Esther McCarthy: I need to stop driving myself mad with worry

We spent most of our free-range summers playing hopscotch with an old shoe polish tin, dodging dog turds, and peeling old chewing gum off the tarmac

Young hopeless woman suffering from depression having nervous breakdown holding head on isolated background, copy space

Man, there’s a lot to be worried about these days, isn’t there? As a parent, I feel like I’m slowly being saturated by all the terrible things that my kids could be exposed to.

I had a conversation with some other mams recently, and we started down a wormhole of horrors that our children are facing that we didn’t have to. The brilliant Jonathan Haidt’s phrase came up again and again — The Anxious Generation. It’s become almost a shorthand for the whole experience of parenting a generation that has to navigate coming of age with a smartphone clutched in their hands, like a poisonous mollusc. The stats don’t lie: Since social media use took off around 2010, mental health problems in our young people have risen dramatically.