To ask you why so many children have anxiety these days

[Tvstar]

Why is today's parenting producing youngsters with so little resilience?

I had bad anxiety and depression as a teen. I realise that now but at the time I was just seen as the moody one.
I went to the GP with my mum during a bad bout and while after she listed my symptoms the GP told her I had 'post viral syndrome' .

I think anxiety has been about for a long time but we didn't label it as such in the past.

I doubt the uni stories. It’s easy to read cooking instructions and I take a few mins to get my head round different washing machines.

I also doubt kids making their way in the world causes crippling anxiety. Teaching students how to cook books were big when I went to uni 30 years ago. I remember us all teaching ourselves.

Do you think i invented that phrase @tellmetruth4 ? Perhaps you want to have a word with the metroplitan police and the BBC if you have an issue with that phrase being put about. Not my circus etc.

Totally social media

Since me dd started high school I monitor her instagram and there are pages popping up daily with the following-

townscrapsandfights
Ratemymate
Ratemeoutoften
The biggest Ming
Ugliestgirlsintown

Sites like these are rife on insta for every town but if people don’t monitor their kids social media they may not notice

I live in a nice area and they exist - I report and they are taken down but back up the next day

Social media is destroying kids confidence

I think information overload, for parents and kids, has a lot to do with it. Too much choice, or perception of choice. Less jobs for life and longer working hours so parents are pressured. Too much rushing around to activities and childcare.

Also better recognition of genuine mental health issues. I had anxiety from as fa back as I can remember but no one to talk to about it. I think I was properly depressed as a teen but was just considered to be a typical sulky teen. I did grow out of it and developed resilience but I didn't reach my potential at school and the effects have lasted my whole life. I still have quite bad anxiety now but I can mask well enough to function, it's exhausting though.

RuffleCrow
but that's my point, if you are so overly anxious that you cannot let your own teenager pop in London with a friend, that's not healthy for your child.

It's also stupid to assume that London = bad, and other areas of the country = safe. It has tragically been proven completely untrue so many times.

Years ago if you have an argument with someone it was done - now someone posts details on their Snapchat stories to 1000 odd followers so then everyone knows and feeds it. There was a fight in dds school last week and kids in schools in my 3 nearest towns knew it and had watched the video by 8pm the same day

Do you think i invented that phrase @tellmetruth4 ? Perhaps you want to have a word with the metroplitan police and the BBC

you can't argue with stupid can you...

Maybe have a look of the geography and the background of the stabbings before commenting.

The routes children take, their personalities and the areas they live differ. You can’t make a sweeping statement re not letting a kid pop into London.

Why are you calling her stupid?

Everyone gets anxious sometimes, it is a normal emotion. I certainly feel anxious a few times a week, before a meeting, giving a presentation, stress etc, doesn't mean I have anxiety though.

You’re right, it doesn’t. However, if you got anxious deciding which breakfast cereal to buy, or every time you open your email, or pretty much all the time for no particular reason at all, then it would.

That’s what clinically significant anxiety is - completely out of proportion to the circumstances and also deeply uncomfortable. As hay fever is to the immune system, anxiety disorders are to the nervous system.

I don’t know whether it is actually more common among children, or what’s causing it if it is. But I do think that assuming all cases of anxiety are people being overly sensitive snowflakes is unkind and untrue.

I had a tumultuous 15th year - lost my virginity which I massively regretted, moved out of our beloved family home, lost our live-in grandma to cancer, started hanging out with a different crowd, got dropped by them due to romance issues and struggled to get back with my old crowd.

All this resulted in me staying in for two years and having no social life. I'd spend each weekend cleaning our house from top to bottom to make up for it (despite having a cleaner!). At 17 my parents sent me to Canada as a nanny for six months to "give me a change of scenery". I was very lonely and unhappy there but came back a much more confident and mature person and sort of never looked back since.

I don't think that would happen now!!

Parenting is a skill learned at the mothers knee . When a person is more or less brought up in a nursery, they are not absorbing parenting skills and in turn lack confidence when they have their own children. Anxious parents produce anxious children. (how would you feel on a plane with an anxious pilot?)

So tvstar, your belief is anxiety is caused by working families, although more specifically, mothers.

And what of those that weren't in childcare and spent plenty of time by mother's knee and have a diagnosis of anxiety?

When I was young and had worries they weren't taken seriously by parents who automatically assumed that whatever was worrying you would be forgotten about tomorrow. We were expected to just get on with things regardless. I'm not sure that that approach was any healthier. Children still felt anxious.

We listen and take them seriously now.

When my kids were in y7, they said that quite a number of their classmates weren't allowed to turn on a stove or use a kitchen knife at home. School provided an environment to learn these skills that quite frankly their parents should have.

Some parents are too anxious and pass on their anxiety to their children. I'm not saying that toddlers should be allowed to use a kettle but they should be allowed to do something "risky " like maybe carefully transferring cutlery from the dishwasher to the cutlery drawer and not running with said cutlery.

Because children are, too often, given mixed messages about their independence. They are fried around in cars and taught that they aren't safe if they walk around the corner on their own, but then they are allowed, nay encouraged, to ignore age restriction warnings and play ganes/watch films that are wildly unsuitable..

sunshine
In schools I've been made aware of worse sites/pages than that.
There's some truly horrible things out there on social media.

