There is a phrase people toss around at dinner parties and in think pieces that sounds neat and tidy the way taxonomies do. People born in the 1960s and 1970s learned resilience before it had a name. It carries a smell of truth and a flicker of nostalgia and it is the sort of statement that invites you to nod then ask for proof. I want to push back and pull the thread at once. This is not a claim that everyone from those decades is naturally tougher. It is an observation about shared cultural and structural pressures that shaped many lives in ways we are only encoding now under the convenient banner of resilience.
Why the label now
Resilience recently became a tidy concept in psychology a word journals and policy papers love. But the behaviours, the small daily economies of coping, the nasty little mental habits of ‘carry on’ and ‘work it out yourself’ existed long before a peer reviewed model gave them a label. What people born in the 1960s and 1970s often share is less a gene than an education in contingency. Schools closed for strikes. Local factories disappeared. Households restructured. Public services rewired. Childhoods contained interruptions that demanded improvisation.
The social skeleton that teaches you to adapt
Think about the mid century realities that slipped into daily life without fanfare. For large parts of Britain the manufacturing base that had supported whole towns dwindled. The welfare compromises and policy experiments of the 1970s and 1980s left families stretched. Parenting styles shifted. Divorce rates rose. Television and mass media shifted expectations. All this meant that, unlike later cohorts who grew up with an industry of psychological services and an accepted language for emotional labour, many kids learned to problem solve at home with whatever was in the cupboard.
That two handedness of coping and self sufficiency is not a virtue handed down by fate. It is a social adaptation to scarcity and uncertainty. It can translate into a stubborn competence. It can also harden people into carrying burdens quietly. There is an equity story embedded here: resilience is not evenly distributed and cannot be celebrated as a universal badge.
A closer look through research
Longitudinal studies offer a more cautious counterpoint to romanticised anecdotes. Researchers comparing cohorts born in 1946 1958 and 1970 have shown how childhood socioeconomic conditions ripple into midlife wellbeing. The patterns are messy and conditional. Some people from the 1970 cohort came through with remarkable psychological adaptability. Others experienced disadvantage that later reduced wellbeing. I accept both facts at once because life does not hand out tidy categories.
There may be something particular about being a child growing up in a socioeconomically disadvantaged family in the 1970s a period of great economic turbulence that had a long term effect on people’s mental outlook on life and their sense of wellbeing.
Dr Mai Stafford Senior Researcher MRC Unit for Lifelong Health and Ageing University College London
The quote is not a crowd pleasing cheerleader line. It is a guarded observation from an academic who examined cohort data and found clear links between childhood disadvantage and adult wellbeing for people born around 1970. That is evidence not exaltation. It tells us that the so called hardening of a generation can include long term costs.
Informal learning versus formal training
What fascinates me is how families and local communities taught certain skills informally decades before resilience became a curriculum item. Practices that look like resilience today were, for many, pragmatic coping mechanisms. Children learned trade offs. They learned to read moods in small rooms. They learned to negotiate scarce resources and to value self sufficiency. Those lessons produced habits that persist even when the economic context changes. Habits outlive the original problem that formed them.
Not a triumphal story
I will not romanticise struggle. Resilience as a word can seduce us into praising endurance and ignoring systems. When we admire grit without looking at the causes of hardship we risk individualising a political problem. The 1960s and 1970s cohorts often had to become resilient because institutions failed them or were withdrawn from them. Public sector retrenchment is not a character building exercise; it is policy. When we applaud adaptability we must also ask who paid for it and who did not.
There is another tension. Resilience learned in scarcity often comes with a cost to vulnerability. People taught to keep emotions contained may be less likely to seek help. They may have a narrower emotional vocabulary. They may be excellent at practical adaptation and clumsy at asking for support. That trade off matters in friendships in workplaces and in how societies design help.
Why the 1960s and 1970s feel different
There are two overlapping forces. First the temporal context. Cold War anxieties economic restructurings and shifting social norms created practical unpredictability. Second the cultural scripts of the time. Parenting and public rhetoric favoured stoicism and self reliance. Together these made the daily work of growing up both uncertain and instructive. Critics will say that every generation claims a unique hardening. I accept that claim but still insist there is a legitimate story here worth attending to.
My experience and an argument about empathy
I am of an age to have watched neighbours and relatives from those decades navigate modern workplaces and new family forms. The pattern I see is not universal and it is not pretty. It is complex: resourceful people who can fix a boiler and feel awkward about therapy. People who marshal practical plans and find it difficult to ask for emotional labour. Sometimes that awkwardness is charming other times it is harmful.
My non neutral stance is this. We are wasting an opportunity if we treat resilience as a trophy. Instead we should translate the strengths those cohorts developed into community assets while also making it safe and acceptable to seek help. That means offering structures that accept both competence and vulnerability. The generation that learned to get by alone might be the very one that can teach the next generation how to rebuild local networks and mutual aid provided we are willing to unlearn the stoic shame attached to needing others.
What this means now
For employers for families and for policy makers the lesson is twofold. Recognise adaptive skills without fetishising them. Understand the origins of self reliance. Create systems that allow people to use practical competence positively without punishing vulnerability. That is less a neat prescription and more an ethic. It asks for patience and design thinking rather than slogans.
Open ended endings because life is not tidy
I will not conclude with certainty because these are social facts not mathematical proofs. The claim that people born in the 1960s and 1970s learned resilience before it had a name is plausible and provable in parts. It is also partial and conditioned by class gender and national context. It invites questions more than it supplies final answers. Which I take to be a good thing. A claim that leaves room for argument encourages conversation and maybe that is what these generations taught us most of all how to carry on talking while the world shifts underfoot.
| Idea | What it means |
|---|---|
| Historical context | Economic and social changes in the 1960s and 1970s created daily uncertainties that forced practical coping. |
| Informal learning | Many adaptive behaviours were taught at home and in communities rather than in formal settings. |
| Research evidence | Longitudinal studies show links between childhood socioeconomic conditions and midlife wellbeing for cohorts born around 1970. |
| Costs | Resilience can come with costs such as reduced help seeking and emotional narrowing. |
| Policy implication | Design systems that value practical competence and normalise vulnerability. |
FAQ
Who exactly are we talking about when we say people born in the 1960s and 1970s?
This refers to cohorts born between 1960 and 1979 in broad terms though national differences matter. In Britain people born in those years experienced post war shifts industrial decline and changes to family structure that were distinct from both earlier and later generations. The label is a heuristic not a precise demographic boundary.
Does learning resilience mean they suffered less mental health problems?
No. Learning to cope practically does not immunise anyone against mental distress. In fact research indicates that childhood disadvantage in those cohorts can predict lower wellbeing later in life. Resilience and mental health are related but not identical. One is about adaptation and the other about the absence of distress both of which can coexist in complex ways.
Can we deliberately teach resilience the way previous generations learned it?
Some elements can be taught such as problem solving and resourcefulness but the context matters. Teaching resilience without changing the underlying conditions that create repeated hardship risks normalising precarity. A balanced approach pairs skills with supportive structures so people are not forced into becoming resilient by default.
Is this praise or critique?
Both. I admire the practical intelligence many people developed. I also critique the systems that made such intelligence necessary. Celebrating adaptability without investigating root causes risks turning resilience into an excuse for inadequate social provision. The conversation must hold both recognition and critique together.
What should employers or community leaders take from this?
Look for talents shaped by informal learning and create policies that let those talents thrive while removing the stigma associated with asking for help. Practical competence can be a great asset in collaborative contexts if it is not weaponised into silence or shame.
