Richard Hogan: Do we need to protect our young people more? 

"Equipping your child with the tools so they come to believe they are competent and they are powerful will mean anxiety doesn’t take hold of their life."

If you look around, I think it would be accurate to conclude we are in the age of anxiety. It’s a word that has become an integral part of the teenage lexicon. But, what exactly is it? Why has it increased so much over the last number of years? And what can we do, as parents, to help our children out of anxious, worrying thoughts? 

All very important questions, that I will endeavor to answer in this article. 

Of course, the pandemic was like throwing fuel on an already burning bonfire. When people struggle with uncertainty and the entire world grinds to a terrifying halt, and all concrete norms collapse like, work, school, and even governments shut down, we have the perfect storm for a surge in anxiety. The news didn’t help, the daily death count became some sort of morbid end-of-day activity. 

Then just as we emerged out of the wet darkness of Covid, war in Ukraine was unleashed and we all despaired for humanity once again. If that wasn’t bad enough, all of these terrible events were underscored by the clamorous rumblings of climate change.

Of course an important message, but do our children need to be constantly told about it in school? I’m not suggesting that we should be like the characters in the dark satire Don’t Look Up ignorantly avoiding the fact they are on the brink of extinction, but why do we want to terrify our children about climate change? What can they do about it? 

Of course I know, many reading this will think, well, the message is the problem, it’s bleak and they need to know. But do they? 

Are we stealing their childhood? I hear it so often in my clinic from young children that I find myself perplexed in the extreme about this issue. I find myself thinking, is it any wonder that our children are terrified? Is it any wonder their limbic system is on high alert? All the messages they are consuming are incredibly negative and pointing at the cataclysmic end of the world. 

I think we need our children to have a childhood, while teaching them how they can be more sustainable in a positive way, rather than terrifying them that the bogeyman is out there stalking them and they have no future, perhaps it would be more beneficial if they felt empowered to protect their future in a positive way.

Anxiety, in my experience, is the fear of an unknown future event. Worried thoughts ruminate in the mind about an unknown uncertainty in the future because the person has an underlying negative paradigm that they don’t have the skills to meet that uncertainty. 

They believe they haven’t the competency to manage whatever might potentially happen in the future. Anxiety is therefore future-oriented and requires a negative self-belief to take hold of a person’s life. It’s different than fear per se but the two are often intertwined. Fear can be the sound of someone at the window or a strange noise, that directs all our attention to an immediate threat. That is important if we want to survive. 

We need it, because if we didn’t have fear we wouldn’t pay too much attention to the person following us home or the tiger strolling up to us out on the plains. So, the brain analyses the threat and the appropriate response is arrived at, which is generally, fight, flight or freeze. Ask yourself this question, why do I not react with terror when I see a Snow Leopard in the zoo, your reaction might even be, "Ah that’s cute". 

Now, let’s say you’re walking through the local park and there in front of you is the same animal, what happens? Well, you certainly don’t think it's cute, you bloody well run or you freeze paralysed by terror. Now, what has happened in this obvious example. The threat has been processed in the first example and because there is a strong glass window between you and ferocious leopard, it is deemed as cute.

Your amygdala doesn’t fire, your neocortex informs the warning system to relax as you observe the creature. In the second example the threat is processed and your warning system fires because it realises you are in grave danger. The neocortex now shuts down and the warning system takes over. You don’t need complicated thinking to manage this event, you have to run. 

Anxiety can often be the result of that warning system firing without an external stressor present. And that can be terrifying. The information doesn’t get passed up to the neocortex so there is no analysis of the threat and you stay down there in the warning system, confused because nothing has caused you to become terrified but there you are, shallow beathing, palpitations, sweating, high blood pressure etc. 

So, we have to give our children a belief system that they can manage themselves. That is the best antidote to anxiety. Prevention is far better than any cure. Equipping your child with the tools so they come to believe they are competent and they are powerful will mean anxiety doesn’t take hold of their life. 

I will outline important strategies parents can utilise next week.