'Listen!' – the least we can do for young adults preparing for a disruptive world

It recently occurred to me that my teenage son was now old enough to drive legally. Playing the dutiful parent, I suggested he might like to start taking lessons. I expected him to gush with gratitude and excitement at the prospect – I would have, at his age. Instead, though, he thought about it for less than a second and then decisively dismissed the idea. The reason for his polite refusal centred on the argument that driverless cars are just around the corner , so why bother learning a soon-to-be redundant skill. I had no counter-argument. The world that today's adolescents and young adults have inherited is radically different to the one in which their parents grew up. We are living in an age of unprecedented uncertainty and disruption. On any given Sunday, a geek working out of his mother's garage could invent an app that will threaten the existence (raison d'etre) of any number of time-honoured professions. The popularisation of the refrigerator in the 1920s eventually ended the job of the person who delivered ice. Today, the threat of game-changing innovation is ever-present and getting new ideas to global markets has never been quicker or easier. There is an old curse which runs: "May you live in interesting times". Adulting in the 2020s is going to be nothing if not interesting. Beyond occupational uncertainty, adolescents coming of age in the next decade will also have to live through many an ecological crisis. One such challenge is melting ice caps and rising sea levels, the other population growth; there will be less land and more people. A growing number of young people in several nations are already joining the so-called BirthStrike movement, which was launched just last year. Followers of the movement pledge never to have babies due to "the severity of the ecological crisis", in the words of its founder, British musician Blythe Pepino. On top of the threats and uncertainty, our young people are still being pushed, and pushing themselves, to be "go-getters". Get a good education, get a good job, have a better life, don't get left behind, don't miss out. Such messages foster competition and our youngsters appear to be locked in multiple battles on several fronts: for example, the struggle for good grades , the war for "likes" on social media and the race for the best university places. One of my daughters was recently devastated when she didn't get the grade she wanted on an important exam. Beyond the initial blow, she also spent weeks agonising over the prospect of potentially being moved down a set in mathematics. Failure is never pleasant, and the window for success is narrowing. There is also an apparent disconnect between the aspirations of many young adults and the realities of current and emerging job markets. A recent US survey, based on data from the the country's Bureau of Labour Statistics and the Internal Revenue Service, found that the jobs teenagers wanted most didn't align with the current workplace reality. For instance, just 1 per cent of teenage respondents wanted administrative or sales positions, despite these roles making up 25 per cent of the workforce. On the flip side, about 20 per cent of teenagers wanted jobs in the arts, sports, entertainment or media, despite these roles accounting for only 2 per cent of the current US workforce. This disconnect is likely to equate to plenty of unmet career aspirations and job dissatisfaction. Pop psychology introduced the term "quarter-life crisis" to describe a kind of anxiety that young people feel about the direction and quality of their lives. I suspect plenty of young adults will be experiencing the quarter-life crisis in the coming decade . It is hard to imagine that society's current state is not taking a psychological toll on adolescents and young adults. From rising rates of depression and anxiety among this demographic to growing economic insecurity and the prospect of never owning a home . According to the Healthy People 2020 report, prepared by the US government, the rates of severe mental health issues among young adults in the country climbed significantly between 1999 and 2014. Similar data exist for other nations too. These are troubling trends that are hard to ignore. What can we do to help our young people? The first thing is to try to understand the challenges they face. It is almost beyond cliche to say that "parents just don't understand". However, this statement is more valid than at any other point in human history. The rate of social and technological change within the last generation has been unprecedented. For example, my 10-year-old daughter recently asked me in all sincerity: "What's a house phone?" I, in turn, have no idea what a "VSCO girl" is (she is usually a young, thin and white girl who wears big-name brands; the phrase is supposedly an allusion to VSCO, a photo-editing and sharing app with about 20 million weekly active users, the majority of whom are below the age of 25). If we are to help our young people find their way in this world, a place so very different from the one we grew up in, then we need to listen to them. Understanding typically comes from paying close attention. The greatest gift we can give our youngsters is attention, a compassionate and non-judgmental ear. This is easy to say but difficult to do, especially in our increasingly distraction-filled lives. At best, we half-listen, at worst our idea of listening becomes waiting for our turn to talk, preach and pontificate. For many of the challenges faced by today's young adults, we – the parents – don't have the answers, they do. We can help our youngsters find and refine their own answers by being good listeners, attentive sounding boards. Simone Weil, the French philosopher, once wrote: "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." Now, more than ever, we need to gift our attention to the youth.

'Listen!' – the least we can do for young adults preparing for a disruptive world

It is the only way we elders can help the next generation find and refine their own answers to the challenges they face