Young people have never been more unhappy

As the inevitable encroachments of old age continue apace, and with the space we oldies inhabit progressively constricting, people of my vintage find ourselves musing about the state of the world. Not least about the ever-diminishing room there is for my generation.

You find it in the cinema where the soundtrack of the latest films is now ear-poppingly deafening. Or you find the menu in what we used to call ‘eating houses’ is now full of teenage food. Or you sense how everyday language is becoming progressively offensive with constant repetition of the widespread F-word and its derivations peppering almost every conversation. Or the grim truth that children have taken over the world.

It's no longer, in Cormac McCarthy-speak, a country for old men (old women) but we oldies inhabit it – in so far as we have a profile at all – as reluctant citizens barely tolerated in what seems a foreign clime. The gap between old and young which heretofore seemed to be no more than a matter of a few years is now of Great Canyon proportions with different generations megaphoning each other with little evidence of agreed understanding or even comprehension of our mutually impregnable worlds. It is a dialogue of the deaf.

Change is everywhere. We have to live with that. Traditional societies got a lot wrong and we have to acknowledge as much and correct it in so far as we can. Science is demanding that we take its lessons on board and it would be mindless to avoid that imperative.

But there is a particular fixation that concerns not just the grumpy or curmudgeonly elderly, but also among most sensible people, that’s getting out of hand. I refer to the now almost ritual acceptance that the young know better than the old, that the wisdom honed by centuries of lived experience is less convincing than the making-it-up-as-you-go-along insights of youth (where beliefs can change from Tuesdays to Thursdays) and that the young are given an inordinate level of attention in today’s world.

This is an issue seldom broached in our modern world. Probably because no one, not least those like myself – unmarried, without children, a priest and therefore singularly unversed in the ways of the young – can claim any credibility for particular insight in this area. Probably too because of the general perception nowadays that anything approaching a criticism or even a comment on the young is unacceptable in the context of parenting as parents (and grandparents) often seem to have lost the run of themselves in their absolutely uncritical devotion to their children (and grandchildren). It’s as if a positive mist has fallen that somehow magically transforms their children (and grandchildren) into icons of insight, wisdom, purpose, intellect, exception and morality. To such an extent that anyone who is foolish enough to question that received wisdom does so at their peril.

Not so Abigail Shrier, in her new book Bad Therapy, Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up. For Shrier, Generation Zoomer – those born between 1997 and 2012 – or ‘Gen Z’ (as she calls them) are "the loneliest, most pessimistic generation on record". She accepts that at one level it’s a reasonable response to the way the world is and what the future for the young looks like: fewer job opportunities; the spectre of climate change; and the harmful influence of social media promoting insecurity, narcissism and a medley of disorders based on ambitioning impossible body types that leads to eating disorders and other psychological difficulties.

Another factor, Shrier argues, is what she calls "permissive parenting", the present widespread aspiration to a style of parenting more understanding of the young, more accepting of their opinions, less authoritarian that what most of have experienced. Parents now tend "to listen better, inquire more, accommodate their opinions". 

"We wanted to cherish our children," she remarks.

This reads very well as a praiseworthy and reasonable ambition for parents but Shrier suggests it may be at the cost of undermining parental authority and, it’s clear, runs the risk of side-lining the security of the adult perspective. There is also the question that encouraging children to have an input into, for example, deciding on ‘the rules of the home’ doesn’t generate the confidence and resilience to enable them to take responsibility for themselves. While the young in the past tended to muddle through as best they could when difficulties arose, the same may not be true of their contemporaries who, at a much later stage, are still running back to their parents to solve their problems.

Another problem area for the young, according to Shrier, is an upsurge in mental health issues – depression, anxiety and eating disorders – running according to a UK study among 18 to 24 year-olds as at one-third (and 40 per cent in America). Shrier points out that while the ‘mental health’ treatments have expanded in recent years – as in Ireland too – there is little evidence of it lessening the ’mental health’ problems. She wonders whether some behaviours and challenges should be as readily placed under the psychiatric category: shyness (‘social anxiety disorder); disruptive classroom behaviour (ADHD); etc.

Shrier’s underlying thesis seems to be that parents should be sceptical of the present tendency to categorise what may be passing difficulties in childhood under the ‘mental health’ heading and that revisiting old-fashioned parenting might be a part solution. The fuller truth is that, as parents know dealing with children in distress is a complex issue, sometimes susceptible to a relatively simple and temporary solution; and sometimes not.