You cannot flip open a newspaper, a magazine or scan Facebook without noticing the rise in anxiety and depression amongst young teens and adults. Many articles call it an epidemic, documented by a severe spike in suicides, prescriptions and counselling appointments on university campuses.
As a counsellor at a major college, I see it first hand. As a mom of four young kids, it scares me. Why this increase? How can I avoid this despair in my kids' lives? These questions have motivated me to read a variety of opinions and theories on the subject, and I'm seeing that the new literature is calling for a change in how we parent and coach our kids in the early years. We cannot start the inoculation in their teens; the time is now.
A common thread in all of these articles seems to offer that teens and young adults lack an ability to compete, to fail and to persevere. They are not prepared and this leaves them scared and anxious when they look at their future in the face. Many are crumbling from the pressure. The finger gets pointed at parents, albeit sheepishly. Have we done too much for our kids, protected them and prevented them from all harm?
Martin Seligman, author of Learned Optimism and The Optimistic Child, looked at the history of how society, in an attempt to help misguided teens, connected self-esteem and success. The simple thread was made that if kids felt good about themselves, they would make better choices, not do drugs or get pregnant. They would go to college. If we just helped them feel better about themselves, they would be happy, well adjusted and have fulfilling lives. It is easy to support this formula. But Seligman knew there was fault in it.
Armed with good intentions, this thinking has crept into policy and we started to see kids' soccer leagues stop keeping score, fewer contests in school for best poems, speeches, you name it; competition became a 'dirty word' as that would mean someone won, but also that someone lost, and this may produce low self-esteem. There is even a movement to stop using the word 'no' to toddlers as that may lead to them feeling badly about themselves.
While protecting them from harm, we have also started to save them from hard work and from boredom. Why ask them to shovel the snow when we can pay someone to do it, and save hearing them whine. And they have 10 hours of booked activities to attend; they don't have time to help around the house. Homework? Let me help you. We want them to do well and feel good about themselves, but it's hard to see them struggle, and so if we just do it, all will be OK.
Working at a large post secondary school, I am in awe of how this seemingly harmless trend in grade school continues. In our counselling and disabilities office, we have had multiple calls from parents with requests ranging from wanting their kids' classes to be later in the day because it is hard for them to get there on time; to parents asking if they can attend class with their child to take their notes. "Tommy has trouble listening and writing at the same time."
We have all heard the term helicopter parent, but the common term now is snowplow parent. Not only are parents hovering, the stress is getting to them too, and they are beginning to plow the circumstances to make life better for their kids, or so they think.
After more than 20 years of this trend, depression and anxiety have reached epidemic levels. Something is missing. Seligman has used science to dig deeper and identify the fault in the formula. Just how do we build self-esteem? Well, it seems obvious now. And 20-20 is always so brilliant, but just telling your kids they are great every day doesn't actually make them feel great.
Ahh. We as a family unit, as a community and leaders in their schools, must provide opportunities for kids to make wins, to learn small successes. This is what builds self-esteem. However, losing is equally important; it is an opportunity to learn resilience, perseverance, sportsmanship and humility.
Seligman also identifies learning independence as a major source of growth. Kids need the opportunity to learn for themselves, the chance to make their own decisions and to see how the consequences work out. Of course, there are many layers here. The prescription is not to go from 0 to 100, and then throw them to the wolves. But what's happening now is that we do for our kids right up until they go to college, and then in essence, we say "OK, you are an adult now, go to it."
Doing this, I would argue, is throwing them to the wolves, and many are not making it. Their lack of survival skills leaves them scared and anxious, and wanting to avoid the challenges ahead.
Instead, let's let them walk to school on their own (age appropriate), pack their own hockey bags, do their own homework, and cook an egg. When kids are young, they are more open to us coaching them on stranger danger, teaching them how to use the oven, making a game of getting ready for school and activities. As they get older, they adopt an attitude of 'I know it already', and it's harder to begin telling them to look both ways when they cross the road.
It's easier to teach them to make good choices when they are young. We are still the centre of their world when they are children. Let's use it; not abuse it and coddle them. At this time they trust our opinion; we actually have a place of power. This is the time to be letting the leash have some slack, all the while whispering encouragements and tweaks along the way. It is here where they can learn some knocks as the stakes are low.
We need to look down the road and give some hard thought to this sad upturn in mental health, sadness and fear. How can we help inoculate our kids? What can we do now? I say it starts with a shift in parenting away from the current model to somewhere balanced, safe and fun. Let's land the helicopters. For the sake of our children.
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We’ve all experienced bullying when we were young; it can form some of the clearest memories of our youth. Bullying was ubiquitous; the unkind words, the names, the shoves, the threats. Adults didn’t step in until it escalated to bruises and sometimes not even then.
