Millennials
After a Christmas holiday break from blogging, I’m delighted to be back at it. Happy New Year!
Some of you may have seen the November 11 60 Minutes, a program entitled “The ‘Millennials’ Are Coming.” Host Morley Safer took his viewers on a quick tour of the rising generation often referred to as millennials:
They were raised by doting parents who told them they are special, played in little leagues with no winners or losers, or all winners. They are laden with trophies just for participating and they think your business-as-usual ethic is for the birds. And if you persist in the belief you can take your job and shove it.
(Read the entire program transcript here.)
In the workplace,
These young people will tell you what time their yoga class is and the day’s work will be organized around the fact that they have this commitment….They have climbed Mount Everest. They’ve been down to Machu Picchu to help excavate it. But they’ve never punched a time clock. They have no idea what it’s like to actually be in an office at nine o’clock, with people handing them work. And oh, by the way, possibly asking them to stay late in the evenings, or their weekends.
Faced with new employees who want to roll into work with their iPods and flip-flops around noon, but still be CEO by noon, companies are realizing that the era of the buttoned down exec happy to have a job is…dead….
What role have parents played in the millennials’ development? The program mentions the “coddling virus” which strikes many homes: parents who continue to look after their children long after their “special” offspring leave the nest. College faculty tell stories of parents who call them directly about their children’s assignments and grades; career services departments offer reports of parents who contact them to update their children’s resumes; employers are beginning to hear from parents in support of a child’s promotion or complaining about a poor performance review. The literature on collegiate student development carries many references to the phenomenon of “helicopter parents,” who hover just a cell phone call away, even calling to wake up their children every morning. The reality is that more than half of college seniors move home after graduation – “it’s a safety net, or safety diaper, that allows kids to quickly opt out of a job they don’t like.”
Another approach to understanding the rising generation comes from sociologist Christian Smith, who in his article “Getting a Life: The challenge of emerging adulthood” describes what he calls a “new, distinct, and important stage of life, situated between the teenage years and full-fledged adulthood” which has come to be in recent years. (Read the entire article here.) Factors in the emergence of this stage of life include the delay of marriage; economic and cultural changes which have served to undermine stable, lifelong careers; and parents who extend financial and other support to their children well into their 20s and even 30s. Traits of emerging adulthood include identity exploration; instability; focus on self; feeling in limbo, in transition, in-between; and a “sense of possibilities, opportunities, and unparalleled hope.”
Smith quotes Jeffrey Arnett’s analysis of how this phenomenon appears in matters of faith:
The most interesting and surprising feature of emerging adults’ religious beliefs is how little relationship there is between the religious training they received throughout childhood and the religious beliefs they hold at the time they reach emerging adulthood…Evidently something changes between adolescence and emerging adulthood that dissolves the link between the religious beliefs of parents and the beliefs of their children.
Millennials’ connections to churches may tend to parallel their connections to the workplace:
…they may very well bring to the churches of their choice motives, beliefs, and orientations difficult to make work from the perspective of faithful, orthodox Christianity…The phrase ‘consumer-oriented’ comes to mind.
Smith also draws on the work of Jean Twenge:
…multiple mainstream institutions in our culture have taught them their entire lives “to put their own needs first and to focus on feeling good about themselves…These messages come…not only from mass-consumer advertising but from the best-intentioned school success programs. Having actually believed such confident messages, young adults then find it hard to cope when real life often turns out differently. Stagnant careers, failed romances, personal insecurities, financial difficulties, and other disappointments and problems often lead to sarcasm, depression, apprehension, loneliness, and self-defeating gambits to force life to turn out the ways it was promised to have worked (e.g. quick “rebound” romances, spending sprees, ill-considered job changes).
How ought the church, and a college like Covenant, address these cultural facts and speak to the emerging generation? As Christian Smith suggests, neither falling all over ourselves “to reconstruct our messages and practices to somehow become more ‘relevant,’” nor blindly ignoring the phenomenon and the questions and challenges it raises, will do. It is crucial to understand the ways and attitudes of emerging adulthood; to grasp the fact that the rising generation will shape the institutions and cultural forms of its own time; to see in this stage of life opportunities for critical self-reflection; and to recognize that there are real possibilities for ministry and service that previous generations could not have realized. There are valuable insights among emerging adults and their ways of seeing and living that must be discerned and built upon.
As I was writing this blog, I heard a CNN report on “extreme flextime,” the workplace development which enables employees to work according to their own time schedules and lifestyles – including through the night, in shorter but more frequent shifts, and from their homes. Of course not all jobs will allow such flexibility, but, for those that will, early indications are that productivity is up and employee turnover is down. So there may be new structures and systems emerging to accommodate and take best advantage of the traits and habits of emerging adults. At Covenant, we have addressed a related issue with a college dining schedule that provides continuous service from early morning through the evening.
At the same time, the narcissism and self-focus to which both 60 Minutes and Christian Smith point must be challenged, even as analogous attitudes have been challenged in every generation. At Covenant this means maintaining and nurturing our foundational theological framework, passing on to the rising generation the true and gracious biblical orthodoxy that has sustained God’s people throughout all generations across thousands of years. It means critical examination and rejection of trends that would indeed “change the message” for the sake of being relevant – as can be seen in sectors of the “emerging church” movement; in the eagerness of many evangelicals to jump on cultural and political bandwagons without careful examination of philosophical and theological sources and implications; and in proposed rapprochements with other faith traditions which dull or distort the beauty and clarity and hope of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
It also means sustaining college curriculum and academic standards that, while taking into account the phenomenon of emerging adulthood, nevertheless hold high the worthy tradition of learning, the rightful authority of the grand fund of knowledge and understanding passed down to us, and the stubbornly real distinctions between fact and fiction, truth and error, good and evil.
One of my greatest delights at Covenant is to observe and interact with our students. Certainly they have been shaped by the cultural trends described by 60 Minutes and Christian Smith, and we as faculty and administration are taking that into account. But they have also been shaped by homes and churches and schools in which truth, goodness, and beauty have been celebrated, where words continue to carry real meaning, where history and legacy are honored, where proper authority is respected, and where the Bible and the gospel truth it proclaims are the foundation for all of life.
All this means that today’s Covenant students have the glorious calling to speak distinctively into their culture and time, in ways that I cannot – and yet to do so with the same gospel message and for the glory of the same Lord Jesus Christ, joining their voices and lives to those of God’s faithful and fruitful people of all generations.
Published on 15 Jan 2008 at 8:14 am. 1 Comment.
Well written. Thank you so much for your blogs, Dr. Nielson. I am one who benefits greatly from your insights.
Stephanie on 29 Jan 2008 at 11:32 am.