Childhood is not a mental illness
We need to stop treating children as if they are psychologically fragile
Children who started school back in 2010, aged just 4, are likely to have spent classroom time engaged in mindfulness exercises. Perhaps a few minutes each day were given over to sitting quietly, focusing on their breathing, noticing their thoughts and thinking about their bodies. Those same children, now aged 18 and about to take their A levels, are currently being offered advice on dealing with exam stress. Perhaps their school is holding lunchtime yoga classes or drop-in sessions with a counsellor.
Their school days have been book-marked by therapeutic interventions. They may not know the date of the Battle of Waterloo, how to solve quadratic equations or how to speak a foreign language. But they are familiar with the vocabulary of mental health. If they do not have a clinical diagnosis, perhaps of ADHD or dyslexia, then they almost certainly have a friend who does. Ten years ago, 135,200 students were granted 25 per cent additional time to complete their exams because of a learning difficulty or mental health problem. Last year that figure had risen to an astonishing 334,375.
A generation of children has been taught that feeling sad, worried or down-in-the-dumps is not a normal part of growing-up, but a potentially dangerous sign of stress, anxiety or depression. And rather than focusing outwards - meeting friends, reading a book or doing some revision - they must seek help to protect their mental health. In this way, childhood itself has come to be pathologised. Rather than a time for fun, growth and exploration, it comes to be considered a period of vulnerability with trauma-inducing events lurking round every corner.
This is terrible for education. Therapeutic interventions do not just take time away from other, more intellectually exciting, activities. They foreground the notion that how a child feels is more important than what a child knows. By this logic, it is better that children feel good about themselves than be confronted with challenging new concepts they might struggle to understand. Tests and competitive sports are likewise best avoided in case they put children under too much pressure or prompt comparison. Rather than being pushed to work hard, teenagers are warned not to put themselves under too much pressure. And rather than being introduced to knowledge of the world, the curriculum turns to what is immediately relevant to the child.
But if this is bad for education, it is disastrous for children. After years of being told they are too vulnerable to be challenged or tested, that they need to protect their mental health above all else, and that perfectly normal emotions are problems in need of professional help, it is hardly surprising that many come to believe this message. Children told to be ever-vigilant for signs of trauma do not turn into independent young adults ready to take on the world but self-absorbed diminished subjects.
Of course, it is not just schools that tell young people they are vulnerable. Every aspect of our culture reinforces the same message. From television programmes to social media influencers, from adverts to song lyrics, the same words are repeated endlessly: Don’t Suffer In Silence! Protect Your Mental Health! Beware Of Stress! Clearly, a tiny proportion of children do suffer with mental illness. But telling every child they have mental health problems does nothing to help this unfortunate few.
The assumption that children are mentally vulnerable now shapes how we see every part of their lives. As I write on Spiked this week, we kept children at home to protect them from strangers. Now, when they turn to smartphones to maintain contact with friends and explore the outside (virtual) world, we panic that social media is bad for their mental health. Yet the only argument being made in favour of children having smartphones is that they might need them to seek help for their problems.
Rather than worrying about the harms of phones - and further reinforcing the message that children are vulnerable - we need to inspire them to look outside of themselves, find excitement in new knowledge, leave the comfort of their bedrooms and forge real-life relationships.
As I wrote on Spiked:
Worry about smartphones is just one in a long line of moral panics about children and their access to new forms of media and technology. Before phones, there was widespread panic about videogames and rap CDs leading to violent behaviour. Go back further and it was television programmes. In 1997, one criminologist argued that even popular family television shows, such as Gladiators and Blind Date, were fuelling a growing addiction to real-life violence, sex and cruelty among children. Before this, people worried that comics were morally harmful to kids.
Two centuries ago, there was panic about children having access to ‘penny dreadfuls’ – cheap, sensational books, often in horror or gothic genres, that were read and passed between friends. One commentator in the 1820s described them as ‘the literature of rascaldom’ and held them responsible for filling prisons.
If we go back further still, right back to the 18th century, there was a huge panic about novels. Fiction was thought to encourage imitation and inculcate harmful ideas. The suicide of the main character in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) was said to have inspired young people to kill themselves in real life.
Novels were also assumed to be addictive. Reading them was said to be a waste of time. Worse still, it was feared they might damage a young person’s eyesight and posture, as well as their morals.
It seems bizarre today that anyone would panic about young people reading novels. Still, across the centuries, many of the concerns – such as wasting time and harming eyesight – remain the same, regardless of the technology.
Other supposed harms have changed over time. In the past there was far more concern about moral licentiousness. It was feared that new media were driving teenagers into inappropriate relationships. Today, concerns focus on threats to mental health, eating disorders and self-harm. We have moved from mostly worrying about how children relate to the outside world to mostly worrying about what goes on in children’s heads. Moral panics, whether about the smartphone or the penny dreadful, tell us more about the preoccupations of adult society than they do about the dangers any new technology poses to kids.