We’d like to stop bullying before it happens by educating students about the effects but criminalizing the interactive anti-social behavior of youth is not likely to help. Short of intervening in the case of violence, bullying may be one of the things our kids will have to learn to work out for themselves.
Children's Aid Societies are to blame for their overprotectiveness of children and setting guidelines such as that children age 8 can't go to a playground by themselves, can't go to the corner store, and that children age 9 can't take a subway or bus. Children aged 12 aren't allowed to babysit without a "nanny" popping in on them every hour or so in the flesh. It used to be that 6 year olds went to the playground alone, 9 year olds took the bus, and 12 year olds learned about money and work through babysitting. In a world with cellphones and streetproofing, children are MORE safe, not less safe.
Here, here!!!
We are all to blame: parents, schools, childrens' aid societies, parenting experts, etc.
Self-esteem comes from arming kids with the tools to be independent; not to bow over and do everything for them, including over-scheduling (a bain of the middle class nowadays). A bored kid is more likely to be resourceful and creative, and to be better at managing social situations during unstructured time with friends than a kid who is schlepped from one activity to another.
Schools share a big part of the blame with a switch from personal responsibility coupled with age-appropriate and developmental-appropriate curricula to a culture of accelerated and compressed learning, with a focus on medical conditions, brain dysfunctions, and therefore, victimhood for a big minority who needs more traditional learning instruction.
Parents are to blame for doing everything for their kids, instead of teaching them how to do things. Kids don't have to play soccer, baseball, violin and piano, while going to gymnastic classes. They should be given one or two things which they enjoy and feel they can work hard at, so as to succeed at something, instead of just being a passive rider in a bunch of different things.
any benefit kids may get from institutionalized learning from 1 yr to 5 yrs cannot overcome the lack of mom. more needs to be done to help parents be there for their kids instead of trying to fix the problem down the road.
socialization is learned- as well as all these life skills- not in a setting with 30 kids and 2 adults where no one can even get a report card that tells the truth about any deficiencies, but from steady interaction with parents who are loving and firm and teaching children the behavior they need to emulate. it is not learned from other kids, other kids teach kids how to be kids, they cannot teach children the skills they need to grow into well adjusted adults.
When I was growing up in the 60s & 70s in Southern Ontario long before the information age. We watched television & would get the Buffalo station, where the news was non-stop murder & arson stories. Flip to a Canadian news station & you rarely heard about a murder or fire (guess they didn't exist in Canada).
Fast forward to today & we are being inundated with news & information from a million sources all at once. That one murder is 500 globally today, that one teen suicide is 5 today globally.
This leaves everyone falsely believing everything is epidemic, when actually incidence of most things have either remained stable or declined. Teen suicide today is about the same it was 50 years ago, but you have to actually look at the statistics to know this.
Back in the 60s & 70s teens never committed suicide, their families had to move away because of work, the same was true of teenage pregnancies. Yet I know personally well over a dozen people of all ages who killed themselves back then. Not one made the newspapers or TVs 6 oclock newscast. Today you read about suicides from every corner of the planet the minute they happen.
There's no blame because there's no epidemic of anything!
AKA... Well said Lapetus.
Looking at science and statistics, the rise of anxiety in teenagers (and into 20s) is undeniable. There is an incredible amount of research right now that reflects this. In fact, the book she mentions in the article proves this. I've read a lot of his material....he writes:
"Depression now ravages teenagers: fifty years ago, the average age of first onset was about thirty. Now the first onset is below age fifteen. There is much more depression, affecting those much younger, and average national happiness—which has been measured competently for a half century—has not remotely kept up with how much better the objective world has become."
If you have kids, whether it's an 'epidemic' or not, it's surely worth paying attention to as the parenting trends are MUCH different today than it was in the 70s. You probably walked to school on your own in the 70s (as did I) but nowadays, one is not given any opportunity to flourish on their own. Is the world a more terrible place now and we need to protect our kids more? Looking at the stats, no, it is not.
I would argue most of these tests were created to produce a greater problem than exists by including & creating new factors that have little to do with anything.
We keep creating new mental health issues like they were cars coming off an assembly line. Autism for example has been split into dozens of competing branches. Each branch including increasingly more nefarious symptoms to justify & support their claims of a new ill.
Everyone suffers from depression, we have simply loosened the guidelines for what is depression. I've suffered from depression all my life & never once needed drugs or special treatment programs. Today teachers are forcing parents to get children diagnosed & medicated, why? Because teachers are ill equipped today to deal with real classrooms full of children. We have not only coddled our children, but our teachers as well.
Uhm, what's a fake woman?