There are many things for which I am thankful. After finishing this book I can add another to the list. I am thankful that I am not bringing up children now. My own three kids are now all adults, with kids of their own, each happy and successful. Whatever mistakes I made, it seems that they weathered these without lasting sequeleae. The big concern in my parenting days was around “smacking”. Although we did not avoid this I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times was used. Rarity seems to have made this more effective and I can imagine familiarity could have bred contempt.
Looking at my own kids, they do not use corporal punishment. They do seem to have to work much harder and much more creatively to ensure good child rearing. It seems to work as well as anything I did but I am not sure I would have had the wit or stamina to follow their strategy. But after reading this book I now know that are facing much greater challenges than I ever did.
In “The Anxious Generation” Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, addresses the rise in mental distress in our current youths. Some have argued that this may be a moral panic and more related to increased talk than to any true rise in distress or disorder. However, the book makes it quite clear that there is a real rise in mental distress by looking at ‘hard’ data rather than just reporting and, on multiple measures, we are seeing a significant rise.
The causes of this are harder to pin down and it can be difficult to be sure that one is not mistaking correlation for causation. However, he makes a compelling case, backed by convincing data that two factors are of great importance. Firstly the oveprotectiveness that has caused us to withdraw our children from unsupervised real-life pay has meant we have robbed children of the important learning that real-life risky play affords them. At the same time, with the aid of ubiquitous smartphones and social media, we have allowed our children to play unsupervised in the virtual world with all the risks that this entails. At their most vulnerable time, when children are trying to understand about risks, about what is is to be an adult, about their sexuality, we have abandoned children to the care of social media companies in the hope that they will ensure they are allright.
Fortunately these are things we can do something about. However, I know how hard it is to refuse a child something that “everyone else has” and parents need support to boulster their nerve. Parents, and the community, also need to show solidarity saying that we know this is wrong and we won’t take part in it. If you need a spur to action and the rising rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm are not enough, or seem to complex, then perhaps a single example from the book may help. Just recall that now, it is quite likely that a young boy will have seen anal sex before he has even had his first kiss – this is not a healthy way for children to develop.
I would strongly recommend this book not just because I think people will find it a valuable and informative read but alse because I hope it will promote futher community awareness of a major risk which we seem to be sleep-walking towards.
Looking back in sadness 