Just about every parent has at one point thrust the TV remote, Wii control or smartphone into the hands of a child and ordered: “You figure it out.” And, after the child does just that, they grab the gadget back and mutter, “I could have done it too, if I had the time.”

But the reality is that time, in technology terms, has passed them by.

“In the 20th century, you worried about a digital divide separating rich from poor,” Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington who is a leading researcher on children and the media, told The Times. “That’s narrowed, and the one that’s emerging is separating parents from their children. We’re fairly clueless about the digital world they inhabit.”

But parents can take comfort in the knowledge that their tech-savvy offspring are soon to be surpassed by another group, still in diapers. These toddlers, what might be called Generation Tech, will experience the world in a radically different way than their elders who are approaching puberty.

Among the tools those toddlers will view as everyday household objects - the way color televisions and push button phone were seen by their parents - are technologies like the Kindle and gadgets like Google’s Nexus One phone and Apple’s iPad. Two-year-olds in 2010 will “know nothing other than a world with digital books, Skype video chats with faraway relatives, and toddlerfriendly video games on the iPhone,” Brad Stone wrote in The Times.

But these are gadgets that children even 10 years older did not grow up with, he pointed out, and the members of his 2-year-old daughter’s generation “will be utterly unlike those that preceded it.” Researchers are theorizing that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be producing “a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development,” wrote Mr. Stone.

And at that point, the generation gap may not be measured in decades, or years, but in mere months.

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, told The Times. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

It makes one nostalgic for the days when generation gaps, like the one between the baby boomers - born after World War II until 1964 - and Generation X - born between 1965 and 1979 - could be measured in decades, not years or months. A.O. Scott wrote recently in The Times about the lament of Gen X and the much larger baby boomer group.

“We grew up on the shadow of the baby boomers, who still manage, in their dotage, to commandeer disproportionate attention,” Mr. Scott, born 1966, complained in The Times. “Every time they hit a life cycle milestone it’s worth 10 magazine covers. When they retire, the Social Security system will go under! When they die, narcissism will be so much lonelier.”

Mr. Scott, of course, betrays his upbringing in an analog era. It may not be possible to count how many screens the generation gap of those born after the new millennium will be played out on.


TOM BRADY


As baby boomers struggle to use modern technology, new generations know nothing else. / CASEY KELBAUGH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES