Today's youth: living in constant anxiety
Europe's press is concerned about the mental health of children and young people. Climate change, environmental disasters, loneliness during the pandemic, the war in Ukraine which is happening right on many people's doorstep. How are young people coping with all the bad news?
Growing up in a doomed world
Many children and young people live in constant fear, write youth representatives from the South of France in Le Monde as the school year starts:
“Not a day goes by without our hearing of a new disaster related to climate change or seeing the wars that rage all around the globe. Not a day goes by without our being told that the world we know is doomed! How can we not be anxious faced with this difficult future? ... It will be our generation that will be confronted with climatic, geopolitical and political problems very soon.”
Shaped by fear
Actress and author Joanna Szczepkowska reflects in Rzeczpospolita on the worries of the young generation:
“'Will Putin invade Poland?' a teenage girl with whom I was sitting on the beach asked me. We'd been looking out at the sea for a while. It was calm, the waves were lapping gently and steadily, all in all the surroundings were soothing. So what was moving was not so much the question itself, but the circumstances in which it was asked. ... A dozen years isn't much, but we're already talking about a new generation here. They hear and know about the dangers, their minds are shaped by fear.”