The Story of Childhood (27 page)

She learned her routine from magazines. She doesn't exactly feel better afterwards, but she does feel like she's acceptable to go outside. She only goes out at night now because it takes the whole day to get ready. It's difficult with magazines. ‘Everything always appeals to me. They do make me feel depressed about the way I look 'cos there's a pretty woman on every page. And – this is going to sound so spoilt 'cos I've got loads already – but it makes you wish you had enough money to buy everything. It makes you want to be a celebrity so you could buy everything.'

‘In a way I think the magazines are a bit wrong 'cos of the way the women in them are absolutely flawless. And you know you buy cigarettes and it says on the packet “these will kill you”? It's not the same at all but girls look at those adverts and think that's what they should look like and there's no sign underneath saying “these women are completely airbrushed and fake and no one ever looks that perfect”.' She looks pleased with a point well-made. The trouble is that the longer Laura stays at home because she feels ugly, the more time she has to pore over those magazine images of supermodels, and the less chance she has to compare herself to other ordinary teenagers, with doughy skin and thick thighs.

Once you have such a set opinion of yourself it stays in your mind and it's hard to change, she says. ‘Sometimes, when I'm with my psychologist and she's doing all her little therapy things, it's just really simple stuff. Like she'll give me a thought that I have about myself, like “I look bad”, and then give me an alternative thought, like “I look good”, so whenever I think I look bad I have to think of the alternative thought. And you can't really imagine that something that simple will actually work.' The delivery is sweet enough, but there's sharpness beneath. Laura is an unhappy creature, but she is tough. It remains to be seen whether she is ultimately a survivor.

The girl gang she ran with, who eventually became her tormentors, were hard: ‘That whole period of my life I was lean, smoking so much draw, high the whole time. They were such street rats, so violent towards each other.' There is revisionist disgust, spiked with a shot of residual pride.

‘I was just trying to be something I wasn't, like I was some rude girl, speaking like them, dressing like them. At the end of the day there's no point in that whole attitude of
“I'm from the ghetto, I'm so hard”, because I've got a nice house and I'm quite obviously not from the ghetto.' She laughs easily at herself. ‘The only way I made friends with them was by completely acting like I was someone else.'

But everybody does it. ‘It's the culture today. Teenagers nowadays aspire to violence and that's it. They see all these American gangsters and think “that's what I want to be.” Boys think they have to fight to prove they're big strong men, and lots of girls fight to look good in front of the boys.'

‘They think it's cool, anything American rappers do, all the violence and the money, the way they talk, all the clothes they wear, that whole image of being a pimp and being a gangster.' That's just what boys learn – that the only way to treat women is for sex.

That hoary double standard is astonishingly persistent. ‘It's fine for them to have sex all they want, but as soon as there's a girl who enjoys sex she's a slag. They'll ask her to do all this stuff and if she actually does it she's a ho or a slut. She gets a reputation, and once other girls hear about that – girls can be stupid sometimes too – they'll beat her up. But if you don't do something with a boy then the boy will get pissed off with you and go round saying you're a slag, so you get the reputation either way.'

There's a desultory acceptance of the status quo. And Laura has met a new boy, called Kevin. It's not a very nice name, she says hastily. Kevin is seventeen, and he's at some music production college. They're going out, so she's spending quite a lot of time with him. Sometimes friends will set you up with a boy, but usually if you're flirting with someone, it's meant to be the boy who makes the first move. You think boys are more confident but recently they aren't like that. It's usually the girl who has to be quite forward.

‘I think boys are more insecure than they let on, and I definitely think women are getting more and more confident.' But there's a vivid dissonance between that and the ‘ho' culture. ‘In one way you think that women are becoming much more powerful, with
Sex and the City
and women being portrayed as so independent. But the stuff that's being most projected towards teenagers, the music videos and rappers, you watch any of those videos and it's literally like women standing there in their underwear dancing for men. And then you turn on the female singers like Beyoncé and she's just writhing around in her underwear. If girls are just going to stand there and look like all they have to offer is their bodies then you can't really blame men for treating them that way.'

When Laura dresses up she can look fairly Beyoncé-esque herself. A few weeks later, it's midday, and she's just come in from a night at Kevin's. She looks dewy. She's wearing a short black skirt, a stripey off-the-shoulder top and heels. Her limbs seem airbrushed. Two long diamanté threads hang from her ears. Aside from a faint haze of self-consciousness, she might be twenty. She rearranges her legs, and fashions her arms into a cradle for one knee.

Kevin doesn't know a lot about her history. Only recently she told him about being depressed and going to hospital. He doesn't ask too many questions, and she likes that. She sniffles. It's hay fever. She's been seeing Kevin for nearly two months now and it's fine. They see each other a few times a week, which is better than when she went out with boys at school and you'd see them every day at lunch-time.

Her mum is OK with her staying over at his place. She was a bit weird about it at first. ‘Some of my friends' mums are completely fine, and my friends have boys to stay at their house all the time, and some of my friends' parents are really
strict. So I think my mum didn't really know which kind of mum she should be,' she explains indulgently, ‘but she trusts me.'

It's fine to stop when you want. ‘I think Kevin lost his virginity to his last girlfriend, and the first time I stayed at his house he didn't know me that well, and he didn't know that I was a virgin so he tried to have sex with me. But I'm quite scared to lose my virginity so I think he understands that and he doesn't really mention it now.'

Of the nine girls in her friendship group, three have lost their virginity, but one of them only had sex once. Some of them don't care, some of them have real principles about how long you should wait, and some of them are just really scared.

