While our world is undergoing one of the biggest revolutionary social periods of change in history, a big question we now have to ask ourselves is why our sons, daughters and grandchildren have all too often these days become unhealthily dissatisfied with their lot, to the extent that some of them suffer mental anguish.

A decade or two ago, our youth made it known that they believed their elders had selfishly achieved life’s dreams without much effort, totally not understanding that inflation, homelessness and sheer poverty ruled the roost during the Great Depression years of the 1920/30s, during WWll and immediately after hostilities had ended.

Even during the latter period of the 1950s, life was still tough for many people of all ages throughout the Western World. Housing mortgages were very hard or impossible to come by and wages and salaries were well below what would be considered sufficient for an average lifestyle.

From my personal observations and research in recent times, the young people of today have now in general switched their demeanour to thinking that our modern way of life is just too complicated for them to cope with. And they are perfectly right as far as current mental health statistics are concerned, showing an estimated 40 per cent increase since the pandemic years.

The changes we all are now confronted with are providing our youngsters with what they believe are too many insurmountable challenges, sadly causing them a loss of faith for their futures.

From my research, it would appear that the time has arrived for everyone in our greater Australian community to devise more ways and means of helping our teenagers and twenty-to-thirty-year-olds into first understanding that everyone in history has had to come to terms with some adversity.

There are no free lunches, so to speak — and never have been — and people of all ages have always had to face up and meet their challenges head-on.

By making these remarks, I am in no way being critical of the battalions of great younger people in our midst. In fact, my thesis is exactly the opposite.

The problems of dissatisfaction surrounding the plight of all young men and women at the present time is exacerbated by the psychological effects being caused by our misuse of the latest communications technology, tools and electronic toys.

In a nutshell, our young today have, from a very small age, been fed violence, sexism, poor ethics, a lack of realism and even brutal ways of treating others through the medium of children’s digital games, television and unhealthy website platforms — all by elder members of society using these mediums largely for commercial profit.

Just think about it. The average child or teenager at present wakes up each morning to TV shows portraying war, mass death and political violence in the world’s warring hotspots.

He or she then goes to school where they may on occasions be bullied by their peers. Official statistics show that one in four schoolchildren and teenagers up to 18 years old have been bullied at various times in their young lives.

While in their classrooms, children are liable to hear their teachers explaining the ins and outs of confusing gender differences between we humans, of LGBT and what adult sex is all about. No wonder then that, a few years later when they are in high school, they find that 30 per cent of their playground mates are sexually active with potentially disastrous lifelong results.

After the school day ends, our youngsters invariably become consumed by what their friends and school enemies are possibly saying about them and each other on Facebook, often with teary results.

Then, in the evening at home, they are once again confronted by a blaring TV or radio set spelling out all the often sensation-seeking news of the latest acts of violence somewhere in the world that day.

Among such news events, young people are all too often being exposed to items concerning their pop music and sports idols falling by their own swords of intense unhappiness from excess alcohol and drug-taking. A former Clarence region school counsellor has related many such instances to me where her young charges have sadly thought their lives were literally at an end.

I have also observed how teenagers no longer rely on playing games and having a meaningful conversation with their kind. Instead, while together, they now resort to surfing their mobile phones in silence, thus losing some of the all-important interaction with friends.

As we all know only too well from the news of the day, schoolgirls now have to bear the fear of having harmful ideas whispered into their ears by late teenage schoolboy predators and adult men using the Web. Recent statistics provided by our universities have shown that a far too high percentage of early year students are, for example, preyed upon within former sacrosanct university campuses.

There is no doubt about the fact that those of us of different ages today are now facing many more of life’s stiff challenges. Children and their older teenage brothers and sisters are, however, more susceptible to these mounting challenges because their minds are still developing, and their bodies are changing drastically as they grow up.

If one combines these unquestionable facts with the advances in our technology, as already described, you must of necessity come to the conclusion that the lives of many younger people these days are so very much more different and difficult than those of their parents and grandparents.

Unless society comes up soon with a final solution to the current waves of anguish experienced by our youth, we will as a nation continue to see some youngsters continuing to ignore authority in general, having no respect for the police, berating their teachers at school and continuing to have fun by stealing cars, wantonly destroying public assets and generally making their personal situations worse.