Millennials are all around you. In fact, they are the focal point of your lives. But who are they?

They are your children. They are members of the generation that began to enter college at the Millennium and they are still entering college in record numbers, as far as the eye can see and as long our family budgets will allow.

Their name, the “millennials,” has been coined by two remarkable historians, Neil Howe and William Strauss, whose seminal book, Generations of American History, set the stage for several books to follow, including Millennials Go to College.

As their core thesis, Howe and Strauss argue that, since the American Revolution, each generation of Americans possesses certain characteristics which are not only shaped by, but which also serve to greatly influence, the time in which they live.

Much has been written by Tom Brokaw and others about the “greatest generation,” the group of people born between 1900 and the mid-1920s, who won freedom’s greatest victory in WWII, and laid the foundation for the prosperity of the last half of the 20th century.

Howe and Strauss are respectful of those accomplishments, but they have a different name for the “greatest generation.” They call it the “silent generation,” with one reason being how “silent” most members of this generation were about the college preparation, application and financing choices of their children.

We baby-boomers and Gen Xers are “making up” for this silence of our parents’ generation by becoming much more involved in the lives of our children. This involvement is not just at the K-12 level, but also earlier in our shared style of infant and toddler parenting and later in our fervent desire to have our children attend the institution of higher education that is best for them, and in our quest to stay more connected to our children’s college experience.

And our “millennial” children seem to like the attention they are receiving from us, as long as we don’t overdo it.

According to Howe and Strauss, millennials as a group are:

• optimistic about the future;
• realistic about the present;
• resilient and hard-working; and
• very much into setting goals and meeting those goals,

Probably rings familiar, doesn’t it? There are exceptions, of course, but these are indeed the general characteristics of our children and we, at College Parents of America, are dedicated to helping you to support, in productive and appropriate ways, these millennials in our midst.

Fortunately, according to Howe and Strauss, the millennials’ core values of civic duty, confidence, achievement and street smarts, all in the context of being cooperative team players who are accepting of authority, make them a pleasure to know and to serve. In short, the millennials want to be taught by passionate educators and to be loved by supportive parents.

What more could we want and how lucky can we be? The kids we are scrambling to rear through our busy lives are, at the end of the day, thankful for whatever we can do to make their road to college a little bit smoother, their application process for college a little less scary and their transition to college a step they can make with confidence.

So, let’s get to work. And let’s share our success stories at Hoverings: A Blog for Current and Future College Parents, located on the home page of www.collegeparents.org.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 7:22 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.