Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
JUDY WOODRUFF: I see my job today as getting out of the way so that a dozen or so really
smart people can enlighten the rest of us about
today’s generation of teens and twenty-somethings. And before
I introduce our first outstanding panel, who are going to give us a portrait of the Millennials,
here is a one- minute video peek at what some members of
this younger generation had to say when I talked to them
back in 2006 and 2007, and then in some follow-up reporting last summer, about how they see
themselves. Look at these screens.
(Begin video segment.)
Millennial Interviewee 1: We have all these skills. We can type faster; we’re more proficient
with computers and stuff. Change is scary. And
the older generation is, like, already set and settled on their
ways. And they’re like, we don’t want to change, this is good, why mess with it?
Millennial Interviewee 2: I have this job and I’m going to go into it with a mindset
that if I do a good job, I’ll be capable of staying there and learning.
And if not, then that’s not what’s meant to be and another
opportunity will arise.
Millennial Interviewee 3: Not to say it’s the right thing but, you know, to be a single
mom and to have kids and work and go to school is kind of
a typical thing. You make a compromise because the things
that you want and the things you have to do and you figure out how to get it all done.
(End video segment.)
MS. WOODRUFF: And you do. You figure out how to get it all done. That’s just a sample.
And now I do want to move to this especially distinguished
panel to kick off the conference.
First, I want to introduce the individuals who are going to react to the presentation
that you’re about to hear, and I’m going to call them up one
by one. First, Neil Howe – come on up – arguably the country’s
most renowned authority on this younger generation, as well as on the generations that preceded
it. With the late Bill Strauss, Neil co-authored a
series of groundbreaking books on American generations. They
first identified the cohort that we’re examining today with the book, “Millennials Rising,”
and that was 10 years ago.
David Campbell, please come up – where are you David? There you are, hi – associate
professor of political science at the University of Notre
Dame, and the author or co-author or editor of a number of
books on civic engagement, on religion in politics and on voting behavior, as well as
a book that he and Robert Putnam will publish this fall, examining
the religious landscape in the United States.
Mark Lopez – where are you, Mark? Right here – associate director of the Pew Hispanic
Center, a project of the Pew Research Center; formerly
an assistant professor at the School of Public Policy at the
University of Maryland. Mark was also research director there for the Center for Information
and Research on Civil Learning and Engagement,
also known as CIRCLE.
Allison Pond – right here – research associate for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life,
another project of the Pew Research Center. Before
taking on this assignment, Allison worked for the
International and Government Affairs Office of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints. She also worked for the National Crime Prevention Council.
And finally, I’m going to introduce the person who is going to lead off this panel
with fresh-off-the-presses survey results, Paul Taylor. Executive vice
president of the Pew Research Center, Paul heads the
Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project as well as the Pew Hispanic Center. Paul spent
25 years – this is the most important part of his
life – as a newspaper reporter. And he is still remembered as one
of the very best the Washington Post has ever produced. After Paul finishes, we are going
to spend about 45 minutes hearing from the panel, then
we’re going to take questions from you in the audience for
another 30. Paul Taylor, you are on.
PAUL TAYLOR: Thank you, Judy. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, everybody,
for coming.
We call this report “Confident, Connected and Open to Change,” and over the next few
minutes, I’m going to try to tell you why we chose those words.
I’m going to offer a very fast tour of a very broad landscape.
This is a sprawling report. We covered a lot of areas. I’m going to drive too fast; I’m
going to throw a lot of numbers at you. Numbers are the lingua
franca of the Pew Research Center. I’m not going to pause
much to discuss what they mean. That’s for the rest of the panelists in this morning
panel and the rest of the panelists throughout the day, and I hope
all of you. I know Judy very much wants to get the audience
involved. So let’s go.
MS. WOODRUFF: Before you get started, I just want to say if any of you at the far end over
there want to get a better view, there are a couple of empty
tables over here, so feel free to make your way over.
(Off-side conversation.)
MR. TAYLOR: This is the most diverse generation racially and ethnically in our history. I
think most of us recognize that. We are in a period of enormous
change. The face of America is changing. By the middle
of the century, we will no longer be a majority-white country. Hispanics are the biggest driver
of that change. In this generation, they account for
19 percent. But they’re only the leading-edge of a much
bigger demographic bulge. One-quarter of all children born in the United States today is
Hispanic. Never before in our history has a single minority
ethnic group made up this large a share of our young
population.
Most people associate Hispanic with “immigrant,” and, indeed, the Hispanic presence is a result
of one of the great immigration waves in our history.
It’s different from the previous two; they were European. This
immigrant wave is now about 40 years old. Half of it is Hispanic, a quarter of it is
Asian and the remainder is Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
But interestingly about this generation, this generation is not predominantly immigrant.
Gen X, the next- up generation, has more immigrants in it than
this generation does. Because this immigration wave is 40
years old, this generation is primarily the children of immigrants. And we did a big report
about how young Latinos are growing up. Mark Lopez co-authored
it. He’ll be talking some about that.
This generation, like all Americans, but particularly this generation, has been hammered by this
recession. I won’t go through all these numbers there, but in the first report we
did with Judy, we asked them if you are employed fulltime, and 50
percent said yes. Now it’s down to 41 percent.
Another way we can express those figures is through the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We
looked at how many 18- to 29-year-olds are either unemployed
or not in the workforce. And what we find is that 37
percent of this generation today is either unemployed or not in the workforce. This is
the highest share for this age group in nearly 40 years.
The last time it was this high – and this is of interest – was 1972. In 1972, some
bad economic times. It also happened to be the last year that we
had a military draft in this country and there were a lot of young
adults who wanted to stay out of the workforce because they wanted to stay out of harm’s
way, literally and figuratively.
Let me take a little detour from the economics to talk a little bit about military service.
This generation has grown up in a decade when our country has
been fighting two wars. And yet, it has far less exposure to
military service and all the responsibilities and the burdens that implies than any previous
generation in American history.
