This Woman Slams the Parents of Gen Alpha Kids While Claiming Her "Gen Alpha Kids Are Great"

As an only child and member of the latchkey generation — Generation X — I am very familiar with the concept of raising one's self. I also come from a single-parent household which usually meant I was responsible for getting myself up and going to school. I'm also very good at putting on a show just for me. I can't tell you how many times my mother's makeup was used to create what can only be described as deeply upsetting clown makeup. All this to say, I come from a generation of self-reliant folks.

Gen X was undoubtedly the first generation where a two-parent household might not have been the norm. Or, perhaps both parents were working. Regardless of the situation, people were often not minding the store. Despite this, I never got the sense that any of us were chaotic animals with no sense of right or wrong. According to one TikToker, Gen Alpha is mostly feral children who are largely unsupervised. What did they do to deserve such a description? Just normal kid stuff.

Rachel Gist, who goes by @rachgist on TikTok, has one question for the parents of Generation Alpha kids: why are your children roaming the streets unchecked? OK, they aren't wandering around as if they are the Walking Dead, but Rachel does think all of them are strangely unsupervised in public.

First of all, social media has definitely given way to a strange phenomenon that goes a little something like this: A person sees something that a single individual is doing which prompts them to head to social media in order to make a broad generalization about an entire group.

In Rachel's case, she has witnessed a couple of Gen Alpha children acting out in public, ergo all Gen Alpha kids are unsupervised and in her words, "feral." I'm afraid we would need more than anecdotal evidence before we could confidently make this claim.

Despite trying to avoid the "Gen Alpha slander" that is taking TikTok by storm, Rachel hopped onto TikTok so she could add to the slander. The reason why she was reluctant to toss gasoline onto this generational fire is because she is the mother of two Gen Alpha children who are "pretty great."

It wasn't until Rachel took her children to a public green space — which is code for a park — that she saw what the internet had been babbling about.

"They're the worst," said Rachel about the Gen Alpha kids recklessly playing. Not her kids though, the other kids. And not every Gen Alpha kid, but Gen Alpha kids nonetheless.

"Y'all are the most entitled, checked-out, s----y parents on the planet," says Rachel about the Millennials who brought Generation Alpha into this world. As a reminder, that is also Rachel's generation, but she's not like those parents. She's different.

As per usual, we do not have enough information to support Rachel's cause. The story she shares sounds awful but she, like us, doesn't have all the facts. What she witnessed sounds pretty frustrating. The park where her children, along with many others, were playing is in a courtyard by a restaurant where some parents like to eat while allowing their kids to "wreak havoc," upon the parents who are actually watching their kids.

Rachel had to pull one little boy, who was about three or four years old, off of at least four other children including her own. Every time she would glance up at his mother, she was talking to a friend. It got so bad that according to Rachel, every parent and child there was angry at this kid. However, no one said anything to his mother. They all decided it was pointless.

I'm probably going to be in the minority here but, if this woman has no idea what's going on then she cannot change her own behavior and by extension the behavior of her child. I find it very strange that everyone at this park continued to discipline her child while building resentment against her, and yet no one thought to say something. Honestly, if other people were watching my kid, I too would continue chatting with my friend.

Rachel then begins to project pretty heavily which makes me wonder if she has a personal gripe with older Millennials. She broadly describes them all s---y people who believe their "little precious cherub can do no wrong." Wow, Rachel really built a whole story for a woman who was having a conversation with a friend. Should she have been paying more attention to her kid? Yes. Does Rachel know anything about this woman? No.

Once again we can witness a byproduct of living in the social media age, and that's simply not allowing any context or nuance before creating a narrative and responding to it. If I were Rachel, I would first try to have a private chat with the woman whose child was being disruptive, long before I took to TikTok in order to write her villainous origin story. I find that behavior to be more troublesome than a child acting like a child.