Adults are always telling kids these are the best years of their lives. Enjoy being young. Stop worrying. Wait until you’ve got a mortgage and real problems.
Then we scratch our heads wondering why they don’t talk to us when something is wrong.
I’ve been looking through some of our Gumboot Friday reporting recently, and what struck me was how young some of these kids are when certain problems start showing up.
Anxiety is right through the age groups we support, including primary school kids. With the younger ones, we’re also seeing anger, family conflict, struggling with change and trauma.
Obviously, this is Gumboot Friday data, so it’s not representative of every kid in New Zealand.
It simply gives us a snapshot of what the young people coming to us for counselling are struggling with.
Anger in younger kids really interests me. I’ve spent enough time in schools to see how quickly adults can decide a kid is naughty, disruptive or just a pain in the arse.
Sometimes they are. But sometimes there’s a whole lot of stuff going on in that kid’s life and their behaviour is the only way they know how to tell us.
As they get older, depression starts showing up more in our reporting, along with bullying, body image, social anxiety and eating difficulties. I can relate to some of that.
I spent half my younger life worrying about what other people thought of me.
You could have put me in a room with 99 people who liked me and one who didn’t, and I would have spent the whole night wondering what was wrong with the miserable bastard in the corner.
Then school finishes and suddenly we expect them to be adults. Get a job. Pick a career. Pay your bills. Find a partner. Work out who you are and what you’re going to do with the rest of your life.
I’m 60 and I’m still working some of that shit out.
There are differences in what different groups are coming to us with too, and I want to understand those properly before pretending the data tells us something it doesn’t. We’ve still got work to do there.
What I do know after all these years talking to kids is that they don’t need us to have all the answers.
Most of the time, they just need to know they can tell us what’s going on without being judged, lectured or told how lucky they are.
So next time a young person starts talking to you, shut up and listen. You might be surprised by what they tell you.
Under 25 and need someone to talk to? Book a FREE counsellor at gumbootfriday.org.nz — no GP referral needed.
