"Our kids these days are so intelligent," said Anges Hsu of Hello Wonderful, whose 6-year-old has read hundreds of digital books, despite growing up in a home filled with physical ones. "This is going to be one of the smartest generations of our lifetime."

But not everyone is so sanguine.

'A whole generation of failure'

Illiteracy is among the most frequent and damning critiques leveled against Gen Alpha online. It is also empirically true of a demographic whose median age is 6½.

In California, children are expected to be able to read around December of first grade, meaning the majority of alphas should have been literate by New Year's Day.

Yet thousands are still struggling, making reading among the starkest reminders of a pandemic most teens and adults would prefer to move past.

Alphas "are some of the hardest-hit kids when it comes to reading," said Shervaughnna Anderson-Byrd,director of the California Reading and Literature Project. "Only 43% of our students are on grade level in California."

Today's average L.A. Unified fourth-grader spent half of kindergarten and the entirety of first grade at home, learning the foundations of reading on a Chromebook. By the time that same student returned to the classroom as a second-grader in August of 2021, they had effectively reached the end of formal phonics instruction.

"That's why we have so many third-graders whose scores look abysmal [on last year's state assessments]," Anderson-Byrd said. "We've set up a whole generation of failure for these kids."

Reading is essential for all academic work from late elementary school forward, she said. Yet, even English teachers aren't trained to teach phonics and other remedial skills beyond the early grades. That's left fourth-graders who were somewhat behind when the pandemic hit in 2020 still functionally illiterate in eighth grade.

"Teachers are complaining they have 14-year-olds who can't read," Anderson-Byrd said.

Those complaints are echoed on TikTok and Reddit, where teachers cite lack of reading skills as one of the reasons they are leaving the profession.

The "kids can't read and they are out of control in school because of it," one teacher wrote in a February post on the r/Teachers subreddit titled "They don't know how to read. I don't want to do this anymore."

Local librarians take a somewhat brighter view, noting that while circulation is still down since the pandemic, digital loans of popular series such as Dogman, Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Desmond Cole Ghost Patrol remain strong.

"The e-books and audiobooks, those go like hotcakes," said Grisel Oquendo, children's fiction selector for the L.A. County Library system.

Younger Alphas are also likely to benefit from the nationwide shift away from balanced literacy and towards the phonics-based science of reading, which could soon become mandatory under California law.

But for the older half of the generation, that move may be too late.

"We hear people complaining [alphas] lack empathy — well, you learn that through literature," Anderson-Byrd said. "There's a lot of blame being placed on these babies when it's the adults setting the narrative."

'A lot more chaos coming'

The last six months have seen the rise of the newest Gen Alpha stereotype: the Sephora tween. These serum-obsessed 12-year-olds have been filmed plundering beauty stores — spoiling samples, terrorizing grown-up shoppers and hoarding expensive products formulated for mature skin.

Experts say it's no coincidence that the flurry of doomed prognosticating about Gen Alpha emerged just as the oldest were entering puberty, the developmental apex of obnoxious behavior and poor taste.

They argue that rampaging through the skin-care aisle of Sephora or binge-watching Skibidi Toilet says less about an era than an age.

"The Sephora phenomenon, that's a timeless characteristic of up-aging," said McCrindle, the demographer. "We're talking about children who are still developing their social skills and their behavior. Kids leaving makeup testers a mess goes with their life stage."

Dutta, the influencer, agreed.

"Those are phases," she said. "You want to be cool when you're 10 ."

Still, she thinks alphas will stay strange.

"I definitely see a lot more chaos coming," Dutta said. "Gen Alpha are naturally against the grain."

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