To hate the ‘youth of today’ attitudes?

[Whatnowthenfordone]

I hated the posts on Facebook when I was a teenager about ‘when I was young we… bathed in a tin bath. Were disciplined at school. Respected our elders. Had no computers and has to TALK to each other. Thank god Im from the last generation who knew how to enjoy life! Youngsters today have everything on a plate and complain!’

I’m 36 now and have just seen someone I went to school with sharing posting ‘We were the last generation to play out. We were the first to have mobile phones. We ate what we were given. We were pleased with a 10p mixup. We had to LOOK at the TV guide, we didn’t stream our programmes! Today’s kids don’t know how easy they have it and they still complain!!’

I know these attitudes are as old as human kind but AIBU to find it so annoying? How can you so quickly forget when everyone accused your generation of not playing out when you blatantly did? Why are people so keen to always criticise the next generation? I’ll try and find examples of the kinds of posts I mean.

I think most of this style of post are about nostalgia!

But yes, every generation seems to think the next is lazy and spoilt.

I think a lot of it is driven by lack of genuine exposure to them and their lives. It’s amazing how quickly you become out of touch with issues.

I’m always so impressed by the total cognitive dissonance around housing affordability, assuming it because younger people are lazy and spending too much, and entirely ignoring inflation in house prices.

My kids and their mates are far more emotionally intelligent and switched on than I was at their age. I always think if young people present as badly behaved or rude it’s most likely that they’ve had shit in their lives, because all of the ones I know from stable backgrounds are awesome.

If anything, they are a bit too sensible and full of anxieties. I just want to tell them to go out, dance, flirt, get drunk, break the rules and make the most of their youth!

The ones that annoy me most are the "back in my day I didn't have xyz" or "I had to work hard for xyz and now kids just get it handed to them".... If that's so true, then why is that a bad thing? Surely we want life for our children to be easier? It feels like if the older generations had it their way, we'd still be freezing cold huddled around a fireplace listening to the wireless every night!

My experience with younger people has been unexpectedly good recently. When out for walks or even driving I've passed "youths" who have always said thank you if I've stopped or moved out the way. I'm glad there are still manners being taught.

I work in a public facing role and I'd say the worst age group in my own experience for rudeness and entitlement is the current early twenty to mid thirty year olds. People over 70 seem to be either lovely or awful. There doesn't seem to be an in between.

The rest of the age groups are more varied but on the whole are okay. Teens to early twenties seem to have been taught manners again imo.

Disclaimer: I'm 43 myself with an 8 and 11 year old and a 29 year old half brother. The above is only from my experience.

It's toxic nostalgia. I was born in 1968, my kids are now early 20s and honestly, their generation are much more politically aware, socially conscious and in every way creative than mine ever was. I think they're great.

I feel the same way about 'the good old days' - they weren't. Rape in marriage was fine, hitting your kids was acceptable, women couldn't get mortgages or bank accounts. It was shit in so many ways.

My 13 Yr old DD is way more emotionally mature than I was at her age, not afraid to set boundaries, stick up for her beliefs and challenge her friends. She is a strident feminist and is highly driven whilst having a massive gift for empathy and compassion.
As a Gen X'er I am in awe of her daily. She has her shit together already. I still haven't got my shit together at 46!

I can't stand the generalisations applied to teenagers today but am sure it has always been so.

I always find it quite ironic when older people are using social media to criticise youngsters for spending too much time on social media I must say!
But criticising younger generations is as old as the hills. My DCs in their early 20s are already moaning about kids!
Personally, I don't think "the youth of today" are intrinsically different to my generation or the ones before. They have different opportunities and different challenges for sure, but they're still just people. I volunteer with a couple of children's sports clubs, so deal with quite a range of kids from preschoolers to teenagers and I don't see them as the cause of society's imminent downfall. Obviously there are some I like better than others, some who behave better than others and so on, but any adult working with me and my peers in the 70s would have said the same, just as I suspect my Dad's Scout leaders in the 1930s would. The younger generation has been about to bring civilisation as we know it to an end for as long as anyone can remember, and yet we're still here. In terms of the future of the world, I'm a lot more worried about what old men are up to at the moment.

I would say though that education has definitely been lacking. A lot of young people struggle with basic spelling and grammar. A lot who hold decent exam results. And appear on the surface to be intelligent but just can't spell. Also have a bit of a slack approach in a working environment after leaving school. Thats just an observation....

Exactly the same would have been said about you generation.

