Childline charity warns: Children seeking help for anxiety is sharply rising

Siobhan Fenton
The Independent
Mon, 31 Oct 2016 15:31 UTC

© Rex Features

Children's charity NSPCC says children as young as eight have contacted them to seek help for the condition

Charity helpline Childline recorded a 35 per cent increase in calls for help related to anxiety over the last year.

The number of children seeking help for anxiety has risen sharply, data from the NSPCC's Childline service has suggested.

The helpline, which offers support and counseling for distressed children, said it answered 11,706 calls which mentioned anxiety in 2015-16. By comparison, 8,642 such calls had been answered in the previous year. This represents an increase of 35 per cent.

Children as young as eight contacted them to discuss their anxieties, on issues ranging to personal and family concerns to wider political issues such as the EU referendum.

The charity said the problem appears to be getting worse, with provisional figures showing that from April to September the facility dealt with almost 6,500 contacts where anxiety was cited as the main issue - an average of more than 1,000 a month.

A gender disparity emerges in the data, with girls seven times more likely to seek help than boys.

Recent released NHS data has suggested a shocking rise in recorded incidents of self-harm for young girls. The number of such incidents requiring hospital admission after administering a poison or other substance have risen by 42 per cent in the decade since 2005-6.

Similarly, the number of young girls administered as in-patients has close to quadrupled in the same period, rising by 385 per cent.

It is not known if the rise in recorded incidents represents a rise in real terms, or if patients are medical staff are now more likely to record an incident as related to self-harm due to raised awareness of mental health issues.

Comment: The article does not give any explanation about why children are experiencing a rise in anxiety. The following articles offer a glimpse into the possible causes of worry and anxiety in today's children:

• Overstimulation: A modern problem that leads to anxiety
• Parental anxiety is contagious and can be passed to children
• Trickle-Down Anxiety: Study Examines Parental Behaviors that Create Anxious Children
• Age of anxiety: Today's students report more worry than psychiatric patients in the 1950's
• Rising anxiety & depression in children and adolescents related to declining childhood play

Mental health issues including anxiety, depression, suicide and narcissism among teens has reached epidemic levels and new research suggests this may be related to a steep decline in free, spontaneous play in childhood. For most of human evolution, children learned through autonomous, self-directed play. Parents weren't involved in every aspect of their daily lives. Kids played in groups, invented games, made up rules, negotiated, experimented and explored their world with minimal parental interference.

According to Peter Gray, the author of The Decline of Play and the Rise of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents:

"Play functions as the major means by which children (1) develop intrinsic interests and competencies; (2) learn how to make decisions, solve problems, exert self-control, and follow rules; (3) learn to regulate their emotions; (4) make friends and learn to get along with others as equals; and (5) experience joy. Through all of these effects, play promotes mental health."