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?

A big issue is safety precautions.

Safety was very lax a few years ago when kids were allowed out all day with no money and no phone, they would go into neighbours homes, jump of swings, get messy in school etc etc

We also didn’t have the internet and so we weren’t really aware of all of the dangers.

Then safety starting becoming more important (a good thing) and kids were taught more about stranger danger and the play parks were replaced with safer equipment and things.

But now safety has become almost too important and everything has become over the top.

Then mobile phones and always being contactable has made young people even more anxious and reliant.

I say young people, there are multiple adult posters who admit to having trackers on their partners phones being they worry about them being in an accident etc.
And these are the parents raising these kids.

I just asked my own kids about this over dinner & gave them a flavour of the opinions on here.

They gave a list of things - Covid, social media pressure, school & University feeling so pressurised to get good results etc
But their main reason was the view that the future is just crap for them and that makes them anxious and left wondering about the point of it all. They said everyone keeps saying how rubbish everything is so it feels hopeless - climate change, cost of living, hard to get a good job, will never afford a house, have to work forever etc

I've worked as a parent educator and I'm not aware of any evidence from social research that parents are less involved, less caring or less supportive than they were in the past.

In fact the 'I blame the parents' cohort can't seem to quite work out what it is that modern parents are suddenly doing wrong in large numbers.

Are they not attentive enough - ie 'neglectful' or 'too attentive' - ie 'helicopter'?

I'm 58 and I lost friends to suicide in my late teens and early 20's. I knew lots of young people growing up that struggled with their mental health and substance abuse. We just didn't talk about it. I had friends who were practically at death's door from anorexia where nobody was talking about it.

Truanting was also common. But not talked about endlessly in the media - possibly because there was more tolerance of the idea of children leaving school with no qualifications.

I was self harming as a teen. My older sister was going to college with vodka in a flask - something that led on to 25 years of functional alcoholism.

This idea that parents across the board were just doing a better job in the 1970's and 1980's flies in the face of logic and social history. The really, really big difference between then and now is that we just didn't talk about mental health then, or acknowledge people's struggles.

BTW - I'm on a Parenting Mental Health board on facebook. Really big group with lots and lots of parents struggling with children who are mentally ill. Every single one of the parents on that group is there because they're desperate for support and ideas to make things better for their families.

Smartphones, terrible parenting and increased "mental health awareness"

It's only a mystery how covid lockdowns might have affected young people if you spent that time in your Fortress of Privilege

I really don't think thd future is crappie for them. I think they are all a bit into big campaigns and we is me. People have survived wars with a more positive attitude than western adolescents of today.

I work in a role that recruits university leavers and to a one they are all lacking in basic social skills time management and resilience if there’s a way to not come to work they use it mental health period pain been dump not been dumped but expect to be fell down drunk got a septic tattoo the list is never ending. What I wouldn’t give for someone who gets in on time and is actually prepared for the day and hasn’t forgot phones laptops chargers id badges etc.

Perhaps the issue is that when I was 18 there was no Internet access and constant bombardment of "the future" so I just went to university, travelled, got a job and went through adulthood without thinking too much of it?

Oh... My... G
I shouldn't be surprised
So sad
Seriously
Short changing their children
Using it as a babysitter and comforter
Jeeze

I’d echo the thoughts of most posters but I thought I’d ask my very opinionated 15 year old for a young person’s perspective.

His main (very long) point was that young people are often not given the opportunity to have a weekend job. He says that being able to work as a teenager teaches you important life skills and allows you to learn and make mistakes when it doesn’t matter so much. It also allows you to learn and then get on with it without having to be told all the time. If you don’t get your first job (or in the case of university I suppose first taste of independence) when you’re a teenager, you’re expected to behave like an adult but you haven’t learnt or made mistakes. DS argues that the laws on children working need to be changed immediately as 4 hours goes really fast when you’re working (I’m not sure I’d agree with that 😂). It also allows you to have your own money and have responsibility for managing it.

Anyway that was his whole point so I promoted him with the following questions:

Do you think mental health plays a part?

DS says that he thinks social media plays a big part and that when you see people talking about anxiety and depression, you may identify with some parts of it and think you must have them too. He thinks that when you like a certain person and watch a lot of their content, you start to subconsciously act like them. He says that because of algorithms, of you watch some content on mental health issues, you are then given more of it.

Do you think Covid plays a part?

DS says that when he went into year 7, he wasn’t able to go into town after school and learn to be more independent. He doesn’t feel that it has had a lasting impact (on him!) though. He then carried on his rant about not being able to work and that young people would not have been able to work on Covid (this is clearly very important to him).

What about parenting?

DS says the worst is yet to come because gen Z will soon be having children and they will be brought up by the people who are struggling now. He says that the “kids” in year 7 are a “nightmare” 😂. Then he also continues on about some parents not letting their children work.

What about schools?

DS says there’s not much schools can do unless they completely redesign their whole system 😂. He says that you’re taught things and how to do exams but you’re not left to find out things for yourself (hopefully he’ll find A levels more to his taste). He says schools don’t teach you life skills and work skills or how to think for yourself.

So essentially, his point is get a weekend job (can you tell he loves working??)

I think Covid caused a particular type of insidious trauma that has been hard for young people to bounce back from. My DD was younger, but she still has a certain hyper vigilance about being in public places in amongst crowds, still flinches when people cough, etc. It must have been so hard for teenagers at such a formative stage to have so much of their freedom and independence taken away.

kids aren’t really challenged in their formative years now - nothing is competitive in case they fail- parents grease the wheels wherever they can they don’t build any self reliance or independent thinking and it’s doing them a massive disservice. At 16 I left school got 2 jobs and went to college a 25 min bus ride from home if I missed the bus it was for me to work out how to resolve that there was no question of phoning someone to collect me.

Yes I think this is more it.

I grew up in the 80s with the threat of the cold war and genuinely thinking we would get obliterated by a nuclear bomb and then the terror of AIDS too. Plus unemployment being high too

We worried about those things but we didn't dwell on them because unless you watched the news or read a paper you could forget about them.
I think young people are constantly hearing doom & gloom stories via social media and it feeds into their psyche & makes them anxious.

I think for those of us who grew up in the 90s there was a sense of things are going to get better

realistically that is gone - the young are I think very aware of climate change/ocean acidification etc and the impact on the earth and the surroundings and that isn’t even scratching the surface of the potential of nuclear war etc AI replacing jobs rise in the cost of living

because truthfully the future is a lot less bright than we have had in the past previous generations have always worked towards the concept of a brighter future and no one can really say that holds true anymore

zero mystery, zero fortress of privilege but carry on with your assumptions

Young people need to cope with the world

All of those things were issues when we were young I remember my mum worrying that they were going to bring back conscription for the gulf war and that we would have to go. We were intensely aware of CfC gases and the hole in the ozone deforestation and melting ice caps not to mention hiv epidemic and nuclear bombs the core issues haven’t changed but it seems that the ability to think critically about them and rationalise them has

@SpunkyKoala I would argue that things are too competitive now, jobs wise. 16 year olds cannot get jobs usually, they're competing against adults. The person doing the paper round in my area is about 28.
In the old days, if you weren't academic, there were options. What are the options now for non academic kids to get secure jobs that earn enough to buy a house?
There's no manufacturing industry. I see a lot of young men who can't work as they can't do customer service, find it hard to think on their feet and apprenticeships are super competitive.

In the nineties, I knew a dental nurse and mechanic who got a 0% deposit mortgage on a nice house in my hometown. Home ownership just won't be the norm for most. If I knew that at 17 and just saw a future of minimum wage jobs, living at home with my parents and watching the planet slowly burn
then Id be depressed.

