Sounds like you don't have children yourself and are judging the next generation through a narrow lens - seeing a few kids out and about, then projecting that onto millions of them. Most of my friends have children ranging from about 6 to 20 yrs old. Different personalities? Of course. A few minor discipline wobbles from time to time - sometimes. But not one of them is the "jellyfish" caricature you're describing. Parents set boundaries when necessary, which is usually all that's required. The old fantasy that previous generations were held together by canings, beatings and kicks up the backside is largely nonsense romanticised by people looking back through rose-tinted spectacles. As for this "Jellyfish Generation"... Watch some of them on a rugby or football pitch getting absolutely flattened and getting straight back up and you might change your mind. Watch them break a finger catching a cricket ball, tape it up and carry on and you might change your mind. Watch them spend an hour or two every evening on homework after a full day at school and you might change your mind. Watch them navigate technology, information and subjects at ages when many of us were still trying to work out how to programme the video recorder and you might change your mind. Watch them sit through a twelve-hour flight without so much as a blink and you might change your mind. Watch them sit in a restaurant, engaging well with their parents and trying different foods they've never experienced before and you might change your mind. Watch most kids with healthy balance and through unhinged optics and you might change your mind. The problem with labels like "Jellyfish Generation" is that they're usually built on a tiny sample size and a lot of nostalgia. Every generation remembers its own strengths and conveniently forgets its weaknesses. Many of the youngsters I see today are better educated, more informed, more socially aware and, frankly, more adaptable than we were at the same age. They'll make mistakes, just as we did. The difference is that their mistakes are now recorded, shared and dissected on social media within minutes, whereas ours disappeared into the ether. And that's the irony. Calling them the "Jellyfish Generation" says far more about the generation doing the judging than the generation being judged. It isn't that we were better. We were different. We also had less competition, less scrutiny, fewer academic pressures and far fewer permanent consequences for youthful mistakes. Every older generation eventually convinces itself that it was tougher than the one that follows. History suggests that's usually vanity rather than fact.
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