There is much current discussion about why the western world appears to be going through an epidemic of poor juvenile health. Many factors are blamed, for example the impact of the recent pandemic, the internet (social media in particular), lack of parental interest and guidance, poverty, schools that are too punitive and schools that are too lax, teaching that is not directive enough or is too directive.
The talk goes on and on, while endless numbers of gurus (or ‘tsars’) take turns to claim they have an easy answer, make a lot of money on consultancy, book deals and interview circuits, only to eventually fall out of favour when their ‘magic bullet’ answers fail to have any tangible effect.
Is there an explanation for this problem? If we look at it from a simple perspective of people as evolved, culture-bearing primates with similar needs to their great ape cousins, then yes, and it may seem very straightforward. But can our current society address the relevant issues? This is when the situation becomes more complex.
What do children need?
In a nutshell, children need time and space.
When they’re under seven, they need to be cared for by an adult whose main work is dealing with the children in the home. It’s an intensive job in the first three years of life and it takes up a lot of adult time.
Traditionally this caring role was fulfilled by the mother, but it can be co-opted among a small circle of adults (including domestic childminders) taking ‘shifts’. It is also advantageous for infants and their carers to be part of a similar community who regularly meet up in public spaces.
In their fourth year of life, children need to move gradually into bigger groups to play with others for part of the day, supervised by professional adults who focus equally on their wellbeing and learning. They are beginning to need a little less focused adult attention, but the need for space to play, particularly outdoors, is greater.
A child’s growing independence
From the beginning of their eighth year, children should be moving on to more formal schooling, including learning to use the internet under adult guidance. Equally, they now need to independently socialise with peers, practising the core human modes of interaction we can summarise as cooperation, collaboration and competition. This can be accomplished by group activities and in free play – that is in safe spaces where they can undertake play with peers that they largely manage collaboratively, with adults nearby to help only when necessary.
Independence in peer activities will carry on growing into the teenage years, and the greater sophistication of teenage social understanding (depending on their previous learning and development in peer play) makes this the best time for young people to begin to independently engage with the online environment.
From their 15th year, there is also a need to experiment with different occupational roles in which they have shown an interest, with the support of specialists in those fields, and alongside general education continuing to the age of 18.
The human brain is not fully mature until approximately the 24th year of life, which reflects the ‘rookie’ period in our career path, be that academic, professional or practical.
What’s wrong with kids today?
The famous American child development expert Uri Bronfenbrenner sets out in very simple terms the security that children need from the start of life: “Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”
Now, if we backtrack across the previous summary of children’s needs, we can see how over the past half century children have lost both time and space. Western governments currently encourage all adults to undertake full-time paid work outside the home; while the preferred location for children under three is group childcare, which in the UK and USA is commercially operated for profit.
The temptation is always to allocate too many children to too few adults and to keep wages low, leading to constant staff turnover and resulting in an unnatural situation for a human (or any primate) infant.
Children who receive insufficient or fragmented adult attention at this stage do not learn to trust other people, and develop high anxiety or ‘stress’, which can become a lifelong risk to their mental health. This may result in a delay in developing impulse control and anger management and give rise to difficulty in focusing on anything beyond their own physical and psychological safety. Emergent problems may then arise in moving on to the greater independence required during schooling.
British child psychologist Susan Isaacs pointed out in 1952, “Without security as a background to children’s lives they cannot dare to explore or experiment, to express their feelings or to try out new relations to people.”
What we learn in the playground
Moving on to mid-childhood, since the last quarter of the 20th century, children have steadily been losing time and space to play. Play is too often seen as an extra by our busy, managerial societies, and children pushed into doing something more ‘useful’.
And yet, as a species, we rely most of all on our ability to communicate, collaborate and debate with others – skills learned principally in the playground, where children first engage in the hurly-burly of collective endeavour, learning how to follow, how to lead, and how to support one another. Experience is gained in brokering agreement, disagreeing, righting misunderstandings, and making amends.
And of course, a child who carries over stress from mistrustful and fragmented relationships in infanthood will struggle to deal with the more onerous social and emotional demands of this developmental stage. Childhood problems tend to build exponentially in this way.
Schools are struggling
Mass state-financed schooling is only around 150 years old in western nations, and has always struggled with complex problems. The most pressing are inevitably around cost and the way in which this has been controlled by governments, who tend to employ as few staff as possible and increase the ratio of children to adults to the maximum.
At the end of the 20th century, a new emphasis on managerialism and performativity for both teachers and children increased pressure on both.
Teachers have struggled to meet targets with too many children, while still addressing individual needs, and some children are placed in a group where they are fated to find it more difficult than others to achieve stipulated targets – for example, due to special needs or age disparity. A classic example is a child who was four in August placed in the same group as a child born in September of the previous year.
Now add in the children who have anxiety issues carried over from earlier childhood, and a majority who lack time and space to engage in play and peer socialisation, particularly when recreation time is curtailed to create more time for work, and a classroom can easily become a pressure cooker.
Isolation and poverty
Since the mid-2010s there has been a fashion in both the UK and the USA for addressing children’s misbehaviour through isolation and exclusion, both of which of course exacerbate psychological damage in children who have lacked adult care and attention in earlier childhood and who had little freedom to undertake recreation and socialisation during their earlier development.
Now throw into the mix the jungle of the internet and social media, where children find themselves in an environment divested of the social signalling that all primates use in face-to-face socialisation, but which they may never have effectively learned due to play deprivation in earlier childhood – and we have the perfect storm.
Poverty, a state in which a third of children in the UK now find themselves, runs through all these issues like a pernicious seam, adding stress to every situation. We see tired, anxious parents who are so emotionally distressed themselves they struggle to give children sufficient attention, linked to the instability of housing, food and warmth, the required school uniform that is beyond parents’ means to afford, and so on.
And now we begin to understand why the kids ‘aren’t ok’.
What can we do for our anxious children?
First of all, we can stop listening to snake-oil salespeople who claim to have easy answers, whether that be putting children in isolation rooms, or not letting them on the internet at all until they are 16. These problems are multi-faceted and deeply embedded in our managerial, insular, neoliberal culture and its incompatibility with our evolved biology and psychology.
Secondly, we must understand that we must invest in our children, not only in monetary terms, but in terms of time and space; we must pay attention to what psychology and biology tells us they need in the unfolding stages of development. We should demand that our governments never construct these as lucrative financial opportunities for unscrupulous adults.
Thirdly, we must grasp that dealing effectively with all of this is beyond one family, one school, one teacher or parent. Our problems are endemic, cumulative and cross-generational; the seed was planted with industrialisation, then super-fuelled by the advent of neoliberal governance from the late 20th century onwards.
The future of our society
The answer lies in raising the profile of human welfare above that of multi-corporations in the international economy. And the irony is, if we raised mentally healthier human beings, we would lose fewer people of working age from the economy, both temporarily and permanently, and spend far less of our national income on public health and criminal justice.
Much of the democratic world is going to the polls in this year. Perhaps, if we could understand that the state of juvenile mental health is the canary raising the alarm on the current dysfunctionality of the democratic world, we might be better motivated to choose politicians who show genuine willingness to pay attention to this, and urgently prioritise young people’s wellbeing in their manifestos.
This is the most important problem our society has to deal with, after all. If we cannot raise the vast majority of our children to become sociable, emotionally secure, healthy, functional adults, we lose our future.