To think the Princess of Wales is wrong and the years that need more support and funding are the teenage years with the 18-25 year group being the most needy.

[Alice1land35543]

Having access to private mental health support , education and all that being rich entails alongside having not experienced the teenage years I don’t think the P of W is fully informed or right.

Teens are facing huge pressures( more than ever before) and mental health struggles are soaring. Services are beyond stretched and what little there is is broken and unable to cope. Schools are struggling, paediatric wards bursting, families are on their knees and continuously battling. When unwell teens reach 18 there is nothing but a cliff edge into zero support and they are abandoned. The brain doesn’t finish developing until 25.

“If we are going to tackle the sorts of complex challenges we face today like homelessness, violence and addiction, which are so often underpinned by poverty and poor mental health, we have to fully appreciate those most preventative years and do everything we can to nurture our children and those who care for them”.

No Kate we need to focus on the years children are struggling the most, fund mental health treatment and support properly and ensure that provision for 18-25 year olds is mandatory in every trust. Early years get plenty already. Teens and parents of teens get next to nothing so why the focus on early years yet again? Maybe the teenage years and 18/25 group aren’t so media appealing.

As an aside rich celebrities jumping on the mental health bandwagon saying let’s talk about mental health and just reach out is not the answer. Those struggling with mental health can’t reach out because there is nothing to reach out to and it’s not that simplistic. That however is a whole other thread.

I’m genuinely bewildered by the point you’re trying to make OP.

As others have pointed out, although the royals get some say, their duties and patronages are divvied out between them.

The Royals don’t often just randomly speak out, they plan it and do it in conjunction with charities’ media strategies etc and it’s in effect their ‘job’ to be their mouthpiece. The speech the POW did would be because it aligned with the Early Years strategy for a specific press release.

What you’re doing is the equivalent of having a go at the CEO of Diabetes UK for not speaking up about Lung Cancer. Yes, they’re both very important and good causes, but it’s literally their job to talk about one instead of the other.

At some other point in time, the POW will in fact probably “speak out” about teen mental health, as she is patron of a few charities that specifically deal with that; and she’ll do it at a point in time that aligns with those charities media campaigns.

Really?

Yabu. You need to build a strong foundation for children. If the basics are right, everything else falls into place. I see my DC’s friends have a lot of issues which are symptoms of a poor foundation.

IMO you need to invest heavily in the basics for a young child.

That said, teens need help too. I was once told that they need most help when under 5, then as a teen. Now mine are older, I agree with that. 5-13 was easier.

I work with teenagers and I don't agree. So often when I talk to parents, it is clear that the young persons difficulties are rooted in early childhood trauma, attachment difficulties, and issues within the family unit that have been allowed to fester and become entrenched for years. We are then in an impossible position of trying to reverse the impact of many years of adversity, poverty, trauma and neglect...rarely deliberate neglect, I should add as IME usually parents have done the best they can in difficult circumstances. Then we get the younger siblings coming through to us repeating the same patterns. Families who have had years of intervention from various services that has made no meaningful difference because so much damage has already been done. It is not unusual for me to speak to Mothers of teenagers who tell me that they now believe they had PND and that this impacted their ability to respond to their child's needs in their early years, but this was never formally diagnosed or treated and progressed to being a chronic MH issue.

Maybe it depends where you live but in my area there really isn't much support for Early Years. HV's don't go out to do visits anymore, support for new parents is over the phone. There are barely any children's centres left and the ones remaining run a fraction of the services they used to, Early Years education is facing a recruitment and retention crisis and Nurseries are seeing a significant increase in kids with a high level of emotional and behavioral issues. There is a massive waiting list for Family Support Workers and other services that can help with these difficulties.

Of course, teenagers and young adults deserve access to timely and effective support but I firmly believe that early intervention and preventative measures are vital.

I absolutely take your point about rich celebs "raising awareness" and encouraging people to ask for support though. It's all very well telling people to "reach out" but so often when they do there is nothing there that meets their needs.

As a said look what Marcus Rashford achieved in months.

I'm not a fan of the RF (I'd vote to abolish them) but I don't think this is a fair comparison. Rashford was, correctly, directly critical of government policy in a way that the RF cannot be. He was calling on the government to do specific things, Kate can't do that.
The RF's charity work has to focus on raising awareness, championing a specific charity scheme or cause etc without coming across as too political, and they certainly can't directly criticise a specific thing the government is doing.

@username8888 seriously?! I mean I think Kate has empathy & sympathy & does actually care but what does posting a photo of a hug mean?

The Prince's Trust is a charity in the United Kingdom founded in 1976 by King Charles III to help vulnerable young people get their lives on track. It supports 11-to-30-year-olds who are unemployed or struggling at school and at risk of exclusion

presumably Kate is aware of this and is purposefully talking about younger children.

plus she cannot be all things to all people.

if she supported the lifeboats, would you think that she was clueless cos the work of mountain rescue is just as important?

jpit isn’t a competition to find ‘the most deserving”

@WeWereInParis which is my point. The Royals cannot be political so their projects can't really do much. All they can do is raise awareness really & in these day & age I think they are far less relevant in that aspect.

