Raising Gen Alpha: Parenting in hyper-digital world

Ideas such as psychological and emotional safety or pursuit of individuality were unheard of, for girls growing up in the Nineties. How do millennial and Gen Z women hope to raise their children in an AI-driven, hyper-digital world? Meera Vijayann shares her experiences first as a daughter, and now as a mother raising her six-year-old daughter

Last summer, after I registered my now six-year-old in kindergarten, the school district sent all newly registered families a list of rules. We live in Kirkland, a suburb in the Greater Seattle area, where nothing of importance happens. I expected a boring list of directional details about parking, nut allergies, and holiday events. But just as I was about to close the link in my inbox, one particular rule caught my eye: cell phones had to be turned off and kept in students’ backpacks.

Why would anyone give a five-year-old a cellphone?

My daughter was born in 2019, right before the pandemic, so I’d always known that her life would be different from mine. The same summer I registered her in kindergarten, I asked my husband to bring up a box of my old journals that I’d safely locked away in the basement. These journals formed the basis of a memoir-in-essays that I was working on, 'Girls Who Said Nothing and Everything', and I needed perspective. I wasn’t surprised that the journals written between 1997 and 2004 were hard to read because it was a tumultuous time. I was a teenager and I didn’t own a phone. My parents wouldn’t allow it because they felt that technology use was a dangerous frontier for young women. Unlike my daughter, I got my first cellphone only in 2005, when I was in my second year of college. I was raised to believe that it was shameful to seek fulfilling relationships outside one’s family. A piece of personal technology granted privacy and access to a world which could lead a girl child astray. New friends, boyfriends, whatnot. Although I rebelled against these views all of my life, I now began to wonder what dangers lay in store for my daughter.

I felt anxious.

Perhaps, decision-making is a complicated internal struggle because I still feel conflicted about the idea of right and wrong.  Of course, I’m not a child anymore. The 90s were also a different time. One, I was under immense pressure to honour my parent’s beliefs—by using technology only when they allowed, and two, privacy was a luxury that invited suspicion in my family of six. We had one computer at home, and it was in the living room for all of us to use. My parents were around all the time. The idea of having an identity that was completely online felt unsafe because they were more tech-savvy than I was at that age. They policed every aspect of my life—clothes, friends, phone calls, activities—and screamed at us constantly for the slightest failures. There were other issues too.

Pursuit of individuality

If pursuing individuality back then was an exhausting ordeal, the idea of psychological and emotional safety was unheard of. Women in my community were strictly home bound. Whenever I challenged my parents about their beliefs, I was reminded that I had more liberties as a woman than my other female cousins, all of whom had far stricter parents. By the time I was a teenager, the absence of a space to grow made home a suffocating and lonely place so I wrote down all my thoughts in journals and hid them away. I was happy knowing that there were no copies of my thoughts floating on the internet, and that I could process them wherever I wanted with just a pen and sheet of paper. Writing terrible love poetry, short stories, and confessionals was how I learned to emotionally cope with life. Even today, at thirty-nine, the thought of someone finding my journals terrifies me. I don’t know if it’s shame around my individuality as a woman, or a paranoia that I might (even now) disappoint my parents but I suspect it’s both. 

Gen Alpha contrast

For my daughter, who is Gen Alpha and growing up in the United States, technology—and individuality—is an extension of life. After Covid-19 pandemic, when the world moved online to cope and fumble towards normalcy, I learned quickly that my own ideas of right and wrong didn’t make sense in the world she was being raised in. I couldn’t raise a child in a country where students primarily used technology to learn. According to a study by the US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in 2022, 94 per cent of public schools provided laptops or tablets for students who needed it. While her kindergarten classroom had rules about not using phones—early this year, the NCES study also showed that 77 per cent of public schools prohibited students from using cell phones during any class because it affected academic performance—it stressed on the changing landscape of classrooms. About 47 per cent of schools teach students about AI. When she comes home from school, most of her homework is on certified learning apps that she accesses on my iPad. Was this good or bad?

I thought about it.

Yes, children are vulnerable online. Girls, especially, are at risk of becoming victims of sexual exploitation, cyberbullying, and grooming. I understand my parents’ worries better now. But I want to raise a confident girl who doesn’t grow up ashamed of herself in the online world and at the same time, find joy in life away from technology. Life is in the trees, the birds, and the wilderness. We live in the Pacific Northwest which is lush and beautiful. So time and time again, I remind myself that my childhood in India isn’t comparable to my daughter’s. This isn’t the 90s. My relationship with technology was lonely and confusing because it was rooted in shame. When I was cyber-bullied, I assumed that it was what I deserved for getting a social media account. I didn’t text in front of my parents because texting friends constantly was seen as wayward. Her relationship to technology, and herself, didn’t have to be that way. If it was rooted in trust and guidance, she could flourish. 

Different times, different parenting

I worried about the phone rule until a parent at my daughter’s school put it in perspective in a few simple words. When I told her about my childhood in India and asked her if she worried about giving her children cellphones, she said, “Think about the reality here. This is a country where there is gun violence. There are school shootings. I don’t think about anything but whether my children and I are prepared.” Her words hit me in the gut. She was right. My responsibility wasn’t to mourn my past but to prepare my daughter for a present—and a future—that was different from mine. It was much more important for me to raise her to be media literate, emotionally mature, and resilient to survive the challenges of AI, disinformation, sexism, and a hyper-politicised world in which she will find comfort but also, loss. 

It is inevitable. 

Generation after generation, we have no choice but to continue learning and growing with each other. 

(The writer's recent collection of memoir-in-essays, Girls Who Said Nothing and Everything, was published by Penguin Random House India.)