Around Christmastime of 1983, adult America fell in love with a precious new doll, harvested from nature, so wrinkly and cuddly that everybody thought it cute. By the hundreds of thousands, Cabbage Patch Kids decorated the playpens of a new Millennial Generation of babies. A year earlier, a Newsweek cover story had heralded these toddlers as the past-due offspring of Boomers who had spent the prior two decades celebrating childlessness. Now Boomers were making a fuss over a life-cycle choice to give birth.3
As bright yellow signs proclaimed Baby on Board in car windows across America, Hollywood quickly picked up the trend. In the early 1980s, movies about demon children (Firestarter, Children of the Corn) suddenly flopped at the box office, soon to be replaced by wanted-baby stories like Raising Arizona, Three Men and a Baby, and Baby Boom. By the end of the 1980s, pop-culture families still had punkish teenagers, but now the younger six- to eight-year-olds were as virtuous as Bart Simpson's younger sister, and their parents were heeding Fatal Attraction warnings against Awakening-era family behavior. By the middle 1990s, cinematic ten- to twelve-year-olds were literally angels (like The Piano's winged Anna Paquin, or the inner-city kids in Angels in the Outfield) whose mere presence inspired older people to be and do better. "Was there ever a bad child in the world--a spiteful, stubborn, domineering sapper of his parents' spirit?" asked a Time reviewer in 1993. "There is rarely one in a Hollywood movie."
Through the Unraveling, these Cabbage Patch babies grew into Power Ranger preteens, riding the crest of a protective wave of adult concern. As they entered preschool, adults experienced what Harvard's Arthur Miller termed a "national hysteria" about child abuse, and polls reported a three-year tripling in the popularity of "staying home with family." When the first Millennials reached elementary school, children's issues toppled the agenda in the 1988 and 1992 Presidential election races, and the United Way launched a huge new children's agenda. As they reached junior high, proposals were made for a new V-chip that would enable parents to screen out violent programming, three-quarters of the nation's largest cities enacted youth curfews, and state legislatures pursued deadbeat dads and changed the custody rules for the welfare of children, not (as in the Awakening era) for the convenience of parents. By the time the first Millennials reached high school, the 1990s had become what Mario Cuomo termed "the Decade of the Child." From crime to welfare, from technology to gun control, health care to balanced budgets, nearly every policy issue has been recast in terms of what journalists called kinderpolitics. Both parties began crafting their messages around the need to save children (whether from deficits or spending cuts). By the 1996 campaign season, President Clinton's focus on protecting children grew so overt that Silent critic Ellen Goodman quipped, "If this is Thursday, it must be Curfews. If this is Friday, it must be School Uniforms. V-Chips on Monday, Smoking on Tuesday."4
Millennials emerged as something of a generational public property. Where child Generation Xers had once been the castoffs of Awakening-era euphoria, Millennials became symbols of an Unraveling-era need to prevent the social hemorrhaging before it could damage another new generation. The "only way" to stop the cycle of dependency and crime, warned Ohio governor George Voinovich, "is to pick one generation of children, draw a line in the sand, and say to all 'This is where it stops.'" When George Bush [41] spoke of "weed and seed," he was implicitly drawing a line between Xers and Millennials. Much of the Unraveling era's attack against welfare spending reflected the judgment that many of the Xer children of Awakening-era family decay were unfit parents. Courts became increasingly inclined to punish parents for child misbehavior--or to take the kids away. Serious talk arose about "breaking the poverty cycle" by raising children in orphanages.
This new adult focus has not yet reversed the Awakening-era damage to the child's world. The child poverty rate is still high. The crack babies of the 1980s are growing up with severe emotional disabilities. Dysfunctional familes are still a terrible problem, and ten-year-old victims (or murderers) still make the news. TV sex and violence have receded only slightly. In the Awakening, all this prompted few complaints from adults. But now, in the Unraveling, it infuriates them.
