Damien Van AchterEvery time I open my TikTok For You Page, I see a creator who strikes fear into my heart. She has blonde hair and wears silk pajamas. Her get-ready-with-me routine is more than 10 steps long and includes a serum that retails for $87. She’s better than me, and she knows it — and based on her videos, I’m sure she’d tell me to my face. She is 13.
I’m talking, of course, about Evelyn, the mononymous tween influencer whose TikTok videos took off in 2023, providing a fascinating glimpse into the havoc her generation is set to wreak. Digitally literate and social savvy, Gen Alpha — the cohort born between 2010 and 2025 — are expected to become the largest generation in the world. Depending on which headlines you read, Gen Alpha kids are lonely. Gen Alpha kids are disrespectful. Gen Alpha kids suffer from “brainrot.” The whole generation is “doomed.” All millennials and Gen Z know for certain? These kids are terrifying.
“It feels like it’s kind of silly that the government thinks that we should be afraid of [it],” a TikTok user said in a viral video last summer. “What I am afraid of is Gen Alpha.”
It’s a rite of passage for a younger generation to be branded by its predecessors as a scourge on society. Millennials were the “me me me” generation. Gen Z was supposedly so disturbed they were eating Tide Pods. (They weren’t.) And, despite the wisdom and maturity that comes with age, I’ve yet to meet an adult who doesn’t tense up when passing a gaggle of youth on the street.
In the past, one might have soothed themselves with the same mantra applied to small bugs and spiders: They’re more scared of you than you are of them. But even those who have lived through multiple generational hysterias have started to concede that something about Gen Alpha feels different. And while these kids aren’t old enough yet to see bullies and mean girls meaningfully emerge among their peers, they’ve found, en masse, another target: adults.
Parents, teachers, and civilians who encounter Gen Alpha rarely escape unscathed. “The internet has brought them together to make them stronger than any other generation,” says Ashley Embers, a YouTube essayist and a mother of Gen Alpha children. “And because every generation loves separating themselves and making fun of the others, they have more capacity to gang up on us.” Two years ago, Laura Loray, a New Jersey-based psychiatric nurse practitioner, coined the term the “honey badger” generation. Like the animal described in the 2011 YouTube video, they just don’t care, she argued in a TikTok post — not about your directions, not about your rules, and not about the fact that you may be 20 years older than them. Now, she has 400,000 followers tuning in to watch her riff on how to deal with the cohort.
As some of the first observers of incoming generations, teachers have been the canaries in the Gen Alpha coal mine. Over the past year or so, some of them have taken to social media themselves to sound the alarm with reports of students becoming increasingly disrespectful. “At first everybody was like, ‘Oh, it’s just COVID, whatever,’” says one middle school teacher, who’s also taught both Gen Z and Gen Alpha in her decade of experience. “I’m like, ‘Dude, I don’t think this is COVID. This is something else here.’”
Teachers’ claims about Gen Alpha run the gamut: Gen Alpha are disrespectful, Gen Alpha can’t read, Gen Alpha can’t focus, Gen Alpha are leaving teachers traumatized. Their unique early mastery of social media and the internet means they’re armed with unprecedented resources to fight back. They’re finding their teachers’ houses on Zillow, they’re referring to them as “Alexa” (as in Amazon), and according to one New York City on-staff social worker, messaging each other via school-issued tablets to communicate without the teacher knowing. “I feel victimized by some of these 6- and 7-year-olds,” another teacher on TikTok says.
The middle school teacher (who asked to remain anonymous) says she regularly feels bullied by her newly-emboldened Gen Alpha students. They participate in TikTok trends that make teachers the butt of the joke, like attempting to steal items from her desk. One female student, upset that she didn’t receive a perfect grade in the class, went to the school principal. She claimed her less-than-perfect grade was a result of “a secret” the teacher had told her not to tell, something negative she claims the teacher had said about the principal — but that she tells me she never did. “[Girls] are very sneaky about it,” she says of the bullying. “Some girls in my class have made fun of me to my face, but they didn’t think that I knew they were making fun of me.”
Some of these antics are, of course, to be expected — these are children, after all. But back in February, a group of Pennsylvania middle schoolers crossed a new line with their bullying. These students terrorized their teachers with fake TikTok accounts: With the help of AI, the avatars who looked like their teachers and sounded like their teachers were programmed to spout pedophilic innuendo and racist memes. As a result, several students were “briefly” suspended, according to The New York Times. It was the first known group TikTok attack of its kind, but, as technology and AI keep advancing, certainly not the last.
Social media often takes the blame for transforming impressionable kids into formidable opponents. After all, according to one study, today’s average tween starts using a smartphone by age 9, experiencing much of their introduction to culture and society through their screens. “If you’re watching content or following influencers who are always putting down adults, then your threshold of normalcy changes,” Jessica Elefante, author and a co-chair for Mothers Against Media Addiction, says.
TikTok culture has also pushed girls in particular to grow up faster. While most boys’ digital childhoods consist of YouTube and video games, many girls find themselves drinking from the firehose of “get ready with me” videos and shopping hauls, many of which feature women twice their age. Throw in that preternatural Gen Alpha confidence and the cloak of social media filtering, and suddenly an 11-year-old can seem like a peer — no, not a peer: a savvy queen who can apply a cat-eye with the precision of a brain surgeon. Suddenly, we withered millennials are bowing down to the likes of Evelyn.