Of this generation, today, 2 percent of the males in this generation of 18- to 29-year-olds
are military veterans. If you look at the Xers, one generation
up, same stage of life, 6 percent were military veterans
– of males. The Boomers, same stage of life, 13 percent were military veterans. The silent
generation, 24 percent were military veterans. So a profound
shift here in one of the classic pathways to adulthood.
As long as we’re on this detour, another important institution where there has been
a profound shift is religion. One-quarter of this generation if
you ask them their religion, they say I’m not affiliated; I have no
formal association with religion. That is unprecedented since we’ve been able to take
this polling. It’s about half the share of their parents’ generation,
the Boomers, at the same stage of life.
Now, we know many people typically become more religious over time and we will also
add – and Allison Pond of the Forum will talk about this, and
perhaps David as well – not belonging does not necessarily
mean not believing, and if you look at various practices – daily prayer, spirituality and
other things – actually this generation is not that dissimilar.
But let’s return to the economic story because it is a – it’s a very profound one. As
I said earlier, this is the most unemployed or out-of-the-workforce
generation in modern history. There is a positive side to
this coin. And there’s almost a see-saw here. Most out-of-the-workforce, they are
also the most engaged in college, community college or graduate
schools. The highest share in modern history of 18- to 24-
year-olds in this case – because that’s the classic college-going age – a higher
share than ever before are now enrolled in college. It’s a tick
under 40 percent. Never been this high.
Some of this is classic long-term change. A modern knowledge-based economy sends a message
to everybody – you want to get ahead, you better
get some credentials. But that trend has been clearly
accelerated in the last few years by the recession. Can’t find a job anyway, might as well go
get a degree or another degree. And we’re seeing a lot
of that.
What is striking about this is that despite this situation, this is a generation that
is very confident about its economic future. We all sort of know – any
of us who have had teenagers – or some of us once actually
were teenagers – we know that teenagers and 20-somethings tend to think they’re
invincible; everything is going to work out fine. We see that in
a lot of polling data over time.
But for this generation to be this detached or this unable to find the first rung on the
economic ladder, we asked them a series of questions that we have
asked over the years: Do you currently have enough
money to lead the life you want to lead, or do you think you will have enough money eventually
to lead the life you want to lead?
Nine-in-ten of this generation say, yes, I’m going to eventually have enough money, or,
I already do. They are much more optimistic about their
own economic futures than older adults are about their
economic futures. The older adults who are worried about their 401(k)s or worried about
their retirement, et cetera.
On top of that, they are also feeling more upbeat about the country as a whole. A classic
question that pollsters have been asking since the beginning
of time is, you know, how are things going in the country
today? Are you satisfied or not with the way things are going in America?
And there’s a line chart that shows on top, it’s the younger generation. And you’ll
see over 20 years, it’s always a little bit more optimistic on that
question than are those 30 and over. But the gap is now the
biggest that we have seen it in the 20 years that we’ve been asking this question.
So whatever toll on the national psyche that the current circumstances have taken – you’ve
got a recession, you’ve got a jobless recovery,
you’ve got a financial meltdown, you’ve got a housing meltdown
in terms of values and you’ve got two wars – it has left a much bigger dent on older
adults than it has on younger adults.
OK, they are a connected generation. Now, this almost goes without saying but we asked
people of all ages in this survey, do you think your generation
is unique and distinctive? And all four generations, one-
half to two-thirds said, yes, our generation is unique and distinctive.
And then we asked, why? And the Millennials more so than any generation – the Xers cited
technology, but only 12 percent. By the way, this was
an open-ended question. Had we asked this in a closed-ended
way, those numbers would have gone way up. But this was unprompted. Fully 24 percent
said something about technology is what makes our
generation unique. You see the Silents, they talk about
their historic moment of coming-of-age, whether World War II or the Depression. And I must
say, let me take a pause to observe the Boomers’ definition
of their generational identify – work ethic and respectful.
And to borrow a phrase that’s popular now, I look at that as a Boomer and I say to myself
incredulously, Dude! (Laughter.) Either we’ve had a big
personality change over these last 40 years or there’s a whole
lot of selective memory going on – (laughter) – because I remember the ’60s – at least
some of the ’60s – (laughter) – and I don’t think that “work
ethic” and “respectful” were at the top of most peoples’ to-do list. I
don’t think most people had a to-do list! (Laughter.) But there you have it.
All right, but let’s return to the Millennials, and clearly they identify – I mean, what’s
so interesting about technology is technology, this little thing
that we all now have in our hands, but they are the leading
adopters of, so it’s their window on the world, it’s their window for information,
it’s their window for entertainment. It’s the platform for their
social lives.
And in a session this afternoon – we had the great fortune of hearing from danah boyd
last summer. She’s a social anthropologist. And I don’t
want to steal her thunder, but she made the point to us, and it
just made little light bulbs go off.
Teenagers and twenty-somethings need to be where other teenagers and twenty-somethings
are. And way back in the distant mist of history before
the digital revolution, that place was the suburban mall or
the soda shop or something like that. Now, that place is Facebook. They need to be there
because everybody else is there. So it’s fused not
just into their generational identity but into their social lives.
And it’s a very important item in their lives. And you see it here in terms of social
networking profiles where fully three-quarters have one, and that’s
obviously a much greater share than is the case with older
generations.
The digital world allows this generation – well, it allows all of us, but for most of us, it’s
a profound and somewhat disorienting change; the idea that
everybody can get on a cyber soapbox and say, here’s who I
am, here’s what I’m doing right now, if you’re interested, here’s what I was doing
yesterday, here’s a video of what I did yesterday.
Everybody really has the ability to share their lives with everybody they want to share
it with. It raises interesting privacy issues and norms around
privacy that I think we’ll discover later. But it has been
dubbed by people more clever than I, because of this power, the look-at-me generation,
they take it for granted that everybody wants to look at them,
and they have the power to be looked at.
And what’s interesting is that in this generation, those behaviors are not only – they exhibit
those behaviors not only online with the ability
to do it but offline as well. And for this generation, as something
as a generational badge are tattoos and piercings, perhaps in the way that long hair was for
those of us who grew up in the ’60s.
