The State is currently funding a pilot project where primary school pupils will have access to specialist counsellors, at a cost of more than €5 million.
It’s a worthwhile investment. Early intervention is essential when it comes to mental health. It is estimated that 50% of mental health problems are established by age 14.
The pilot is a response to rising anxiety levels among primary schoolchildren, which had been obvious pre-pandemic but have been exacerbated by it.
Why are children so anxious? Obviously, lots of factors are at play but, equally obviously, many parents – particularly mothers – will blame themselves. Worse, some others will probably blame them, too.
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It is not so long since autism was alleged to be caused by cold and emotionally unavailable mothering. The Australian psychiatrist Leo Kanner suggested that in the 1940s, and his compatiot Bruno Bettelheim popularised the catchy but desperately damaging term “refrigerator mothers”. It caused untold harm for decades.
Conveniently, both of these revered medical men ignored the fact that these mothers had other children who did not have autistic traits.
Previous generations did not worry so much about children’s happiness as they did about raising kids who would not disgrace them in front of the neighbours
As the “refrigerator mother” theory was being debunked in the 1960s (although it persisted in certain circles for 20 more years), along came the popular acceptance of the idea that parents are responsible to a large degree for their children’s happiness.
Previous generations did not worry so much about children’s happiness as they did about raising kids who would not disgrace them in front of the neighbours. To put it more positively, they wanted their children to be capable, responsible adults but they did not see their primary role as ensuring their children’s contentment.
If the first part of the parental job description is to ensure that your children are confident and secure, the danger of feeling like a failure looms when your child is riddled with every possible kind of fear. Not only that, but the child may well be resistant to your small armoury of tactics designed to help them overcome their anxieties.
Parents blame themselves but mostly, they are wrong. It is a much wider problem.
Genetics probably play a part. Some children seem to come into the world missing a protective layer of skin. From the beginning, they are observing everything, absorbing the moods around them, affected by every little sadness they encounter.
Some children get an even less fair roll of the genetic dice, with a predisposition to serious mental health difficulties. Parents immediately think that they should be able to help in this instance, too, but in many cases, professional help is needed.
Accessing help can be a nightmare. For decades, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (Camhs) have been consistently underfunded. The additional resources allocated in the Budget are welcome but are completely inadequate to make up for previous underfunding.
The waiting lists for Camhs make for shocking reading. In August, there were nearly 4,200 patients awaiting help, including 540 children who have been waiting for over a year.
Cork and Kerry are particularly disadvantaged, with 862 on a waiting list and 198 waiting for more than 12 months.
Things that are extremely important, such as taking time to be parents, are not prioritised in our culture. Instead, the paid workforce is supposed to take priority over everything
Solutions to anxiety in children and adolescents with less serious issues than those on the waiting lists often focus on the individual child rather than on wider issues. There is a lot of value in teaching young children basic anxiety management techniques such as simple breathing exercises.
But we also need to look at the broader picture, and realise that far more is needed than individual responses or even family ones.
There really is a great deal about which to be anxious. It did not take a pandemic to show us that. The climate crisis alone is enough to paralyse most adults, much less a dictator in Russia with a fondness for threatening us with nuclear weapons, not to mention the housing and cost of living crises.
Things that are extremely important, such as taking time to be parents, are not prioritised in our culture. Instead, the paid workforce is supposed to take priority over everything.
It calls to mind that parody of If, Rudyard Kipling’s popular poem: “If you can keep your head while all around men are losing theirs, do you even have a clue what is going on?”
We live in an anxiety-inducing world magnified by social media algorithms that benefit from our fears because we either seek more information, distraction or self-medicating consumption.
All the recent talk of quiet quitting — people putting in the minimum hours and labour necessary to keep a job — may miss the point that some of those people are parents who decided during the pandemic that childhood is short and burnout is long.
The fact that our children’s anxiety levels merit a pilot counselling service in primary schools should prompt us to reflect on why it is needed. It is not just vulnerable individual children. It is certainly not just parental inadequacy.
If our children are signalling distress in such numbers, they are alerting us to a society with skewed priorities, which are making both them and us unwell. The trick is to worry enough about that sad reality to spur us to ask what we can collectively do about it.