Do today's teenagers/20-somethings lack resilience?

[ToutesetBonne]

Prompted by another thread, I'm reminded of the number of times, at work, when I shake my head in disbelief about the dramas some of the younger staff create out of nothing!

I work for a lovely organisation in beautiful surroundings, with some of the best 'perks' I've ever encountered. Our salaries are well above average and we have free lunches, parking, and private health care.

Despite this, so many of our younger staff throw complete wobblies if asked to do anything that they perceive to be outside their role description, and have close to a breakdown if a manager (I am not one - no-one reports to me) queries any aspect of their work or asks them to change something in a written paper, or suggests that they might need some help with a task.

Where is the resilience? I am a labour voter who cringes at the expression 'snowflake' but, gosh, I'm beginning to see where it comes from!

Honestly, I find the entitlement and lack of resilience in that generation astounding 😬

We advertised a job for example - 3 days office, 2 days remote - two weeks in, apparently a poor little lamb found the commute too stressful and demanded WFH FT. They’d attended the office three times.

Another applicant, who had only six months experience, wanted 50% more than the advertised salary.

I’ve had people cry in appraisals for being asked to check their work for accuracy.

Another one cried when she was asked to be at her desk at 9:00 (her contracted start time) because she HAS to get a Starbucks on her way in and can’t possibly arrive before 9:15.

It’s actually exhausting!

I agree with this: it’s that mid 20’s to 30’s age bracket that have of the wobbly attitudes.

Extensions of deadlines, scaffolding of essay answers, notes provided for them, secondary school pupils not allowed off the premises at lunchtimes, lack of exclusions, bullying not being dealt with robustly, teachers not being allowed to issue consequences etc. It varies from school to school but all these are happening.

I see it where I work. So much drama, very often self inflicted. Very often an obsession with perceived unfairness. Refusal to adhere to basic absence procedures, leave procedures, working instructions and all stressed by the tiniest bit of challenge. Any attempt to manage them results in the mental health defence. We actually had something quite genuinely stressful happen at work this week and I will be interested to see how people will react to something more life changing than being asked to do the company the courtesy of a phone call if you're not going to turn up for work.

I totally agree. We've had problems recently at work because some staff in their 20s don't like the way they are spoken to. I'm in the same meetings. What they're objecting to is being politely but firmly told why a particular thing isn't a priority right now. Or when our manager tries to bring a rambling discussion to an end and move us on. Or being asked to please also do X when they say they're doing Y. You get the idea - all totally normal professional chat that they seem to get the hump with.

One young lady came to the interview with her mum holding her hand (she also works with us)
The same lass about a week after starting rang to say she couldn't be bothered to do that days shift.....

@DelboytrottersDnecklace I haven't quoted the rest of your post because I couldn't get past the fact that you gave this person a job in the first place. I mean, how desperate are you for staff that you would take on someone who came to an interview accompanied by her mum? And then you are surprised by her lack of resilience.

Why didn’t you just speak to whoever the manager is or nurse in charge?
So many reasons as to how this could have happened which doesn’t involve lack of initiative,intelligence etc .
Am sure most people would be impressed that a young person has given up their Christmas Day to care for the elderly!

Sorry “ most of”

I'm not the hiring manager
If I was,I wouldn't have taken her on
It wasn't my choice
Sorry if I hadn't made that clear-i didn't think to add that detail

Yes.

@Catsonskis To be fair it is shit being moved around. Our manager did that and put me in at a desk with everything falling apart on my own/no DSW and it did make my morale shit, wouldn’t go off with stress but it’s one of the worst things you can do for a sedentary office job.

Yep, I was running an induction course at work and asked this particular person ( I would say early 20's) twice to put her phone away. She's now off sick citing mental health - apparently I humiliated her in front of her new colleagues and she can't face come into work..... and that's just one example.

Honestly it's insane, something somewhere has gone horribly wrong!