But the tattoo numbers – there they are – 38 percent of this generation has a tattoo,
have a tattoo; and for most, one is not enough. Just to dig a little
deeper here with some more numbers, 50 percent of those
who have tattoos have two to five, and 18 percent have six or more.
Piercings in a place other than the earlobe: 23 percent piercing in a place other than
the earlobe. On privacy of those tattoos, of those Millennial
tattoos, 70 percent are typically hidden beneath clothing.
Take it for what you will.
So we’ve talked a lot about how these folks are different, these young adults are different.
Let’s talk a little bit about how they’re similar. Here’s
a classic: We gave folks seven or eight things, said, look, here are big, important things
in a lot of peoples’ lives. Tell us these – you know, what are the most important
things in your life, and rank them, or tell us which ones are the most important, next-most
important.
So here’s the list we got and it’s a pretty familiar list, as I’ll show you – well,
I can leap forward to it. So here are the Millennials, and it’s parenthood
and marriage on top of career success, helping others and
other things. If you look at the same list and you compare how 18- to 29-year-olds and
30-and-aboves answered those questions, there’s almost
no variance whatsoever. So in terms of life priorities, they are
in the same place.
But then let’s look at behaviors. How many of this generation are currently married?
Twenty-one percent. And again, if you project backwards
in time and look at the same stage of life for Xers and
Boomers, twice as many of their parents’ generation was married at this stage in life
and more than half of in effect their grandparents generation.
So they’re not – they value marriage; they are not rushing to
the altar.
And then in terms of parenthood, of course, there has been a social revolution on the
linkage between marriage and parenthood that these numbers
express. In 2007, the last year we had, 40 percent of all
births were to single mothers – that’s basically quadruple the figure that was pertained
in 1970. This has been a gradual change over those 40 years.
The Millennials are part of that change. The Millennials more so than any generation didn’t
grow up – only six in 10 grew up – with both parents.
So broken homes, never-formed homes, reformed homes –
it’s part of their life experience, and judging from this, they are repeating that
pattern, perhaps even more so.
All right, getting near the end here, open to change. Clearly, their political behaviors,
their big support for Barack Obama and his message of change suggests
that they very much are open to change. But this
battery of questions also tries to look at their attitudes toward changing cultural and
social and family values.
We asked all generations, do you think these newer forms are good or bad for society? And
I’m only showing you the Millennials’ responses here,
and they are – in every case – they are more receptive to
these newer modes of family arrangements and parenting arrangements than are older adults.
That doesn’t mean they are approving of them. And interestingly, on single – what
is it, single mothers raising children – the majority are disapproving.
Only 6 percent say this is a good thing, 60 percent a bad
thing and about a third say it’s neither good nor bad. But in all cases, they are more
approving and more receptive to change. They are more receptive
to immigration; they are more receptive to interracial
dating, et cetera, et cetera.
Let me close I think where Judy closed. I too am the father of, a parent of three. Mine
are Xers, or I guess my youngest is a Millennial. And I’m,
like you, very fond of this generation. And reading these
numbers in many ways made me fonder. They really are an interesting group. Here was
something that kind of teed up our interest in this:
Back in 1969 at the height of the kind of age-based social conflicts of the 1960s, Gallup
asked what was the generation gap question: Do you think
there’s a big generation gap between young and old? And
Gallup found then, 74 percent of all adults said, yeah, there’s a big generation gap.
We asked the exact same question last year, and, to our shock,
we found the number hadn’t gone down. If anything, it had
gone up slightly, 79 percent.
So what is this about? And we’ve asked a body of questions since then to try to tease
this out. And what we, in sum, what we find is, yes, this is
a gap, but it’s not a war. And it’s a much gentler generation gap.
And I won’t run you through all the numbers, but on all sorts of fronts, what we find is
that younger adults – these younger adults – are respectful
of their parents and their grandparents. We asked them – when
we asked them, what’s the source of this gap, they all talk about technology.
They all say, and, well, also we have different moral values – young and old alike say that.
And then we ask them, well, whose moral values are better?
And the younger adults agree with the older adults that
it’s the older adults’ moral values that are better. It’s hard for me to imagine
40 years ago, the Boomers saying, ah yeah, we’re sort of different
from our parents, and they sort of had it right, and we sort of had it
wrong.
We asked them – we asked adults of all ages, when you were growing up, did you have a lot
of fights with mom and dad? And the young adults in this
age group had about half the number of fights as they report
than the older adults report they had with their parents when they were growing up.
We asked them about family responsibilities. They clearly see the family, in whatever way
– it either was never formed in the first place, it got broken,
it’s been recombined – they see the family as the ultimate
social safety net. They are living that reality right now in a bad economy. One-in-eight of
them in their twenties has moved back in with mom and dad
because they can’t find a job. And mom and dad, for a lot
of them, now that they are adults, are not just parents; they’re actually buddies.
They actually do get along.
And when we asked them about grandma, and when you ask them, if grandma is in a situation
where she might need to move in with the family, is
that a family responsibility to take in an elderly parent who wants
to move in? The younger adults are much more likely than the older adults or the elderly
themselves to say, yes, it’s a family responsibility.
We’re actually coming up with a report next week or next month on the quiet revolution
that’s going on, the multi-generational family, which went
straight down for the decade – the entire 20th century – is
staging a quiet revival. These kids are part of it; it’s likely that they’re going
to be a part of it going forward.
And finally, when we asked everybody again, yes, there’s a generation gap, but people
really don’t see that there’s generational conflict. Indeed,
among all sort of social groups we asked about, the fewest see
there is social conflict.
So to sum up, this is a generation that I think by all empirical evidence has been dealt
a lousy hand. They’ve got a bad economy. Their family
situations started broken, became broken, got recombined,
whatever. The political system is looking pretty dysfunctional these days. There are
mountains of debt that we’re piling on this generation. We
sort of all know those stories.
So what are they doing in response? Well, in some ways, it’s what they’re not doing.
