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As long as youth culture has existed, adults have been mystified, perplexed, and even threatened by it. At least once a week I think about the scene in A Hard Day’s Night, a film released in 1964, in which the Beatles are being interviewed by clueless older journalists. (“What would you call that hairstyle you’re wearing?” “Arthur.”)
But even seen against the long history of grown-ups not getting it, the culture of Gen Alpha — kids born between about 2010 and 2024 — feels especially hard to pin down. It is famously fragmentary — the monoculture is dead, and if adults aren’t all watching the same shows anymore, a lot of kids aren’t even watching shows. They’re watching short-form video on their phones, sources of entertainment (or personality erosion) so limitless that every kid in the world could, in theory, be consuming a different piece of content right now.
Given all this, every time I hear a claim like “Gen Alpha doesn’t laugh at farts,” I’m tempted to ask whether Gen Alpha collectively laughs at — or cries over, or has any sort of aesthetic experience with — anything. Is there a mass culture for kids and teens today? And if so, where does it come from, and what does it look like?
When I posed these questions to people who study kids and culture, the answer I got was that while young people probably aren’t watching the same things, a lot of them are craving similar experiences from the culture they consume, whether it’s movies, YouTube, or, increasingly, video games.
They want to feel safe, they want a sense of community, and they really, really want adults to leave them alone.
Kids “are still participating in culture,” said BJ Colangelo, a media theorist and analyst who has spoken about Gen Alpha trends. “They just are making their own, and they’re choosing not to share it with the rest of us.”
Kids don’t need mass media anymore
Young people have never enjoyed being told what to like, and there’s always been something organic and chaotic about their engagement with pop culture. At the same time, previous generations did have cultural arbiters and gatekeepers who controlled, to some degree, what they could access.
For millennials and Gen Xers, “magazines, MTV, and the radio were major outlets that were promoting and selling us what ‘cool’ is,” Colangelo told me. Young people could accept or reject what they were offered, “but even with that choice, it was still being curated by editors, producers, DJs.” That was also true of culture aimed at younger kids, whose options were circumscribed by conglomerates like Nickelodeon and Disney.
Parents also had a lot of involvement in — and veto power over — what kids watched. Your whole family could see what you watched on the TV in the living room, and parents could ban, or at least sneer with disapproval at, shows they found unwholesome. (I can’t be the only millennial who looked forward to sleepovers as a time to watch R-rated movies after the grown-ups went to bed.)
Today, media companies still try to manufacture hits, and sometimes they succeed. But kids no longer need to go through those companies to get their entertainment. And while parents can set screen time limits and put controls on children’s phones or iPads, kids are notoriously great at getting around them.
The result is a cultural landscape dominated by social media, one in which nearly half of younger kids’ viewing time takes place on YouTube, TikTok, or other social platforms. You could certainly think of social media trends as shared cultural experiences within that landscape — indeed, many of the touchstones of youth culture that have received mainstream media coverage in recent years have been trends that managed to spill over into offline life, like the phenomenon of young people wearing suits to the film Minions: The Rise of Gru (incidentally, this trend appears to have been promoted by Universal Pictures, the studio that distributed Minions).
Trends can be shared cultural experiences like the popular shows or movies of previous generations. The difference is that there are so many of them, and they pop up and flame out so quickly, said Jenna Jacobson, an associate professor of retailing at Toronto Metropolitan University who studies social media. “Young people are experiencing a series of these micro mass events, which could be a sound or a meme, or a particular brand.”
At the same time, “social media allows many micro-communities to exist, which means that not everybody is seeing the same thing at the same time” — until something becomes big enough that it permeates everyone’s feed, Jacobson said.
Some of those big trends come from movies like Minions or Barbie, but a lot of them come from video games. It’s no accident that A Minecraft Movie, one of the most popular films with Gen Alpha to date, is based on a massively popular game.
In a survey of 10- to 24-year-olds last year by the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA, only 12 percent reported not playing games. “More than a lot of things, it is a unifying culture,” Yalda T. Uhls, founder and CEO of the center, told me. “When my kid, at 21, was hanging out with a 6-year-old, they were playing Minecraft together.”
What kids want from media now
Young people today crave a sense of connection, Uhls said: “In a world where kids are not allowed to run outside, there aren’t as many spaces for them, or they’re overscheduled, gaming is a place they can gather.”
It’s no surprise that a generation of kids who spent formative years in lockdowns and remote school would feel starved for community. To me, another desire was more striking: The top goal for Gen Alpha and Gen Z, according to research by the Center for Scholars & Storytellers, is to feel safe.
But if part of what kids want is to be safe from us, maybe we need to pay attention to that.
This took me aback a little because a lot of what I think of as archetypal Gen Alpha content — Skibidi toilet, for example — can feel jarring, choppy, and a little scary. But Uhls points out that young people in 2025 are facing down climate disaster, rampant inequality, and active shooter drills at their schools. For them, gaming, and media in general, can be a source of comfort.
And kids don’t just want to be safe from the very real threats to their lives and livelihoods, Colangelo told me. They also want to be safe from the constant evaluation and judgment of adults.
Gen Alpha “has come of age in the social media surveillance state that we are all suffering under,” Colangelo said. “So many of them already have a digital footprint that they never consented to because their parents posted them online when they were babies.”
They’re drawn especially to sandbox games and open-world games like Roblox and Minecraft because those games allow them to “make their own realities and mini games and communities away from the watchful eye of Big Brother,” Colangelo said. “It allows them to have something that they are in complete control over.”
A Minecraft Movie was such a success not just because it was based on a game, but because it was truly for kids, not for their parents. “So much of the mainstream culture right now is based on nostalgia,” Colangelo said. “It’s stuff their parents, their siblings, or even their grandparents like. Minecraft is very much their thing.”
Adults often deride young people today for craving safe spaces, being afraid of anything new, different, or difficult. But if part of what kids want is to be safe from us, maybe we need to pay attention to that.
I don’t want to be too much of a Pollyanna — kids, like adults, are certainly capable of wasting time watching AI slop or its equivalent (don’t ask me about the video my kid loves in which a toddler is inexplicably stung by a caterpillar). It’s also the case that if kids are spending all their time within their microcommunities or on their highly-curated feeds, they’re less likely to discover new artists or ideas, Colangelo pointed out.
At the same time, a lot of kids’ media habits can be understood as bids for autonomy, Colangelo said. They’re really “against things that are being force fed to them.”
That’s scary for adults who, sometimes understandably, want some say over what kids see and hear and play. But it’s also a message about what we’ve taken away from a generation of kids, and what we might need to give back.
The Department of Health and Human Services has said that its upcoming second MAHA report will include solutions for improving kids’ health. But a draft report obtained by the New York Times does not include restrictions on pesticides, which experts say are necessary to reverse the increase in children’s chronic disease.
Oklahoma will require teachers from California and New York (and only those two states) to take a certification test showing they know “the biological differences between females and males,” among other topics, before they can teach in Oklahoma. (The state’s superintendent of schools previously announced that all teachers would need to incorporate the Bible into curricula.)
Wired asked a group of kids what they think of AI. My favorite is Leo Schodorf, who tries to be polite to ChatGPT because, “if they take over the world, and they’re destroying everyone, then maybe they’ll be like, this guy says please and thank you.”My little kid has been enjoying Zog, about a dragon who becomes an ambulance, kind of. Also, journalist Alyssa Rosenberg has started a new Substack all about children’s books, and you can check it out here.