Suddenly, we withered millennials are bowing down to the likes of Evelyn.
It’s a stark contrast for us adults who remember no such confidence in our own childhoods, our attempts at beauty trends consisting of stuffed bras and uneven eyeliner. These Gen Alpha queens may not yet have their front teeth, but who needs ’em when you’ve got Drunk Elephant drops, expert contouring skills, and a mom at the ready to give you a coveted slicked-back bun? Such is the life of creators like Haven Garza, Ayla Palmer, and Harper Zilmer.
Casey Lewis, writer of the youth trends newsletter After School, says it’s only to be expected that these girls are interested in mimicking older women: “When I was 17, I wouldn’t read Seventeen magazine because you don’t want to wear what someone younger than you is wearing,” she says. “You want to wear what someone slightly older than you is wearing.”
Plus, we know that Gen Alpha can only follow trends for so long. Soon, they’ll start to create the trends themselves — and we’ll be primed to follow suit. Convenient that we millennials are already on bended knee, eager to kiss the Ring Pop.
So who do we blame for this entire generation’s main character energy? While it’s easy to blame TikTok, some parents and experts argue that social media is nothing more than a red herring. It’s the (millennial) parents who hand them the phone, and the (millennial) parents who should be doling out the discipline. Specifically, Gen Alpha has been raised in an era of “gentle parenting,” which focuses on addressing the feelings behind bad behavior instead of correcting it. But as Elizabeth Passarella wrote for The Cut last year, if they’re not careful, gentle parents become “permissive parents,” who fail to enforce any boundaries at all.
“Kids were always excited to come in and they always at least tried to do the stuff that we would do in class,” the middle school teacher says of previous Gen Z students. But now with Gen Alpha, “it’s like, ‘My mom says I don’t have to, my dad says that it’s stupid.’ Like, ‘I’m never going to use this in my life.’”
As we watch this monolith of outspoken, impeccably-dressed miniatures with their own language grow into their power, it’s hard to know whether our panic is as overblown as it’s proven to be in decades past. Lewis insists that it is: “I think it’s a mistake to make Gen Alpha out to be more evil or shrewd. Because we’re literally talking about 12-year-olds here,” she says. “I think it’s a fear of our own obsolescence and irrelevance versus actually fearing a generation.”
“Certain kids have always been precocious,” she continues. “It’s just that now they have platforms like TikTok that are amplifying their precociousness.”
Just ask Gen Alpha themselves. “That’s not me or most of my friends at all,” insists Catherine*, an 11-year-old from Michigan.
Catherine enjoys school and doesn’t see the animosity toward adults that others have reported. She’s aware of the headlines, but thinks Gen Alpha doesn’t get enough credit for their positive traits. “Most people think we’re an unfocused, really playful group, and in some situations that’s true,” she says. “But we have a big imagination which can lead to great stories and problem-solving.”
Certain kids have always been precocious. It’s just that now they have platforms like TikTok that are amplifying their precociousness.
Maybe, then, it’s time we welcome our new Gen Alpha overlords, and consider the idea that perhaps children that challenge authority could even make for world-beating adults. These are people whose formative years occurred during the pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a generation — set to be the most diverse yet — that has been raised with equality and consideration in mind.
This is an especially hopeful vision for young women. Already adept at contour, these girls will be primed to fight for the big stuff — abortion rights, equal pay, paid leave — without shame. Perhaps thanks to the Evelyns of the world, they’ll no longer put up with less than they deserve, or putting unnecessary exclamation marks in their work emails. They’ll be alphas, in every sense of the word. All hail the queens.
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Résumé de l'article :
La montée en puissance de la génération Alpha, ces jeunes nés entre 2010 et 2025, fait trembler les générations précédentes de par leur maîtrise innée des réseaux sociaux et des nouvelles technologies. Voici les points saillants de l'article :
- Gen Alpha, une force numérique : Ces jeunes sont non seulement hyperconnectés, mais aussi très influents sur les plateformes comme TikTok. Leur aptitude à manipuler les outils numériques leur offre un pouvoir sans précédent pour défier l'autorité adulte (Embers, YouTube).
- Un défi pour les éducateurs : Les enseignants se disent désemparés face à des élèves de plus en plus audacieux, capables de retourner les technologies à leur avantage, parfois en les utilisant pour humilier leurs professeurs (New York Times).
- Des parents à la croisée des chemins : Les méthodes de "parentalité bienveillante" sont pointées du doigt. Elles risquent de devenir trop permissives, laissant Gen Alpha sans limites claires (Passarella, The Cut).
- Un potentiel inexploité : Malgré les critiques, ces jeunes pourraient bien devenir des agents de changement positif, notamment grâce à leur diversité et à leur capacité à défier les normes établies (Lewis, After School).
L'article souligne l'importance de s'adapter à cette nouvelle génération, en misant sur l'éducation numérique et l'accompagnement pour tirer parti de leur potentiel. Pour les décideurs politiques et les professionnels des médias, il s'agit de comprendre ces dynamiques pour mieux anticiper les évolutions futures.
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