We have to talk about the children

A recent Report from The Children's Society in the UK expressed concerns that teenagers are becoming increasingly unhappy with their lives.

Amongst the reasons cited for the disgruntled mindset of the current youth of the country are school, appearance, choice and freedom.

I am the first to accept that we are living in very different times. There are economic undercurrents, Environmental issues, World Unrest, we are up to a NOW!85 album for goodness sake  but when I was a teenager I never had time to even contemplate if I was worried about anything because I, like my peers, was just too busy getting on with things.

From getting up early to going to bed, early, the day was simply packed with activities.

Of course, during school term time there was the effort to get ready which in a household of 5 children was only kept from being chaotic by good adult supervision and a rota for the bathroom and the breakfast table.

We were always well turned out in school uniform, washed and brushed and with clean shoes. This enabled us to follow our Father as he strode off down the street to take on his role of Manager at a bank in the town. We would straggle along before peeling off at the top of the road to the school although on more than one occasion my younger brother just doubled back when out of sight and went home.

We did range about quite freely in our teenage years whereas with the modern phenomena of paranoia around stranger danger and the perception of crime many of todays young adults are driven about everywhere by over indulgent parents.

We stayed for dinner at the canteen. This was not one of these multiple choice affairs which feature in State Schools today and rival a reasonable bistro but with a menu that you could set your calendar by. Monday was fish fingers and chips, Tuesday liver and onions, Wednesday some form of meat in a pie, Thursday cold salad and Friday some other form of meat in some form of gravy. There was dessert  including flapjack, treacle sponge pudding, spotted dick, chocolate sponge and Angel Delight on a strict rotation basis whether or not complimentary to or inducing an adverse reaction when combined with the main course. All washed down with tap water and ,oh yes, pink custard.

As for lessons, well we just stuck to the basics of the three 'R's as they say with a smattering of science, languages, arts, crafts, music and strenuous physical exercise. There was none of the variation found in the current curriculum such as multi faith studies, media studies, citizenship and vague arty-farty subjects for which everyone gets a certificate of merit.

There was a level of mutual respect between the teaching staff and us pupils although it was borne more out of fear and retribution rather than anything enlightened. I do not think that I ever knew the Christian names of any of my teachers in senior school unless bastardised into a nickname or if it was unusually hilarious and capable of being sung or put in an offensive rhyme.

We did have a clear objective in our schooling years whether to go on to a University, Polytechnic or College or go straight into employment. I can appreciate some of the anxiety of the current teenagers about what to do with their lives post-secondary education given the lack of meaningful full time jobs in the UK economy.

As for money in our pockets, well, I only had my pocket money which until I got a paper round was based on one new pence per year of age. This did not go very far other than my monthly comic/magazine, goodies and my flirting with being a smoker, briefly, one rebellious summer.

I was never a saver and shamefully this still applies into my 6th decade on the planet.

In the absence of personal wealth the only option was to make your own entertainment and this we did large.

What was better than having competitive foot running or bike races around the housing estate with your mates or going into battle armed with home made bows and arrows against the kids from the nearby council houses?

The local streams and ponds were teeming with sticklebacks, frogspawn and newts providing endless hours of fun from daybreak to dusk. Just take a net on a stick and a jam jar.

There were trees to climb, gardens and allotments to trespass through, small shops ripe for a five finger discount if in enough of a group to constitute a distraction for the proprietor, things to set alight and wait for the fire brigade, doors to knock on before running off, people to follow at random through the town just to see what they were up to, Bob a Job week once a year with a licence to wash cars and use all of my Father's chrome polish on gleaming bumpers and hub caps, animals to stalk and worry, girls to chase, catch and kiss, small kids to impress with bravado and daring near the railway line, river and on the bridge over the by-pass.

It all now sounds borderline delinquent and illegal but I like to think that all of these things were enacted in the right spirit and with not a malicious thought in our heads. Some friends did get arrested or died though.

Any prowess at sport, in music or in performing arts was hard earned through many hours of practice and sacrifice of time and effort. That was probably why I never did much in any discipline in my teenage years. Todays youth are just waiting around optimistically to be discovered by talent spotters whether singing flatly and nasally under their headphones at the Mall ,on a You Tube video or through posted onFacebook.

I can sense their frustration if by the age of 17 they have not signed to a record label or modelling agency or are not otherwise entrepreneurial millionaires.

Teenagers today are very fashion and image conscious. We were never too concerned about our appearance. Take a look in the family photo album from my mid teens and you will know this to be true. My idea of style was a pair of Lopez jeans, formal shoes, button up shirt and a cardigan. Pretty square you would be entitled to say but I can assure you that I did not stand out as being any different to my contemporaries. My hair style, or lack of it, was a bit of a basin cut, floppy fringe and with the later mature growth of sideburns which, if shaved off after the summer, just left a white stripe down the side of my head.

Perhaps we were innocent and naïve compared with the current crop of teenagers who have multi-media and Wikipedia at their fingertips. Perhaps we were happy to look up in a book or just wait if a question was needed to be answered rather than demanding immediacy. Perhaps we lived in a time of guaranteed employment and a job for life. Perhaps the world did not seem such a scary place because we were not force fed scaremongering news on a 24 hour basis. We did, it should not be forgotten, live under the threat of nuclear world war, civil and social unrest and turmoil but the key factor to maintaining our sanity and off setting those very modern ailments called childhood stress and unhappiness was that we knew how to play and have fun.