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Jul 25
2024
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Helen Whitten
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Back in September 2019 I wrote an article, I Worry for the Girls, about my concerns for the safety and wellbeing of young girls in a changing world of porn, trans and a more diverse society. Five years on I read in the Yorkshire Post of 23 July that reports of violence against women and girls have risen to an even more worrying level. In the same week, J D Vance referred to “childless cat ladies” implying that Kamala Harris and other childless women “have no direct stake in America”, not taking into account that women are quite often heartbroken that they cannot have a child and it certainly doesn’t mean that they don’t play their part in society.
But his words are an example of the derogatory way that some men can describe women and my generation have certainly had our fair share of being insulted and spoken down to by men for much of our early lives. When I went to study in Florence in 1967 I remember having to carry a rolled-up umbrella on the buses in order to push off the wandering hands of Italian men, and being nervous walking back to my apartment at night when men would follow you down a dark street as if taking some pleasure in frightening you. When I worked in the Middle East not so long ago several of the women reported that they could not walk to the shopping mall on their own without being harassed. Throughout much of the world women have been designated a lower status and continue to be subjected to demeaning and violent behaviour such as FGM.
But here, in the UK, we have worked hard to overturn this kind of behaviour. At many schools in the 1950s and 60s girls were not encouraged to go to university or into a profession but to become a secretary, nurse, or hairdresser. By the 80s and 90s we were proud to see that women could be just as good a lawyer, doctor or scientist as men were, and ensured, as practically as possible, that salaries were equal for equal work.
But in the last decade or so we are sliding backwards and I feel we need to become far more aware of this so as to protect our daughters, granddaughters and nieces. We have witnessed in Iran and Afghanistan how a society can switch from allowing women and girls’ education and flourishing to brutally preventing the freedoms of women to wear what they want, do what they want or to be educated. We must not take these rights for granted and must keep a wary eye open for any infringements in this country.
The police report on violence this week spoke of an explosion of misogynism that has derived from porn and influencers like Andrew Tate but it starts in the home and not all cultures treat women with the same respect. It is how a father talks to his wife or daughter, how a brother talks to his sister, how an uncle talks to his niece, how a man talks about women in his male group. It is how a teacher talks to a girl in class in comparison to how they talk to a boy. In the words, voice tone and body language a child knows whether they are given the same status as the males in their family and society or not. When I grew up, as I mentioned, girls were often not sent to the same level of school as their brothers and a son might be sent to university where the girls might be sent out to work in a shop but we have come so far since then. Let’s not lose it.
The lyrics of some hip hop and rap music can be shockingly misogynistic and yet this music has been embraced by politicians and celebrities alike despite this. The NHS has blithely deleted the word “woman” from countless posters and notices even in the context of maternity and obstetric services. See https://millihill.substack.com/s/the-word-is-woman for examples.
On the Radio 4 programme Beyond Belief a Muslim woman spoke about polygamous marriage, which is occurring here in the UK under Sharia law. One of the presenters spoke of the anguish this causes some of the women involved who feel replaceable and how inevitably it is not financially easy for any man to maintain several households to the same level. When I mentioned my discomfort of this practice to a C of E priest I admit I was shocked when he responded “there wasn’t much monogamy in the Old Testament” as if that somehow made it ok. But, I protested, those women 2000+ years ago had few rights, no reliable contraception, little independent income and therefore no power to object and that surely we had come some way since then. But here in this country today there is still polygamy and of course it is only men who have the rights but any wife not married legally under British law has no legal protection when it comes to divorce, child maintenance or redress so is left vulnerable.
I feel blessed but also proud that we have enabled women to express their intelligence, creativity and perspectives with freedom here and throughout most of the Western World. We are 50% of the population and have every bit as much right to exist and express ourselves in life and work as any man. We should not feel fearful of male violence or abuse when walking down the street nor in our homes. But we have seen in the USA how these rights can be taken away from us, how in Afghanistan girls still cannot attend school and in Iran how women can be executed for speaking up for themselves.
It is surely important that each one of us, male and female, become aware of how these rights can slip away and be brave enough to call out threatening or abusive behaviours. We need to talk to our sons and grandsons and help them stand firm against anyone encouraging any kind of misogynistic behaviour. We are talking about their sister, daughter, mother, cousin, niece. We must put a stop to this escalating disrespect and violence.
Jun 09
2024
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Helen Whitten
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My beautiful granddaughter, Emmeline, was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at the age of 8. She had been tired, thirsty and going to the loo frequently. Luckily her mother looked up the symptoms and she was taken to her GP who immediately sent her to St Mary’s Paddington. There she stayed for several days while they diagnosed her Type 1 and endeavoured to stabilise her condition.
It was here in the hospital that Emmeline, my son Rupert and his wife Jendy, learnt about what it meant for Emmeline to learn to live with Type 1 and for them, as parents, to support her and manage this condition. It was here in the hospital that they came into contact for the first time with JDRF, the Junior Diabetes Research Fund, and all the wonderful support they give to children, their parents and to the specific research involved in both understanding and managing diabetes but most importantly to finding a cure.
My son and his family were in shock. So was I. I shall always remember taking his call and having to go and sit down for several minutes afterwards as I digested what this meant. Type 1 Diabetes is an autoimmune disease, unlike Type 2. It involves finger pricks, blood tests, injections, the worry of her levels going either too low or too high, the impact on her physiology over time.
It was a huge learning curve for Rupert and Jendy. The testing kits, the administration of the finger pricks and injections, learning that everything she ate or even drank had to be calculated for the carbohydrate content and then calculated again to consider what she needed once any food had been weighed precisely. Like other parents in this situation, they experienced many sleepless nights watching over Emmeline, fearful that she might lose consciousness or worse. It’s tough enough to be a parent but with this condition everything suddenly gets harder and more complicated.
They, and I, were also in grief. I believe we still are. The grief that our beloved girl has to manage this every day and will have to do so for the rest of her life. And that they, as parents, cannot watch her enjoy a care-free childhood in the way that other children do, nor now, as she becomes a teenager, will she be able to enjoy as carefree an adolescence as her friends can. For sure she will need to be even more wary around alcohol and always to keep measuring her carbs and keeping track of her levels. It is a relentless 24/7 process for her and her parents, as it is for all who have or are caring for someone with the condition.
A few months after diagnosis luckily Emmeline was able to go onto the continuous loop system with the Dexcom monitor and insulin pump. It’s a game-changer in terms of managing Type 1 as it continuously measures her blood sugar levels and the pump administers insulin to keep her balanced. The algorithms in these systems were developed using JDRF funding. In addition to the continuous loop system both her parents can now track what is happening via their Apple watches so that they could be in a business meeting in the City somewhere several miles away from her but be able to see if she was going low and ring the school to alert them to take action and give her glucose.
But even with the pump system her levels can vary. As a child grows, as she does PE at school, or as her hormones rocket around, her body can go out of balance.
Inevitably this limits her normal childhood activities such as going for a sleepover at her friends’ houses. How can you ask a friend’s parents to get up in the middle of the night to adjust the pump should it need to be calibrated? And so she would come and stay with me because of course as her Granny I will never mind getting up in the night to make sure she is healthy. And gradually as Emmeline has learnt to manage herself, and her friends’ parents have acclimatised themselves to her needs, she does now go for occasional sleepovers and school trips. But these are not without their worries and hiccoughs.
And yet, now aged 13, she is marvellously brave and stoical and gets on with life, and we are all very proud of her. She can still have bad days and her parents still have to be up at night when her levels are out of kilter and this will continue for her lifetime – you may have read about how the actor James Norton, who is Type 1, has to manage his condition on stage and secrete glucose tablets amid the props of the plays he is in.
There are around 35,000 children and young people diagnosed with Type 1 in the UK. My cousin’s grandson in Switzerland was diagnosed at the age of 2 and some children are diagnosed even earlier, so there are a large number of families experiencing the challenges of caring for a child with this autoimmune condition. The work JDRF do to support the children and their parents makes a huge difference.
JDRF’s information was hugely supportive in helping Rupert and Jendy become familiar with the challenges involved, and also what to expect in the future – it provides them, the whole family and other children and parents with real hope. JDRF has research programmes that are tackling the multiple ways in which this condition can be managed, prevented or cured across technology, immunotherapy, stem cell treatments and more.
And so I ask that you donate some money to JDRF because not only do parents of Type 1 children, and the children themselves, receive such wonderful emotional and practical support from this charity but also, and so importantly, JDRF are working every day towards a real cure for this debilitating and demanding condition. We really pray that there will be a breakthrough soon, and of course this requires investment in the research.
On June 22nd I am taking part in the JDRF One Walk to fund-raise and if you are able to donate a sum to this, however large or small, we shall all be eternally grateful. The link is https://support.jdrf.org.uk/fundraisers/helenwhitten/one-walk-london-2024
May 23
2024
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Helen Whitten
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A wave is about to crash down on us in the form of AI programmes and robotics. There is no question that this will happen. The question is can we use this new and amazing technology wisely? And the second question is could philosophy help us to do so?
There is a major difference between being clever and being wise. Making a clever break-through or clever innovation may not, in the long run, prove a wise decision for humanity. We are seeing how Smart phones and social media are interrupting the natural development of children’s social lives and beginning to wonder what to do about it. This wave has already crashed and it is difficult to reverse it now.
We have witnessed recently with the Horizon Post Office scandal the terrible destruction that can occur when IT technology is allowed to run rampage without the humans controlling it stopping to reflect on the consequences. What makes a group of adults become ‘wilfully blind’, in Margaret Heffernan’s excellent phrase, to what is happening before their eyes? To knowingly do injustice and harm to others?
Technology can. It can deskill us. We give way to what we assume is something cleverer than we are. We can see this in our own lives when we submit to a SatNav’s directions although we know a route like the back of our hand and have a better way to go. Garage mechanics become deskilled as so many parts of a car’s engine are now monitored by computer rather than by hand. If the computer fails, they are lost. Medics similarly are being led by scans and computer diagnostics where they used to make the diagnosis themselves. And yes, this can sometimes be more accurate but where a scanning or X-Ray machine is not available or there is a long delay before screening, then that medic needs to retain the confidence to make the diagnosis without technology. I have personally heard of two near-deaths caused by burst appendix because a doctor was waiting for an X-Ray machine, where in a previous era it would have been up to the medic themselves to make the diagnosis for surgery. We have to watch this tendency.
There are all kinds of clever individuals who are creating AI technology and there are many brilliant applications for it but how can we encourage the developers to stop and reflect on the wisdom of their inventions? Or the ethics? Does there not need to be a wise figure in the room to nudge them in the direction that benefits humanity rather than just makes their business wealthy and successful? Could, in fact, that wise figure even be AI-generated?
I was reading some Plato the other morning, as you do, and it occurred to me how far governments of countries and governance of business environments have diverted from his ideas of how to govern. He predicted how Athenian leaders would gain power by telling voters what they wanted to hear rather than defining a strategy for the future and a set of principles and values by which to direct its course. His solution was to ensure that politicians worked for the good of the state and adhere to their principles through contemplation and reflection of the good rather than the need for a vote. He was an elitist, yes, and believed that leaders should be well-educated generalists but should have studied mathematics and philosophy if they were to govern well. Philosophy, after all, is the love of wisdom.
I think his concept was that the ideas, strategy, principles and direction should be created by the leaders and the public servants should be those who excelled at administration and project management. He saw the ethics of the state as essential as the driver and shaper of individual action. When there is a lack of principle in government, therefore, this can lead to lack of trust and a rottenness within society. As Bob Garratt’s book suggested, Fish Rot from the Head.
So back to my point about could AI actually drive the ethics, this would surely be all about how any AI innovation is programmed. Fill it full of rubbish and we will get rubbish. Fill it full of evil and we will get evil. Fill it full of Plato and the wise words of other philosophers then perhaps we could receive wisdom?
OK, this may sound far-fetched but when I look back over the technological innovations I have witnessed in my lifetime I observe that since my family rented our first television in around 1955 we have watched some amazing programmes and yet now, with all the streaming channels available, there is a preponderance of mindless game shows and a vast amount of violence depicted on screen. Couldn’t we do better? Couldn’t someone in the Board Room encourage scriptwriters to stop and reflect on whether they could produce more uplifting dramas?
People are turning off 24/7 global news because they can’t stand so much negativity brought into their sitting rooms. Human beings need hope and it is clear that our younger generations are desperate to be fed some optimism. And it isn’t as if there isn’t hope to be had, for even with all the problems we have in the world today, including climate change, there is nothing to say that we don’t have the ability to find solutions for these problems. The key is to believe that we can do so, otherwise people give up.
Plato believed that the health of a society depended on minds being fed with education and inspiration to instil a sense of moral value, a wish to contribute to their community. He felt that children should not be exposed to negative images, or exposed to literature that glorified lying or violence or lack of self-control but should be provided with examples and role models of justice and self-discipline. I think he would be pretty horrified by Naked Dating or the scenarios exposed during this year’s Eurovision Song Contest!
My point isn’t that governing politicians or boards of directors should give way to AI technology. It is that perhaps there could be an AI programme that stood in the corner of the room, so to speak, to ask leaders to stop and reflect on whether an action was wise, or ethical, whether it would benefit humanity for the greater good or only benefit one political party or one tech company. If an AI robot was programmed with the wisdom of the ages could it not make decision-makers stop for a moment and contemplate in stillness the potential consequences of any future actions? This should happen anyway, of course, but we only have to look at Horizon and other recent examples of political, medical and business malpractice to realize that this is not happening.
Could an AI robot be the Oracle in the Room, not to force a decision but to make those responsible for it consider the wise and altruistic option rather than the merely selfish one?
May 15
2024
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Helen Whitten
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I owe a lot to the late Dame Shirley Conran, who died on 9 May 2024. She and her peers were the forerunners of the feminist movement. We may forget that women did not have easy access to finance or equality until after the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975. Shirley and her generation wouldn’t take no for an answer and she came to realize that education, communication and the ability to add up and be able to make your own money were the essential ingredients for an empowered life, whether male or female. She not only wanted that for herself but set out in her own inimitable fashion to make it happen for other girls and women.
This she did through her books – the sexual liberation suggested in her blockbuster novel Lace and her more practical suggestions in Superwoman. She also pursued the interests of women through her philanthropic projects and this is where I first met her, in the 1990s. I had just set up my coaching and training business, Positiveworks, which was focusing on how to provide individuals with the personal and professional skills to make their work and home lives easier. I had a specific interest in work-life balance and attended the Mothers in Management conference at the Savoy which Shirley had arranged. I was hesitant to introduce myself to her as she presided over the conference in her wonderful white trouser suit but, as has been the experience of many other women involved in her various projects, she saw in me things of which I had not previously thought myself capable. This was quite a talent of hers as it provided her at the same time with individuals (not all women) who had the skills and know-how that she did not specifically have herself but from which she felt her current project could benefit.
And so shortly afterwards she suggested I become Deputy-Chair of the Work-Life Balance Trust, which is what Mothers in Management transformed into, and that I run sessions at conferences and also create a CD-Rom, through the sponsorship of BT, on the topic of Help Yourself to a Better Life. This was a seven-step self-development programme to enable individuals to consider, analyse and create a life that reflected their priorities and helped them feel in control of their time.
More recently Shirley turned her attention to the subject of learning and specifically of maths and its importance in everyone’s lives. She set up the Maths Anxiety Trust with a variety of experts in the field of mathematics and of education, and worked alongside Caroline Shott at Learnus and the Learning Skills Research Foundation. She tested some of her theories out at Langley Park Girls’ School with my colleague Diane Carrington and later created panels and interventions to help people, but girls and women in particular, to develop confidence and capability in maths. Through this Diane and I created another CD-Rom, Launching Yourself, which led us to write our book Future Directions, Practical Ways to develop Confidence and Emotional Intelligence in Young People.
There was a legacy of women releasing the responsibility for finance to their husbands. This wasn’t always the case as in certain families the man would pass the money over to his wife but there were many other cases where women assumed that their husband was in control, knew what he was doing and they took no interest, only sometimes to discover, should he die, that the family were deeply in debt.
Shirley realized how important it is for girls to feel at ease with numbers, to understand interest rates, to seek to save and invest money, to consider their pensions and to feel in control of their lives as individuals. As a business coach I shared with her my experiences of coaching women managers and how often they shied away from asking for a raise where their male colleagues felt no such reticence. We studied the reasons and the potential difference in values and interests and discovered there were massive discrepancies in financial security for women, especially when it came to pensions. Shirley had lived this experience herself and wanted to pass on her tips to others. The Maths Anxiety Trust provides support in this and many other ways.
It takes courage to make things happen. You can’t be a shrinking violet and Shirley was not. She had exacting standards and huge ambitions. She drew people to her through this commitment and also because she was generous. She gave philanthropic donations to her old school, St Paul’s Girls’ School, and to many other institutions. She also was gracious in giving credit where credit was due.
She was an extraordinary woman and I don’t suppose younger women can fully appreciate how much she and her generation of feisty women did to change the shape of women’s experience in the world. We should all be grateful to her, to them, for this, and make sure we hold onto those rights for our grandchildren’s sake, and in her memory.
She changed my life in her own way, giving me confidence, giving me opportunities with my business that I might not have had without her. I am not alone. I know I speak for many of us who knew her and received her generosity of spirit.
Some women have the reputation of pulling the ladder up after them when they achieve success. Shirley was not that woman. May we adopt her example.
Apr 15
2024
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Helen Whitten
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About a year ago I was listening to a programme on BBC Radio 4 where a teacher was being interviewed about discussing transgender with school pupils. “We must be led by the pupils,” she said, and I thought hang on, that turns education on its head. Surely it is usually teachers who lead pupils not vice versa, so why were the grown ups abdicating that role in this particular issue?
And now looking at what has been taught in schools and the whole “gender-affirming” policy that seems to have had little or no research behind it, this approach is all the more troubling. Why were/are adults so loathe to have these conversations with children to explain that it is very few people indeed who feel they want to change sex – which has only been possible anyway in recent decades – and that even if they did go ahead and decide to do so they would risk becoming infertile and have to undertake painful surgery that could also render them unable to have an orgasm. Indeed, that such a decision would likely be irreversible in any practical way.
Instead, countless adults, politicians, institutions, schools, universities and the NHS went headlong into affirming any child who was unsure about their gender, as if that child knew what it was talking about. But of course a child doesn’t know anything much at all about sex, sexual attraction, or what relationships are like as they grow into adulthood. It’s up to adults to help them to wait, to mature. As Hadley Freeman wrote eloquently in The Sunday Times yesterday, 14 April, “teen life is scary” and young girls in particular have to deal with many physical and emotional changes and challenges. The fact that girls seeking to transition ended up outnumbering boys by six to one should surely have waved many red flags for those responsible for supporting them? And now countless schoolchildren have been exposed to ideas that they could be the “wrong sex” and how will that impact them as they grow up?
And how is a child supposed to listen to the concept of “I was born in the wrong body” and make sense of it? Why, indeed, has this concept become normalised? When I was growing up there was no idea that your sex was a decision. You were born male or female, full stop. People are not, it seems, saying they feel they were born in the wrong skin colour, or if they do have issues around appearance or identity then in the main a therapist’s role is to help them accept that we are all different and all unique and valuable in different ways.
But importantly, where are the philosophical questions around this concept “I was born in the wrong body”? Where are the religious leaders to analyse and discuss what is a mental model rather than a physical reality? Where are the conversations about soul and whether someone has a male or female soul or whether the idea is quite simply a psychological perception that someone might grow out of? After all, the priests wade in when there is a conversation about abortion, suicide or assisted dying, raising spiritual points for people to consider. Unless I missed something, I believe they have been pretty silent on something that seems to me to impact mind, body and spirit. But most certainly life and how it is lived.
Where were the checks and balances? Obviously sorely missing from the medical profession, the NHS and biological research. Within seconds everyone was changing the language, deleting the word woman, mother, breastfeeding from medical literature that specifically related to women. Trans women were transferred to female prisons, where some women were assaulted. Rapists were called “she” when the act of rape requires a penis. And in business HR and DEI departments insisted that people use pronouns even when the majority of people thought it a nonsense as they had no questions about their identity. All to placate a small minority, who deserve to be protected but not at the expense of other’s rights and freedoms.
Any women who legitimately questioned this trend were immediately silenced with insults such as TERF, gender-critical, fascist, far right, as if this has anything to do with politics. People lost their jobs, their mortgages, their friends, their reputations for “mis-speaking” in the terms of the trans-lobbyists. Words, such as those by J K Rowling, were taken out of context. Others, like Milli Hill, fighting bravely to maintain the word woman and mother within maternity care rather than ovary-owners or some other nonsensical label, were cancelled with no recompense. So the real bullies were those who silenced others, who refused to have a proper debate.
It has been a kind of madness, has it not? Where children were given puberty-blockers or had healthy breasts or penises removed because of an idea that had not been properly researched? Where was the risk assessment that these young people deserved? As adults, parents, teachers we know that children, especially teenagers, get confused about life, about sex and about maturing into adulthood. They needed to be heard, yes, and of course the young will always have some new ideas from which we can all benefit, but in the main we adults are there to help them work out the risks, to converse and help them see different angles of a situation before they decide on something life-changing.
We have all become jibbering idiots within this conversation, terrified of saying the wrong thing, using the wrong pronoun. We have been the victims of ideological capture where people felt they could not even advise a child that it might be better to wait a few years before taking radical and mutilating options. Of course there will be a small number of children and adults who really do feel uncomfortable and it is imperative that they are supported but their mental health needs to be explored before blockers or surgery, surely. Not just deciding that because a girl likes Thomas the Tank Engine or climbing trees that they are probably a boy. The examples given have been horrifyingly antiquated and stereotypical. But I fear the lobbyists may want more children and adults to trans to make themselves feel better, to normalise the situation but this is cruel to those children, teenagers or young adults who may just be going through an unhappy or confused stage of their lives. Or are captured by a trend.
As J K Rowling wrote: “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?” Or, I would add, inflict irreversible surgery and hormones on a vulnerable young person? No, surely not.
Let’s ensure that the Cass Report opens up the debate at last so that people can speak openly about a problem that is impacting countless people’s lives and freedom of speech. Let’s make sure that the medical profession does not again steam headlong into action before proper research has been carried out and let’s make sure that any person, young or old, who is questioning their gender is given all the information available before they go ahead.
Let’s wake up from this groupthink and make this a turning point where the adults, experts, doctors, teachers, HR professionals and politicians walk right back into the room and start protecting young people by speaking factually and honestly.
Apr 02
2024
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Helen Whitten
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I speak for myself but I think my generation are a bit confused by the burgeoning problem of mental health amongst the young. We were brought up at a time when our parents had just been through the Second World War and our grandparents had been through two wars. Our everyday concerns probably seemed thoroughly petty in comparison. If we were shy before a social event or anxious before exams there was pretty much an attitude of ‘so what, that’s pretty normal, just get on with it.’ The concept of not feeling safe because someone didn’t agree with your opinion on something, or the idea that a teacher should give us a trigger warning before we read Macbeth, King Lear or even Of Mice and Men would have confounded us.
But that is not to say I don’t feel compassion for those who are experiencing these concerns, for who is to measure one person’s anxiety or depression against another’s? Surely these things are hard to measure in a really scientific way. They are emotions that are experienced subjectively so it is perfectly possible that younger generations are experiencing heightened emotions. Professor Jonathan Haidt, whose books The Coddling of the American Mind and The Righteous Mind I would urge you to read, is putting this down to Social Media. I haven’t yet read his new book The Anxious Generation but I understand he has studied the impact of social media in great depth and is recommending that children are not given a smart phone before the age of sixteen, unless for medical purposes. This is because the endless competition can be damaging to self-esteem and he also argues that the intensity of interaction with a phone is reducing a young person’s ability to communicate, socialise, play, or learn to take risks.
I’m not convinced that there is more to worry about now than there was in our youth. We faced potential extinction through nuclear war with the Cuban Missile Crisis and were given ridiculously inadequate advice about hiding in the cupboard under the stairs (like that would save us!). But there was a more optimistic energy in the air. The lifestyle in the 1950s was thoroughly basic but all of a sudden there was Elvis and then, as the 60s arrived, the Beatles and the whole pop and fashion scene that gave us teenagers a distraction from real life and actually boosted the economy too. There was that essential ingredient to life – hope. And there wasn’t social media, nor were there any 24/7 misery-news channels. We got outside and chatted and played and most certainly took some risks.
So what do we do about a large group of the younger generation lacking the resilience to manage life’s challenges? I fear we have not helped them to understand that life is tough. Perhaps they have seen too many photoshopped images of people looking amazing and happy and successful and feel inadquate. Companies report that the younger generations are entering the workplace expecting to go into senior roles, unhappy if asked to do the photocopying or make the coffee. I guess we had been raised to expect less. Certainly we women had been, and we had to fight to get taken seriously. But expectations have to be set within a context – go for an optimistic outcome but accept that things may not work out the way you want – “I would rather my TikTok post gets lots of likes but I can manage it if it doesn’t,” or “I would rather I get this job but I can manage it if I don’t” style of thinking. This way your emotions won’t fall off the edge of the cliff if you don’t achieve your goal but you are going for the goal nonetheless.
But we also have to give people hope, remind them that history unfolds in patterns and what seems hopeless one moment can be replaced with good news in the next. I think what may have been missing from the message in the self-help literature of recent decades is that success doesn’t happen in a vacuum overnight, it generally comes from working very hard and it’s only the very lucky few who have any kind of overnight success. But of course now one gets 13 year old influencers who are making pots of money on TikTok and I am certainly confused by that as I personally don’t think we know anything much about life until we’re over 40. But no doubt I wouldn’t have believed you if you had told me that earlier in my life!
So how do we address this problem of mental health? Well, as I have written before, it is good that the conversation is out there but it seems to me that we are over-pathologizing some of these cases and forgetting that teenagers always have trends and, as emotions are infectious, if one is feeling something then it’s more likely that two, three, four, ten, or a hundred will feel it quickly too. Look at my generation screaming at the Beatles – that hadn’t happened before but it soon became the way girls behaved at concerts, just as the heavy mascara, short skirts, pvc macs and the rest became a fad. We have to be careful not to pathologize a whole generation but to be able to spot those who really are suffering or require a specific diagnosis. When I read that GPs have given out 500,000 prescriptions for anti-depressants I question whether they have had time to explore the symptoms adequately in their ten-minute appointments, or whether they have pointed the young person to lifeskills or, indeed, philosophy as an option.
For Cognitive-Behavioural approaches were based on the Greek philosophers and I am a great believer that philosophy can indeed give us consolation. My father gave me some philosophy books when I was a teenager that helped me think about myself and my responses to life. That’s not to say I didn’t get a lot wrong, certainly was shy in particular situations then and now, and got and still get anxious before exams, interviews or presentations as this is pretty normal stuff, but I had some mental tools to overcome those feelings so that they didn’t capsize me. We can talk our anxiety up or create self-talk that boosts our confidence and sense of calm in a realistic yet optimistic way. Thinking is key.
Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living”, suggesting that we should spend some time in reflection and self-observation. In this we can learn to accept that we are each unique mentally, emotionally and physically and that we can respect ourselves and others in the right to have different responses and opinions to situations. We can learn to focus on what is joyful and what we can be grateful for, but not shy away from the difficult emotions such as anxiety, sorrow, jealousy, resentment for these are part of the human condition and feeling them can ultimately make us stronger. But there is a point where any one of these can, indeed, become a problem that requires psychological support should they overwhelm on a longer-term basis.
We all get into habits of thinking. We can get into the habit of being pessimistic or seeing the world from the perspective of the glass half-empty but equally the brain is plastic and, just as we can learn a language, manage a new mobile, or how to control a new software programme, we can also learn new ways of thinking that bolster our resilience and mood. A useful one is to question whether one’s thought is logical, whether others might respond differently – which opens up lateral ways of approaching a problem – or whether one’s thought is actually helping one manage the situation one faces. If not – change the thought! This will change the emotion and therefore the action one chooses to take.
I hope these younger generations will develop the skills to manage life more easily and I would suggest that reading philosophy can be helpful. So I shall finish this article with some words from the philosopher Epictetus about not shying away from difficult situations: “The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skilful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.”