Screenagers Conference – Part 1

I had the privilege of attending the Growing Leaders 2008 National Leadership Forum called Screenagers. Thanks ENCM. This was a conference specifically aimed at “equipping and unleashing generation y.” I am going to attempt to blog about this over the next few days. There was a lot of information and I’m still trying to process it all myself. Hopefully this will help.

If you don’t know who Generation Y is, its ok. Here is a quick review. They are many times also called Millenials and also Mosaics. All generations have a little discrepancy of where one generation ends and another begins, but they are all pretty close. The time frame I have seen the most for Generation Y is 1984-2002. This span indicates the year that they were born. Since I work with a college ministry, obviously this is very applicable since I work with Millenials day in and day out. 

I was inundated with info so I will try my best to compact it for the reader without making it too long. The first couple of sessions are really about who is Gen Y, then we will get into how to help them. 

Here are some of the Pro’s and Con’s of Millenials.

Pros	Cons
They feel special and needed	They can act spoiled and conceited
They own the world of technology	They expect quick and easy results
They love community	They often won’t act outside of their cliques
They are the focus of their parents	They may be unable to cope with reality
They are high on tolerance	They often lack absolute values
They’ve had a fairly easy life	They lack stamina to finish high school
They catch onto new ideas quickly	They struggle with long-term commitment
They can multi-task	hey often cannot focus on one central goal
They want to be the best	They can get depressed when they aren’t
They plan to live a life of purpose	They often neglect tasks that seem trivial
They are confident and assertive	They can come across careless and rude
They hunger to change the world	They anticipate doing it quickly and easily

                

Dr. Tim Elmore is the head of Growing Leaders and spoke at a good number of the sessions. He is an amazing guy and I really like him. This was info from his first session. One of the things that he said to differentiate between Gen X and Gen Y is that Gen X had an authority problem and Gen Y has a reality problem. 

Basically Gen X said the world is messed up so they coped with it by writing a song about how messed up everything is, bucking authority and committing suicide in extreme cases. Gen Y says, the world is messed up but they want to do something about it to fix it. Their problem is they think its going to happen in a few years and then get really depressed and discouraged when it doesn’t happen that fast. 

What do you think? Do you see this in our culture today?