Growing Up in a Different Time
I was born in the 1970s, a time when childhood came with fewer instructions, fewer comparisons and, perhaps, fewer anxieties. When I look back at my childhood today, one word that comes to mind is uncomplicated. Not necessarily easy, not necessarily comfortable, but uncomplicated. We did not know there was something called mental health. We knew about being happy, being sad, being scared, being scolded and, occasionally, being heartbroken. We fell down, scraped our knees, cried for a while, dusted ourselves off and went out to play again. Life, in those days, seemed to have a remarkably simple way of teaching us resilience.
We studied hard, but we played even harder. Our parents cared deeply for us, but they did not try to build a protective wall around us. There were no elaborate schedules designed by our elders to optimise every minute of our childhood. There were no parents constantly checking where we were, whom we were with, what we were doing, or whether we were keeping up with someone else's child. We went out to play, often for hours. We climbed trees, cycled around, played cricket or football in whatever open space we could find, fought with friends, made up, got scolded, came home late, and did it all over again the next day. They allowed us to wander, to make mistakes, to quarrel with friends, to lose games, to fail examinations, to face disappointments, and, most importantly, to discover for ourselves that none of these things was the end of the world.
Our parents wanted us to do well, certainly. They had aspirations for us. But they also understood, perhaps instinctively, that children needed to experience the world for themselves. If we fell, somebody would help us get up, but we were generally expected to learn how not to fall the next time. If we lost a cricket match, we were told to practise harder. If we did poorly in an examination, we were expected to work harder. If somebody said something unpleasant to us, we were often told to stand up for ourselves. Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether we were actually less protected but better prepared. We were not spared adversity; we were gradually introduced to it. Failure was not treated as a catastrophe. That, perhaps, was one of the most important lessons of our childhood. We learnt quite early that life does not always give us what we want. Sometimes somebody else comes first. Sometimes we do not get the school or college we wanted. Sometimes our friend gets an opportunity that we desperately wanted. Sometimes we fail an examination. Sometimes we lose a competition. Sometimes we are rejected. Sometimes things simply do not go our way. And yet, the next morning, the sun still rose. We went back to school. We went back to the playground. We met our friends. We ate our meals. We laughed. Life went on. Perhaps this repeated exposure to small disappointments taught us something that cannot easily be taught through lectures: resilience.
Our aspirations were high, but they were also, in many ways, realistic. We wanted to become doctors, engineers, scientists, teachers, civil servants, pilots, businessmen and professionals. But we also understood that not everyone could become everything. There was a certain acceptance of one's circumstances and abilities. We did not have the constant spectacle of other people's achievements placed before us every waking hour. There was no social media to tell us that someone our age had already become a millionaire, published ten papers, travelled to twenty countries, bought a luxury car or built a spectacular career. We compared ourselves with the people around us, not with the entire world. Perhaps that made a difference. Success, when it came, was celebrated, but it did not necessarily define us. Failure hurt, sometimes badly, but it did not necessarily destroy our sense of self. We learnt to absorb both. We could be extraordinarily happy about an achievement without believing that we had conquered the world. And we could fail at something without concluding that our life had failed.
Today, however, I sometimes wonder whether we have inadvertently made childhood and adolescence far more complicated. Our children have access to opportunities, information and comforts that we could never have imagined. Parents are more aware, more involved and, in many ways, more sensitive to the emotional needs of their children. We talk openly about anxiety, stress, depression, counselling and mental health - something that our generation rarely did.
That is undoubtedly progress. Yet, alongside this progress, I sometimes see a troubling fragility. I see young people who seem to find it extraordinarily difficult to cope with disappointment. There appears to be an enormous impatience for results - for academic success, admission to a particular institution, a particular career, recognition, relationships, financial success and social validation. The expectation seems to be that life should move quickly, and preferably in the desired direction. And when it doesn't, the emotional reaction can sometimes be disproportionate to the setback. A rejection becomes a crisis. A poor grade becomes a judgment on one's entire future. Not getting the desired branch or institution feels like the end of the road. A relationship ending becomes unbearable. A professional or academic setback becomes an existential question. And, most distressingly, for some, thoughts of ending life can enter the picture.
I want to be careful here. I do not believe that this is simply a story of one generation being “strong” and another being “weak”. Mental-health problems are real, and we should never trivialise depression, anxiety or suicidal thoughts. People in our generation also suffered, sometimes silently. Many probably endured enormous emotional difficulties without having the language, awareness or support to articulate them. Suicide, too, is not a new phenomenon.
I teach Emile Durkheim’s classic study of Suicide to our first-year Int M.Sc. students, and I often wonder how he would have interpreted the world we inhabit today. His argument that suicide has important social causes, beyond individual circumstances, reminds us that the way society is organised, and the nature of our connections with one another, matters enormously. The strength of our social bonds and our sense of belonging matter profoundly. This also brings to mind one of the most haunting moments in The Shawshank Redemption, when Red discovers the words “Brooks was here” carved into the wooden beam, and later adds, “So was Red.” Brooks had spent decades inside the Shawshank prison and, when finally released, found himself unable to reconnect with a world that had moved on without him. His tragedy was not simply about freedom or confinement; it was about belonging, identity and the loss of social connection. Perhaps, in our increasingly connected yet strangely isolated world, that is a lesson worth remembering: sometimes what keeps a person going is not merely success, achievement or material security, but the deeply human feeling that “I belong here. I matter here. I am seen here.”
What troubles me the most is something slightly different: the apparent shrinking of our tolerance for adversity, and the ease with which a temporary crisis can sometimes be perceived as a permanent dead end. Perhaps the world has changed faster than our ability to adapt to it. Children today are growing up under extraordinary academic competition, relentless comparison and a culture of instant gratification. Social media exposes them constantly to carefully curated versions of other people's lives. Parents, with the best of intentions, sometimes try to remove every obstacle from their children's path. In doing so, we may occasionally deprive them of something equally important- the opportunity to discover that they can overcome obstacles themselves. Maybe we need to rethink what we mean by good parenting. Protecting our children does not mean protecting them from every disappointment. Supporting them does not mean solving every problem for them. Loving them does not mean ensuring that they always win. Perhaps we need to let them lose sometimes. Let them struggle. Let them make mistakes. Let them experience rejection. Let them take responsibility. Let them discover that embarrassment is survivable, failure is reversible, and disappointment is temporary.
But there is an equally important responsibility on our part: when a child is genuinely struggling, we must listen without judgment. We must not dismiss emotional distress as attention-seeking or weakness. We must create an environment where asking for help is regarded as courage, not failure. The lesson from our childhood should therefore not be that children today should simply “toughen up”. It should be that resilience and sensitivity must coexist.
I once heard an interesting observation about the Australian Army: that it values people who have experienced adversity, setbacks and failure, not because failure itself is a qualification, but because those who have stumbled, learnt, adapted and come back can develop something invaluable: resilience. That may be an oversimplified version of the Australian military philosophy, but the underlying idea is worth reflecting upon. We perhaps need to give our young people more opportunities to fail safely, learn from failure and discover that a setback is not the end of the road.
We were fortunate to grow up in a time when life gave us many small lessons in resilience without our even realising it. Perhaps today's children need those opportunities too, but with something our generation often lacked: awareness, openness and appropriate support. After all, the objective of parenting is not to build children who never fall. It is to raise human beings who, when they fall, know that they can get up again, and when they cannot get up on their own, know that it is perfectly all right to reach out for a hand.
As I always keep borrowing this proverbial line: “A ship is always safe at the harbour, but that is not what the ship is built for.” Perhaps that is what growing up is really about—not a life without storms, but learning how to sail through them.
