1.
January is the time of year for soul-searching questions about one's life in the future, yet questions like these are asked constantly by teenagers all the year round: Why am I here? Why am I not more popular? Why am I not more beautiful/fit/clever/likeable? How will I pass these exams? How can I bear to go to school tomorrow knowing that those people detest me so much? What can I do about my enemies? Why does nobody understand me? Why am I so alone?
2.
Things get too straight
I can't bear it
I feel stuck, stuck on a pin
I'm trying to break in
But I know it's not for me
And the sight of it all
Makes me sad and ill
That's when I want - some weird sin
Just to relax with
Yeah, some dumb, weird sin
For a while anyway
With my head on the ledge
That's what you get out on the edge.
Some Weird Sin – Lyrics by Iggy Pop
The song describes the feeling of alienation, when all the choices available to you are no good. The pressure's too much, you need an escape, a way out, otherwise you will explode.
What could it be?
3.
Self-harm, eating disorders, poor mental health, suicidal feelings, porn addiction, the huge obesity problem, alcohol and drug abuse, mobile phone/screen addiction. The list goes on. Pressures on children and teenagers are greater than they ever have been. The effect of this is seen in statistics on the increasing prevalence amongst children and teenagers of damaging behaviour.
In a UNICEF study released in 2007, the UK came bottom of a list ranking industrialised nations in terms of child wellbeing.
Yet despite all of this, many youngsters still courageously manage to achieve higher grades than ever before and are opting for healthy diets.
But whichever choice they make, the need for an escape is crucial when children and teenagers feel powerless and under pressure, as they too often do.
Where can they go?
4.
"How has childhood become so unnatural? Children are enclosed indoors, caged and shut out of the green and vivid world in ways unthinkable a generation ago.
"[Seeking the answer to] the riddle took me to the spirit of childhood... the importance of woodland for the psyche; the secret world of a child's soul where the stories of childhood are whistled with a deft and fragile panache of poetry."
– from Jay Griffith's introduction to her incredible book about childhood and the need for the wild, of which Philip Pullman said: "Kith could have been written by no one but Jay Griffiths. She has the same visionary understanding of childhood that we find in Blake and Wordsworth. Her work isn't just good - it's necessary." (It's also published as A Country Called Childhood.)
5.
"I used to love reading to my children at bedtime. The song about Mike TV's fate in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a favourite. In it, Dahl vents his wrath on the hated television: 'They sit and stare and stare and sit until the hypnotised by it.' ... What would Roald Dahl think now?
"The need to be close to nature is in our DNA... Wildlife Trusts work with many children to reverse the trend of young people not having access to the wild: in schools, in parks, in wild places. A wild childhood is good for health, well-being and nature. We want every child to be wild."
Stephanie Hilborne, Chief Executive of The Wildlife Trusts in her editorial in the latest issue of the publication Natural World. (Coming events for children are listed here.)
6.
If you are a teenager, what do you think about when you're lying in bed trying to sleep? What kinds of thoughts go round and round in your head when you are waiting in queues, walking, commuting? Would they be your worries, your troubles, the demons of self-doubt? How can you avoid their persistent nagging?
One way that is not self-damaging is to escape into stories you are reading. You imagine yourself as the protagonist of a great adventure, misunderstood, vilified, ignored or even obstructed by authorities, but determined to overcome every obstacle with your special powers to achieve success. So much more empowering, distracting and fun than to be dragged down into the dark, hopeless swamp of your own psyche.
Some of the children doing this may even make up their own stories and become the writers of tomorrow.
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| The Awakening of Childhood Heroes by Charlotte Soileh |
7.
When I am lying in bed trying to sleep, or when I am waiting in queues, driving, cycling or commuting, I spend hours solving the problems that my writerly life has set me: problems of plot, research, character, tone and structure. If I did not do this I do not know what would occupy my mind except the interminable, grotesque treadmill of self-doubts.
And when that fails, too, you can find me in the woods at the end of my garden, in the hills, by the sea.
In the wild.
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| Me kayaking in the stunning Mawddach Estuary |
8.
“There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
"This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild
David Thorpe is the writer of the Sci-Fi YA novel Hybrids and the cli-fi YA novel Stormteller.