There are lots of reasons why Laura hasn't done it yet: ‘I'm scared 'cos everyone says it really hurts the first time. I know that when I wear outfits like this' – she gestures to her troublemaking skirt – ‘it seems like I'm really comfortable with my body, but I'm not that comfortable being naked around boys. There's not that many things in life that once you give away you can never get back, but I think my purity, my innocence …' – the thought gets a little tangled – ‘… I could never say I was pure again.' She shakes her head. ‘It sounds a silly reason.'

Most of Laura's friends have experienced some sort of miserable time. One took a small overdose; another used to be bulimic and now she never eats. The friend under discussion calls on the mobile at just that moment: ‘Jessie, hey baby, can I call you back in half an hour? Love you.'

She didn't appreciate the scale of adolescent unhappiness until she got there herself. ‘When I went into hospital I started hearing about how many teenage psychiatric units there are, and how there's this underworld of depressed teenagers,' she says. ‘Everyone in these different units knew
each other, and there was this whole scene of depressed people. So maybe it is happening more, and our culture alienates a lot of people too, people who don't want to be part of that gangsters crowd and can't find any other good friends. Loads of teenagers don't really know who to try and be.'

In 2004, the Nuffield Foundation published a detailed assessment of the mental well-being of three generations of fifteen-year-olds. The most authoritative study of its kind to date, it found that behavioural problems had doubled between 1974 and 1999, while emotional problems rose by 70 per cent. Comparable work in the United States and the Netherlands has not identified similar trends.

The deterioration of children's mental health in the UK has been stark. Since the mid-1980s, emotional problems like depression and anxiety have increased for both girls and boys. Adolescent conduct disorders showed a continuous rise over the whole twenty-five-year period, though the study found that this related to non-aggressive behaviour such as lying and disobedience, rather than fighting or bullying. The researchers ruled out the possibility that these results were attributable to changes in the thresholds for what was counted as a problem. Teenagers were not simply being rated as more disturbed; there were real changes in the numbers experiencing poor mental health.

The Nuffield researchers offered a range of possible causes for their findings. While expectations of academic achievement have increased, opportunities for children who struggle with testing have been restricted. Young people are finding it harder to enter the job market, which may affect how they see themselves and their economic role.

As young people spend many more years in full-time education, and remain financially dependent on their parents
for longer, the transition to adulthood has become increasingly mutable. Perhaps we parent differently from families in other countries, the researchers suggested. Or maybe something has changed in non-familial socialisation over the past twenty-five years.

Identification of risk factors is at an early stage. But the Nuffield study did conclude that family breakdown and poverty made only modest contributions. Although children in stepfamilies and single-parent families are unhappier than those with two natural parents, mental health has become dramatically worse in all three categories, and the deterioration has in fact been fastest among children in conventional families. Similarly, although teenagers from wealthier backgrounds had better mental health, the decline was significant across all social classes, and particularly for middle-class children.

The psychiatrist Professor Peter Hill, who worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital and is now in independent practice, notes that although children's experience of physical abuse and deprivation has decreased over the generations, ‘other more shadowy influences, certainty of personal identity, security of career structure, have taken their place'. In particular, he points to work carried out in the United States, which found that adolescents who were able to adopt a social or professional identity handed down to them by their parents tended to be happier.

‘We are more alert to young people's distress now, and more inclined to see it as distress rather than as reprehensible behaviour. But,' he cautions, ‘we don't like children in this country, even though we're going to be so dependent upon them with the current demographic shifts.' He argues that the position of the Children's Health Tsar has been serially emasculated, and that we need a Children's Minister in the Cabinet with the power to veto.

Despite the Nuffield study's gloomy prognosis, Hill remains hopeful about this generation. ‘I think that today's fifteen-year-olds are much more impressive than fifteen-year-olds in the 1950s. I don't think that they are less resilient, but that they are more emotionally literate. Soap operas, for example, have been wonderful for that. Young people are much more aware of the impact of arrogance and prejudice, and much more able to be sensitive to those sorts of things.

‘The problems arise when other influences make them less likely to display that. For example, the amount of alcohol consumed by the young is terrifying, and once you're drunk it's hard to be sensitive to other people.'

Hill says that one of his greatest concerns is the abuse of skunk. ‘It's emerged in the past three or four years as a major problem, and I don't think that parents realise that they didn't smoke the same stuff that's around now. I've seen a number of youngsters going quite seriously mad on it, and the parents are indulgent because they think they know what their children are buying.'

The increase in alcohol and drug abuse, especially of the stronger types of cannabis now available, must certainly have an impact on mental well-being. A variety of other factors also play their part. Hormonal changes are generally thought to have a small impact, though they can be significant for a minority, and research continues into the effect of adolescent brain development on mental health. Deteriorating diet may have a direct biological impact. In one study, young offenders who were given multivitamins and fatty acids over a two-week period showed a 34 per cent drop in antisocial behaviour.

Parenting clearly makes a major contribution to children's psychological well-being, particularly the quality of care received in the earliest years of life. There is also
ample evidence that increased consumer choice and affluence has been accompanied by a general decrease in levels of satisfaction.

Like all young people, Laura and her friends are bombarded with messages about celebrity and wealth. She says that ‘loads of teenagers don't really know who to try and be'. The tyranny of absolute choice can make the universal struggle for identity feel like a personal failure. And the people who teenagers best know how to emulate are those they watch on MTV, guiding them round their luscious mansions. When expectations reach this level of extravagance, the ordinary disillusionments of growing up become infinitely harder to bear.

Gender is another factor. As a middle-class female, Laura may be particularly vulnerable to psychological distress. In a study of fifteen-year-olds over a twelve-year period, published in 2003, the Medical Research Council found that girls with professional parents were more stressed, particularly in relation to their academic achievement, than those from the lower social classes and boys. It suggested that these girls were doubly disadvantaged by a combination of newer educational concerns and more traditional worries about personal identity, in particular body image.