Why Kids Matter

Kids matter, even if for no other reason than that they'll be adults one day. Among the teenagers and young adults exists a President of the United States, a speaker of the house, thousands of CEOs, best-selling authors, movie stars and a whole lot of other people that are going to shape the world in 40 years.  And it is the teenage years that these future leaders develop there personalities.  This means that when parents, teachers and other adults interact with adults, they have the power to shape the future of the world.  But to say that these adults have complete control over who these kids will become is ludacris.  The average kid devotes over 7 hours to some form of media consumption every day.  That's not including how much video games they play, or how much time they spend on the phone, that is 7 hours of TV and internet most. Dad's on average spend about the same amount of time with their kids per week!  So it is likely that the factors of these kids developments go much far past their parents, and the question is, who will these kids become?

Will they become technology reliant assholes?  Some might say so.  Or will we become strengthened by technology, becoming more productive workers?  Or maybe we will even grow more connected through technology; Facebook does have the effect of keeping people in touch.  Either way, it is becoming evident that technology will play a huge role in the development of Generation Y.

So if you care about the future you need to look at kids now. And what will we see when we look at kids now? We will see a group of self-publishers who are used to writing about themselves on twitter and other social medias.  We will see a group of kids that are going to compete with the rest of the world for jobs. A group of kids that will be even more connected to technology than we are now, and will be comfortable even to make payments digitally.  We will see a group of kids who are consuming more politically correct material than ever. So what does that work out to?  I have no idea.

It is impossible to look at kids now and predict the future.  Almost every generation looks down on the next generation with scorn and disgust.  This has been going on since 1700 B.C.. The truth is kids aren't developed yet.  We have seen 9-11 and that has affected our political views, we have seen the Iraq war and that has affected our views even more.  There are still many historical events yet to witness, there are still many technological developments yet to come out.  There are still many authors yet to write influential books.  Kids have not yet developed and we don't exactly know what will be the influences on them in the next years.  For now I can say this, our future will not be drastically different than the present.  How we get from place to place may change, how we send a message to one another may change, but we won't be much different from our parents or their parents or the their parents before them.  People are people and although people's ideas change, in the macro view, every generation has not been so different.