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In the end, it was my daughter’s clumsy attempts to tie her new school tie that broke me.
Like most parents with a child starting secondary school this term, the excitement had been building for weeks, operation “come to terms with the fact that your baby isn’t a baby anymore and hasn’t been for a while” in full swing since the moment she left primary school back in the mists of July, when I was still in denial and assumed someone would invent a time-stopping machine at the end of the summer holidays.
Reader, they didn’t.
And so, like thousands of parents across the country, I walked five steps behind my 11-year-old daughter this week, not so much escorting her to the doors of her new school as following her there, like a particularly unpleasant smell. (“No offense, but I’m going to pretend I don’t know you,” she said, as I sobbed into a tissue in the kitchen.)
Like thousands of parents across the country this week, Bryony Gordon dropped her 11-year-old daughter off for her first day of high school.
Later, the sight of 120 terrified-looking seventh graders lining up on their new playground, ties askew, reminded me that my excitement wasn’t all pathetic and sentimental. Because as much as I’ve spent the summer telling my daughter that she’s going to love high school and have a blast meeting new people, I know from experience that the truth is probably going to be a little more complicated than that.
And as these kids paraded through the doors of our strict local public school, I realized they were right to look scared. Because high school is not, as we’re often told, the happiest time of our lives, but by far the most stressful, and we need to stop pretending otherwise.
It was pretty bad in the nineties when I went through the GCSE and A-Level exam process.
Then, as now, the media was filled with stories about school failure and increasing anxiety. Then, as now, teenagers tended to react to that stress in one of two ways: either they rebelled against it and went on a rampage, or they took it so seriously that they ended up losing their minds in pursuit of good grades.
“High school is not, as we are often told, the happiest time of our lives, but by far the most stressful,” writes Bryony Gordon.
I belonged to the latter group: a GP prescribed me Prozac when I turned 17 and signed me out of school for a month with a doctor’s note citing clinical depression and OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder).
However, all that was forgotten when I started studying a first-class Advanced Placement course and my professors realized that a hint of mental illness was often the price one had to pay for being a “high-achieving” student. And so began a life of putting others’ expectations of me above my own expectations of well-being.
In 1998, being kicked out of school and prescribed antidepressants was the exception, not the rule. But in 2024, our children’s mental health is so bad that it’s sadly an all-too-familiar story.
Statistics released last week showed NHS referrals for anxiety in children are more than double pre-Covid levels, with 500 young people a day being referred to mental health services in England.
Experts described the figures as “staggering” – there were 204,526 referrals in 2023/24, compared with 98,953 in 2019/20 and 3,879 in 2016/17 – and called for urgent investment in CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services).
The government says it plans to provide specialist mental health support in all schools, as well as drop-in psychiatric “hubs”. But mental health professionals have become accustomed to politicians failing to deliver on their promises, and none of these things help any of the children who are suffering now. Indeed, as I watched my daughter and her classmates file into what should be an exciting and adventurous new chapter in their lives, I wanted to shout: “Why, in the decades since I went to school, have we not improved on this? How have we managed to get worse?”
Social media pressure doesn’t help, but it’s the pressure we put on ourselves at home that makes the biggest difference to a child’s well-being. Overprotective parenting, where parents become overly involved in their children’s lives, now seems to be the norm.
I felt like I was failing myself when, this summer, I didn’t pack a load of exercise books for our holiday, instead letting my 11-year-old devour the latest best-seller in the Lottie Brooks series. Meanwhile, it has become perfectly normal to cram a child’s week with so many extracurricular activities that their diaries are more packed than ours. One friend told me that her 14-year-old son leaves home for school at 6.50am and returns 12 hours later, when he must scarf down his dinner before doing his homework.
This is all well-intentioned. We want the best for our children, but we have fallen into the trap of thinking that the “best” is academic excellence, no matter the emotional cost.
Now seems as good a time as any to remind ourselves of the lesson we only really learn after we leave school: that we will be good at some things, bad at others, completely mediocre at still more… and that it will probably all work out in the end, even if we always need our mother’s help tying our tie.
Showmance or not, I love TayTay and Travis.
Travis Kelce hugs Taylor Swift after a game in Baltimore in January. Rumors that their relationship was a sham to generate publicity have been debunked
Travis Kelce had to call in his lawyers after a fake document shared online appeared to provide the NFL star with PR advice for when he splits from Taylor Swift.
Fears that they had indulged in a “showmance” (i.e. a fake relationship to generate publicity) have since been allayed, which is a relief to all of us Swifties who have enjoyed the drama of their very public romance almost as much as the record-breaking Eras tour.
Beetlejuice takes me back to the eighties.
Despite her initial reservations, Bryony’s daughter soon became enthralled with Tim Burton’s quirky style in his Beetlejuice sequel.
After 36 long years, the sequel to Beetlejuice (pictured) hits theaters today.
Starring Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton, the film was one of my favorites as a kid, so I decided to treat my own daughter to it last weekend.
Despite his initial reservations (‘ahem, CGI is rubbish’), he soon found himself won over by Tim Burton’s quirky style. We’ve now put together a list of 80s classics we want to see. What’s next? Three Men and a Baby, of course.
According to research, half of us find it awkward to say sorry because we think we never make mistakes. I belong to the other group, the ones who spend their lives regretting it. My friends tell me to stop saying sorry every day, but the only response I get is: “I’m sorry!”
Yes! Ban the plague of electric bikes
I firmly believe that the world needs clunky electric bikes like… well, a fish needs a bicycle.
Thousands of rental bikes are lying abandoned on pavements in London. Now Brent Council has taken a firm stand, telling rental company Lime that it has three months to address safety concerns or risk having all 750 of the machines allowed in the north-west London borough removed.
Well, I hope other councils follow Brent’s example and ban them all.
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