The non-future of young people is everyone’s problem

The future belongs to the young. That is why it tastes so bad that adolescents who emerged from the pandemic see it blurred or prefer not to see it. The one that in this Sunday’s newspaper we baptize as the covid generation is that of some boys and girls who have come out of confinement upset, with some lessons learned and a few traumatic experiences as a backpack. They are between 15 and 18 years old, and their immediate project is to get back on their feet, make up for lost time, start over. The feeling is that they have lost two decisive years, a mortgage that weighs them down and makes them see a cloudy, uncertain horizon. Young people have the virtue of speaking clearly, openly, and what they are telling us is that they lack enthusiasm. They are the mirror of what also happens to us adults, to society as a whole: the chain of crises -economic, political, pandemic and now war- has left us disoriented and demoralized, with the feeling that we have to start over , but without us yet having a clear direction.

The covid generation has emerged from the pandemic with the feeling of lost time and with blurred horizons: we have to listen to them ”

Well, if this is already a heavy weight for adults, it is even more so for young people, who, as health professionals explain, have emerged quite altered from the pandemic in terms of mental health. The data is worrying and has a gender bias (girls have suffered more than boys) and income (young people from vulnerable backgrounds have suffered more). Socialization has been basically restricted for two years to screens and social networks, a fact that has mediated relationships and has accentuated tendencies towards isolation, towards insecure introspection. Exposed to the networks almost as the only showcase, without the spontaneity of direct contact and physical relationship, so important at this age of personality formation, many adolescents have seen their insecurities and fears grow. They have only left the family, when precisely they had the urgent need to stand out. In cases in which, moreover, the family has not been a welcoming and understanding environment, with the capacity for dialogue, the problems have worsened. That is why mental health professionals have had to collect a quantitative and qualitative increase in cases, a reality that must be addressed with resources and specific attention, both in the health system and in the educational world. It is also necessary, of course, to create the socioeconomic conditions so that they have the prospect of forging an autonomous life. Without dramatizing and without minimizing, it is time to help adolescents and young people to believe in themselves again. It’s time to give them the floor and listen to them. Only in this way, making them recover their self-esteem and illusions, will they look forward again without misgivings, will they rethink a possible future, the one they want. Their future is also ours, everyone’s.

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