Unemployed Young People – Is Millennial Parenting to Blame?

One of the most interesting phenomena of our times is the rising apparent (alleged?) inability of young adults to cope with life. The ever-increasing numbers diagnosed with anxiety and depression is having a material effect on the availability of their generation to work. The Telegraph announced the other day, ‘Almost a million young Britons idle as migrant workforce soars‘:

Britons under 25 are being squeezed out of the workforce by mass migration, rising payroll taxes and surging benefit awards, a report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank has claimed.

Researchers found that the number of Britons aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training – known as Neets – has increased by almost 200,000 since the pandemic to 948,000.

It has been compounded by a slump in the number of Britons under 25 in paid employment, with 49,000 fewer on company payrolls than there were five years ago.

By contrast, the number of non-EU workers aged under 25 employed by British companies rose by 315% – or 258,200 – between January 2020 and December last year.

Of those unemployed 16-24 year olds:

Six in 10 had mental, emotional or other difficulties. Some 128,000 had depression or anxiety, a rise of 36,000 since the pandemic. Universal credit was the most common benefit, followed by incapacity and disability benefits.

Some eight to 10 years ago, I met the head of personnel at a major British fashion chain on the train. We had an interesting conversation. I asked her what the biggest change was that she had experienced in her career which had lasted three decades.

She told me that nothing else matched the collapse in resilience among young adults. She found that intervening to help them in their jobs would normally result in panic and despair, with parents often demanding to come in. She had been astonished also to have parents demanding to attend their offspring’s job interviews.

Around the same time, I gave a lecture at a provincial university. The professor of history there told me that his faculty had to devote two-thirds of its resources to dealing with the students’ problems, which varied wildly from the real to the imagined. He believed they were mostly the latter. Students would experience total despair if they were awarded anything less than full marks for an essay, and blamed the university or their conditions, never themselves.

These are purely anecdotal of course, but they match a wider and deeper trend borne out in so many contexts today. There is no question that the government’s reckless lockdown policies and unconsidered consequences during Covid are part of the explanation for the problems deepening.

But these young people are much more likely to have been brought up differently from those in the 1980s or earlier. New Statesman has an article by one of their writers called Kate Mossman entitled the Millennial Parent Trap which seeks to describe and analyse the different ways of bringing up children today:

The difference between the Millennial style of parenting and that of our own parents’ generation might be summed up in the image of the supermarket trolley. When I was a child, our Saturdays were spent being dragged along to Sainsbury’s, sitting in the little shelf inside the trolley with our thighs chafing on the bars, then perhaps a sweet at the checkout if we’d been ‘good’. Today, in many branches of Lidl and Budgens, the child has a miniature trolley of their own, often with a flag attached, and is followed around by parents, congratulated when they choose food for the family table. (They will not be allowed sweets, because what a gentle parent may allow in many other ways, they make up for with their deathly hard lines about sugar.)

Rather like the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, gentle parenting puts the child and their feelings at the centre of things: an idea that, surprisingly, has only been part of the parenting conversation for the last 25 years. At best, this means that when a child is distraught and having a tantrum, we empathise with their struggle and validate their emotions. This helps the child to understand these feelings and, over time, learn to regulate them – without resorting to the demeaning tools of threat, reward or punishment. At worst, gentle parenting has turned into an extraordinary test of personal resilience, increasing the anxiety of an already anxious Millennial generation. One’s own needs are negated in service of the child’s, and parents are sucked dry with the effort to be empathic and patient – left less like actual mummies and more like the wizened Egyptian ones in the casements of museums.

When I caught one of my sons tormenting one of his younger brothers, I didn’t waste any time empathising with his ‘struggle’ and validating his emotions. The ‘cooler’ (Great Escape style) was for him. He’s now nearly 40, a father and an excellent parent. He visits us regularly.

More worryingly, Mossman goes on:

Philippa Perry, who wrote the 2019 best-seller [The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read], won’t even use the word “parenting”. “I don’t like verbing people. We are relating to people. Children and babies are people. ‘Parenting’ makes the child into a chore.”