Also Haidt and Greg Lukianoff's Coddling of the American Mind. Excellent analysis of how we got here: children raised in affluence, but underscored by fear of slipping back ...

We studied how to survive a nuclear attack and what it would be like afterwards I can only imagine how kids these days would deal with learning about radiation poisoning and exposure and how to purify water using iodine we watched footage of Hiroshima and studied the after effects of radiation exposure on subsequent generations. We saw the aftermath of the zebrugge disaster, hillsborough, Lockerbie we lived in the shadow of the IRA and the constant threat.

Self study A-Levels, then Open University - gives time to work on the anxiety management?

Absolutely this.

I find it horrifying how many children & young adults have MH issues now. I know some of it is probably due to it not carrying such a stigma as it once did - eg.in the past you might make an excuse eg. "be busy with family" so you can't go out, whereas now it's more accepted to give the real reason (anxiety or whatever). But it's not just that.
And what would harm my MH.wont bother someone else at all,.so of course.its impossible to make a list.anyonebelsebwould agree with. But...

COVID
Social media
Devisivness - the growing lack of social mobility
Lack of independence /freedom
Being sheltered from things, so you can't ask about them but know they happen. EG when I was little, I knew you had to watch for cars in case I got run over and killed. Brutal, but seems weirdly less frightening than an ominous "don't do that, you Might Get Hurt".
Echo chamber - find things that reflect their interest and their opinions rather than stepping outside that bubble.

Get it wrong or offend someone and it's out there online Forever. That would stress me out massively, particularly the thought that someone could video your fuck up.

To an extent, our (ie parents) ambitions for our children may be a factor for some - EG - an attitude of is there any point in doing hobby xyz if their not going to be Good At It? (Well, of course there is!), of "you can be anything you want if you set your mind to it" (in reality, you're not going to be prime minister if you hate public speaking and don't manage meeting new people).

I'm a primary school teacher.
You know that saying, 'prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child' - I think that there has been a massive increase of parents swooping in to ask the world to change to accommodate their child's needs. Just this week I have had:

• My son is a bit worried about hurting himself on the playground. Can you please leave the classroom open for him to have a quiet place to be during playtimes?
• My son's hat is a comfort item. Please allow him to wear it at all times. (School rule is no hats inside).
• My son is disruptive during wet playtimes because his good friends are in other classes. Pease could he be allowed to wander between classes during wet playtimes so he can see his friends?

Three different children in my class. Just examples from this week. They are 10 yr olds. Now, all of these are small adjustments that seem reasonable to request. Why stop an anxious child wearing his favourite hat? Why shouldn't kids have somewhere quiet to be at playtime? What difference does it make to me to leave the classroom unlocked while I pop to the staffroom at playtime?

But the thing is, they all add up. These children are learning that any time they have a small amount of discomfort, their parent will swoop in and clear the road for the child. They are never given an opportunity to develop any kind of self-advocacy or resilience and I worry so much about these children when they get older and these skills have not been formed in childhood. Young children are developing their neural pathways with habits they will use for life and Covid plus parenting are stopping that from happening.

I'm not unsympathetic. I have three children, one of whom is a textbook anxious child, and I have had to work so hard over the years with her to help her develop a clear understanding that it's okay to find things hard and do them anyway; it's okay to feel anxious and push yourself through; it's okay to advocate for yourself, but sometimes the best thing to do is to just fit in with what everyone else is doing. That's harder for some children than others, but we do them no favours by simply not teaching them those skills.

That is so true. Without wanting to sound callous, a major event such as Lockerbie, Herald of Free Enterprise, The Challenger Spaceship. Were all seen as almost once in a lifetime things to us children. Today as you say, children are constantly informed of ongoing major world events. They don't have that innocence we grew up with.

The standout thing for me growing up during the 80's was Chernobyl. Most of our parents would have known that if the work done to stop the burning didn't work, the whole world was finished.

I think it's a mix of social media, internet access, screen time and COVID.