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?

This is because people see every other teen having anxiety every time they are asked to work hard or do something difficult. This makes it so hard for those who do have mental health issues to be taken seriously and that is devastating all round. My friends DS has severe anxiety and mental health issues, it has been so hard for him to access the help he needs as waiting lists are so long.

@FernGullyLunchbox1994 you cant ignore that for a long time long term residential psychiatric facilities housed children and adults who were most likely neurodiverse but also those with mental health conditions, and yes 40+ years ago there were many more manual jobs that were certainly beneficial for a certain group of individuals that needed structure.

This. We have a child in school who is apparently highly sensitive to noise and mum has insisted on supply of ear defenders in class yet the same child managed perfectly well without them at the school disco. The same child clings to mum at drop off ( we are talking upper ks2 age), mum gives cuddle after cuddle, child is apparently highly anxious according to mum. Child is prised off of mum and once escorted into school is smiling and fine within minutes. If dad or nan drop off there is none of it. Drop and go with a smile and a wave. Mum is enabling the behaviour. The amount of parents who swoop in and want the school to sort out friendship issues is ridiculous. If you leave the kids to it they more often than not sort things for themselves. The parents make things worse.

I also was dropped and left. My parents were fairly close, some kids on my floor came from 4000 miles away.

But one thing was that there were no cell phones, and none of us had phones in our rooms that first year. We all relied on the pay phone in the hall. If someone wanted to call they hoped a passer by would pick up, and most kids called home once a week or so. A few far less frequently.

Similarly when I joined the army, I was older as I'd already done a degree, but a lot of the recruits were very young, barley old enough to drive. They had time to call home on the weekend but there was only one phone for everyone so it was very short!

Why only some people though? Not all youngsters. I have a DS that was 16 when first lockdown happened, missed GCSEs etc. Doesn't seem to have caused him any harm so what's the difference ( there must be one) that causes others so many issues. Same age same lockdown

I think this is right.

It wasn't just the lack of normal interactions during covid.

The messages from the media and medical people were crazy, and in themselves must have had an impact. There are still adults I know wearing masks, my ILs don't really go out, one of my staff won't go to places like pubs anymore due to fear of illness. A lot of people where I live (not the UK) are testing for covid every few days which is encouraged by public health.

The danger part of the brain is being activated constantly, and I think that bleeds into everything.

My Dd was like this with talking on the phone. I found it ridiculous and I basically did not enable it. She would make excuses try and find work arounds ( chat bots, messaging) but eventually she had no choice as there were some things she just could not do without speaking to someone on the phone. She now says she doesn’t know why she was so worried.

Because that is how everything works. Cigarettes don't give everyone lung cancer. But it would be idiotic to say "well I smoked and I didn't get lung cancer, so it can't be smoking that causes lung cancer" or "well I smoked and didn't get lung cancer, so I must have done things Correctly while everyone who got lung cancer must have handled their smoking Incorrectly."

In the real world there are different predisposing factors, different combinations of events and sheer dumb luck that all play into how an individual will be affected.

@Gogogo12345 maybe the cohort of nt 16yr old males fared well. maybe the cohort of 5-6 year old were the most set back academically and maybe the early teens the most socially set back. i could see it varying from family to family as well. some had no outdoor space some even managed to travel out of country. but having been on mn during those years it's easy to imagine how the pandemic could have lasting effects.

Yes, I did the same. I helped them out with what to expect and say, but I pretty much told them they had to do it. Similarly with talking to teachers, going to pass in a resume for a job. I even dropped my eldest off at the passport office to get her passport stuff sorted herslelf.

She had a job this summer where she had to make a ton of calls to elderly people, and she told me she is now much more comfortable doing it.

It's interesting, because when I think back, I knew how to make a call to my friends, or pick up a call, and be polite, by the time I was five. I didn't even know I should be nervous at that age I just thought it was fun. My kids just never had much chance to do that.

It strikes me that a few people on the thread have mentioned that the early teens are when you are supposed to gain some independence and this was interrupted by lockdown. But it strikes me, for those of us from the 70s and 80s, we became independent well before that in some significant ways. And at an age before teenage self-consciousness set in. I think it's probably a lot harder to learn to make a call at 14 when you are so worried about being an idiot, than at 5 when you don't know you can be an idiot.

