Book Review:

Millenials Rising. The Next Great Generation

By Jonne Hower

Vol. 24 Number 3,  2003-04

Millennials Rising.  The Next Great Generation.  Neil Howe and William Strauss.  Vintage Books, Random House, New York.  2000.  Softbound. 

Endings lead me to think about beginnings.  It seems as though I’ve been thinking about a lot of endings lately as so many of my friends have recently reached the stage of their lives when they are ending their job-careers and beginning their retirement-careers.  Another ending and beginning is that this is the last paper issue of Women in Natural Resources—we will soon publish online only.  I wonder if, in the future, we will speak of p-publishing to distinguish it from e-publishing, the way we do for mail and commerce.   

Another important issue is, who are the folks who will succeed us in the workplace?  What can we expect from them?  Will the natural resources we have fought so long and hard to manage (regardless of our definition of the word) be safe in their hands?  Will they appreciate the battles we fought and the freedoms we won, as the first generation of “women working in the woods”?  Predicting the future, just like predicting the weather, is imperfect at best.  Millennials Rising. The Next Great Generation attempts to deal with some of these issues and to predict the future, as laid out before us all in the promise of the youngest generation.  

According to information in “About the Authors” in Millennials Rising, Neil Howe and William Strauss have been active in “generational issues,” host two relevant web sites (www.millennialsrising.com and www.fourthturning.com), and are both parents.  They define “Millennials” as people born from about 1982-2002.  In the first chapter of their book, Howe and Strauss point out that:

As a group, Millennials are unlike any other youth generation in living memory.  They are more numerous, more affluent, better educated, and more ethnically diverse.  More important, they are beginning to manifest a wide array of positive social habits that older American no longer associate with youth, including a new focus on teamwork, achievement, modesty, and good conduct. 

The authors begin Millennials Rising by painting a graphic picture of the generational stew: a thumbnail portrait of the six generations currently inhabiting the United States, ranging from the oldest—those born in the late 1800s—to those born after the calendars rolled over to 2000.  They write that a generation develops a sense of identity during their early work years and that those in the earlier part of the age span develop it sooner than those born a little later.  However, “Thanks to the media and advertising obsession with today’s teens . . . this delay has shrunk drastically.  Firstborn Millennials are showing a clearer sense of generation membership, earlier in their life cycle, than any other youths in American history.”   

So, the authors predict that the:

Millennials will be a generation of trends . . . and most of these trends will represent a direct reversal from the trends associated with Boomers. . . . Boomers started out as the objects of loosening child standards in an era of conformist adults.  Millennials are staring out as the objects of tightening child standards in an era of nonconformist adults . . . [and] could become the cleanest-cut young adults in living memory.   [emphasis by authors]

Howe and Strauss go on to demographically describe the Millennials:  “One Millennial in five has at least one immigrant parent, and one in ten has at least one noncitizen parent.” 

The second section of the book is devoted to describing the Millennial generation, including descriptions of their parents.  They write about Boomers, their parents, and now their children.  They offer the contrast that:

Back then, GI [parents] kept their doors unlocked for one another, but learned to lock them against one another’s kids.  Boomers learned early to lock their doors (and install security systems) against their like-aged neighbors—but have lately begun to unlock them for their neighbor’s kids. 

Generally, the GI generation is the one that fought World War II; the Boomers are their children; Generation X are those born 1961-1981; and the Millennials are those born 1982-2002.  The authors point out that there are “three attributes [to identify the persona of a generation]:  perceived membership, common beliefs and behaviors, and a common location in history.” 

The third and final section of the book is devoted to speculation about what the Millennials might accomplish in their lives.  Fully acknowledging that we cannot truly know the answer to this question, the authors muse on what the Millennials might do to families, the culture, the economy, or the government.  They describe how and why this generation is different from the Boomers and the Gen-X’ers.   

Some of this section reads like “pie in the sky.”  For instance, the authors claim that “By the time Millennials entirely fill the ranks of college and graduate schools, they will resolve longstanding debates about substance abuse.”  This statement really seems far-fetched—I’m in the “wait and see” category on this point.   

So, the Millenials seem to know who they are.  But do they know where they are going?  That remains to be seen.  And the only way we are going to know the answer is if we live long enough.   

The biggest drawback to Howe and Strauss’ book is that it was written before September 11, 2001.  The authors make the claim that the shootings at Columbine will shape the Millennials.  As horrific as Columbine was, it falls in the shadow left by the events of September 11.  I wonder if 9/11 will shape this generation in the same dramatic way that President Kennedy’s assassination shaped mine, or that the attack on Pearl Harbor shaped my parent’s generation.   

The page layout of Millennials Rising includes short quotes on the outer margins of both pages.  Many of these are by kids and some are as young as six.  Many are quotes from magazines and newspapers, such as Time and the Washington Post.  I found some quotes to be unexpected.  For instance, Chris Thomas, age 16, says “I’m kinda glad that there are people like the police who [patrol]  juveniles who are out late at night roaming the streets.  We have no right whatsoever to be out past the established curfew.”  Whatever happened to “question everything?”  The book also includes some great cartoons, such as the one that shows a 1970s-era hippie saying, “My parents are fascist pigs!”; followed by the 1980s student saying, “My friends are sold-out hypocrites”; followed by the 1990s professor saying “My students are greedy materialists!”; and finally, the 2000-era parent saying “My children will save us all!” 

The history of a generation is always full of exceptions.  For every draft card-burning activist of the 1960s, there were kids who resembled the conformist 1950s.  Predicting future actions for an entire generation likely focuses only on the center, so we must leave room for both extremes in our portrait.  Even so, this book provides a glimpse of what the possibilities might be.  I read this book and dreamt of the future.  But unlike in a dream, I truly believe that all of us have to continue to focus on good parenting skills, whether we are parents, step-parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, or just interested friends.  We are all responsible for keeping the dream from morphing into a nightmare.