I used to work in an elite sport organisation and we got a lot of telephone and email enquiries for work experience, sandwich years, summer jobs, etc. My CEO made a point of ignoring every enquiry that wasn’t from someone who had personally made it. The number of enquiries made by the parents of 20 year old sport science grads (and in two cases PhD students) was off the scale.

Yeah, sorry. I was using "you" more to refer to the company you work for than you personally.

The ones I have worked with just don’t seem to ‘get’ work. The need to be there for the hours you are being paid for. That fact that a first job will be a bit dull at times and no they won’t be asked to do the exciting or more complex tasks before they have got the experience to do so. Normal changes to work - a new line manager or whatever are treated as huge dramas. I’ve seen this in my own 19 year old and had to give her some real talk. At her age I was working 3 months a year in an egg factory as a summer job. It was cold, awful, boring, and all the full time staff hated me and showed it. But I needed the money and I was able to suck it up for the 7 hours a day I was there as a means to an end. She works in a boring entry level role in a call centre. She hates it and was getting so upset about it. But there was nothing actually wrong with it other than that it’s a bit dull. It took her a while to compute that it wouldn’t be instantly gratifying or exciting and she had to do it to save up for her next steps. She sailed through school, had lots of friends and hobbies etc. She has been shocked that work isn’t the easy and sociable ride school was I think and has struggled to get her head round it. I’ve been really surprised and not a little bit disappointed in her around her attitude to it.

Why didn’t you just speak to whoever the manager is or nurse in charge?

I did speak to the manager on duty.

That's how I was able to find out about the situation.

I was told that it would take too much time to bring her down to have Christmas Dinner with the others. I was also told that they couldn't spare the staff to help her eat her food as they were short-staffed as it was Christmas Day.
I was also told that as she wasn't a relative of mine I should MMOBB.

Hence my complaint to QCC

To be fair,they hire anyone
We are short staffed and if we weeded out the useless,we'd be even more fucked
One lass started (her mum knew the boss) and every time I turned around,she'd gone
I was doing both our work and when I mentioned it,I was screamed at by the boss
Turns out,she was spending her whole shift in the toliet and vaping while gawping at her phone
Fuck all was done

@rubbishtvthe young person didn’t ’give up’ her Christmas say to care for the elderly though. If you take a job in a care home you know you will have to work unsociable hours and holidays. You get paid for it. It’s in your contract. Yes it sucks but it’s no excuse for not actually doing your job properly. So many of them feel like they are doing their employer a favour by just showing up and thsts the issue

Maybe as an overall generalisation but there are still some amazing young people around and I think we need to be careful not to write off an entire generation.

I have a young person working in my department they are 18 live alone as Mum died and they needed to leave Dad's house for several reasons I won't go in to. They are hard working, kind, insightful, helpful and dedicated. Every so often they say something that reminds me how young they are but honestly I couldn't be prouder of them and I do try to let them know this without coming across creepy or embarrassing them.

The problem is the education system / schools. It’s producing generation upon generation of burnt out young people who are hyper sensitive and reactive. There needs to be a total overhaul.

They start too young and the pressure even from year 1 is a lot. Primary schools seem to be very focused on being ‘rights respecting’ schools and teaching children this repetitively, huge amounts of praise and then they get sent off (again too early) to secondary (which for some is like a real life ADOS and that’s why school refusal often starts or peaks at this point). On top of that you have the sudden removal of all the rights taught throughout primary and huge amounts of rules and regulations that causes resentment not compliance (ridiculous uniform requirements eg blazers and jumpers during heatwaves). It causes confusion brings out undesirable behaviour and/or anxieties.
The pace is often too quick for some students and there’s not the funding or staff to offer tailored schooling for individuals. It’s a mess and it’s affecting so many who would otherwise do really well.

My ds16 says things like he can't be bothered to catch a bus to go swimming because my car is off the road for one weekend. Which I find completely limp since swimming is 'his' sport.

But is he any less resilient than I was at 16. Probably not. I think he lacks the confidence of an adult (not unnaturally) and I've forgotten what all those teenage worries were like.

