Gen-X dads get ignored yet again.
The most refreshing thing about this video posted to the YouTube channel You Betcha is its evenhandedness. “Millennial Dads vs Baby Boomer Dads” doesn’t favor one of its generational cohorts over the other. Instead, it mocks both of them equally, its prerogative as comedy to exaggerate the stereotypes of each generation.
The fairly low-production value sketch intercuts two characters: a burly, baseball hat-wearing boomer dad and a millennial dad with AirPods and a beanie. It touches on a lot of different topics, on each accentuating the differences between the two parenting styles.
Boomer dad asks the coach to bench his kid to teach him a lesson; millennial dad asks the coach to put his kid in because he hasn’t had a chance to pitch yet. Millennial dad checks to make sure his kid are wearing two seatbelts; boomer dad tells his kids to just hang on to the broken seatbelt. Boomer dad asks the kids if they want to go to Mickey D’s; millennial dad says they can’t and takes them to Whole Foods instead.
You get the idea.
Boomer dad comes off as too indifferent to his kids; millennial dad comes off as too worried about them. It’s a perfectly harmless video that got us wondering what a more incisive take on the two groups might be like.
Boomer dad could taunt his kids with the Social Security checks they won’t get if boomer politicians make cuts to the program. Millennial dad could make his kids take public transportation in a well-intentioned but probably doomed effort to stave off global warming. Boomer dad could tell his kids to pay for their own college because hey, it wasn’t that pricey in the ’70s. Millennial dad could call TikTok “like MySpace but with videos.”
Again, you get the idea.
It’s not exactly fair to say that the world’s problems are boomers’ fault, but it is fair to say that boomer politicians have enacted policies that gave rise to mass incarceration, worsened global warming, and exacerbated inequality.
If that’s not a gold mine for comedy, I don’t know what is!
