Responsibility is Needed
For regular readers of my blog, you will remember I wrote a little while ago about how children and adolescence rates of anxiety are on the rise. This obviously has repercussions for all of us. If one looks through the data, there is a disturbing issue which has come to light. In addition to all the other anxieties of growing up, children have reported that they are anxious about things like Brexit, the US Elections and the war in Syria.
The title of this piece is responsibility is needed and this responsibility is two fold. Whilst “in my day” parents tried to shield children from the fears of the adult world, it is no longer common practice. Now, I am not saying that parents should censor what their children hear, in reality with so many points to access information this would be an impossible task. However, parents can attempt to contextualise the difficulties of the world so that children needn’t worry unnecessarily.
The second fold is the media itself. Yes the world is a constantly evolving place with bad things and troubling things all around us. That being said, it could be argued that there are times when news outlets salivate at the details of every crisis and analyse every doomsday scenario to make a big story historic. Indeed the term historic is used so often it has lost its meaning.
Anxiety in adults, adolescents and children is bad enough, can we please as a society try to dampen the flames by being responsible as to how we discuss the issues of the day?
