Question
How are Millennial parents different from previous generations, and how can I best relate to them as a teacher?
Answer
There is controversy about exactly when Millennials were born, but it's somewhere between 1980 - 2000. Millennials are now in their early to mid to later 30s. They are having babies. They are now the parents of your preschoolers. Let's meet Millennials where they are. I think of this in coordination with the National Association for Education of Young Children (NAEYC) definition of developmentally appropriate practice that came out in 1986. What do we know about development? Meet parents and children where they are. Create the scaffold to move them forward into new skills and new abilities where we all choose and want to go.
Millennials are different than previous generations. They are digital natives and they are tech multitaskers. I know there are controversies over multitasking, but today there's a phone on every table. There is a phone wherever I am. We're pictures. I just did a Facebook Live from my classroom yesterday. Phones and mobile devices are part of all our interactions. Maybe we need to unplug at times, but there are exciting opportunities now that we can multitask with technology.
Millennials are also community-minded. They are connected to their peers, their friends, their relatives, and their sources of information. The things that make them feel calm and validated are values and community. They want to change the world and they truly care. I have a counterexample back to this one. I have a parent-child program and maybe 10 years ago, parents would bring lawn chairs and line up outside my administrative office to make sure they got the first spots in the class they wanted to have for their child. About five years ago, the parents told me they were not going to compete with their friends. If they couldn't all get in the class together, they said they would find another class. They said, "Maybe you'll create another class for me or maybe we'll go somewhere else." Their relationships with their friends were more important than being the first to get what I had to offer, and I respect them for that.
Millennials will crowdsource information. That tends to go along with judgment and blame, but crowdsourcing information is not a terrible thing. For example, I've written three potty training books. I figured this out. I collected stories. I did interviews and then when I wrote the books, I went through a learning process. Whenever you write a book, that learning process results in something that you never would have discovered without investing the time and going through the process of learning for yourself. So, I'm an expert on potty training and have everything there is to know about it. And yet, I watched parents in my classes ask one another about potty training. I thought, really? Here I'm an expert. But then I sat back and I watched how they supported each other, engaged one another, and drew from me as a resource, but not as the "be all, end all." I loved seeing this happen; I was liberated by it and I have a new relationship with all of my families because of it. Millennials will also crowdsource choices and decisions. When they want to evaluate your program, they're going to be able to do that with feedback from their friends. Everything you need to know is about how their friends are perceiving and supporting choices, decisions, and information.
Millennials have been accused of oversharing, and have been negatively judged because of this. I want you to let go of those judgments. It's not oversharing, it's just a different way of sharing, and notions of privacy are different now. Again, you have to erase your old expectations and your old assumptions. With oversharing, parents are going to take control of information in ways you might not want them to. Be prepared. Oversharing will come up again in relation to transparency when we get to the strategies later.
This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course entitled Kids Haven't Changed but Parents Have: Tips and Strategies for Connecting with Millennial Parents, by Karen Deerwester, EdS. For tips and strategies on working with Millennial parents, refer to the course.