Are they protesting in the streets? No. Are they taking over the
dean’s office? No. They’re hanging out on Facebook with
their friends. They’re in school preparing for careers that it’s not clear that the
economy will deliver unto them. And they’re looking forward to a brighter
future.
And if you read the cover of the Atlantic magazine, you will hear – you will see that
there are a lot of economists who worry that this jobless recovery
is going to last a long time. And it will have a lingering
effect on these kids in terms of their earnings and their careers for 10, 15, 20 years. That
was the case in the early ’80s. It may be the case more.
These kids are not worried about that. They’re putting one foot in front of another. And
what they’re not doing – what they are not doing is pointing
fingers at their elders and saying, you know, this is a pretty
unholy mess you’ve given us. What they are doing is putting one foot in front of another
and saying, we’re going to get on with it because it’s
our future. There you have it.
MS. WOODRUFF: Great, great. A lot to chew over there. And I encourage everybody here
to read the full survey, the full report because there’s
so much material there that Paul has very deftly woven together
for us to kick off our discussion.
Neil Howe, I want to come to you first because you really are the person more than anybody
in the country, as I said earlier, who has studied
generations and especially this one. Paul touched on this at
several points, but what are some of the main ways this younger generation is different
from Boomers when we were younger, Gen X when they were
younger and the others?
NEIL HOWE: Thank you Judy. First of all, I just want to thank Pew for doing this study.
For those of us who have been talking about generations for
a long time, it’s great to have all of you come out and talk
about a generation. Social scientists talk about the cohort effect all the time, but
they don’t often talk about entire generations. Can you pass me
just a –
MR.
: Sure.
MR. HOWE: I’m tethered here and I can’t move. (Laughter.) Someone wired me up, so
I can’t move. Hold on one second. Thank you very much.
And as well, that you use the name Millennial generation, which is – I recall it was in
the late 1980s when Bill and I were writing our first book, “Generations:
The History of America’s Future,” which is sort of a
generational biography of America going back to the 17th century. And we’re wondering
about what to name the 14th generation. And we were coming
up with different names.
And Bill said, well, you know, the first one of them is coming along in 1982. They’re
going to be the high school class of 2000. And I bet you ABC and
all these networks are going to have big shows about the
high school class of 2000. What do you say we name them Millennials? (Chuckles.) So anyway,
that’s how the name was invented once upon a time,
and I think it was around 1980.
We made some predictions at that time about Millennials that no one believed. We said
that due to their location in history, this generation by the
time it became teenagers would cause a huge decline in many
of the measures of social pathology associated with youth. We said that the crime rate would
go down. Teen abortion, teen pregnancy, some of the
most dangerous measures of drug use would go down. And
indeed, I think that was kind of amazing that by the late 1990s and shortly after the year
2000, we saw all of those indicators shift.
And I think that’s one of the things to keep in mind about Millennials. They may say
that the Boomers have all these values, and these Boomers are
so much more moral people than they were, but it’s useful
remembering that when Boomers were coming of age, we had 17 uninterrupted years of declining
SAT scores, rising drug use, rising teen pregnancy,
rising suicide, rising rates of self-inflicted accidents, rising
crime – of that crime, the share that was violent was rising. Basically everything moved
in that direction. Millennials have been moving – most of these
indicators – in the opposite direction. And that’s truly
remarkable.
I think to answer your question, Judy, just about what makes them different. You have
to talk first – this is true of any generation – you have to talk
about location in history. Location in history is what shapes a
generation. And I think it’s very useful to think about that period from the mid-1960s
maybe all the way to the early 1980s, the Consciousness Revolution,
what some historians call America’s fourth or fifth great
awakening, what Francis Fukuyama calls the great disruption in American culture over
recent decades. That was a period where each generation locates
itself in a different way.
Boomers came of age, into adulthood, during that period. And that’s when we acquired
our reputation for reshaping values, reshaping the culture. We
were the counterculture. We were Consciousness III. We
were the greening of America. We were all of those things. And now that we’re in midlife,
we still think that all values revolve around ourselves.
So back then any discussion of values – back in the 1970s –
was a discussion about college kids. Older people back then apparently didn’t have
any values. (Chuckles.) We never talked about them.
And today, most discussions of values today are about midlife people. It’s red zone/blue
zone, it’s culture wars, it’s Boomers arguing with each other.
So if Boomers always go through their life telling other
generations what’s good and what’s bad, what’s right and what’s wrong, that’s
just – that’s how they’re wired. But that was the result of that location
in history.
Generation X were the children of that period, and that hugely influenced them. They were
the throwaway kids, the latchkey and self-care
guide kids. And they grew up at a time when childhood was –
when children were basically not wanted. They’re also the lowest – result of the lowest fertility
rate in American history. Fertility rate reached its
all-time low around the time of Watergate in 1974.
And they grew up in a time when childhood was devalued. I don’t know if you recall
all the child-was-devil horror movies of the 1970s – you know, “Rosemary’s
Baby” and “Omen” and “Damien” and “It’s Alive” –
and you know, they played – they packed theaters back then. That was our image of
childhood. (Laughter.)
The Millennial generation arrived when the Consciousness Revolution was over. And I think
that is how you define its location in history. Boomers
remember it coming of age, Xers remember it as children,
Millennials don’t remember it at all. So Woodstock is an SOL question to Millennials
today. It’s as remote from them as talk about the New Deal is from
a Boomer like myself. They don’t remember it. They don’t
remember anything associated with it in their own lives.
And in fact, when they came along was precisely a time at which childhood was revalued again
in America. This was a period – the early 80s
– when suddenly things began improving for children.
Alcohol consumption per capita among all Americans has been gradually declining since about 1981.
Drug use among all Americans has been gradually declining. The abortion rate, the divorce
rate have all been gradually declining.
I don’t know if you recall the early 1980s; it was the year of the yuppie finally settling
down. It was family values. It was cocooning. In 1982, when the
first Millennials were born, we saw the appearance of baby-
on-board bumper stickers all across America. Right? We’d never seen that before.
