To say that the next generation is primarily screwed in terms of resilience

Many of the students I teach are refugees from war torn countries, they have witnessed atrocities beyond belief. Amazingly, they are very resilient. Wouldn’t dream of not going into school! In fact, they see it as an absolute privilege to get a free education. They certainly don’t see global warming as a war though and if you asked them about 9/11 they wouldn’t have a clue. My 28 year old DD has little memory of it too and she was 6 at the time.

Are this the first generation to grow up with the majority of both parents working.
I wonder if spending much time away from parents when little contributed to this anxiety. Many countries have cheap labour who provide childcare at home.
On the other hand this may result in children being more sociable and having more experiences so better able to go out in the world.
Haven't seen any stats on this.

And our teens are growing up with wars, several of them starting off with 9/11 aftermath and more recently Ukraine, Palestine/ Israel acceleration….The global warming war is the biggest of the lot and there are no answers for any of it.

But those generations weren’t having the news and photos of atrocities shoved down their throat all day every day.

I grew up in the 90s - news came in the form of the newspaper or on the TV at 6pm. Even as an adult I have gone through phases where I have had to mute my BBC news app’s notifications and just this morning I woke up and the first post on my Instagram feed was a photo of the US soldier who set himself on fire in protest of the genocide in Gaza. So even without a news app, it’s still over all the social media sites.

I would argue that in WW2 it was unavoidable, but you cannot say that didn’t have any affect on them, I’m sure plenty of teens from the 40s carried trauma with them for the rest of their lives.

Completely agree OP. The is a whole industry of people being paid to propagate dependency -in my school the SENCO is endlessly canvassing us for pupils to ‘assess’ and parents are only too happy now fur their child to be given extra ‘support’ hence it is an epidemic amongst the girls especially.

Thirdly when you look at the world today's teenagers are growing up into I'm not bloody surprised they're anxious. From climate change to war to an increasingly fucked economy, I'd be surprised if any but the most privileged viewed their future with any sort of comfort.

Do you really think no previous generations had to deal with that? People were talking about climate change when I was a kid - a long time ago - there have been wars for as long as I can remember, and I have lived through several times of a fucked economy. How do you think the generations who were teens in the two WWs managed?

Fadhionable is
girls/anxiety
boys ADHD
basically get out of jail free cards for them to be pandered to

Absolutely this. We are being bombarded by information 24/7 when our brains were only meant to cope with picking some berries off a tree or hunting some food.

Loving the way previous generations are allowed to destroy the planet, fuck the economy , sit back and allow Russian infiltration online and cause all the wars we see now and teens are supposed to be putting it right.

Our anti apartheid protests seem a whole lot more doable than saving the entire planet particularly when politics are currently the way they ars.

I assess parenting, children, family dynamics, teach parenting etc for a living.

It's multifaceted as a pp said but one of the main contributors is parental burnout. Both parents working, often full time, trying to run a household and take dc to activities, juggling so many plates alone. Very few people have actual support these days and those that do it's minimal. Life has become busier but real practical and emotional support has decreased. Parents are exhausted. It's difficult to go beyond meeting basic needs when you are running on empty. Most people are drudging through the day praying for bedtime. Parental mental health is on the floor. Resilience needs teaching but the parents are too exhausted to teach it.

The thing that surprises me is their sense of helplessness, or even resentment. Young adults are the ones who will change the future - there seems to be little recognition of that, where fear and hard times galvanised previous generations. In less-well-off places, they still do!

Like a preponderance of MNers, I grew up under a very real fear of nuclear annihilation. I now disagree with my younger self's view on what to do about that, but I tried to make a difference. I was born into hardship and lived through serious economic depression (1970s) when there were far fewer support systems than now. Our attitude to challenging circumstances was "What can we/I do about this?"

