The figures have fallen to alarming ages: access to pornography, the first consumption of alcohol, cases of suicide, the ages of bullying, the debut with joints and cocaine, mistreatment of parents, crime, technological addictions, behaviors risky sex, sexist behavior… we are increasingly surprised by the lower and lower age of the children who make headlines and plummet statistics.
Parents come, together or separately, to seek therapeutic help because they do not know how to disconnect their children from video games after having dedicated an entire summer to screens for between 8 and 14 hours a day. Now it’s high school, but many of them have acquired routines that generate dependency and even addiction, and these adolescents respond to attempts to turn off the console with shouting, defiant behavior, threats of self-harm or verbal and physical attacks on their own parents. Furthermore, they cannot concentrate in class, they have lost social and communication skills, they have become more impulsive, they have much higher anxiety and they easily get into fights or risky behaviors looking for a bit of that dopamine that their console no longer gives them.
“I don’t know what to do with my son,” they tell you as soon as you enter. And it’s true. There has been a generational leap that, more than a gap, has meant an earthquake. You see how kids of 27 or 28 years old look more like their parents than their younger brothers, with whom they have only been around for a few years. That generation lives in the eye of a technological and social hurricane that changes by the minute, and that people of other ages and other rhythms are not in a position to keep track of even remotely. Many parents recognize that they need help, tools, and guidance to establish more or less fluid, affective, and reliable communication with their children.
According to the EDADEs survey, almost 20% of young Spaniards consume benzodiazepines for their depression, sleep or anxiety problems. Furthermore, in detoxification centers we increasingly find younger children with more problematic profiles. They accompany their technological or substance addiction with psychoticism, borderline personality disorders, dissocial, narcissistic behaviors, cognitive dissonance, concentration difficulties, inability to project future plans or assess the consequences of their actions in the medium-long term…
We have stated it many times. The best prevention of “almost everything” is education and emotional management. Only with that, bullying, annual suicide figures, frustration tolerance, depression or addictions would see their numbers improved and reduced.
I don’t know if the format of this attempted solution would consist of a subject, in family schools or in workshops for parents, but Someone needs to take care of this publicly and for free. Otherwise, they already know in a very few years what their children’s extracurricular activities will be: English, tennis and therapy.
PRAYING TO GOD
Theologian, therapist and General Director of Grupo Guadalsalus, Medical Saniger and Life Ayuda y Formación.
