People who grew up in the 1960s and 70s aren't more resilient because they were stronger; they just learned to function without feeling

It's a common notion that the older generations, those who grew up in the 1960s and '70s, were tougher than us today. They did not need therapy. They didn’t discuss how they felt. They just carried on, and that's somehow hailed as evidence they were tougher.

But what if that is not resilience?

What “getting on with it” really looks like
Think about how many Baby Boomer households were running. If a kid fell off their bike, they were told to get back on it. If they came home and were upset about something at school, they were told to wash up for dinner. Feelings weren't discussed; they were endured, quietly, alone.


That kind of childhood raised adults who were very good at getting through hardship. They went to work. They took care of their duties. They didn't seem to fall apart.

That’s how it appears from the outside, but researchers have another word for it.

Suppression isn't the same as resilience
In their seminal paper published in the Journal of Personality, psychologists Oliver John and James Gross examined how individuals regulate their emotions and identified two primary strategies: reappraisal and suppression. Reappraisal is changing your thinking about a difficult situation and working through it mentally so it hits less hard. Suppression is controlling how you appear on the outside without really changing what’s happening on the inside.

In their research, they discovered that the two approaches result in very different outcomes. Over time, those who use reappraisal tend to have better emotional health, stronger relationships, and lower levels of stress. But people who suppress their emotions, on the other hand, suffer more from negative feelings, unexplained health complaints, and problems in close relationships even when they seem to be doing well on the outside.

The generation that “just dealt with it?” They were holding back a lot of what they were doing, and there's a cost to suppression, even if you can't see it.

What happens when no one asks how you feel
It’s not just about individual coping strategies, either. How parents react to a child's feelings affects how that child learns to manage his or her own feelings for life.

In a seminal 1998 review in Psychological Inquiry, Nancy Eisenberg, Amanda Cumberland, and Tracy Spinrad examined decades of research on how parents influence emotional development. Children whose parents respond to their feelings with support and genuine engagement tend to develop stronger emotional competence. Children whose parents dismiss, punish or ignore their emotional cues tend to have weaker emotional skills, even if they seem to be coping just fine on the surface.

It’s not that kids raised in the '60s and '70s had bad parents. Many of those households were warm, loving and stable but they did not speak about their feelings. Research also shows that silence about feelings doesn’t build resilience in children; it just teaches kids not to talk about what’s happening inside.

Why this matters for you right now
You might be in your 20s or 30s, a millennial, and you grew up with a parent who seemed invulnerable, who never cried, never complained, and always had things under control. And you might have measured yourself against that. That person likely was not doing well emotionally. They were just functioning. Those are two very different things.

True resilience, as psychologists define it, is about processing what happens to you, not just bulldozing your way through. It’s feeling something difficult, sitting with it and then bouncing back. That takes more than gumption. It takes emotional vocabulary, and often, someone in your corner to help you build it up.

The bottom line
It is not wrong to be functional. It’s important to get through hard things. But to call that resilience and to consider emotional awareness a weakness is doing a disservice to everyone, including the generation that was never given the language to say what they were actually feeling.

Knowing the difference is not about blaming your parents. It’s about breaking the cycle of silence that we hand down to the next generation.