Another day, another article on Facebook telling us that our children’s mental health is in crisis. Depending on the article, depending on the day and depending on the agenda, it’s that young men are in jeopardy, young girls, teenage girls, young boys…so that just about covers everyone, right? Everyone is in jeopardy and at the exact same time as the majority of young people are completely losing their shit for a multitude of reason, the mental health provision in the NHS is overwhelmed and underfunded.
As I wake up every.single.morning. I reach for my phone and lazily scroll through my social media feed, allowing crisis after crisis seep into my half awake brain. The malleability of the human brain is both our strength and our weakness.
I bump into my daughters on the stairs and talk about privacy online. I put the kettle on whilst checking that we’re all good on the effects of drugs. I watch them chomp on their toast whilst I regale then with stories of the need for consent.
They humour me. Sometimes they laugh at my ignorance.
Then I think to myself, who are the neurotic ones? Who are the ones being manipulated? Who are the ones who are really bloody stressed out because they no longer know what they should be thinking?
Mental health problems may well be on the rise in young people, but I think we need to seriously address our behaviour as adults, as parents, as journalists, even as experts, before we judge the issue as being caused by the world our youngsters inhabit. The world of a like for a like, of Internet porn, of online bullying and narcissism. We forget that this is all they know and have ever known. We forget that they talk to each other and work things out amongst themselves. We forget that we communicate with our children far more than our parents ever did with us.
Meanwhile us, the adults, are easily led. We’re totally absorbed in reading about how other parents do it. We’re malleable and neurotic and when we aren’t, we are judged as not caring. We have not grown up with the Internet. So whilst our children are using it comfortably, we are using it in a state of paranoia. We simply cannot make sense of the deluge of information that it throws at us, warping our instinctive brains.
Yes, we are so malleable.
We are believing all the hype. We think that our children are suffering mentally because of Fortnite and cruel words online and not getting enough likes. And yes, sadly some may well be. Sadly when I was young a boy didn’t know that ‘no’ meant ‘no’, so I felt raped. Sadly friends suffered from identity issues and bulimia. Sadly many were bullied. A good few were anorexic. I was approached by a paedophile, my sister was approached by a paedophile and friends were approached by paedophiles, whilst others went off with older men far too young.
It happened. It still happens. Who is really suffering the most from mental heath issues now – is it our children or is it us? Are we being driven crazy by the need to keep up with perfection on Instagram? Perfect children brought up the perfect way in perfect houses. Are we going nuts having to constantly check our social media feeds? And when we do, is what we read making us unable to see the wood for the trees? Can we no longer make decisions from the gut? And what is the effect of all this on THEM?
WE can’t handle the Internet pressure.
THEY most often can.