Parents - we need to do something drastic, don't we??

[BrianOfBritain]

Another report about the huge number of teens with mental health problems in the press today. So many of the adolescents I know are anxious, low, self-harming, self-loathing, etc. And almost all the parents - myself included - think phones and social media are partly to blame. But instead of changing it much, we all struggle on with them, saying "well, I'd better let him/her, or he/she won't have any friends" or whatever. We look to systems of online protection to "keep them safe". But this won't even scratch the surface, I suspect. Why are we putting up with/going along with this? I seriously think we might need some kind of revolution, where thousands - millions - of parents act together, pethaps to get rid of smart phones for kids altogether. Millions all going back to old style non-smart tech, all at once so kids are in it together and won't be left out?

Of course the technocracy have more and more ways to get us - and more importantly our kids - most and more hooked. But if we acted together, surely we could step away from it on behalf of our kids. Surely we can do SOMETHING? I suspect it may have to be drastic, to try to turn this juggernaut. Are there any initiatives to get lots and lots of us together to sort this? Is there even any appetite for it?? I just feel like we're passively allowing our kids to be so harmed, and assume we're powerless when we're not...

You’re lucky to get a referral because there’s been an absolute explosion in parents wanting one, and not enough resources to meet that demand. I think parents are approaching GPs and MH services more than ever with what used to be ‘quirks’ or ‘phases’.

For example, many posters whose kids have diagnoses on here say they ‘see traits in older family members’, usually their parents. But it seems those parents have been fine muddling through life and just doing things ‘their way’.

Then they are punted back. There are criteria. GPs don’t refer to placate parents.

Totally agree. My daughter put so much pressure on herself to do well in her year 6, ended up in A&E a few days before the start of the year with a panic attack, got herself so worked up over SATS… spent weeks practicing after school, was devastated when she didn’t meet the target for one subject, despite doing amazing in all the others…. started secondary school in September and has been suffering severe anxiety since…. Absolutely debilitating for her. Far too much pressure these days, kids are taught, they’re just groomed to pass tests!

No I’m not saying they do, but I also see many threads where parents are pushing and pushing for referral despite GPs not seeing a need to do it.

I haven’t read the full thread but pretty much everyone around me is suffering from mental health issues. I don’t know why, because I’m not an expert. But I don’t think it’s exclusive to children and young people.

No parents haven’t been getting on just fine. Many have masked and it has impacted lives . There are increasing numbers of late diagnosed parents. I am one. A diagnosis as a child would have had a massive impact and made life so much easier

Absolutely! Smartphones should be adult only: children shouldn’t be carrying the internet around in their pocket. We need government regulation on this not all this crappy asking Facebook to step up.

Those parents and grandparents often may have trauma from their experiences though. I have ASD diagnosed in my children. I see it in other family members who have severe anxiety, one has depression, one has really struggled. BUT they had to get on with it and did. No help or sympathy available. I'm sure I was depressed in mid-childhood but was just told to get on with it and had my feelings invalidated. There's ongoing consequences from that (I'm now unable to ask for help or accept help. I just wear a mask of strength.) I know I bore the brunt of my father's anxiety disorder and it was awful. No-one knows about that.

Respectfully, I disagree. The children I see in school with the worst anxiety are those who spend a lot of time using technology.

Those with good MH appear to be the ones whose families are active in the outdoors.

This might not be the case across the board, but it does apply a lot.

Sorry- quote fail !!

And yes I agree about the massive lack of downtime and how parents seem to timetable every day so there isn’t a bored/unoccupied moment. My parents never planned our weekends - we just dossed about, played on the estate, walked to the park/shop/recreation ground. Our pleasures and ambitions were smaller, much less pressure. It used to be that you’d leave school, get a job (unless you were a brainiac then you would go to university), then buy a small house and probably get married. Work hard and you’d get promoted, could buy a bigger house and go on holiday. We dismiss that as ‘unambitious’ or ‘narrow’ now, but there was much less stress and expectation, and lots of people stayed in the local area close to friends/family. That sort of life is dismissed as ‘sad’ on MN but I think it’s very underrated.

Totally agree

If only. Instead society is becoming more and more vacuous.

Imissmoominmama

Not what I see. We spent a lot of time outdoors, ditto many of out friends. We live in a very outdoorsy area. All have children with significant mental health struggles.

This is my experience too.

At 63 I am far from technically savvy but still spend too much time on line. In fact I've changed "My Ding a Ling" to "My Smartphone "! Seriously - society is far too online as it is. Try to keep your kids cheerful.and to.think for themselves- unfortunately getting ahead in this world generally requires one to be a hypocrite!

I honestly think too many parents wrap their kids in cotton wool. I work in a primary school and the amount of parents who pander to their kids..' sorry X won't be at school today as he's got a runny nose'.
'My child isn't going on the school trip because he might get anxious amongst crowds'.
All this does is encourage it.

I also think kids are way more sensitive nowadays because anything said out loud can be classed as offensive. It only takes one child to roll their eyes at another for them to have a complete meltdown over it. There's just no resilience anymore.

