• Pipoca@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    generation noun gen·​er·​a·​tion ˌje-nə-ˈrā-shən

    1 a : a body of living beings constituting a single step in the line of descent from an ancestor

    b : a group of individuals born and living contemporaneously

    c : a group of individuals having contemporaneously a status (such as that of students in a school) which each one holds only for a limited period

    d: a type or class of objects usually developed from an earlier type

    Socially, named generations like millennials use definition 1b, because some people are grandparents at age 30, and others don’t become grandparents til they’re 80.

      • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I still think it’s a really weak definition if you give out arbitrary date ranges which inevitably leads to random smaller generational definitions and too many varying opinions on what generation starts or ends where.

        The point of generational cohorts like millennials or the silent generation is that being born at a particular time in history has an affect on people.

        The silent generation’s earliest memories were depression and war. The great recession impacted millennials in their early career or in high school.

        Age ranges captures that and makes it easy to measure things without having to find out when someone’s great grandparents were born.

        And yeah, 30’s on the young side. Lauren Boebert was in the news recently as a teen mother who became a grandmother at age 36.

        Your definition slips pretty quickly, though. Some siblings have really long age gaps. Some women first give birth at 18 or 19, others not til they’re 40.

          • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The average really isn’t close enough that you only need to consider outliers.

            Two generations of 30 year old first time mothers fit into the same time as three generations of 20 year old first time mothers.

            Neither of those cases is an outlier, and that’s slip in only two/three generations.