It was certainly not the same lockdown for everyone - some people had gardens, some people had the trauma of relatives dying without being able to spend time with them and so on.

OP

The big sick leave report: The top reasons educators take a sick day in the UK revealed

From our report, we found that from 2019 to 2022, stress (personal or work-related) and depression were the top two mental health reasons given for taking a sick day. However, anxiety among educators also had an increase of 230% between 2020 and 2021

So teachers are having far, far more issues with MH in recent- does that affect students?

You know what? Reading the many posts on this thread is reminding me of the lyrics to the song: We didn’t start the fire by Billy Joel.

Perhaps it’s worth considering that young people today are no better or worse than young people of previous generations. And older people today are no better or worse than older people of previous generations.

I remember my granddad criticising my parents generation (baby boomers) for being too soft and not working as hard. Perhaps older generations looking down on younger generations and making comparisons of we were much better, stronger, tougher is a vicious cycle we should try to break.

Here’s the lyrics for we didn’t start the fire. What do you think?

We Didn’t Start the Fire
Song by Billy Joel

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye"
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu falls, "Rock Around the Clock"
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Krushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, "Bridge on the River Kwai"
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide
Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go
U2, Syngman Rhee, Payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it
Hemingway, Eichmann, "Stranger in a Strange Land"
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
"Lawrence of Arabia", British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British politician sex
JFK – blown away, what else do I have to say?
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
"Wheel of Fortune", Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shore, China's under martial law
Rock and roller, cola wars, I can't take it anymore
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
It will still burn on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning, since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: Billy Joel

There is actually some pretty solid evidence that depression etc has skyrocketed among young people. Anecdotally everyone I know working with young people has observed it too.

Anyway, that's not what Billy Joel was talking about. He was telling young folks (Gen Xers) that they were wrong to blame Boomers for making things shit, the Boomers found things shit when they were young too.

@TempestTost I wasn’t referring to depression in my post regarding the lyrics to We didn’t start the fire. I wasn’t even suggesting that he was singing about depression.

I have read most of the thread. I am not basing my post on just a few of the topics raised in this thread. I am basing it off the continual underlying theme.

Many millennials today do blame baby boomers for what’s wrong with the world today. Some gen xers probably do to. Though in my experience it has been mostly millennials and baby boomers locked in battle. Boomers criticising millennials as being a snowflake generation wasting their money on expensive smashed avocado toasted sandwiches instead of saving to buy a house. Millennials firing back that Boomers are self centred, had everything handed to them on a plate with free education, lower cost of everything, destroying the environment, denying climate change and therefore destroying our planet and our future.

In my pp I mentioned my granddad criticising the baby boomers for being too soft and not working hard enough. In other words calling them a snowflake generation. It’s interesting how the boomers are now criticising the younger generation of the exact same thing.

As for Billy Joel’s song, I am not sure that he wrote it specifically for Boomers and X gens. I had the feeling that he wrote it for everyone.

The original point in my post still stands.

I think it's multifactorial. Yes Covid Lockdowns played a part in some cases but trust me you will notice similar anxiety posts on mumsnet and other forums precovid. Workloads at schools are insane. The world is full on negative news 24h7. Then there is the "everyone has the power to be super successful, beautiful, rich etc" culture. Even ultra processed food has been linked to poor health. And of course there is parenting. By holding their hands a bit longer on everything we teach them they are incapable and that the world is very very dangerous. So of course they are scared. Honestly I have lived in many many countries and I have never seen children "supported and protected" as much as those in the uk. Ironically I admire it but also wonder what it means for building resilience. There are so many other factors at work. I hope as a nation (and the wider world) we find a solution sooner rather than later.

This phenomenon isn't seen in say Bulgaria, or Vietnam

It is seen in Vietnam, at least my Vietnamese colleague (lives in Hanoi) says the same. She is bewildered by how unresilient young adults are; we both have daughters age ~22. "I don't understand the young people why they have no toughness. We just had to get on with it" is her sort of comment.

