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?

You are not being unreasonable, however it is not their fault necessarily, they are a product of circumstance. It's the current culture crisis affecting us all. Parents have no time due to work, they throw tablets at kids, the media is misleading, people trust it too much, everyone is in a hurry and doesn't have time to think and reflect on any new concepts thrown their way.
To be resilient in relationships one must have physical interactions, not digital.
To be resilient in life one must be not hovered on, let to fall, and guided accordingly how to get up and be pragmatic about obstacles.
There are also lots of MH issues due to burn-out and hustle culture. Work life balance is skewed for many people. People's self worth hangs against their success.

Are you sure it's not just because many more kids are being diagnosed as neurodiverse? Some (not all) of your OP describes my eldest dd, but as she's autistic it's to be expected. None of that applies to my youngest dd. Both have had the same upbringing, schooling etc.

Or read Jonathan Haidt: The Coddling of the American Mind. It addresses this head on.

He also has a book The Righteous Mind about polarisation and how people dismiss viewpoints they associate with the 'other side' without consideration. That may also interest you...

Did you just wake up from a coma? 🤣
It’s not a point about grammar!

This is the only way to stop anxiety incresaing:

Face the fears gradually, voluntarily, at a pace you control.

Instead we've gone down the route: how can we help you to remove things that make you anxious.
This just means more and more things have to be removed.

It's very basic psychology that psychologists seem to have forgotten or abandoned in order to look compassionate.

I’m a driving instructor so see plenty of 17 year olds. I’ve experienced the opposite, they make us Gen Xers seem like babies. My learners are really sensible and mature. It’s a tough world but they are negotiating it pretty well.

I do see the odd instance of the adults in their life taking too much control but actually they’re pretty good when they’re in the car.

When I was seventeen in comparison I was utterly ridiculous.

Maybe it’s our respective roles giving us bias, I’m going to see the more capable, whereas you the opposite.

Children haven’t changed, the world has changed and the dysfunctional environments we now put them in.
Lockdowns. A toxic, ultra controlling, outdated school system. Social media.

Also young people have no freedom to ‘rebel’ anymore. Teenage years should be about separating off into adulthood and independence but they mostly go to schools which are run like prisons.
They have no freedom to be themselves, there aren’t many youth subcultures anymore (well there is one but I don’t want to get political!). Life is so ‘vanilla’ yet weirdly pressured.

How can an adult who won't open their front door when someone knocks, who cannot make a decision about going to A&E without asking permission from the internet, who genuinely is too terrified to put their baby down to go into another room, who is so afraid of being seen as 'unkind' that they cannot think critically - how can such a person parent a child to a resilient adulthood?

And yet these are recurring themes on Mumsnet, thread after thread, poster after poster. These are the mothers of our young people..

Scary times.

@TheScenicWay - that's a really interesting question and it bears looking into. It might just be bias from the people I know, but I do generally get the impression we see these issues less among young people of colour. Could it maybe that have a longer cultural experience of struggle/disadvantage and tend to 'work on through it' more?

I dislike approaches that discuss it as a failing of a generation; I think often young people do have a point that some expectations are actually not very fair or are too much.

I do think helicopter parenting may bear some blame - I am sometimes surprised on these forums and other places at what people won't 'let' their kids do in terms of independent travel, being left alone etc at ages when it seems more than appropriate to do so. It's not these kids' fault if their parents have been overanxious and not letting them experience life directly and unmediated.

There was an interesting OpEd piece in the Times on Saturday, based on a book by an American writer (Rob Henderson) about what he calls "luxury beliefs".

These, he argues are the beliefs that only the liberal-thinking elite can afford about marriage, drug use, policing and a whole range of other topics. In a nutshell, an affluent, educated person can afford to hold such beliefs and thereby appear to be of high moral character, because they will have a safety net to help out if it goes wrong. But if applied wholesale to society, the weaker and more vulnerable end up being badly affected by the wholesale descent into anarchy and poverty.

It's not related to this thread's topic, but it's another slant on the reasons underpinning them. I would link, but can only find it behind paywalls.

I don't know what the answer is, but YABU to expect people to "just get on with it". That MIGHT just about work if everyone had the same level of support in their personal lives, but this society is more fractured and divided than it has been for years, and inequality is just getting worse.

I said in 2020 that this is going to ruin the mental health of our young people for years and possibly forever for some.
I don't know if my own DS will ever really recover from being at home on his own for months with no real life company, while I had to go out to a minimum wage, completely non-essential job travelling 3 hours a day by bus, despite having ME/CFS!

