Have you ever looked at someone who is roughly your age and yet has a completely different mindset? Maybe I’m weird, but I have. What makes people tick has always interested me. I tend to watch people and look for patterns and links and ways to make things “fit” in my brain. I’m always trying to answer “why”. Lately the theme that keeps reoccurring is generational–I look at someone and determine the age of the parents they were raised by and often think “Yep, there it is.” Not always, but it still intrigues me.

I am solidly Gen X. More often than not, I identify with whatever meme or tiktok is floating around about Gen X. I wonder where in the hell y’all were hiding back when I was in the trenches as a hair band headbanger fan being bullied by preppies, and why you all are suddenly claiming hair band music as your own when I know all y’all were listening to Duran Duran and sneering at us for following Twisted Sister. But sure, go ahead and claim you jammed out to “Welcome to the Jungle”.

But even in Gen X, there were very different mindsets. My parents were relatively young when they had me, 24 and 22, but here’s what made the difference–they were raised by older parents who fell in the Silent Generation category.

According to Indeed, the Silent Generation are those born between 1928 and 1945. They valued hard work, loyalty, and being thrifty. They believed in respecting authority and your elders, and they were resilient when facing adversity. “This is the way we’ve always done it” was just fine with them, and technology was viewed with suspicion. Dad or Grandpa had “their chair” and you didn’t sit in it without express permission. My dad was actually born in the Silent Generation in 1944. My mom was born in the Baby Boomer Generation in 1946, but she was raised with the Silent Generation values; in astrology, I would call her a cusp baby.

Let’s go back to Indeed, where they discuss the Baby Boomers who were born between 1946 and 1964. According to Indeed, Boomers were goal-oriented, independent, and competitive. They liked to work collaboratively and engage in social activities. This is where you get the hippies, folks. They loved to gather ’round the campfire and sing “Kumbaya” and ’round the office water fountain to plan weekend cocktails, bridge parties, and civil rights protest marches. This was NOT my parents–the only gathering we were going to be doing was at the grandparents’ homes with other family members for food and visiting, or the occasional neighborhood pitch card games. There was definitely none of the wacky tobacky at our home. I did have aunts and uncles and older cousins who imbibed, so I wasn’t completely cut off from the counterculture, but it was not my nuclear family’s jam. We had beer and bourbon, not LSD laced kool-aid.

So along came Generation X. Indeed says we were born between 1965 and 1980. We like to be given a goal and then left to our own devices to meet it without micromanagement. We’ll figure it out, trust me. We believed that education was important to get ahead in the world, and we learned enough technology to not completely embarrass ourselves. If we are stuck without power and technology, we can pull out the pen and paper and do things the slower old-fashioned way, but we appreciate the speed and efficiency of technology. Don’t always trust it, but we respect its usefulness. Tech gadgets are pretty snazzy. According to Emma Singer, https://www.purewow.com/family/gen-x-characteristics , we bucked the trend of dressing up in the work place and brought denim and jersey knit to the corporate world. We see no problem DIY-ing projects even if it is cheaper and faster to buy them in a store. We grew up fairly unsupervised and independent, since our parents were both in the workforce usually, earning us the nickname “latchkey kids”.

So why are some Gen X kids stalwart traditionalists who appreciate the simple things in life and favor peace and quiet, while others are waging corporate warfare like coke fiends chasing their next high? Look at who their parents were and how their parents were raised. Some of us had parents who were “old souls”, and some of us had parents who fought the establishment on the regular. Some of us had traditionalist parents and did our damnedest to fight against all they stood for in an effort to be independent.

It has trickled down to my own kids and their friends. I got a late start on having kids in my mind, but apparently quite a few of my peers delayed having kids. The first set of my generation’s kids are Millennials, born between 1981-1996, while the later set are called Gen Z, born 1997-2015.

Millennials don’t chase carrots unless that carrot is going to bring value to their life. “Because I’m the boss” doesn’t carry much weight with them; instead of following blindly, they are more apt to shrug and invite the “boss” (complete with air quotes) out for drinks. They have DVRs and remote controls mastered as soon as they can grip them in their chubby little toddler hands and figure out they are good for more than teething toys. They love a good project and will dive in and work until it is complete with a complete disregard for timelines. They really love getting to spend time with teammates and bouncing ideas off of each other and working toward the greater common good. If you are going to praise them, do it immediately–by the time their annual review comes around, that is ancient history. Millennials are so creative and flexible when it comes to problem-solving; it is a delight to just sit around and ping-pong ideas with them.

Then we have the Gen Z crew. They were born with a smartphone in their hands. They have grown up in a world that is changing so fast, and they take those changes on beautifully as they zip by. They are independent and really don’t see the point in the traditional boss/worker bee dynamic–if someone tries to pigeonhole them too tightly, they will pull up stakes and go do their own thing. Even if a Gen Z is completing traditional tasks, I guarantee they have multiple side gigs going on that different pockets of people in their lives have no idea about. Your straight-A honors student walks out of those classroom doors every afternoon, holes up in their room, and transforms into the most fearsome warlord known to virtual man in the latest FPS game. That shy girl who never speaks up is down at the local soup kitchen every weekend serving warm food and even warmer compassion. Take the time to get to know these kids, because they are a wealth of creativity and information if you just show interest and let them open up.

My biological kids were all born in the Gen Z age range–1997, 1998, and 2003. But because they were born to Gen X parents who were raised by Boomers who were raised by the Silent Generation, they have a Millennial mindset sometimes. My kids know their parents are old. There’s no getting around it. When I walked into my second son’s kindergarten meet & greet and saw the other 20-something parents there in pajama bottoms and with tattoos and piercings and dyed hair, I was acutely aware that I was in my mid-30s and did not have much in common with the other parents. The parents I could vibe with were those that had kindergarteners as their youngest children, whereas my kindergartener was one of my older children.

My kids had to be parented differently than I was. The world I grew up in is GONE. Kids can’t be turned loose to roam the town until dark anymore now that predators are more common. When I was a kid, we knew who the creeps were in town and if we saw them, we skedaddled into the nearest house of someone we knew. Creeps are better at hiding in plain sight these days.

My kids have a world that is both bigger and smaller at the same time, thanks to technology. All of my kids have friends online from around the world, and I don’t consider them to be any less friends than the IRL ones. They have so many opportunity avenues open to them that my generation didn’t have, and I love that for them. My kids are slightly hindered by my lack of tech-savvy, but they know how to do their research and find the resources they need to figure stuff out. The world is their playground, and it is beautiful to watch them fly and explore. And my kids have the advantage of having been raised around many generations–they knew their great-grandpa Jim from the Silent Generation, and their Boomer grandparents. They are thoroughly marinated in Gen X thanks to their parents, and all of this blended nicely with Millennial media to create the fascinating people that they have become.

I can’t wait to see what happens next.