Millennials gave birth to 'Generation Alpha.' Are these kids already doomed?

When it comes to school-age alpha children, the concern has been focused on the much-maligned "iPad kid" — a child who cannot sit through a restaurant meal or a brief ride on public transit without mainlining YouTube from a tablet in a plastic case.

"The stigma is to not have our kids on screen time all the time, but I probably check my phone just as often," said Chris Chin, 39, whose 8-year-old son Kaven is a YouTube star with half a million Gen Alpha followers. "As long as he keeps his grades up, I let him do what he wants, and most of the time he chooses to jump on the iPad."

Elementary-age viewers flock to Kaven's channel to watch him navigate new games on Roblox, frolic through lavish Disney vacations and unbox surprise egg toys — entertainment most teen and adult observers find baffling but anodyne.

Other facets of the Gen Alpha zeitgeist are more extreme. Case in point: Skibidi Toilet, the violent, vaguely scatological short-form video series that debuted in February 2023. It shares the market with popular horror games, including Rainbow Friends and Poppy Playtime, which may shock some grown-ups with their colorful cartoon-creature bloodshed.

And yet, the creations are low-key mainstream, with fanged Huggy-Wuggy dolls hanging from the stalls of street vendors and in the toy aisle at WalMart.

For a curious grade-schooler, experts say, YouTube more often works like Wikipedia, answering questions like, where is the oldest tree on Earth? How do you defeat Shy Guy on Level 4 of Paper Mario? What are boogers made of?

"A kid who may not have access to art lessons, we have a creator who does exactly that," said Amanda Klecker of pocket.watch, which represents blockbuster kid creators such as Ryan's World and Art for Kids Hub. "They will show you a really cool illustration, and the dad and the daughter will break it down side by side" so that the child watching can learn to draw it, too.

Others, including the Gen Z influencer Dutta, agreed with that assessment.

"When I'm hanging out with kids now, they have so much energy, and they are so well-informed," Dutta said. "They have all this information at their fingertips."

That information translates to influence with busy and relatively permissive millennial parents: Kids now increasingly determine what their families buy, where they vacation and even what they watch on TV, studies show.

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