What's happened to young people? Can parents give me insight.

[EveningSpread]

I work in Higher Education, and I'm increasingly worried about young people.

So far this year, I've encountered more students than usual who:

• say they are unable to attend classes due to anxiety
• who are afraid of being in classes
• who won't speak when spoken to by staff or other students
• who say they find getting on a bus and getting to class to overwhelming
• who find the thought of doing their work so stressful that they can't cope
• who don't come to classes due to family parties / their hamster dying / waking up late (to name the reasons I've had just this morning) and expect you to fix what they've missed - in other words, who seem totally immature and unprepared for life (a different problem to the other things above, perhaps)

Obviously we express sympathy, reassure, and explain that they need to access the help that will enable them to function - to enjoy life, succeed on their degree, and get a job afterwards. (So the wellbeing services, and their GP.) Often the reassurance really helps. But equally a lot of these students don't cope at University. I'm sure this problem is exacerbated by the fact that I work in an institution that attracts students from postcodes with multiple indices of deprivation.

Part of me hopes that mental health issues are sometimes exaggerated or even an excuse, as an increasingly large percentage of my students seem essentially afraid to leave the house -- which would be much worse than them just trying it on/being a bit lazy! It's great that we have a language to talk about mental health now, but it's hard to know how/when to tell people that (a) they are responsible for improving their own mental health so they can function in the world, and (b) experiencing some mild discomfort and difficulty, such as being nervous around new people, is normal and crucial to development.

But I'm left wondering: how are parents coping with their young people if these are the miserable lives they're living? If they're not going to classes, are scared to leave the house, and can't function?

So AIBU, or is this problem getting worse? What can parents of roughly 16-20 year olds tell me? Are we still dealing with the legacies of COVID? What's the word on the street among young people about mental health these days?

I think this is a good summary.

Problem been building a while Tory's removed support services then major population stressors happened and results of all that are now coming home to roost.

I thought that student meant that pet lived with them that’s why mentioning that was a hamster was relevant.
It’s easier to have hamster in your room in halls than cat or dog. I’m sure they are not allowed to have any pet but with hamster it’s at least probable, cat or dog is impossible.

Definitely. Austerity meant there was already no slack in many systems when covid hit.

I'm not. The number of people still living at home at 30 may have gone up in the last few years, but it is still nowhere near a majority.

Social media.
Covid.

I also think the way the world has changed has changed children massively. Children don't play out in the same way anymore and it changes the way they learn life skills like conflict resolution, dealing with problems, and learning and respecting boundaries. Not to say kids wandering off all day long unsupervised not being a thing anymore is a bad thing, but it's definitely changed things.

Many children don't know how to be bored anymore - they are used to constant instruction and structure that their ability to think for themselves isn't encouraged.

The pressure of exams is ridiculous now imo. As is the expectation that the vast majority will go to university. DD has literally just started secondary school a few weeks ago and it's being discussed already.

Add into that the financial pressures being faced by so many families a lot.

Plus things like anxiety and ASD and other conditions are actually being diagnosed now. I can think of multiple kids in my class at school who were a 'crybaby/worrywort, who were naughty etc who in hindsight clearly needed help, not punishment.

I genuinely feel in the minority in the way I have chosen to parent and raise my DD to be resilient. I myself was parented that way, and I had DD young so I myself had to be resilient and had to try harder to get us somewhere decent in life.

I have friends who seem quite happy with zombified children in front of games and iPads constantly and then wonder why they seem vacant. I have friends who are still 'baby lead weaning' their 3 year old so its never going to learn to eat with cutlery. I have friends with 4 year olds in nappies with dummies, because 'they'll do it when they are ready!'.

I am a millennial and I don't know what my generation are doing with the raising of their own children. And I don't know what happened to my generation to make them decide to raise children that way.

