But then again
:o
Research which finds that teenage problems have more than doubled in 25 years is the kind of headline-grabbing news that social scientists launch gingerly into the public domain.
Put this research into the hands of the Daily Mail and it would be ample grist for those peddling tales of Britain's moral decline: kids don't know right from wrong; they lie, they steal, they're disobedient. Or another favourite: the breakdown of the family is making our teenagers miserable, and working mums should bear the most blame as the rise in maternal employment virtually parallels the increases in emotional and behavioural problems. New Labour has opted to play the former tune - Tony Blair gave one rendition earlier this summer in his tirade against 60s values.
New Labour has had only two policies on youth: its crusade against anti-social behaviour and its mission to raise educational standards. It expects two things of adolescents: that they achieve academically and are law-abiding. A very large proportion fail on one or both accounts. Surveys of the developed world show UK teenagers have one of the worst staying-on rates in after-16 education and are more likely than most to take drugs, binge drink and have underage sex. Compared with this dire record, the success story of government policy has been all about Sure Start and early years. The language is about investment, as if children were stock options. The pressure is on teenagers to start paying returns - and yet this is entirely at odds with reality.
Never has the financial dependence of children lasted so long - well into their 20s - and at the same time consumer pressures have intensified. No political party has known what to do with adolescents once the apprenticeships and assembly-line jobs ran out. The Tories cut their benefits. Under New Labour, they got the New Deal and little else. Adolescents have had a raw deal out of a government which heaps expectations on them which they can't meet. In the New Labour rubric of rights and responsibilities, they were given the latter but without the means to fulfil them. At the same time, the rights shrank. It is harder than ever to get on to the housing ladder, harder than ever to fund a university education. New Labour has only exacerbated the contradictions of the transition to adulthood which awaits your average 15-year-old. We expect them to be independent and yet cut off all financial means of being so. No wonder the 18- to 24-year-olds are the constituency least likely to vote.
Experts are divided about the rise in teenage misery. They broadly fall into two camps. The first take the view that the causes lie predominantly in structural issues: for example, the labour market has few jobs for 16-year-olds spilling out of an unsatisfactory education, and the secondary educational system sets up far too many children to fail. Plus, we have a media culture which bombards teenagers with marketing and invidious social comparisons that undermine self-esteem. As a result, adolescence has became a painful experience and teenagers are self-medicating with drugs and drink to cope with the stress.
This is the explanation which has got through to government, and two initiatives out next month will propose remedies: the Tomlinson report is looking into a restructuring of education for 14- to 19-year-olds, while a green paper will look at youth services such as leisure activities. The concern is that both are being drawn up according to the familiar New Labour preoccupations of ensuring that teenagers are employable and law-abiding.
The second camp take a much bigger and more disturbing view. They argue that this is not just a problem of adolescence, but that further research is likely to show up a comparable rise in miserable seven-year-olds. They argue that there has been a deterioration in the mental health of all children. This isn't just about troubled teenagers but troubled tots. An increasing number of under-twos are exhibiting abnormal behaviour which is being diagnosed as depression.
The idea that we are raising unhappy children seems close to a doom scenario, but even more horrifying is how commonplace this kind of assumption seems to be among many experts in child and adolescent mental health. It is an assumption which has made few inroads into public debate and has had precious little impact on government policy: only 5% of the mental health budget goes to the under-16s. Perhaps we just don't want to know; we invest so much in the happiness of our children, we can't bring ourselves to face the evidence to the contrary. Perhaps we prefer to indulge in moral panics about their unruly behaviour rather than listen to their misery.
This line of argument takes us swiftly into huge controversy because it goes to the heart of how we parent. It suggests that an increasing minority of parents are unable or unwilling to provide the emotional nurturing which will ensure a resilient child. Margot Waddell, consultant psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic in London, defines that as wisdom, thoughtfulness, consistency, forbearance and availability. These qualities can occur in any shape of family and in any kind of childcare, so we shouldn't get caught up in pinning the blame on single parents or working mothers - it's the emotional dynamics which count. The question is why fewer of us are providing that kind of care for our children. At adolescence, early experiences of childhood are being replayed, says Waddell, and the stress of the transition to adulthood exposes all the faultlines. Dinah Morley, of the mental health charity Young Minds, puts it even more starkly: there is a failure in attachment. A growing number of us simply aren't bonding sufficiently with our babies.
That's a haunting thought. We're anxious parents now, but what we worry about more than ever is our children's safety, health and education. Childhood has been infected by a highly supervised techno-managerialism loaded with targets and statistics - developmental outcomes, tests, league tables - and perhaps we need to put back centre stage an old dream: happy children. What is just as important to a child's life chances as a clutch of exam certificates is their emotional resilience to deal with what life will throw at them. It's a troubling possibility that our teenagers are like the canaries they used to take down the mines to detect gas. Their acting-up is acting out a much bigger problem.
·
No Have a look at the link Sarah Its COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL :)