To ask a genuine question about child mental health?

[poldarkssecretlover]

This is an issue that has touched our family recently and something we are struggling to understand and I was just interested in the views of other parents as to whether you think children's mental health is generally worse now than it was when you were young or whether we're just more aware of these issues now?

My daughter has mental health issues yet on the face of it has a much "better" childhood than I did - she has nice trips and holidays, better clothes and toys, loving friends and family. So we have been asking ourselves whether it's something in her character or whether her life is somehow affecting her mental heath - are schools more pressurised nowadays? Do we give her too much - would she be happier with a simpler life? I came from a very poor home with lots of arguing and we didn't get holidays or many toys and at times I wasn't that happy but I don't remember having the levels of anxiety my daughter has. I wonder if other parents feel the same.

Would be really interested in people's honest views on this subject- I won't judge anyone's viewpoint, I'm just looking for a better understanding of this. Thanks!

It's inevitable that you'll lose your temper sometimes. Don't beat yourself up for snapping occasionally. Just apologise and move on. You're only human and mental health issues are extremely difficult for all concerned. You're both suffering because of them.

Nobody my age (40) remembers schools holding extra classes to prepare kids for phonics, reading or maths tests....not until at least 15yo.

Now, from MN sampling it seems that around 50% of infants schools are getting kids in outside normal hours to boost their league table rankings.

Then there is the overwhelming availability of information....

My DD is 7yo and she was complaining that she wanted to find things out 'properly' instead of just getting it instantly off the internet. She wanted to look things up in books to search out the information and compile it herself.

I think the fact that you can essentially instantly know anything you want to is creating a strange devaluing of human mind. I think it can be stressful even trying to understand where humans fit into our new digital society.

My DD doesn't have a phone or any social media accounts, but she already sees so much more of what people all over the world are doing than I did at her age. The infinity of choice is a lot to handle.

I have very strong feelings on this! There is a lot of research about the impact that the loss of freedom/ freedom to play without adults nearby / freedom to go out and make their own decisions - and how this affects children.

Children start formal learning now at the age of 4 - this reduces their time spent playing at school - play is the way children develop relationships and learn how to be human beings - it is more important than phonics!

So - we remove freedom and play from them at school and put them under pressure there - to conform - to get the 'correct' answer all the time - then outside school they are taken to various activities always adult led or with adults nearby.

Because they don't play in the street they are taken (if they are lucky) to the park - where adults are always on hand to involve themselves inf allings out / dictate what sort of play goes on.

children are literally no longer having any real 'childhood' - as a time of play/ freedom to choose their own way of spending time with friends/ using their own brains and imagination to decide how to spend their time.

They are like caged animals - no resilience/ no freedom to think for themselves

I have a 7 year old and I worry so much about how I can let him have that freedom - when no other children have it - there is no point sending him out to play, there is nobody there! In the park there are adults everwhere.

yet when we go camping he just thrives - running off and inventing games with friends for hours on end, rarely falling out, learning how to be resilient and make decisions.

I think its a catastrophe and all of us parents should be looking at how we can work together to give childrne back some freedom.

Someone said something 'dealing with a mean kid in the park' - very good example. Children are not ever learning anything if they have adults mediating everything they do - then suddenly at 11 they are going to school alone and have unfettered internet access - of course they aren't suddenly able to be resilient to it ,they have had no practice.

I also agree @M3lon that seeing the different ways of living all the time is naturally leading to unhappiness - true of adults as well.

I notice my son is more whiny and bored when we have not been able to let him run off and play without us...I think it is genuinely boring for kids over the age of 7 or so to be with adults all the time..and they become unhappy but don't know why.

In my experience depression and anxiety runs in my family but I think in some parts my childhood contributed - parents split when I was very young and my mother was unstable and went most of her adult life without being diagnosed with depression.

She was 50 years old when she finally spoke to somebody about it.

But a lot of my family members have suffered with mental health and I think it's not a coincidence that as an adult I am now experiencing the same.

I personally felt a great deal of pressure just due to the fact my childhood was so so much better than either of my parents had experienced. School was highly pressurised, a B grade was seen as a failure. And then hobbies became pressurised too, as we were told it would look good on uni applications/CV that you'd 'stuck at' something for a long time. I also had several part time jobs as a teen one to do with younger children at one hobby and then as a regular mothers help/babysitter. It was all too much and by 19 I was simply burnt out, a depressed anxious mess. I still am at 24 tbh.

Kids need time every day to run around without adults closely supervising. Kids who don't get this IME tend to be more unhappy and more likely to be badly behaved. I see it as essential as feeding decent food. And yet not all kids get this.

Social contagion and labelling have roles to play as well.

I don't know if there is more of it or more that we are just aware of it more these days? I have had anxiety since I was a child myself and I feel sad that my own children may have their own issues, but what I will ensure is that they are fully supported if they do.

