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?

So the “it’s all your fault, Boomers” line is getting an outing. 🙄

Yeah, terrible that generation. Living with the real threat of nuclear Armageddon, fighting wars, managing through recessions, creating great art, literature and music, driving technology forward, building a whole new world of communication and computing, going to the moon, developing better diagnostics, drugs and treatments, and so on. Losers!

Wow you should be so proud.Really tough times.🙄You seem to be such a lovely representation of your generation. Youngsters have all that to contend with and far more.Shame as a generation you didn’t develop the ability to recognise and own your mistakes whilst having a bit of empathy for younger generations who do actually have it far worse.

You don't learn resilience from getting everything handed to you and by being told you're great all the time.

This really struck a chord with me. 7yo dd now has an ehcp that focuses on building her resilience to failure, altering the way she sees mistakes so they become learning opportunities instead of sticks to beat herself with. She's a perfectionist and very performance driven, currently being assessed for adhd with asd/ pda. We've had a couple of episodes of school avoidance. To meet and speak with her you'd think she was the most confident, able, sociable child you've ever met. Her anxieties are well hidden - while at school. It was only through sheer determination that we secured the ehcp for her and obtained agreement to assess her. Chances are that with the interventions we've secured, she'll build her resilience and become a well adjusted girl. But the key was early intervention.

Incidentally, our 13yo ds has never had any problems in this respect and is thriving - raised exactly the same way, different personality.

Could what we're seeing now be the outcome of a lack of early intervention and awareness/ mental health services for children? All the evidence seems to suggest that for children who are particularly anxious - for whatever reason, whether neurodevelopmental or environmental - early intervention to help them improve the skills they lack makes a huge difference to their long term chances of success.

The world and life is very different now to several decades ago. There are so many pressures and risks from increased and unrestricted access to technology in recent years, and then we had Covid. Children's mental health has not been adequately invested in. When you're in the system, it is long, opaque, convoluted and only the most determined and knowledgeable parents will succeed in their navigation.

How do we solve lack of resilience? Improved awareness of both the challenges young people face today, and the strategies that parents and schools can and should be employing to reset expectations. Investment in early intervention.

An entire thread tearing apart the younger generation and a few posts commenting the boomer generation having responsibility for some of this has set you off?! 🤷🏻‍♀️
I am neither generation so no axe to grind.

That’s a good point and really were a ticking time bomb having a mental health service so poor that it’s causing problems down the line. That said I would say the idea of mental health support for children is still a newish thing. I don’t remember any talk of MH in the 90s. We had an extremely traumatic childhood event when my siblings and I were children and teens in the early 2000s and never received counselling. Wasn’t even mentioned. No mention of it causing in going issues. No ‘working with school’. I think home issues were home issues and never mentioned much in school so it depend entirely on your family circumstances as to what help was received.

I know a lot of older adults like this I’m afraid! Not just kids, but it’s easy to blame them.

. . . but haven't mental health services always been diabolical? Pretty much none existent before the year 2000? There wasn't even a mental health service for children until 25 years ago. Young Minds didn't exist.
There is more mental health knowledge, acceptance and support than ever before in history. It doesn't seem to be enough to cope with the ever growing demand though.
Something is clearly going wrong for kids somewhere along the line.

I’m actually wondering if a lot of these resilience issues in young people are down to the introvert/extrovert difference.

Extroverts will always be ‘people’ people, regardless of the opportunities offered by the digital age, and I’m not sure much has changed for them in terms of confidence and resilience.

However, I’m an introvert and when I was a teen and young adult I just had to really force myself to get out there and socialise as there was no alternative, which in turn gave me the confidence to eventually make my way in the world.

Nowadays introverts have every opportunity not to interact with the real world and real people if they would rather not. Boys have mostly gaming and girls have mostly TikTok etc. The lecturer in a PP stating that many students choose to remain in their rooms and do all their learning online is another example.

@TooOldForThisNonsense

I disagree

When I sat exams we had choices It was the be all and end all as it's touted now.

Teacher endlessly telling kids they need to pass or their life will be ruined. That's too much pressure on a teen. Their are always choices and teens should be told and given different options

We need good apprenticeships
Work based training
College
Jobs that you can progress in
Uni for the brightest.

Not the endless uni uni uni shit (which kids now realise can lead do huge dept and no golden job)

No wonder kids are anxious.

Was not the be all - I meant.

Exactly

My dad left school with no GCSEs, got an apprentiship and ended up with a decent job in IT

One of my team who graduated a few years ago with a decent degree is stressing that not having a masters is holding him back in his career in IT and going by job adverts hes not wrong.