And suddenly all those child-as-devil movies – no one wanted to watch them. It was all
these cuddly baby movies. You remember, “Baby Boom”
and “Parenthood” and “Three Men and a Baby” started
coming out. And then about 10 years later, there were happy movies about adolescence.
Movies like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Searching
for Bobby Fischer.”
And today, in fact, a very common kind of movie – you see this all the time – these
are kids who basically inspired their parents to become better people.
And you see this especially now when you have later-
wave Millennials with Xer parents. A typical plotline now is, you know, Millennial kid
puts Xer dad into rehab or something like that. (Laughter.)
I mean, it’s just – we’re used to that today.
At the same time this happened – this new image of childhood – came a new protection
of children. And this is important to remember: Things like
child abuse and what was in their Halloween bags and bicycle
helmets and protective playground materials – all of this came into fashion. Fathers
present at the birth of their children. Even in the late 1970s, only
about 20 percent. By the late 1980s, thanks to the Lamaze
movement, about 65 percent. Today it’s over 70 percent.
So these were huge shifts. The entire home protection industry – all those gadgets
you put on your plugs and your stoves and so on. That was a self-made
– those were self-made devices back in the 1970s.
Incredible to remember it. Parents just kind of made those themselves. That became a multi-billion
dollar industry by the late 1980s. So all these things
began to shift.
And when parents couldn’t protect kids personally, they started deputizing government to step
in. The last 25 years have seen one of the great child
protection movements in American history – every bit as
big as what happened during the Progressive Era in the first two decades of the 20th century
under Roosevelt and Taft. You think of all of the
laws now even named after Millennials, you know, like Megan
laws or there’s now a Code Adam – you know, some kid is lost at a Wal-Mart. Bam,
all the doors shut, no
one gets in or out until that one child is found. But we’re very used to this now – throughout
our society and culture – this new protection.
And let me use that as a way to kind of get in a payoff, I think, of what you were asking.
So what are the basic ways that it really differs – this
new location in history? One is this sense of specialness. They’re
special. They’re special in the eyes of the media, politicians, their community and,
above all, their parents. These kids have been raised with
William and Martha Sears’ attachment parenting. The
parents are always around.
And we’ve looked at a lot surveys comparing parents, actually saying, you know, do I spend
more time with my kid than my parents spent with me?
Back in the 1980s, those surveys showed that parents
generally said, no, I don’t spend as much time. Today, decisively, particularly with
parents of the younger Millennials, they say overwhelmingly, I spend
much more time with my kids than my own parents spent
with me. So I mean, that’s an indicator of what’s going on.
Teachers, K-through-12 teachers, according to the last 6 years of the MetLife survey,
say that parents are their number one professional problem. OK?
(Laughter.) These parents are in their face constantly.
And one of the things I do when I talk to groups about dealing with parents is you can’t
straight-arm them. You can’t say to these parents, get out
of here, I’m the professional. You’ve just made your worst enemy
if you do that, OK? The fear and loathing and hatred in that parent (laughter).
What you have to do is you have to channel the energy. You have to basically say, OK,
together we’re going to raise this great child. (Laughter.)
I’m going to do this, and you’re going to do that, and together
we’ll get – you have to partner it. This is what colleges are now doing, these huge
elaborate freshman orientations where they pass out the teddy
bears and all those Boomers are crying, you know?
(Laughter.)
Some institutions really get it. I don’t know if you’ve seen recently the U.S. Army
recruiting slogan. You’ve seen those ads, right, with the parents
and kids that are looking at their careers together. But the
slogan really gets it. You made them strong. We’ll make them Army strong – right? – which
is perfect. It’s the partnership. And you see this.
And now the new message is for employers. Get used to – you know, meet the parent
of these – (laughter). There’s going to be a bring-your-parent-to-work
week. (Laughter.) It’s coming. And they’re on the phone with their parents anyway, so
you might as well just meet them. And they’re telling their
kids things about – they should get benefits and make sure you get a pension plan and stay
there for the long term and all that. So they’re cheerleading
for their kids. Anyway, get to know them. (Laughter.) But
that’s one thing with specialness.
The other thing – the sheltering. And the sheltering is huge. They’re aware – and
you see, Xers had mixed feelings about sheltering because with
an Xer, you sheltered them and two thoughts came to their
mind: First of all, they would ask, well, why do I trust you to shelter me? You know,
that natural skepticism. (Laughter.) You know, what’s
your real agenda here? (Laughter.) And the other thing is,
what’s the message here? I can’t take care of myself? You know, that’s kind of
the exit response. You know, I’m not tough enough? You know, what’s
going on?
The Millennials have no problem with sheltering. The Millennial response is, I get it. I’m
special; you want to protect me. (Laughter.) I mean, what’s
the matter here? I don’t have any problem with that. So
sheltering is big. And you see that in every institution dealing with young people.
MS. : What is sheltering?
MR. HOWE: Sheltering.
MS. : What is it?MR. HOWE: What do you mean, what is it?
MS. : How would you define it?
MS. WOODRUFF: Protecting, providing for.
MR. HOWE: Providing protections for kids. In other words, all of these laws and rules
and regulations – just look at graduated license laws now in
most states where you have to go through this elaborate
procedure: OK, now two-and-a-half people plus a dog can be in your car while you’re driving.
Next month it will be something else.
Another huge trend – and I won’t spend much time – it’s the confidence. And I
think you covered that. The incredible confidence of this generation.
It’s causing them in the midst of the recession not just to
take the first jobs that gives them cash, but to say, no, I’ve got longer-term goals.
I’m going to live at home. I’m going to go to school. I’m not
giving up that longer-term dream.
One huge difference – and this is something that we pay a lot of attention to in this
generation – and that is this ethic of teamwork and community. And
you see this most dramatically in what they spend most of
their time thinking about and doing, which is their technology. And I want to just touch
on that because I think it’s so important.
People often ask the question: How does technology shape a generation? And that’s an interesting
question, but it’s usually the wrong question. The much more interesting and fruitful question
is: How does a generation shape technology? Much more
interesting question because if you look at that you
see, who invented the personal computers and why?
