I agree with Bel.Totally!

Many parents want to do a better job at raising children than their parents though, so maybe that's where things stem from. Many of us can look back at our childhood and think of things we wouldn't want our children to experience. So we do things differently and get different results. In general every parent tries to do the best for their children, so each generation is different. Not better or worse, just different. So no, I don't agree with Bel.

Absolutely agree with Bel and other posters. I grew up in a house without central heating and very little luxuries. Teachers in school were awful for the most part and you had to " get on with" a lot of things. We were certainly too poor for me to go to university, I put myself through a degree in my early forties after dealing with the death of my middle child and the breakup later on of an abusive relationship.

However I still look back on things with a lot of pleasure not everything was stressful. I am happy have many friends and a lovely supportive family. Despite all the difficulties in the past I feel blessed. At some point only you can make your glass half full instead of half empty.

I agree "soontobe". It's all "look at me, look at me" with the younger ones where we would have been told to stop showing off. They do seem to need to be centre stage and to make dramas out of trivialities. (Bless their little cottons!) I speak from the experience of three DGDs and a drama queen DDiL, you understand!

So try to control the fuss factor. Yep. With you there, Bel.

Facebook, Twitter, sites with younger people.

Who are you talking about when you say 'some people just write things'?

I wonder if some people just write things, but dont really mean it to the extent it sounds.

If they do, I think it is because of what KatyK says. They may not have known real hardship.

I'm with you Bel and jeana, suppose the moden version is 'Get over yourself'. I feel sorry for those who now collapse in a puddle of tears and almost hysteria at the slightest thing, what will their children learn?

Spot on Bel

There's a thread somewhere on GN about University students not being able to hack it, and your blog hits the nail on the head. As Lucky said, the pendulum's swung too far.

I have no problem with people (male and female) feeling that it is OK to cry now in a way that it wasn't when we were young. But the question is what they are crying about; whether it warrants their tears.

I would not want to go back to the stiff upper lip completely - it led to emotional constipation, which was not healthy, as tears were seen as a failure and a weakness - but we now seem to have the opposite!

My DCs all think they have been traumatised by having a mother whose stock response to everything was a variant on 'pull yourself together'

I totally agree with Bel on this. My life has been quite difficult and I have also had to 'get on with it'. It seems that people are always crying over what, in my opinion, is really nothing at all. They cry on programmes such as The X Factor and such like. Sometimes I am totally flabbergasted at the reactions of people to what seems to me to be trivial. Perhaps it is because they have never had any real hardship in their lives so don't know any different. I don't wish suffering on anyone of course but sometimes a bit of hardship makes us realise what is really important in life. Then maybe what we see as trivial, they see as devastating.