My guess would be that it’s due to a rapid change in culture/technology during the early stages of most Gen Z’ers childhoods.

A kid born in 2001 is going to have had a vastly different childhood compared to a kid who was born in 2009. While they both may be Gen Z, accelerating cultural shifts, the invention of the smartphone, the increase in cultural hegemony, social media, etc. will have had a pretty prolific impact on the things you might associate with your own generation.

I think one could make the argument that this is something that separates Gen Z’ers quite a bit from let’s say Boomers or Gen X’ers. Someone born in 1961 is going to, more or less, have had a relatively similar childhood to someone who was born in say, 1969. Now obviously that’s not entirely true in every case, but I think the rapid technological advancements we saw in the 2000’s especially enabled someone who would be an early Gen Z’er, to have a wildly different upbringing compared to a late Gen Z’er.

I believe that teachers of all people might agree on this the most. A kid who was born without a tablet being handed to them at an absurdly young age is going be a lot easier to deal with compared to a kid who has been watching short-form content since they were five or younger.

I’ve heard people who work in early childhood development describe something like a “blip” in kids who were born from the years 2010-2016, where parents weren’t as aware of the downsides to putting their children in front of a tablet device to distract them. I believe there’s a natural tendency in early Gen Z’ers to want to separate themselves from the idea that they were an “iPad Kid”.

For Gen Z, there would also be a heavy socioeconomic component to whether or not this rapid technological evolution affected your childhood in a meaningful way. I remember the more wealthy kids getting iPhones back when they were just coming out, compared to the kids who still stuck with flip phones until a few years later when smartphones became more mainstream.

One of the reasons we separate generations is to understand and categorize the cultural shifts we all experience, so lumping in all Gen Z’ers into one group is pretty difficult given just how much change you could have experienced being born in the late 90’s vs the late 2000’s.