Well, it was Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in the late ’70s, early ’80s. Why? Because
they wanted to get away from those huge mainframe IBMs that had
been designed by their GI generation parents. The idea
was that all the information went to the top of an organizational pyramid, someone crunched
the data and then all the orders went down – right? – throughout
the organization.
Boomers said, no, we each want an individual think station on our own desk separate from
anyone else, so we can be personally creative. And that
was the whole, 1984 won’t be like 1984 ads you remember in
the 1980s and Apple and everything taking off. Gen X took this theme of individualizing
and individuating the technology further with the internet,
particularly with the web commerce and everything they did.
But here’s the surprise, and here’s the real trend-breaker. Millennials are taking
this technology and – to everyone’s surprise – when they were growing
up – you know, when they were growing up they came
home and the first thing they wanted to do on the computer was, well, they wanted to
e-mail their friend. And then they wanted to go on the chat room,
and then it was IM, and then it was Facebook and
MySpace, and now it’s these cell phones, which have a little Marauder’s Map; you
can track every single one of your buddies all day, 24/7.
But the point is, they’re moving technology back to the community. And in fact, they’re
revitalizing and galvanizing political campaigns and community
action through technology. This was not designed or
anticipated by older people. This was driven by young people. And you see this in hugely
higher rates of community service and volunteering. I mean,
let’s face it, for Gen X, volunteering was a punishment.
You know, you did something wrong at college, you do community service. (Laughter.) And
the Gen Xer would say, why me of all people? (Laughter.)
But the Millennials – it’s more of a norm. And so that is
huge.
And maybe just one last thing to comment on is how conventional this generation is. Conventional
in a very important way, and it often surprises
Boomers. You ask them what they want to do as they get
older, and they say – they have very conventional answers. They say, I want to have a balanced
life. I want to be a good citizen and a good neighbor.
According to the UCLA freshmen poll, an unprecedented share say they want to get married and have
kids eventually. Much higher than it was for Boomers. You ask them how they want to spend
their time, and they say, I want to spend time with my
parents. And it gets back to this whole revitalization of the
extended family, which is going on today.
And even their attitudes toward issues like gay marriage and minorities getting along
with each other is very much driven by this sense that we should
all have a place, we should all have a family, we should all
be brought into the mainstream. There’s a complete absence of the stigmatizing that
goes on so often with Boomers.
And I think in that sense, underlying that is a great sense of conventionality. They
want to take things and make them conventional so that we can all
celebrate them, we can all enjoy them and everyone can fit in
and have a place that way. No one has to shock anyone, you know, like Boomers were constantly
doing at the same age.
MS. WOODRUFF: Neil, I let you go on a long time because everybody can see he’s just
a goldmine of history and information about this generation
and just some wonderful context that you gave us. David, I
want to come to you. I mean, how do you explain – and this picks up both on what Paul and
Neil were saying – given the severity of this recession,
this economy, where does this optimism, this confidence that
things are going to be all right for this generation? What’s your understanding of
that? Where does that come from?
DAVID CAMPBELL: That’s a good question. I suspect if you look at the trend over time
– the fact that young people have always been more optimistic
than folks who are older – that suggests that there’s
something simply about being young that makes you more optimistic, which is – given the
dismal state of the economic climate – probably a refreshing
thing.
I mean, I spend a lot of time with Millennials since I am a college professor, so these are
the people sitting in the seats in front of me. And I
certainly see this – a high level of optimism. And I think it goes
back to this individualized sense, this personalized sense of this generation, that they’re sort
of – you know, all the trends that Neil was describing.
This is a generation that has had lots of things provided for them in an environment
that’s been supportive and such, that this is a generation that’s
been taught that you really can accomplish anything. I mean, I
see that in the students that I speak with all the time, that they always have 17 internships
lined up, and they have all sorts of ambitions and such
because from knee-high to a grasshopper, that’s the world
they’ve been raised in. They have been told, the world is your oyster, go out and do whatever
you want. And that’s in spite of the economy.
MS. WOODRUFF: Yeah. So it’s not like they feel the rug has been pulled out from under
them because of the economy and the – what is it? – 37
percent, Paul said, don’t have a job?
MR. CAMPBELL: No, again. So I think part of that is just youthful optimism that you would
find at any point in time, but I do suspect – and again,
if you look at that graph we saw, the gap between older and
younger in optimism is a little higher now than it has been in the past – that’s
probably because of this environment in which today’s young people
have been raised.
MS. WOODRUFF: Allison, I’m going to ask you to pick up on young people and faith – again,
this is something Paul talked about. But how does
the fact that they are less attached to a traditional religion
and yet – you know, it’s not just a purely black-and-white picture there. I mean, they
pray more, I gather, than other generations did when they were
young. Fill in some of the blanks there about young people
and their faith and their connection to organized religion.
ALLISON POND: Well, you’re right that this is a very nuanced picture that we see there.
By some key measures – for example, affiliation and
attendance, young people are a little bit less religious than those
who are older than they are – in some cases, significantly less religious. They are also
less likely to say that religion is important to them.
But when we look at measures of belief – for example, belief in an afterlife, or belief
in heaven and hell, or miracles, angels and demons – young people
believe in these things just as much as their elders do and,
in some cases, even more.
But as Andy touched on in the beginning, there are several ways to look at this. We can look
at these age differences at this point in time, but
we can also look at what other generations looked like when they
were a similar age. And, as Judy pointed out, prayer is an excellent example of this. Young
people today – the rate at which they pray is lower than
that of older people today.
But when you look at these older people when they were young – for example, Generation
X in the 1990s or Baby Boomers in the 1970s, you see them
praying at almost exactly the same rate. So there are some
aspects of religiosity that are not entirely generational, but that result in a tendency
for people to place greater emphasis on religion as they get older.
And so we can kind of see that young people may be a little bit less attached to religious
institutions, but that this by no means indicates that they
are more secular, that for them, faith – they may be navigating it
in different ways and coming at it from different angles, thinking about it differently than
previous generations.
