Caring Kate: Teach teens how to be a good parent
TEENAGERS could be taught parenting and relationship skills to help stop their own children going on to develop mental health problems, the Duchess of Cambridge said yesterday.
Mum-of-two Kate, who expects her third baby next month, said it was important to get the next generation of parents “child-ready” before they have offspring.
Kate told a symposium she had convened there is a need to break the “intergenerational cycle of disadvantage”.
And she said: “We all know how important childhood is and how the early years shape us for life.
Vital
“We also know how negative the downstream impact can be if problems emerging at the youngest age are overlooked or ignored. It is therefore vital that we nurture children through this crucial period.”
The 36-year-old Duchess wore a mint green Jenny Packham coat for her speech to the Royal Society of Medicine in central London, one of her last engagements before starting maternity leave.
She announced she was forming a steering group to explore how to bring experts, charities and funding groups together to give children the best start in life.
The group is likely to report back to her when she returns from her time away from official duties in the autumn.
Kate has spent much of her charity work focusing on how problems such as family breakdown and addiction can create emotionally bruised children who have issues later.
Now she intends to make promoting better early intervention a major part of her work as a royal, to help create a generation of emotionally tougher children.
She asked the symposium: “At what stage in a child’s development could we, or should we, intervene?
“The more I have heard, the more I am convinced that the answer has to be, ‘Early, and the earlier the better’.”
She called for help for mothers-to-be and mental health support in primary schools. There should also be backing for parents to get their children ready for school and to become confident of coping with their emotional needs.
Kate added: “But potentially we could start to look even earlier by teaching parenting and relationship skills to teenagers, to get the next generation of parents child-ready well before they have to put these skills into practice.”
Prof Peter Fonagy, chief executive of the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families, described Kate as the person “who has done more to turn the tide of stigma around mental health than any other single individual I could name”.