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

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And WTF do we do about it?

Obviously many young people are wonderfully resilient but the overall trend I’ve seen in my line of work (behavioural education) is that there are vast, and I mean VAST numbers of young adults who cannot leave the house, come into a classroom, look someone in the eye, make a phone call, speak infront of the class (if they make it in), cry when pronouns are wrong (daily occurrence), take responsibility to revise/get a job/learn to drive.

What is going to happen to these humans in the future?

Maybe the parents need to take the mobile phone away from their child or heavily restrict their use of a mobile, after al that is heir job.
I lived in a flat with 3 under 5 and i worked, i also had a husband who could be away 9 months of the year, they had outside time most days even of it was only a walk round the block.

Please consider that there are some kids/teens/young people who have NOT been mollycoddled by their parents who are still unable to do things due to anxiety.

My DS has always been pushed into doing things out of his comfort zone but it has NOT worked for him and short of using a cattle prod on him I'm not sure what else could be done. He is one of the people who can't use a bus, go to school, speak to people etc. I can assure you that we as parents have tried (and are trying) our absolute hardest but he is autistic and I think that there are certain things that are outside of his comfort zone at the moment.

We have another child who is the total opposite and is outgoing, capable and resilient. Brought up by the same two parents.

Please don't be quick to judge.

No, well I don't mean to say that, I don't know any Academics (uni professors etc) I was trying to suggest that resilience is a trait that some people have and others don't, it is across the generations and jobs etc.

I had a GAD (I don’t consider myself to have it anymore). It involved retreat and then eventually forcing myself to do things. That often meant getting ready 2 hours early because I needed to give myself a chance to sit naked and sweat for a bit before getting cleaned up and doing it anyway.

I completely agree with previous posters about anxiety being worsened by avoidance. It got better the more things I did and knew I survived to tell the tale. The longer a child is absent the harder it is for them to go back. It gets larger and larger in their heads (what have I missed out on in school social life, what is everyone talking about now). The approach taken now seems to be about “kindness” rather than actual improvement. I would have been fucking delighted if someone said “oh going to x makes you anxious, well you don’t have to go”. Except I would never have got better and I wouldn’t have been able to support myself.

My Dh is very cautious with DD and always encouraging her to be safe while I shout over his shoulder “YOLO!!! JUMP!!”. He doesn’t understand, he thinks he’s protecting her but actually he is teaching her she’s not competent to judge risk and that she should always be careful and it’s all too much. I took her back to the same activity she didn’t want to do for something like 6 months before she would step inside the room by herself. It was hard there was a lot of crying, but she bloody loves it now. At 4 she has a bunch of similar examples of being scared and then overcoming it to do something new and we go over them when she’s worried “do you remember when you were scared of x but you gave it a go and….”. I’m trying to show her that she can try things, she can be by herself and be fine, she can handle it. It’s bloody hard sometimes but she now says things like “no I’m resilient, I’m going to do this by myself, I’m not giving up”. I absolutely steadfastly refuse to allow her to live like I did for most of my life.

I read a few studies on school refusal (I linked them in another thread, you can google) and one element that I thought was interesting was co-dependency with a parent (there were kids from families that were very distant and at the other end families who were emeshed). I think COVID disrupted the normal stuff most young people do slowly, go to town by yourself, get on a bus by yourself, many kids were cosily tucked away in a really safe environment (sadly not the case for all kids) which was probably quite nice, teen years are brutal. Maybe kids didn’t get as much of a chance to do the natural pulling away from parents and some parents are going to be more likely to shove their kids out the doors than others.

I know I sound brutal but I am talking as someone who had a pretty bad anxiety disorder and I’ve overcome it. Yeah I still feel anxious sometimes, this is normal and human but I don’t have a disorder. I worry that young people can’t tell the difference between “I feel anxious in this moment” and “I have an anxiety disorder”.

Oh give over you have no bloody idea. None at all. It’s not that easy with mobile phones, trust me I tried.

Are you actually serious? You realise others come from abusive homes or have real trauma happen in their lives and they’re far more resilient? Kids from third world countries where just having clean water is a challenge, never mind a chance to go to school and they manage without crying every 5 minutes and moaning about their mental health. Being out of school for a year is not some big traumatic, life changing event that removes any resilience. In fact you’ll find hard situations tend to increase resilience if anything.
Get some perspective.

The pandemic wasn’t good for resilience (except perhaps for essential workers) and I personally think young people should not be allowed to work from home for at least the first 5 years of their career.

Once someone has become disciplined enough to physically go to an office, regardless of lack of sleep, and cope with all a normal day’s work throws at them, then maybe consider WFH occasionally.

Parents should also stop regarding sending their children to school as optional, unless they are actually ill. A little tired, go to school; a slight sore throat, go to school; hamster died; go to school etc etc

Routines build strong mental health and resilience, making thing optional depending on how you feel does the reverse.

My relatives who are mainstream teachers say the same thing - something is wrong now, starting with attendance, which is down. They also believe part of the problem is the irrelevant curriculum. Students say there is no need to know "x" and it is hard to argue with them most of the time.

In the work place, I see people claiming "work-life balance" and "anxiety" as a way to stop going into the office or agreeing to new tasks or even changing a process that needs to be changed. (I am in the states.)

And how much were you working- full time during your children's’ entire childhood? 3 under 5 in a flat. Not much of an issue really as under 5s aren’t generally able to go out on their own.

For me, resilience starts young.

Children need lots of play, try and fail type toys, try and change toys, things to return to, toys to help with problem solving, a chance to be independent, to think for themselves.
This includes jigsaw, construction toys, small world play and lots of time outside.
Teens need to realise ( and parents too) that not all children are ‘neuro-diverse’ - they just have different personalities, needs and interests. They require parental support to develop strategies to meet their own needs.

