‘We’ve hit peak children’
Millennials gave birth to ‘Generation Alpha.’ Are these kids already doomed?
Zoomers fear them. Boomers want more of them. Millennials will keep making them for the rest of the year.
Born between roughly 2010 and the end of 2024, “Generation Alpha” is the demographic successor to Gen Z. Its oldest members are not quite ready for a quinceañera, while its youngest will be conceived in the coming weeks.
When the last of them arrive this December, they’ll close the largest cohort of children ever to exist on Earth. There are already concerns that the kids aren’t “alright.” The overwhelming majority have yet to graduate elementary school, and
1 in 5 are still in diapers, yet they are widely being called “feral,” illiterate” and “doomed” on YouTube and TikTok — where alphas themselves make up a large and growing share of users.
Blame bad parenting by millennials or tech companies or both — but many of those responsible for setting the discourse online agree we should be worried for them.
“Everyone on the internet is really scared of Gen Alpha,” said Gen Z influencer Rivata Dutta, whose content is popular with alphas on TikTok. “They’re like, oh my God, Gen Alpha is so weird.”
Despite decades of declining birth rates and years of hand-wringing over a pandemic baby bust, there are now more than 2 billion alpha children worldwide — more than quarter of the population of the planet.
And some aspects of their culture are sparking backlash.
Baby decor in “sad beige”? That’s Gen Alpha.
Screen-obsessed iPad kids? Alphas again.
Beauty-store barbarian Sephora tweens stampeding through skin-care aisles and slathering their baby faces in retinol? Alphas, allegedly.
In recent months, the alphas have emerged as TikTok’s newest supervillain, a designation that has followed them into mainstream media. If zoomers are delicate snowflakes, alphas are the opposite — a horde of marauders chasing Drunk Elephant beauty products.
But where did this reputation come from? And why is it ascendant now, when the last alphas are still in utero?
“There’s more children today than ever before, (and) more than there will be in the future,” said Mark McCrindle, the demographer who coined the name “Generation Alpha” in 2008. “We’ve hit peak children.”
Alphas are overwhelmingly the offspring of millennials (those born 1981-1996), who have famously been accused of destroying such beloved American establishments as the department store, the housing market and the institution of marriage.
Now, according to wide swaths of the internet, millennials are ruining childhood for the next generation.
“I need to ask millennials — why are your kids so awful, and more importantly, why do you think it’s so funny?” TikToker Alanna Dinh said in a viral video in November.
“Part of the truth is, if any of our careers were maybe further along, maybe we wouldn’t be doing podcasts,” Werkheiser said in an interview. “There are comments that speak to that, as if we don’t know.”
Since the “Ned’s” podcast debuted in February 2023, several exchanges have caused a stir among its 717,000 TikTok followers. Shaw, who played Moze on the show, spoke about her past struggles with substance abuse. Werkheiser gave an emotional account of his time on the set of the troubled Alec Baldwin Western film “Rust.” And he and Shaw punctured the innocent image of their old show with an awkward exchange about their fumbling off-screen sexual encounters.
Werkheiser was approached about starting a “Ned’s” rewatch podcast by Brendan Rooney. Rooney founded the PodCo podcast network last year with his wife, Christy Carlson Romano, a former child star who played Ren Stevens, the overachieving older sister in the Disney Channel series “Even Stevens.”
In addition to the “Ned’s” podcast, the company produces “Wizards of Waverly Pod,” hosted by former stars of the Disney Channel show “Wizards of Waverly Place,” about three sibling wizards in training. Romano, who also voiced the title character in the Disney Channel animated series “Kim Possible,” hosts two podcasts of her own, including one with Anneliese van der Pol, a former star of the Disney Channel sitcom “That’s So Raven.”
The audience for podcasts continues to grow, with 42% of Americans 12 and older reporting last year that they had listened to one in the previous month, according to a report by Edison Research. But making money isn’t simple, in part because the market is so saturated that there isn’t enough advertising revenue to go around, said Ethan Cramer-Flood, a principal forecasting writer at Insider Intelligence, a market research firm.
PodCo, which was founded last year, expects to turn a profit by the second quarter of 2024, Romano said. The company plans to introduce several new podcasts this year, including “Pretty Little Pod” featuring Shaw and Tammin Sursok, who appeared together in the ABC Family series “Pretty Little Liars.”
Romano said it was never her plan to capitalize on nostalgia. Rather, she said, she ended up greenlighting shows featuring former stars of Disney and Nickelodeon teen sitcoms because they were people she knew and could trust.
She hopes the podcasts are places these stars can feel heard, she said.
“We’ve been a silent, niche population of people that were conditioned to be compliant and never truly understood our autonomy,” Romano said. “I want to show them that they can be empowered by having these podcasts.”
The hosts haven’t been afraid to get personal.
Jennifer Stone, who played Harper Finkle on “Wizards of Waverly Place,” recalled feeling left out on set at times in an emotional exchange on “Waverly Pod” with co-host and former co-star David DeLuise. Alyson Stoner, who was a host of the Disney Channel series “Mike’s Super Short Show” and was in the film “Cheaper by the Dozen,” has discussed being stalked and other pressures of child stardom on the podcast “Dear Hollywood,” which is not a PodCo franchise.
As they adjust to the new platform, the hosts have occasionally landed themselves in trouble. The “Ned’s Declassified” stars appeared in a TikTok live video March 18 in which they appeared to mock Drake Bell, a former star of the Nickelodeon series “Drake & Josh” who shared his account of being sexually abused by his dialogue coach in “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV,” a new Investigation Discovery documentary series.
There was a swift backlash, including a rebuke from Bell. Within days, the “Ned’s” hosts apologized, saying they had not seen the series when they were asked to comment on it, and that they did not have a grasp of the gravity of the allegations.
“Now we’ve watched it, and I get it,” Werkheiser said in the March 22 episode. “If I had just watched, especially that third episode, and then watched us joking like that, I would be like: ‘Are they sociopaths? Is there something wrong with them?’ ”
The hosts have also used their shows as forums to talk about what they’re doing now. Werkheiser, who has spoken about having trouble finding work as an actor after “Ned’s,” described his elation at being cast as a cowboy in “Rust” turning to anguish, after a revolver that Baldwin, the film’s star, was handling discharged a live round, killing the cinematographer.
After the film’s safety protocols were called into question, Werkheiser spoke about it in a March 2023 episode.
“Every set has some chaos; every set is cutting corners and cutting budgets,” he said. “I can only speak for my experience. But in my experience, it was no different than any other set I’d ever been on.”
For Werkheiser, the podcast came about when he needed it, he said. In 2021, he spent countless hours on a pitch for a “Ned’s” reboot, a survival guide for young adults, only for the studio to pass on it in a brief email. His career was foundering, and he “spiraled into deep depression,” he said.
About a year later, Rooney approached him about starting a podcast. Werkheiser quickly embraced the medium, which he said gives him more freedom than he would have on a scripted show. He also relished the chance to reconnect with Shaw and Lee.
“It feels like we’re back on set a little bit,” he said. “Some parts of our childish selves come out, so it does feel like we picked up where we left off.”
We’ve been a silent, niche population of people that were conditioned to be compliant and never truly understood our autonomy. I want to show them that they can be empowered by having these podcasts. — Christy Carlson Romano, a former child star and co-founder of the PodCo podcast network