Wait until they enter the real world you won't be there holding their hand. They need an education of some sort and a job to support themselves. The nanny state is over.

Food gone up
Rent gone up
Mortgage gone up
Gas gone up
Electric gone up
Council tax gone up
Anything else you can think of gone up

Our young people are not prepared for what is going on now. They will have a rude awakening and they will blame you and their parents because they were children. Most children rebel against adults but it's you who they are blaming when they ain't got a pot to piss in. They can be who they want to be but they have to fund it.

Ha kids are clever, and not wanting to go to school is as old as time....or at least since education became compulsory! The difference is truancy was easy in my day (70s kid), you would be unlikely to out right refuse school as that would lead to a clip round the ear....

Oops part of my post disappeared!
You wouldn't directly refuse school to a parent (clip round the ear) but once registration over, it was easy enough to disappear for the day!

I wonder what all these people suffering Mental Health problems think are going to fix it. There's counselling and medication, admission to hospital for seriously ill ones, but it's no magic bullet. If your life is not as healthy as it should be - good food and exercise and relaxation, in a stressful life situation - you're going to be hard to fix.

I am not talking about those with SENs or autism, adhd or extreme depression.

I think people are mislead into thinking that it can just be fixed by someone else.

Interesting discussion. Competing theories of how to build resilience in kids. I guess we will see how this plays out in the global marketplace. To some extent we already are, with DEI departments starting to see their budgets slashed. Employers want to hire capable candidates, not those who demand a gold star for everyone.

If your life is not as healthy as it should be - good food and exercise and relaxation, in a stressful life situation - you're going to be hard to fix.

Maybe they simply want the option of an attainable lifestyle where these things are inherently achievable

Resilience has become one of those words which is used like tooth paste by every talking head, political pundit, expert etc in relation to mental health and society.
The type of resilience they’re talking about is always different though and it’s an important distinction. Sometimes resilience is just way of saying people need to shut up and put up, other times it’s the toxically positive kind where you’re not allowed to acknowledge you’re upset or hurt when something really quite rubbish has happened… I find people who talk about resilience often have their own brand which isn’t always positive or healthy.

Mental health services are dire and will continue to be until they’ve had a complete overhaul. Back in the early 1990s certain local authorities directly funded crisis centres for women that were 24/7 staffed by mental health professionals and social workers, obviously this isn’t the case anymore. Now you’re lucky if you can get a space in refuge if you’re experiencing DV. Having lived my adult life through an austerity government I just assumed the gov didn’t know how to deliver services, but that’s just not the case it’s always been about money.

Recently, I’ve noticed there seems to have been a rush to recruit for SEN support and seemingly the NHS has outsourced this yet again, as a cost cutting exercise more than anything else, but these private sector charitable organisations I wonder how much good they do when they won’t pay people properly for really challenging work. How can they expect to retain good staff if they’re only willing to pay slightly more than min wage come April? I’m not saying all these services will be sub par or won’t be appreciated, I’m just saying there isn’t any willing to invest in anything especially when it comes to kids. It’s a sticking plaster that lines the pockets of those at the top and fails staff and clients. It’s this mentality that’s got us where we are, thinking we can run everything like a corporate company and dole contracts out to the private sector thinking they’ll provide value for money.

Tell me, how on Earth are kids meant to develop resilience if they’re witnessing this? Even if there is ‘more support than ever’ for mental health just simply having a prescription doesn’t change the fact your social situation can be absolutely dire. Poverty, wars, threat of another war, crime, lack of opportunity, low page wages, no consistency in support, can’t see a doctor… The effect cost of living has on parents? You’ve got to be a very lucky person to have not experienced the effects of at least some of this for yourself recently. I think I’d retreat to my room too if I could.

This kind of moral panic about lack of resilience in the next generation is a recurring theme.

Boomersand gen x worry that millennial are snowflakes, millennial worry that gen z are flaky and so on.

People mostly turn out OK . Eventually they grow and up take responsibility for themselves. People of my age use to have safety pins through their nose and wear bin bags and believe they were hard-core punks/ anarchists. They didn't stay that way, they got a job had kids etc and grew out of it.

This podcast just dropped which may be of interest: https://www.honestlypod.com/podcast/episode/e19edb0d/why-the-kids-arent-alright

How did the non reading student get on the course

Did they have to do A levels which involved reading

Totally understand, must be quite depressing

@SheerLucks

I’m actually wondering if a lot of these resilience issues in young people are down to the introvert/extrovert difference.

