Posted by 2025 not only rang in the new year with its traditional festivities and holiday cheer. While the ball was dropping and people were toasting to renditions of Auld Lang Syne, another event was taking shape, heralding the official beginnings of a new generation. At the stroke of midnight, Generation Beta was born.
Beta Babies will be comprised of all children born from New Year’s Day 2025 through the year 2039. But just what will characterize this new demographic, and what will their world look like?
Generation Beta’s parents mostly hail from Gen Z (born mid 90s to early 2000s) and the youngest millennials (born 1980 to ‘94). Betas represents just the second generation to be born entirely in the 21st century – and many of them may live to see the 22nd century.
Experts predict Generation Beta’s lives will be heavily shaped by the influence of AI, as well as other rapid advances in technology, which will be the norm in their world. Depending on the rate of technological achievements, it may not phase them at all to see a human walk on Mars, and they may never be familiar with riding in a car that doesn’t drive itself.
Generation Beta will be the first to be entirely surrounded by automation and immersive virtual environments, according to demographer Mark McCrindle, who coined the term Gen Alpha for their predecessors born from 2010 to 2024. By 2035, it is predicted that Generation Beta will constitute 16 percent of the global population.
McCrindle explained that the Greek Alphabet system was specifically adopted to distinguish these successive generations in order to “signify how these different generations will be raised in a new world of technological integration.” The Greek letter system will continue to identify new generations born every 15 years, to keep all data from these “tech generations” of kids standardized and easy to analyze.
As a result, there may not be any memorable catch phrases like “The Greatest Generation” or “The Silent Generation” for these new demographic groups. But Pew Research Center said such monikers shouldn’t be overly relied upon to characterize groups, noting how other factors like race or current events could go farther to shape a demographic group’s viewpoint than birth year. Keep reading here.