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

And you expect teens to have the skills to do that.🙄

Resilience is gained, not given. We’ve all had a rough trot. And life is relentless. I think some parents are the ones lacking in resilience. We’re meant to be the adults in the room. I’m honestly a little fed up with the marshmallow parents out there. Yes, boundaries are fucking hard and sometimes you’ve got to fake it til you make it. But you’ve gotta pick a side; piss or get off the pot. Follow through or don’t fucking complain to me. If I can do it, anyone can

Where did I say just regulate?

I said there is a choice like there is for many things. To ask and examine one’s own feelings and the why. That is not just regulate.

If it exists, this behaviour perhaps is corresponding with the breakdown of the social contract - you study hard, you work hard and then you will have a secure future, this is not the case now so why work all hours God sends.

Yes, I know what happened in the war. I'm not suggesting it wasn't hard.

Yet the social isolation that some felt in the pandemic was not there. Mums at home with babies in apartments alone for weeks or months. Old people scared to go out for years - some are still affected by this, afraid of normal human contact. Kids and teens cut off from other kids for months.

And not just friends, also normal daily interactions like shops.

Some of us 'older people' have been guiding successive waves of 'youngesters' (grads) through their early careers, chartership and into highly trained professionals on good salaries for decades. I have been involved in grad training for nearly 25 years and there has been a noticeable increased trend in recent times of the oft mentioned 'flakiness' insofar as poor attendance ("I'm feeling a bit poorly/not in a good place today"), push back on certain aspects or training and basic workplace functions(I.e refusing to travel to site, unwilling to do a basic presentation infront of half a dozen peers). This was virtually unheard of before. I can only speculate that such antics were tollerated at university and as such people though it was an attitude they could carry into the workplace. The odd thing is that part of the grad selection process involved team exercises, presentations, solving problems within a set time etc so they can clearly do it when it matters.

If you can stomach it watch breathtaking on ITVX

I was fortunate not to loose a parent in covid but my husband lost his mum. She already had lung cancer so we dont know it was covid as it was very early on but she had been doing well until this point. No tests at this time.

I found the program very triggering and it brought back many memories of those early days.

What we were being told.

Now imagine being a child and hearing all that.

Kids listen. They pick up
on everything their caregivers do. Language, tone, body language. Even if you think your not they know.

Fear was everywhere especially at first and it was very real. It was
Only a while later conspiracy theorists started.

That stuff stays with a child.

I was terrified in the 80s of aids and nuclear war. I can be more rational now but as a teen I remember being really worried about this stuff.

Add in school shit. no nhs support cost of living, climate change and war It's been a decade of stress so far.

As usual this thread has turned into an ‘us V them’. Older generations telling younger generations how flaky they are in this case. So sad and predictable. No empathy whatsoever.

It’s pointless comparing challenges from the past to challenges today. It’s like comparing apples and pears. It’s also very divisive (what isn’t lately!)

Older people should be guiding youngsters and supporting them. People in jobs like the @Namechangechangeobv should be supporting and not slating people. I’m amazed she is in the job she is the way she walks about our young people. Youth is a difficult time for most people whenever they are born!

SM is all young people have known. They have never experienced life without it and never experienced a more mindful life. Brains are continuing to grow and develop until 25. Adults have enough problems regulating and they have pre smart phone lives to fall back on so not how anybody can think saying just regulate is helpful.

Telephones were not common in houses in the 1940s. I am amazed someone thinks they were. Even in 1970 only 35% of households had a telephone. It was only in 1944 that education became compulsory between ages 5 and 15 years old. Things were very different in the 1940s just after the war.

I'm going on the experience of my parents. They had secondary and tertiary education and they had telephones at home post-war when they were children. I know because I was fascinated by them telling me about party lines.

You’ve more patience than me. I wasn’t going to bother trying to educate that poster.

You're right, I'm an idiot, my parents must have been lying to me.

I will clarify that I grew up in a different country though. I assumed the UK would have been more advanced than where I lived but apparently not.

Agree.

There are too many people imo with black and white thinking where they seem to refuse to choose not to see evident shades of grey and everything to them is on the extreme ends and they conveniently forget how algorithms work, on top of a sad lack of personal responsibility and self-awareness which was there way before Covid.

Social media and constant news makes me feel bad, then either get off of it or change what you see on it, or maybe go further and examine why it makes you feel bad and why you choose to follow things that make you feel bad. Why not take a break, delete, and/or unfollow such things. The choice is yours.

I can understand wanting to know what is going on when it comes to the news but it is typically the same thing being reported over and over and it is not always unbiased.

People openly admit that what they see on social media and what goes on in their everyday vastly differs and I often wonder if they are using social media to the extent where if it’s reported repeatedly that specific generations are xyz, they believe it over their own experiences and/or look for certain characteristics to make it true to them.

The reality lies somewhere between the two points, I think.

Previous generations had harder and easier aspects of their lives growing up.

Being away from home, for example, now is a very different and much more simply managed situation than it was 30 years ago. Contact is so much easier. Air travel is another massive change: young people can see first-hand much more of the world than a generation ago.

The internet has brought risks and harms, especially with the constancy of interaction. Teens don’t have time away from peers. But the internet has also brought astounding changes in efficiency and opportunity, for the better.

