Once they get into the work force, she says, "something happens. Something clicks in and they behave more the way they should. But still you have to adapt to them, not expect them to adapt to you."

Bender recently talked to a Human Resources person from a large bank who told her the bank not only had to change the way it trains recruits, but it was having to train older workers in how to deal with the Millennials. "UPS has also found that classroom training sessions that worked with older generations don't work with Millennials. They need interactive, hands-on training."

Millennials are also the most wired generation to date. "They were digital in diapers," says Bender. "They've never known a world that was not digital, not online."

They were born when CDs were phasing out cassettes — vinyl records are entirely foreign. By the time they were in preschool, the Internet went global, and homes began loading up on PCs. They could surf the Web in elementary school while racking up humongous scores on video games.

By middle school, it was TV on demand with VCRS, which were soon replaced with TiVo and DVDs.

By high school, cell phones, electronic organizers, pagers, instant messaging and digital cameras were the norm. The gadgets that seem strange to older generations have become almost like body parts for the Millennials. And, as one researcher put it, "the computer is not a technology, it is an assumed part of life."

Bender remembers taking her 10- and 13-year-old children to an open-air history museum, along with their 70-something grandmother. The grandmother got talking about how when she was a child, they wrapped bricks in cloth and tucked them into the bed to make it warm. "She talked about when TV first came along and what funny little TVs we had, and the children were looking at her wide-eyed. 'That can't be true, grandma,' they said. It was beyond anything they knew."

It's not just that the Millennials prefer the Internet to TV, "their preferred method of communication is text messaging," Bender says. "I used to think my children didn't have any friends because the house phone never rang. But they were communicating by cell and text and e-mail. And they have their own words. They talk in acronyms and slang. They shorten words and don't use punctuation."

Which sometimes creates problems in school and in the workplace when they have to write, she says. "They can't spell and they can't punctuate."