Give kids a chance to fail.
Pushy middle class parents who pressure their children to do well in school risk damaging their mental health, a leading psychologist has warned.
Professor Tanya Byron said a growing number of youngsters are so terrified of getting bad grades they suffer from stress and never develop the “emotional resilience’ needed to succeed in later life.
She claimed many children are effectively ‘brought up in captivity’ because their parents are too scared of letting them play on the street.
Professor Byron, who specialises in child and adolescent mental health, told Radio 5 Live presenter Richard Bacon that psychologists are increasingly treating young patients “who come from families where you wouldn’t predict that they would generally really struggle at a psychological level”. She added: “It’s a small number but it’s a growing number.”
Professor Byron revealed that she felt sorry for her own children, aged 16 and 18, because of the constant pressure they face. “I just think, ‘Oh, you poor things’. I mean it’s ruthless and it’s endless. It is continuous assessments and it is exams, it’s AS-Levels.
“There’s a lot of pressure on kids even without parents adding to it,” she added.
The 47-year-old who has presented TV programmes on child behaviour such as Little Angels, said: “We are a risk-averse society. I say children are being brought up in captivity. Kids nowadays have more managed lives.
“You don’t really see kids on the streets anymore. I grew up in the 70s, I was out on my bike with my mates. We took risks, we did things, we weren’t all supervised.
“Now you see kids fear failure. They are not really given the opportunity to take risk or experience challenge or fail at anything. So failure becomes a massive issue for them. They start to put themselves under so much pressure and that’s when they become vulnerable.”
Professor Byron said adolescents are particularly vulnerable to psychological pressures because their pre-frontal cortexes – the part of the brain that controls rational thought, problem-solving and empathy, is not yet fully developed.
She added: “A lot of children don’t get the depth of experience or the confidence in their learning or themselves that they need.
“I see a lot of children who lack emotional resilience… The ability to take the knocks of life, fall down and pick yourself up again, to think, ‘I made a mistake but, hey, let’s move on’.”
