Stop Panicking About Anxiety, Teenagers Will Grow Up

To know the ways of children is a talent that society seems to have forgotten. When reports come out like the one in last week’s Sunday Times that reveals a third of 16-17 year-old girls have anxiety, over 50% of teenagers have tried alcohol and 42% spend more than six hours a day on their phone, we act as a society with complete bewilderment. What on earth has happened? Who is to blame? What should be done?

A pause is needed, and a moment of reflection on human nature. Even with the misery of lockdown and phone addiction, can children really change so much in a generation? Isn’t older childhood always a morass of crippling anxiety, great lurches for freedom and shameful incapacity to regulate emotions? We can all remember the opening scene of Jane Eyre where she’s curled in a curtained window seat reading about birds, hiding from everyone and her own sadness, yearning for freedom.

Our own inability to fully remember what it was like to grow up is partly responsible. It may well be the case that it is impossible to do so. Søren Kierkegaard suggests that memory is tied to the development of a reflective self, which emerges later in childhood: “The self is not something ready-made, but something in the making, and memory is its thread.” For reasons of necessity and propriety we forget the way we used to be. If kept, teenage diaries are re-read as adults with the most cringe-worthy sense of embarrassment and shame. If at all, we remember our tantrums, our gothic love affairs, our petulance, our unkindness to siblings, our wild recklessness with the same astonished detachment that we look upon the behaviour of wild animals. If we have our own children, we examine their behaviour and emotions in efforts to understand what on earth is going on yet so often completely fail to remember what it was like to be a young child at the end of the summer holidays refusing to try on a school uniform to see if it still fits. Our brains wisely tidy away our childish and adolescent selves in a way that benefits us, but hinders our ability to understand fully the whole excruciating business of metamorphosing from a child to an adult.

As a first step in understanding what reports like the Times’s tell us about this generation of children, it is useful to remember that children are not small adults. We have become terribly confused in our approach to children – on the one had trying not to infantilise them by rebranding them as ‘teenagers’ (a term only popularised in the 1940s) and even giving them their own acronym: CYP (children and young people). At the same time Governments dangle the option of voting for 16 year-olds but will not allow them to see certain content on social media, vape or marry. Children are schizophrenically viewed as either innocents at the mercy of predatory adults or corporations, or savages in need of endless DEI lectures at school about not sexually assaulting each other.

For those wishing to understand the ways of children I would avoid the advice of child psychologists, youth counsellors and the like, who have solidified the timeless business of ‘putting away childish things’ into a dark collection of medical conditions. Instead, look to those rare authors who do remember what it is like to be a child grappling with adulthood. Roald Dahl of course, Charlie Higson (I commend whole-heartedly his Enemy series for anyone who wants boys to read), all the Brontës, Sue Townsend, Robert Muchamore. Tolstoy’s rendering of the laughter-filled child Natasha growing into a heartbroken and recovered adult is perfection.

This is what the now forgotten novelist Margaret Kennedy wrote of her ‘teenage’ character Tessa in 1924. In the language of today, the young girl was feeling ‘heightened’ after a fractious family dinner ‘overwhelmed’ her. She ran outside her Austrian home:

In every direction she could see for miles and miles, but the view was simple, a succession of serene ranges sticking up into emptiness. … It was a simplification that delighted her. There were, usually, too many things. The people and colours and noises crowded her mind with ideas and confused her. Often she felt that she saw nothing clearly, but here, where there was very little to see, it might be managed.

I teach confidence techniques to groups of teenagers and this extract sums up beautifully their feelings of being anxious about school work, social media, family, friends, choice – the general business of emerging from the cocoon of childhood into the reality of adulthood. Their minds have not get grown the capacity to organise what is important and what is urgent, what is vacuous and what is meaningful. But they are capable of learning. And given time, space and endless love, they will. Because they will grow up. And once grown up, they will look back on this period of their lives with as much bewilderment as we remember, if we dare, our own.

Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach. She is looking for a publisher for FLOURISH: How to Help the Digital Generation Leave Home and Live Happy and Prosperous Lives. Please get in touch if interested.