Youth is fearless. Or, it’s meant to be, anyway. Half the point of being young is to feel invincible, not ground down like your boring old parents: to be convinced you’re going to do things differently and better. Yet more than half of British teenagers think they won’t be as well off by the age of 30 as their parents were, according to a survey of 14- to 17-year-olds by the children’s charity Barnardo’s.
This ought to set off alarm bells. It both confirms something we’ve long known – that it’s getting harder for young people to tick what were once considered the boxes of successful adulthood, such as being able to buy a home – but also highlights something less frequently discussed, which is the emotional impact on children of watching their own parents struggle to get by, no matter how hard they try.
Children from working-class backgrounds were markedly more likely than the children of middle-class professionals to believe that as grownups they wouldn’t have enough money to live comfortably, wouldn’t have a job they enjoyed and generally wouldn’t feel secure in life – assumptions rooted in the bleak logic of experience. “My mum struggles to pay the bills and she’s a nurse with a master’s degree. I’m not that clever, so imagine my life will be harder than hers,” as one child somewhat heartbreakingly put it.
As a teenager in the 1980s, I don’t know how I would have answered the question. But, tellingly, I’m not sure it would have occurred to adults to ask. We gen Xers grew up through a grim recession and the overhanging threat of a nuclear war that ultimately never happened, but we were still the children of a socially mobile postwar generation that was conditioned to believe in the logic of progress. Many of us would be the first in our families to go to university, enjoying what we didn’t yet know would be a temporary sweet spot where access was widening but getting a degree was still free. Property was still cheap enough that millions of us could sneak under the wire of home ownership without even realising that, in a few years’ time, it would have become unaffordable. And for girls especially, there was the heady sense that life was going to be more exciting than it was for our mothers. We were going to have careers, see the world, not get stuck at home changing nappies. Time brought its fair share of disappointments, obviously. But in retrospect, gen X still look and feel like the lucky ones compared with our teenage children, growing up in a world that has felt more often as if it’s shutting down – quite literally, during the pandemic – than opening up for them.
Teenage girls’ mental health in particular seems worryingly fragile, while a rise in NEETs (16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training) driven by young men suggests there may be worrying longer-term economic consequences of the dramatic fall in school attendance since lockdown, which saw too many teenagers dropping out and never catching up. With an already patchy programme of catch-up tutoring currently due to end this spring, teachers are warning of a widening post-Covid attainment gap between the richest and poorest which will only further affect life chances if it isn’t closed.
Speaking outside Downing Street in the wake of the Rochdale byelection, Rishi Sunak railed against extremist groups trying to convince children that “they cannot and will not succeed because of who they are … that the system is rigged against them or Britain is a racist country”. But what has his government done to inspire confidence in teenagers of all backgrounds who clearly do worry that they’ll never be secure, sometimes because they can see their parents still aren’t? His main priority in this week’s budget appears to be cobbling together a 2p tax cut that is liable to benefit the highest earners most, with only around 3% of the £10.4bn it would cost going to the poorest families, according to an analysis by the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank.
What’s missing from many children’s lives isn’t just the hope that things will get better at some unidentified point in the future – though hope matters too – but a sense of the tide beginning to turn already and the ground feeling steadier under their family’s feet. As the saying goes, it’s hard to be what you can’t see. If we want kids to feel confident about the future, nothing beats making them feel secure about the present.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
