said yes. Response rates for MtF hover around 80%; for the YRBSS at 86%; and the GSS at 70%. The American Freshman survey includes data from campuses only if their response rate is 65% or greater.
This is important: if a survey has a low response rate, it might not represent the population. Some have speculated that this is what occurred with the polls for the 2016 election: Response rates for telephone polls dropped from 36% in 1997 to 8% in 2014 and might have been even lower in 2016. Those who didn’t pick up the phone, or who hung up once they realized it was a poll, might have been a different type of person from those who answered the poll questions. That may have been one of the reasons why the polls did not predict Trump’s win in several key states. The response rates for these surveys are about ten times as high as those of the 2014 phone polls, so the risks of their results being off by a few percentage points are less likely. With captive audiences in schools and at colleges, these surveys reach a much larger percentage of the population with much lower refusal rates. Even the GSS of adults gets a response rate eight times as high as phone polls (probably because it follows up extensively with possible respondents and administers most interviews in person).
Many of the topics explored in this book appeared in more than one of these surveys and often across several questions worded in different ways or asking about different aspects of time use or behavior—and the results are almost always the same. In some cases, the trends that show up on these surveys also appear in behaviors measured in different ways—for example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ data on employment rates, or Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data on suicide rates.
Nearly all of the figures and conclusions in the book are based on these surveys, the best data available to capture cultural change. Of course, the data available online are in data files—incredibly long and detailed columns of thousands of variables and rows of hundreds of thousands of survey participants. Like any researcher, I had to make some decisions about how to present the data.
Means or Percentages?
First, I decided to focus primarily on percentages, as they are easier to comprehend immediately than means based on scales. For example, many of the survey items here used a 1-to-5 scale, with 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = agree, and 5 = strongly agree. Instead of showing the mean response (which might be something like 3.75 for an item most people agreed with), I instead show the percentage of people who agreed (the combined percentage of those who answered “agree” or “strongly agree,” say, 56%). I did the same with items on time use, which also used 1-to-5 scales (usually ranging from “never” to “nearly every day”). Here I used either the percentage who said they did an activity “nearly every day” or those who chose “once a week or more” or “nearly every day.” This seemed more readily comprehensible than the mean on a 1-to-5 scale, where it’s necessary to recall what each number represents.
The downside of percentages is that some of the variance in the data is lost. Focusing on the percentage who agree doesn’t allow a view of whether the change was focused on those who disagreed or those who chose the neutral response of “neither agree nor disagree,” while means capture this possibility. I found, though, that the trends looked extremely similar when graphed as means and when graphed as percentages. For example, consider the use of print media among 8th and 10th graders. Here is the graph using means:
Figure A.1. 8th and 10th graders’ print media use, 1–5 scale. Monitoring the Future, 1991–2015.
And the graph using percentages:
Figure A.2. 8th and 10th graders’ print media use, percentage using once a week or more. Monitoring the Future, 1991–2015.
The graphs for the MtF, the YRBSS, and American Freshman data all show the raw average percentages from those years. These data sets survey between 2,000 and 200,000 people on each item every year, so the percentages are fairly reliable. Given the large sample sizes, I didn’t think it was necessary to include error bars, which would be very narrow.
A few items of interest (for example, belief in God) were not asked on the three very large surveys, so I present data from 18- to 24-year-olds in the GSS. The smaller sample size meant that error bars might have been useful, but I chose not to include them as they would have made the graph more difficult to read. The span of 18 to 24 also has issues, since in 2016 that included those born in 1992 to 1998, most of whom are late Millennials rather than iGen’ers per se. Overall, the GSS data on 18- to 24-year-olds should be considered weaker evidence for iGen’ers’ behavior than the other three surveys, which is why I present it only when the other three do not include an item measuring the same thing. That said, the GSS is the longest ongoing survey of US adults and is arguably the most respected over-time survey in social science. One other note: the figures and analyses in the book exclude the black oversamples in the 1982 and 1987 GSS and are weighted by the suggested weighting variable (WTSALL) to make the sample representative of individuals rather than households.
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