New Adaptive Generation

Members of the New Adaptive Generation, which include some of our kin, are babies born in 2004 and later.¹ Their parents will be either the last wave of the reactive, nomadic Generation X or the first wave of the heroic, civic-minded Millennial Generation, who will tend to nurture them, during a crisis time. in an overprotective, even suffocating way.

"Overprotective was a word first used to describe our parents," Benita Eisler recalls of her Silent Generation peers' Depression-era youth, when adults ruled the child's world with a stern hand. Back in the Greatest Generation childhood years, no one spoke of overprotection, because the crusade to protect the child's world was then just getting started. As the Literary Digest demanded a "reassertion of parental authority," parents injected what historian Daniel Rodgers describes as "a new, explicit insistence on conformity into child life." Thus raised, the Greatest passed through childhood showing America's largest measurable one-generation improvement on health, size, and education--along with big reductions in youth crime and suicide.²

By the time the Silent entered school, however, clean-cut behavior was taken for granted. The leading parenting books suggested a no-nonsense total situation parenting with behavioral roles that critics likened to the housebreaking of puppies. Whenever movie kids like Alfalfa or Shirley Temple encountered adults, they would "mind their manners." During the World War II years, America had perhaps the best-behaved teenagers in its history, but controversy simmered about whether a long absence of soldiering fathers would cause them to grow up a little uncertain of themselves. Times were indeed fearful for children, since any day could bring devastating news. Frank Conroy recalls having asked as a boy, "what was in the newspapers when there wasn't a war going on."³

This was the last time the Artist archtype entered a Fourth Turning.

"Many of the social conditions we think of as black problems are merely white problems a generation later," William Raspberry has observed. Early in the Awakening period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the children in America's urban cores were the harbingers of new trends that afflicted the whole society by the start of the Unraveling: disintegrating families, absentee fathers, teen mothers, rising crime, falling performance in schools. In today's Unraveling, America's urban children are once again bearing signposts. They have become shut-ins, tucked behind walls, sleeping in bulletproof bathtubs, escorted to school by anxious adults and swept off late-night streets by police curfews, even though the actual risk of violence, in many inner cities, is beginning to recede. Come the Fourth Turning, variants of these 1990s-era inner-city child swaddling trends will be visible all across America, from downtown to suburb to small town.⁴

Imagine being a child living in a world surrounded by a concrete wall originally raised to ward off dangerous neighbors. The danger has receded (the enemies are now distant), but the concrete remains. Adults don't bother to remove the walls because they're busy and find it an easy way to keep track of their kids. Come the Fourth Turning, the rules a child must follow will begin outlasting the original reasons for those rules. Picture high-rise children still barricaded behind walls in a time of reduced crime on the streets below. Picture compulsory kindergarten uniforms in a time of wholesome new trends in young-adult fashion. Picture a vigorous police presence in a time of generally compliant teenagers. What in the Unraveling felt like sensible protections will now, in the Crisis, reach a state of stifling suffocation at the hands of parents and governments alike.⁵

The babies of the Oh-Ohs will be America's next Artist archtype, the New Adaptive Generation. Their link to Crisis will be the vulnerable seeds of society's future that must be saved while the emergency is overcome and the enemy defeated. They will be the Crisis era's fearful watchers, tiny helpers, and (if all goes well) lucky inheritors. Tethered close to home, they will do helpful little deeds like recycling, keyboarding, or tending to elders, the circa-2020 equivalents of planting World War II victory gardens or collecting scrap metal. The New Adaptives will look on adults as competent and in control. Crisp rights and wrongs will be a common adult message, unquestioning compliance the expected response. New Adaptive kids will not be encouraged to take chances or do things on their own. Naïveté and sweet innocence will be presumed to flow from those of tender age. In a reverse from the Unraveling, deviancy will be redefined upwards. Youth sex, abortion, and substance abuse will remain at low levels. Parental divorce will be restigmatized, and public talk about family matters will be newly taboo in the media. Unlike today, the bulk of the family disruptions will be involuntary, the result not of personal choice or dysfunction but of Crisis-era forces utterly beyond the family's control.

Child welfare will be a settled priority, no longer anyone's crusade. Protective nurture will be on autopilot. Few adults will dispute that children must be taught community norms, often by rote. Children who fall below standards will be warned that the community has ways of remembering, that a young person's reputation can be easy to harm but hard to repair. Good child behavior, academics, and civic deeds will win few kudos because all this will simply be expected.

Children's activities that felt new for Millennials will now feel well established. The child's world will be altered only to meet urgent community needs, not any new inklings of children's needs. In an America locked in Crisis, no one will be particularly interested in the teen culture, except to chastise anything that offends. As nativism runs its course, the New Adaptives will be the least immigrant, most English-speaking generation in living memory. Growing up in a time of adult sacrifice and narrowing cultural horizons, the New Adaptives will develop an earnest and affective temperament, yet still feel stuck in a stiflingly parochial social environment.

The New Adaptives will be treated this way because that will be how middle-aged Generation Xers will prefer it--and they will be America's dominant Crisis-era nurturers of children. As parents, teachers, and community leaders, Xers will look back on their Awakening-era childhoods as chaotic, hurried, insecure, and underprotected. While Xers take pride in the firmer, more reliable family life they will establish, New Adaptive kids will eventually look back on it as a smothering overcorrection. Later in life, they will recall their Crisis-era child's world as having been oversimple, overslowed, overprotected, too grounded in moral cement--and, like the Silent Generation, they will loosen parental authority accordingly.⁶

Like history's other inheritor or postheroic generations, the New Adaptives will endure constant reminders of what great sacrifices are being made on their behalf. As the Crisis rolls toward its resolution, they will cope with anxiety, fear, and powerlessness. For the rest of their lives, they will never forget these feelings.

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This page was last modified on 07/20/2025 06:41:07