The youth of today are the unhappiest ever

[Unfinishedkitchen]

www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/05/young-people-have-never-been-unhappier-research-suggests

Some are stabbing each other. Some are killing themselves. Some can’t escape social media bullying. The nihilism, hopelessness, anger and hate is rising. Its like many of them see no real future. It feels like we’re entering a dystopian age. It scares me. Our country is sick and the youth are displaying the most painful symptoms.

There is far too much pressure to be academic. My sons teacher recently asked me if he could attend morning revision sessions for SATs and I refused. My son really struggles at school and I have seen his self esteem drop this year. His teachers frustration at his low ability is palpable and I count the days until he leaves. What she doesn't know is that he recently told me wants to die because of how this all makes him feel. . Not to sound flippant, but I don't think he really does. It's more an expression of his frustration. We have agreed to go though a SATs paper once a week at home and that's it and he's a different boy. I will not dance to this tune of testing and categorising young children based on two subjects. Once they leave primary it doesn't matter anyway.

We are raising spoiled children in a much to overprotective society. Children are growing up with a sense of entitlement that is beyond precedence and no sense of resilience at all. They can't cope with any stress, everything they don't like doing turns into anxiety and therefore something to be avoided at all costs. Parents feel guilty if they can't give them expensive toys when they are baby, send them the local school when it's not outstanding, choose to get into debts so that they can buy the latest gadgets or expensive clothing, feel their child will fall into depression if they can't go on the ridiculously expensive school trip etc....

Next to all this, you have children who are continuing to grow in completely dysfunctional families, that have been increasing in size because tax credits allowed it. Kids who get very little attention, with terrible role modelling and couldn't possibly believe there could have a future when all they see around them is people who think that not working is an achievement.

Once they leave primary it doesn't matter anyway.

Well, actually, it does a bit, although I can see why you're hacked off with it all.

Dangerousmonkey I did NOT say it was all down to shit parenting. I said I suspect in SOME instances and anyone who thinks every parent in this country does a great job by their children is a fool. And I am NOT talking about awful circumstances where, say, someone is left widowed and does their very best. I am talking about a set of parents who basically do fuck all and leave their kids mostly to their own devices and do not tell me that doesn't happen because I have eyes that see it.

Someone from the very communities most affected yesterday specifically mentioned the lack of fathers playing an active role IS part of the problem in the rise in gang culture in the black community.

I think it may be connected to the huge disparity in wealth in this country. Comparison is the thief of joy and all that - and yes social media and 'reality' tv make the vast inequalities much more obvious. On the thread about the 1970s it was striking about people living in fairly poor circumstances but crucially they felt everyone had the same circumstances so it didn't really bother them.

wowLookAtYou I have a child in secondary and IMO it really isn't important. The sats are used for gcse predictions but that would only be an issue if they were overly optimistic. DS grades will be lower than DD's but that doesn't mean the secondary will only aim for lower grades if he improves. Whereas the pressure to achieve higher grades is much harder to deal with. The sets are based on SATs and the schools own tests and then the children are moved about quite a bit anyway.

Wowlookatyou - how do they? (Serious question from a secondary teacher, not goady)
We use SATs to calculate target grades for GCSE and that’s it. We do our own skills tests in proper exam conditions and set according to our perception of ability, not SATs or target grade. I’ve found SATs to be wildly inaccurate at judging children’s ability - although the stories of cheating we hear from the kids are always interesting!

That's been my experience Holiday but I didn't realise all this until I had a child in secondary. DD's sats are very good and as a result her gcse predictions are good. However, as her school cheated they aren't realistic. I am planning on supporting dd and telling her to aim for her best and not the predicted grade but that won't help her secondary school teachers who have to explain why she won't reach the predicted grades. The whole system is broken. How can dd have predicted grades for topics she hadn't even done? Bonkers.

I'm always up for a spot of doom and gloom, but I think we need to be wary of assuming our kids are all definitely going to hell in a handcart.

The older generation has worried about the younger since the dawn of time. This is nothing new.

We don't get them because they're growing up with periphery (internet, phones, social media, etc) that we don't have experience of at that age.

I honestly don't believe that this generation has it any harder than, say, young 'uns growing up in 1800 when they were being beaten and sent up chimneys for a living, no idea where their next meal was coming from.

