"Remember those summer days that stretched on forever? No phones buzzing, no parents tracking your every move, just you and your mates figuring things out until the streetlights came on. I grew up in the 80s outside Manchester, and looking back, I realize how different childhood was then. We didn't have helicopter parents or participation trophies; we had scraped knees, hurt feelings, and parents who expected us to sort it out ourselves."
"No GPS tracking, and no instant answers to every question. If you got lost, you stayed lost until you figured it out; if you were having a bad day, you dealt with it. Your parents couldn't swoop in to fix everything because they simply didn't know what was happening most of the time. This forced us to develop what psychologists call "distress tolerance.""
Childhood in the 1970s and 1980s involved unstructured play, minimal supervision, and expectations that children solve interpersonal and practical problems themselves. That environment produced scraped knees, emotional setbacks, and opportunities to build self-reliance. Contemporary young adults often struggle with basic workplace challenges after experiencing intensive supervision and safety-focused parenting. Overprotection reduced opportunities to develop psychological strengths that emerge from facing adversity. Seven key strengths are identified as commonly formed by those older generations. One such strength is tolerance of uncertainty: without constant texting, GPS, or instant answers, young adults learned to sit with discomfort and solve problems independently, building distress tolerance.
Read at Silicon Canals
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]