50 years ago , we had innocent fun ... we could walk on walls on the way home from school and no one shouted at us ... we could fish for tiddlers with jam jars and no one was hysterical if we put fingers in our mouths ... sweets and pop were a party treats not a relentless stream of sugary chemicals ..... food came from farm and wasn’t blasted with chemicals and steroids .... we went to school and played with each other and had 20 minutes reading as homework .... we didn’t have or worry about SATS, 11+, exams relentlessly, they just occurred and we got on with it with no fanfare..... it was far easier to say 'no' to boys coz the threat of your big brother would sort them out ..... largely our parents were there for us, they had time but they didn’t micromanage every living second of our free time … we were allowed to be bored and to have free time and imagination… we could escape by reading and have fun building dens and climbing trees ..... we learned resilience, self management, cope ability

I found secondary school high pressure (a selective school) and I was very anxious but it wasn’t spoken about. I don’t think I had the vocabulary to talk about it. So in one sense youngsters now are more emotionally articulate but we had a lot more freedom. I think I had more outlets for stress relief and diversions. At 15 I was going clubbing, at 16 I had a part time job..was always out and about on my BMX or just going for long walks alone as I enjoyed my own company. Imagine 15year olds getting pissed and going clubbing now! Someone would call the police!

tattooq That is heartbreaking - and a story I see being acted out again and again with the undergraduates I teach.

It is a massive massive problem.

tattooq I am sorry to hear that. Yes it does sound like far too much pressure.
I remember feeling under a lot of pressure in secondary school. But I also had time to just do nothing, go for long walks, hang out with friends, and listen to music.
I think I do have a bit of a tendency towards anxiety and could have easily been a kid that struggled to cope at all, if I had not had time to do not much at all. I still need that sometimes.

I wonder whether, in addition to issues already raised, there are epigenetic issues that are being triggered by an increase in pollutants, synthetic chemicals etc.

I have issues with anxiety and depression and had my first depressive episode aged 10. In my 40s now.
I think that there was so much right with my childhood - long periods of time in nature, stretches of watching and thinking, time to create, unstructured play, time off from socializing, little emphasis on appearance.

I worry for my own dc that they don’t get time to benefit from boredom, that they have been aware of how they look from the outside since they were little, that they will have to deal with relentless social media, that they have experienced so much that they will be jaded.

On the one hand I want to be able to give them my childhood. But then I think of how that freedom we like to reminisce about meant a local school girl died at 12 in a road accident, and I was groomed at 15.

Adeste There are risks in kids having more freedom. But I think lots of kids are being very negatively affected by having no freedom.
I play sport. My friends who take no exercise often make comments whenever anyone I play with gets an injury. Yes there are risks of injury. But no exercise means risks of heart attacks and strokes. There is no such thing as a risk free choice for our kids.

I think kids are under more pressure than I was at there age, and the advent of phones and social media has meant that the pressure invades their safe spaces.

I also think that there is a higher expectation that people should be able to live happy and fulfilling lives, rather than just getting by. I don't think that is a bad thing.

Just to say though.
I work with families who live overseas and return. I help their kids adjust back to UK, and process their often complex lifes.
Until relatively recently, it woudl have been considered to be making a fuss out of nothing, and the 'old school' would have said - get on with it.

But those kids who were told - "stiff upper lip, get on with it" then wrote books about how broken they were by their lilfes experiences and the lack of any way to porcess it. They were the beginning of the change, which means we now accept that expecting a child to move country every 2 years is not reasonable.

I guess what I am saying it that it went unrecognised, and resurfaced years later

@LatentPhase I totally agree!

I am not sure this is a new thing. Although the word anxiety is used more now when children might have been called shy or nervous in the past. At my secondary school (early 2000s) there was a lot of self harm and there were eating disorders.

It's good that people are more open / aware about mental health

But I sometimes wonder if the pendulum has swung too far in that direction. My nephew describes himself and his friends as having social anxiety. I suspect it's more likely that all, or at least most, of them are just a bit awkward in the way that most of us were as teenagers

Children have lost the freedom to play for hours with their friends that was how they grew up for the majority of human evolution! They are no longer taking small risks all the time thst help them take big risks when they get older. Play is how children grow and learn...empathy and resilience as well as balancing and understanding risk.

So we have children who are fearful and anxious and what really worries me is they really only go to school and come home and sit about on their screens or they do very organised activities. If wr don't let them have the freedom to ge away from us being creative and having physical adventures they are going to be mentally and emotionally stunted

However I also agree that wr can be rosy tinted about the past. I'm 44 and there were plenty of anorexic self harming teens in my peer group.

As a primary school senco, I think the narrow curriculum with a focus on knowledge rather than skills has caused a lot of damage to children’s mental health. I think the total focus on phonics rather than a more well-rounded approach to reading was a mistake as well.

We are seeing loads of children in KS1 with huge levels of anxiety-I believe a lot of this wouldn’t exist if the curriculum was better designed. We don’t necessarily need masses of mental health support, we need a huge redesign of the curriculum and education in general. The system is pretty broken at the moment.

I don't remember anxiety being an acknowledged issue during my childhood, although I was a very anxious child. It simply went by the label of, 'Photolass is very highly strung.' Nothing was ever done about it.

Today we are much keener to put a label on certain behaviours that wouldn't have had them in the past. (I'm talking about the sixties). I'm sure there were children who would today be diagnosed with autism, ADHD etc but these labels simply didn't exist.

But, children today, in general, don't learn resilience. They don't play together unsupervised, they are hardly ever out of their parents' sight and any perceived problem at school (have a look at some of the threads on here), are met with parents wanting explanations and further investigation from the school. This almost never happened in the past.

And then there's social media - all the pictures of seemingly perfect lives, full of happy smiling people on holidays. They never report on the arguments, the awful weather etc. It's all got to be perfect.