Are we bringing up a nation of snowflakes??

[shellstarbarley]

Are this generation of kids going to be a nation of snowflakes? I am bringing my children up the way my mum brought me up and I would say I am quite a strong person with minimal issues. I work in a primary school and every little graze or bump has to be accounted for children fall over and cry and scream until somebody comes, very few kids seem to just get up and dust themselves off and carry on. My kids rarely have a day off school but their friends seem to be off for any little thing and everyone seems to be dying when they have a cold or a sprained wrist etc. Parents won't let their children walk to school or even catch a bus so they are reliant at parents at all times. When we were 13 all our pocket money was stopped and she we had to find a part time job I did a paperround, babysitting and washed up in a local pub my brother mucked out at a stables and my other brother helped on our cousins farm. I know now it is much harder to get jobs like it was then but teens parents seem to do so much for them that they can't do much for themselves anymore. I loved being busy and still do and loved the responsibility in my part time jobs aand I remember my dad saying to me when I was out of work in my early 20's and claiming benefits that the one thing I cettainly wasn't was lazy but I would always be out doing something constructive whilst looking for work as they had instilled this strong ethic in me. We got buses and walked everywhere and we never lied to our parents we always told them where we were or used a landline at a friends house or phone box if our plans changed. Maybe looking back as my mum worked full time it was a bit of a parenting cop out. I don't know. BUT I am sure this made us strong adults. I don't give up everytime I get a cold or period pain dose up and carry on like wise I don't miss work. I also remember phoning and booking my own hair and dental and dr appts and even going to doc appts on my own at 15. I am trying really hard to bring my kids up this way but is so hard because their friends get lifts everywhere , their parents give them an endless supply of money and shower them with sympathy every time they have a sniffle or a grazed knee. I want my kids to be able to survive in the adult world because actually it is quite a harsh place and you have to be strong and determined to fight against the problems you may come up against and I think my parents did me a massive favour as I feel able to cope with adult life and conquer the problems because I learnt to build up strategies when I was growing up and not be 100% reliant on my parents for everything.

Personally, I think confidence, self-reliance and resilience come from a place of emotional security, and I believe that loving, supportive parents help to build that sense of security. It's important to let your kids develop their independence, but it's also important for them to know that you're there if they need you and there is nothing wrong with helping them out when you can. Isn't that just what families do?

@AlexaShutUp

Personally, I think confidence, self-reliance and resilience come from a place of emotional security, and I believe that loving, supportive parents help to build that sense of security. It's important to let your kids develop their independence, but it's also important for them to know that you're there if they need you and there is nothing wrong with helping them out when you can. Isn't that just what families do?

This 👆 So many people use the word “resilience” incorrectly because they don’t understand what it actually means and how we build it in our kids. Making them get a job at 13 or do their own laundry at 11, isn’t about resilience. That’s about independence. Making our children feel secure, safe, loved, looked after and listened to will build resilience.

I work in a primary school and every little graze or bump has to be accounted for children fall over and cry and scream until somebody comes, very few kids seem to just get up and dust themselves off and carry on.

As a first aider in a primary school I would actually prefer a child to tell me if they've hurt themselves. It means I can check that they're okay and decide whether they need treatment.

One child who didn't mention that they'd fallen over in the playground and had learned to 'not make a fuss' spent an entire afternoon with a fractured collarbone and we had no idea. I'll gladly take 100 children screaming about a graze if the payoff is that another child won't spend hours in pain because they'd been taught to just get on with things rather than seek help.

I hate the term snowflake. I have pre-teens and I think life is much tougher for them when I was their age. More pressure and tougher expectations at school, social media and the ease of online bullying, not to mention the impact of being young during a pandemic. I wish their had been more awareness of mental health when I was their age. I was bullied at school and it was just sort of accepted as something that happens. I never told my parents or teachers about it. I also ended up with an eating disorder and never spoke to anyone about that either. Being able to communicate your emotions is much healthier.

@AllThatFancyPaintsAsFair I’m not saying that independence and hard work aren’t important. I’m saying that those things look different now than they did when I was growing up. There’s also a difference between encouraging and allowing your children freedoms and challenges when they are ready and forcing them to do things independently before they are mature enough to cope.

I don't like the expression Snowflakes but there certainly seems to be an over abundance of mollycoddling even of young adults who should be perfectly capable of standing on their own two feet.

