Daily Mail, 14 September 2004

We British are, in so many ways, the most fortunate of people. We live in unprecedented prosperity, during the most developed age for mankind and in one of the most advanced and free societies on the planet. Yet the evidence suggests that our children are experiencing an unprecedented degree of misery and distress.

Research by the Nuffield Foundation has found that over the past 25 years, the mental health of teenagers has sharply declined, with emotional problems such as anxiety and depression leaping upwards by as much as 70 per cent. One out of every five fifteen year-old girls suffers from an emotional difficulty, while behavioural problems are increasing among boys.

When all this is added to other clinical data showing increased rates of suicides, eating disorders and self-harm, not to mention high levels of juvenile disorder, drug abuse and binge drinking, it is clear that our young people are issuing a desperate cry for help.

Some commentators single out the government for blame — not enough youth services, too many school examinations, not enough jobs or houses. Such explanations are far too superficial. The real causes surely lie very much deeper in the many profound ways in which our society has changed.

Yes, the pressures children feel from our competitive, fast-moving and often bewildering society are indeed formidable. But the crucial factor is that young people are now far less well-equipped to cope with whatever life might throw at them. Our society has progressively knocked away all the props that once provided support and reassurance, both at home and further afield.

It is, above all, at home where the most serious damage has been done to children’s vital support systems. For it is within the family that children learn how to negotiate their way through the world, and from where they draw the confidence to do so only if they are firmly anchored in networks of security and love.

But these networks have been increasingly shattered by the fragmentation of family life. While some parents manage to shield their children from the worst effects of family breakdown, in general the damage this has done to children is incalculable.

This is because a child’s identity is formed and nurtured by the two people who created it. If they split asunder while their children are growing up — or if the father has never been in evidence at all — children tend to feel somewhere deep inside that since their parent didn’t care enough about them to stay around to bring them up, they must themselves be worthless.

Nor are such ill-effects confined to the children of broken families. With family breakdown or serial parenting now the norm, even children in intact families are often uneasy that their parents may split up. It all creates a bleak view of relationships, a lack of trust in adults and a general climate of insecurity which dump upon children a level of anxiety they should not have to bear.

But this is by no means the whole explanation. As the Nuffield study suggests, while adolescents in single-parent households suffer more mental health problems than those whose families are intact, there have been comparable increases in the rate of such problems in all types of family.

The most likely explanation for this is that something has gone disastrously wrong with parenting itself. To feel safe and secure, children need to know exactly where the boundaries on their behaviour are set. But in recent decades, the adult world has persuaded itself that parental authority is oppressive and that children need instead to be free.

The result is that, either from a misguided fear of being thought authoritarian, the inadequacy of their own upbringing or because they are simply too selfish to bother, many parents fail to enforce any rules of behaviour on their children. At the most superficial level, you see this now on buses or in cafes and other public places where mothers totally ignore the fact that their very young children are running amok.

The idea that children are happy if they are left free of discipline is the very opposite of the truth. For children receive a very different message — that if their parents don’t care about the way they behave, then they don’t care about them [ital ‘them’] either.

What children need above all is to be looked after. That means nurturing them with both love and discipline, which is what children understand to be the expression of their parents’ unconditional commitment to them.

But instead, parents have shied away from exercising any authority over their children at all. Instead they treat them as quasi-adults, capable of making their own decisions and negotiating their own rules and boundaries, whether it’s about downloading the internet alone in their bedrooms, or staying out all night clubbing.

As the adult world has become more self-centred it has required children to behave more like adults, from leaving young children to fend for themselves alone at home while their parents go away on holiday, to using them inappropriately as a crutch when the parents’ own relationships break down.

Since children essentially depend on their parents for protection, guidance, comfort and support, this is a kind of betrayal. Worse still, the rest of the adult world behaves in a similar way.

At school, ‘child-centred’ educational theory treats pupils as the equals of their teachers, leaving them to flounder in a sea of ignorance while dumping the responsibility squarely on the childish shoulders of such ‘learners’.

When it comes to sex or drugs, schools expect them to make ‘informed choices’ about how to behave. But informed choice is adult territory. Children cannot cope with such burdens. Far from benefiting them, it makes them confused, frightened and unhappy.

Who can be surprised, therefore, if under the weight of all this grossly inappropriate adult responsibility children become depressed, or resort to ever more desperate ways to gain the attention of the adult world? And yet even the forces of law and order seem too paralysed to exert the authority and discipline that show children acting out their anger and distress that someone, somewhere, cares.

The Nuffield study revealed one other salutary fact. A similar deterioration in adolescent mental health in America, accompanied by terrifying rates of fatherless children and violent crime, was confronted in the nineties by politicians who finally drew a line in the sand and started to reassert adult authority and responsibility.

In Britain, we still haven’t learned this lesson. The fetish we have made of individual choice has made a veritable bonfire of attachments — to family, religion and other institutions that sustain and console us.

This moral and spiritual vacuum has left many adults feeling isolated. But the collapse of duty and authority in the adult world, and its corresponding retreat into a self-obsessed infantilism, have meant that our irresponsibly adultified children have been left, in a society of intolerable pressures and impossible expectations, tragically abandoned and adrift.

Posted by melanie at September 14, 2004