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

[Namechangechangeobv]

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?

This, exactly.

As the first lines of two brilliant Manic Street Preachers' songs so aptly say:

"The future teaches you to be alone
The present to be afraid and cold"
(If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next)

And:

"The gap that grows between our lives
The gap our parents never had"
(The Everlasting)

🤔😳😫

Oh fuck off. My parents generation lived through the second world War. My dad fought in the middle east, my mum worked in the munitions factory and Liverpool like many cities was blitzed.
My uncle was a POW in Burma and was damaged for life.
We have produced a generation of 20 year olds who need trigger warnings for books.
We spent far too much time pandering to "mental health" of young people which is a gross insult to those poor sods who really do have mental health issues as opposed to being upset because someone used the wrong pronoun

I wasn't talking about 20 year olds so Im not sure why you thought I was?

Apparently despite all those experiences of your parents they still couldnt bring up a child who could be polite to someone who has an opinion you disagree with

Perhaps you need a little resilience to help you with that?

Turning up to be taught by a string of supply teachers who might be excellent teachers but simply don't know the kids, or be teaching the subject they trained in.

My son (14) is pretty resilient and happy but he's pretty ambivalent about school.

I think this is a good point and demonstrates how overused the word ‘resilience’ is on here. What appeared to be resilience in previous generations (gen x and boomers) was just buried down emotions and came out later as trauma.

Alcoholism for example is rife amongst my peers and my parents peers. Stiff upper lip was the way forward.

Perhaps we weren’t more ‘resilient’. We just buried it down as children should be seen and not heard don’t you know.

I think the fact that children/teens today have the confidence/rights to say NO, to stand up for themselves and to say enough is enough is testament to the fact that they have more rights than ever before and I think this is triggering for many older people.

I actually think gen z are pretty cool. I don't think there's anywhere near as much angst and nihilistic tendency amongst them as the media likes to portray! My daughter is almost 14, and she's infinitely more savvy and grounded than I was at that age.
The idea that something is set to destroy our youth (for my gen it was satellite tv, computer games, video nasties and such like) is a tale as old as time.

And at the left of the political spectrum, the social cachet translates directly into political power. I used to be in the Greens and watched the Disabled group become overrun with people who self-identified as ASD, just as the women’s group had become overrun with people who self-identified as non-men.

Me and my friend were talking about this the other day. We were both neglected when we were young, in different ways but legit both experienced real abuse. My friend is successful in traditional sense, brilliant job etc, and I am in my own way. We agreed that because of this neglect we developed resilience and we’ve both overcome things which other people couldn’t even begin to understand how. Now that’s not to say everyone who experiences neglect is resilient, or that everyone should be neglected to develop resilience. Far from it. What we both came to realise that if we didn’t have quality professional support in our lives when we were growing up in those formative adolescent years, we wouldn’t be in the places we find ourselves today.

Anyway, what I’m trying to get at is that it doesn’t matter whether these kids have got resilience or not, they’re clearly not doing well and there needs to be proper investment in professionals who are trained properly and remunerated fairly for the important work they need to do with these kids. Because it’s so important they get quality support so these don’t become long standing problems stretching into adulthood.

My gen z graduates at work are frigging fantastic tbf so I don't recognise many of these stereotypes either

But then going by some posters complaints of anyone between the age of about 5 to their mid 30s I think some posters dont even know which generation they are moaning about anyway, just the younger ones

I am still waiting for all the serial killers or whatever it was video games were supposed to turn us all into though

I also think this weaponisation of the word ‘resilience’ is a convenient unintelligent way of blaming people (here young people) for the issues in society rather than looking at the society/ environment we have placed our young people in.

The concept of resilience is used to victim blame and psychologically bash people about. It’s a passive aggressive tactic/weapon used to person blame.

I’d counsel OP to think through her use of the word and think a little more deeply about WHY the young people in her care are struggling so much.

I don't see the term resilience as a convenient, unintelligent way to blame people.