It is very noticeable what a nasty shock our young grads at work have when a) they realise that 'an adult' is not going to swoop in and solve their problems and the are expected to do it themselves, with support of course but the responsibility still lies with them to proactively try to sort it (after all they are adults themselves), b) that whether they want to do/are interested in doing a task is an irrelevance (if it is part of their job they are expected to do it) c) they are expected to clear up after themselves in the same way everyone else is (eg not leaving meeting rooms a mess).

Most of them suffer the shock and then get on with it, but we do get tears and tantrums from some as they seem to think that is how they get their own way. These people are in their 20s, they are adults and expected to behave as such in a professional workplace, but unfortunately their parents have set them up to fail by continuing to treat them as children at home.

I tend to agree. Having seen the transformation a new teacher has made to one of our incredibly difficult classes in primary school this year, I think we have completely screwed over a bunch of children, mainly boys.

We had a Y5 group which had more than 50% SEND, lots of swearing, running in and out of the classroom, fighting and really disruptive behaviour. Loads of resource and support put in by school and LA (extra adults, nurture group etc). Class teacher couldn’t cope and left. We have supply in because we couldn’t recruit, on first day of term supply teacher (not from U.K.) gave the class the bollocking of their lives. Several of the difficult kids in tears. The supply teacher has ruled that class with an iron fist.

We’re now a month into term. That class is calm, orderly and peaceful. Children are not roaming the corridors or swearing. The headteacher can actually do their job and not have to firefight that classes behaviour. And more importantly- those SEND children have gotten more work done in the past month than in years; I’ve seen their books.

I can’t help look back and the years of play therapy, councillors and educational psychologists wasn’t worth a damn. What those children appear to have needed was someone who was in charge, had a clear set of rules and followed through, and it feels like many modern primary schools aren’t set up to facilitate that.

The OP (the post not the person) reminds me of the working class work ethic.
My partner was brought up like this, and looking back it was a rather odd and unforgiving position, in his case he was chastised for pursuing academic stuff, reading and not wanting to sign up for manual labour - which led to a great deal of resentment down the line.
His siblings are very much advocates now themselves and laugh at me if I need to use an umbrella in the rain. In fact some of it borders on bullying, it is something I associate with masculinised self consciousness.
His familyy would also disapprove of vegetarianism, creativity and anything remotely bohemian. Almost as if it threatened them.

I, on the other hand, had a very different upbringing. perhaps a little too pampered, and my parents had me down as a budding poet or art photographer, lol. I did end up a painter, so maybe it rubbed off well

@Benjispruce4 this 'resilience' word always gets rolled out by people that work in schools and it drives me nuts.

If you fell over whilst at work and hurt your leg and were upset I can guarantee that you would not be told to 'build resilience'. The same if a colleague was consistently hitting/insulting/undermining you.

This is an absolutely awful thing that we teach children. That to be upset about something that hurts you means that you are not resilient.

Absolute shite that lazy schools use every single day.

Kids have 100% more pressure on them when we ever had. I didn't have a test until I was 16. No one ever told me my work didn't meet the required/ advanced standard.

Maybe kids need a bit more comforting now because they shoulder adult level evaluation?

@Benjispruce4

I agree OP. I work in primary school too and most children will fall or hurt themselves and sit or stay where they are and scream until an adult tends to them. Parents complain if they weren’t told that their child scraped their knee. It’s ridiculous really. There is very little resilience. I console myself with the thought that it won’t be me dealing with the fall-out when they are teenagers.They are generally very needy in every way and it’s worse than 15 years ago when I first started working with children.

There is a balance to be struck though surely?

When I attended primary school in the 70s, there was corporal punishment, children's needs were basically ignored or quashed. Special needs were not known about, or if they were, not taken in to account. I spent a lot of time afraid of the teacher, and learning when you are afraid is quite difficult. There was no "child centred" learning. And the quality of education was overall quite poor. And I was also parented in a style of benign neglect and as a result, I think I was quite "needy" too. Except it was normal for those needs to be ignored.

I agree though that there has been too much emphasis on self-confidence, self-esteem, self-fulfillment, self-care (all good things!) but not enough emphasis on "the other person's perspective" and thinking about others in general.

I think this is where our education goes wrong tbh as it is very individualistic in the UK as compared with some other countries. Again that's not all wrong by any means, but there is a balance to be struck.

