Talha was doing his homework, but a thought was troubling him, making it hard for him to focus. To find a proper answer, he decided to ask his grandfather.

Talha ran to his room and said, “Dada, today our teacher made us read a chapter from our textbook. It was amazing and interesting, but the moral of the story was ‘once a cheater, always a cheater’.”

Grandfather smiled and said, “Oh! That’s an interesting moral.”

Talha continued, “Yes, Dada, but I was wondering, how can someone always be a cheater if he did it only once?”

“Oh, okay,” his grandfather replied. “Let me tell you a story and I think then you’ll understand this saying more clearly.”

Talha became excited and his grandpa began the story.

“When I was in school, I had a classmate who wasn’t good at studies. He could never pass the class tests, but somehow always got good marks in the finals. This went on until one day, he was caught by our teacher for bringing cheat papers into the examination room. He was about to be suspended, but after apologising and begging for another chance, the principal decided to forgive him.

“Days passed and soon it was time for tests and then the finals again. During one of the exams, I noticed him taking out a tiny chit of paper from his pen cap. His way of cheating was quite clever; he could copy whatever the person beside or in front of him was writing without getting caught. I was shocked to see him still cheating, even after being given his last chance.

“It became unbearable for me, so on the last day of school, I asked him, ‘Didn’t your parents say anything when you were caught cheating or passing exams without studying?’”

“His reply stunned me. He said, ‘My parents just want to see me pass. They don’t care how I do it.’

“Many years later, I met him on the road. I was driving and following all the traffic rules when a traffic policeman gestured for me to stop. I pulled over, a bit confused, as I hadn’t broken any rules. The officer came over and started telling me about the violations I had supposedly made. As I looked at him closely, his face seemed oddly familiar. Just as I was trying to recall where I had seen him before, he asked me for money.

“That’s when it clicked. He was the same boy from my school! I smiled, a bit uncomfortable, and reminded him who I was. We talked briefly about our school days. But deep down, I realised something painful: he was still cheating, only this time under the name of a prestigious force, committing a much bigger wrong,” grandfather concluded.

Talha said, “So even today, he’s cheating our country while being in the police force?”

Grandfather sighed and replied, “Yes, sadly. I hope you now understand my point.

A person isn’t born a cheater, but when they keep doing it again and again, without being corrected, especially by their parents, they eventually become one.”

Talha nodded and said, “Now I understand. It’s true that once a person cheats without any consequences, they can end up becoming a proud cheater.”

Published in Dawn, Young World, December 6th, 2025

Sometimes, I look at you Gen Alpha kids — the ones born from around 2010 all the way to the mid-2020s; growing up with screens and shortcuts for everything, and I’m honestly amazed at how different you are from the rest of us and then I can’t help but think you’ve landed here from the future.

One minute you’re just sitting there, staring at nothing, switching channels or doing your own thing; the next minute, you’re swiping through apps like a professional software developer, faster and smarter. You talk fast, think fast, jump from one topic to another like it’s nothing and somehow manage to understand things even we adults need a tutorial for.

And the funniest part? You don’t even realise how strange and brilliant you look to the rest of us (millennials and Gen Zs). You are expressive, but also confused at times, curious and therefore, mostly glued to screens. You’re all of these tiny contradictions walking around with emotions double your size and hands that somehow know how to use technology better than the people who invented it. Isn’t it?

So yeah… when we talk about Gen Alpha, we’re not just talking about kids. We’re talking about a completely new version of childhood and that’s what this whole article is about.

Gen Alpha, you’re not just the kids of today; you are geniuses, sharp, with extraordinarily intuitive and somehow more grown-up than you should ever have to be. So come join, it’s all about you!

Your world is completely digital

Screens aren’t just a part of your environment… they ‘are’ the environment. And that’s not even your fault; that’s just the world you were born into. And because of this, you can’t separate the “real world” from the “online world.” To you, it’s all one thing.