MS. WOODRUFF: There’s also – if I remember correctly – a stronger interest than perhaps
one would expect in some of the evangelical faiths?
Am I correct about that? Help enlighten us a little bit about how
they’re choosing among the different religions that are available to them?
MS. POND: Our data for this report don’t speak exactly to that, but there has been
quite a bit of work done in looking at how Millennials choose
– or how young people decide what they – how they sort of put
together a pastiche of beliefs. And that they are much more open to choosing, finding a
set of beliefs in different places and more likely than previous
generations to sort of tinker and put together these different
sets of beliefs rather than necessarily subscribing to one religion overall.
In terms of evangelical or not, I think one thing that stands out to me that I think is
very interesting is that, you know, we can talk about Millennials as
a whole as a generation compared to older generations, but
even the Millennial generation – there are big differences within that generation according
to religious affiliation. That those who are evangelical
do tend to register much higher levels of religious commitment
on many of these items than do those who are not affiliated with a faith, for example,
and even those who belong to mainline Protestant faiths or to
the Catholic faith.
MR. CAMPBELL: Judy, can I speak to that?
MS. WOODRUFF: Sure.
MR. CAMPBELL: So on the specific question of whether Millennials as a generation are
attracted to evangelical Protestantism as a segment of
the religious marketplace – that was the case up until about 20
years ago, that young people were being attracted into evangelical ranks. And so if you look
over the long haul from the ’60s to the ’70s, you
do a slight increase in the overall percentage of Americans who
were evangelicals, but much of that growth was concentrated among young people.
That, however, ceased to be the case. That is not the case over the last 10 or 15 years.
You have seen evangelical churches, sort of, remain on the
American landscape. And anyone who has been to the
Saddleback Church in California or the Willow Creek Church in Chicago – these are massive
megachurches – will know what I mean. But in terms of the evangelicals attracting the
Millennials, that does not seem to be the case. It’s not that
Millennials are streaming out of these churches, but they’re
not being attracted to them the way that young people were in the past.
And what that suggests is that there’s an opening in the religious marketplace, that
there’s a group of people that the Pew reports have described
quite nicely who are young. They’re not comfortable with
formal religion, but it doesn’t mean that they’re truly secular. They just haven’t
found a religious home yet. That suggests to me that there’s an
opening for religious entrepreneurs to somehow reach that
segment of the population. They haven’t yet done so, and evangelicalism as it exists
today does not seem to be reaching them.
MS. WOODRUFF: OK. I want to jump around a little bit because one thing that keeps coming
back to me, Mark Lopez, is the diversity – the enormous
diversity of this generation. More diverse than any
generation – and we heard the statistics a minute ago – how many are Hispanic – was
it 17 percent of this generation?
MARK LOPEZ: Nineteen percent.
MS. WOODRUFF: Nineteen – it’s jumped to 19, just in the last few years.
MR. LOPEZ: Yes. Keeps growing.
MS. WOODRUFF: And growing. Talk about how that shapes who they are and what they think
as a generation.
MR. LOPEZ: Well, first on the diversity, there’s a tremendous amount of diversity among young
people. Young people are more likely to be diverse,
as Paul pointed out, than older generations. And to give you
an example, when we talk about people who are of school age or schoolchildren today,
about 20 percent – one in five – are Hispanic. And, as
Paul pointed out, among newborns, one in four are Hispanic. At the
Pew Hispanic Center, we predict that by 2050, about 30 percent of the U.S. population will
be Hispanic. So when we talk about moving forward, we’re
going to see a lot of demographic change coming from
Hispanics.
But one of the things about that is, is that when you look at growth in the Hispanic population,
a lot of that growth in the last decade has actually come
from native-born Hispanics. Immigration plays a large role
still, but actually more growth in the Hispanic population has come from the native born.
And when we talk about young people, young Latinos – we’re
talking about young Latinos who are actually – two-thirds
of them are U.S.-born.
So much of the experience that they’re having is actually going to be a U.S. experience,
not necessarily an immigrant experience, yet they themselves
– about 40 percent of young Latinos are the children
themselves of immigrants. At least one of their parents is an immigrant. So when we
talk about young people, diversity is a big part of this.
Now, what are young Latinos like? Because clearly they’re playing a large role in
defining this generation of young people. And much of what has been
mentioned today, I think Latinos are playing a part in that.
For example, when we talk about how youth vote. When you take a look at the youth vote
in 2004 and in 2008, you’ll notice that non-white youth
tended to vote differently than their white counterparts.
And as the youth population becomes more and more diverse, I think you’re going to see
a continued sort of difference in how they vote compared to
other groups. Young Latinos, for example, voted
overwhelmingly for Obama, just as young African-Americans did. Young whites did vote for Barack
Obama, but not to the same degree that you see among young Latinos and young African-Americans.
A couple of other things about young Latinos that make them distinct. They’re also – just
like all young people – very optimistic about the future.
They see the future – they see themselves as doing better than
their parents. They put a lot of faith and a lot of value in hard work and in education.
And so just like other young people, they are optimistic, and
I think that you’re going to see that they’re going to – that
they see themselves as being successful or, at least, the future will be successful for
them.
Yet at the same time, they face a lot of challenges. And when we talk about some of those challenges
– you’ll notice, for example, young Latinos
are more likely to be high school dropouts than other young
people. Young Latinos – even though they place a high value on education – many of
them are not in college.
And part of the reason they give is because they themselves have to support their families.
I’d say supporting their families is one of the key
reasons why they’re not in college. And when you talk about
teen pregnancy, young Latinas are actually the ones who are most likely to be teen mothers
by the age of 19 – about one in four – compared to other
groups of young people.
So when we talk about Latinos, we certainly see that, yes, much of the growing diversity
of America is coming from the Hispanic population – is
going to be coming from the Hispanic population of the United
States, but to a large extent young Latinos face many challenges that, in some sense,
distinguish them from other groups of young people.
MS. WOODRUFF: I want to ask – whether it’s Neil or Paul – just to talk about how that
diversity is shaping their view of the world, their view
of each other, politics and the rest.