To take the example above about falling over in the play ground. If children are taught sports or to ride a horse, you become used to being hurt in the short term and getting up and brushing yourself down without making a fuss. You know that the discomfort will pass in a few minutes and you get on with it. Also, you get to know that making a fuss isn't the done thing because there is a possibility of being seriously injured, so you learn a measured, proportional response and not to alarm others unnecessarily.

This is what is missing in the UK, not enough children get the opportunity to experience enough freedom and enough (controlled and proportional) danger. Again, our health and safety culture is quite strict compared to that of other countries. Not all bad in some instances but fairly restrictive in others.

The problem that arises when a parent or a collective culture sets too many rules or safeguards is that it basically says to the young person, "I don't have confidence in you to eye up a situation and judge the correct response" . And of course many youngsters don't have that ability yet, precisely because they are young, but they need to gain the experience somehow in a controlled and measured way. And the responsibility needs to increase over time.

I’m referring to the unjustified whining and demanding not the genuine hurt . Of course young children need comfort and help when they fall but increasingly there is(at my school) there is more of the demanding behaviour.

@yogafairy Quite. My son hurt his wrist at school. He was told to stop overreacting and making a fuss. Turned out he his wrist was fractured. I can't imagine being told I was making a fuss if I broke my wrist at work

First aiders are not medics and the difference between a sore wrist and a broken one are not always clear. We have to asses and get on with our other job.

@DazzlePaintedBattlePants

That's probably the most depressing post I have ever read on Mumsnet.

God, I hate the term snowflakes.

I think kids have had a bloody rough deal recently and I am often impressed by their resilience and hard work and the way they look out for each other.

@Benjispruce4

First aiders are not medics and the difference between a sore wrist and a broken one are not always clear. We have to asses and get on with our other job.

If that's is the case (and I know that you personally cannot answer for other people) why was pp son told to stop moaning about it? If as a first aider you really cannot tell the difference between a sore wrist and a broken wrist then call the parent and let them take the child to someone that can tell the difference. This kind of treatment does not make a child feel resilient.

My parents brought me up with no money and found me a paper round at 13. I've worked ever since. I was also told I was fat and useless, and I could do nothing to meet their approval, but there you go.

Times have changed. I live in London. DD(15) has tried to get part time work but keeps being told to come back at 16. Same with volunteering. Also on top of her GCSE work (which is far more intense and time consuming than my time in the early 1990s) she's expected by school to take on a sport and extra core subject lessons. Whatever time she has left over, I allow her to spend with her friends. If she didn't have that free time, I'm sure she'd crack up.

So yes, I support her with £10 a week allowance. She's very good at saving it up and buying things she wants or needs.

My daughter is a very sensible, very motivated girl. When she realises she needs to find a job to finance her studies I think she'll get something.

@Benjispruce4 I agree it's not always clear but then maybe the default position of 'stop overreacting' needs to be looked at?

If looking after your children's emotional well-being is snowflakey, ill take it.

I never say stop over reacting.

If anything I’m cautious as we just don’t know. I have sent children home who turned out to be fine and others seemed fine and weren’t. I have to be a first aider, don’t get paid for it and it’s a lot of responsibility. I always check the children over and monitor and observe if in any doubt.

This thread raises it's head every month or so. Same bullshit rose tinted glasses of how much of a better parent you are, and how much better and educational your childhood was and how youngsters today are doomed and spoilt.

Same frikking arguments since Ancient Greece. Literally every single generation has complained about how the future ones are lazy,entitled,spoilt and heading towards ruin. Can't be arsed to compile them all through the ages again.

I also work in a primary school. The kids overall are fucking amazing just by being in and trying every day. They deal with health issues, SEN, trauma,abuse, poverty, being young carers etc. They're still in and try. Try to learn,to smile ,to have a laugh, to make a joke,to form relationships, to trust. They definitely don't lack resilience. They're not snowflakes. They're young children dealing and trying to cope with struggles that would bring an adult on their knees.

So what if they cry over a grazed knee? It hurts. It happens. Let them cry.

Give over OP. I suspect you also had to get up in the dark to walk 10 miles to school, in 6ft deep snow, up hill both ways, after a shift down the mines, carrying a pack that was heavier than you, returning home to a single meal of dry bread and water?

Undoubtedly. It’s impressive how much people baby their children. A lot of the threads on MN blow me away e.g. how do we convince a child to get the bus to school so it’s a not stupidly long round trip for the person driving them. Errr you just tell her
A friends daughter is 20. Only works 12 hours as week as she “doesn’t like working full time”. No physical or mental health issues. Meanwhile mum does about 50 hours a week.