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?

If we are worried about the next generation then we have the power to do something about it. We are the adults. Remember that.

This problem was created by us - as a collective - the way people have voted and the way our society is run.

If we want to change it, and help them, we can. On a small scale and a big scale. Moaning and burying heads in the sand does not solve anything.

So if you care about this, think what can you do to support young people in your community? Could you start a youth club or volunteer at one? Can you get to know your teenage son/daughter's friends, talk to them about their lives, be a role model?

"It takes a village" is true - especially with young adults - so if you are worried, the answer is get yourself out there and influence and help them.

There's a strange sort of undertone that suggests people believe the school of hard knocks builds resilience.

Maybe some think that but I don’t think it’s the majority view. I think many think that helicopter parenting and permissive parenting are actually very harmful for children. There is a balance that can be reached. You don’t need to go straight to school of hard knocks style environments for children.

@greatwesternmailman my son is similar, fully capable in the structured environment of the classroom, incredibly resilient when he had a major operation with a 6 month very painful recovery time at age 16 , great exam results followed by a huge breakdown at uni and is still in recovery. He has depression and been diagnosed with ASD and ADHD.
He's stopped masking and is rebuilding himself, I'm incredibly grateful he's still with us but the rebuild is slow and painful to watch, I would do anything to 'fix him' but he doesn't feel he deserves to be fixed, resilience isn't the issue.
Maybe we could investigate a school system that rewards bullies and ignores their victims, look to your own school processes for bullying, you'll find plenty of resources and interventions for how to support the bully but what support does the victim get, my son was told that his bully had a difficult home life as if that meant that the behaviour should be excused and ignored. I fully support troubled children having help but the people who dread going to school every day because of their bullying also need support.
Add ASD to the mix and the utter unfairness of the situation which becomes internalised as I don't deserve help because my home life is good and I should always be perfect, if I'm not, I'm a failure because I'm not disadvantaged.

My teen goes to a specialist school for kids with poor mental health.

She started showing signs of struggling in prinary school, before lockdown, but couldnt be addressed because then lockdown happened and totally destroyed her mental health. She hasn't recovered.

For her, lockdown happened at a critical stage in her development and has caused lasting damage. She is nearly 15.

She is getting all the support available, but the support is crap to be honest.

The world is crazy now. Internet stuff, climate change, covid. It impacts people who never knew a calmer world more than those who grew up with that stability.

That's hardly surprising after how some Unis went 100% online for some courses in 2020 and into 2021. That entire cohort weren't used to leaving their Uni flats as they had to stay in!! That cohort only left last Summer!!

If a student spent their first year trapped in their flat, literally with all lectures, seminars, tutorials, etc., wholly online, for an entire year, it should be no surprise to lecturers if they're a little bit stressed/anxious when expected to appear in person.

My son still had some 100% online modules in his second uni year (the 21/22 academic year). It was only his 3rd year (22/3) when everything was in person again!

I think some Unis went way over the top and continued the "stay in your flat" way of learning far too long, some even when there were no lockdowns!!

I'm surprised that a Uni lecturer doesn't realise that the way Unis treated students was appalling and surprised he can't understand the impact on their students who were at Uni during those two years!!

I think it's a mass combination of things. When I was doing my counselling degree we had 4 tutors who were SME in their own areas, psychodynamic, person centred etc.....The person centred approach has most Definately been pushed into the parenting guidance signposts, cleverly labelled as gentle parenting where in most cases there are no consequences and "no" is not an answer.

From those who were brought up by hippy 70/80s parents, they are well rounded and know that their childhood is not what everyone else experienced. That is now not the case and children are, in some cases, pretentious, rude and self absorbed.

Don't even get me started on the labels. Naughty....the child is adhd etc..... But never properly diagnosed. It just helps lazy parenting which mocks the genuine cases that do need additional support in school.

I do think these children are going to struggle in adulthood.

But the labels thing is rife in adulthood, I know various people who claim to have ptsd diagnosed by either themselves or a GP. Doesn't happen..... As someone that takes 6 different meds a day just to function, I just want to do a body exchange for a day!!

Anxiety..... Everyone has it, it's part of our make up and is healthy. But more and more I'm seeing children and adults being excused bad behaviour because they have MH problems 🤔

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” Michael Hopf

just a quote, feel free to replace men with whatever you identify as…. Or what you actually are

The next generation is primarily screwed in term of the world/society we have given them to inherit.

OK we all know genuine disabilities isn't what we are talking about here 🙄

@Realityisreal

Maybe we could investigate a school system that rewards bullies and ignores their victims, look to your own school processes for bullying, you'll find plenty of resources and interventions for how to support the bully but what support does the victim get, my son was told that his bully had a difficult home life as if that meant that the behaviour should be excused and ignored. I fully support troubled children having help but the people who dread going to school every day because of their bullying also need support.

Nail on the head. Far too many teachers/schools simply don't appreciate the harm that is caused by bullying, and go down the "victim blaming" route of telling the victim to toughen up, fight back, avoid them, etc! It's not the victims who are at fault and who need to change, they should be protected from the bullies, but teachers just can't see it!

A friend who’s a teacher told me recently that about half of every year has to use break rooms during exams, because of the supposed stress that exams cause. The ‘stressed’ pupils get longer to sit an exam.

I asked what would happen if a child was refused. She said that they’d tried to take a firmer line in the past but parents got very angry and said that they and their child had rights.

Great post, thank you.

DD2 (15) struggles with anxiety about school (since 2020 and secondary school) which affects her school attendance but she does not struggle with social skills in general, comes across mature, confident and self-aware (recently praised for the same by her counsellor) and has achieved things outside school which would make many adults severely anxious such as performing on stage and in sports competitions, and in spite of everything she has a nice group of friends.

