Children’s Mental Health

Miriam Cates Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

We are facing a crisis in children’s mental health, as many hon. Members have outlined articulately in our debate. I welcome the Government’s mental health recovery action plan, but if we are serious about tackling this tragedy—and it really is a tragedy—we have to look at the root causes.

First, covid-19, or our response to it, has been a disaster for children’s mental health. Despite knowing very early on that covid posed almost no risk to children, we closed schools for months at a time and our children missed more face-to-face learning than in almost any country in Europe. However, covid measures have not been the only political threat to children’s wellbeing.

Over recent years, we have seen the increasing politicisation of children in schools. Parents across England frequently write to me about extreme gender ideology and other radical ideologies being taught in schools and reinforced by the internet. When gender non-conforming, autistic, same-sex attracted or troubled children are being told by trusted adults that their problems can be solved by changing sex, we have a serious safeguarding and wellbeing issue. The rise of the internet, particularly social media, presents a serious threat to our children’s mental health. There is a huge piece of work to do to keep children safe online, and tech companies must step up.

Family breakdown is a threat to children’s wellbeing. Children aged 11 to 16 who live with a lone parent are twice as likely to be diagnosed with a mental disorder as those who live with both parents. It is no surprise that our children are facing a crisis of mental health when we have one of the highest family breakdown rates in the western world. In recent decades, our social policies have made family life progressively more expensive and stressful, with more and more parents pushed into full-time work with less time and energy to devote to nurturing children. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Dame Andrea Leadsom) for her amazing work in delivering the Start4Life offer that will strengthen families, but there is more to do.

We need to start by recognising that intervention through schools and through the NHS, as important as it is, is no substitute for strong families in which children have the opportunity to develop virtues and character traits that will give them the best chance of good lifelong mental health. We have to pursue policies that strengthen families and equip parents and communities to foster in their children values and virtues such as patience, resilience, perseverance, self-control and humility —the kind of virtues that are taught not only in school, but in families and communities—and to build the foundation for fulfilling and happy adult lives. As the proverb says:

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”