At YouthBeat^®, we publish a quarterly newsletter highlighting new and newly-relevant youth + family culture elements that we expect to be relevant to brands’ portfolios beyond a fad’s lifespan. Rather, we identify constructs that we predict will still be applicable in a year, five years, even ten years down the road. In our Winter 2021/2022 edition, we start by broaching the topic of what Generation Z adulting looks like in the workplace and the nursery. Gen Z parents, in particular, are a group we’ll be keeping an eye on in the next several years.

The year 2021 has been one of adjustment and recalibration for youth and adults alike. Schools are mostly back in-person, but Covid variants aren’t going away anytime soon. The ensuing inflation and supply chain issues have had everyone wondering what the “new normal” can, and does, look like, and that picture changes regularly. Youth culture, however, marches forward—and here are YouthBeat’s top highlights from the last 12 months:

YouthBeat's Holiday Wish List for kids, tweens, and teens is available for download here!

Find out whether youth want lots of small gifts or just one big gift, also what are this year’s hottest gift cards, and more. And, given the way family time has changed throughout the pandemic, this year we added a question, “If someone were to gift you ‘an experience’ where you spend time together, what would you want it to be?” 

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YouthBeat^® Generational Spotlight Infographic

Download our snapshot that compares Generation Alpha, Generation Z, and Millennials. 

At C+R Research/YouthBeat®, we’ve been generational experts for decades. We’ve been doing custom research with youth since the 1970s and have had our own proprietary panels of kids, tweens, teens, and parents since the early 2000s. Sometimes we think we’ve seen it all—we’ve lived through almost every fashion trend and musical style, seen one technological disruption after another, and borne witness to the eternal joys and tragedies of growing up into adulthood.

Gaming is for everyone; all ages, genders, backgrounds, and skillsets. Video gaming is experiencing exponential growth as it becomes a shared pastime for more folks when in-person activities become untenable.

One of our media clients recently reached out to the YouthBeat^® team about kids’ perceptions of the diversity in TV programming that is available to them. It’s an interesting topic, and one that we’ve been writing about in our Trendspotters for several years. We’ve been taking note of not just the inclusion of ethnicities and LGBTQ+ characters, but also autism, food-challenged characters, homelessness, and differing abilities that require things like wheelchairs.

Everyone is talking about Gen Z right now—they’re the teens and young adults disrupting old notions of brand loyalty and success and requiring alignment with their value systems. At YouthBeat^®, we’ve had them in our panels since they were preschoolers—and now some of them are starting to rejoin as parents.