50% of 13 to 19-year-olds have never written a thank-you letter; 26% have never written a birthday or Christmas card. 58% think writing by hand is too slow to bother with. 9% say they don’t own a pen; by contrast, 74% have a tablet and 89% a smartphone. (Bic/Daily Mail)

It’s not thanking people for gifts that is shocking. This is the fault, not of the teenagers, but of the parents. Grandparents I know complain that it isn’t just a lack of thank-you letters but the absence of any acknowledgment of presents whatsoever that upsets them – not an email, a text message or a phone call to say “thank you”.

The parents are not doing their job. It’s hard work chasing children to thank parents and friends for birthday and Christmas gifts, but its something that countless generations have had to do in the past. It’s a poor world when basic good manners and courtesy depart. Fortunately, not all young people are guilty, and I believe that these old-world courtesies will return to favour when the current crop of poorly brought-up people are adults and they are treated cavalierly themselves by their nephews, neices and grandchildren. Followers of Epicurus think of the feelings of others, especially family members.

Some (un-comprehensive) answers to the excessive angst among young people:

– Pull back on organized, adult-led activities, and allow kids to organise their own play, setting their own rules.
– Parents offer too many compliments to their children. One should praise children for effort and sticking at it – constant praise for everything breeds egotism and gives them inflated ideas of their abilities.
– Try to get schools to open in the afternoons with monitors, but no organized activities.
– Advocate for a shorter school year and lots of downtime for dreaming.
– Ban homework for young kids. Too much homework does more harm than good.
– Encourage them to read actual books, and have a ban on computers during certain hours.
– Children can’t be good at every subject. Let them fail a bit.
– For older children, schools should ban cellphone use during lessons, and should assure teenagers that it’s quite alright not to have a presence on Facebook.
– Schools should severely crack down on all bullying.
– Parents should stop the drift towards ad hoc, lone eating in the evenings and insist on family meals where parents talk to their children, and vice versa.
– Being by yourself playing video games is unhealthy, and arguably lonely and addictive. And there should be a serious crack-down on sales of alcohol to teens (yes, it’s been an issue for far too long).

There has been an inexorable rise in anxiety and depression on both sides of the Atlantic in the last 80 years. These are some of the causes:

– an unhealthy preoccupation with fame, money, image and pressure to have sex at far too young an age. This generation is faced with more sexualization and more porn than any previous generation. Girls face the most difficult challenges.
– a rise in broken relationships, such as divorce,
– a sense among some of not being in control of their lives.
– parents who expect their kids to excel at everything, who say it’s not about winning, but then celebrate winning. Actually it is very healthy to fail sometimes.
– technology, which is addictive and is also accused of affecting memory.

Some people point to problems caused in early childhood. Children aren’t learning critical life-coping skills because they never get to play like children used to play. The emphasis is on skills like reading and writing, which are insisted on far too early.

Play is brain-building for babies and young children. There is a sequence of how children develop, from the moral and emotional to the social and intellectual, says Dr. Ellen Littman, a clinical psychologist. Each phase requires building certain muscles, whether to do math, or make a friend. There is a developmental sequence and you can’t violate it all that much. But now children are expected to focus on academic tasks. In 1998, 30% of teachers believed that children should learn to read while in kindergarten. In 2010, that figure was at 80%. Playing during unstructured time, with rules set by the kids, is how kids learn independence, problem-solving, social cues, and bravery.

Then again, too many parents micro-manage their kids’ every mini-success, helping them with homework, science projects, setting rules, then wondering why they can’t set their own and grow more independent. Isn’t independence the object of it all? (Thought: how much is this over-parenting is owing to parental guilt?).

Thus, many teenagers reach their teens without the coping mechanisms and abilities of previous generations, and are very unhappy about it.

A few weeks ago the teenage daughter of a friend of a good friend of our took her own life. I don’t know the circumstances, but know she was a troubled child.

Something is undermining young people’s mental health, especially that of girls. A study conducted by Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, looked at four studies covering 7 million people, ranging from teens to adults in the US. Among her findings: high school students in the 2010s were twice as likely to see a professional for mental health issues than those in the 1980s; more teens struggled to remember things in 2010-2012 compared to the earlier period; and 73% more reported trouble sleeping compared to their peers in the 1980s. These so-called “somatic” or “of-the-body” symptoms strongly predict depression. Children are being diagnosed with higher levels of attention deficit hyperactivity and everyone from 6-18 is seeking more mental health help and more medication.

Meanwhile, according to The Guardian (25.03.16), British teenagers are third from the bottom of the league of 42 countries in terms of unhappy young people, only beaten in misery by kids in Macedonia and Poland. They feel they are under stress at school, are often unwell, have a lot of mental and emotional problems, drink too much alcohol, and are under pressure through social media owing to their looks or their weight.

Tomorrow I will address the causes.