What is wrong with our kids these days?

[2021ismyyear]

So I live near a town that has a recent alarming number of teenage suicides. Mostly girls but there have been boys too. There seems to be a huge mental health crisis brewing. More and more are needing professional help. Schools are at a loss what to do. Parents are angry.

Parents are blaming social media, the schools, the teachers, the government.

One parent said that they had to remove their kids phone as there is peer pressure on social media with regards to suicide, becoming lgbtq, and going on anti depressants.

It’s just exploded here. Young people have lost it! I remember a few in my year with mental health issues (eating disorders, those that were abused etc) but it seems every teen has an issue at the moment. So severe in cases, that they are killing themselves.

What is this all about? How can we stop this?

I think my DD's generation are soon going to completely dump social media. Not all but many.

Two of my DDs mates (16) have dumped Insta and use phones only to talk and text. They obviously watch TV too but there's probably going to be a sort of mass exodus.

Also kids have always had mental health problems. It was NEVER talked about, never, not even in the 80s and 90s when I was growing up. I certainly had mild depression when I was a teenager and dealt with it by eating my bodyweight in chocolate and never ever talking to anyone about how I felt.

I am no expert, but a global pandemic and a year pretty much in lockdown might have something to do with it.

@FourTeaFallOut

I'm in NZ and a lot of young people here have experienced devastating earthquakes, a massacre and now the pandemic - all before reaching age 20. It is no wonder if they are feeling demoralised. All while the adults around them are grappling to manage too.

What happened to the sky high teen suicide rates in NZ? They were already right up there long before the Christchurch earthquake. Has there been any improvement or did any interventions make a difference?

Suicide rates are still extremely high here, don't quote me but I think the highest youth suicide rate in the world. Male in particular.

Overall rate is higher than UK but lower than Australia or US.

Not just social media. My DS has had very little access but still managed to get very mentally ill. The Conservative 'reform' of the exam system a few years ago seems to correlate with a lot more exam stress. No longer good enough to get an A (7) now need to get a 9 or an A*.
Plus for some reason it is much harder to get onto competitive courses than it used to be. Places seem to relatively fewer. Conservatives decided it make financial sense to import doctors and dentists rather than train them, leaving a generation of aspiring doctors and dentists without enough places. More stress, higher entry requirements until now there isn't a high enough entry requirement and other rather random factors are used.
I just hope the children of those Conservative ministers involved are also having a truly shit time and MH issue just so they know what it is like to have a child with MH issues largely due to Conservative party education policy.

In my opinion there are a complex variety of reasons. Including that we are so much more aware due to social media and spread of information.

There is also the current cultural influence of individualisation in some society’s, like UK. The me me me factor, people care less about collectives, Familes for example. Focus is very egocentric. You can be anything, do anything, no one can judge you. Which is true to an extent but how do we teach conscious and consequences??
I wish I knew.
Furthermore. Try getting health support for your 13 year old if said 13 year old is against you being involved.

I read this the other day that made sense to me
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/05/childhood-in-an-anxious-age/609079/
But also I have teens and they all say tik tok is making them hate humanity. They don't seem to be able to weigh up common sense and trolling, it's like all opinions have equal value so they get out raged about e.g. bands of feminists saying "kill all men" or schools in America doing forcible genital checks on students. I think its just overwhelming amounts of unfiltered information and is too much for human brains to handle

Yes, I do wonder how many people who "suffer from anxiety" are actually "just" anxious about things it's perfectly reasonable and normal to be anxious about, but as I'm not in their head, I don't know.

I did an interesting bit of training about how the human brain is not actually designed to be happy all the time. It's being unhappy and finding the means to change that (food, shelter,etc) that ensures our survival, but we lead our young people to think constant happiness is the normal state.

@Mousetown

Peer pressure to become LGBTQ?

I don't know if I'd call it peer pressure, but coming out as bisexual/pansexual/omnisexual is something we're seeing a lot amongst our DD's friends at the moment and it's causing a lot of issues and there are some very unsettled kids in her circle. One in particular wants to change her name to something genderless but talking to her about it, it's obvious she feels she should because her friends think it's cool rather than because she wants to. Meanwhile, my DC has other friends who feel isolated because they know they like boys, but they feel they're not allowed to be straight, and that's causing them emotional turmoil. I'm just thankful it all seems to be bypassing my kid, who prefers animals to humans anyway!

