Babies born since January 1st, 2025, are part of the new Generation Beta – replacing Generation Alpha which covered the past 15 years.

With a new generation currently being born, questions arise - When did we start labelling generations? Why do we label generations? Do these labels actually mean anything?

Technological University Dublin lecturer and counselling psychologist Leslie Shoemaker told Newstalk Breakfast that these labelling generations with names dates back to the last 1800s.

"Hold them lightly"

The first labelled generation is “the Lost Generation”, Ms Shoemaker said.

“They were born in around 1883 up to 1900 [and] they're called the Lost Generation because of World War One,” she said.

“They came of age in World War One, they went to fight in World War One, or they did their bit back home during World War One.”

Ms Shoemaker said these generation names are helpful “if we hold them lightly”.

“I think that they're a way of helping us create shared mutual understanding of a particular group of people,” she said.

“The names that are being developed, they're coming as a result of what's happening socially, but also economically.

“It's just a nice, broad, general way to help us understand these different generations.”

"White centric" stereotypes

The problem with generational labels and stereotypes are very “white centric”, Ms Shoemaker said.

“[These labels help] us broadly understand but… we're not looking at other differences,” she said.

“For example, with the millennials - we now know that with black millennials, only about 24% of them married at a particular time of a study, whereas it was double for the Hispanics, for the whites and for other groups.

“What bothers me, what worries me, is when we get these social scientists who do this research into this and again, they're not delving down into the differences.

“We're not looking at gender, we're not looking at race, we're not looking at all these other things.

“What's interesting is when we're looking at these more recent groups, they are really into looking at all these differences [like race] gender and all these other sub-sections.”

Again, Ms Shoemaker said these labels are an interesting way to examine groups as long as we “hold it lightly”.

Baby sleeping in a cot. Image: ronstik / Alamy Stock Photo