On mental health, I don’t think there’s any realistic dispute that we do catch, treat and support young people with genuine mental health concerns better than we did. That is progress, generally.

The difficulty seems to me to be what is caught in the slipstream. If we stretch the definition and identification of mental health issues so far we create problems where none really exist. Anxiety and stress are usually part of life. Labelling these things as problems creates a minority of young adults who see the world as a place to take refuge from when it’s not plain sailing and requires effort. Which leads to an expectation of dependency.

FYI both our sets of parents had idyllic WWW2 experiences. They weren’t living in cities, had very limited information and were babies who then went on to become and enjoy being boomers.

If your parents were babies in WW2 then they aren't boomers. You can't become one, you have to be born one.

Just what I was about to say!! People keep going on about phones, constant bad news, and social media as if there is no escaping it. It is a choice people make to be on social media, constantly be receiving news alerts, and even to have a phone switched on!

People seem to have lost all sense of reason, and as for blaming covid (or previous generations) for everything that is wrong A convenient cop out. But of course we couldn't have parents blaming themselves for anything that's not perfect in their children's lives!

Nobody said it was the same, it’s very different and I strongly suspect the children who were alive in WWW 1 or 2 would find today’s environment to grow up in equally as hard as today’s teens are finding it. FYI both our sets of parents had idyllic WWW2 experiences. They weren’t living in cities, had very limited information and were babies who then went on to become and enjoy being boomers. They really pity young people today. Many do, not all previous generations are sitting there puffing themselves up saying “ we are so great and had it 20 times worse”. The fact is we have to sort the damage caused by previous generations- the burning planet, Brexit fallout, online dangers and pressures, crappy education system…youngsters didn’t cause any of it. They’re just being berated and left to navigate theirselves through it. But hey let’s just carry on whining about great we all were and how crap they are- that will sort everything.🙄

Nothing kids these days are going through is anyway the same and world war 1 or 2, being online is a choice therewas no choice in the wars

But seperate to that I can picture parents of school age children or older in 50 or 100 years time still blaming covid for everything

So, many many more teens and young children are now being abused online. Times change. Pressures and dangers change . Dismissing what current teens are having to navigate and deal with because of something a group ( most of whom are no longer with us) experienced 80 years ago is frankly ridiculous and of no help what so ever.

I was shy growing up but still had to do English presentations infront of the class. My parents helped by encouraging me to practice with them as my audience and gave me other tools to help me focus rather than discourage me from doing it. Sometimes we do need to do things out of our comfort zone to realise actually we are capable and that helps in the long run. My dad also emphasised that if I got confused or lost track I would have notes to refer to, that I wouldn't be the only one nervous and that even if I did 'mess up' that was actually OK. My dd and ds did show and tell on a rotation every other week and we practiced with them to help their confidence at only 5.

Nowadays parents seem to think that their kids can opt out or just shouldn't have to do things that make them nervous. This is poor parenting because you are setting up your kid to fail. How are they going to get a job if they are too afraid to turn up to an interview? I'm not saying we all have great social skills straight away, I didn't and had to learn. It's also a lot harder for kids to get part time jobs at 16 now which for me alongside volunteering helped me learn the art of smalltalk and made my world bigger. Some kids will thrive when thrown in the deep end but others will struggle.As a parent you will recognise which your child is and should be putting measures in place to support them gain the soft skills needed.

I also think social media plays a part as do influencers. On several I have seen they are along the lines of it's ok to have bad days and if all you can do it the bare minimum then that is fine and you are 'winning'. That is fine now and again but not as a day to day.

People just don't seem to have the imagination to see just awful it would have been living through WW2. Being in lockdown just isn't comparable, especially given the many ways people were able to keep in touch with others.

Yes, and around a million British children were evacuated to live with strangers in unfamiliar surroundings. Some were, in fact, abused and some of those ended up with lasting mental health issues (but still, in the main, coped with adult life). The vast majority were sad and bewildered but they adjusted, often coming through it as a very positive experience.

My daughter has had a myriad of setbacks and missed quite a lot of schooling due to her diagnosis. However she's now 18 and never misses a days work. Yet many older staff are flaking all around her constantly. I'm not sure you can come to a conclusion that a whole generation are less resilient. Surely some are and aren't at different ages and stages.

@TempestTost I agree the isolation of lockdowns was hard. But if you were living in a city that was being bombed and had your male relatives fighting in the war, then that was very tough.
In WWII there were 384,000 soldiers killed in combat, and 700,000 civilians died in the UK. There were 41 million people living in the UK just before the start of the war. Nearly 1 in 40 people died living in the UK. And many of these were young adults.

More awareness about mh
More strictness and rules in schools coupled with a lack of resources and fatigued staff..
My situation is the same as forhecksake
It's not that they won't its because they can't.

I am not sure the pandemic is very comparable to things like WWII.

In many ways the war was much worse. But in general, people were able to carry on seeing each other, and in fact it made many communities that much more dependent upon each other.

It was the weird isolation of the pandemic that was so damaging and I think it's largely unprecedented. It would never have been possible to have people isolate on that scale in the past, for more than a week or so. There were odd examples of people who had to quarantine, but that was the few actually ill with a virulent communicable disease. And even the ones in sanatoriums and such were with other people!

Lots of middle aged and older people struggle with trauma. But you do have to get on with work and life. You only have one life. And life can get harder as you age.