Children today face a tougher upbringing than 'privileged' older generations and are branded 'snowflakes' to ease guilt of having 'messed it up for them', MPs told

Children today face a tougher upbringing than the privileged older generations who insultingly brand them 'snowflakes', Professor Peter Fonagy said.

The child psychologist, who chaired the Independent Review into Mental Health Conditions, ADHD and Autism, said adults use the slur because they cannot face up to their own responsibility for making children's lives more difficult and depriving them of the opportunities they enjoyed.

He told MPs on the Commons health and social care committee this morning: 'The snowflake generation is an insult to young people.

'I challenge all of you here to cope with the pressures that young people are under and sustain the quality of childhood and young adulthood that you all were privileged to experience.'

Professor Fonagy said younger generations face growing financial pressures, insecure employment, unaffordable housing and 'incessant' social comparisons, while receiving less support than previous generations.

'Therefore, it's much easier for us to say they are a snowflake generation than for us to say actually we've really messed it up for them, and it's our fault,' he added.

He argued that older generations had grown up expecting their lives to be better than those of their parents, while youngsters today face a bleaker future.

'We are currently with a generation who are convinced, and rightly so, that they will not have the opportunities that their parents had.'

Professor Fonagy said young people are also being deprived of the support networks and opportunities for recovery that helped previous generations cope with stress, including a 73 per cent reduction in youth services funded by local authorities since 2011.

He further warned that social media was damaging sleep and replacing face-to-face contact with friends, undermining young people's ability to cope with increasing pressures.

He told the cross-party committee: 'If you have social media that actually keeps you awake and it stops you from sleeping, and also reduces face-to-face interactions, you will have less capacity to cope.'

Professor Fonagy criticised the treatment of children during the Covid pandemic, suggesting that adults had prioritised their own health at the expense of younger generations.

Restrictions aimed at slowing the spread of the virus, such as school and playground closures and bans on visiting friends and family, are believed to have harmed their education and personal development.

'Mostly, the priority is given to the new generation, but for whatever reason, and I am not here to blame anyone, we decided that our priority, our health, was more important than theirs,' he stressed.

He urged adults to take greater responsibility for their own behaviour, particularly their use of mobile phones in front of children, which he described as 'appalling'.

'One thing that we could all do in relation to discouraging children to overuse social media is to use our own social media less.

'The number of people who are engaged rather than face-to-face interactions with their cell phones over meals is actually appalling, and of course, it sets a model for young people because they are there to learn from us, and that's how human beings learn - looking at adults and see what they do.

'If we set an appalling model, can we be surprised that they do appalling things?'

He called for a fundamental change in how parents and society treat young people, arguing that encouragement rather than criticism was needed.

'I think we need to be less spiteful and less depriving in our approach to young people, and far more encouraging,' he added.

Professor Fonagy's landmark review - published last week - found Britain risks harming a generation of children by overdiagnosing ADHD and autism.

He found parents have been incentivised to secure a diagnosis for their children by misguided schools and welfare systems that reward such 'labels.'

Youngsters have also been influenced by social media posts that wrongly present common traits as evidence of the conditions, it cautioned.

And there were warnings from MPs that children face being defined by such definitions, putting them on the path to a life of unemployment and benefits.

Diagnosis rates have soared up to 40-fold in recent years but the government-commissioned review found no evidence that the number affected has actually increased.

Professor Fonagy raised concerns about the 'consistency and quality' of ADHD and autism assessments being carried out by private providers, who have exploded in number as the NHS struggled to cope with demand.

Private firms now conduct more than half of NHS-funded ADHD and a third of autism assessments but they are poorly regulated and allowed to advertise their services directly to potential customers, with the NHS often picking up the ballooning bill.

Last month, a survey of GPs said many have never known a private provider reject a diagnosis request.

Prof Fonagy's report stresses that misdiagnosis and overdiagnosis are 'harmful', as it may lead to unnecessary or inappropriate treatment, delay appropriate support for other issues and lower expectations of what children can achieve in life.

The review notes that children diagnosed with ADHD before 17 are around four times more likely to not be in education, employment or training in early adulthood, with each additional young person in this situation costing taxpayers £244,000 over their lifetime.

In his foreword to the report, he writes: ‘Life has become harder since I was a young man: more uncertain, more relentlessly observed and appraised, with less belonging and fewer opportunities to take time-out, to recuperate and recover.

‘The cacophony of voices now available to a young person - most of them digital, many of them confident, few of them accountable - has made the ordinary developmental process of understanding oneself far harder than it was for me, and the consequences for how young people function are correspondingly greater.

‘Young people today are contending with more powerful forces than I ever faced. They are not fragile. They are outnumbered.’

The independent review stresses that this is not simply a matter of greater awareness but young people really are becoming more distressed.