Our teenagers are in trouble. Mental health conditions affecting young people are on the rise. Suicide is the biggest killer of under-35s in the UK. In England, 40 per cent of 16- and 17-year-old girls describe themselves as unhappy with their mental health. So what has happened?

We‘ve known for the last few decades that those living in difficult circumstances are more vulnerable. Around 40 per cent of the most disadvantaged suffer mental health problems, compared with just 13 per cent of the population overall.

But alongside this are new developments. Psychologists believe a fresh approach to parenting took hold in the 1980s, in which we began to see children as precious possessions rather than as resilient and responsible individuals.

Numbers of primary school pupils who walked home alone from school plummeted from 86 per cent in 1971 to 25 per cent in 2010.

From the 1980s onwards, children began to be supervised at home rather than left to play outside with their friends. At school they were sheltered from coming last in competitions or on sports day.

As a result, when these coddled children left home for university, researchers found they demanded safe spaces, trigger warnings and the non-platforming of speakers. Good intentions to protect children were carried too far, robbing them of crucial life experiences and making them more fragile.

A second trend in the 1980s was the rise of the self-esteem movement, and a competitive need to feel special. The problem was that we cannot all be special.

And this has all coincided with the rise of a phone-based childhood – the third factor that has led to poor mental health.

A fourth factor is family instability. Studies have concluded that in general, children who grow up with continuously married parents have better health outcomes than children with single or separated parents. Possible explanations include higher poverty and time limitations of parental engagement within single-parent families.

A final complicating factor is the aftermath of the Covid pandemic. Most students had their education disrupted. Teenagers were often left to their own devices, in every sense. Lessons were taught online, and some had no lessons at all. Problems such as online bullying became rife, and post-pandemic, attendance at school plummeted.

Peter Gray, a professor at Boston College in Massachusetts in the US, argues that the primary cause of the recent rise in mental health problems is a ‘decline over decades in opportunities for children and teenagers to play, roam and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults’. College students whose parents were most overprotective or controlling in their day-to-day lives reported higher levels of anxiety and depression.

Independence starts at home, as teenagers learn to cope with their emotions and doing chores. But it is also about discovering the big bad world, which is on the whole safer than we risk-averse parents imagine.

Remind yourself of your own childhood. Maybe you didn’t grow up playing independently on bombsites like some of our grandparents did, but the chances are you had a less supervised and structured childhood than your offspring.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Letting teenagers roam free goes against the understandable desire to insulate our children from literal knocks and scrapes.

Hold your nerve. Instead of ‘What if she gets mugged?’ or ‘What if she doesn’t get home?’, try ‘What if her journey goes to plan and she gains in confidence?’.

Taking risks and stretching limits yields benefits. If you shield muscles too much they atrophy; if you protect bones, and don’t use them, you are vulnerable to osteoporosis. A similar approach applies to our teenagers: we must not treat them as Ming vases.

A mental health problem… or just unhappiness?

So how can we decide if our teenager really has a problem, or if they are just dealing with what we all agree is a tough gig – life? It’s tricky.

We have as yet no blood test or brain scan that can say for sure whether we have a mental health disorder. Diagnosis is more an art than a science. Perhaps because of this lack of clarity, the past few years have seen an explosion in the number of mental health conditions, described by some experts as ‘diagnosis creep’. Whereas once a person was shy, now they might be diagnosed with ‘avoidant personality disorder’.

Along with diagnosis creep, there has been an increase in teenage neurodevelopmental disorders, including ADHD (those who are impulsive and have difficulty concentrating) and autism (those who have problems communicating and interacting with the world).

Only last year there was a 28 per cent increase in adults on ADHD medication and a 10 per cent increase in child prescriptions.

The number of teenagers being diagnosed as autistic is also rising. Eighty years ago, autism was thought to affect one in 2,500 children. Now one in 36 children is believed to have autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with a notable rise in diagnoses among girls.

What to do: It’s challenging for us parents to judge when a teenager needs professional help. It’s hard to accept our children are suffering. What have we done wrong? We might resist getting help because it makes us feel like failures. But this is about them, not us.

A sensible approach is to ask yourself a series of questions. How intense are the symptoms, and how long have they lasted? Look out for warning signs: changes in school performance; changes in sleeping and eating habits; excessive worry or anxiety; refusing to go to school; hyperactivity; nightmares; persistent disobedience or aggression; getting into trouble at school; showing less interest in things they used to enjoy. Book an appointment with your GP in case there is a physical issue, such as low iron levels.

Supporting your teenager

Not all teenagers will share their mental health difficulties with their parents. Indeed, perhaps you as their parent are part of the problem. Maybe they feel you will not listen, or are unavailable and distracted. 

Often they do not believe that we parents could possibly understand what their lives are like. They may worry that we’ll blame ourselves, or get angry with them.

What to do: One of the most difficult periods of my life was when one of my teenagers was suffering and they chose at times to talk to others rather than me. I could not force the issue, much as I wanted to. Instead, I offered practical help: sorting a therapist for them and organising food that they liked.

I used guided meditations in the middle of the night. I would bring to mind a circle of light around me and imagine my teenager – who by then had moved out of the home – being bathed in the light and love. It felt that I was at least doing something rather than just lying awake worrying.

And I imposed the rule that I wouldn’t call them: they would call me if they wanted to discuss their emotional wellbeing, alleviating pressure on them and saving the heartbreak of unanswered calls for me.

Their return to improved mental health will be bumpy: some days will be better, some worse. As my teenager said to me, ‘Just keep quiet, and I will get there in the end’.

Try not to be shocked – or at least not to show it – if your teenager tells you some frightening detail of their experience or treatment. Panicking doesn’t help anyone. But showing that you are dropping everything to focus on them does. 

One teenager I met at a wellbeing workshop described how his mother had, in front of him, called her boss to say she wouldn’t be available to go to a meeting, and someone else would have to go in her place, because her child had a serious mental health problem. It was at that point the teenager knew that his mother cared, and wanted to help.

Supporting yourself

It’s amazing how much time it took me to realise that my own mental health needed attention. Parenting can at times feel like a long and gruelling grind. To give just one example, the average parent spends 52 hours a month driving their teenager around, according to a 2023 survey. 

If we are to stay the course, everyone benefits if we are as strong and balanced as possible. I am an example of what can happen if we fail to look after ourselves. I crashed and burned, trying to be all things to all people, but was not there for myself when I became severely depressed in my thirties. At the time, I was juggling motherhood with working as a journalist, trying to keep all the balls in the air. The last person I was looking out for was me.

What to do: Looking after yourself without being annihilated by the demands of your children is a starting point for being an effective parent. Take time out. Your teenager is going to be OK without you for a bit. 

They may actually benefit from seeing us looking after ourselves – they, too, need to learn to prioritise their psychological wellbeing. By taking care of our own needs – exercising, seeing a counsellor, making space for a friend, or whatever keeps us steady – we are setting an example for them. In my own case, it was a big first step when I took up boxing at the weekend about five years ago. At first that felt outrageous. 

Surely weekends are for family time? To be there for my teenagers? But the Sundays when I put on my gloves were the days I felt my best. I would return from a class in the park with a different kind of energy. I felt physically stronger, and psychologically different too. Difficult exchanges with my teenagers before I went out now seemed more effortless. Tricky topics lost their charge. Think of this as relationship number one.

Supporting your co-parent

Children put a strain on relationships. Differing ideas on raising children have always provoked arguments among couples, alongside conflicts over work, in-laws, friends and sex.

Studies have found that couples argue more when bringing up teenage children than at any other stage. Marital happiness drops sharply as soon as the first-born child goes through puberty. Divorce also peaks in the mid-to-late forties, coinciding with the age when many couples’ children reach adolescence. While there are multiple reasons for this – women arriving at menopause, for example – one undoubted factor is parents at war over how to bring up their teenagers.

What to do: The first requirement is for parents to work together – not always easy. Some parents long for more help and support from their other half – if they have one, and many households do not.

We can, though, do something about ourselves, if we are the ones who find it hard to share parenting. This is known as ‘gatekeeping’, whereby one parent tries to keep the other one out, talking about ‘my children’ instead of ‘our children’.

There is, of course, an understanding among some dads that if you do something badly enough you won’t be asked to do it again, a sort of weaponised incompetence that means some men avoid domestic tasks. We need to encourage fathers to be involved. Clearly, they can bring imagination, energy, insight and tenderness to the job.

You will probably be different kinds of parents – authoritarian versus liberal, for example. Everyone’s entitled to their view. A breakthrough for me was not labelling an approach ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but just different.

Take the topic of how we view missing school in my household. I’m usually pleased to have my teenagers at home. If they don’t want to go to school, perhaps there’s a reason for it, and we can figure it out. My husband’s view is that missing school is less of an option. In his opinion, it is not good preparation for life, and for understanding how the world works.

Both views have their merits, but I used to struggle to see his. Differences between us felt personal. In the past I would take it as a criticism if my husband disagreed with me. Now I realise that seeing things differently does not mean I am to blame, or wrong.

