I can anticipate that many adults or older generation folks reading this news and the research findings would be tempted to remark along the lines of “nowadays young people so fragile”.. “strawberry generation”.. etc etc.
These are precisely the unconstructive and damaging remarks and responses that youths have to deal with that invalidate their experiences and challenges. Many youths I’ve interacted with share painfully with me how they often feel invalidated and gaslighted by those who care the most for them.
How have we gotten here? How does love, instead of nurturing and soothing, end up hurting?
My team and I have been looking into mental health and have seen reports that Adverse Childhood Experiences have affected more than half of the adults in Singapore.
And in my own selfwork and coaching work with clients, a common theme is how we all suffer in some way from the baggage and projections of our parents. Without intending to, we end up projecting this same baggage onto the young ones.
What might be some helpful questions to ask?
Here are some questions which I hope we can ponder and reflect on together, as individuals and as a collective society:
1. How are the realities of our youths different from when we were growing up? And how are they the same in some ways?
2. What might we need to unlearn to learn in order to empathize with their struggles?
3. What are the feelings they are grappling with that we may have stifled or ignored within ourselves and forgotten how to relate to?
4. How have the previous generations learned to love? How does this love now beg a different expression?
5. Is this a problem that needs to be fixed? Or a phenomenon that tells us there is something really important we need to learn? And what is that?
I have found that the work of realising and releasing ourselves from our own past baggage is so tremendously important. In learning and understanding ourselves and our own feelings (often buried, cos no one helped us tend to these feelings), we have hope of truly empathizing and holding space for another, and for our youths.
If there’s one thing that we can all begin to learn to do, it is this
TENDING TO
Tend to our feelings, not get over them.
The youths too are telling us,
“Please tend to my feelings, not judge them, or tell me to get over them, cos I am hurting.”
