A Snapshot of Youth in the United States in Infographic Form for 2024

Recently, a co-worker at my day job came to me and asked me a question about making infographics about teen demographics for our service area. At the same time, an article came into my inbox about Generation Alpha. This sent me down into a rabbit hole – thank you ADHD and hyper-fixation. I have spent some time now digging around in local statistics and generational data to help me better understand my service area. I then spent my evenings researching and putting together an infographic of youth in general in the United States, out of curiosity. Knowing your local specifics is vital to understand who you serve directly, but it’s also interesting to see how your neck of the woods compares to the larger picture. For example, I learned that my local service area is more diverse and has a higher rate of poverty that the United States average. These are important things to know.

I made a different infographic for work, but in the evenings I dug deep about the larger picture and I adapted that infographic to make a more general one, which I am sharing with you now. If I am doing this correctly, you should be able to click on this link and the template will open for you in Canva so you can copy and edit for yourself. I recommend making a copy and filling it in with your local data. And of course, you may be interested in different data so you can adjust how you would like. The one I made for work is different than the one you see below, because I was interested in different data for some categories. And I wanted to include information about books and libraries here, but I don’t really have specific local date for my day job to compare it to.

So, here are some caveats. I looked at a lot of different resources and summarized the data as best as I could. Many different resources use different numbers, this is especially true when you look at defining the dates and numbers for the generations. If you do a Google search for “Characteristics of Generation” whatever, you will find a lot of great articles. They tend to focus on marketing or characteristics of that generation in the workplace. PEW is a great place to start, but there is also good information at places like GWI, EdSurge and the National Institute of Health. Please note, some GWI information is free, other information is behind a paywall.

This is a good article about Generation Z: https://www.aecf.org/blog/what-are-the-core-characteristics-of-generation-z

This is a good article about Generation Alpha: https://www.generationzalpha.com/blog/what-are-the-characteristics-of-generation-alpha

In addition to the U.S. Census, the CDC, and the Pew Research Center, you can find some good statistical data at places like USA Facts, US News and World Report, and ACT for Youth.

The National Center for Education Statistics is a great resource for education statistics as is the Department of Education.

Youth.gov is a good place to start researching youth with disabilities. The National Center for Education Statistics also has a lot of data on youth and disabilities in our schools.

The Human Rights Campaign is a tremendous starting place to find youth LGBTQIA+ information. The Trevor Project is another good resource.

Information about the NAEP report on reading can be found here: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4

Scholastic Reading Report can be found here: https://www.scholastic.com/content/corp-home/kids-and-family-reading-report.html

ALA Report on Gen Z and Millennial Library Use can be found here: https://www.ala.org/news/2019/12/new-ala-report-gen-z-millennials-are-visiting-library-prefer-print-books

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