MR. TAYLOR: Well, I think Neil said it very well. They want everybody to have a place
at the table. It’s baked into their values system. It’s baked
into the way they were raised. And it’s baked into – literally
and figuratively – who they are. The diversity that those of us our age look at and we say
– we kind of look and say, huh, America really is changing.
For them, it’s not changing. It’s the way America always
has been. So it’s taken as a given.
One of the most fascinating – and I think we have this in our report – if you look
at interracial dating – and we’ve been asking this question for 40 or
more years, we and other organizations – well, the whole
country has come from a place where the idea of interracial dating or marriage was not
only a social taboo, it was a legal taboo.
Every generation has marched north over the last 40 years on acceptance of that. But every
successive generation starts at a higher place and the
Millennials start at the highest place of all. It’s taken as a
given that that is part of who we are. And then look at our president today – a product
of an interracial marriage.
And we actually have a big report out there about African-American views about the whole
idea of race, the idea of race and ethnicity, which is actually
terribly confusing. It’s confusing, as we discovered, to a
lot of Latinos who don’t quite – am I white? Am I black? Am I a race? Am I an ethnicity?
And frankly, I don’t think our classification schemes have
caught up with the realities on the ground. But ultimately, the
realities on the ground will change the language.
MR. HOWE: When Gen X was young – I mean, coming of age in the ’80s and ’90s, one
figure of speech used a lot was the idea of a multiracial,
multicultural society, suggesting a bunch of discrete races and
ethnicities that sort of pulled a little bit in different directions. And that was also
an era where in the commercial culture you saw a lot of what we
used to call “salt and pepper ads” – you know, people or kids
of, sort of, very different races together. You know, you show a few blacks with whites
and so on. And that’s how we described this multiracial
or multiethnic society.
I think that’s really shifting now. I think for Millennials, there’s much more the idea
of simply a transracial or transethnic society in which people represent
all gradations. Typically now in the commercial culture,
you see ads showing people of indefinable ethnicities, hues that you don’t know where
– you know, where that comes from. And I think this reflects
the difference in the Millennial sensibility. A rising
number of them, when it comes to Census questionnaires, don’t want to answer. You know, the Census
forces you to say, I’m a this or a that. They’re really bothered by that. They don’t
want to answer it.
There’s even some resistance that some Millennials have talked to me about the way, sort of,
a multiracial and multiethnic training is done
corporations. You know, where there’s sort of a – where people are forced to confront
a lot of the animosity between races and ethnicities. And a lot of the
Millennials say, why does it have to be so hateful? (Laughter.) Why does all this have
to be so unpleasant? You know, you have to drag us
through all of this stuff? We’re cool with what goes on here.
We don’t want all of that bad news and those bad vibes.
And I think, in that sense, and what truly comes across in the Pew report, which I find
really kind of stunning, is the fact that despite the fact
that Boomers find it so easy to diss younger people – you know,
they don’t have work values, they’re superficial, they don’t have an attention span, and they’re
entitled, and they go on and on, all these things – every
generation, though, agrees that this generation is more
racially and ethnically tolerant. That is the only thing that all generations agree
on when it comes to a positive trait among today’s Millennials.
MS. WOODRUFF: I want to come to the audience, and as I do, just think about what you want
to ask the panel. But as I do, just, David, quickly,
because there’s so much to talk about here, we don’t have time to
cover everything: this question of increased civic engagement. Neil talked about the great
contrast with Generation X. What underlies that desire to
give to the community and maybe, if it’s connected, the belief
in government, a surprising positive view of government?
MR. CAMPBELL: Well, I think it’s fair to say that the Millennials have kind of a complex
view of government. On the one hand, we do see evidence,
obviously, that they are a heavily Democratic group
and that they’re happy to call themselves liberals and they’re happy to trust government.
But at the same time, we don’t see them participating much
in formal avenues of politics.
But we do see a lot of action, as has been described, in community volunteering, which
has a different implication for how you think change happens.
If you think change happens by changing laws and
policies, then you’re more likely to be engaged in campaigns, and you’re more likely
to be speaking to elected officials. If you think that change
occurs because, at a very localized level, people get together
and run a soup kitchen, and they’re not worrying about what policies led to the need
for the creation of that soup kitchen, but they’re just volunteering
for the soup kitchen, that gives you a very different way of
thinking about the way politics works or the way society improves itself or the way society
solves its problems.
The Millennials definitely fall into the camp of a group of people who see change as coming
from small groups of people getting together to do things.
Now I say all of that in a very rosy, optimistic, aren’t-the-
Millennials-great kind of tone, and I do actually think there is a lot of merit to all the community
service and volunteering that you find among this
generation.
But we should not forget that at the same time, many of these kids are doing this because
they know that that’s the credential they need in order
to get into a good college or in order, once they’re in college, to
get a good job or to get placed in a good medical school or a good graduate program
and that sort of thing.
And I know in my conversations with students, we’ll often have a debate over just how
virtuous we should think volunteering to be, and it’s often
the young people themselves pushing back on me saying, well, I
don’t really know how virtuous this stuff seems to me because don’t people just do
it because they feel they have to, in some cases they’re required,
and even if they’re not required, there’s this heavy social
expectation that this is what good kids do in order to be accepted into college or get
a good job or whatever?
And I actually disagree with that. I think that it’s very difficult to unpack motivations,
and if one of your motivations is, I’m going to do this because
it enables me to put a line on my résumé and another
motivation is, I want to do it because I really do care about the people in the soup kitchen,
I think the fact that they’re in the soup kitchen working
is important and the fact that there is that cultural expectation is
probably, on balance, a positive thing.
MR. HOWE: The very fact, too, that they actually want to win credentials from big institutions
and win the approval of older people by saying they did
these things makes them very different from Boomers. I
mean, our attitude was, doing something just to put it on your résumé? (Laughter.) No
way! I’m not going to do that for you.
So I mean, that whole attitude to saying, I want to please these institutions, I want
to do the right thing, I want it all down on this big résumé, says
something about their approach.