A deep breath and a bit of perspective helps one not to feel completely fatalistic about it all. 💗

I work with vulnerable children and young people and the thing they most frequently report as causing them worry and unhappiness is, without a doubt, academic stress.

The current culture of subjecting kids to constant exams and assessments means from such a young age means that instead of instilling a love of learning in young people we are instilling a fear of failure which can result in perfectionism, or at the other end of the scale a feeling of "what's the point? I'll never be good enough so why bother".

The Year 11's I work with are expect to attend after school revision sessions every evening and then revise for at least 2 more hours when they get home, because the sheer amount of material they're expected to understand and commit to memory for their 25+ GCSE exams is completely unrealistic. They're all tying themselves in knots, telling me they're "not good enough" and that they can't sleep or eat because they're so worried about their exams. But this is all starting in primary. Many parents tell me they're constantly struggling to get their primary school aged kids to bed at a reasonable time in the evenings, let alone enjoy any family time, because they have so much homework to do. Parents feel they have to fork out for extra Maths and English tuition they can't really afford because they're already panicking that their DC "isn't achieving" at an age where in many countries they wouldn't have started school yet!

Yes, social media is certainly a factor in unhappiness for many kids but it's a symptom of the problem, not the cause. Kids are becoming so reliant on social media and online gaming because they're using it as escapism, to temporarily get away from the pressure they're feeling. Of course the content of what they're seeing online just compounds their stress but it's no different to adults using unhealthy coping strategies like gambling, drinking, online shopping, comfort eating etc. You know it's going to make you feel worse in the long run but the temporary escape from your problems you feel when you're doing it is addictive.

joanofnarc she’s very lucky to have a mother as sane as you, lots of parents act as though GCSE targets are set in stone —not bullshit numbers pulled out of the air by someone who never even MET The kid
By GCSE age though they’re all pretty attuned to the bullshit. I find it immensely frustrating that SATs cheating is so rampant, if we did that in secondary we’d lose our exams licence instantly, and my pay is impacted by if children met their target grades. The system stinks...

I agree with Shatners in that you can't deny a lot of unhappiness amoungst the youth is down to shit/absent parenting. Not always certainly, but it's really naive to think it's not there.

The most unhappy girl I know is from a fairly affluent family. She lives with her mother who herself is social media obsessed and dysfunctional. The dd's father is in her life but fairly emotionally unavailable too. Her dd is 14 and desperately unhappy. She hugely overweight but swings from binges to self harm to bulliemia.

My Dsis is a governor fir child welfare at a private school and says the levels of unhappiness amoungst students is huge - not due to poverty, low aspirations or even particularly social media (although I'm sure that doesn't help) but due to complete absent parenting. The levels of drugs and alcohol abuse is rife.

The current violence in London is complex and I wouldn't want to even begin to comment on why but I'm certain it's extremely complex, however lack of stable supportive parents must contribute to levels of unhappiness and feelings of being 'lost'

@ShatnersWig it's got shit all to do with iPhones. That's just a convenient excuse people use because they don't want to look at the real issues.

Today's young people are growing up in a world which has never been more hostile. Many of them won't remember a time before 'austerity', meaning their entire childhoods have taken place amid huge cuts to services they rely on - their schools and their communities are failing to thrive because they are perennially underfunded.

Because wages have fallen in real terms and because unemployment is high, a quarter of kids in this county are also growing up in poverty. This is a vicious cycle which leads to them to do less well in school and earn less as adults.

Today's young people are the first generation who aren't growing up in the expectation that they will be as well off or better off than their parents. Traditional expectations, like buying a home, are unattainable dreams for millions of young people.

Lack of funding for mental health services means that thousands of young people can't access help for depression or feeling suicidal.

Young people are fully aware of issues like global warming and plastic pollution and yet see our leaders consistently failing to effectively regulate the industries causing these things and fail to meet carbon and plastic reduction targets. There is a floating patch of plastic twice the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean and nobody is doing anything about it.

And on top of this, young people are demonised in the media as being entitled, lazy and narcissistic.

And you think the problem is SMARTPHONES? wake up and stop making excuses for the real problems that lead to youth unhappiness. Smart phones are a tool that may expose children to issues that make them unhappy, but that doesn't change the fact that we have to resolve those issues if we are going to fix this problem.