If someone is your friend in Roblox or Minecraft, you consider them your “friend” — full stop! If someone on YouTube feels comforting, their voice feels familiar, their channel feels like home, then they become a part of your emotional world. Sadly, you have made your digital playgrounds your real playgrounds. Servers are social spaces. Group chats are your version of hanging out. Fandoms become friendships. Isn’t it?

Your reality and your digital imagination blur together and create this world. You make friends across the planet without even thinking twice about it. You speak to kids you may never meet, but somehow you trust them, laugh with them and care about them. You create global friendships without needing permission. You don’t think or take permission to make friends; you just have your way. It is more like, “You like this, I like this, too. I think it’s cool, let’s be friends.”

But that’s not cool, my little friends! There are things you need to take care of before everything else and this one, specifically making connections, comes in the top-most priority to be taken care of.

You bond in the most effortless way

As I said earlier, most of your world is built online: shared screens, shared characters and shared obsessions. You become inseparable because you and the one you get befriended with both obsess over the same weird video on YouTube shorts. You build Minecraft villages together. You roleplay random scenarios in Roblox. You create entire storylines that only make sense to you and your friend.

Your friendships don’t need deep conversations or childhood traumas or long heart-to-heart discussions, like the generations before you required. If you share a moment, whether stupid or fun, that moment becomes the one strong thread that ties you together.

But trust me, the online world has nothing to do with your real life. So if someone is online with you, doesn’t mean they are your true friends. People vanish, change, block you and ignore you in a blink, and it can hurt more than you expect.

There’s something so unique about you that no generation before you — your great-grandparents, the Boomers, your grandparents from Gen X, your parents who are Millennials, or even the slightly older ones like Gen Z who might be your cousins — can fully understand. And if they watch you, means two Gen Alpha kids talking, it feels as if you’ve come from a completely different world, one they’ve never seen or even read about. Your private jokes, the random sounds you make, the imaginary characters you mention and those tiny dramatic arguments all make perfect sense to you, but not to anyone from another generation.

I read somewhere that Gen Alpha grows up in a world that’s always loud and full. For example, when a Gen Alpha kid opens YouTube, within 30 seconds, he sees a funny video, a sad story, a shocking clip, a cool trend, a scary headline and some influencer showing a “perfect” life. That’s a lot of emotional pressure in just a few seconds. So, of course, you feel things more intensely, because your online world is full of varied stuff.

And that’s what most of today’s Gen Alpha friendships are; one minute you’re best friends forever, sharing snacks or sitting together, and the next minute you’re devastated because your friend didn’t wait for you in the game lobby. Or someone sat with someone else today. Or someone didn’t reply to your message despite the chat box indicating they have seen it.

Therefore, when so much is going on around you and in your life, your friendships take a new turn. You evolve fast. One day, your moods match with someone because of a shared obsession, but just a few days later, you or your friend’s interests change, and that’s when you realise, “Oh… that’s someone else,” and the bond ends. You hang out with another like-minded person, and for how long… well, that’s probably something even you don’t know yet.

You mimic everything you see

The one trait I have observed so much in most of your age group is that you are very good at copying adults, teenagers, influencers, YouTubers, characters from shows and even gamers you admire. You pick up phrases, expressions, habits and even emotional patterns.

Ahh… these phrases just go whoosh over my head sometimes. But for you, this is just everyday language. Skibidi, Fanum Tax, Gyatt, Rizz, NPC, Ohio, Cooked, Sheesh, bro’s wild… the list never seems to end. And I still don’t get why “cap” means lying. Like… who decided that? How did you all just invent an entire dictionary on your own? But that’s exactly the point; it shows how wildly unique your generation is. You didn’t just grow up with a language; you created one.

So, my dear Gen Alpha, watching you is like watching a whole new world unfold. You look at the digital and real world as one; you bond or make friends over tiny moments, which is nothing like what your older generations would have done. And perhaps that’s the whole point: you are making your own rules, some ways of connecting and surviving in this world.

You aren’t just kids; you’re brilliant humans making a version of childhood that’s completely new, somehow messy, extraordinary and real, one that the world hasn’t seen yet.

Published in Dawn, Young World, December 6th, 2025