Aigul Zabirova,
Doctor of Sociological Sciences, Professor,
Chief Research Fellow at the KazISS
under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan
Every morning a box of protein cookies sits on the counter of a small healthy food club. The owner’s son bakes them. He is seventeen. Anyone who wants one takes a cookie with their morning shake. His customers are the same people as his mother’s. She told me about it with pride. Her son came up with the idea himself. He bakes the cookies himself and sells them himself. Then she added, “He’s a Zoomer, after all.”
Over the past year or two I have often heard this phrase from parents about her age. A child learns new things fast. He knows how to find, invent and organize. He already works. But the explanation is always the same. “He’s a Zoomer, after all.” Parents now explain their children’s good qualities by their generation. Not by family, not by upbringing, and even not by themselves. It is as if parents are writing themselves out of their own children’s story.
But the data show something else. In one public opinion survey people were asked whether they had taken any courses in the past year. Among young people aged 18 to 29 who have no university degree but whose mother has one, 34.7% said yes. Among their peers who have a degree of their own but whose mother does not, the figure was 27.3%. Clearly, a mother’s education is more closely linked to the habit of learning than a person’s own diploma.
A diploma cannot be handed down to a child. Knowledge also goes out of date quickly. Especially today. By the time a child graduates university, some of what was taught in the first year will already have changed. But something else can be passed on. The habit of figuring things out, searching and not being afraid of the new. The habit of sitting down and learning on your own, when nobody asks you to and nobody gives you a grade. For now this is only an assumption. One snapshot of data is not enough to say what exactly is going on here. But the link is stable. It holds when we take into account age, family income, city or village, and the father’s education.[1] The father’s education, by the way, has no statistical link to the habit of learning.
Why the mother? Among parents aged 35 to 40 who have children under 18, 35% of mothers and 22% of fathers have a higher education. So in a Kazakhstani family with children, the most educated adult is quite often the woman. One generation ago the picture was different. Among the mothers of people who are now in their sixties, only 8.5% had a higher education. Among the mothers of today’s students, the figure is already 39%. This means the country is raising a generation of children who are brought up by educated women much more often than before.
What exactly does a child get from an educated mother? An old Kazakh proverb offered an answer long ago. “Әке көрген оқ жонар, ана көрген тон пішер”, which means “One who has watched his father will carve an arrow. One who has watched his mother will cut a fur coat”. We usually read this proverb as being about concrete skills that children learn from their parents. But perhaps the idea goes deeper. A child picks up not only what an adult does, but also how the adult goes about it.
Some will object that today’s teenager is raised by a smartphone more than by parents. In one evening a child can master an app, find instructions, watch a video and learn to do what took the parents months. One could also say that educated families are better off and can more easily pay for courses. Or that a woman sociologist is pleased to find proof of the special role of mothers in the data. Almost every teenager does have a smartphone. But far from every teenager has the habit of learning. If it were only about the smartphone, we would not see such a gap. The argument about money is stronger. That is why the analysis takes family income into account separately, and the link is still there. Courses are not a substitute for a diploma either. Young people with a degree take them even more often than those without one. And the gap between the children of educated mothers and everyone else is almost the same in both groups. It is about ten percentage points. The last objection is so fair that the word “proven” does not appear anywhere in this text.
So why does the mother herself say “He’s a Zoomer, after all”? Perhaps because it is a very convenient explanation. The word “Zoomer” lets us explain a young person’s behavior by something outside the family. The times, technology, a generation. It is easier to talk about your own child this way. There is also a very everyday reason. In Kazakhstan we do not usually praise our children out loud. Көз тимесін, we say, may no evil eye fall on them. We feel awkward telling strangers that our son is very gifted. But “He’s a Zoomer” can be said to anyone. This leads to an interesting result. Mothers in Kazakhstan today are more educated than ever before. They may be passing on to their children not only knowledge but the very habit of learning. Yet they credit the result to the technology that happened to be in the child’s hands.
A boy of seventeen came up with a product on his own. He bakes it himself and sells it to his mother’s clients himself. Maybe he really is a typical Zoomer. But the more interesting question lies elsewhere. Where did he get the habit of coming up with an idea, figuring it out and getting it done on his own?
[1] The survey was commissioned by KazISS and conducted from October 10 to November 12, 2024. The sample was 8,000 respondents aged 18 and older. They came from all 17 regions of the country and from the cities of republican significance, Astana, Almaty and Shymkent.
