Calls to Childline increased by 13 per cent in 2000, according to statistics released today. While we tend to associate the service with children calling to report abuse, in fact, nearly 44 per cent of the children (mostly aged 10 to 15 years) who were "meaningfully engaged" in conversation called because they felt lonely and isolated and needed a supportive adult to talk to. This statistic raises a disturbing question: in a booming economy, why are children experiencing such a deficit of nurturing human contact?
"This is a high-achievement society in which parents are experiencing pressures - and we are putting those pressures on our kids," says Paul Gilligan, clinical psychologist and chief executive of the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC), which runs Childline. Gilligan does not blame parents, but does think that "the statistics illustrate that society's attitude to mechanisms of support is changing more significantly than anyone appreciates. Penelope Leach argues that in the past, communities raised children and now that is changing. A significant number of children come home from school and have no parent or adult present to talk to," he says.
When Childline was launched 13 years ago today, child abuse was still a taboo subject. Now, there is another taboo which parents may find difficult to talk about: many of our children are emotionally at sea because parents - and teachers - are too busy and too stressed to create safe spaces in which children can open up and express themselves. So children are picking up the phone.
That's the interpretation Fionnuala Kilfeather, chief executive of the National Parents' Council Primary, puts on Childline's latest statistics. She blames the changing pattern of family life, whereby two working parents arrive home too burdened and exhausted to spend quality time with their children. But she doesn't blame working mothers, who are doing two jobs including, as studies show, 90 per cent of the work at home.
"The issue is that there has to be far more of a partnership concerning who does the housework," she says.
Kilfeather is also critical of Irish schools for giving too much homework - more than elsewhere in Europe - so that family life is dominated by the pressure to study, leaving little time for families to enjoy each other's company and open up lines of communication. "As adults, we often are pretending to be listening, but you really have to actively listen to children," she says. The lack of listening time is a symptom of the warped work/ life balance in our high-achievement culture, which is not healthy for parents or for children. "We are not a child-focused country, and that is a national issue," Kilfeather believes.
Fred Lowe, a clinical psychologist with a special interest in child abuse, disagrees with the isolation theory.
"The rise in phone calls to Childline may well be associated with the access children have to mobile phones," he says. "The statistics may not be an indication of need. They may mean that children are using mobile phones as toys and calling Childline because it is a freephone number."
There has indeed been a rise in the number of calls made to Childline from mobile phones. But Gilligan believes that this is because mobiles give children privacy, making it safer to call. Calls logged by Childline actually fell in the two years before 2000, despite the mobile phone boom. The rise and fall in the volume of calls to Childline is directly linked to the number of available volunteers, Gilligan explains. Children have also had difficulty getting through due to inadequate technical service.
That problem is being solved today with the launch of a new telephone system, donated by Advanced Telephone Systems and Mitel. This will make Childline more accessible and also enable the ISPCC to analyse the volume of calls through more reliable technical data.
JANE FRY, a counselling psychologist who works with adolescents and who has no connection to Childline, believes that the service performs a valuable function. "A lot of children don't necessarily have people to talk to about very normal things. It's important for them to have a friendly adult who can listen to and validate their feelings," she says.
Childline received 112,824 calls last year, 40 per cent (44,557) of which resulted in "meaningful engagement". The purpose of 19,167 was "to chat" and "basic engagement". The latter covers first-time callers who just want to talk about what is going on in their lives.
But we still need to be concerned about the 200 children who were referred for direct intervention by Childline as a result of severe difficulties. While that proportion may seem small, Gilligan points out that most children who call Childline never give a name.
And while the majority of children needed no more than a sympathetic listener, there were children with traumatic problems. For example, nearly eight per cent of children who called Childline were concerned about pregnancy, nearly five per cent needed to talk about physical abuse and nearly four per cent reported sexual abuse. Twenty per cent of calls involved some sort of abuse, including emotional abuse, sexual assault and neglect.
Childline has in the past been criticised for the fact that so few calls result in referrals, but this may not be an appropriate way to interpret the organisation's contribution. "Childline is an extremely important service in preventing abuse," believes Elaine Martin, a counselling psychologist who once worked with Childline. "Keeping channels of communication open is a big step in preventing difficulties occurring."
The fact that 44 per cent of children phoning do not have specific problems shouldn't be allowed to detract from the fact that 56 per cent of them do. Whether a child has a specific problem or not, talking with a trusted adult is crucial. Martin maintains that having someone with whom they can discuss their intense feelings and experiences is a crucial factor in developing "resilience" and a strong "sense of identity" in children, thus making them far less vulnerable to potential abuse. The issues that children want to talk about may seem, to adults, to be relatively minor issues, such as a fight with a sibling or the vagaries of playground politics.
However, she says, parents need to realise that if they want their children to talk to them about issues such as sex and drugs during their teenage years, they must start earlier in childhood by "being around after school for what may seem like the inane chatter about what happened on the playground".
Gilligan says that many parents, on hearing that their children have phoned Childline, probably over-react by feeling appalled. Instead, they should accept that sometimes children just need to talk anonymously to somebody other than their parents. "UK and ISPCC research has shown that young people often find it difficult to confide in their parents about certain issues, not because they feel alienated but because they are worried their parents will overreact or worry," he says.
Often, Childline's telephone engagements with children are concerned with helping the child to realise how supportive their parents, or other adults in their lives, can be.
"Adults know that if they want a good relationship with a partner, they need to invest time in that relationship," says Gilligan. "Parents need to invest time in their children in the same way."