The gap between the old people and the young is called the generation gap. It is the difference in the attitude, priorities, and views among generations.
As to the different attitude of life, the people belonging to the old generation always wonder what has gone wrong with the new generation. They feel that during their time, young boys and girls were better behaved, more obedient and had greater respect for elders. Young people, on the other hand, feel that they are capable enough to learn on their own rather than lean heavily on the older generation for any guidance. Young people do not like to be spoon-fed by their elders.
The differences also appear in some other ways. For example, the way of entertainment. Our grandparents' generation never understood Elvis and the Beatles, frequently opposed to them, relating rock as "the devil's music". They did all they could to ban rock and contraceptives, mostly because they couldn't understand what was going on. Then came flower power and the hippie generation, who were smoking pot, protesting against Vietnam, taking acid and going to rock festivals, such as Woodstock. With it came the Sex Revolution and Women's lib. The seventies bring the punks and the disco generation, leaving parents' hairs prematurely whitened. AIDS came in the eighties, and we are the children of a generation in which, contrary to all others, pleasure leads to death. Even so, many parents don't understand their children, and often neglect them. .
Several kinds of the generation gap.
The first kind is the generation gap between the immigrants and the native people. Take the students for example. Newcomers are racking up high grades despite language barriers, overwhelming poverty, and personal hardship. Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, a Harvard University researcher who, with his wife, Carola Suarez-Orozco, has studied immigration for 20 years says: "I think immigrants bring hope and optimism and energy that is harnessed in the first generation.