<P> In August 1993, an Advertising Age editorial coined the phrase Generation Y to describe those who were aged 11 or younger as well as the teenagers of the upcoming ten years who were defined as different from Generation X . According to journalist Bruce Horovitz, in 2012, Ad Age "threw in the towel by conceding that Millennials is a better name than Gen Y", and by 2014, a past director of data strategy at Ad Age said to NPR "the Generation Y label was a placeholder until we found out more about them". Millennials are sometimes called Echo Boomers, due to their being the offspring of the baby boomers and due to the significant increase in birth rates from the early 1980s to mid 1990s, mirroring that of their parents . In the United States, birth rates peaked in August 1990 and a 20th - century trend toward smaller families in developed countries continued . In his book The Lucky Few: Between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom, author Elwood Carlson called this cohort the "New Boomers". </P> <P> Psychologist Jean Twenge described Millennials as "Generation Me" in her 2006 book Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before, which was updated in 2014 . In 2013, Time magazine ran a cover story titled Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation . Newsweek used the term Generation 9 / 11 to refer to young people who were between the ages of 10 and 20 years during the terrorist acts of 11 September 2001 . The first reference to "Generation 9 / 11" was made in the cover story of the 12 November 2001 issue of Newsweek . Alternative names for this group proposed include Generation We, Global Generation, Generation Next and the Net Generation . </P> <P> Chinese Millennials are commonly called the 1980s and 1990s generations . At a 2015 conference in Shanghai organized by University of Southern California's US - China Institute, Millennials in China were examined and contrasted with American Millennials Findings included Millennials' marriage, childbearing, and child raising preferences, life and career ambitions, and attitudes towards volunteerism and activism . </P> <P> A minority of demographers and researchers start the generation in the mid-to - late 1970s, such as Synchrony Financial which describes Millennials as starting as early as 1976, Mobilize.org which uses 1976--1996, MetLife which uses birth dates ranging from 1977--1994, and Nielsen Media Research which uses 1977--1995 . </P>

When did you have to be born to be 21 today