snowflake generation

English[edit]

From the use of snowflake for a hypersensitive young person who sees themselves as unique and special.

The generation born in the 1980s and 1990s, viewed as being hypersensitive and needlessly treated as special compared with previous generations.
- 2008, Hart's E and P - Volume 81, page 150:
  The Snowflake Generation — they are all special and unique!
- 2014, Georg Vielmetter, Yvonne Sell, Leadership 2030, →ISBN:
  Much has also been made of the psychological impact on the only children born since 1979—the “precious snowflake” generation, lavished with love and attention by their parents and without siblings to share life with.
- 2016 February 20, Eleanor Harding, “Mollycoddled 'snowflake generation' of students are fuelling campus zealotry, education tsar warns”, in Daily Mail, Australia:
  Students who demand protection from controversial views are the product of a mollycoddled ‘snowflake generation’, the Government’s behaviour tsar has warned.
- 2016 November 14, Richard Brooks, “In defence of generation snowflake- everyone's favourite punching bag”, in The Telegraph:
  Miraculously, they did this without any input from the so-called snowflake generation.
Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see snowflake,‎ generation.
- 1957, Papers in Meteorology and Geophysics - Volumes 8-9, page 197:
  At an early stage of snowflake generation in the upper convective cell, the growth of snow aggregates seemed to occur considerably rapidly.