Raising Generation Alpha: When Your 8-Year-Old Wants a Smartphone

When you were eight, you played in muddy ponds. Today's kids are swiping phones in their sleep.

Generation Alpha is growing up in a world we barely understand.

Jack and Adam explore what it means to raise the first generation of true digital natives - kids born after 2010 who've never known a world without smartphones, tablets, and algorithms designed to capture their attention.

They dive into shocking stats (90% of two-year-olds already have an online presence), the constant battle parents face managing screen time, and whether today's kids will ever know the joy of building dens, rolling in hay bales, or playing in abandoned buildings full of delightfully dangerous stairlifts.

From the way educational content on TikTok and YouTube is replacing traditional learning to whether Generation Alpha will even recognise real danger after growing up in games where you simply respawn after death, they unpack the strange new world of childhood where creativity might be dying but visual-spatial skills are thriving.

Plus, Jack confesses to letting his daughter watch Baby Shark before realising how bad it was, Adam reminisces about adventures in chemical-filled field runoff water, and both hosts wonder if we're all just turning into miserable middle-aged men complaining about "kids these days."

🧠 What We're Banging On About:

00:00 - How 90% of two-year-olds already have an online presence

04:00 - When YouTube babysitting became society's expectation in restaurants

09:00 - The weird horror of kids swiping in their sleep

14:00 - Why Generation Alpha might never know the joy of boredom-fuelled creativity

18:00 - How today's games are too immersive to ever put down

25:00 - When TikTok becomes your primary education source

31:00 - Why physics should be taught as "do we live in multiple dimensions?" not "roll this ball down a ramp"

37:00 - The constant parental battle of saying "no screens" while everyone else says yes

45:00 - How 85% of Generation Alpha's future jobs don't even exist yet

52:00 - When your biggest childhood danger was sugar, not screen addiction

💭 If you've ever caught yourself saying "back in my day we played outside," you're not alone. Subscribe for more chats where we try to make sense of how digital life is changing what it means to be human.

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