This is something I've been pondering on. Back in my youth and early adulthood, I think most people were "middle of the road". I remember a few overly extroverted people and a few overly introverted people, but on the whole, the majority weren't at either extreme and were just middling! Say, in a pub 20/30 years ago, most people would just be sat chatting/sitting not being a nuisance to anyone, but nowadays, it's groups of people shouting/jeering, always on the move etc. A lot of people seem "pumped up"!

Nowadays, people seem more polarised. There are definitely a lot more introverted people about, but also a lot more extroverted, and I don't notice many at all in the middle. It's all the extremes.

Obvious when you watch TV game shows of the 70s and 80s where contestants were generally pretty middle of the road, some a bit quiet, some a bit gregarious, but on the whole, middling. Compare to a modern game show and the contestants are jumping around, shouting, etc., even on "quiet" game shows!

I see the same in real life. My son mentioned the same when he was trying to "find his tribe" at university. Lots of students wondering around, head down, earbuds in, ignoring everyone around them, and then groups of students shouting and being generally noisy, drawing attention to themselves.

When so many people are being loud, that's exactly the behaviour that introverts can't cope with, so it forces them to retreat even more and disengage.

Where have the "middle people" gone???

I have experienced a baffling lack of resilience across the board (regardless of age) and my theory is that certainly in a country like the UK, people have lived in relative safety and security for the last few generations, and have not had to be constantly challenged in ways that those who live in less stable countries have.

Resilience is not a taught skill, it's one that is built on experience, it requires individuals to face challenging situations and find appropriate solutions in order to learn from them, and on the whole, that has not needed to happen across the board. Before anyone jumps on me-I am not saying that individuals do not encounter challenging circumstances, I am saying that as a society, the UK has had a good 80 years of relative stability.

That's why I think COVID has come as such a shock. I still hear so many people talking about the effects of COVID on their well-being etc. but very few of them are taking active steps to overcome this, but are instead wallowing in it (as harsh as that sounds). When we look around us at the rest of the world, since COVID, other countries have had to deal with wars, natural disasters, dictatorships etc. They haven't had the time to sit and wallow.

While I appreciate the importance of looking within, I do think the current trend for incessant navel gazing (again, across age groups) that I see in the UK is dispiriting. And it detracts from us as a society being able to focus on the needs of those who truly need additional help and support. People seem to have lost the ability to categorise emotions. Feeling sad, anxious, angry etc. are natural emotions to specific circumstances. Feeling these emotions does not mean one HAS anxiety or depression. And people should not be worried if they do feel these emotions from time to time. The nuance is somewhat lost.

I think there are two things at play affecting everyone, but perhaps seen disproportionately in younger people who dont yet have the life experience to put them into perspective. First is that by talking about MH more (which is absolutely right to do) people are starting to mistake usual feelings for MH diagnosis and telling themselves it is not right to feel this way. So for example, the idea that any anxiety is a bad thing and sign of pathology, rather than understanding that sometimes you feel anxious and that is ok.

The second is that the world in general feels a lot more difficult and less hopeful than it did 10 years ago. I think this is a cyclical thing and will bounce back but we are all under more pressure because of it, even if it does not seem to directly affect us.

What will happen? Some people will move through it and become more resilient. Some will lead miserable and narrow lives.

@Gallowayan

People mostly turn out OK . Eventually they grow and up take responsibility for themselves. People of my age use to have safety pins through their nose and wear bin bags and believe they were hard-core punks/ anarchists. They didn't stay that way, they got a job had kids etc and grew out of it.

That's exactly what I was trying to say a few pages ago. Once these "troubled" teenagers are out in the workplace, rubbing shoulders with adults in the real world, they often mature and turn out fine. It's the artificial "bubble" of schools that's the problem!

I remember many years ago, I worked with a largish firm that took on a lot of 18 year olds for professional training courses (before everyone went to Uni who wanted a profession!). She maintained she far preferred recruiting 18 year old college leavers rather than 18 year old school leavers as they were generally more mature and "ready to work" having experienced two years of the more mature college environment instead of two years of extended artificial school life in a school sixth form!

I do wonder whether we'd be better with a three grade system, instead of primary and secondary. I.e. primary for maybe 4 years, the intermediate for 4 years and finally some kind of college for 4 years, instead of moving schools at 11, do it at say 9 and say 13, and then go into a college environment for either academic qualifications or for trades/manual skills, etc. That seems to be the way in some other countries who don't seem to have the same kind of problems we have with our schools. Personally I think forcing kids to stay in school until 16 predominantly doing academic subjects is the cause of a lot of our problems. They can't start to do trades/manual skills soon enough so turn to being disengaged and disruptive as well as MH issues.