AN ACQUAINTANCE recently met a couple – he’s a psychotherapist, she’s a GP – who have a 15-year-old daughter.

The daughter has been cutting herself and making herself throw up to keep her weight down – distressing in itself, but what shocked me was the attitude of her parents. “It’s normal now, isn’t it?” said the father. “What can you do?”

“They all do it,” shrugged the mother, who seemed to think it was perfectly within reason to expect their daughter to harm herself like this – and for them to do nothing about it.

By bringing up the subject, it seems they were seeking confirmation that this is indeed the norm now among teenage girls – but they’re wrong. While there has been a three-fold increase since 1993 in the number of 15-year-old girls in England who self-harm, the figure is actually one in five, according to a study called Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children by the World Health Organisation last autumn.

That is well below the norm, if you accept that the norm means the majority, and in my opinion the blame for that rise can be laid squarely at the feet of the toxic effects of social media.

It seems that according to the study both boys and girls showed a good level of emotional wellbeing at the age of 11, but by 15, 45% of adolescent girls say they feel low once a week compared with 23% of boys.

Other statistics show that around half a million children and young people say they are unhappy and dissatisfied with their lives and one in ten in the five to 16-year-old range have a mental disorder.

Last week, the government said mental health services for children and young people need a complete overhaul, and Chancellor George Osborne, in last Wednesday’s Budget, pledged an extra £1.25billion for mental health services for children and new mothers, helping more than 110,000 people. But what about the causes? Why are children so unhappy? I hope some of that £1.25billion is invested in researching the reasons so that as a society we can understand fully the sources of this epidemic in order to know how to deal with it.

To me, some of the causes are obvious. Parenting appears to have lost its way, with parents choosing to be friends with their children and subsequently failing to set boundaries.

There is the rising tide of family break-ups – which are often followed far too quickly by new blendings – and pressures on appearance and behaviour on social media can become all-consuming. Academic pressures from schools are becoming unbearable, and bullying is reaching epidemic proportions.

It’s not all down to the government, though. If young people are suffering from mental health problems, parents have a responsibility to try to discover the cause.

Surely any parent would do their best to help a child who was self-harming or vomiting after every meal, unlike the parents of the 15-year-old self-harming daughter, who appear to have relinquished all responsibility to discover what is wrong with their child.

Sadly, they may be the new face of parenting, so it’s even more vital that the government invests some of that money in prevention as well as cure, for the sake of the many children in this country feeling only despair.

 

Parents take up new roles

In middle age, I have taken up a new profession: taxi driver for teens. Not so long ago, I had fondly imagined that as my children grew into their more independent teen years, I would be able to have time to myself as they took themselves off to friends’ houses and organised their own social lives.
Well, yes, they are doing that... but the problem is that when they take themselves off to friends’ houses, they then need collecting later on. And my daughter, a singer and bass player in her spare time, now goes to gigs at the weekends and in the evenings. And as her bass guitar is huge, heavy and cumbersome, muggins here takes her there and back in the car. I’m going to have to wait until old age before I start my third profession: relaxation.