First things first, brace yourself because I’m about to drop a truth bomb that may well ruffle a few feathers. Alright then, here goes – kids these days are soft. Yup, you read that right. Not weak, not bad, but unequivocally, undeniably SOFT! Now for those among you already positioning your keyboard arrows aiming at my jugular, give it a rest. Ill-informed venting does nobody any good. If you don’t get the difference between ‘soft’ and ‘weak’ or ‘bad’ it’s very likely you’re a part of the problematic coddling brigade.
Today’s kid’s lives are essentially an elongated summer camp, complete with emotional lifeguards ready to dive in at the faintest splash of distress. Their world is so diluted with padding and precautions that calling the rules they live by ‘rules’ feels ridiculously liberal. ‘Gentle guidelines’ enunciated lovingly through a kaleidoscope of indulgence may be a more fitting description. Breaking them only leads to platonic discussion circles, a catalogue of feelings to identify with, perhaps even a therapist thrown in, all cooing and examining the ‘distress’ the broken rule may have triggered.
Let’s time travel a bit here, shall we? Head back to the heady realms of the 60s, 70s, and 80s where kids learned under the unsparing law of “don’t do dumb shit or you’re gonna regret it.” No emotional tact, no hurt-feelings triage, no trauma-centered chats. Just instant karma, with painful lessons learnt in real-time – a headmaster’s reprimand, a parent’s look of disappointment, or a whack of grandma’s robust wooden spoon. Those were lessons learnt, my friend and they were learnt quick.
Back then, school rules were sacrosanct. There were no arguments or exceptions. And let me tell you something, there certainly was no TikTok platform broadcasting a disobedience challenge! You simply toed the line, or swiftly gleaned why you should’ve in the first place. You faced the music – detention, suspension or the horror of a sealed letter to your parents spelling doomsday, and no, the teachers weren’t petrified of the parents. Ironically, these days it looks like the tables have turned significantly.
Fast forward to today, a kid who screams like a banshee, defies tasks, tosses a chair with abandon is politely handled by a system that contorts itself into unimaginable postures to avoid discomforting the child. The onus is on the adult to avoid being ‘too strict,’ to navigate a minefield of policies and most importantly, to steer clear of causing any emotional flare ups. TOO STRICT! Just imagine, a phrase like that getting you ridiculed out of, say, a 1978 classroom!
Here comes the raw truth, though. Kids these days aren’t emotionally tougher, they are just poorly honed in dealing with the ghouls of discomfort. They grow up in an ultra-sanitized world devoid of friction, failure, and fear. They’re so swaddled that a simple ‘No’ feels like an emotional apocalypse. That’s not because they’re inherently incapable, but because we’ve fussed over them so much they’ve not developed any emotional resilience.
Our generation understood resilience and we did that the hard way. We scraped knees, fought off bullies, lived through a million embarrassments and famously survived the word ‘no’. Our safe spaces were wild childhoods under open skies, not plush, liveried rooms with soft corners and delicate hues. We figured issues out or stoically moved past them. All of this without any committee to validate our emotions every time Life decided to spring a little surprise.
I’m not advocating a rollback to the days of lead paint, corporal punishment, or emotional neglect. So you may recommence clutching your pearls and misquoting me out of context. That’s fine. I’ll wait.
What I am saying is this: discomfort isn’t abuse, rules aren’t oppression, and consequences aren’t trauma. They’re preparation. And a generation raised without them isn’t kinder or stronger, just less equipped.
You don’t build resilience by removing friction. You build it by surviving it.
And when the real world shows up without a counselor, a feelings chart, or a reset button, it won’t care how gentle your childhood was. It will only care whether you can stand up without collapsing.
That’s not cruelty.
That’s reality.
