...and thus it shall always be.
This thinking is found on both sides of the aisle, from the young Marxist of my last post to the second-hand Fox News I was exposed to recently.
The guest was blaming the Millenials problems on poor parenting by Baby Boomers who just "stuck their kids in front of iPads."
Well, yeah, you can certainly make the case that Millenials woes and need for adulting classes is attributable to poor parenting. Many things in early adulthood can be attributed to a lack of pre-adulthood training. Then again, blaming parenting for everything sort of lets people off the hook for responsibility to educate themselves, and frankly, the Millenials taking adulting classes are doing precisely that, so I'd be more inclined to applaud those ones.
Also, I really wish I'd thought of adulting classes and lived in an area urban enough to capitalize on this idea. Sadly, most of the Millenials around here grew up in farms and/or the (used to be) Boy Scouts, and are therefore pretty well-equipped for adulting.
What you can't make a case for, though, is that Millenials were plopped in front of iPads.
Why?
Because Millenials run from 1981-2002, and the first iPad was released in 2010, and, at a base price of $600 inflation adjusted, was cost-prohibitive to wide circulation let alone giving to a clumsy little brat.
This means that the youngest Millenials were 8 before they handled an iPad or other tablet. 90% were at least double digits; 77% were at least in their teens, and 44% were in their 20's.*
Okay, so, he should have said "Commodore 64" or for the younger kids "Gateway 95." Big deal.
Well, it is a big deal. He just asserted a narrative that Millenials grew up plugged in 24/7 like a lot of kids these days are (Supposedly. Ours sure aren't.). Except, that's completely false. If my parents plopped me in front of anything, it was an old Zenith Space Command Color that weighed as much as me. Not exactly something that fit in a stroller, plus, you'd need a really long extension cord. But not a cable, because it had rabbit ears.
Oh, sure, the school's Apple IIC had a carrying handle, but it also weighed 18 pounds with the monitor, so I never carted it around. Plus it cost $3000 inflation-adjusted, so it wasn't the sort of thing you let a kid play with unsupervised.
This guest just made an obvious, objectively false statement, and rather than anyone calling him out on his (at best) stupidity or (at worst) dishonesty, the talking heads nodded along sagely. The narrative trumped the facts for them. They wanted to believe that the proliferation of children playing everywhere on smart devices has always been a thing that can be blamed for Millenial infantlization...and so they did.
And then they complain about "fake news."
*Source: Infoplease.com birth rates by year. All calculations mine. I welcome any corrections.
