To feel sad watching all these kids going to school

Oh I hear you, I'm very concerned at the moment. I hate Labour!! Hoping they're voted out soon.

But it’s what it is. When I graduated and bought a house, I was paying probably 10 times what my parents paid 30 years previous. Things change over time and the generation of that time adapt as they know nothing different.

@ReadingSoManyThreads We are retired and we did all of that! Labour will find a way to tax it! Our pension savings? Our home if we downsize? Money we’ve saved for dc? Everything worked for. I’m now having sleepless nights about what dc might not get. I feel betrayed really.

My boys found out at 13 that they could earn money, that with that money they could spend it how they liked!.
They helped at a function when adult staff failed to turn up and got paid at the end of the night and when I explained to them that is was their money, they earned it, they didn’t need to give it to me and perhaps they could combine it and buy the second Xbox they wanted me to buy, ( I’ll be honest buying the first one took me almost 3 weeks of my own wage).
Even since they have worked, all through school and college, finally leaving school and obtaining full time jobs.
I used to worry about their futures and their lives as adults, but it was unfounded and they are living their lives as they see fit, both doing well, so much so that come our retirement, we decided abroad is so much better than the UK!.
kids can and will thrive, if they work at it!.

The EU will be no better! Some countries will actually be worse off and prospects poorer! So not sure about the smugness that’s coming across!

This is exactly why we are ensuring both of our children will have a home and an income when they become adults. Neither my DH or I will ever receive inheritances, we've built up what we've got through our own hard work and wise financial planning. Even though our children are young, we already teach them about being financially responsible and the importance of savings and investing over needless spending.

And what happens when you retire? Pension/ retirement income is typically lower than earned income during your working years, the idea being that you’ve finished bringing up your children and you’ve paid off your mortgage. I wouldn’t want to go into retirement worrying about paying rent.

Only if the ropes, harnesses and other equipment are safe and quality checked with an audit trail for each and every component used. AI will probably be ace at dealing with those records!

Every generation has its challenges. I try to only think on the bright side. Humans are ingenious, we should be able to work it out. The danger is letting doomism overwhelm you. As long as we’re not dead we can still keep living.

In part because of that true.

That's partly because people doing those jobs - largely minimum wage ones - cannot live on those wages in places where the staff are needed.

And yet the supermarkets, logistics companies, food producers, bars, hotels, transport providers, recycling and refuse companies etc etc all still struggle to find enough staff.

I get what you are saying, but I have voted YABU.

My eldest started school yesterday. Rather than dread his future, i am already conscious of trying to prepare and do everything i can to support his future. One of those things is to support financially if needed, as i recognise things are harder than when i was starting out.

It makes me feel less guilty about being a working parent as well. I know anything can happen, but for me, continuing to earn money while my kids are in nursery will be good for everyone in the long run.

I get what you mean about home ownership though. I had awful experiences of private renting, which i believe is partly due to the lack of regulations in this country compared to others. So my aim would be help my kids when they are older with housing costs.

@Penelopepetunia You will inherit that bonus though! The ones whose parents never bought are the ones with less.

I'm excitedly waiting for the day when a robot vacuum cleaner can recognise a shoe lace and not try to throttle itself with it.

I’m not sure how old you are OP but for my cohort, graduating from top 10 universities in the mid 90s, it was very much a struggle. Even those on grad schemes weren’t in a position to buy their first flat until the age of 30 or so if working in London. It was definitely a struggle financially and many of us were living below the poverty line for a few years after graduating. Not saying that it’s not challenging for young adults now, but I keep seeing threads conflating what it was like for some boomers (an anomaly) with the experience of generations before and after.

Oh gosh, this made me chuckle - old and ill and ugly definitely isnt pretty, I agree! I'd give my right arm to be young and healthy again after a decade of poor health, after a head injury and post concussion syndrome before being injured by an off label antipsychotic 😢

Youth is definitely wasted on the young...!