I'll drag him out swimming later (on the bus 😁) and then next time he'll know it's really not too much hassle.

He persevered with his pool lifeguard qualification despite being the youngest & slowest on the course, and finally managed to meet the timed swim requirement during the exam (with the rest of the course screaming him home). If he had no resilience he'd have given up.

I think he'll be ok. He just needs a few more years.

Most of his contemporaries seem to be the same. They'll be fine with a bit of parental support.

I only realised I was lacking in resilience when I recently got sacked (not redundant) from my "C" level role..

At the end of the day it is all just "work", and for most of us it is a variation of typing stuff into a computer.

So, maybe the younger ones giving a bit less of a shit about their employer is actually a good thing..

Meh, I think this is a fashionable trope at the moment and its true in some cases but honestly I don't think its much worse now than it was when I was coming of age (late 80s/early 90s).

The reality is that people in their late teens and early 20s don't yet have fully formed brains, are still learning how to socialise and are learning the realities of work. It's a shock to the system, particularly to those of them who have extended time away from the "real world" by going to university and beyond. It took me a very long time to make peace with the idea that if someone was paying me I had to do what they told me and there was no benefit in railing and moaning. Spoiled? Maybe, but its a fairly common phenomenon for people to take some time to adjust to the realities of work.

Meanwhile the economic environment is far less supportive to these people than it was to people of my generation. It's hard to find good graduate jobs without nepotism, they work incredibly long hours and its impossible for them to imagine being able to save for anything tangible such as a house at the end of it.

I do think there are some kids who struggle with the reality of having to do as you're told, particularly after the discursive environment of university where you are led to believe you'll have a degree of autonomy in the workplace.

But for generations middle aged and older people have railed at what they perceive as "snowflakery", just using different words.

I also want to say I work in an education and career setting, we help with getting skills and training etc for young people. I work in the research and insight side of things and some of our research talks about the mental health issues of young people today but also that what is lacking is resilience. This is actually what young people are telling us!

We interviewed a cohort of young people under age of 24 as part of a deep dive into apprenticeship careers and actually that was one of the themes that came out. Those young people said that they found their work really challenging and difficult but they thrived on it. All of them said that they didn't think a lot of their peers would be able to cope with it and would need resilience. These young people were determined and didn't let the challenges get to them. It was a mindset. But again they talked a lot about the influence their parents had on them to have a good work ethic etc. Many of them had also worked in scouts, Duke of Edinburgh etc. One had come from a really deprived background so had qualified for a sort of assault challenge course thing as a hobby which had helped build resilience. It just goes to show that perhaps the best thing to do is for parents to stop mollycoddling, for kids to be taught team building, leadership etc at scouts and things like that, to have a work ethic and to deal with challenges.

Also some of them had siblings and/or other relatives who were disabled or who required care. So from a young age they'd been exposed to having to care for or see their parents care for relatives. I was very impressed by these young people we interviewed. So despite my previous comment about what my friend experiences in her chip shop, it does show the differences that exposure to life's challenges can do.

YABU. Some do, most don't. I'd say it's just the same as other age groups. It's just that there's currently a "kick the youngsters" attitude and people are feeding on what others are saying and believing it to be true even though they've no personal experience of it.

My DS and his peers went through Uni during Covid. They were lied to, conned, treated worse than criminals, and most got through it with stoic attitudes. My son's friends and Uni flat mates were an absolute credit to their generation for their fortitude, getting each other through it and out the other end with degrees after not experiencing anything close to the Uni "experience" they were promised - not even face to face lectures or tutorials for 2 years - just stuck in tiny rooms like prison cells. Yes, lots of them had wobbles, but they kept each other sane and got each other through it. (And no, they weren't ignoring the rules and partying - most were responsible and followed the rules!).

I have no doubt that some youngsters over-dramatise minor things like breaking a finger nail, but the vast majority are just the same as we were in previous generations.

Perhaps people should actually talk to youngsters and get to know them rather than making cheap jibes from the safety of their computer based on rubbish they've seen posted on the internet!