I see resilience as a kit for coping with what the world throws at you. People with resilience will still feel the anxiety, worry and fear - but they will have positive coping strategies and an inner dialogue which helps them rationalise situations, seek solutions rather than only seeing problems. It's positive and empowering.
If you're resilient you still experience the same situations as everyone else, you just have personal inner strength to help you cope with it.

Resilience is nurtured and learnt. It's survival.

There just seem to be fewer secondary age pupils that have these coping strategies. I still think EYFS and primary pressure for targets and SATS has induced anxiety in many (not all) children too young when the coping strategies haven't yet been developed. Too much, too soon.

I think that many younger people have no understanding of recent history. I have read this whole thread and have seen many times people claiming that younger people face challenges that older people did not face, when this is simply not true.

When I was young in the early eighties, the place I lived and other places around the country were decimated by Thatcher's policies. Watch Billy Elliott to get an idea of back then. Adults on the TV were talking about how many in my generation would never manage to get a job and would always be unemployed. I remember a 16 year old classmate coming into school elated telling us he had managed to get a job in a factory. Unemployment was high.

You could easily argue that none of us should have worked at school as we would have had no motivation to do so. And some did no work. But many did. And over time things got better. Where I grew up is unrecognisable and low paid employment is fairly easy to get.

Workplaces used to be far harsher places for working class young women. Sexism, page 3 girls stuck up in offices, sexual harassment, "banter" etc still existed although it was being challenged and gradually faded out. And we were expected to work very hard. There was no minimum wage. I was paid much less in real terms than the minimum wage now. If you worked part time you often could not join the company pension scheme and plenty of smaller companies had no company pension scheme.

And there was no legal protection if you were LGBT. You could be fired for being gay openly and there was nothing you could do. Gay bashing was rife.

The one thing that was better was that accommodation was cheaper. But it is the middle class who changed that with buy to let mortgages and holiday lets. So yes get angry at all the small landlords, they have made your life harder. But the idea that everything else was easier just is not true.

We are at the end of many years of the Conservatives ruling. Things are always shit when Conservatives have been in power for a long time. And that also has an impact on young people. There have been massive cuts in under fives provision and youth provision. Their fiscal irresponsibility has made life harder for most of us. And as a result families are more stressed.

But the biggest change is smartphones and social media. I am horrified at the primary school teacher on this thread who said her pupils are spending 4 plus hours a day on the internet. We need face to face interaction. We are not evolved to operate in this way.

There was a thread here the other day about how we mustn't ask kids if they went away on holidays because it might be hurtful to those who hadn't.

That kind of thinking kills resilience.

One of the major things that needs to happen for kids to gain it is they need to come up against hard things, hurtful things, sometimes scary things, and see that they can get through them. That is how they learn that it is possible to survive, and how they learn to put things in perspective - the difference between something not nice, and something actually harmful.

The other element IMO is the lack of time away from adults and unstructured play with other kids.

At the teen stage phones do have an effect. Not just due to SM, but because they are always tethered. When you have a phone you can always call or text for help from mum or someone else. It means they never find out they can actually dig deep and solve problems themselves.

Parents and teachers too don't seem to realize that letting kids off when stuff is scary actually makes a lot of anxieties and fears worse in the long term.

@TempestTost Being a poor kid who gets asked every year about holidays and always has to say they have been nowhere, is pretty shit actually. And I had plenty of resilience. Kids brought up in poverty tend to have far more than middle class children.

Think yourself lucky you didn’t grow up in the ‘70s. Lordy, those were depressing years.

I’ve always wondered what a ‘60s adolescence and young adulthood was like. Probably for the working class kid much like the ‘50s. For the middle class kid I expect it was all very liberating.

I think we have a hugely divided society, more so in younger people than older. There are more young people who are very privileged, and many who have had much tougher and poorer backgrounds - the divide is so much bigger now.

