Oh Em Gee. It has recently dawned on me that I could very easily be looking after women that I delivered. I started catching babies back in 2000 so the maths isn’t terribly complicated! Thing is, I’m still working at the same hospital I trained at so it’s not just an abstract possibility. To be fair, I’ll never know because they won’t remember me. But the next generation I had in mind when planning this post was our future midwives. The brave, optimistic, hard working, undervalued, kind women (and a very few men too) who are in training.  It makes my insides squirm that they pay for the very dubious privilege of spending three years doing crazy shifts (including nights and weekends), attending full time lectures, writing long essays and sitting exams, while meticulously filling in reams of paperwork to record Every Single Skill that they have both practiced and achieved. I get it, we want competent midwives. But also, we want midwives. Midwives who aren’t burned out before they’re even qualified. Midwives who aren’t saddled with debt before embarking on a poorly paid career. Is that so crazy?

As midwives, we’re expected to help train the next generation. This seems reasonable as the best way to learn is by getting stuck in: practising the skills you’ve learned in lectures on real humans, guided by a midwife mentor who, if you’re really lucky, you will spend a few shifts with and who will teach you new stuff. If you’re even luckier, she will sign your log book attesting to the fact that the skill has indeed been mastered.  Sometimes it all works like a dream. We get to a know student and watch them metamorphosise into a fully fledged midwife and it’s very satisfying. The vast majority of students are conscientious and helpful, often providing a valuable extra pair of hands. Obviously sometimes it’s more complicated because we might have concerns about a student which we need to address sensitively so we can come up with a plan.  It can be time consuming even when there are no concerns. We we do have to invest a little time teaching the odd skill and letting the student take her time honing it even though we might be running a wee bit behind on our clinic. And then we do need to factor in a few minutes at the end of the day going through the log book to see what skills could be signed off. It sounds pretty straightforward, right? WRONG! The problem is that in theory at least, if we sign a student off as competent and it later transpires that she wasn’t, there could be repercussions for us. It’s supposed to discourage us from getting too pally with our students, thereby losing our objectivity on their ability. Which is fair enough. Up to a point. But the fear of those repercussions can cause midwives to be very parsimonious with their autographs which can be disheartening for a perfectly competent student who has literally thousands of signatures to collect.

This upsets me because I’d quite like to retire knowing that I won’t have to deliver my own grandchildren! If we’ve managed to break all the newbies because we expected them to behave like saints (historically, that’s quite a high bar), and be treated like saints (historically, that’s anything bad up to and including martyrdom, just saying), then that’s on us! We’re all humans doing our very best. We were all students once, and we had to jump through similar hoops. I suspect each generation thinks the next one is more slovenly, less respectful, worse educated, less committed; a woeful product of the new substandard era. (If anyone has seen Call the Midwife, you’ll know what I mean!) Well, that can’t possibly be true; we’d be extinct if it were the case! Each generation is different,  for sure, but never worse. As a middle aged mother of teens I  may have, on occasion, complained about the next gen because, not gonna lie, I don’t really understand them. Yes, they are a product of their time, and sure it’s not perfect, but so too were we the product of ours, and we drove our parents to the edge of sanity and beyond! We complain that they spend too long on their phones/screens but who gave them these devices? We complain that they overuse social media, but did they invent these platforms? We complain that they use AI to do their homework but were they responsible for Chat GPT? We bemoan the fact that they don’t use the correct recycling bins, but is climate change their fault? They are inheriting the world we created, for better for worse, and are dealing with it as best they can. It’s not all bad though. I may occasionally struggle to use technology, but would I go back to pre-mobile phone, pre-internet, pre sat-nav days? No sodding way! Maybe that’s because I remember life without. I remember trying to read an atlas while driving. I remember using encyclopedias and yellow pages for information. I remember carrying little wallets full of coins for parking. Going to the bank to cash in or deposit cheques. Paper plane tickets that were handwritten (in triplicate using carbon paper) by the travel agent who was sitting in front of you… praying that my favourite show had successfully been recorded on a VHS tape that had enough space left. Recording songs off the radio, and painstakingly putting them onto a mixed tape. Having to guess how long to press fast forward to get to the song you actually wanted to listen to. And then guessing how long to rewind! Perhaps all this faffing made me stronger? I doubt it. But maybe we forget that all this progress comes at a cost that us oldies might be less vulnerable to precisely because we grew up without it.  We maybe feel that the kids should be grateful for the lovely tech, but when they struggle with information overload and privacy deficit (that we didn’t have to contend with) we label them as anxious, unresilient; we call them snowflakes… We try to ban the tech to reduce the harm but now they can’t do their homework, and they can’t chat to their friends or listen to music or wake up in the morning, or take pictures or look up a recipe… ok, I know, there are old fashioned ways around each of these first world problems! And if they were good enough for us when we were young… trouble is, they’re boring. Going outside? Ugh! Reading a book? Meh! Faffing around flipping the record/tape to listen to the B side? Passé! Being woken to an insensitive alarm (that you have to remember to switch on) rather than your favourite ringtone? Downright dodgy! Taking selfies on a Polaroid camera? Fun, like once! Being incommunicado with your friends? Torture. Thankfully there are techie ways to limit screen time (google’s family link is ok) and reduce access to the worse stuff but they are far from perfect, and honestly, they don’t make it easy or intuitive (maybe it’s just me…) to set up these parental controls.

But Firstborn Son, Middle Child and Only Daughter (like so many other youngsters) have each found ways to use technology to maximise their natural creativity which I find quite inspiring. I know I’m biased but I’m allowed! This doesn’t mean I don’t worry about their use of social media,  because I really do, but it helps to put it into perspective.

So anyway, the next generation will be OK. We’ll do our best to guide and support them without expecting gratitude. Like every generation before, they’ll make mistakes which they’ll occasionally learn from. We’ll be there for them without too many I Told You So’s. They’ll innovate for sure, but sometimes simply regurgitate old ideas believing them to be original. We won’t bore them too much with lectures about old masterpieces from which they might inadvertently gained inspiration.  Some will be saints, some not so much. We will celebrate good enough. Some will be driven to succeed, others a little more laid back. We’ll promote the middle ground because success can come at too high a cost. We’ll try to keep the lines of communication open even when echo-chambers and culture wars conspire to make this seem impossible. It won’t be easy but us oldies should never forget that growing up wasn’t a bagful of laughs for us either although we tend to remember our youth with the same rose tinted glasses that have been worn by every generation gone by. I remember in my early days of nursing, looking after men and women who’d done their growing up during the Blitz and I swear the nostalgic stories they told made it sound like it was the best time to be alive. Don’t want to sound judgy, but really? The good old days were wonderful precisely because we were young. The present is far from perfect but it is a direct consequence of the stuff that happened before, stuff that the next generation, whatever their faults, cannot possibly be responsible for. Let’s help them navigate the difficulties and praise them when they succeed. And if they are choosing to become midwives, extra kudos to them, let’s show our gratitude and pass on our hard learned skills with patience and goodwill.