There is a particular look I see on faces in the pub when someone over sixty mentions childhood. It is not nostalgia in the glossy sense. It is the steady lift of someone who remembers being left to their devices and coming back with something fixed or made or learned. Psychology explains why growing up in the 60s and 70s shaped emotional strength in ways modern childhood rarely duplicates. I want to make an argument here that is part observation part pushback: that those decades trained thousands of ordinary people in habits of feeling that survive crises without being loud about it.
What I mean by emotional strength
Emotional strength is not stoicism masked as a social badge. It is the ability to stay functional under strain and to carry on without collapsing into spectacle. It looks like someone who can be painfully honest in private but not make suffering into a performance. It looks like a readiness to act before waiting for permission. It looks like long patience disguised as ordinary stubbornness.
The slow accretion of competence
One quiet mechanism that produced this strength was routine responsibility. Many children from the 60s and 70s had chores that mattered, small economic tasks that connected effort to outcome. That is not a celebratory claim about austerity. It is an observation about learning the causal link between effort and change. Repeating small competent acts builds a private ledger of trust in yourself. Trust, strangely, is more resilient than optimism.
Unsupervised boredom as an engine
Boredom was not a failure state. It was a pressure cooker where imagination and problem solving were forged. Without a constant stream of entertainment the mind learned to produce its own stimulation and to sit with the slow burn of unsolved feelings. Contemporary psychology now recognises that unstructured time strengthens attention and self regulation. I have watched a retired teacher explain to her grandchildren how a summer of nothing taught her to manufacture projects out of scraps. Those projects were exercises in tolerance as much as creativity.
Social grammar that required facing discomfort
There is an old social grammar from those decades: talk, fix, repeat. If neighbours argued you watched them argue and then make up. If someone lost a job you learned to help without turning it into a drama. These were not ideal arrangements but they trained people to process conflict face to face. That exposure to ordinary messy human interactions gave many people an emotional vocabulary for repair that cannot be downloaded from a feed.
Why silence taught form as much as content
People were told to toughen up but they also watched adults muddle through without theatrics. Silence in that era did not always indicate absence of feeling. Often it indicated a way of containing it. Containment is not repression by default. It can be a method of preserving the ability to act. That distinction matters and it has been misunderstood by some commentators who reduce older generations to either heroic survivors or emotionally constipated stereotypes. The truth is messier and more instructional.
Real expert perspective
Resilience is not about sucking it up or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It is the ability to recover adapt and grow through adversity. Boomers learned this out of necessity. The Boomer generation grew up in the post World War II era marked by rapid industrialization cultural shifts and less emotional handholding.
Dr Crystal Saidi Psy D Psychologist Thriveworks.
That quote is not a paean. It is a correction. Resilience is recover and adapt it is not a style of silent suffering that must be imitated. Yet, the mechanisms Dr Saidi describes are visible in behaviours from that era: repeated exposure to manageable stress and the social expectation to resume function without spectacle.
Internal locus of control without the fanfare
People who came of age in the 60s and 70s often report believing their actions mattered because they had to see that link early on. Saving for a bike washing dishes earning pocket money these are mundane acts but they embed a worldview where agency is less mysterious and more habitual. That mental habit reduces the hollow panic of novelty; it creates a default position of trial and repair.
Not everything was strength and not every outcome was good
It would be dishonest to romanticise those decades. Emotional suppression and the stigma around mental health caused harm. Some learned to bury feelings that later required translation. The key point is that the era produced tools too: problem solving under pressure for some, avoidance for others. In both cases the pattern of response was durable. That durability is what looks like strength when life throws curveballs later on.
Why younger people envy parts of it
If you speak to people now in their thirties many will say they do not know what to do with boredom or how to tolerate a slow repair job. There is envy because the older pattern offered practical templates: how to fix a leak how to find a second job how to console a distressed friend without turning it into a social audition. Younger generations have different muscles. They are fluent in networks and visibility and rapid feedback. Those are strengths too. But the scarcity of quiet practice in modern life makes some of the older generation look unusually resilient by comparison.
What is rarely written about
Here is an original piece I have not seen in most commentary: the emotional economy of delayed recognition. In the 60s and 70s many acts of competence went unrewarded publicly. That absence trained people to find reward internally or in small reciprocal networks. It made the habit of acting without applause more common. That habit reduces fragility when external recognition vanishes. It is not moralising. It is an explanation about structural formation.
A different kind of humility
Another thing that fascinates me is how the era produced a humility that is not meekness. It is a private realism about limits combined with a practical refusal to be defeated by them. Those who possess it do not always speak of it because they assume the rest of the world will not value the unseen work. That silence is part of the cultural signature and it confuses modern narrative forms that prioritise visible achievement.
Loose ends to keep thinking about
I will not claim to have settled every question. Did those decades produce uniformly better coping or simply different trade offs? Some communities were privileged in ways others were not. Did the lack of conversation about feelings produce hidden costs that ripple across generations? These remain open. Some strengths accompany costs. The balance changes from person to person.
Final note
If you grew up in that era and you feel proud of practical habits do not confuse pride with invulnerability. If you are younger and you feel left out of certain skills you can practice them without erasing your advantages. The point is this: environments teach emotions. The 60s and 70s taught ways of enduring that still matter. They were not perfect teachers. They were effective at certain tasks. The rest is for us to decide which lessons to keep.
Summary table below synthesises key ideas and then there is a short FAQ that aims to answer the common questions that follow this argument.
| Feature from 60s 70s | Psychological effect | Possible modern trade off |
|---|---|---|
| Routine responsibility | Internalised competence and agency | Less public validation dependence but risk of invisible labour |
| Unstructured boredom | Creativity attention regulation | Lower tolerance for instant stimulation |
| Face to face conflict | Repair skills and emotional courage | Occasional suppression of vulnerability |
| Delayed recognition | Intrinsic reward habits | Reduced appetite for public acclaim but possible under acknowledged work |
FAQ
Does growing up in the 60s and 70s guarantee emotional strength?
No. It shaped tendencies and provided opportunities for certain habits to form but individuals vary widely. Many people who grew up in that era carry unresolved issues from social stigma around emotional expression. The decades offered tools not guarantees. Context family socioeconomic status and personal temperaments all mediate outcomes.
Are these strengths teachable today?
Yes some are. Deliberate practice of boredom tolerance routine responsibility and face to face repair can be cultivated. It requires changing environmental scaffolds not just willpower. Create small habits that link effort to result. Allow unstructured time. Practice difficult conversations in safe contexts. These are interventions in daily life rather than quick fixes.
Were there harms to that upbringing?
Certainly. Silence about mental health led to untreated problems for many. Gendered expectations about emotion caused harm. Some communities experienced systemic neglect. The era contained resilience producing practices alongside damaging norms. Looking critically at both aspects gives a fuller picture.
How should younger generations respond to this account?
With curiosity and selective adoption. Recognise the value in skills without romanticising the social conditions that produced them. You can borrow practical habits while holding onto the advantages of modern openness and connection. The best outcome is synthesis not imitation.
What does this mean for how we talk across generations?
It suggests listening without immediate judgement. Older people may understate their emotional labour while younger people may overvalue visibility. A better conversation begins by naming different training histories and then exploring what practices each generation finds useful.