Funnily enough, i have sort of been able to access to health care of the "future" and had a pharmacogenetics test that showed that I couldn't metabolise the drug types like antidepressants and antipsychotics. Shame it was something that i knew after being injured and having a permanent neurological movement disorder 😕

We’ve accepted our kids will be living with us a lot longer and consequently will not be charging them rent/keep provided they all save up towards a house deposit

It’s not just houses though - we’ve a son who has just passed his driving test. Trying to find a car that’s even reasonably priced is insane - and then the insurance is ridiculous. £3k insurance on a ten year old Ford Fiesta that’s costing £5.5k - make it make sense!!!!

My sister bought a house in 2000 for £65k - it’s now worth £500k. Our house was bought ten years ago for £128k and is now worth £250k.

And there’s a new estate near us selling ‘first time buyer’ properties for £350k!!! Tiny 2 up 2 down style properties with hardly any garden. We are in the North West of England for reference.

The entire country is utterly f*cked.

I think it is much much harder for the younger ones.

My parents- mother stayed home, no childcare and they lived in a university post grad apartment at like £10 all bills included whilst they saved for a house. Mother not working within a year they brought. They soon saved enough for another house which they rented and a property abroad.

As a young single parent earning a decent salary £40 K they said they would help me to buy - all I needed to do was save a deposit. I gave them my income, rent, bills and childcare written down - they wasn’t a penny left nothing. I was in a 2 bed flat. They berated me and said I needed to live cheaper - how?? Just how.

My salary has gone up 6 K in the last 20 years. My outgoings are huge- without my husband we wouldn’t have this house. He paid for it. Meanwhile my parents house for which they paid £70K in 1980 is now worth over £800 K - they can’t see it. Not a 100% increase that would be £140 K my parents could never see it. Ever.

It's not AI which we need to fear, it's greed, and those at the top increasing their already vast wealth while everyone else's standard of living goes down, when there is absolutely no need for it to.

@abathofmilkwithladydi the cognitive dissonance is strong!

The key is to teach your child to think for themselves. In general, technology is neutral. It's up to us what we do with it. Yes, a teenager can use the internet to look at pornography and visit self-harm websites. But they can also use it to order any book from anywhere in the world. Imagine a clever 15-year-old girl who has started reading, say, Virginia Woolf or Jane Austen. When I was young, if you wanted to find out more about a writer (or artist or singer), you'd have to get a bus into town, go into the local library, and hope there was a biography on the shelf. Now, at the click of a mouse, you can find out limitless information. You can print off essays on their novels, or order any book ever written on them to your door.

Assuming climate change and nuclear weapons don't wipe us out, our medicine should improve exponentially. Truth is, we're still in the medical dark ages. We can barely cure a thing. Not only do we have no cure for cancer or dementia or Parkinsons or MS, we can't even cure things like male pattern baldness or acne or hemorrhoids or insomnia or depression. Yes, we can 'treat' them. But so can a tribal witch doctor. And, frankly, in some cases I'd have more faith in the witch doctor. Like most people I have all sorts of chronic, niggling miseries – insomnia, migraines, anxiety, back problems, etc. Nothing works.

I was listening to someone on a podcast who said that by the late 2030s (when today's primary school kids are in their 20s), people will look at photos and videos of their grandparents in disbelief. They'll shake their heads and say "eww, yuk, did people really used to look like that?" Thanks to advances in nanotech and gene editing and anti-ageing drugs, people in the future will look much younger and prettier than they do today. It's hard to see how that can be a bad thing. As an ugly teen, I can tell you it's horrible being unattractive. Absolutely horrible. If gene editing can make everyone young and beautiful, then great. Being old and ill and ugly is dreadful.

Yes, the young face problems. In 1900 the world's population was one billion. Today it's eight billion, and we're going to hit ten billion right in the middle of climate meltdown. Births may be falling in the West, but in Africa the birth rate is so high the African population is going to double. Then of course there's nuclear weapons and the unpredictable impact of AI. But my god they have a lot to be exited about as well.

Architecture is already going to AI - my architect has been telling me all about it.

Which is why, as a society, we need to reconfigure the centrality of property ownership to ideas of a good life.

I suppose the difference is people of our generation had the opportunity for both of those options.