@YellowFish12

I’m no child psychologist but if I had to point to one thing, it would probably be social media and unrestricted/unsupervised internet use in young children and teenagers.

But I’m sure it’s actually incredibly complex and multi faceted.

I'm on the same page as you.

The other thing I notice is that parents seem to think refusing a child's demands will damage either the child or the parental relationship.

It's GOOD for children for parents to say No and mean it .

Unless children grow up with that experience in the safety of home, ( understanding the sky won't fall in) no wonder they can't handle conflict /refusal on social media. Far more worrying, how will they ever be able to deal with healthy disagreement/ criticism from ( and to) partner,employer, work colleagues.

@QuentinBunbury

I read this the other day that made sense to me www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/05/childhood-in-an-anxious-age/609079/ But also I have teens and they all say tik tok is making them hate humanity. They don't seem to be able to weigh up common sense and trolling, it's like all opinions have equal value so they get out raged about e.g. bands of feminists saying "kill all men" or schools in America doing forcible genital checks on students. I think its just overwhelming amounts of unfiltered information and is too much for human brains to handle

Yes...I've been careful to try to teach my DC about not believing all they read and about fact checking but they think I'm stupid and old.

Ironically I work in digital marketing and know all about what they think they've invented.

One parent said that they had to remove their kids phone as there is peer pressure on social media with regards to suicide, becoming lgbtq and going on anti depressants

This is partly true. There is now huge pressure for teenagers to identify as trans, queer or non-binary. Social media is largely to blame for this and if they don't conform they are vilified and harangued. Add to that the disruption of the pandemic and you have the perfect storm.

i honestly don't know what the answer is. I wish I did.

I think people have been encouraged to talk about mental health, but not given adequate resources to deal with challenges, whether by learning how to develop their own resilience or receiving external professional support

And people have been encouraged to medicalise everything, instead of accepting that some ups and downs are natural / normal eg worrying about your exams is OK, it doesn't mean you have anxiety

And people watching TV all the time, whilst playing on their phones = lack of human interaction

And social media = no escape from school bullies, seeing photos of parties to which you weren't invited

And copycat behaviour (self harm and worse)

And growing up during a pandemic

Several things are at play.

PARENTAL

i) Lack of boundary setting leading to;
ii) Lack of consequences for disrespecting other people's boundaries.
ii) Laissez faire parenting / latchkey kids
iii) Lack of parental interest in their children's education.
iv) Broken and or blended families. Unplanned pregancies in unstable relationships.

SOCIETAL

i) Children are no longer allowed to fail.
ii) This deprives them of the motivation they need to remedy themselves.
iii) Or alternatively, if they do screw up, their mistake will haunt them for the rest of their lives (see social media).

TECHNOLOGICAL

i) Social media and online relationships lead to detachment and loss of social skills in the real world.
ii) Peer pressure through social meda. Kids crave acceptance and validation, leading to self esteem being defined by the number of likes one has.
iii) All the phonies on Instagram merching and selling an idealized but fake lifestyle.

INTRINSIC

i) Anti-education rhetoric in working class communities.
ii) A class system very much alive and kicking
iii) Demotivated youth and lack of ambition

IDEOLOGICAL

i) Negative public image of Britain and British people by the media more akin to the propaganda of a vanquished nation rather than that of a thriving democracy.
ii) Tolerance of everything and anything no matter how absurd and counter intuitive or even criminal
iii) Blurred societal boundaries.

Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier will open your eyes for ever to the “social contagion” of becoming “trans”. I would say it’s pretty much a must-read for any parent or teacher of teenagers.

It was quite common when my DS was a teenager for lots of his friends to have mental health issues and to go on anti-depressants. I think that teenagers have been encouraged by social media and each other to look far more inward than before.

I don't what is for the best to be honest. I had school mates with un-diagnosed mental health issues until they were adults which must have been miserable. And yet when I wanted HRT my doctor insisted I was depressed when I wasn't.

It all smacks of the Valium cure all of the 1960s.

Suicides though - I honestly don't know where to start with that one. It cannot be seen as glamorous, the poor things must be desperate.

Unfortunately, services are not being funded enough and now with the pandemic there must be an unprecedented rise in mental health issues with adults and teenagers. It feels like a couple of years of teenagers have missed the ease into adulthood we had and instead are just bang into 19 or 20 without any experience. And we all know adulthood takes no prisoners.

