I keep meeting people who talk about their childhood like a secret training manual. They do not mean it literally. They mean the small daily frictions of the 1960s and 1970s taught them a steadiness that shows up in odd places later on a late train with a rude passenger a delayed parcel a failed DIY job. Psychologists have been sketching the same outline recently and calling the shape distress tolerance or frustration tolerance. The phrase is clinical. The lived reality is knobbly and sometimes stubbornly inconvenient.
Not nostalgia exactly but a pattern worth noticing
There are lots of articles that list the familiar differences screens have made or how parenting styles shifted. Those pieces are helpful in their way but they often tidy the story into neat cause and effect. The real pattern is patchy. Childhoods in the 60s and 70s varied wildly by class region and family, but a consistent feature was lower immediate convenience. Fewer devices fewer scheduled activities and more unsupervised hours. That environment, many psychologists now argue, offered repeated practice with waiting tolerating minor setbacks and solving practical problems without a quick rescue.
Practice beats sermon in the grammar of resilience
Frustration tolerance is not an on off switch you either flip. It is practiced. When a television broke you learned to wait or to fix it or to accept missing your programme. When a bicycle chain snapped you learned how to coax the chain back on or how to ask a neighbour who could. These are everyday microlessons. The brain learns by doing not by being told it is resilient. This is not to romanticise hardship. There were real dangers and real injustices in those decades. I am arguing only that certain ordinary constrictions offered repeated conditions where patience and problem solving were the default option.
“Have smartphones destroyed a generation?” said Dr Jean Twenge Professor of Psychology San Diego State University. “The question here isnt what are all the causes of unhappiness were asking what changed in that period that could have possibly caused teens psychological well being to fall so suddenly.”
Twenge is speaking about a different cohort but the logic is the same. When the scaffold of daily life supplies easier escapes and constant stimulation the brain stops getting those small but important repetitions in tolerating delay and boredom. Wherever you sit on the debate about screens you cannot easily deny that repeated exposure to manageable frustration builds a different sort of muscle than constant immediate relief.
What psychologists actually look at
Clinical research frames the phenomenon with terms like distress tolerance emotional regulation and grit. Longitudinal studies and interviews show correlations between unsupervised play later independence and performance under stress. Again correlation not tidy causation. Yet when clinicians interview adults who say they feel steadier in a crisis there are recurring childhood recollections of enforced waiting of shared resources of learning to fix or to make do. Those memories map onto measurable outcomes in impulse control and delayed gratification in many studies.
Where the neat story frays
Not every child of that era emerged tougher. Some were scarred by neglect by rigid punishments by poverty. Those harms are real and measurable. What is interesting is that the same decades also contained structures that accidentally trained certain capacities that modern parenting and technology often remove. It is not that today is worse in every dimension. Many modern practices protect children from risks they need not face and open opportunities earlier generations lacked. The truth is asymmetric. You get certain strengths and lose others depending on the environment.
Original observation few blogs pause to make
Most commentary emphasises the absence of screens as the dominant cause. That is part of it but not all. I see a quieter mechanism at work which I will call social friction. Homes often ran on very small shared economies one phone one television one weekly grocery budget. Negotiation for scarce resources forced children to speak up to bargain and to accept the answer when the result was no. Today scarcity can be simulated digitally yet the social choreography of waiting in a room where others also want something is different from silently refreshing an app until a screen tells you the slot is free. Those embodied negotiations shape patience in ways we do not often measure.
Small constraints as invisible teachers
There is a practical corollary to this observation. Constraints whether in time in objects or in social expectations force children to practise planning compromise and to delay gratification. A child who shares a single television slot with siblings learns sequencing and fairness. That learning is social not just internal. You learn to read other people to manage your desire. Thats a different architecture of patience than private screen based distraction which tends to be solo and immediate.
Why this matters now
We are living with a generation mix and with rapid cultural change. Employers schools and families notice differences in how different cohorts handle setbacks. This is not a moral judgement. It is a practical one. People who grew up in slower more frictional childhoods often tolerate everyday annoyances with less theatre. They are more likely to sit with a problem and try a second approach before calling for help. Again not universal but statistically notable.
There is a stubborn tension here. We are rightly protective of children in ways earlier generations were not. That protection grants safety and opportunity. Yet some of the accidental training that used to happen in the margins of everyday life has faded. The question is not whether we should be less caring. It is whether we can deliberately design moments where children get to experience manageable frustration and learn not meltdown but mastery.
A partial conclusion and an open-ended challenge
I do not want to tell you to copy the past wholesale. Nor do I believe the 60s and 70s were a golden age. But there is an element of apprenticeship in those childhoods that we can observe honestly and borrow selectively. Give children tasks that matter that have small stakes. Let them wait for certain pleasures. Teach negotiation without shaming. These are small cultural choices rather than radical reversals.
One last thing to remember. Frustration tolerance is not a single trait you toggle. It recombines with temperament social context and life experience. Treat it like practice not prophecy and you avoid the worst teleologies in generational talk.
Summary table
| Key idea | Short explanation |
|---|---|
| Repeated low level friction | Ordinary delays and shared scarcity in 60s and 70s gave practice in waiting and problem solving. |
| Social friction | Negotiating scarce household resources taught compromise and delayed gratification. |
| Distress tolerance | Clinical term for capacity to sit with discomfort without immediate escape. |
| Not universal | Many from that era suffered harms that reduced resilience; environment matters. |
| Designable skills | Modern families can create manageable challenges that build patience without harm. |
Frequently asked questions
Does this mean kids today are weaker because of screens
No the reality is complex. Screens change the rhythm of experience and remove certain kinds of practice in waiting. That does not make children weaker across all domains. Many children today develop different strengths such as digital fluency social awareness and access to knowledge. The point is to recognise what might be missing and to consider how to provide those experiences intentionally rather than assuming they will occur naturally.
Are psychologists unanimous about this claim
No experts debate the size and mechanisms of generational differences. Some emphasise the harms of online environments while others caution against simplistic narratives. Clinical data on distress tolerance and longitudinal surveys provide supporting patterns but there is no single decisive experiment that proves the whole story. The evidence invites cautious interpretation and further inquiry.
Can modern parenting recreate the benefits without the harms
Yes it is possible to design childhoods that include manageable frustrations safe autonomy and responsibility. Practical examples include assigning tasks with real outcomes encouraging unstructured play limiting instant digital escapes and modelling calm problem solving. These are choices that families and institutions can make deliberately not miracles that happen by accident.
Is this article saying the past was better
No I am not making a binary claim that the past was better in all respects. My argument is narrower. Certain everyday structures in the 1960s and 1970s inadvertently trained frustration tolerance in ways that are less common now. Recognising that pattern is useful not as a prescription to return to older social harms but as a prompt to create modern practices that cultivate important capacities without recreating past injustices.
How should employers or schools respond to these differences
A thoughtful response is to avoid generational caricatures and to design environments that teach tolerance for delay and iterative problem solving. Employers can create development opportunities that require persistence. Schools can design assessments and group work that reward sustained effort. These steps are about designing learning environments not about blaming individuals for cohort trends.