As the beneficiaries of moral outrage, Millennial children have come to personify America's Unraveling-era rediscovery of moral standards and spiritualism. The natural child represents absolute good, the abused child the victim of absolute evil. Many Boomer evangelicals reported that their born-again movement arrived with the birth of their first Millennial child. From evangelical Christians to Pentecostals to Muslims, many of today's new religious currents revolve around parishoners' protective urges toward small children. And in the secular culture, the little Jonahs provide the magic by which Sleepless in Seattle adults find the right path.
Through the Unraveling, a solid adult consensus emerged that Millennial children warranted more protection than the Xers had received. Where the cutting-edge fertility issues of the Awakening pertained to taking pills or undergoing surgery to avoid unwanted children, the Unraveling was marked by advances in fertility medicine, preemie care, and other technologies to produce desperately wanted children. Where the circa-1970s natural childbirth fad focused on the richness of the experience for parents, the circa-1990s priority became longer hospital stays for the sake of the baby. An expanded child safety industry that focused on I-See-U car mirrors in the 1980s started emphasizing child-athlete injury prevention in the 1990s. The Unraveling began with new laws requiring infant restraints in automobiles; now, new laws mandate bicycle helments.5
As Boomers came to lead the institutions that dominated a child's life, the combined two ascendant words--family values--to capture the gist of Millennial nurture. What David Blankenhorn called the "new familism" began to reverse the Awakening's rise in divorce and abortion rates. The stay-at-home parent revived as a popular choice among families able to afford it. In sharp contrast to the Awakening, a majority of working women now said they would "consider giving up work indefinitely" if they "no longer needed the money." Spurred by the new Fatherland movement, record numbers of American men were stay-at-home nurturers. When fathers divorced, they now often demanded joint (or sole) custody. From the Million Man March to its Promise Keepers white equivalent, men sought atonement for past child neglect and vowed to become better role models. Two of every three parents said they would accept a pay cut in return for more family time. Thanks to such new workplace trends as job sharing, telecommuting, and career sequencing, parents put away the latchkeys and reconstructed an adult presence after school. Unlike circa-1980 Generation Xers, the high-tech child of the 1990s was less a home-alone game freak than a pen pal on the Internet with a parent peering over the shoulder.6
Adult nagging returned to the child's world. Wincing at their own coming-of-age behavior, Boomers became what The New York Times dubbed a "Do As I Say, Not As I Did" generation of parents. In the American High, parents had generally loosened the rules from one child to the next; now the reverse was true, with parents tightening the rules from one child to the next. Good habits were newly demanded, poor attitude less tolerated. When a much-touted Pepsi ad showed a small child uttering its new "Gotta Have It" slogan, the parental reaction was: "If that's how you ask for it, then you're not going to get it!" (The ad campaign failed.) In the Little League World Series, a Texas twelve-year-old boy was rebuked for celebrating his home run while his team was losing. In Youth League football, kids got yellow flags for moon walking in the end zone.