Messy triangles

In recent years I’ve become more aware of what I think of as ‘triangular traps’ within the family dynamic. In the first triangle, I intrude into my husband’s relationship with one of our children. In the second kind, during an argument or issue between me and my husband, we use one of the children as a focus or substitute for what is happening between us as a couple.

Once, on holiday with some friends, my husband felt one of our teenagers had been rude to a fellow guest about their cooking, and told him so in no uncertain terms after the meal. I saw the altercation differently: I thought my son hadn’t been offensive but had tried to be amusing. I stepped in, told my husband he was being unfair, and attempted to comfort our son.

These days, I would keep out of the triangle. My teenager later told me my involvement had made things worse. He wanted his own relationship with his dad; and actually, he felt he had been flippant and, arguably, rude to the guest, albeit while trying to be funny. He welcomed his father setting some boundaries about the fine line between humour and rudeness. Equally, my husband was understandably annoyed that I had challenged his own parenting style.

The second type of triangular trap is when tension in your relationship with your co-parent spills into an issue with your children. For example, if you feel that your partner doesn’t listen to you, you might be sensitive to your child experiencing the same. Or if you feel that your partner is bossing you about, you might overreact if he tells one of the children to do something.

What to do: Parents may need time away from their teenagers to find ways to talk about their own problems as a couple. ‘Relationship care’ is as important as self-care. Try not to argue in front of your children. Studies show that homes full of conflict make it harder for teenagers to regulate their own feelings.

Life became easier between my husband, myself and our teenagers when we both acknowledged and tried to step out of these kinds of triangles. Indeed, I’ve taken to walking away altogether to disentangle myself, muttering ‘Step out of the triangle, step out of the triangle’ as I do. As far as possible I try to let my husband interact with our children as he sees fit. They have their own relationship.

Don’t try to be the perfect parent

Perfectionism is a dangerous idea that has been gaining traction for several decades now. I know I have often compared myself with other parents and felt like I did not measure up. In an attempt to improve my efforts, I once foolishly bought myself a parental self-help book, titled something along the lines of How To Be A Brilliant Mum. Far from helping, it made me feel even worse. Social media piles on even more pressure, with the digital world offering endless information about the achievements of others, from another child’s exam grades to knowing who has passed their driving test first. If our child messes up (and whose child doesn’t?) we start to compare ourselves with others who seem to be handling things so much better than us. We start setting ourselves unrealistic goals – feats that are way beyond us.

What to do: Allow yourself to mess up. We need to fail our children on a regular basis so that they can learn to live in an imperfect world. Aiming for ‘good enough’ will make them feel less stressed by the idea of imitating us. In my case, having serious depression meant I left my job as a newspaper reporter. It seemed a terrible setback at the time, but it led to a new life writing about mental health. My teenagers have seen that stumbling blocks can become stepping stones.

The pressure of perfection can backfire not only on you, but on your children. When two of my teenagers were facing exams, I tried to be the perfect ‘exam mum’: sending good luck cards, buying them wall charts, popping up to their rooms for supportive chats. One teenager told me that I was interrupting. What they needed was some time to themselves to do some work.

Stop focusing on goals. Given society’s obsession with results, it is no surprise that parents can become trapped by recognisable measures of success in their children. Get them out of nappies! Tick. Teach them how to read! Tick. Get them to pass their exams! Tick. Teach them how to drive! Tick. Yet, ironically, racing around all day ticking things off lists may make us (and, crucially, our teenagers) less creative.

Focus on your inner worth, instead of seeking validation from others. For many years, I looked for outward approval. Only recently have I begun to feel that I’m more or less OK, and am less needy about others telling me so. I feel a whoosh of freedom. I feel good enough.

I have been something of a late developer as a parent. I remember a fairly recent setback when I decided to leave one of my older children in charge of a younger child’s teenage party. With no adults present, chaos ensued. So did a major row between the two siblings: one guest was so drunk that the older child asked them to leave, while the younger teenager (whose party it was) wanted them to stay. There was a lot for me to learn about boundaries, rules and sibling relationships.

But now, instead of allowing these kinds of supposed setbacks to knock my confidence as a parent, I try to be grateful for them. No experience is without value. My route to becoming a confident parent is not to imagine I will do everything right, but to be gentler with myself when things don’t go according to plan.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is easy – I’ve needed years of trial and error to embed this view in my psyche. And there have been painful times en route. Part of this willingness to rethink supposed failures is to remind ourselves that life is in constant flux, that our learning is continuous… and that this is an endlessly fascinating journey.

Adapted from The Gift of Teenagers: Connect More, Worry Less by Rachel Kelly (Short Books, £16.99), to be published May 8. © Rachel Kelly 2025. To order a copy for £15.29 (offer valid to 17/05/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.