Catspaws Again, I didn't say it was ONLY to do with phones. You talk about mental health and kids with depression. I know about that from personal experience. But there are kids who have depression and mental health issues because of bullying, a lot of which now happens on social media via their phones. There are young women with self esteem issues who feel they have to compete and do the constant selfie pout thing which then leads to, yes, more bullying. Young teenage boys have more access to pornography than ever before and that leads to other issues, such as persuasion of girls to use snapchat and send photos they really shouldn't.

If you think phones and social media don't play A PART then you're being ridiculous. And I know many social workers, teachers, school governors and, most importantly, psychologists who say this.

It's a multi-pronged problem, not due to just one thing - and I never said it WAS. But they DO contribute to it. How do you think half these gangs communicate with each other to arrange what they get up to? Yep....

There are undoubtedly pressures on young people these days from various quarters, but as someone else has said, I think that some elders have always worries about society's youth since time immemorial.
Plus, I have to say it, years ago, no one knew if young people were depressed etc or not because no one asked them: young people were not seen as so important, it seems to me, in days gone by.

A lot of changes have happened but I’m sure this generation will make changes for their own, just as our generation has made changes for this unhappy generation

Oh and I know about poverty. I'm 44 and all my clothes came from jumble sales, bar school uniform, until I was 13. We were the only family in my primary school that didn't have a phone at home (which we got when I was 11). What's this expectation of home ownership only applying to the current generation? My parents lived in a run down rented home that smelt of damp, had electricity on a meter. We were able to afford a dog which actually killed the rats. Don't fucking talk about poverty to me as if I didn't fucking know what it was thank you.

Well done Catspaws.

They are never good enough

Absolutely. Kids are constantly tested and told they must improve and constantly strive to do the best they possibly can (actually adults get this in work too).

You are constantly told you need to give your all to school / work. And then people are shocked to find a child / adult is left utterly drained and miserable.

I don't want t to give the impression I don't are about SATs or exams. I do to an extent. But they have to be put into perspective. No one is going to care what you got in your SATs or what set you were in during secondary when you are 25. There is room for everyone, the academic and the practical. My 10 year old telling me how wanted to die because if the pressure was a wake up call.

Excuse typos..

What total and utter nonsense. A child born in 1870 was in danger of contracting measles, small pox, mumps, scarlet fever, polio or getting scurvy or rickets due to poor nutrition. Their chances of living to 2 years were very low and of living to five years only marginally higher. There were no protections whatsoever from abuse - in fact, it was pretty normal to beat children and sexual abuse wasn't talked about at all. Many children had limited access to education and many others worked in horrific conditions from a very young age, dying in their thousands in horrible accidents. If you became disabled in any way you were entirely fucked and if your family feel on hard times it was starvation or the poor house which was often a fate worse than death.

If you were a girl you had no rights whatsoever - you couldn't access any education and you couldn't have any sort of career (but you could work a menial job for much less pay than a man). You had no access to property and if you got raped then you would be shamed and shunned by your community. If you got pregnant out of wedlock your life was guaranteed to be hellish. Your only option really was to get married and your husband could rape and beat you at will or leave you at any point leaving you destitute.

A person born in 1896 would have been 20 when WW1 started, in the prime of life and just about begin adulthood, and 43 when WW2 started, still recovering from WW1 and trying to build a life. They would have fought in one or both wars and/or lost family and friends in both.

The idea that this generation is the unhappiest ever is a total joke. It's more that in previous generations happiness didn't really come into it - just surviving was a struggle. Now we have everything we need we expect more, and sometimes there just isn't more.

I agree with a pp who mentioned a 'winners and losers' society. I think it's easy to feel a failure now, maybe our expectations have changed? (don't think that's just caused by social media though). It affects adults as well. School does seem to be a lot higher pressure than even in the early 2000s when I was at school, I'm not sure what kids who aren't academic do, there don't seem to be many options for them.

I don't really think it's caused by smartphones or social media, I just think our society in general has become more competitive and harsh. Just look at the media and attacks on anyone it sees as a 'scrounger' or 'skiver', the kind of language that's used against people who are unemployed/sick/have mental health issues etc.

Why our government constantly look at the Shanghai teaching methods for inspiration I will never know.
Children’s performance can’t be measured like a car salesman’s. So neither can the schools.

I want my children’s childhood to be a happy content one to grow into a happy well rounded child who is as interested and well educated in geography and science as maths.