how the tide shifts: the generational cycle at work before our very eyes

• Xers (born 1961ish to 1981ish) and early Millennials (born 1982-ish to 2001-ish) had a cartoon Joe Camel selling us cigarettes. The new generation -- the Boomer-run Generation Watch suggests calling them the Homeland Generation, which sounds pretty good to me -- the eldest of whom are preschoolers, is now being looked out for even by the freakin’ tobacco companies, as an article in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine states: Steve Parrish, senior vice president for corporate affairs at Altria Group, which used to be called Philip Morris, “says that it is important to keep kids from starting to smoke.” And new innovations in the tobacco industry, like “smokeless products,” which is far less dangerous than cigarettes, are to be approached with extreme caution, because they “might get kids hooked on nicotine and then allow them to ‘graduate’ to cigarettes.” This is the industry that, just ten years ago, the article states, had to be dragged kicking and screaming to make public-health concessions -- today, it’s taking a lead on such issues. (The article suggests that there are plenty of ulterior motives beyond pure benevolence behind Altria’s stance, but the fact that it couches its message as a “think of the children” thing hints that that’s what the public wants to hear today.)

• Also from the New York Times Magazine: Two Sundays ago, it devoted its entire issue to debt -- public debt, personal debt, all of it, and how it’s on the verge of sinking America into a massive economic disaster. Xers? We’re Generation Debt, according to one book; another book, Strapped, explains “Why America’s 20- and 30-Somethings Can’t Get Ahead,” and it has nothing to do with us being slackers. There’s an interesting interview with Strapped author Tamara Draut at Alternet that recaps her argument, but all you need to do is read the reader comments posted in response to see that Xers are still considered mostly to blame for whatever predicament we may be in: we broke it, basically, we bought it, even if the economic conditions that we’re forced to live with are not our doing.

But now, when it comes to our juniors, it’s time for everyone to be concerned. One article in the Times Magazine details the financial woes of college kids -- who are Millennials today -- who get hooked on Internet gambling. The focus of the piece isn’t a slacker or a loser or some bad seed: he’s a good kid, dammit, “a minister’s eldest son” fer pete’s sake. But no kid is safe from this pernicious threat, the purveyors of which prey on the young and the innocent: maybe it’s a bad idea, the author states, to put high-speed Net access in dorm rooms; after all, “administrators would never consider letting Budweiser install taps in dorm rooms”!

Another chapter in the debt issue is all about student debt. What’s it called? “Forgive Us Our Student Debts”! Not the debts already incurred by, for instance, those in their late 20s, 30s, and early 40s -- no. Future student debt, that which will be incurred by Millennials and Homelanders. Why? “The view that today’s student debt may have explosive consequences for society seems to be gaining support in some quarters.” Xers may be the ones getting hit by the shrapnel of that explosion, but there’s no discussion whatsoever of helping us out. It’s all about the children. The piece mentions the Gates Millennium Scholarship program, which started in 1999, just in time to help Millennial students, and covers any outstanding costs after scholarships, meaning that the recipients of Gates’s largesse pay nothing for college. “The people who don’t have to worry about debt, like the Gates cohort,” says Ed St. John, an educator working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in the article, “are making life choices that are more contingent with their interest rather than to the market.” How nice for them.

Now, don’t get me wrong -- I think it’s fantastic that there may not be another generation that has to deal with the monster of student-loan debt. I’m not complaining -- really, I’m not (and I’ll get to why in a bit). But I do find it absolutely riveting to watch how attitudes about just about everything having to do with how we raise kids are changing seeming so quickly.

• It’s time to rethink how we feed our babies. “Breast-Feed or Else” is the unambiguous headline of a recent Washington Post article:

Warning: Public health officials have determined that not breast-feeding may be hazardous to your baby's health....

A two-year national breast-feeding awareness campaign that culminated this spring ran television announcements showing a pregnant woman clutching her belly as she was thrown off a mechanical bull during ladies' night at a bar — and compared the behavior to failing to breast-feed.

"You wouldn't take risks before your baby's born," the advertisement says. "Why start after?"

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, has proposed requiring warning labels, on cans of infant formula and in advertisements, similar to the those on cigarettes. They would say that the Department of Health and Human services has determined that "breast-feeding is the ideal method of feeding and nurturing infants" or that "breast milk is more beneficial to infants than infant formula."

Child-rearing experts have long pointed to the benefits of breast-feeding. But critics say the new campaign has taken things too far and will make mothers who cannot breast-feed, or choose not to, feel guilty and inadequate.

Of course, I doubt there’s ever been any real debate over the fact that breastfeeding is how babies were meant to be fed, but our society has not made that easy... and this example of the pendulum swing is especially scary. Will this cry of “think of the children” result in government and corporate policies that will make it easier for working women to breastfeed (like, oh, on-site daycare that allows women to be near their infants during working hours), or easier for families to make do with only one salary if they so choose. Or will it be, as my friend Bonnie pointed out, “another step towards The Handmaid's Tale”:

more likely it will be "breast feeding is good for our most precious resource -- the future generation. working and breast feeding are not compatible. it is not right for women to deprive our children of the benefits of breast feeding... therefore, women should not work while their children need to be breast-fed."

