Our children are at breaking point – and it’s our fault

I think it’s time we stopped scaring the children. I think they’ve had enough. They’re at breaking point now, every generation more anxious than the last – and anxious younger, too. There’s a record number of British children diagnosed with anxiety, and a record wait – two years – for therapy, though I’m not at all sure the therapy as it is helps much.

The usual idea is that if the kids are troubled, it’s the world that’s to blame: smartphones, Instagram, the constant comparing; Trump, Putin, the existence of Tories; Covid, global warming. No wonder they have the heebie-jeebies. But I think in fact that we’re doing it to them. It’s us, the parents, carers, teachers in charge. We’re inadvertently torturing our kids.

Last week a consultant psychiatrist at the private mental health Nightingale Hospital, one Dr Chetna Kang, told the papers that she’s seeing children in London who are traumatised by the war with Russia.