There is a lot of 'gentle parenting', but I think that has got out of hand. I would consider myself a 'gentle parent' in that I have only on about two occasions in 18 years raised my voice at my daughter and have instead instilled discipline and boundaries in a manner that hasn't relied on shouting, smacking, banning, grounding etc like my parents did. But even 'gentle parenting' requires some sort of PARENTING which some (quite a lot!) of people don't seem to understand.

To me my role as a parent is to spend 18+ years raising, modelling, supporting, encouraging a decent, happy, balanced human being who is able to function and be contributing and positive in their environment.

Not read the full thread but I can’t help thinking people have forgotten we are human and feeling anxious is a normal emotion. Rather than learning coping skills, it’s now acceptable to refuse to do things that make us anxious. All evidence suggests that you should try to do things even though they make you anxious and avoidance increases anxiety.

Well said. DS2 started sneering about boomers at me a while ago, about how easy I'd had it. I am on the cusp of Boomer Gen X.

I told him our house had no heating. Ice inside the windows in winter. Chilblains. If I wanted to warm up I laid a fire in the living room - fetching coal from the coal house at the bottom of the garden.

No telephone - not even a house phone let alone personal mobiles which weren't invented for another twenty years. If I wanted to speak to a friend I had to walk to their house or down the street and queue to use the public phone box.

No fridge. Butter and milk turned sour in summer.

No car. I walked to and from school every day in all weathers. Never once picked up safely from a friend's party or a night out. I walked alone in the dark miles and miles, or with a friend if they were going the same way.

No pocket money. I worked after school from the age of twelve. I bought all my own clothes, shoes, toiletries. It was that or have none. I remember my mum buying me a skirt once in my entire teenage years. I wore second hand shoes that didn't fit.

No computer. If I wanted to know something I walked to the library and looked it up.

For my birthday I'd get an LP record. That's it. Not big expensive presents like musical instruments or designer trainers.

I asked if he'd like to swap. He never bitched about boomers again.

I do think this generational finger pointing is so random, anyway. Ironically it was my parents, of the 'silent' generation (hah - my dad never shut up ever) who never had to pay for anything - not education, health, eye care, dentistry, who had a job for life, solid pensions, tiny mortgages, could retire at 55. My generation, tail end boomer - was the beginning of the gig economy, zero hours, short term contracts, no company pensions.

Pretty much sums up my view on it all I think!

Because their social development, social life, college life and work life were OBLITERATED then they’re expected to just move on after losing a crucial part of their development. This generation will never not be effected.

I worked with young people in a professional environment from 2003 -2019.

Nothing concrete, just anecdotal but I had noticed a marked difference in confidence and attitude in that time.

By 2019, the young people I was employing, training and working with were on the whole, anxious, shy, lacking in confidence and far less able to hold an articulate conversation than those I encountered 2003-2012 ish.

I wondered if social media had a big role to play as it really took off in about 2007/8 and by 2018/2019, those kids will have been affected by it throughout their school career, in a way the previous cohorts hadn't.

Years ago you were just told to get on with it. If you were worried about something then tough- get over it. Stiff upper lip and chin up.
If you were brainy and confident / wealthy you went to university. If not, you went to work at 16 or 18 because you needed the money and wanted to get a job.
People would have looked at you like you had two heads if you said you had anxiety or didn’t want to come to class.
Yes, people had worries and trauma but not every little thing was turned labelled ‘anxiety’
Anxiety to me is contagious. Between parent and child certainly but also amongst peer groups. And once you have labelled yourself, lots of perfectly normal feelings feed into it. The brain thinks ‘I’m not safe’ and so more intrusive thoughts come.
If a couple of your friend in the next rooms to you talks about how they didn’t go to class because of some small thing or other then it’s like a seed in the mind and when you face a difficulty in life, or a situation you are not 100% comfortable with it’s just tempting to put ot down to anxiety and opt out. That could be learning such as a presentation or social stuff such as a friends party.
Life throws us many instances of uncomfortable or challenging situations. The brain will not want to do this and will look for a way out- If others you know are opting out then why can’t you? It seems far easier in the short term.
Social media has a huge role to play because these ideas are spread and perpetuated in a way they never were before. You get to see a thousand strangers lives and opinions and the algorithms will present you with more and more of what they think you are interested in. Mind set can be easily shifted and young peoples minds are just developing so easily swayed to whatever insta or tik tok or MSM is feeding them.
And this is just a small part of the reasons young people are now like this. Parenting style, over diagnosis, food, non socialisation away from screens, lockdown, risk adverse parenting, increase in population, increased perceived crime risk leading to parents not allowing kids to be independent. Lots of other factors.

I haven't RTFT but IMHO it's a combination of factors:
Covid lockdowns - these did a lot of DC a lot of damage, made shy children downright anxious, and anxious children even more so.
Social media - having let my own DC on it from early teens, I wouldn't do that now. They find out too much too young and are also put under pressure from their peers all the time, no let up. It also exacerbates the whole doom-and-gloom of the news, and that isn't good for anybody.
Pandering to DC who are taking the piss - I've seen in the school where I used to work, an intermittent school refuser smirking at getting her own way (there was nothing she liked more than seeing a member of staff being over-ruled by another member of staff and getting her way as a result), a child claiming to be 'scared' of the kindest TA in whole bloody school and his mother backing him up on it rather than telling him to buck his ideas up. It used to be that parents trie to keep the school happy. The pendulum (again, in my opinion) has swung too far the other way.
Helicopter parenting: DC never being left to find their own way, make their own mistakes, deal with their own disputes and differences, but always having adult supervision. You obviously have to keep an eye out for bullying, but the level of adult intervention expected now is just insane, and it's not healthy.

I certainly don't want parents feeling that they are being blamed for their children's poor mental health. I'm sure that they have enough on their plates to deal with already and we shouldn't be making their lives harder.

However, I think there is a danger of some people being too quick to ascribe the cause of poor mental health amongst young people to lockdown without properly examining the various other contributing factors that may be playing a part. Blaming lockdown is a satisfyingly simple explanation, but the problem is a complex one and we don't do the next generation any favours by not seeking to understand all of the other factors that are relevant. I think lockdown is probably one small part of the picture, but there will be many other parts that we need to understand if we actually want to improve things for the next generation of teens that are coming through.

No their social development wasn't obliterated! I am sorry but its posts like this that put all the blame onto one event and that isn't right!
What did it effect, their development, their social life, their college life or their work life it couldn't have affected all of them could it??!!

My son is this generation - it hasn't affected him one iota! He bloody loved it and would go back in a second.

Stop blaming all societies ill on Covid.

I work in 6th Form and we face these issues as well. It makes our job incredibly incredibly difficult.😥

I wrote about being resilient but I did caveat with that with not children who are seriously mentally ill or have mental health disorders because, no of course that can't just be put down to lack of resilience. Or parenting. I fully sympathise with parents with mentally children and admire them hugely

It must be more than lockdown causing this. Lockdown was not constant over the period, there were gaps where things opened up before they shut down again. Lockdown also finished years ago now. This generation has a problem with resilience.

I had an incredibly challenging childhood, far more difficult than lockdown, yet I coped with university and became an independent adult.

People would have looked at you like you had two heads if you said you had anxiety or didn’t want to come to class.

They certainly wouldn't have looked at you like you had two heads if you just didn't turn up though @WhiteLily1 ! You don't have to be very old to be able to remember a period when we were much less bothered about kids not being in school, and we were much less aware of things like anxiety at the time. If you wanted good data on eg the impact of anxiety on school absence in the 80s, it would be very difficult to get it.

This is not my school or the schools my children go to.

I haven't read the whole thread but I wonder -

Would (some of) these pupils even have got to university in the past? Likely they may have been bullied or shut down by teachers/parents at a much earlier stage and not achieved the required grades. Or played truant or dissociated at the back of a class or shunted to a special school or behavioural unit, prison, or even become more ill and potentially harmed themselves/become institutionalised/been taken advantage of by an older pupil, ending up in trouble with the law, addicted to drugs, or pregnant.

