Ryan Vet joins Karen Chong on Mind Blend to walk the Generational Pendulum forward four generations: from the Silent Generation’s post-Depression frugality, to the boomers who chased the American dream and left Gen X coming home to an empty house, to the Gen X helicopter parents who filled a millennial childhood with 48 to 55 hours a week of school and extracurriculars, to the millennials who promised their kids freedom and handed it to them in a bedroom with a phone in it. The current swing looks like a correction — free play, fewer screens, back outdoors — until you notice the camera on the deck and the AirTag in the shoe. Ryan’s argument is that a named parenting style and a chatbot are the same shortcut: both let a parent stop thinking about the child in front of them, which he calls cognitive erosion, and both turn a kid into a project to be fixed rather than a person to be known. He also names the Velocity Gap, lays out how he reads an incoming generation by rewinding eighteen years rather than counting birthdays, and makes the case for letting kids fail while the stakes are still small.
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