Boomers on all sides of the Culture Wars agreed that Millennial children had to be shielded better than Xers had been from media sex, violence, and profanity. Having grown up in a High-era culture in which nearly everything on the TV dial had been all right for children to watch, many Boomers took cues from the author of Not with My Child You Don't and guarded the hearth against the Unraveling's far less kid-friendly culture. According to Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment, renting kids a random video or buying them an unfamiliar CD was the cultural equivalent of dioxin. When William Bennett said, "There are, after all, some things that children simply should not see," he delivered a message that his own generation had laughed off in the All in the Family Awakening years. Responding to Bennett, Tipper Gore, Michael Medved, and others, Boomer scriptwriters crafted plots with stronger moral lessons and less ambivalent messages about drugs, alcohol, and teenage sex. In TV sitcoms, parents were now depicted as more in charge, children as more dutiful. Children's books and magazines returned to simple stories and traditional themes, while New Realism books were removed from child shelves.7
In their new attitudes toward children, Boomers played out a psychodrama about how undisciplined they themselves had become. "By intuition or design," wrote Michael Sandel, "Clinton discovered a solution: Don't impose moral restraints on adults; impose them on children."8
The new values nurture started to produce a fledgling civic virtue. Since the Awakening's end, the child savings rate nearly tripled. More children did community deeds under adult supervision. Child sports teams were never more popular. A dozen states launched Trial by Peers programs, letting children judge one another. In Kids Voting USA, children discussed issues, registered, campaignsed, and voted in mock elections. "It's created political monsters among Arizona kids," said the head of Phoenix's program. "We couldn't stop them." Newsweek called "the peer group" a potential "magic bullet for academic success," citing a 1996 study that found that "the influence of friends" boosted school achievement even more than "the influence of parents."9
As Boomers sought to standardize the culture and values of this child generation, they saw advantage in uniform clothing. In Washington, D.C., this trend began in the fall of 1988, when inner-city kindergarteners at Burvill Elementary sported green and yellow coats, ties, blouses, and skirts. The contrast could not have been starker between these daffodil-colored younger kids and their older siblings with their X caps, logo shirts, baggy pants, and Day-Glo sneakers. Within three years, thirty-one D.C. schools encouraged uniforms; by 1995, the idea was spreading rapidly across the nation. In districts that required uniforms, four in five parents supported uniforms, in the belief (said the Washington Post) that children who wore standard clothes "would become more productive, disciplined, law-abiding citizens." In 1996, much to the nation's applause, President Clinton added his own support for school uniforms and for child curfews--notions that would have enraged most of his peers in their youth.10
Nearly all school systems were trying to heed Rudolph Giuliani's demand that schools "once more train citizens." The new 1990s educational buzzwords called for collaborative (rather than independent) learning for regular (rather than ability-grouped) kids who had to be taught core values, do good works, and meet standards, with zero tolerance for misbehavior. The new three R's were rules, respect, and responsibility. Some inner-city schools returned to old-style direct instruction, requiring children to recite their lessons in unison. Calls mounted for more objective grades, separation of boys and girls, abstinence-only sex education, and school prayer--along with longer school days, year-round schooling, and stiffer truancy laws. Like Hillary Rodham Clinton, many Boomers who had once believed in liberating the child from the community discovered that It Takes a Village and now supported a strong and protective child-community bond.11
In public schools, surveys indicated that teachers felt much better about their own profession and were staying with it longer than at the start of the Unraveling. From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, the share of teachers with more than twenty years' experience nearly doubled. Parents reversed the Awakening-era decline in PTA membership and were now raising money at a record clip. Many Boomers now demanded that public funds be redirected to charter schools and vouchers to allow parent choice, a threat intended to compel underperforming public schools to improve. Through the Unraveling, the number of U.S. children taught at home--mostly by Boomers who believed the public schools were corrupted--rose from 15,000 to half a million.12
Parents slowed down the developmental clock, letting Millennials linger longer in childhood, reversing what Richard Riley termed the "hurry-hustle" of the Awakening. From Sesame Street to Barney and His Friends, the most popular TV programming for kids went from urban to pastoral, from kinetic to lyrical, from wry to sweet, from discovering the self to sharing with others, from celebrating what makes kids different to celebrating what makes them the same. Many grown-ups found Barney mystifying, perhaps because it provided no adult subtext. One Washington Post TV writer called the show "so saccharine it can send adults into hypoglycemic shock." Anna Quindlen feared its utter simplicity: "What they're learning is that life is black and white," which she saw as "the primary colors of censure." Parents were stressing a values nurture, aided by a huge new bookshelf on the subject. Bennett's Book of Values, the Unraveling's best-selling children's book, had a medicinal cover, scant humor, and eleven teachable virtues that did not include individuality or creativity. Millennials were not being raised to explore the inner world (Boomers figured they could handle that just fine) but rather to achieve and excel in the outer.13
Like any child generation, Millennials underwent a mid-turning transition in the generational composition of their parents. The Cabbage Patch babies, born in the 1980s, were mostly the offspring of Boomers. Their parents' overt pride in them rankled Silent observers such as Jonathan Yardley who chided those kids as "Baby Boom trophies"--an implicit concession that the Silent's own (Xer) kids weren't anyone's trophies. Born in the early 1990s, Barney's kids were about equally divided between Boomers and Xers. The rest of America's Unraveling-era babies would mostly be born to Xers. Polls showed that Generation X married couples with children to be far more culturally conservative than their peers who at that time still remained childless. Younger Xer parents seemed less interested than Boomers in political discourse about the child's world, but they showed signs of being even more protective within their families.
