iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us

by Jean M. Twenge

Until recently, most of the generational patter focused on Millennials, sometimes defined as Americans born between 1980 and 1999. Yet this is a long span for a recent generation: Generation X, immediately before the Millennials, lasted only fourteen years, from 1965 to 1979. If the Millennial generation lasts the same amount of time as GenX, the last Millennial birth year is instead 1994, meaning that iGen begins with those born in 1995—conveniently, that’s also the year the Internet was born. Other milestones fall close to 1995 as well. In 2006, Facebook opened up to anyone over the age of 13—so those born since 1993 have been able to live their entire adolescence on social networking sites. A cut in the mid-1990s also makes sense based on the hard data: in 2011, the year when everything started to change in the survey data, the 13- to 18-year-olds answering the questions were born between