When he was asked what advice Nelson Mandela had for young people, he supposedly responded that he had no right to advise them and had more interest in what advice young people had for him.
Nobody has ever claimed that being a parent is easy, and often I hear people say that it becomes more difficult the older the children become.
Guiding them through their education, friendships and choices has been challenging for everyone at the best of times.
During the pandemic this has been made even more difficult. Saying that I did hear of one friend whose teenage daughter said to her that she had never been happier during lockdown as she did not have to sit with all those other ‘mean girls’, which, whilst it may have made home schooling marginally easier, really must have been difficult to hear.
As parents of school aged children, we could certainly give sensible advice on what to do at school – choose the options you enjoy, turn up and work hard.
Try to get an apprenticeship that you enjoy or go to University and study something that interests you.
As they grow older and start developing a social life, it is relatively easy to empathise and understand, as we lived that life.
The temptations of alcohol, late nights and attempting to form relationships was not that different in the 1980s to how it is today, although
in fairness our every move was not photographed
and disseminated in those days.
We have the ability to understand that would not have been possible for our parents’ generation whose teenage years could have been in the 1940s and 1950s, when life genuinely was so different.
In other words, we knew what was out there and what our children were up to in a way our parents could not possibly have understood.
And now the irony. We have been able to guide and assist our young people, but what guidance beyond ‘turn up, work hard and be nice to people’ can we give to our children when they become young adults?
Where once we could sagely say ‘get a job in bank, you will be respected by everyone and have a job for life’, ‘get yourself on the property ladder as soon as you possibly can’. I am not sure what the advice should be.
Should they try to work for a big company, should they work for a small company, should they set up on their own? Sorry, not sure.
The reality is that this is now their world.
They are ones who understand and guide us around social change.
They can figure out what to do when our laptops stop working and we do not know whether it is the operating system, the battery, the broadband connection or quite simply a problem solved by switching it off and switching it back on again.
That is not to say that these young adults are necessarily the font of all knowledge.
When daring to suggest to our daughter that the length of the journey to work in the London traffic was a consideration when looking for an apartment, we were informed that ‘You’re killing my vibe’, a 2021 expression which is roughly translated as ‘you are dampening my enthusiasm’.
I guess the moral of the story is that all that we can do is try to encourage our young people to develop the tools to deal with the world in which they will be living, hopefully for decades to come, and if we ever do give any advice, choose the right moment and do it subtly.
