I think there’s a lot of compassion among young people. They seem more open to talk about mental health stuff and they take each other’s emotional well being more seriously than us older generations did. That’s my impression from interacting with young people irl.

I think the parents of some of these younger people have been more emotionally available and accepting. The shift sort of happened between boomers and Gen X (I am 100% speaking from personal anecdotal experiences btw) and millennials have in general continued the tendency of being more available to their children.

In my own case, my parents are very old. Like, my dad remembers when we were liberated from the Germans kind of old. I have Gen X siblings who are old enough to be my parents. I have observed how they have raised their kids vs how we were raised. My boyfriend’s parents are around the same age as my oldest sibling and his upbringing was vastly different from mine. His parents, much like my siblings, treated their children with respect and compassion. They built a trust based system with their children, where freedoms were given because they believed their children to be capable of making the right decisions. When their children fucked up, their parents showed disappointment and would converse with them after a cool down period and then the children were trusted to have learned from their mistakes (especially during the teenage years).

My upbringing was based on zero trust and constant assumptions that we would betray our parents. We were in a constant transactional relationship where love and affection was earned, not a given. We were punished severely for minor or perceived mistakes and always made to be the villains in our parents’ lives.

For example, the first time I got really, really drunk, like dangerously drunk, I was still aware enough to beg my friends to not call my parents because I knew that if they found out, I would be housebound and never allowed to have friends again. When my boyfriend, around the same age (16), went through an almost identical situation, his friends called his parents with his permission, and his parents came and picked him up and put him to bed. The next day life returned to normal because his parents knew that he that he knew, it was a bit cringe what he did.

I see it in my peers and my younger sibling, how they raise their kids, with a respect for their children’s emotional integrity. It is a thing I have discussed with many millennials, that we grew up being told that our feelings didn’t matter, that since we were kids, we were barely human and that it was our responsibility to look after the emotions of the adults in our lives.

In my own sibling group, there is a repeating theme of working yourself into stress related illnesses because you have no worth unless you perform. You have been told always that you are a narcissistic, spoiled brat who had everything handed to you, so you work yourself to the bone and you never feel good enough because you were constantly invalidated.

I look at my Gen Z and Gen Alpha nieces and nephews and they are all so much better off in terms of self love and and self worth. They function better in society. They have of course had mental health struggles like most people go through at some point in their confusing youth, but they all seem to have come out the other side with a healthy sense of self. They are good at setting boundaries and they know themselves and what they will and won’t put up with. They are very emotionally mature and kind people.

My siblings and I are almost all semi-broken people who have had to Frankenstein ourselves into something kinda functional as adults. I feel like my older siblings have done a pretty good job, but my younger sibling and I have been through the absolute fucking ringer with dysfunction and mental health struggles when we were kids and teens. We have both struggled with disordered eating, suicidal thoughts, depression, anxiety, nonstop self hatred and a neverending feeling of worthlessness. We have been behind on pretty much everything in terms of education, career and social stuff. I didn’t make long lasting friends until my mid 20s. I didn’t get a degree until 30. I was emotionally immature for my age. I wasted so many years of my 20s wanting to die and feeling like I had no purpose and no future because i kept failing everything I tried to do. I have achieved a lot in my 30s and I still feel like a failure.

I learned unconditional love from strangers and I built a flimsy base for self worth rather recently. Its closer to a raft than a proper ship, but at least, I’m still afloat. I try to show every teen and child in my life that they matter and that I love them as they are because I want to give to them what I almost never got when I was their age. If I hadn’t had my older siblings, I might have developed a personality disorder.

I’m not saying that all Gen Z’ers have great parents and that they are all better off than people from my generation. I know it’s never that simple, and it seems like a lot of Gen Z’ers have also been through a lot of bad shit.

But I do think that there is a general tendency to be more open about mental health in Gen X and Millennial parents that trickles down to their kids (for better or worse).

Having boomer/silent Gen parents is basically the “emotions are scary and must be suppressed at all costs” experience. It is very damaging and it fucks you up to be told by the people who raised you that you’re a spoiled brat who can’t do anything right and no matter how hard you try to please them, it’s never good enough. That absolutely fucks you up and you become everybody’s doormat as an adult.

It was looked down on to be open about your emotions when I was young. I did it anyway because I needed an outlet back then. I think it is generally a good thing that being open emotionally has become more accepted within younger generations. It brings som issues with it, of course. Oversharing and all that, but I think it’s better to be open and vulnerable than to bottle it up your whole life until you break later in life and everybody is like “but he/she seemed so normal”.

Gen Z is better at being vulnerable and putting words to complex and painful emotions.