• It’s time to rethink how we feed everyone. High-fructose corn syrup -- a product of argricultural subsidies that benefitted enormous corporate factory farms, encouraged them to produce vast quantities of corn -- started being used as a sweetener in just about every kind of processed food in the mid to late 1970s. Which may be a major contributing factor to the obesity epidemic (the National Soft Drink Association disagrees, of course). And who’s getting fattest? Why, Xers, naturally (or unnaturally, as the case may be):

Generation x-tra large: Americans getting fatter younger, study finds

PHILADELPHIA -- (June 18, 2002) Americans are getting fatter at younger ages, and the percentage of adults who are actually obese doubled since the 1960s, according to a new study of 9,179 U.S. adults.
The study, "The Natural History of the Development of Obesity in a Cohort of Young U.S. Adults Between 1981 and 1998," appears in the June 18, 2002, issue of Annals of Internal Medicine.

The study of found:

=Twenty-six percent of men and 28 percent of women were obese by the time they were 35 to 37.
=Young adults are becoming obese faster. People born in 1964 became obese 26 percent to 28 percent faster than those born in 1957.

And more:

GENERATION Xs are at risk of dying before their parents with a new Australian study showing they are becoming obese faster than any other age group.

The Sydney University study found adults born between 1966 and 1970 were putting on weight more rapidly than baby boomers and adults of the pre-war generations.

And so now that we’re all so fat we’re killing ourselves, we have a book like Michael Pollan’s brand-new Omnivore's Dilemma, part of which is about how we omnivores have become a kind of univore, with the standard American diet consisting, in a large percentage, on corn, in one form or another (and very little of it in any form recognizable as, you know, corn).

And -- it must be reiterated -- it is Xers, in large part, leading much of this new “think of the children” thing. (Super Size Me, which also railed against fake corporate “food” contributing to our poor collective health, is by Xer Morgan Spurlock, for instance.) Tons of examples abound in the public sphere, like Angelina Jolie giving money to poor babies and new celebrity dad Jack Black fretting over how to protect his precious little one (“I’m already having headaches like, ‘Where is he going to go to pre-school? Am I gonna put cameras in every room of my house to spy on babysitters to make sure that they don't shake the baby?’”)

Hell, there’s a celebrity baby boom going on -- it’s fashionable and hip to have a baby now. And, ohmigod, there’s actually a Celebrity Baby Blog.

Now, is all this protectionism a 100-percent good thing? I don’t think so, and other Xers agree with me. Mike, the 30something lawyer who blogs at Mike’s Neighborhood, posted “Sex, Drugs & Shopping” recently:

An article from late last week, from the "HealthDay News," reports that risky health behaviors are down among American teens. While the panoply of activities comprising "risky" behaviors is nowhere laid out in-full, the article alludes to some: dangerous driving; sexual activity; tobacco, drug & alcohol use; violence & fighting; obesity; and "couch-potato behaviors," such as watching too much television.

Now I'm the first to applaud any change in teen behavior that reduces incessant television watching & obesity, but frankly, when teenagers report engaging in less sex, fighting, drinking, smoking and driving like a maniac, I have to ask: then What The Hell Are They Doing? If you remove these activities, what's left? Sleeping, studying & . . . let's call it "self-help"? Watching a little television? Shopping?

Seriously, though, I have to ask three questions: What does it mean for our future to raise such a risk-averse generation? What are they doing instead? And, notice that excessive consumerism isn't on the list?

Risk-Aversion: Obviously one wants to live in a society where random fights between men don't break out over each disagreement. It's good not to worry that a car'll cross the divider at 90 M.P.H. and plow into you. But most adults avoid such behavior because they learned the dangers. I was a 16 year-old boy. I know what 16 year-old boys do when they get behind the wheel. Like most, I narrowly escaped death-by-flaming wreck a couple times, due to my own skill, that of the other drivers, and mostly good old Luck. Like everyone, I know someone or a few someones who left us a dozen-or-so years ago because their luck failed them.

But I, and everyone else who survived, learned what not to do and why.

There’s much more, and it’s a good read.

And then there’s the voice of Generation X, Mark Morford, who, in a column entitled “Walt Disney Stalks Your Child: Now even kids have GPS cell phones. So much for running away from home,” shared this child-of-the-80s wisdom:

It was perfect. We were, I believe, less than one mile from home. But it might as well have been the moon because no one knew where we were. The devil had yet to invent cell phones or GPS or implantable RFID chips and hence it was still possible to get away and, for all intents and purposes, vanish from the face of the Earth. Ah, the glory of it.

We leaned some planks up against a tree. We found a beat-up tarp for a doorway. We collected nails and hunks of scrap wood (for ammo) and dug in. There was a small market right nearby (excellent strategic planning on our part -- access to cheap candy was, like, right there) and we stocked up on supplies: one box of Honeycomb, four generic grape sodas, a large bag of potato chips. We had 75 cents left over for, you know, emergencies....

I now guesstimate that our radical rebellion lasted roughly six hours. During this time, I do believe my parents had no idea where I was. Not only that, but when I returned, they didn't even realize I had gone. I remember this being rather humiliating, because if there's one thing worse than failing in your defiance of authority, it's having authority smile warmly when you walk back in the door and offer you a bowl of hot macaroni and cheese with little bits of cut-up hot dogs in it. Bastards!

Alas, it is but a faint memory. And it's also a scenario that might well be disappearing from the face of the culture. No more tiny but fiercely independent romps into the unknown for modern postmillenn

Again, there’s much more from Morford (I don’t like to steal page views from fellow online writers), so go check it out.

There’s an independent spirit to Generation X that is not going to reassert itself in today’s children. They’re be safe, maybe... but they’ll be conventional and lacking a sense of adventure. And I’m not sure that that’s entirely a good thing.

But it’s happening right in front of our eyes... no, we’re making it happen right in front of our eyes.

(Technorati tags: Generation X, Millennials, Homeland Generation, tobacco, debt, breastfeeding, obesity, high fructose corn syrup, celebrity baby boom)