Millennials Are Raising the Class of 2039

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Around this time of year, my social feeds fill up with pictures of kids going back to school. Parents stage their children in front of the fireplace on the front porch, arranging a letter board just so or using the now almost-standard printout featuring the kids’ own prediction of what they want to be when they grow up.

It’s easy to look at what this year's seniors are facing when they head off to college or into the workforce. I write that essay myself, every spring around graduation.

But I think it's worth understanding what kids are walking into when they begin their schooling experience for the next 13 years.

Many of these kindergarteners were born in 2021, with some in 2020, depending on where the cutoff falls and parent preference. This makes this class the real COVID babies. The class ahead of them was born during the pandemic but conceived before it. This cohort was conceived during it.

And in 2020 we all thought COVID babies would be a thing. The evidence points otherwise. There were 3,664,292 births in 2021, up only 50,645 from the year before (Osterman et al., 2023). The boom came in at 1.4%.

Here are eight thoughts and predictions about kindergartners this year.

All kids entering school this year are Gen Alpha (those born between 2013 - 2025). Now, I often talk about the Generational Blur and how generational labels are not a true science but instead a convenient way to group people and, in some cases, are helpful and others harmful. So bearing that in mind, what’s interesting is if you look at a textbook Millennial (born from 1981 - 1996), 74.5% of 2021 births went to a Millennial mother.

The remaining quarter of births went to mothers outside that band. Again, I hold these labels loosely and I speak against the stereotypes that come with them, so take it as an interesting anecdote and not a profound academic finding.

Those starting school for the first time this year are likely the first class that never had to wear a mask. That’s different than even many of the kids that started in the last two or three years. Most entering kindergarten this year were under the age of 2 during the mandates. Meaning, these kids likely never had to mask up during the COVID-19 pandemic. They turned 2 after almost all of the mandates had been lifted.

Three years ago, only one state had school bans in the classroom. As of today, 38 states plus DC require districts to ban or restrict student cellphones, and roughly 28 of those go bell-to-bell (Dalbey, 2026; Rock, 2026). Most of their parents carried a phone through high school. Flip phones, Razrs, but still a phone in a pocket. These kids might go twelve years without one in a classroom, which is an advantage their parents never had.

It’s not just phones that are in the conversation; it’s the use of Artificial Intelligence in the classroom too. By early 2026, more than 30 state education departments had issued official guidance on AI in schools, up from none in 2022 (Ballotpedia, 2026; Education Commission of the States, 2025). At the federal level, a July 2025 Dear Colleague Letter affirmed that districts may use existing federal grant funds for AI, and in April 2026 the Department finalized a priority steering discretionary grants toward AI literacy, instructional materials, and high-impact tutoring (U.S. Department of Education, 2025).

I don't think educators are asking whether these kids get exposed to AI anymore. The question is when.

By the National Household Education Survey's own numbers, the homeschooled share of K-12 students doubled between 1999 and 2023, going from 1.7% to 3.4% (Bielick et al., 2001; Vaden-Kiernan et al., 2024). In 1999 their parents were the ones sitting in those classrooms.

The rise seems small. But the percent increase in the cohort alone is pretty dramatic, and it should make us pause and think about why homeschooling is surging. It's a small subset overall. But it's a rapidly accelerating subset.

Put private school, charters, microschools, hybrid, and virtual next to it, and this class won't graduate from one system. They'll graduate from countless versions of school that did not exist at the same level even when their parents were in school.

They have access to information by asking their computerized friends. Their parent's phone. An iPad. The machine on the kitchen counter. They can say "hey Siri" before they can spell it, and get the weather, or an answer, or how far away school is that day with the traffic on it.

They can get information without having to be read to. They can just ask, and then keep asking, because the device will hold a conversation with them.

I remember growing up when seeing a set of encyclopedias in somebody's house used to be a big deal. Then I remember when I received Britannica on CD-ROM, or multiple CD-ROMs. That was a huge deal! I could learn about King Tut or Pluto (which will always have a place as a planet in my heart) on my own computer. Then the internet came with access to virtually anything. But I still needed to learn how to read, write, and type.

