“Small children, small problems. Big children, big problems,” said my friend on the phone last night. We’re in the era of 18 - 25 when they’re not kids anymore that can be reined in and put to bed, when they have the reins themselves and are learning to use them. You wouldn’t hand a new driver the keys to a Ferrari, would you? They have to start on a moped at best, “a Reliant Robin” as Margaret commented when I had the same conversation with her later. But these young people in our lives are off driving the road of their lives with powerful decisions at their fingertips, their abilities not yet fully formed and no experience under their belts but with their feet on the pedals.

18 - 25 are the years that social services have no service for. Young people in care lose that close eye and are delivered into the world before they’re adults. It’s deadly. They’re not ready. Those are the years of high speed crashes. When I worked for the Fagus Trust, it was the 18 - 25 years olds we focused on; the organisations which scooped them up in clear understanding of the perilous nature of their unfinished neurones.

My own are bolshy and clear in equal measure. They’re facing me down with uncomfortable truths, individuating at a rate of one insensitive comment after another. It’s good! I applaud it! and also, f**k they’re rude and entitled and choosing their truths with the exquisite irritation of this particular generation. Have I found myself shouting in my head, For f**k’s sake mate you are going to have to toughen up - ? Yes I have. Have I become lost in daydreams of how it was in my day? You bet. They, and that is my two, have been so cared for and wrapped, so listened to, so heard, so heart-poundingly set free. And the result? There’s emotional articulation for sure, there’s a sense of knowing they have the right to know themselves even as they’re developing the sense of who they are, they’re bright and funny and clever, they’re nice people, yes, these things are true, but they’re also 18 - 25 in an era, confusingly, of oversensitivity. There. I’ve said it. One of the most brilliant minds I’ve ever met said to me in a conversation last year about the rise of fascism, “The liberal left gave rise to Trump and our snowflake kids have no idea what’s coming. They think someone using the wrong pronoun is a big deal for their feelings to cope with. Wait till they meet the army coming over the hill.” That same army that manipulates young people into thinking a 24hour shut down of TikTok is the end of the world.

Insensitive and oversensitive. What a combination. Those same young people who think nothing of delivering a take-down line to me will call foul at the mere mention of Get over it. I know when they do things that hurt me that it’s not personal; I know this because I’m 54. It’s my job to know it. I’ve learned. But they are 18 - 25. They’re not cooked. They can’t know. Their brains are still forming. They can dole it out but they can’t take it and the social era in which they’ve grown up has done nothing to help.

Somewhere between Pull your socks up and I hear you lies a road where my age group don’t have to tip toe through the glass and daisies of a culture that’s spent a decade misappropriating words. Where we can say, Now listen up without reminding ourselves too much of our own parents. The seventies were bad, there’s no doubt about that. Nothing wants me to go back to an era of corporal punishment and Jimmy Saville. We were lucky if our mother managed to count to five before driving out of London on a Friday night. I dropped out of university, flew to India and didn’t call her for a year. If she noticed, she never said. But sweet Jesus. Can our young people put down the weaponry of triggered for one minute and consider we might have some wisdom to impart? That differentiating between a peer and an elder might useful? And then I tell myself, stop. They’re individuating. It’s a good thing. And I bite my tongue and grow up inside and keep the home fires burning. I throw an invisible net around them and watch and pray and accept it was ever thus and this is how it should be. I’m writing the manual and as soon as I’ve finished it and figured it out and really learned how to handle this age they’ll promptly reach 25 and all my study will be for nought. They’ll be in the next era and I’ll be back at square one, searching for the handbook on 30.

Eleanor

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