@Alice1land35543 Are you saying most MH problems don't have roots in early years problems? Poverty, neglect, abuse have always caused issues. This doesn't mean of course all teen issues have these causes, but a significant amount do.

You work from the bottom up, you support children as they grow, and hopefully by teenage years it’s got better for them

There are a multitude of ways that the under 5s are being disadvantaged in society. Starting with the shit show that is maternity care in this country, to woeful HV provision to lack of social services support for some of the most vulnerable children. The number of families with babies and children living in poverty has continued to rise and, no doubt, will get even worse.

The number of families with babies and children living in poverty has continued to rise and, no doubt, will get even worse.

yep, things are going backwards.

It's in response to this comment This is a wealthy white woman who shook hands with poor little black kids through an iron fence for God's sake. She hasn't got a clue

Early years get plenty already.

As someone who has been fighting for over a year to try to get im place the Early Years mental health support my children need, to no avail, I'd love for you to tell me more about this.

@neverbeenskiing This is exactly what the headteacher at my sons first school said. She left the secondary school environment because she wanted to reach very young children and prevent the problems she was seeing in education later on.

The same is obviously true for early years care.

This

@username8888 I don't understand your point? What are you trying to say?

@Alice1land35543 I work in MH though mainly with young adults, the youngest we see on our unit can be 16. Of course the very serious mental illnesses young people we see have are not caused by a lack of children's centres. Most have autism and learning disabilities, have experienced bullying, developed additional serious mental distress after disruption at school or at home. And are much more vulnerable to mental illness anyway. The suicide rate in this population is worryingly high. And I completely agree with you we don't have anything like the resources to reach young people with symptoms of mental illness early enough currently and are usually intervening when they are seriously unwell abd we have a lot of work to do to help them recover and they and their families have suffered a lot of pain. That said across the whole population even among autistic and learning disabled young people most do not develop serious mental illness in their teens. One of the factors that may help protect all children and young people from future mental illness is good support in the early years and throughout childhood. Families with a strong network of peer support around them are more able to seek help early when they face challenges. Children who have lots of positive experiences of being accepted and supported and encouraged to learn abd explore will have more confidence and self-esteem. This does not mean families facing challenges in the teen years have somehow messed this up. Just that if we want to prevent problems downstream we should invest upstream. I regularly meet parents with children whose diagnosis was delayed until they were 18+, who never received appropriate support in school, who were constantly punished for completely normal autistic behaviours, whose whole families knew perfectly well how to accept abd support their sister/brother, son/daughter but they could not get help for love nor money until after an episode of psychosis occurred. This is just autistic young people. IF we empowered families to help their children from the earliest stages and offered adaptations and emotional support for children experiencing anxiety, sadness, anger from as young as 7/8/9 a lot of the teen MH crisis would not be happening.

By advocating for Early years, she's not saying that teens don't need support and help. That's like saying raising money for a breast cancer charity means that you don't support raising money for heart disease. They both need the money.

It's scientifically proven that the first 5 years of a child life make a massive difference. If the POW started talking about teens then people (including on here) would ask why she was commenting on that when she didn't even have teens. (Her kids are under 10)

Early years don't get plenty. My understanding is that HV checks are far less than when us older mums had kids and that government funding of nursery hours has barely changed in financial terms since our older kids were nursery aged. There were Sure Start centres which provided support to parents thus improved lives of children.

MH Services are underfunded for everyone.

I can see your point. To older teens and young people - who have long since left the cocoon of school - it must feel like support has dropped off a cliff.

The idea is to work with early years so that they don’t have mental problems at 18-25 (or any age).

The two issues you describe are different.

DrMarciaFieldstone

That’s just laughable and so naive.

Policy can’t be designed based on your personal experiences. It has to be evidenced based.

Do you have evidence to show that many of these issues aren't rooted in early life experiences?

I work with teenagers with SEN and my teen has autism and serious MH problems. I agree that this area needs more funding, but I think Kate is right about the early years. The cases I deal with are largely a result of trauma or instability in the early years. I had PND and I wasn't given adequate support. It eventually required hospitalisation, resulting in massive amounts of trauma for my child.

Prevention is essential and it will free up resources for the YP whose MH declines during adolescence. You should look up Suzanne Zeedyk. She talks a lot about how early years trauma reshapes the brain. There's also a lot of compelling research about the impact of adverse childhood experiences on lifelong physical and mental health.

By the time they are teenagers and young adults, the problems are entrenched and they've usually had a significant impact on educational attainment. This creates another barrier and makes it really difficult for the YP to improve their chances. This means they're vulnerable to issues like poverty and drug addiction. It doesn't make any sense to focus all the attention here. We need to stop it from happening in the first place. Research shows that high quality early years provision is the key to that.

Alice1land35543 Why? As PP have said, it’s well-documented that many mental issues, dependencies and problems in later life are rooted in childhood. There is more money and support needed everywhere, at all stages of life. Clearly the current 18/25 cohort need support, but root cause also needs addressed. You sound resentful tbh. One group of society being helped, doesn’t cancel out the needs of another, that’s not what Kate or anyone else is suggesting. It’s odd to feel aggrieved at help being directed to young children.