My DC’s are older - as a student, a sudden claim of MH issues was followed by lots of conversation, lots of checking in and unpicking. This uncovered a young adult who was a procrastinator, unable to manage time and failing through last minute pressures of assignments to complete. Strategies shared and adopted to improve time management, lessened the anxiety of completing work and increased DC’s success, resilience and self reliance and motivation.

In time, DC could recognise and laugh about ‘being just lazy’! ( and disorganised and tired from too many parties). He recognised procrastination as part of his personality. ( goodness me he was always last out of the changing rooms at age right, last to put his coat on to get in the car).

I'm not saying this is the case for all, I was very careful in listening and supporting and if genuine MH issues were evident the support would have been different. However, having personality traits does not mean there are MH issues.

Yep. I've got many middle aged/older client who are verging on being incompetent in "normal" life skills, but are brilliant and successful in their chosen trade/vocation/profession.

Simple (to most people) things like paying a bill on time are alien to some of them and they end up in difficulties by missing deadlines, incurring penalty charges, even down to seeing more parking fines than an "average" client. They just struggle with normal life. Incapable of doing comparison websites so end up staying with the same mobile company, Sky/Virgin TV, insurance, utilities, etc paying through the nose but just can't bring themselves to do a bit of research and change to cheaper options.

It never used to be like this. I've been doing my job for 40 years and back when I started most people were competent in life skills, and those that weren't (usually those who couldn't read nor write) got someone else to do it for them, usually a spouse or relative/friend. Now, there's a kind of ingrained "helplessness" not only in the young but in those aged in their 30s, 40 and 50s too. Strangely, I don't see it as much in older people, i.e. those who have retired.

In my (limited) experience, I think something's being going wrong for a few decades and it's just getting worse.

This is absolutely true . I am always amazed at the number of threads from people making a huge deal of minor friendship issues

I think we can't under estimate the effect of lockdown and the wider Covid pandemic on young people .

What I see from my son and his friendship group who are all early 20s is a group of youngsters who are mainly confident and hardworking - but couple with struggles - one minor and the other major. I don't know if that would be replicated across other areas or even across older age groups .

I’m not sure silencing this debate is massively helpful to young people, it really is something that needs to be discussed. I’m sorry if you can’t see it was started in good faith.

It does frighten me how the right hijack this as an example of how ‘lefty’ ‘woke’ principles have damaged our youth when infact it’s apparent that the mismanagement of the country over the past 14 years has caused huge problems.

I'm an academic. I currently have two of my managers off with stress and there's always at least one member off staff in the dept off with stress.

I'm also a bit concerned that none of the academics or educators on this thread have referenced any actual research.

Right. Please don’t dismiss neurodiversity as just having different interests. It’s far more than that.

My parents were Boomers and were quite comfortable inhabiting the mindset of not wanting your children to feel like they were failures, particularly my Mum. It is anecdotal but I don't think resilience is a generational trait, I think it is a personality trait.

I guess "life skills" now involves a lot more tech than it used to and a lot of people of all ages have a struggle with it at times.

I work in education and completely agree with you. It is concerning to see.

They are so much more free to say how they fell, which, in a way, is good.
But afyer addressing how you fell, you should look for the reasons and the solutions, yourself!
I think the parenting and education that they had is too blame of a good %. It is like they stopped there. I feel sad, followed by tears. And then a grown up (now, replaced by manager) takes over.
Children, teens and young adults do need to learn to deal with their feelings on their own. Raise it at work when is relevant.

All true.

Nah, they'll be fine. Every older generation (like us) has thought this about the younger ones. We were all fine, really. And the GenZs and millennials will be fine too!

No need to stress about the young 'uns.

@Realityisreal I’m so sorry to hear that your son suffered so badly, I had a very similar experience and also had a breakdown at uni. I’m really pleased that he is getting help. If it helps, I’m almost 30 now and things do get better! I still have tough times but the burdens are lighter to carry.

I think young people are the opposite of cossetted and are put under a lot of pressure to perform well academically. Universities all want As for courses that required Cs a few years ago.

And not many other options or alternative routes are given for those who are not academic, or are capable of getting qualifications but not at the prescribed time 16 or 18. It's either you get As or you're a failure.

It's certainly not that they aren't allowed to fail, it's that so many are made to feel like failures.

The irrelevant curriculum is nothing new nor recent. Most of it has been irrelevant for a few decades. I.e. trying to teach pythagoras to kids who don't know the basics such as times tables or prime numbers is never going to end well! Likewise trying to teach Shakespeare to kids who can barely read and write!

I know these days people say they don't need to know much history, geography, etc., because it's all easily accessible via google, but the same applied decades ago when people had books or encyclopaedias or maps! Likewise with engineers/mathematicians - they didn't memorise everything, they had "props" such as log books, slide rules, etc., so just needed to know how to use them.

What I could never understand was, say, in Maths or Physics exams, you'd get some equations on the back page (or separate sheet) to help you, but not all. I remember thinking it was particularly strange for them to give you the equation for the volume of a sphere but not the volume of a cone. Just why??? In real life, today you'd google it, but back then, you'd just open your book of equations if you needed to do it for your job - school students only need to know that there IS an equation and how to extract the relevant numbers and work out the equation.

But it's a lot worse now and a huge amount of the curriculum is pretty irrelevant. We need to be concentrating on research, comprehension, understanding, rather than learning things we'll never need to know once we leave school!

But it’s not a generational thing - I’ve done this job for bloody years! It’s a recent thing. Started a while before lockdown and has been exacerbated by it. This is new and it’s scary. There is such a huge divide between those who can function in our weird ass society and those who can’t. And the numbers of those who can’t are growing every year.