Quote Ecclesiastes 7:10 at them.
Or the Four Yorkshiremen sketch.

The stupid thing is that the examples they gave in the post about 1940w to 1979 or whatever it was, I was also doing, playing out, recording songs from the radio onto a cassette etc etc. I was born in 1992.

It's all nostalgia, but older generations forget times change, some things they did just aren't possible now. And some if them aren't possible down to their doing. The world we live in now is mainly down to the generations before creating the world we've in now. As will the generations growing up now will change the way things are for future generations.

Completely agree @Whatnowthenfordone

Better they refer to remember when we.... instead of sounding like they where the best generation around when everyone thinks their generation is the best.

The worst spelling I see on facebook and other sites is by far the 40s+ people who were kids in the 70s and 80s.
Before and after that time seems different

This is such a sweeping generalisation.

So many of my boomer parents’ generation are either very good at grammar and spelling or awful at it. That’s not a new thing!

Yes. I especially hate the ones about this generations parenting and how awful our children are.

A teacher of mine was saying the exact same thing when I was at school about people born in the 60s and 70s.

Totally agree OP and it’s depressing seeing people of our age saying the same old rubbish. There’s an inbuilt smugness to these posts as the unspoken message is that WE are obviously brilliant so all that playing out, wearing gloves on a string, polishing our shoes, penny sweets or whatever bollocks it may be is what made us the wonderful wonderful people we are today. Young people today are (supposedly) doing different things and therefore those things are worse and will make them into terrible people unlike us. Btw we are marvellous.

I think we are all hardwired to think they way things were when we were children is normal and good and other ways are odd and not as good, but most of us grow out of that.

Every generation has said that though.

I do think our current batch of school leaver new recruits are useless compared to those we were hiring 15-20 years ago though, and that's if they bother turning up for the interview. Constant skiving to browse their phones, calling in sick all the time and needing spoon fed everything like baby birds.

You don’t know ‘my’ generation? It’s the teaching. Not enough emphasis is placed on spelling things correctly. I had my dds English book back, marked, but no correction of spelling mistakes. When I checked with the teacher, she said spelling words was not a priority. It was all about what was written, rather than any spelling errors. Which is madness and one of the reasons we have school leavers coming to work without basic English capabilities.

Standards were higher in teaching in the 60s and 70s. You would never find kids mixing up ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’, or putting would ‘of’ instead of would ‘have’ or writing ‘your’ instead of ‘you’re’. But in our office we are having to check letters going out every single time because of these recurring type of errors.

I’m not a ‘boomer’ parent btw. I was born later, but I work in an office and the staff over 40 definitely have a better grasp of grammar and spelling than those coming through in their late teens/20s.

We’re the same age op. The posts you’re seeing are generally shared by those left entirely untouched by the concept of critical thinking.

I do think there will be some fall out relating to the pandemic for the younger gen Z’s and gen alpha’s even more broadly. How that will play out, who knows.

However, I am enjoying seeing gen Z’s come into the workforce and challenge the status quo in a way I don’t think Millennial’s ever have, as a generation.

Most of the 'would of' I see in my work comes from people in their thirties and forties. My kids are early twenties and they had spelling and grammar hammered into them at school.

you don't see the criticism in saying that people's parents 'aren't there' for them (although ironically this is insulting themselves rather than younger generations) or that younger people "don't have anything to talk about"?
Not to mention the fact that most of the things are completely untrue - they weren't the last generation to do completely common things like play outside or laugh under their covers,for example.

apart from anything else, you don't see the irony in someone almost certainly posting a stupid meme about "kids these days always with their phone in their hands and unable to interact" from their phone?

it's so stupid. Older generations weren't so reliant on mobile phones (and other technology) because of some moral superiority, it was solely because they didn't exist yet.

I'm the same age as you OP, and 36 is way too young to be posting this rose-tinted crap

I think its as stupid to say "youth of today are shit" than it is to say that they're great.
This idea of generalising a whole generation is absolutely bonkers.
Some people are good, some are bad, most are boring, it has always been like that and will always be like that.

Yep I am glad you posted this as I thought I was the only one. Being a teenager in the 90s I don't view it with rose tinted glasses. Although there are many issues now, the difference is we talk about them. Back then bullying was never ever dealt with or discussed and sexual abuse was swept under the carpet. I was a teenager slap bang in the middle of 'ladette' culture and 'hello boys' wonderbra and waifer thin models to inspire to. As I said, we have a lot of issues today in different ways but saying it was better back then isn't so.