NEW YORK — A TikTok influencer’s rant that called out millennial parents for allegedly failing to discipline their children has gained wide attention online.

Ms Alanna Dinh, a New York City-based fashion and lifestyle content creator with close to 600,000 followers, turned to the video-sharing application to voice her frustrations about what she perceived to be a lack of discipline and education in children raised by millennial parents.  

At the start of her video, the TikToker pointedly says: “I need to ask millennials, why are your kids so awful? And more importantly, why do you think it’s so funny?” 

She recounts an incident at her job as a receptionist of a medical office, when a woman she assumed was a millennial mother seemingly ignored her child's disruptive behaviour.

“You can tell she’s a millennial. She’s, like, 34. She has a yoga mat in one hand and her four-year-old in the other,” she says.

Ms Dinh is from Generation Z, meaning she is younger than those classified as millennials. The US-based Pew Research Center classifies millennials as anyone born between 1981 and 1996, making them between 27 and 42 years of age this year, and Gen Zers are those born after that.

Ms Dinh continues: “Her Satan spawn walked up to the counter, and I was, like, ‘Hi.’ And there’s a bunch of business cards just stacked up on the counter… And the kid knocks them all over and starts mixing up all the different business cards on the floor of the office.”

Seeing this, Ms Dinh adds that she expected the mother to reproach the child for misbehaving but to her astonishment, the woman casually laughed it off and said, “Isn't she so cute?” 

Ms Dinh goes on to claim that she would have responded very differently if her own child had acted that way.

“I would have yelled at it and then cleaned up the mess it made and then made it apologise to the receptionist,” she said. “And I know millennials with children are going to hate this because they’re the most self-righteous people on the planet.” 

Ms Dinh then advised millennial parents to focus on teaching their children manners, as well as learn some themselves. 

“As someone who has had a lot of jobs in her day, serving you people (millennials) is genuinely one of the most insufferable things I’ve ever had to do. Thank you.”

The influencer’s TikTok video has attracted more than 6.7 million views and 17,300 comments since it was posted on Nov 11.

A deep dive into the comments section showed that the majority of the viewers seemed to share Ms Dinh’s negative views on millennial parenting, citing examples of a lack of manners, discipline and even struggles with fundamental skills such as reading and writing among their offspring.

One user wrote: “Millennial parents are one of the biggest reasons I stopped working with children. The way they raise their kids is ridiculous.”

Several TikTok users also shared their personal encounters with such poorly behaved children in public spaces or within their professional roles as childcare teachers, retail workers and the like.

One commented: “I’m 20 and work in childcare. The amount of ‘Are you going to do something’ stares I give millennial parents in public is exhausting.”

Another person said: “At my job, we have a decorated Christmas tree. Already four kids have destroyed them while their parents did nothing. Only one mum scolded her son overall.”

Responding to Ms Dinh’s video with his own, fellow TikToker “movie_daddy” relayed his experiences of dealing with millennial parents as a cinema employee.

“An alarming number of these kids who got kicked out of the movie for being disruptive would call Mummy and Daddy, and then one of those parents would show up at the movie theatre and start yelling at us, the employees,” he said.

The TikTok user added that many parents would dismiss the cinema’s rules as “stupid” and tell the employees to “let kids be kids” and to “let them make their mistakes”.

A number of people also blamed the perceived lack of discipline on the rise of “gentle parenting”.

Online parenting magazine Parents quoted an expert as saying that gentle parenting is a collaborative style of parenting where parents do not compel children to behave by means of punishment or control, but rather use connection, communication and other democratic methods.

One top comment read: “I think a lot of millennials were mistreated so badly by their parents growing up so now, they overcompensate by gentle parenting too much.”

Another remarked: “I think it’s that us millennials decided to ‘break generational trauma’ by going way too far the other way.”

The topic of “iPad Kids” was also raised by some TikTok users, who attributed the poor behaviour of the current generation of children — or Gen Alpha (children born from 2010 up to 2025) — to their excessive exposure to screened devices.

One said: “It’s because (millennial parents) put an iPad in front of their kids instead of teaching them the basics of life.” 

However, a handful of online users stepped up to defend millennial parents, saying that not all of them raise their children that way.

One wrote: “Millennial mum with Gen Alpha kid here. He’s seven, (has) been doing multiplication for three years, advanced reading, and he would so be apologising (in that situation).”

Another concluded: “That’s just a bad parent. (I’m a) millennial mum and my boy knows I don’t play around with his behaviour.”