Society has changed and moved on but a lot of these MH where there back in the 70s/80s90s before social media and phones were a thing. We just didn’t have them reported to us directly (via social media and instant access to the news). We used to buy teen magazines and read the problem pages. They were full of quite similar stories we read on here. We didn’t know what the kids in the class/school were up to outside of school as we weren’t seeing daily posts on SM about their lives but it doesn’t mean those things weren’t happening.

More things are making it hard. Anti social behaviour seems to be getting worse - or appears to be as we are seeing in reported on SM daily. When I was a kid we hung out on large ish groups with kids on our estate playing games and generally hanging out and having fun. We didn’t go setting fires to local playgrounds for fun. Older teens did hang out in slightly hidden areas drinking diamond white and smoking but they didn’t seem to cause the bother we get today.

I had a Saturday job as soon as I turned 16. Those jobs are rare now as shops are open 7 days a week so staff not work on 5 day shift patterns changing weekly to cover weekends, or many staff work part time including thr weekends. Before I was 16 I did babysitting for local people - it was boring, had to stay awake til late watching one of the 4 channels on tv or if I was lucky watching a video from blockbusters. The kids I baby sat were never any bother - played out til dark then came in and went to bed themselves.

We do now have a better understanding of neurodiversities so more and more young people are being diagnosed. Those people were always there in the last, just struggling on with out diagnosis or support.

My autistic teen has a phone but pulled out of all what’s app groups as she can’t stand conflict and general chit chat, doesn’t have her own social media other than access to a family tik tok. She does now follow autistic people though and uses it to learn about different presentations of autism. She does plenty of out of school activities though and when she’s not doing those she does scroll a bit through tik tok videos but only in the same way we used to either watch tv or put on our favourite vhs.

I was a nanny and online is so engrossing I would have to remind children to hydrate or go to the bathroom. This struck me as an out of body experience where the attention and needs were all empowered to the keyboard rather than the actual body you were housed in.
We are all making offerings to the data gods 🙈

I find that online time tends to replace the time we spent as kids watching TV. Something that was also considered detrimental. A bit over 100 years ago reading was seen as detrimental.

I had plenty of screen time, it just wasn't on a device.

Because quirky children no longer cope in school.
This isn’t a pushy parent phenomenon , as much as many people would like to think it it.
ND children are literally not coping. Rates of school refusal are rising, schools crack down in ever more authoritarian ways to deal with attendance, to deal with children who don’t fit the mould.
I remember both primary and secondary school in the 70s and 80s - there just wasn’t the pressure to succeed that there is now. We went for nature walks, we played, we had time to be. We didn’t have homework in primary, in secondary we had minimal homework to start off with, none of this 2 hours a night for Y7 pupils at our local grammar school. Every learning moment didn’t have to count. Even GCSEs and A levels in the early 90s, I don’t remember having the insane pressure that children have now. We were taught, the rest was on us.
Non academic children had plenty of non academic options, it wasn’t an issue at all - now there has to be a great deal of work to access different types of education for children who aren’t academic, which puts more pressure on them, makes them disengage because they’re practically told they’re thick.
If I understand it correctly government policies and curriculum input are behind these changes, perhaps in an attempt to make UK education world class, but having seen the changes first hand I think they’ve done a real number on education and our children.

My dc are autistic, as am I. I wasn’t a fan of school but I managed. It wasn’t as overwhelming and strict back then. I can see exactly why my dc and others have not thrived, in a way that has directly led to them needing to be diagnosed in order to attempt to access support, and in hopes that they can understand themselves and not believe they are crap for not coping.

My last post looks like I’m saying school in the 80s was a utopia - it wasn’t, I struggled throughout, but school now puts so much more pressure on children, it’s no wonder they’re not coping.

I have issues with school defined resilience, and see many pupils being told they need more of it, all while having it chipped away, because resilience in school often means “get to school, stay in school” without looking at the root causes of why children are struggling in the first place.

My dc school refused, one had very poor attendance rates, I took two dc out of school to home educate. Despite school (they were certainly no help to my dc whatsoever), my dc have shown amazing resilience. They work, they are productive, they have gone through some pretty traumatic stuff but have still picked themselves up and pushed themselves, but no school has acknowledged this because it didn’t fit what they wanted dc to do. IMO they missed a trick here, in having to run schools in one size fits all ways that actively lets down many pupils.

@Darlingx ,
You've described very well. Sometimes I feel I have to pull my kids out of some other dimension. They than struggle to come back to the real world.

I’m not sure about the anxiety and depression caused by phones. I had terrible anxiety as a teen but no one identified it or helped in any way. I dropped out of college and lost contact with my friends for around 2 years. That would not be so easy with social media or the other support in schools you have now. Back then I had no support from college about what was wrong , it was just that I was a nuisance with my poor attendance and should leave.
we identify issues much better than we did and have more forms of intervention given that you can usually get in touch with people.

Of course social media amplifies the opportunity to compare yourself and to increase your self consciousness and self doubt. These are problems teens have always had as they go about trying to forge their own adult identity.