Note: All the material on this page was published by Strauss and Howe in 1997, before the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal became public, before Clinton's impeachment and acquittal, before the contested election of 2000 and the ascendency of President George W. Bush [43] and his neoconservative administration, before the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, before the military operations in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003)--and before the pervasiveness of the World Wide Web. The text that follows, part of their description of Millennial Generation youth, entitled "Into the New Millennium: Junior Citizens," is predictive, and--as it turns out--surprisingly perceptive. I have retained the authors' future tense (even when referring to a future now in the past) and reserved for footnotes occasional references to Clinton's disgrace, Bush [43]'s neoconservative agenda, or other events of the unfolding Twenty-first Century. Here are some explanations to some of the authors' terminology:
From their birth through their arrival in junior high, a national spotlight has followed those first Cabbage Patch Millennials. Where the first half of the Unraveling was marked by rising alarm over the children's problems, the remainder will be marked by rising satisfaction in their achievements. Meanwhile, the cutting edge of initial concern will move on to adolescents and, as the Oh-Ohs progress, to collegians and young workers.14
In the years ahead, the well-being of the Millennial Generation will become a focal point for the renewal of America's civic culture. Organized public places--athletic stadia, parks, malls--will be newly segmented, isolating kid-friendly havens from coarser fare elsewhere. The Internet will start teaching "netiquette" and will help parents shield adolescents from chat rooms with misbehaving adults. Hollywood will make movies about wholesome teenagers doing good things for their communities. Suggestive teen ads and magazines will draw adult condemnation, as Boomers aggressively scrutinize and chaperone the teen culture.
Millennials will provide a focal point for the renewal of the American family. Thanks to a growing presence of telecommuting parents and live-in Silent grandparents, neighborhoods will retain more daytime adults, whose supervision will grow more assertive. Boomers will follow Hillary Rodham Clinton's demand that adolescent behavior be monitored and constrained. The rates of divorce will decline--in part, because new state laws will make divorce harder for couples with children. Judges will not so freely grant separation in families with children and will punish deadbeat dads severely. This restrengthened family will not be a replica of the 1950s. Children will not attach themselves so exclusively to mothers, many of whom will be working. Instead, they will attach themselves to a rotating array of substitute parent (often male) who represent the community. Like the offspring of well-run kibbutzim, Millennials will grow up to be sociable and team-oriented adolescents but will strike adults as somewhat bland, conformist, and dependent on others to reach judgments.15
Children will enter their teens looking and behaving better than any in decades. In place of the late Awakening's "tragic freshmen" dressed in dark, dour colors, the late Unraveling's friendlier frosh will dress in bright, happy colors. The new impetus toward upbeat styles and behavior will come from peer pressure--words that by the Oh-Ohs will carry a newly positive connotation. Millennials will police themselves and force a sharp reduction in adolescent miscreance. Teen coupling will become less starkly physical and more romantic and friendly. As no-longer-Clueless teens will back away from early (and unprotected) sex, the adolescent abortion rate will fall, fewer teens will get pregnant, and adoption or marriage will become more prevalent among those who do. Binge drinking and teen gambling will decline. Just as today's twelve-year-olds are confounding experts by turning against crime and crack cocaine habits of their Xer predecessors (with juvenile murders down 15 percent in 1995 alone), Millennial teens will prove false the consensus prediction among today's criminologists that America is in for a big new wave of youth violence. To the contrary, youth crime will decrease. Some youth gangs will gradually redirect their energy from criminal mayhem toward collegial enforcement of an ad hoc public order. Those Millennials who do step out of line will be dealt with swiftly. Unlike the aging Xer criminals (many of whom will be warehoused and forgotten), the purpose of punishing Millennials will be to shame them, shape them up, and get them back in line.
