Former health secretary Alan Milburn’s Young People and Work interim report has revealed astonishing figures. Almost a million 16- to 24-year-old Britons are “not in education, employment or training”. One in eight young adults is now classified as Neet, while 58% have never had a paid job. How did Britain get here?

The standard explanations point to artificial intelligence, automation and an unforgiving economy. Yet it is a convenient obfuscation to pretend that youth unemployment is simply a consequence of technology. Britain’s Neet crisis has been exacerbated by a culture which lowers young people’s expectations of themselves while raising their expectations of what older people should provide.

A Saturday job used to be a rite of passage. We stacked shelves, waited tables, delivered newspapers, cleaned floors and endured difficult managers. It was badly paid, often boring, and occasionally humiliating. Yet it provided something increasingly rare today: our own money, a degree of independence, and the knowledge that effort could lead to opportunities. It was also responsible for the revelation that school was only one measure of ability, and that those who struggled academically could still thrive in the workplace.

These modest jobs once served as training grounds for adulthood. In their place, young people are now offered an endless succession of training schemes, employability programs and “pathways into the workplace” rather than proper jobs. Endless preparation is boring and school refusal is on the rise as disaffected kids opt out and become Neets.

There is another important factor here. The Milburn review notes that “one in five (20.0%) of all Neet young people report a mental health condition, more than double the share in 2012, when it stood at 7.7%.” Young people have been taught to seek accommodations and allowances whenever they encounter difficulties. They have learned to tend to their feelings like a gardener tending a bonsai tree, carefully nurturing and shaping them. As a psychotherapist, I believe in the value of talk therapy in the appropriate context. Yet the mental health industry has helped create a generation that believes feelings should be the chief guide to making decisions. This is not only untrue but dangerous.

A generation of emotionally incontinent people has contributed to a culture in which victimhood has become a form of social currency. Under such conditions, the rise of the Neets is almost inevitable. A minimum-wage position provides less kudos among peers than being seen as vulnerable, so that’s what the socially ambitious young person seeks. While many disorders first emerge during adolescence, the extraordinary rise in diagnoses alongside the startling numbers attending therapy is enough to give even the most committed psychologist pause for thought.

Adults have spent the last few decades limiting the experiences that helped previous generations grow up. They have restricted children’s independence, to the point where young people have increasingly come to view responsibility as an imposition. Schools prepare children for further education, not for a working life. We have knelt before the great God of Education, always assuming that endless schooling is the answer and that under-18s shouldn’t be starting jobs.

A society cannot spend years telling children that they are especially vulnerable and entitled to accommodations whenever they feel distress, and then act surprised when they learn to organize their lives around those incentives. Children are growing up in a gilded cage that offers little freedom and incentivizes emotional fragility. Some have responded to this by becoming Neets.

One glimmer of hope in Milburn’s review is that 84% of young Neets want to find a job, education or training. The task now is not to create more programs, pathways or accommodations. It is to help young people grow up by removing the restrictions on their freedom to experience real life.

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Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist and bestselling author. She is Founder-Director of Genspect, an international organisation that advocates for a healthy approach to sex and gender.

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