Now you don't even have to be able to read or write. You can speak and listen.

I remember my countries and capitals project. My Statue of Liberty project…I became so invested in each.

For the Statue of Liberty project, I wanted to go life size, or at least kid-sized. So I printed Lady Liberty onto an overhead transparency, taped multiple pieces of foam board together in the back, and projected her image. I traced it, cut it out, and colored it. She was almost 4 feet tall, with a hole cut so somebody could stand behind it and put their face in place of hers.

My teachers thought my parents helped because of the quality of the work. They didn't. My parents were forbidden to touch any of my projects. My perfectionism was almost a disease, quite honestly. I would labor over my school projects to an unhealthy level, and I didn't learn to correct that until much later in life. But I learned through every little laborious moment of it.

Later I brought a digital camera to school and did a junior Hollywood production for a high school psychology class, and my teachers were blown away that I had that ability for “special effects.”

You could prompt that in seconds now. You could get a picture-perfect slide deck or a 3D model of the Statue of Liberty just by speaking to generative AI. It's fun reminiscing about the projects I created. But the sad reality is that Gen Alpha will be able to have AI generate a slide deck. They're not going to labor over every pixel. They'll have AI make the video, they’ll 3D print the solar system, and hand a little tchotchke to every kid in the room.

We’ve already seen the growing trend in teenagers delaying their driver’s license. Jean Twenge does a great job outlining this in her book, Generations (Twenge, 2023). But here is where those stats may take a turn. There's a good chance that by the time these kindergartners get to the age where they're driving, they're not going to have to worry about driver's ed at all, because full self-driving vehicles are going to be ubiquitous.

We're already seeing the precedent. North Carolina separated the driver from the license in 2017, before a single child in this class was born. State law says the operator of a fully autonomous vehicle does not need a driver's license, and that a child under 12 cannot ride in one unless someone 18 or older is supervising (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 20-401). I'm sure there will be court cases where this will be interpreted differently later.

We have to remember, this generation has always grown up being monitored and tracked. That's what I spent the last five weeks talking about, so I'm not going to rehash it here.

But they know. They smile for a camera. They pose. They know they're always being watched.

And they're going to face something no generation before them has. It’s not just trolling or mean comments. The reality these kids are going to face within the next few years on their playgrounds is images and video that look completely real, made by somebody who knows them. It may not always be malicious, just like those old JibJab animations. But this will be something that parents, policymakers, and leaders will continue to battle. It’s the newest frontier in bullying, and the effect and impact is going to be far worse, because it resembles reality.

There is a lot I could not fit here, and to be honest the eight above were the easier ones. They are the ones you can see already. The bigger things are still out on the horizon.

Work itself is going to look different by the time this class gets into the workforce. I think the trades will be in high demand and I also think robots will be doing a lot of that work, not the occasional robot or a robotic arm on an assembly line, but landscaping and maintenance and the ordinary physical jobs. We already have robotic mowers. College is going to look different too, with universities closing and the whole shape of higher education changing, which makes the fractured education system we just talked about look like the early version of something much bigger.

And I think this is the class that runs headlong into transhumanism, into a fight about merging humans and technology, more than any generation before it. We are already watching their older classmates fall deeply in love with chatbots. But as science and technology and medicine and the human experience continue to converge, we are going to have a whole slew of ethical conversations that this generation will be facing by the time they hit middle school.

Their parents are also a part of changes. These Millennial parents are overcorrecting on screen time and pushing back toward free play, which is a good instinct. I am excited for that move. However, in many cases “less screen time” is code for secretly supervised free play.

Don’t worry, I’ll come back to some of these in future essays.

Newton's third law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I think that holds for generations and not just for objects.

Thirteen years from now, this class will walk across a platform and move a tassel from one side to the other. They will be entering a very different world, and yet, many of the moves being made towards traditional learning and screen-free schools is a positive sign for the future.

The signs on the front porch this month say astronaut and veterinarian and paleontologist. The haunting reality is that it probably does not matter much whether the parents take the picture. If it ever goes missing, these kids will be able to generate the childhood they remember.

Time will tell!