This generation will build a reputation for meeting and beating adult expectations. In 1996, America's third graders were issued three major challenges: Dr. Koop called on this Class of 2000 to be more drug-free, smoke-free, and sexual disease-free high school graduates than their predecessors; President Bush [41] summoned them to graduate "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement"; and African American Project 2000 called on school boys to grow up providing "consistent, positive, and literate black role models" for the children who follow. Millennial kids will do all that, and more. Around the year 2000, America's news weeklies will run cover stories singing the praise of American youth--commending them for their growing interest in current affairs, rising aptitude scores, good community deeds, and a more wholesome (and standardized) new teen culture.
By the end of the Unraveling, adult Americans will view twenty-year-olds as smart and forty-year-olds as wasted--the inverse of the perception at the end of the Awakening. Impediments against this generation's current and future well-being will not be tolerated. To the extent Millennial kids appear to tbe losers in the free marketplace, adults will demand redress. Youth poverty will fuel a new class politics. Colleges will be pressured into holding the line on tuitions and student indebtedness, faculties into putting teaching ahead of research, employers into creating apprenticeships, older workers into making room for the young.
Graying Boomers will see in Millennials a powerful tool for realizing their values and visions deep into the Twenty-first Century. "My great hope," says Greater Expectations author William Damon, "is that we can actually rebuild our communities in this country around our kids." Democrats will point to youth as reasons for expanding government, Republicans as reasons for cleaning up the culture. Calls will rise for a spare-no-expense national program of compusory youth service. The dwindling defenders of public borrowing (and of public spending that benefits the old over the young) will hear themselves accused of fiscal abuse of a glorious new generation of junior citizens. Old federal budget arguments will feel all the more urgent.16
Where Boomer children came to the conclusion that the adult world was culturally deficient but well run, Millennial children will come to the opposite discovery: that adults understand values well enough, but don't know how to apply them to public life. They will reach voting age acutely aware of their own potential power to meet this need. They will organize huge youth rallies and produce vast voter turnouts. A new breed of college activists will band together not to resist national leaders, but to prod them into taking bolder steps. Starting with the election of 2000, when the first Millennials will vote, anything perceived to be a barrier to their future will provoke heated political argument.
Each day, adult optimism is building about this generation. Aerospace commercials plug Millennial kids as the astronauts who will build and run the first big space stations. In the mid-1990s global competition, U.S. elementary school students placed second (and U.S. girls first) in reading skills, prompting Hillary Rodham Clinton to praise these kids as "the smartest in the world." In 1995, National Geographic launched a brand-new Kids' Hall of Fame (for children fourteen and under) that "celebrates the good news, recognizing and rewarding some of the great things that kids have done"--praise Americans seldem offered to Xers back in the Awakening.
By the Oh-Ohs, Americans will hear constant talk about the budding heroism of youth. A 1995 TV ad for Kohler faucets showed a bearded Boomer father pulling his wet tot from a bathtub, anointing him with a bath oil, and proclaiming him "king." In future TV ads, the father's beard will be grayer, and the child will be stepping off a graduation podium, but the proclamations will be much the same. The Arizona Republic recently asked elementary school students how they expect to improve the world. "We should start now," said an eleven-year-old boy. "Plant a tree every day. Get groups together." Can they make a difference? "I know it. I just feel it," said one cheerful young girl. "I believe in myself because my parents and teachers do."17
This page was last modified on 07/20/2025 06:27:48