On the face of it, those young people from poorer backgrounds are less ‘snowflakes’ but experiencing extremely tough circumstances - not going to University but struggling with poorly paid work or suffering crime. They are probably not the demographic whose parents are generally on mumsnet so we don’t hear about them. So I feel for them.

And we, parents of the more privileged (and I count myself in this, even though I’m not wealthy) - I do think are quite blinkered and our young adult children are quite blinkered, and feel that their anxieties or self identifications are the Centre of the world, but really relatively speaking we are much better off.

So I do think there is a skewering towards the problems of privilege. And not enough of our time, money or energy is on helping those whose are not so privileged.

Yeah, I can see more and more people locked up in their houses due to anxiety.

Could it be due to the rise of gentle parenting that newer generations are less resilient?

I also believe that WFH affects some people, they may have less interactions with the outside world.

I agree that WFH is bringing about changes that we will all need to adjust to. And ‘gentle parenting’ 🙄 has a lot to answer for.

But part of the problem generally - not just with young people - is that the social bonds and expectations have loosened. Schools are harassed by self-important parents. Pubs and social clubs are shutting at an unprecedented rate. Cinema is on the way out, under pressure from streaming services. Communal activity like sports clubs and voluntary groups find it ever harder to insure themselves and maintain decent premises and sports grounds. The (individualistic and anti-social) gym culture seems to be the main replacement.

We’re losing a social world that so many people used to take part in.

The major losers are young adults who no longer have the opportunities to learn about others from beyond their little bubbles.

Add that to the demands to be treated specially and you end up with isolated and self-indulgent young adults.

The idea is that reliance comes from having to confront things, not be protected from them. Your example is hardly a convincing argument agsinst that idea.

It can be disheartening to not have the fun things others around you do. It's normal for kids to feel disappointed, or jealous, or that it's unfair.

But there is nothing wrong with not travelling, and it's worth knowing that, and that it's just fine to say they haven't been away, and its especially worth wrestling with the fact that life isn't perfectly just, and going on holiday isn't really what gives a life value.

Pretending that there aren't differences like this between families doesn't do the kids any favours.

So my teen was groomed and abused online and damaged for life. My other child has been damaged by SM, battled a severe ED amd been force fed in hospital multiple times which has damaged her for life. They live with the realities of global warming they never caused , fallout from Brexit they never voted for and have lived and are living through several wars.

You on the other hand going by the dates are a boomer who caused much of the above and are part of the most pampered generation ever to have walked the planet.

I don't think it's the economic/hard times slant though. I was born in the 70s into poverty, so I know what you mean.

Its the information onslaught from the communication revolution. They feel helpless and resentful because they are absolutely bombarded. Whilst we might have been aware of the potential for nuclear destruction or of different wars playing out over the world, which were really no different to today, we consumed slightly sanitised information in a newspaper or on the ten o'clock news. We weren't seeing constant media, videos of atrocities, deepfakes, and so on. I'm not surprised they are a bit broken and scared. The broadcast of 9/11 was a turning point.

Loving the way previous generations are allowed to destroy the planet, fuck the economy , sit back and allow Russian infiltration online and cause all the wars we see now and teens are supposed to be putting it right.

Our anti apartheid protests seem a whole lot more doable than saving the entire planet particularly when politics are currently the way they ars.

They’re not currently seeing much example setting by previous generations either. Where are all the boomers saving the planet and economy they fucked up? Don’t see many out marching, protesting or trying to put things right. No just a shed load of pulling up the drawbridge and teen berating.

I think it's a culmination of different factors
social media allows them to see a false world
Education is heavily scripted, and there is no individualism
Helicopter parenting
Lack of unsupervised outdoor play, kids don't learn to risk assess
Childcare - I think eventually there will be the link made the same way boarding school syndrome is viewed now. ( before I get jumped on, I know it's necessary!)
Diet
Housing
Lack of exercise, kids need to be running around.

Fuck me. So on one thread, kids are all growing up too fast and need to be protected, whilst on this one, parents are producing a generation of snowflakes. We really can't win.