However, it's one small part of teen life and most teens won't be using that sort of thing and won't appear on it.

ThatMuppetShow
I agree.
How many threads are there where people justify dropping kids door to door as if the UK is some crime ridden kidnapping central?
Just the other day there was a thread where someone was worrying about their child maybe walking to school in year 7 in a year's time.
There's threads where people honestly think their NT child can't be expected to cross a road safety aged 9/10.
Every summer during trip season there's threads and threads of wound up posters because the school has said that KS2 children don't need mobile phones on school residential. Posters are up in arms about "but what about an emergency" when they have school contact numbers for staff. The reality is that on trips kids with phones often end up having a great time, get too busy to text home and then we get calls from worried parents because their 14 year old on a GCSE trip hasn't been in touch for an afternoon.

It is:

1. More diagnosis of anxiety
2. Social media meaning that teenagers never have their own space
3. The increase in child obesity alongside pressure to look like a film star
4. Porn, no need to say anything else
5. Too much pressure over exams, it quite simply isn't true that dc will need all 9's to ever get a job so chill out, ignore the competitive types and live for the moment. Quite simply that isn't how the employment market works,
6. Parents catastrophising over stuff including bird flu, Brexit, Trump etc
7. Fear of the danger of the outside world
8. The expectation that we all are entitled to be happy. Survival is a more realistic aim and happiness is a bonus and is what makes life good. But no one is happy all the time as life is bloody hard sometimes, it's fine to want to be happy but it isn't necessarily the norm.
9. The expectation that life is fair. It isn't so stop analysing the unfairness of you getting a DT for something Johnny got away with. Get used to it instead.

10. Some people are just prone to it, my DM always went on about people who 'lived on their nerves' so it's nothing new.

Basically it's a combination of the above isn't it?

As the mother of two mid teen girls, I would say that the following are the main causes of social anxiety:

Social media - always on, no escape, comparing lives to others, feeling left out, beauty ideals pedalled by instagram ‘models’ that have been pumped up with lip fillers, Botox and filtered beyond recognition.

Exams - dd1 is taking 11 GCSEs and some of her peers are taking 13!! School piling on pressure through ‘motivating’ assemblies, teachers hassling them to meet target grades that were set in Y8 (thanks Progress 8 🙄) and hassling parents too (not teacher bashing, they are clearly under a lot of pressure but it’s causing mental stress to our own kids)

Openness about mental health issues. To many they are almost fashionable.

Too much choice, too much materialism, not enough spiritual growth, not enough altruism.

Not surprising kids are fucked.

Oh god yes. Porn. And global warming.

As a child I struggled with trauma and possibly depression. I was emotionally and physically abused by my mother and sexually by others. I was a fucking mess,that was laughed at,dismissed,blamed and always the eternal question of "the hat do you have to be depressed about? You're a child, wait until you have a job and a home and then you'll know real worry".

I self harmed a lot,I did many stupid things. I had another friend that self harmed. It wasn't publicised or talked about or even acknowledged beyond "you're stupid".

A girl I knew hanged herself. The grownups that knew her were too busy blaming outside forces, including her being cursed or a spell put on her. I remember being so fucking enraged with the stupidity,ignorance and unwillingness to accept MH issues of those adults.

Yes I came out on the other side eventually,fairly ok but that was due to sheer luck, not strength or resilience or character.

@SafetyAdvice0FeedWhenAgitated

I also think 50:50 split custody is not great for children- not having a secure home base is not great for children struggling with mental health issues. One psychologist said that the only way this could work properly for the benefit of the child would be if parents were the one moving around with bags, not the child. DC would have a base and parents would be switching there according to contact plan. Obviously that's bit unrealistic due to costs, but I can see what he means

I disagree with this. There are studies that show 50:50 access is the best way to split childcare arrangements. If 2 parents can’t drag together or add in a toxic relationship, that is thought to be much more damaging on a child’s mental well being.

50:50 might make it logistically difficult at times but ultimately the child gets to spend equal amounts of time with both parents which again shows to be more beneficial.

It's weird how much sneering there is over children not being resilient enough. The young person from DS2's school who took own life had a history of anxiety and depression. It's incredibly difficult to get a mental health service referral accepted, and the GP can't intervene in the process.

There's a huge push towards charity/Voluntary projects instead, but I don't think these are an adequate substitute for some children.

Not much to add to what has already been said.

But hearing TheMuppetShow say that parents cause anxiety has me raising my eyes. It's the typical ill educated bullshit you hear from others who have no clue about brain development and are lucky enough that they haven't had to find out.

My son has severe social anxiety because he is autistic. It kind of goes hand in hand with autism.

There are also several other children I know NOT autistic with anxiety based avoidant behaviour.

Their parents have been through the mill trying to get help and support. There's very little to help them thanks to 10 years of cuts to mental health services.

There is a huge area of research that says children of anxious parents - particularly the primary carer.: are more likely to have anxious children.

Given that the average family has 2 children. It is basic maths to assume the level of anxiety in children will at least double every generation.

Perhaps we as parents should stop just 'accepting' that we are anxious as 'it's just the way I am' but take serious steps to deal with it and learn how not to pass these issues on.

Sussex University has been piloting parenting programmes to deal with this exact issue. Maybe time to give it a try