Flaxmeadow - I agree.
My childhood was a mess, in a lot of ways, and very much up and down, depending on what state my parents were in and who I was living with. It swung from riding lessons and holidays, new clothes and toys and books almost weekly, attending super selective schools, to unheated, overcrowded flats with no plaster on the walls, no working cooker, shoes that were falling apart, and back again. Looking back, it taught me a lot. It certainly taught me how to cope in multiple different environments and with different resources.
My husband, on the other hand, grew up very comfortable, and was never challenged or allowed to take any risk. He has no 'coping ability' at all, and anything even slightly adverse is a huge deal.
He's a lovely bloke and he loves our daughter to bits. But, in many ways, he's a source of stress, not a reduction of it, because he cannot plan, cannot cope in a crisis, cannot take ownership of an issue or effectively solve a problem. It means people avoid telling him 'negatives' or giving him challenges, because it's easier to just deal with everything without involving him. Even DD's started to spot it, and is starting to show that she won't lean on him unless she's made to. She's 10.
We've had times when he's gotten quite upset about not being asked to do things, and I've tried to push back and 'handover' tasks to complete but the reality is, whenever that happens, whatever it is proverbially proves the straw the broke the camel's back, and it all becomes a huge drama.
It can be draining, having to constantly gee him up, smooth his path, just listening to the man complain about what are minor inconveniences. They're not minor to him, because he's never been subject to a less than ideal environment, but to me - it's neither here nor there. That doesn't make me 'better' in any way - I'm well aware that what I would consider stressful, someone else would laugh at - but he is an extreme example.
And he is an example, I think, of why people are getting stroppy a bit, and starting to use words like 'snowflake' and 'lack resilience', because there seem to be a lot like him around, and its hard to listen to people catastrophising over the loss of a privilege others have never had.
The furlough scheme is the classic example. So many complaints about 'how are we going to cope' on the cap, and zero understanding that there are hundreds of thousands of families who could only dream of having that as their biggest challenge.