@FortunesFave

I think my DD's generation are soon going to completely dump social media. Not all but many.

Two of my DDs mates (16) have dumped Insta and use phones only to talk and text. They obviously watch TV too but there's probably going to be a sort of mass exodus.

I have been expecting this for 10 years but now I'm thinking I just got it wrong!

Agree lockdown a huge factor.

Re families, not a popular view but as a teen it is hard enough dealing with one family. Dealing with more than one must be awful.

@khakiandcoral

I am no expert, but a global pandemic and a year pretty much in lockdown might have something to do with it.

Exactly.

I think it is hard to only blame the kids when the adults themselves do not act like adults.

Parents when they are younger to children "it is forbidden to lie " when they are the ones who are lying everyday. If you lie how do you expect your children to be truthful?

Also regarding social media, everything is exaggerated. Even on here you see a question where someone says "is my OH stingy" what do you see in the responses? Gas lighter, Toxic etc.. Words nowadays get thrown into everything nowadays. There are people who gas light others and toxic. But trying to exaggerate it into everyone is the problem. There is a difference between a man/women being stingy and someone who beats their spouse (they are most definitely toxic, abusive, gas lighters etc..)

I think regarding social media it is not helped by so called "influencers." In my opinion, they have done more harm than good. They live a life that is not real (filters, clothes being loaned to them etc..) Also another thing about social media that I dislike is announcing everything. 20-30 years ago everything was more discrete not everyone felt they had to tell the whole world everything. Now, it seems like everything has to be broadcasted (e.g. relationship status, what you ate, going to university etc...)

"This will be very controversial, but I wonder if parental conflict and the determination to share contact is partly responsible. Residency seem to be more about things being fair for the parents than in the best interest of the child. It must be very unsettling to live between two homes."

50-50 residency is the default in Belgium. If your theory were true, there would be more mental health problems in Belgium and any other countries that do a lot of shared custody.

Young people today have experiences that most of us never had to endure... they are acutely aware of the climate crisis, they have been witness to countless terror attacks (there's no shielding them when it's blasted on huge screens everywhere) and they are living through the greatest health crisis in a century. I think they are entitled to feel unnerved
Previous generations have certainly faced similar issues at least in Europe. IRA bombings, AIDS, the financial crash etc... It's easy to forget what others have had to deal with.

Every teenage generation has done it though, within the parameters of what was available at the time
I fully agree, but kids were mo resilient. They had more of a 'I'll prove them wrong' attitude. People were much more expected to take ownership of their issues. Nowadays, there is an expectation that everyone else should sort out one's problem and then moan when that support is not to their liking.

Kids can't do and say anything anymore that us even remotely outside if the box without being labelled and shoot down by media. On one hand tolerance towards minority groups has very much improved which is great, but intolerance towards individuals has instead taken over.

@TheTuesdayPringle

DynamoKev

There is not one simplistic reason for self-harm, it is complex. But it is very catching. Self harm is glamorised on the net, young people who post pictures of their SH have huge numbers of followers. It is so sick. Maybe start by trawling through your child's social media... Good luck. I had to do this, and ban him from hanging out with certain kids, get a psychologist etc.

There was no social media when I was young and I had at least three friends who were self-harming in mild ways, mainly putting the compass needle on their arms.

Not to mention everything nowadays you need a identity and you have everyone jumping on the bandwagon. For example, pronouns. If someone identifies as something else (minority of the wider population) that is fine but why do others feel the need to jump on the bandwagon and write their pronouns? I mean it just is unnecessary.

I think the economic environment has an impact on kids MH, with 2 parents working f/t how much attention does a kid really get? I know teens don't tend to actively want parental attention, but they do need it, and I think adults being around, really helps. I have always worked p/t and I feel lucky for this, as I really believe it's been beneficial to my DC's. I'm NOT knocking working parents, but I would like to see Dads more involved and prioritising work less, but I do appreciate the financial pressures people are under.

Previous generations have certainly faced similar issues at least in Europe. IRA bombings, AIDS, the financial crash etc... It's easy to forget what others have had to deal with

There is nothing which compares with Covid since 1945. I lived though all of the above mentioned there and it is utterly fucking ridiculous and insulting to compare any of that to a global pandemic.