Kids Today: Your guide to the confusing, exciting, and utterly new world of Gen Alpha

Welcome to Kids Today! I’m Anna North, a senior correspondent at Vox covering policy and culture, and today, I’m launching a Vox newsletter that will have me in readers’ inboxes weekly with stories about Generation Alpha (people born between 2010 and 2024) and American childhood. It’s a newsletter about kids — for everyone. If you’d like to receive it, sign up here. I’m a parent of two young kids, but I’m not here to talk to you about parenting. For that, I recommend Sara Petersen or Angela Garbes. In this newsletter, I want to focus on the experience of actually being a kid in America right now. Childhood in 2024 is an incredibly fraught topic. We’re all trying to make sense of the aftermath of a pandemic, the impact of social media, and the effects of climate change and war on the world kids grow up in. Children have also taken an outsize role in the upcoming presidential election, with Sen. JD Vance and others arguing that having kids is a patriotic duty, and not having them makes you “deranged.” Part of my goal with this newsletter is to get deep into some of the most heated debates around contemporary childhood and give you an accessible, panic-free look at what’s really going on. I worry about kids today (the demographic, not this newsletter, although I’m sure I’ll worry about it too) as much as anyone, but I also know that every generation has freaked out about the youngsters on its lawn, and I want to approach today’s scary headlines with a dose of skepticism. I also want to bring you a portrait of Gen Alpha that tackles what’s unique about this group of young Americans, as well as what they have in common with Gen Z, millennials, and beyond. We live in a time of intense and fast-paced generational warfare, and while some of that is pretty fun and funny, I also want to look at where these generalizations fall short. I’ll acknowledge that I am an imperfect guide to the world of kids. As a grownup, I am inherently uncool. I will never understand kid culture as well as kids themselves do. My own older kid likes to call me “Guy Who Doesn’t Know Anything.” That said, I’ve been talking to kids — from preschoolers to teenagers — as part of my reporting process for nearly a decade now. I’m committed to meeting kids on their level, with curiosity, openness, and honesty. While I’ll definitely talk to adult experts for this newsletter, I’ll be bringing you the voices of actual children whenever possible. Kids are us before our filters fully developed, when the world was still fresh and strange and confusing. Kids are unpredictable. (My 6-year-old, for example, just asked me if worms can do yoga. Yes?) But kids are also smart and thoughtful. They have sharp insights about the world today, and about the future when they’ll be in charge. I’m excited to learn from them, and I hope you are too. Next week, you’ll get a full newsletter from me about what kids think about “Gen Alpha” as a concept — how they see their own generation, and what they think about TikToks and news stories that criticize them. In the meantime, here’s a little of what I’m reading and thinking about as summer winds down: * School supply lists are always an issue this time of year — with district budgets often insufficient, families or teachers end up on the hook for purchasing everything from pencils to graphing calculators. I’m also interested in how kids think about back-to-school shopping, and to what extent the financial stresses of this process trickle down to them. * Kids’ relationship to nature is determined more by their socioeconomic status than by whether they live in the city or the suburbs, according to a new study. * More states are moving to place chaplains in public schools, concerning some who worry that these clergy members may proselytize, or offer counseling to students without proper mental-health training. * Kid-friendly dance parties, where parents can enjoy house music with toddlers in tow, are apparently on the rise in Brooklyn. I was prepared to be annoyed by this but actually it is sweet. * Right now my older kid is obsessively watching Bread Barbershop, an animated show about a slice of bread who is a barber. * My little kid does not want to read Spring is Here, by Taro Gomi, a soothing story about the inevitable cycling of seasons that helped keep me sane during the pandemic. He wants to read a book that makes vrooming sounds, and that I will not name. A final note: I’d love to hear your questions about kids and childhood, whether you’re a parent, a childfree adult, or a kid! (Kids with questions about grownups are also welcome to write in.) Are there topics you want me to cover? Experiences you want to share? You can reach me at anna.north@vox.com.