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Gen Beta is here. 

At exactly midnight on New Year’s Day, in a suburban Philadelphia hospital, Henry Schamp was born, arguably the first official member of Gen Beta in the United States.

And if you’re thinking, “Wait, weren’t we still figuring out Gen Z and Gen Alpha?” you’re not alone. 

The arrival of Gen Beta signals a new era. A new wave of parenting. A new set of cultural collisions shaped by AI, digital saturation, shifting values, and a leadership environment defined by speed, polarity, and eroded trust. Many of these macro trends I shared in last week’s essay with my 2026 predictions. 

There’s still real debate about when Gen Beta actually begins. Some outlets rushed to crown January 1, 2025 as the starting line. Others argue that Gen Beta won’t arrive for years. I’ll explain why I land on 2026 in a moment, but regardless of where you draw the boundary, the arrival of Gen Beta marks more than a new label.

Before we dive into a mini-series of essays on Gen Beta in the weeks ahead, I want to set the frame, because generational labels are tricky. And how we use them matters more than most people realize.

I often push back on generational labels. Not because they’re useless but because they’re usually treated like gospel truth or settled science when they’re really shorthand and, unfortunately, grossly misused. 

Generational labels show up everywhere: headlines, HR meetings, boardrooms, marketing decks, policy conversations. Even when major research institutions, like Pew, have stepped back from naming generations, culture and media pull us right back into the labeling game. So my posture isn’t that labels are bad. Instead, if we’re going to use them, we should use them intelligently.

That’s why I rely on what I call the Generational Prism framework, built on a simple idea: Age - Moment - Label

The label (i.e. Baby Boomer or Gen Beta) isn’t the starting point. It’s typically the output. It is the extrapolation of what happens when a person’s life stage collides with the conditions of the current moment of the world around them.

When we start with the label, we usually end with stereotypes, unhelpful generalizations, and false narratives. We’ve seen this repeatedly. One of the clearest examples is the decade-old claim that Millennials were uniquely prone to job-hopping compared to previous generations. As I have debunked before, longitudinal data from multiple different sources tells a much different story. By age 25, and even by age 30, Millennials had held only about 0.3 more jobs than late Baby Boomers or Gen X. The difference, when analyzed by age, is so negligible and yet entire books and countless articles were written about the job-hopping generation. I digress.

But understanding where labeling is helpful, and particularly where it is unhelpful is especially important as we start talking about the newest generational cohort beginning in 2026, Gen Beta.

Generational shifts tend to follow cultural tipping points, not calendar pages.

We’ve seen this pattern before. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, home internet access in the U.S. climbed from roughly 1% of households to over 50% in about seven years. With the tipping point being around 1998. The smartphone followed a similar curve. By 2012, nearly half of U.S. adults owned a smartphone, well past what Malcolm Gladwell famously referred to as the “magic third,” the point where adoption moves from novelty to inevitability.

That framework matters here.

Though AI has been around for decades, it was not a household term or a widely utilized technology, at least on a consumer level, until recently. Generative AI didn’t enter society gradually. It arrived all at once. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in roughly two months after its public launch in November 2022, a pace that far surpasses other adoption cycles. By mid-2025, Pew found that 58% of U.S. adults under 30 had tried ChatGPT, while 38% of all U.S. adults reported using generative AI for work-related tasks.

AI utilization is well past the novelty phase.

And this matters for the future because childhood is shaped by what the adult world normalizes. 

That’s also why reasonable scholars and futurists disagree on where one generation ends and the next begins. Normalization doesn’t happen overnight. It happens unevenly, across systems, families, and institutions. For instance, Jean Twenge has suggested Gen Alpha (or as she calls them, “Polars”) may extend closer to 2029. Mark McCrindle argued that Gen Beta started in 2025. Both perspectives are defensible.

But here’s the hinge for me.

The parents, educators, and institutional decision-makers shaping early Gen Beta are disproportionately Millennials, and they aren’t just trying AI. They’re integrating it. In fact, data shows Millennials currently use AI tools at higher rates than any other adult cohort.

Simultaneously, Gen Z makes up a growing number of new parents as elder-Millennials are biologically aging out of natural birth. This signals a new moment. 

Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, alludes to a range of 2010-2013 being the turning point from Gen Z to Gen Alpha.It wasn’t a clean break. And that’s the point.

This isn’t a sudden pivot. It’s a shift. I often refer to this overlap as the Generational Blur.

So stating that Gen Beta begins in 2026 isn’t about being “right.” It’s about shared language. If we want to talk meaningfully about what’s changing, we need common nomenclature, even when the edges are fuzzy.

For the sake of clarity moving forward, I’ll refer to it this way: Gen Beta begins in 2026.

Henry Schamp didn’t arrive with a fundamentally different future than a child born at 11:59 p.m. on December 31st, 2025. A generational label doesn’t suddenly alter a child’s trajectory.

An individual’s worldview is shaped by countless variables, and birth year by itself is rarely the deciding factor. Birth order matters. Parent age matters. Family culture matters. Whether someone grows up in urban or rural areas matters. Education, faith, community, socioeconomic reality, and lived experience all play a role. That’s the Generational Blur in real life. The edges are messy because humans are messy.

So why draw a line at all?

Because sometimes the world crosses a cultural tipping point. That’s what the beginning of 2026 represents: the moment artificial intelligence stops being something you occasionally use and starts becoming invisible infrastructure…something you grow up inside of, attached to, and increasingly dependent on.

Gen Beta, nor even Gen Alpha or Gen Z will encounter the friction and true hands on learning experiences that are fundamental to growth. I remember learning graphic design in the early 1990s literally designing with clip-art books, photocopies, transparencies, cutting and pasting by hand and then duplicating that master document. Later, I learned Photoshop by zooming in 500% and erasing pixels one at a time to cut out an image or stitch images together. It wasn’t efficient, but it taught me how things worked because there was no shortcut. Today, all of that can be done in seconds by voice command.

We’ve already become dependent in ways we barely notice. Getting from point A to point B without knowing where we are, relying on apps to calculate tips or do basic math, letting devices decide routes, timing, reminders, even judgment calls. Convenience has quietly replaced competence in places we once took for granted.

And here’s the twist.

AI may have arrived at the exact moment culture finally started asking harder questions. We’ve already seen the irreparable harm social media caused to many teens, particularly Gen Z. But change is starting to happen. Now we’re seeing smartphone bans in schools, renewed conversations about childhood development, attention, and mental health. The awareness is growing.

The tension is this: we may finally understand the risks, but we’re also more dependent on technology than ever before.

That’s the world Gen Beta is being born into.

In the coming weeks, we’ll explore a few dynamics that will shape how this generation grows up:

Generations don’t change because the calendar flips from one year to the next.

Culture and society evolve because the world does. And the world Gen Beta is inheriting a world that is changing at a more rapid pace than most realize. They will grow up under a new order of parenting, technological dependency, and polarity. 

We will explore all of these in the coming weeks!

P.S. Whether this is your first essay or you’ve been here for a while, thank you. Over the last six months this community has grown 7×, the YouTube channel crossed 100,000 subscribers, and these conversations have deepened in ways I never take for granted. Essays drop every Tuesday at 4 p.m. ET, with audio versions available Thursday mornings at 7 a.m. ET. I’m grateful you’re here.