MAJOR ISSUES BULLETIN

For it is the Family that children learn how to find their way through the world.

The following article by reporter Melanie Phillips appeared in the Daily Mail on Tuesday the 14^th September.2004. And its content is well illustrated by the following Title:

‘Adults behave like infants. Children are treated like adults. No wonder the young are cracking under the pressure.’

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 15 year-old girls suffers from an emotional difficulty, while behavioural problems are increasing among boys.

When all this is added to the 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 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 serious damage has been done to children’s vital support systems.

Breakdown

For it is within the family that children learn how to negotiate their way through the world, and they draw the confidence to do so only if they are firmly anchored in networks of security and love.

But the 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 children of broken families. With family breakdown or serial parenting now the norm, even children in intact families are often uneasy that their parents might 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 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 families.

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 children are running amok.

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