KEY POINTS:
In just one week this month, 700 children and parents visited a youth centre in Rodney, the semi-rural suburbia north of Auckland. Aged seven to 20, many were from Pakeha, middle-class homes, and many were angry or despairing.
Hibiscus Coast Youth Centre manager Penney Lucas and her staff try to dig beneath the aggro and petulance to what's troubling them. They guide them into help for family strife and emotional turmoil, run boot camps in conjunction with the Navy, run training programmes and support distraught parents.
Lucas spends 30 hours a week outside of work scrabbling together the $185,000 a year to fund the centre. Recently, kids on one course gave $2000 they'd raised to help fund a truancy officer.
Charities like the centre are plugging gaps in state systems by catching troubled families from across the economic spectrum.
Child helpline 0800Whatsup receives an average of 1500 calls a day from children as young as five (it has enough counsellors to take only a third). