I always hear ‘being a parent is hard but being a parent to a teenager is even harder,’ or ‘oh wait till they hit the teens!’
Being a parent is hard granted, and being one of teenage children may be more challenging, I give you that, but honestly when I see teenagers today, I actually think their life is more of a struggle than ever before!
Yes, I was a teenager myself, and remember the arguments and debates that I went into with my parents, at exhaustible measures, to buy this, to go out with him, to have a sleep over, to eat this, to want that!
But in fairness looking at life then, and it has been a while, I find that teenagers’ struggles today are very different to when I was a teenager.
With Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, reality shows, being accessible at all times through mobile phones, having to think you need to be a certain standard to be accepted, and on and on.
Imagine growing up in our world today. Constantly battling the effects of human rights violations, wars and violence in the home, schools and businesses.
Young people are spending most of their day on the Internet – experiencing cyber crimes, cyber bullying and playing violent video games.
Yesterday was World Mental Health Day and during the week, our school, specifically the older students have been talking to the younger students about the issue in the various assemblies.
To be honest I didn’t even know that half of all mental illness begins by the age of 14, with most cases going undetected and untreated.
Mental illnesses are disorders of brain function. They have many causes and result from complex interactions between a person’s genes and their environment. Having a mental illness is not a choice or moral failing. Mental illnesses occur at similar rates around the world, in every culture and in all socio economic groups.
The statistics are staggering, one in five young people suffer from a mental illness, that’s 20 per cent of our population.
“If you break your leg, you will go straight onto Instagram and Snapchat telling all your friends about it and then next day you will be showing off your coloured plaster to everyone and wanting them to sign it,” says Dubai-based student counsellor Kyvia Patrick.
“I am pretty sure you won’t be telling your friends about your anxieties, your fears or how you are feeling. So let us break the barriers and put mental health on the same level as physical health.”
A mental illness, she says, makes the things you do in life hard, like: work, school and socialising with other people.
“Youngsters should not be made to feel that anxiety, self-confidence, school, friends or other issues they deal are not important enough to talk about and that their mental welfare should be swept under the carpet,” says Ms Patrick.
“Every human deals with situations or life differently and this has to be accepted.”