@Soontobe60

Most of the list I'd say is fairly new in the last ten years.

Housing was affordable on one wage even in the 90s

Gove changed schools for the worse in last 12 years

Climate change tho talked about has ramped up hugely but nothing is done

War has always been around but threat of nuclear war has not really been around since the 80s

The pandemic is a new event none of us have ever experienced.

So add social
Media and BOOM

This. We don’t need personal anecdote on this thread. There is quite extensive research charting changing patterns in mental health. It’s going down for both sexed and girls/ young women in particular.

@MrsMurphyIWish Severe Anxiety is still a SEN. A lot of undiagnosed autism presents as anxiety. And no it's not just people who are a little bit worried.

Or is 'anxiety' being used as an excuse? Lots of children don't like going to school but go anyway!

But you only see those 17yo who learn to drive. Which is a vastly lower proportion than 20 years go. My own DD, just 18, is one of <5% in her year who have learnt - it is not about cash, she is at a fee paying school. I wonder what the correlation between driving and general resilience is - I suspect from experience that it is high.

I think it’s due to changes in parenting over the last couple of generations, and changes in lifestyles of many people. I think post war families have changed so much and consumer culture means people don’t have to wait for anything or work as hard to ‘have’. I think this has created a feeling of ‘entitlement’ for want of a better word - amongst almost everyone - and as a result people, and kids, are less prepared to tolerate situations they find difficult or aren’t keen on. I think just culturally there is less ‘grit’ in life now.

So true! I get amazed at the number of people who can't make a decision without asking thousands of strangers for their opinion.

It is young adults who are most likely to have mental health problems

• that is a change as historically it was middle aged adults I think

• clearly part of the solution must be better availability of mental health resources for children and young adults

Paid for by raising more money via inheritance tax if I was asked

My eldest was just old enough to walk home form after school club - it was light and less than 5 minuets to out house - wasn't wild about it TBH but with two younger kids it was easier and allowed and she walked with a mate.

I got this awful judgemental phone call from the school deputy head one day where was I didn't I know there had been attempted abductions in area how irresponsible a parent was I. I hadn't heard anything but turns out local police had put out something on Facebook to "be aware" - which I hadn't seen.

Anyway that put a stop to walking back - but I saw a story by local journalist who tracked it back - turns out a Dad in work van notice teenage daughter was late offered her a lift - it was reported as you can never be too careful - 30 miles away different LEA and police force meant I was facing extreme judgement for allowing my DC to walk home.

Exactly. My son has recently started a job with one of the UK's largest insurance firms. They have a "safe space/quiet room" where employees are encouraged to "chill out" if they find their work getting too stressful and need a break. It's a rule that if you go in there, you aren't to be disturbed under any circumstances, no matter what your boss needs "right now" or any other workplace demand. The whole point of it is a sanctuary. You only go in if you need to chill out and literally no one can come and get you, there are no internal phones or PCs in the room, so you go in there to be undisturbed to collect yourself. Son says he's only been in once (in six months) after an irate/shouty phone call from a different department that was nothing to do with him and he just need to calm down because it really upset him, but he was out and back at his desk in 10 minutes!! They also have other "chill out" areas, but they're just for chatting/thinking and not intended as a "safe space".

Absolutely this.

I'm sorry, dont't have time to RTWT right now but I am very interested in this (very worrying) topic.

To simplify, my feeling is that the world as it is now has become way too complicated and overwhelming for most human brains. Let alone those prone to ill MH (and yes, neurodivergent).

So it used to be a minority who struggled when things were 'simpler'/more straightforward in the past, with fewer distractions, less exposure to an excess of 24hr information, when we were not all 'plugged into the Matrix' as it were. Now it's more and more people struggling.

As an example, take my friend's uncle, who suffered from ill mental health at a time when MH wasn't spoken about. He was unhappy and depressed, but he was the 'odd' relative who manage to just about survive and have a job by withdrawing from the world as much as possible. Now that withdrawal is almost impossible.

Then take his daughter (myfriend's elder cousin), who has inherited his sensitiviy and tendency to ill MH. She can barely hold it together, has been on long term sick leave several times, and has lost several jobs. I strongly suspect in the 60s, 70s and even 80s she'd have muddled through, like her father before her at her age.

The numbers in our school and the surrounding school have shot up, too.

So many children with 'anxiety' and other mental health issues who are struggling to cope. I've never seen anything like it.

And yet children in war zones and much more deprived economic situations in other countries appear to just get on with it and fight to stay in schools, continue their educations, etc. We are doing something terribly wrong here.