What we may be seeing is the positive results of more support and inclusion, allowing people who may have previously been too shy or anxious or socially awkward to access HE. Now that that is happening, it's important that they have the correct supports in place to allow them to access education. Access is more than just admittance.

Not to mention that HE is expected in a lot more careers these days - so some pupils may not even particularly want to be at university but feel it is their only option.

Also, these are very vulnerable young people. We know from statistics that the most vulnerable children are many, many times more likely to die before reaching adulthood from medical causes such as SIDS, disease, infection, childhood cancer etc as well as accidental or external causes such as accidents or injury e.g. by parents or self-injury.

Our society rightly considers this very tragic and so we have made lots of changes, from improved safety standards and risk warnings, to vaccines and other improvements in medicine, to changing socio-cultural norms around things like supervision and parental smoking and seatbelt/car seat use and so on. So we have successfully reduced infant, child and youth mortality and the statistics reflect this:

In 2022, roughly 5 children out of every 1000 born died before their 16th birthday.
In 2000 it was roughly 10.
In 1980, 17.

There are about 750,000 births per year in the UK (fairly stable since the mid 1970s).

So in 1980, ~750,000 of whom ~127,500 would never make it to uni as they would have died before turning 16.

In 2000, an extra 52,500 babies born surviving to age 16+

Today, an extra 37,500 babies born since 2000, or 90,000 since 1980 survive to age 16+ (yearly) - and many of these will be the most vulnerable children in our society. They may well suffer more MH problems, anxiety, struggle to manage basic situations etc.

As well as not ostracising young people who do not fit the mould, there are probably also more of them.

Later parenthood is also thought to be behind around 10% of the rise in neurodivergent conditions. And though we are better at keeping premature babies alive, we are not good at preventing the developmental risks of premature birth, so there will be more young people around with complications resulting from this who would not have survived generations ago.

I don't think it's a parenting failure - modern parenting in general is better than it has been in the past. It's only if you subscribe to hopelessly outdated ideas about "respect" and "authority", or you are focusing narrowly on a particular group of parents, that you could possibly think parenting has gone down the toilet across the board. There have always been unengaged parents and overprotective parents, and I don't think there is any evidence that rates of either have dramatically changed.

Environmental factors like social media/societal division, austerity and lockdowns could be exacerbating things. It's probably just hard to tell how much this is the case unless you look back in hindsight at long term data, and compare between different countries (most Western countries are seeing similar issues).

I don't think there's much point in intergenerational fingerpointing either.

However, in these discussions older generations always compare what life is like for young people now versus themselves when young. Not what life is like for them (boomers) now compared to people the same age when boomers were young.

Yep, no central heating and one bath a week and the rest of it, but life is as comfortable now for older people as it is for younger people. Boomers have chosen luxury too, they're not living austere lives because that's the right way to live.

I would say there were rescources. They weren't perfect but they were there.

What a mess things are now, all farmed out to the cheapest or most pushy.

We had railways, power, youth clubs, sports, schools and so on that just did what they were supposed to do.

Thank you so much. X

I have tried with our 2 children (mid-teen and pre-teen) to give them bits of independence, give them clear guidelines on acceptable behaviour, and also to limit their smart phone access/activity.

I'm probably a reasonably strict parent in some ways (don't like them wandering around aimlessly for hours, not out much after dark, not on screens for hours on end) but also think they need to be able to do things for themselves. Both get themselves to school (one walks quite a distance, one gets a train), and the eldest has a Saturday job, despite plenty of people saying oh she won't be able to get one anywhere. She's 14, a high achiever in school, and works probs about 5 hours a week. I think she's grown in confidence, even just with stuff like answering the phone and talking to people of different ages. I think giving kids time away from screens and some positive real world experience/independence is critical to their self esteem.