Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away… well, that’s what the world feels like to me nowadays. You start to feel like everything is beginning to move away from you, the fashion, the culture, the mood. Of course, every generation since Adam has probably felt like this. In fact, I seem to remember reading Socrates moaning about the younger generation back in 5,000 BC. Plus la change…What I notice most these days is the complete lack of courtesy and basic good manners you see nowadays. People seem to have a very sketchy idea of personal space and the queue is fast disappearing as a great British tradition. Doors are often slammed in your face and if you hold a door open, you very rarely get a “thank you”. I feel a theory coming on…
And it's this- most young people aged 16-26 have been raised by child minders. This has a double effect. One is that the bond between mothers and their children is not as strong as it used to be. In some cases, babies as young as three months old are given to child minders. I
t’s probably not surprising therefore that this lack of a strong bond can lead to disfunction. We see it all around us. The second effect is the almost psychotic need for attention that young people nowadays seem to have. Any psychiatrist will tell you that this stems from not feeling special as an infant. Most full-time mums can obviously give more time to their children if they are with them all day, but a harassed, busy woman you only see for a couple of hours a day is not going to have the time to read to you, let alone make you feel like the unique individual you are. Look around at all the “stars” in the street, the amount of completely untalented young people on TV and the sheer confidence of the most excruciatingly bad singers you get on talent shows. This is “over-compensation” on an extreme scale, a general psychosis.
t’s probably not surprising therefore that this lack of a strong bond can lead to disfunction. We see it all around us. The second effect is the almost psychotic need for attention that young people nowadays seem to have. Any psychiatrist will tell you that this stems from not feeling special as an infant. Most full-time mums can obviously give more time to their children if they are with them all day, but a harassed, busy woman you only see for a couple of hours a day is not going to have the time to read to you, let alone make you feel like the unique individual you are. Look around at all the “stars” in the street, the amount of completely untalented young people on TV and the sheer confidence of the most excruciatingly bad singers you get on talent shows. This is “over-compensation” on an extreme scale, a general psychosis. 
How to fix this? Not easy, since people’s expectations have risen so high. When I was a child most women stayed at home because they simply weren’t educated well enough to earn a living. That is why most women married, you couldn’t run a home on a woman’s wage even in the 1960s and 70s. It’s not that different now, most women earn between 17% and 20% less than men on average. Luckily, more women today are educated well enough to earn decent money. There’s no financial incentive to get married anymore. I wonder what the next generation of women will do, when they realise that “having it all” means “having to do it all” and decide that they don’t want to play?
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