Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Fay Weldon
Fay Weldon’s new novel, After the Peace, is the story of a child of the new millennium. Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian
Fay Weldon’s new novel, After the Peace, is the story of a child of the new millennium. Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian

Blame parents for ‘snowflake’ millennials, says author Fay Weldon

This article is more than 5 years old

Writer says criticism of young people is unfair and older generation deserve no respect

It is unfair to deride millennials as “snowflakes” or to criticise them as overly sensitive, self-centred or ignorant because it is their parents who are at fault, the author Fay Weldon has said.

“We should stop being beastly to the snowflakes since we, their forebears, left them with such a mess to clear up and no tools to deal with it,” she said. “Today’s young grow up into a violent, angry, unstable environment, all too likely to end up jobless, homeless and childless, unlikely to reach their full potential. They are probably the most despairing generation ever conceived. The least we can do is not add to their burden by slagging them off.”

She added: “If the new millennials – at best dependent on the bank of mum and dad, at worst on benefits in a shrinking job market – should despise and hate the old, it’s not surprising.”

After a series of odd jobs as a single mother, Weldon became a top advertising copywriter before moving to television drama and writing novels including The Life and Loves of a She Devil, her cautionary tale of adultery.

Her new novel, After the Peace, is the story of a child of the new millennium, Rozzie, a “sperm bank baby”. In one passage, Weldon writes of “poor, baffled, indignant, work-deprived, renting-not-owning millennials” who have been let down by their “careless, stupid, smug” parents.

Speaking to the Guardian before the novel’s publication next month, she said: “We brought the millennials into this rather extraordinary, slightly insane world and then they turn out to be what they are. Through the drug and money culture of their parents, we’re landed with the product of what is our fault.”

In her novel, Weldon refers to “a millennial for whom the past was an irrelevancy”. She blames both parents and the education system, saying: “They’re not taught it, so how can they know? Teachers don’t teach history, or only certain bits of history which they approve of. They know about Hitler. But absolutely nothing about Charles I.”

She believes ignorance about the past has led to campaigns to remove monuments of historical figures. “Give them background about the past because they know so little about it. Society was different once upon a time. They don’t realise how different times were, how different values were.”

Weldon also criticised parents who constantly tell their children how beautiful and clever they are in order to give them high self-esteem. Instead it gave them low self-esteem, she said, observing that when children could not live up to such ideals “they get depressed and cut themselves”.

She fears that the obsession with social media and selfies is only encouraging young people to focus on themselves. “They see themselves as the centre of the universe.”

Weldon teaches creative writing at Bath Spa University and describes millennial students as “really nice and very sensitive”, noting that “they look after each other”. But she added: “I don’t think they like old people. We don’t move fast. We get in their way. We pay with cash. We don’t have smartphones and we criticise them. So it’s a two-way street.”

The very term snowflake was unkind, Weldon argued. “I really understand why they don’t want to hear other people’s views, because they’re battered with them all the time: do this, do that, think this, think that. They just think: I can’t bear anybody else telling me what to think.”

Acknowledging that younger generations had always resented being told what to do, she said: “But they didn’t despise us for doing it.” In the past, she said, older generations deserved some respect. “Now I don’t think they do.”

She pointed to the lack of morality in today’s older generation, with politicians caught fiddling their expenses but refusing to resign and bankers who caused the 2008 financial crash not going to prison. “There’s no punishment for anybody provided they can talk well. They’re building their own morality.”

Weldon also spoke of a society blighted by “general stupidity and the frivolity of everything”.

In her new novel, which takes the reader through the 60s to the millennium and beyond, she writes that millennials “seem to be in denial of anything pre-computer age … never learn anything by heart, as we used to call it. Perhaps they don’t have hearts in the way we did?”

She refers to them as “merciless”, putting “feelings above facts” and being obsessed with their imperfections.

Asked whether readers could assume that her characters reflect her own views, Weldon said: “Yes, I think you always can … It’s not actually anti-millennial. It’s just that we deserve the millennials.”

More on this story

More on this story

  • Writer Fay Weldon dies aged 91

  • Fay Weldon obituary

  • Fay Weldon: the fearless glass ceiling cracker who loved being outrageous

  • Fay Weldon: a defiant writer who was thoroughly wised-up

  • Fay Weldon: ‘Feminism was a success, but then you lose a generation’

  • Fay Weldon’s Lives and Loves of a She-Devil taught me how to connect with my inner anti-heroine

  • Room of my own: Fay Weldon

  • Death of a She Devil by Fay Weldon review – provocative to the end

Most viewed

Most viewed