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?

I think partly is because teens are not trusted and are constantly controlled . So they leave to Uni or work without having to make any decisions . Honestly the way teens are treated in secondary schools is vile , uniforms , getting detentions for silly things , not even allowed to color their hair or have a different haircut , everything is dictated to them . It wasn’t like this when I grew up . Therefore when we messed up we knew we would need to sort things ourselves.
By trying to control them to much , we created a dependency and that means less capacity on the real world

We are late fifties as a couple and both on or near minimum wage. Not everyone is in high flying jobs. The bad employers have got worse as they can monitor everything. But many minimum wage employment is easier than we were young. My DP has an easy job where there is loads of support as they are desperate to keep staff. There are people he works with who would have been quickly fired years ago, but they can't recruit the staff because the pay is so low.

They'll stay dependent on their families forever until they die then they'll use the taxpayer.
It's no individuals fault though, society insists on infantilising them . They can't can't work, can't play out, can't go to dentist alone, can't leave school, if you dare send them to walk to primaryschool alone you'll be reported....

And if you listen to young people about what the workplace is like they will say its tough. In most places it is easier than it used to be in minimum wage jobs. A friend works in a call centre and she says it used to be far harsher.

I was telling my partner that social media has corrupted our young people. My children watch it and now I monitor its usage. It was never this hard growing up.

I went to university over 20 years ago. There were plenty of people struggling with their mental health. Two of them took their own lives, many left and went home. As someone who has been praised all their lives for being very resilient, very adult and capable at a young age I can tell you very unequivocally that it was the result of that no-nonsense get on with it parenting that everyone here seems to think is so great, and that it has caused me significant harm throughout my adult life.

I don’t think a lot of people here remember what it was actually like being a kid in the 70s / 80s and being out “til the streetlights come on” do you know how many adult men’s penises I saw before the age of 12?! My mum has no clue. Probably likes all those shitty Boomer themed posts about the good old days.

Exactly the same for me. Many problems.

I assure you @Rollinroller that adult men have been waving their penises at young girls since Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, even in the 1960s (when it happened to me) and the 1940s (so my mum tells me).

Or maybe all the previous generation's just ignored all the children who actually had issues! I always find it funny hearing we never had this nonsense or you just got on with it or you'd get a slap, yeah because you was actually autistic but got slapped enough to grow up and be a giant people pleaser and have no common ground on saying no to people based on thinking they would be punished, to say you work in the behavioral sector and your saying this is actually worrying, the fact you thought 10 children was a normal amount is crazy also, there has always been a higher number but I don't think you realise behind closed doors the amount of parents fighting with the system for help! So much more behind children with issues not just a new thing at all.

Nobody is saying people in the past had no issues. And even forty years ago slapping your child was heavily frowned upon.

@Rollinroller I grew up in a very deprived and rough area in the seventies and early eighties. I am always surprised by those who say they got flashed lots by men. But then in my area anyone who did this to children would have been attacked by the adults. I always felt safe playing out as a child.

I do think there’s always a tendency for older people to decry the lack of resilience of the young. See for example the treatment of brainwashed young men who had been POws in the Korean War- there was a huge outcry in the US about the “lack of moral fibre” that had led them not to withstand psychological torture. Mind-boggling really.

Old people (like me) have always criticised the young for lack of resilience etc. I suspect that a large part of it is simply our failure to remember accurately what we were like when young, and the fact that the ways in which some young people
struggle vary between generations.

That’s not to say that young people now don’t face a particular set of challenges- they do. But anecdotal stuff isn’t really a good guide. I also think some things ascribed to a lack of toughness are actually just a different sort of toughness- eg my mum is convinced young women are less tough than she was because they report sexual harassment rather than laughing it off, whereas to me reporting is the more resilient and responsible reaction.

Or maybe there is a bit more nuance as to the pros and cons of growing up in different eras. I'm in my late 40s now, very much a child of the 80/90s, so no mobiles or social media, lots of outdoors play, most teens had Saturday and summer jobs, there were options of youth clubs/brownies/scouts etc, less exposure to junk food, property was affordable and one income could maintain a household, you walked or cycled to most places and were trusted from a young age to use public transport and yes you did not have to check in with your parents every 5 mins and that was fine so long as you were home for dinner/ or before it got dark. Conversely racism was rife, god forbid if you were gay, nuclear strike and AIDS public information programs terrified you, teachers were still prone to physically assaulting you, bullying at school 'was just one of things' and was solved by fighting back, going through puberty was still rubbish and any kind of understanding of mental health issues was limited.

My sisters BIL is 22,never had a job. Lives at home and spends all day in his room on his computer. He is coddled though by the sounds of it and is the youngest. He has "crippling anxiety " and barely goes out albeit to a little shop around the corner. Cushy life if you can get it, but he's fucked if parents move/when they pass away.

It's really not nice to mock someone with a severe mental illness when it sounds like you don't actually know them personally.

The only people who should be deciding the severity of someone's mental health is a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist.

Maybe it's increasing, but the withdrawal from school/work/life isn't new or unique to young people here. It's been a recognised social problem in Japan for decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori

Haha did you see the other thread about the apparent astronomical rise in people who stink and don't wash themselves. 😂😂 Thankfully I haven't noticed this maybe I'm noseblind because I'm one of the stinkers???
I'm in my early twenties and can confirm that the vast majority of my fellow agers aren't curled up in a ball at home afraid to go outside, unemployed and having panic attacks every time someone looks at them. I mean I'm sure there are people out there like that but they're rare as they ever were and I hope they get the mental help they need tbh.

