WINNIPEG — It’s a generation often reduced to a punch line in the media and popular culture.
Millennials are mocked for being self-absorbed, having a poor work ethic and perhaps most commonly, a sense of entitlement.
“I don’t think it’s valid, I don’t think it’s fair. I think there’s always been entitled people and I don’t think it’s fair to classify an entire generation as entitled,” said April Matheson, co-owner of a boutique on Academy Road, called Margot + Maude.
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The 32-year-old millennial remembers her classmates all getting ribbons for participating.
Some of the perceptions of her generation are true, but others she said, aren’t.
“I’m one of those millennials that doesn’t consider them self a millennial,” she said.
Who is a millennial?
The years that make up the millennial generation range. After talking with many experts in the field, Global News is defining the generation as anyone born between 1981 and 2004.
According to George Fulford, an associate professor of anthropology, being a millennial is a good thing.
“I think there’s as much hope and potential in this generation as any other,” he said.
Fulford, a baby boomer, teaches at the University of Winnipeg in classrooms full of mostly millennials.
He believes his students are coming of age in a time when the economic and political outlook is particularly bleak.
“It’s not the student’s problem, it’s that the circumstances my students face on a day-to-day basis are entirely different from the ones that I faced,” Fulford said.
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His students respond to this reality differently, he said. “One sense of reaction to that is to give up, another sense is to quietly work hard, a third and there are more than three is to say, ‘hey, I’m entitled to all the things you boomers had, so give it to me.'”
But encountering that sense of entitlement is rare, he said.
Sense of entitlement?
Global News compiled four videos that depict millennial stereotypes — from a Saturday Night Live sketch to a Ted Talks lecture. Global News then headed to the Red River Campus on Princess Street, showing people the video.
WATCH: Popular culture depicting the millennial generation as entitled
WATCH: Students and adults react to video
According to clinical psychologist, Syras Derksen, older generations have always thought younger generations do not work hard enough.
“That was the same impression people had 40 years ago about people who were younger, and so it’s not really a generational effect, it’s just kind of how people view the younger generation,” Derksen said.
However, at his practice Derksen often deals with parents who are worried about a lack of motivation with their adult children.
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“It’s good for parents to be thinking they expect them to develop independence skills … constantly pushing children to develop that next step I think is really important,” he said.
Overcoming stereotypes
Independence skills are what helped Matheson open her business last year, after working years in the retail sector.
Despite the perceptions about her generation being entitled, she thinks there’s something about her peers that makes them more willing to strike out on their own as entrepreneurs.
“I think the generation of millennials do have a calling to do something that makes them happy,” she said.