Elders listening to youth
I have been listening a lot of young people recently. I am hearing stories of anxiety, of despair, self-harm and deep lostness. I am hearing that young people feel abandoned by their elders. The adults in their parents’ and grandparents’ generations have no idea how to listen to what they say. They only know how to either dismiss and deny the very real fears of the young, or to offer advice and suggestions to fix the problem. In both cases they miss the point, which is that simply listening to someone else’s experience and showing that you understand and care is the most powerful first step to supporting them. It meets the ancient and basic need of accompaniment. When adults fail to do this they are leaving young people alone with overwhelming distress.
I can see that we live in a culture that has no care for the young and certainly not for their health and wellbeing needs. There is a powerful education industry that pretends to prepare them for their future while completely ignoring the high levels of stress and inequality that it creates and perpetuates. The distress that is an obvious result of this gets first punished when it emerges in disruptive behaviour and then diagnosed as a mental health problem in the individual that should be sorted out by the right therapy.
This generation is strikingly the first to be absolutely sure that their future will be nothing like their parents’ lives. They are staring climate and social catastrophe in the face and they are seeing that the older generations are either causing it or failing to act or even understand what is happening. Their lives have been disrupted by the global covid pandemic of the past few years and there has been no support from the government or education system for recovery from that. It makes complete sense that young people are facing an increasing anxiety epidemic.
You might think that I am laying it on a bit thick here. Surely there are lovely things too. Life is good for the young. They are resourceful and it would be more empowering to focus on how to be positive. No. It is this misguided need to keep things positive that is abandoning our young people to face devastating levels of painful feelings by themselves. There is plenty of space to express ‘positive’ feelings but no empathy, care or support for the distress. It is such a relief to express the most difficult things and have someone listen, understand and care without trying to do anything about it. Just to be seen and heard. To be welcomed exactly as we are.
The challenge here is that we older people never had this ourselves when we were young. We mostly just don’t know what it feels like to be really listened to and we have never learned how to give that precious attention to others. We have been brought up in cultures that do not cherish children and young people, and as adults we can be stuck in authoritarian expectations of power over the young. Many of us may have worked to heal the wounds that are our cultural legacy but there are still so many obstacles to simply listening with warm curiosity and welcome for whatever is there.
This time we are living in, this very moment, is urgent. Young people are facing intolerable stress and anxiety and they need us. Those of us who are older, who have some capacity to support and hold them. It is time for us to step up and do what it takes to grow our ability to listen, truly listen, to young people. So that they know they are not facing this alone, so that they know that someone has their backs. It is a vital unabandonment project and we are needed.