Another thing I find strange about Mumsnet is the claims that the world is more fucked than ever because of wars and that's why kids in this country are going crazy. Are these people aware that there's never been a time when there wasn't wars in other countries 🤔 we had America invading Iraq and Afghanistan in the 00s, yugoslavia in the 90s etc etc. Threats of nuclear annihilation in the cold war. And don't try and argue people didn't have phones back then so didn't know about it they still had TVs

My 15 year old DD is one of these children. She can’t make a decision, she can’t go out on her own, she has crippling anxiety, the smallest thing upsets her, she is constantly overwhelmed. She was diagnosed autistic last year. It is easy to judge but I can not tell her to toughen up or get on with it. She is extremely ill and taking a tough stance would definitely not help. I wouldn’t have really understood either if I wasn’t experiencing this. The worry for me is huge. I constantly think what her future holds. I don’t know why so many children are like this now, but it is very strange. I completely believe that you are seeing hundreds of cases now in your school. And it is a massive concern.

I suspect all these issues did exist back in the older days. However we didn’t label them, they weren’t widely talked about, people didn’t make reasonable adjustments and everyone was just told to get on with things. Also people with chronic mental illness were often institutionalised along with all the disabled children and adults.

Nowadays everything has a label, research has been done as to how best manage things, people talk about things and share more with each other, people are more confident is saying no, people are more confident at asking for adjustments. The research and awareness means more is picked up at an earlier age and therefore interventions are put in place at an earlier age.

My dad retired in the early 1990s in his 40s after a breakdown. He saw a psychologist who also diagnosed OCD. The psychologist told him how to manage things for himself and ignore his family complaining if it didn’t fit in with their way. He was encouraged to be fairly selfish to look after himself. I’m not sure the same approach would be used these days. Potentially he would be offered medication and more options - he refused any medication and any CBT attempts fell on deaf ears. Now he would be almost forced back into the workplace in his 40s with a label to his name and a list of reasonable adjustments that would need to be made for him. Many of these things would likely be things he tried asking for and was refused as no one had any rights or protected characteristics so discrimination was high. Oh and I also suspect nowadays he would have got an ASD diagnosis as well - back tracking during assessments for younger children more recently leads me to believe this as well as working in the field. When he was at school, any kind of not being able to take part in something wasn’t accepted and you’d be caned at school or by your parents for refusing to go to school or take part in certain lessons.

I imagine after the war, those who survived combat would have been hiding a multitude of mental health problems such as PTSD. I know my late grandfather would never talk about his time in the UN which we later found out involved clearing out the concentration camps. My ex’s grandfather did talk about how he was a prisoner of war at one point but we never got much more out of him. That generation were just so glad to have gotten out alive that their mental health wasn’t really considered as so many others had life changing injuries.

I am a parent and I also teach children with severe disabilities and complex needs. I don’t recall coming across many young people like those I teach when I was at school. Likely that they were institutionalised. If not then hidden away at home and definitely not sent to school.

I think all these issues have always been around but they’ve been deeply hidden into recently.

I come across many mothers making appts for their 20 somethings who apparently can't do it because of anxiety even though they're at uni.

I agree OP, having worked in education with pupils and parents. I saw one reason being parents allowing children to opt out of things that it was perfectly normal to be worried about. This worry is now called anxiety. I'm talking about tests, speaking in front of class, school trips, sports day etc. It's done children no favours at all.

I would say the cuts in funding are having huge repercussions. Schools have had to cut funding for pastoral services to the bone. Hats off to those still in the education system propping it up, as it is broken 💔

@Ohanotherflippingcold totally agree.

@givemushypeasachance has provided the link to the Japanese descrition of this withdrawal of young people and it really does seem to tally with what's happening in the UK. Here's an excerpt which I think describes what we are also seeing in our young people:

"The dominant nexus of hikikomori centres on the transformation from youth to the responsibilities and expectations of adult life. Indications are that advanced industrialized societies such as modern Japan fail to provide sufficient meaningful transformation rituals for promoting certain susceptible types of youth into mature roles. As do many societies, Japan exerts a great deal of pressure on adolescents to be successful and perpetuate the existing social status quo. A traditionally strong emphasis on complex social conduct, rigid hierarchies and the resulting, potentially intimidating multitude of social expectations, responsibilities and duties in Japanese society contribute to this pressure on young adults.[34] Historically, Confucian teachings de-emphasizing the individual and favouring a conformist stance to ensure social harmony in a rigidly hierarchical society have shaped much of East Asia, possibly explaining the emergence of the hikikomori phenomenon in other East Asian countries.
In general, the prevalence of hikikomori tendencies in Japan may be encouraged and facilitated by three primary factors:

1. Middle class affluence in a post-industrial society such as Japan allows parents to support and feed an adult child in the home indefinitely. Lower-income families do not have hikikomori children because a socially withdrawing youth is forced to work outside the home.[35]
2. The inability of Japanese parents to recognize and act upon the youth's slide into isolation; soft parenting; or codependency between mother and son, known as amae in Japanese.[36]
3. A decade of flat economic indicators[when?] and a shaky job market in Japan makes the pre-existing system requiring years of competitive schooling for elite jobs appear like a pointless effort to many.[37] "