daft, people are lonely at all ages for different reasons.
I agree that though the small baby stage can be stressful, difficult and potentially dangerous if PND is present, there is often quite a lot of support out there. I found eventually, once I had adjusted to being a parent, it was a bit like University, in that you are suddenly thrown together with a lot of people with different backgrounds but with something in common and time to make good friends.
My triggers were a combination of children growing and giving up work, with DH very busy at work and my life dominated by trying to sort out care and living for a frightened, angry and aggressive mother with dementia desperately clinging to her independence with all the family politics that this entails. But I can see that finding friendship group conversations now revolve round potty training and 3+ entrance exams would be equally difficult. I also agree with Friday, busyness is a problem. When I stopped work I realised that I had not seen people I considered my friends for a decade. It may be different elsewhere but in London contact has to be deliberate, but so do children's social lives (including sports, homework and those fruitless piano lessons) and these take priority. And that divorce or bereavement will again leave people sitting looking at four walls, damaged confidence, and wondering what to do next. In retrospect my advice would be to maintain contact with a very occasional "I was just thinking of you and wondered how you were", or "I loved your post about .." message through Facebook, so it is easier to follow up with a "I will be in your town and wondered whether you would like to meet up for a coffee" when you can. My experience has been that you find you still like people you used to like despite a long gap, and the joy of social media is the ability to link up.
I am no sociologist but I assume we want friends:
- to validate ourselves. The perfect end to an awful day is to laugh with a friend and be reassured that you are alright, even if your boss, husband, teenager, etc tells you, you are not.
- to share experiences. How much nicer to discuss a play, or even a PTA meeting, with a friend.
- to shared history and therefore experience. I found year 13 difficult as my fledgling adult children faced important choices and rejection. A friend phoned me yesterday going through the same and knowing that I had known them from very young. No solutions, a few ideas, and I could share that she is a great mother and has raised lovely children.
- motivation. A friend has asked me to help her with her allotment today. Not really my sort of thing, but different, and I should come away with some fresh veg (possibly wrong season?!) and motivation to stick to my diet. I might even walk there.
I am sure there are other reasons. My sense is that the solutions lie somehow in an analysis, at different stages of our lives, of why we need friends and why people struggle to make friends. I suspect some of the answer will be modern living, and the fact many of us simply don't know how to make friends. I also suspect that what is a problem now could be a crisis in a generation's time.
My concern is that the Commission will do what Government policy makers always seem to do, and that is call in "stakeholders" (a phrase that always makes me think of Berni Inns) with specific interests to peddle. I find it telling that they are concentrating on specific groups: new parents, older people, carers, people with disabilities, asylum seekers and refugees. Not that these groups don't have specific problems but these are areas where organisations will be pushing for funding. Social links may be a bit like education. Some groups need extra help but everyone needs community bonds.
There is always a focus on funding, but more might be done with enabling. How can we build open, welcoming and accepting communities in big cities or in rural areas (and everywhere in between). An empty nester in their early fifties could get involved in a local gardening club, which in turn links with a local school, which in turn encourages mothers from different communities to work together on a project to improve the local public realm. Lots of gains, including within communities that might otherwise self-isolate, not much money needed. (And barriers are probably imposed ones like DRB checks, public liability insurance etc.) I like near the home of the
guerrilla gardening movement and love coming across patches of bright flowers. And plan, when I next need to spend time down with my mum, to link up with the Dorset Devils, patrolling South Coast beauty spots in a group and picking up litter. Better still someone who gets involved in community activity in their fifties has a good chance of maintaining those links through the years, and thus be able to support ailing peers, or receive support themselves.
I was once involved in the major regeneration of a large estate in the North, where the housing management were closely involved with the tenants association. Whilst canvassing individual tenants they uncovered some shocking examples of social isolation. The good people of the tenants association worked to support them. The Council listened and were determined to resolve physical problems (access to the estate was via a single road with a couple of shops, which is where the druggies congregated which meant no one on the estate felt safe to leave after dark).
There is something very wrong and across society, and it is getting worse. It would be reassuring to think that this commission were focussed on the basic problem, and were approaching it more like marketing executives addressing consumer need, rather than a London based, lets call in the vested interests and consider only certain high profile groups, standard approach to policy making.
End of rant.