There is currently a great deal of social cachet attached to "oppression" and vulnerability, with kids vying for positions of most oppressed and most vulnerable. I can't think of anything more likely to quash resilience. I keep hoping it's a fad that will die off, but it's been going on for so bloody long now that I worry it's more likely to kill the kids off 😢

Obligatory rider that the Gen Z kids in my family are extremely pro-active, resilient and realistically ambitious. They didn't grow up exclusively in the UK, though. It's possible that the chunk of their childhoods spent in SE Asia contributed to their work ethic.

The thing that surprises me is their sense of helplessness, or even resentment. Young adults are the ones who will change the future - there seems to be little recognition of that, where fear and hard times galvanised previous generations. In less-well-off places, they still do!

Like a preponderance of MNers, I grew up under a very real fear of nuclear annihilation. I now disagree with my younger self's view on what to do about that, but I tried to make a difference. I was born into hardship and lived through serious economic depression (1970s) when there were far fewer support systems than now. Our attitude to challenging circumstances was "What can we/I do about this?"

There is currently a great deal of social cachet attached to "oppression" and vulnerability, with kids vying for positions of most oppressed and most vulnerable. I can't think of anything more likely to quash resilience. I keep hoping it's a fad that will die off, but it's been going on for so bloody long now that I worry it's more likely to kill the kids off 😢

Obligatory rider that the Gen Z kids in my family are extremely pro-active, resilient and realistically ambitious. They didn't grow up exclusively in the UK, though. It's possible that the chunk of their childhoods spent in SE Asia contributed to their work ethic.

Oh fuck off. My parents generation lived through the second world War. My dad fought in the middle east, my mum worked in the munitions factory and Liverpool like many cities was blitzed.
My uncle was a POW in Burma and was damaged for life.
We have produced a generation of 20 year olds who need trigger warnings for books.
We spent far too much time pandering to "mental health" of young people which is a gross insult to those poor sods who really do have mental health issues as opposed to being upset because someone used the wrong pronoun

@TempestTost Being a poor kid who gets asked every year about holidays and always has to say they have been nowhere, is pretty shit actually. And I had plenty of resilience. Kids brought up in poverty tend to have far more than middle class children.

Yeah, I can see more and more people locked up in their houses due to anxiety.

Could it be due to the rise of gentle parenting that newer generations are less resilient?

I also believe that WFH affects some people, they may have less interactions with the outside world.

I think that many younger people have no understanding of recent history. I have read this whole thread and have seen many times people claiming that younger people face challenges that older people did not face, when this is simply not true.

When I was young in the early eighties, the place I lived and other places around the country were decimated by Thatcher's policies. Watch Billy Elliott to get an idea of back then. Adults on the TV were talking about how many in my generation would never manage to get a job and would always be unemployed. I remember a 16 year old classmate coming into school elated telling us he had managed to get a job in a factory. Unemployment was high.

You could easily argue that none of us should have worked at school as we would have had no motivation to do so. And some did no work. But many did. And over time things got better. Where I grew up is unrecognisable and low paid employment is fairly easy to get.

Workplaces used to be far harsher places for working class young women. Sexism, page 3 girls stuck up in offices, sexual harassment, "banter" etc still existed although it was being challenged and gradually faded out. And we were expected to work very hard. There was no minimum wage. I was paid much less in real terms than the minimum wage now. If you worked part time you often could not join the company pension scheme and plenty of smaller companies had no company pension scheme.

And there was no legal protection if you were LGBT. You could be fired for being gay openly and there was nothing you could do. Gay bashing was rife.

The one thing that was better was that accommodation was cheaper. But it is the middle class who changed that with buy to let mortgages and holiday lets. So yes get angry at all the small landlords, they have made your life harder. But the idea that everything else was easier just is not true.

We are at the end of many years of the Conservatives ruling. Things are always shit when Conservatives have been in power for a long time. And that also has an impact on young people. There have been massive cuts in under fives provision and youth provision. Their fiscal irresponsibility has made life harder for most of us. And as a result families are more stressed.

But the biggest change is smartphones and social media. I am horrified at the primary school teacher on this thread who said her pupils are spending 4 plus hours a day on the internet. We need face to face interaction. We are not evolved to operate in this way.