OPINION
How can parents ensure their children grow up happy? (Image: Getty)
Hardly a day goes by when there isn’t something in the news about Britain’s child mental health crisis. As a parent of three young children, I have often wondered how best to avoid my own children adding to the statistics. And the statistics are stark. There clearly is something going very wrong with our children. Currently one in five children aged eight to 16 have a probable mental health disorder, up from one in eight in 2017. Analysis by the Centre for Social Justice has forecast this could be one in every four children by 2030, if trends persist. There are valid questions as to how much of this is “real” but some statistics are indisputable.
Self-harm amongst girls aged eight to 17 has more than doubled since 2007 and eating disorders in young women have soared, from 2% in 2017 to 21% in 2023. Tragically in 2021, the suicide rate for girls aged 10-24 was the highest it’s been since 1981. What is going on and how should we parents react? Perhaps I take a more modern, therapeutic and ‘enlightened’ approach to my parenting by encouraging my children to pay close attention to their feelings and what they might mean?
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I could try educating them on the range of mental disorders out there in the hope that one day, should they ever encounter such symptoms, they will know which acronym to use to define themselves. If I was being a truly conscientious parent, I could even download one of the new mental health apps, which promise to bring therapy to every single child to promote their optimal wellbeing.
But having read the CSJ’s new report on mental health, Change the Prescription, I would now say a resounding “no”. It reports that more than four in five GPs believe that the stresses and strains of everyday life are being redefined by society as mental disorders.
In short, we are over-medicalising mental health and labelling our children as mentally ill, when they are often experiencing just the usual highs and lows of growing up. We say a child has anxiety when they are a little stressed and unsettled and tell them they have depression when they are feeling down and we regularly label them with the behavioural disorder of ADHD with often very little evidence.
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A friend’s son was recently diagnosed with three different mental health conditions given by three different psychiatrists – ranging from borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder and ADHD - one wonders how much of an exact science this thing is.
Part of this is being driven by social media and the media itself which can glamourise mental illness, spread disinformation (by people who have little or no medical training) and encourage young people to self-diagnose, with anxiety, depression and ADHD being the most common self-diagnosed conditions.
Mediums like TikTok flashing eye-catching slogans like ‘three signs you have anxiety’ are hard to ignore when you are a stressed teenager looking for answers. The planting of the seed starts young too. My daughter when aged seven suddenly announced she had ADHD having learned all about it on Newsround. When I asked her why she thought she had it, she explained that she found it hard to concentrate on her homework .
The issue, of course, with all this is that putting a medical mental health label on a child is not a neutral action. It alters and damages the child’s perception of itself, making it think there is something intrinsically wrong or different with them. It can lead to a spiral of decline, unnecessary treatment, and a worsening of their condition.
If anybody has read Abigail Shrier’s book, Bad Therapy, you will understand the obvious concerns with the uneven power dynamic between an adult therapist and a child patient and the message it sends to the child that ‘your mother thinks there is something wrong with you and your problem is above her pay grade’. And that’s before you even start considering whether being encouraged to focus on your upsetting thoughts rather than keeping those upper lips slightly stiffer, might be more of a cause than a consequence of mental health deterioration.
The other consequence of this over-diagnosis, is that those who really are suffering severe mental illness are not getting the support they desperately need. Treatment in the form of cognitive behavioural therapy should be reserved for those children who genuinely need it, often the result of experiencing severe trauma.
But some of the increase is also very real. There is little doubt that our children’s mental health is getting worse and we are sadly an international outlier in this.
In our increasingly therapeutic society, we focus far too much on treating the symptoms of the mental health crisis with therapy and pill-popping, without addressing the causes of why so many children are suffering, particularly the social causes.
Social media is a major culprit, as were those dreadfully short-sighted lockdowns which have had a catastrophic effect on children’s mental health.
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Then there is the much-neglected issue of family breakdown, something nobody likes to talk about, but I am afraid the statistics speak for themselves. According to the Office for National Statistics, primary school children with married parents have just a six per cent chance of having a diagnosable mental health condition. But that doubles among children with cohabiting parents - and triples - when parents are separated. This is particularly alarming given almost half of parents are now separated by the time their children are 16.
But what can we do about it? Rather than turning one’s gaze inwards, and obsessing about the self, try getting struggling children to look around and outside of themselves to get perspective that isn’t filtered through a smartphone.
Take them volunteering at a charity like Time Givers, where I have seen my own children forget any thoughts about themselves and instead be filled with a sense of purpose, a greater sense of perspective and a feeling of being part of the community which helps prevent feelings of alienation.
Prevention is better than cure. We should restrict children’s access to smartphones until 16 and never allow politicians to be so gung-ho about locking us all down for months on end.
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The Government should look past political correctness and promote family-friendly policies, particularly marriage, to help prevent mental ill-health at source and tackle our family breakdown rates, which are some of the worst in the Western world.
We should invest in programmes like conflict resolution which teach couples to talk through their problems rather than resorting to divorce or violence. It is worth noting that the link between lowered rates of domestic abuse (heavily associated with mental ill-health in children) are much lower among married couples and civil partners.
With the diagnosis so imperfect and over-medicalised, and the treatment often a double-edged sword, perhaps it is time to focus instead on the social causes of our children’s mental health crisis and help stop this problem at source.