Sadly I have never been able to persuade her to try home schooling/online school either after the poor experience of it when schools were closed, even though I have explained that online schools are nothing like that.

I just hope she will find her way and get a PT job in a year or so and find her way to getting some qualifications either pre or post 16.

You've only got to look at this forum to see why the younger generation are struggling.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Why shouldn't ALL the pupils have somewhere quiet to go to chill out in between exams that let's face it, adults still have nightmares about 30 years on?

And it would be far better if we hadn't gone back in time and made everything about final exams instead of having a mixture of coursework and exams.

@Namechangechangeobv I didn't say doing well... I mean the very basics like getting up in the morning and keeping going even though they are very clearly struggling. Sometimes I think we need to reconsider what we see as a 'win'. A lot of the young people I work with have limited family support at home or come from difficult backgrounds. Just getting up the morning is a win sometimes and as I'm sure you know progress isn't linear. So I think when we're talking about resilience specifically it's important to remember that resilience looks a whole lot of different ways and how one person displays good resilience will match what you've listed (making phone calls confidently for example) whereas for another it's the fact they made it over the door to see you at all. If you're working in BE and you're actually seeing these young people, then their resilience is good on some level. Otherwise they'd be completely disengaged. If you're always looking for them to act like well supported peers who are NT and have a decent emotional vocabulary and good social networks then you're going to be disappointed. Their resilience and their 'wins' just maybe look differently.

Great post, @taxguru - the secondary school environment for most is just awful. Noisy, aggressive, unpredictable. In my DC's school there are constant fights, shouting from children and teachers etc. The teachers do their very best but it's a horrible out of control environment that few adults would cope with.

It's not just young people. I am sat here in my office and there are 6 of us who work in here and only two of us in today. The policy is that we are in at least 3 days a week. I can count on one hand how many times that every one has been in as they should be, people are either off sick or wfh due to 'unforeseen circumstances' every week. Everyone is over 40, I'm the lowest earner. The other 5 earn over 50k a year, some of them earn up to 100k. Someone cried in this office last week because another colleague raised his voice. I was in a meeting again last week, where there were people on over 100k a year asking me for detailed instructions for sitting on a conference panel in their area of expertise. Anxiously asking for spoon fed instructions on how to sit and answer questions and they are top of their field.

I have also seen three friends face to face this weekend, one has an issue with alcohol and can't seem to knock in on the head, the other has awful mental health issues and hasn't been to work for months. The third was obsessively talking about her body. All three were Mum's over 40 who own their own houses, are in long term marriages, taking regular holidays and have permanent employment.

It isn't just the kids.

Not in between exams, during.

And we're moving back towards exams because of the prolific cheating in essays and projects - essay mills, plagiarism, AI. It's very hard to stand over anything that doesn't happen in an exam hall, with a sheet of paper and a biro and no other resources.

It's society in general that allows this bs.

"A friend who’s a teacher told me recently that about half of every year has to use break rooms during exams, because of the supposed stress that exams cause. The ‘stressed’ pupils get longer to sit an exam."

Perhaps that's the case in your friend's school but in my DC's school there are absolutely no allowances made for exam anxiety, no matter how severe.

I've had a quick read of the articles on the report that i assume triggered this post. The one where people in there 20s are more likely to be off work than people in their 40s?

The things that leap out are the big difference between men and women, with women much more likely experiencing mental health disorders

And the link with only having gcse level qualifications

So i guess if we really want to tackle this rather than go on about how terrible young people are, we are looking at increasing mental health support focused on increasing participation in education of school age children esp girls.

She said it was a Covid hangover. She does understand the impact. So, presumably does the uni, given they are taking attendance for lectures (not just tutorials).

And she didn’t say ‘a little bit stressed’. Clearly it’s much more than that. Choosing to absolutely not attend in person anything at all that you can view online is surely not healthy. Not only do you miss out on the lecture, you miss out on walking to and from, meeting up, chatting, etc.

Plenty of grownups would sooner wfh the entire time, as would plenty of the uni faculty I suppose. I think it’s (eventually) disastrous for mental health.

This too.

And it goes in with the loss of unstructured, unsupervised play. Parents didn’t need to spend their evenings ferrying kids around to structured activities ( or stopping them fighting in the house) when kids just played out unsupervised

The kids of that has not been good for the mental health of kids or parents

We may never know why this is, but it strikes me there are certain factors and changes that have happened while these young adults were growing up that can't have helped matters:

1. The 'everyone is special' ethos in primary schools gives young children an inflated idea of their importance;
2. The tendancy over the last few years for parents to protect children from anything that might make them unhappy/bored/out of their comfort zone
3. The increasing isolation of childhood - the pandemic will not have helped - where parents shun any offers of advice/help/experience and gather their children up if a stranger dares to speak to them
4. The increasing tendancy to normalise mental health issues - in general this is probably a good thing, but it can lead to over-thinking and obsession
5. It used to be quite normal to be married and have children in your early-mid 20s. Nowadays this is fairly unusual, so young people have a bigger window of opportunity to think about just themselves
6. The tendancy for people to make excuses for everything. You see it all the time on here: A woman parked in a disabled bay and she was not disabled - she might have invisable disabilities, she might be collecting someone disabled, she might be fleeing some one and needed a safe space asap etc etc etc. The liklihood is she was just being a twat really, but excuses, excuses, be kind etc.
7. Resiliance isn't encouraged anymore. Everything is always someone else's fault and no-one is accountable for their own actions.
8. Finally - the internet. There is no longer any requirement to get on with others or fit in as no matter how niche your opinion is, there is always someone who will agree with you.