I grew up in Australia in the nineties and two-thousands, so I wasn’t a 1960s kid. But my parents were. And most of the adults who shaped my life when I was young were people whose childhood happened in the decade of miniskirts, moon landings, and a kind of emotional climate that’s almost impossible to describe to anyone under forty.
When I got older and started paying attention, I noticed something about them I couldn’t quite name. It wasn’t just that they were tougher than the people I met at university. It was subtler than that. They had a specific internal mechanism for handling difficulty that the people around me, myself included, didn’t seem to have.
They weren’t colder. They weren’t less kind. They were just built differently on the inside, in a way that showed up only when something actually went wrong, and that’s when you noticed that the people around them suddenly looked young.
Psychology has a reasonably clear explanation for this. It isn’t about genetics or generational virtue. It’s about what the nervous system learns when it grows up in an environment where emotional comfort isn’t consistently available.
What “not consistently available” actually means
This is where care is needed, because the phrase can sound like a criticism of parents in the 1960s, and that’s not quite what I mean.
Most parents in that era loved their children. What was different was the cultural expectation around emotional availability. A child in 1963 did not reliably have a parent who would sit down, ask about their feelings, help them name what they were experiencing, and stay with them while the feeling moved through. That kind of parenting existed, but it wasn’t the default. The default was more like, you’re fine, go outside, don’t make a fuss.
The consequence wasn’t that kids didn’t feel things. They felt everything. The consequence was that they learned, very early, to manage those feelings inside themselves rather than having them regulated by a nearby adult.
This is a small thing when you describe it. It is an enormous thing when it stacks up over twenty years of childhood.
The specific skill the environment built
Developmental psychology has a concept called co-regulation, which is the process by which a child’s nervous system learns to calm itself by borrowing the calm of a trusted adult. When co-regulation is abundant, children develop strong emotional regulation skills because they’ve been walked through the process thousands of times.
When co-regulation is less consistently available, something else happens. The child doesn’t fail to develop regulation. They just develop a different version of it. They learn to handle the feeling alone. They learn that the storm will pass whether someone else helps or not. They learn that the world continues to need them to function, and that waiting for emotional support is sometimes a losing bet.
A 2020 review in Frontiers in Psychology discusses self-regulation as the capacity to manage one’s own emotional and behavioural responses in the absence of external support. The research makes clear that self-regulation is built through experience, often experience of having to hold something without being rescued from it. The kids who were told to walk it off didn’t actually walk it off. They walked it inward, which is a different skill, and which, when it matures, becomes a kind of durability the current generation doesn’t have easy access to.
What this looks like in an adult
The tell, in a person built this way, is how they respond to things going wrong.
Their business fails, their marriage cracks, their diagnosis comes back bad, and you watch something remarkable happen. They don’t fall apart. They don’t need to be walked through it. They absorb the news, they take a private moment, and then they start doing what needs to be done next. The feelings aren’t absent. They’re just not in charge.
I watched my own mother move through one of the hardest years of her life this way. She didn’t process out loud. She didn’t ask anyone to witness the feeling. She just held it privately, kept showing up for the rest of us, and handled what needed handling. At the time, I thought it was stoicism. I understand now that it was a trained capacity most of her generation shares and most of mine doesn’t.
When I went through a hard stretch in my thirties, I noticed I did it differently. I needed to talk. I needed to be seen. I needed to name the feeling. My mother’s version needed none of that. She’d already built the internal infrastructure. Mine was still being assembled on the fly.
The part that doesn’t get talked about honestly
Before I keep going, I want to name something clearly, because this kind of article can easily turn into nostalgia.
The 1960s version of resilience came with costs. Plenty of people from that generation carry buried grief, unprocessed loss, and a discomfort with their own inner life that occasionally surfaces as emotional distance from their own adult children. The same mechanism that made them durable also made some of them quietly unavailable to themselves for decades. That isn’t nothing.
But the mechanism is real. And what’s also true is that the modern emphasis on constant emotional availability, while it’s built a generation far better at naming feelings, has not built a generation with the same ground-level capacity to hold a bad day on their own. Both things are true at the same time.
Every style of upbringing trades one capacity for another. The 1960s traded fluency with emotions for durability in their presence. My generation has made the opposite trade. Neither is cost-free.
What the research says about inconsistency as a builder
There’s a counterintuitive line of research in developmental psychology about moderate adversity and resilience. A 2010 study by Mark Seery and colleagues in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people with a history of some adversity, neither no adversity nor extreme adversity, reported better mental health and well-being than either extreme. The paper’s title, “Whatever Does Not Kill Us: Cumulative Lifetime Adversity, Vulnerability, and Resilience,” captures the pattern. A nervous system that never gets tested doesn’t build the muscles. A nervous system that gets flooded doesn’t either. The middle ground is where durability grows.
A 1960s childhood, for a lot of people, sat squarely in that middle ground. You weren’t coddled. You also weren’t, for the most part, in a warzone. You got enough frustration to build something, and enough love to have a floor. That combination, which modern parenting has largely engineered out of children’s lives, is the specific thing psychology now understands was building resilience quietly in the background.
Why you can’t just reproduce it
The honest answer to “how do we build this in the next generation” is that you probably can’t, not deliberately, not ethically, not without reintroducing harms we were right to leave behind.
You can’t fake the conditions. The 1960s version worked because nobody was engineering it. It emerged from a specific combination of post-war economic stability, larger family sizes, less parental anxiety, fewer screens, more unsupervised time outdoors, and a cultural expectation of stoicism that wasn’t performative because it was just how everyone operated.
If you try to simulate that now, in a world where parents know what they’re doing and why, you get something performatively tough that doesn’t actually build the muscle, because the child knows the adult is there emotionally even when they’re pretending not to be. The real thing required the adult not to be pretending.
What the Buddhists saw about this quality
When I wrote Hidden Secrets of Buddhism, one of the ideas I kept turning over is that the Buddha didn’t treat suffering as something to be avoided. He treated it as the raw material from which durability, wisdom, and eventually freedom get built. The mind that has never been tested is, in the Buddhist sense, an unformed mind. The mind that has been tested and learned to be with difficulty without running is what the tradition calls a ripened mind.
The 1960s childhood, for a lot of people, happened to produce a milder version of this ripening by accident. Not through meditation. Through life. The children sat with feelings nobody was going to soothe for them, and over years, something in them learned how to be with the feeling without being overtaken by it.
Watching my parents and their friends in their seventies now, I can see this quality in them clearly. They aren’t chasing happiness. They aren’t performing resilience. They’re just, quietly, present in their own lives in a way that you don’t get without having spent a lot of years being alone with yourself.
What the rest of us can learn without reproducing the conditions
We can’t and shouldn’t bring back emotional unavailability as a parenting style. But we can notice what the generation before us has that we don’t, and we can build some version of it deliberately.
Be alone with a hard feeling sometimes without immediately talking about it. Not as avoidance. As practice. Sit with the storm until it moves, not because nobody cares, but because you’re building the muscle that only grows under its own weight.
Don’t hand every uncomfortable moment to someone else to help you process. Let some of them belong to you.
Watch the older people in your life who have this quality. Don’t imitate their silence. Imitate their steadiness. That’s the thing that was worth preserving from their childhood, and it’s a capacity you can still grow, even now, in a world designed to spare you from ever needing it.