In her time as a psychotherapist, Perry has seen a striking number of people cutting off contact with their parents for the perceived wrongs done to them in childhood. “It’s down to a lack of nuance in every area of our lives,” she says. “It’s Instagram therapy: these six things mean your mother was a narcissist. It’s not an individual explanation of somebody’s psyche.”

Not once in the article does Mossman contemplate the impact of this sort of child-rearing on individuals as they grow up. Is there a connection between this ‘gentle parenting’ and the inability of so many of today’s young adults to function in the ‘real world’?

We might regret the nature of threats, rewards and punishments in life, but that’s what it’s like out there. You get paid for doing a good job, if you don’t you get sacked, and probably after a warning. Perhaps by denying young people the opportunity, within reason, to learn to cope with these and make their own choices, the Millennials are sending their children out into the world with entirely false expectations.

Figuring things out for yourself is the only freedom anyone really has. Use that freedom. Make up your own mind.

Starship Troopers. Mr Rasczak to Rico

I was a teacher for nine years between 2007 and 2016. I was older than almost all the other teachers. I was appalled at the extent of spoon-feeding that went on and, in some departments, outright cheating when it came to coursework. The culture was always to do things for the students, and to insulate them from reality.

I ran the history A-Level coursework ruthlessly and by the numbers. I issued handouts explaining deadlines, the rules and how to save their work, and explained that no excuses would be accepted. I made them sign for each handout so that none one of them could claim they didn’t know any of this.

One girl lost her coursework four days before submission. She’d ignored my handout telling them how to save and back-up their work. Her mother stormed into school, but the head of Sixth Form didn’t dare come near me. To the girl’s eternal credit, and knowing me well enough, she told her mother to back off and spent four days solidly rewriting the work. She handed it on time and explained: “I knew I didn’t have a leg to stand on.”

Should I have applied ‘gentle teaching’ in the style of ‘gentle parenting’? What I told Katie (as we’ll call her) was that she had just learned one of the most important lessons in her life, which was that when it came down to it, she had to sort things out for herself, and that she’d never make such a mistake again. I was enormously impressed by her determination to take responsibility for her own foolishness. Personally, I believe in those four days she learned something more useful than in almost the rest of her school career. Today she’s a recruitment manager at a university.

But if I’d subscribed to the school culture and what her parents wanted, I’d have given her a massive extension and rewarded her for ignoring the instructions. As it happens, across the entire time I taught there, no student ever asked me for an extension.

Far from being regarded as an ogre, I came to learn that the students vastly preferred my approach. They thought it was fair, and that it resulted in work that was their own. They bitterly resented the extensions, the concessions and extra time given to anyone who could bleat hard enough.

One thing Mossman gets right is when she says:

It is a psychological law that sooner or later, everything turns into its opposite. In an American survey by the Lurie Children’s Foundation conducted in 2024, 73% of Millennials said they thought they were doing a better job raising children than their parents had done. In one sense this is entirely natural, something we need to tell ourselves. But an obsession with ‘what our parents did’ defines this generation. So, what did they do? Were they really so tough on us? Why is it that, when we share our parenting problems and our fears of getting it wrong, our parents don’t seem to remember ever worrying at all?

In the end she concludes, after seeing two children (including one of her own) discussing their feelings, that:

It is hard to look at scenes like this and think Millennials are doing parenting wrong.

I’m not so sure. The Telegraph‘s article doesn’t prove cause and effect, but it’s difficult not to wonder just how much harm this Millennial parenting might be doing, even if it’s just another type of harm.

As Mossman said (above), “It is a psychological law that sooner or later, everything turns into its opposite.” Yes, indeed. Eventually, Millennial parenting will have had its day too.

Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer, with four employed and married sons in their 30s and early 40s, not one of whose job interviews he and his wife ever attended. He still sees some of his former students and takes great pleasure in hearing about their achievements. His latest book is The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations (Abacus 2025).