The boomer generation had everything handed to them on a plate.

That statement is so weird, Bullshit actually. I don't understand the desire to vilify another generation (including GenZs). Setting aside the fact that GenX gets called "Boomers" nowadays. The comment overlooks ...

Boomers had

Nuclear War & Armageddon as a serious possible thing to worry about DAILY & no parents or grandparents helping them with property deposits and parents who were traumatised by the experiences of WWII and expectations of playing out alone from age 6 with everying bad that might happen as a result & and high income tax burdens and rolling blackouts & the Miners Strikes & themselves working at 5:30am on milk floats and smoking everywhere & rampant homophobia and probably no central heating and maybe not even a telephone at home to help them do things ...... do you mean those Boomers had it too easy? My parents were born just < 1945 so just barely 'pre-Boomers' and my hat is off to them, they scrapped & hustled & worked hard for every penny, everything they had in life.

It’s a bit different for young people since that’s where most of their social interactions are these days. Great that you can switch off but the world is bigger than you and you’re bubble of life 👍

@ImustLearn2Cook fall out boy did a modern version check that out.

The problem is that doing something when you don't feel like it is hard. But doing nothing isn't meant to feel good. You have to do hard stuff to feel good.

I was reading some research that children's mental health has been negatively impacted by the fact that they don't have an opportunity to gain independence and take risk and sometimes failing ,as they are much more monitored than they used to be.
This makes further sense linked to Covid lockdowns when everyone was monitored .
I do wonder without throwing stones at anyone why so many children were so impacted by lockdown, were we so close to the precipice as a society that many people, not just young people feel of the cliff in Covid ?
Why have so many struggled ? I have a very personal issue with all of this my then teenagers lost their dad to Covid , unbelievably traumatic !! but appear to have moved onto adult life positively and well with less issues than many of their peers .

Honestly , I find the ,it was Covid quite hard to hear as my family were shredded by it and have found a way to rebuild. Unfair maybe ,just like much of life

This is not blaming the children and it sounds quite basic but they need more exercise and more time outside.

You sound like a lovely mum.

There’s a lot to process here! But I’m building up a picture of some young peoples’ lives as quite fraught during the transition to adulthood, which is when we get them at uni.

I’m trying to summarise the gist of things many have been saying, which seems to be:

• Modern parenting, mental health discourses and schooling have improved in some ways, but a can also infantilise young people, remove their independence and resilience, and make them feel as though any bad feelings or discomfort are unacceptable.
• If they’ve had a childhood that’s aimed to remove most difficulty for them, the thought of adulthood in a challenging world (job market, cost of living, climate change) is likely to be really stressful to them.
• Covid showed them that the rules can change/be bent.
• Life today entails a weird mixture of extreme materialism and easiness (the internet, cheap online shopping, takeaways, social media stars) and difficulty (reality of jobs and the job market, housing, 24/7 catastrophic news reporting). This is probably quite confusing.

I’m finding it really interesting that regarding mental health discourses, some people seem to think we’ve swung too far in the opposite direction. There’s definitely a sense on here that older generations problematically repressed their emotions, while people today prioritise and are controlled by them, to their detriment.

It’s also good to hear of all the teens who are fine. I guess in my job I notice these less because they’re not the ones asking for help and talking about things.

Probably shouldn’t address the hamster can of worms but here goes: sorry! I just meant that it seems a strange thing to tell your lecturer who you barely know - a bit young, if you see what I mean. I’m also not sure the bond is the same as with a dog/cat etc who lives for 10-20 years and is capable of more emotional reciprocation. But then I wouldn’t really have told someone I barely know that my dog had died when I was 20 either, I would have just got on with things. But that’s not really what the thread is about so I’ll leave it there! 😂

Perhaps at one time many additional needs, including neurodiversity and mental health issues, were not disclosed and perhaps were not even identified. This meant that reasonable adjustments were not requested or expected to be put in place.

In the institution in which I work, mature students would also have guidance on reasonable adjustments that would include all or many of the statements in the OP. A large proportion of these students may have been unable to study in HE when they were younger because their additional needs were not considered.