Generation Alpha Is Defined by Tragedy (Opinion)

Generation Alpha Is Defined by Tragedy

Rising teens have direct digital access to unending pain, violence, and loss

By Bettina L. Love — February 06, 2025 | Corrected: February 12, 2025 3 min read

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Bettina L. Love

Opinion Contributor, Education Week

Bettina L. Love is an award-winning author and professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. She is the author of several books, most recently Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal (St. Martin’s Press, 2023). She writes about race in America for Education Week Opinion. Visit Bettinalove.com for more info.

Corrected: This essay was updated to correct information about Sandra Bland’s death and the New Orleans terror attack.

My wife and I have twins born in 2010, members of the generation dubbed “Alpha” (born from 2010 to 2025). It’s the first generation to grow up fully immersed in and consumed by digital technology.

When our kids were just 2 years old, Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman for, as many believe, being Black. After Trayvon’s killing, I remember my wife and I looking at each other, silently acknowledging with our eyes, no words needed, that we could not keep our Black children safe in this country. It was a feeling that linked me to my ancestors in a way that moved generational trauma from abstraction to reality.

After Trayvon, there was Michael Brown (2014), Tamir Rice (2014), Freddie Gray (2015), Philando Castile (2016), Breonna Taylor (2020), George Floyd (2020), and Ma’Khia Bryant (2021)—all killed by police. Sandra Bland died in a jail cell after a minor traffic violation in 2015, and Robert Brooks was killed in 2024 by prison guards.

When our kids were 10 years old, we took them to protest the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. With tears in our eyes, we explained to our children how Black bodies are deemed violent and disposable in America.

Now, in our house, conversations concerning the killing of Black bodies by the police seem routine, almost expected. The everydayness of Black death, which kids can consume in the palm of their hands on many an app, underscores how ordinary tragedy feels in their lives. Watching my children grow up, I have come to realize they are constantly processing tragedies—Black death is just the beginning.

In our house, in between singing along to Billie Eilish, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and calculating how many times we can watch the musical “Wicked” in a weekend, there are ongoing conversations and heartbreak after each school shooting. During COVID, I remember holding my daughter as she cried in my arms missing her friends, yearning for social interaction as online school became emotionally too much to bear.

Some days, I am in awe when I remind myself that my kids lived through a pandemic that killed over 1 million people in the United States alone. I never thought I would have to explain to my kids what an insurrection is as we watched men and women filled with rage storm the U.S. Capitol. I find myself constantly checking in on my kids’ mental health as I read article after article about the rise of suicide in teenagers and how so many kids and young adults are lonely today.

After extreme weather disasters, children are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, suicide, and post-traumatic stress disorder than adults.

I don’t have the words to answer questions about how someone could kill 14 people and injure many more in a homegrown terrorist attack like the recent one in New Orleans, but my son asked me about it anyway. I feel like I let them down with each storm, flood, and fire that I know is due to human-driven climate change and is only going to get worse as they become adults trying to breathe in a world we polluted. No one prepares you for how to talk to your kids about genocide, war, the possibility of police entering schools to deport children, the banning of books, and civil rights.

And, of course, one thing that brought Generation Alpha some semblance of joy—TikTok—could be banned. This is a generation of children consuming and consumed by tragedy with direct digital access to all the pain, despair, destruction, violence, and, ultimately, loss.

According to the American Psychiatric Association, after extreme weather disasters, children are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, suicide, and post-traumatic stress disorder than adults. Researchers found that children who experience the horrific tragedy of a school shooting are prescribed antidepressants at a higher rate, have increased student absenteeism, and are more likely to repeat a grade in the two years after a shooting. In 2018 and 2019 alone, over 100,000 children attended a school where a shooting took place. Our children are surrounded by tragedy inside and outside of school.

And so, as the adults in the room, we must recognize the harsh reality that Generation Alpha is in fact the Tragedy Generation. It brings me no pleasure to give such a label to my own children, but their unrelenting reality steadily marching toward a seemingly condemned future makes it so. And sadly, I see no reprieve in sight.