Researchers have believed for a long time that traumatic events suffered at a young age have a particularly brutal impact on young people’s wellbeing. It makes sound theoretical sense that the recession would leave an impact on the children hit hardest by it, and that the effects would linger for years. (Of course it left an impact on adults as well — by one 2013 estimate published in the British Medical Journal, the largest suicide rate increase in the Americas occurred among men aged 45-64, a group hard hit by layoffs and foreclosures.)
I think what is not being noted is that different generations are in fact different. The generalities may be similar, but the experience of being has been different. I was raised by my mother and grandmother, both factory workers. My grandmother’s deceased husband — my mother’s father — had been from Poland. My mother and grandmother knew the Depression up close and personal. But one only learned of this incidentally. Something might come up in conversation — maybe being on what they called “relief” — and they’d talk about it. But nobody every seemed to dwell on it. Nowadays lots of people have theories, which for some reason they think correspond to reality.
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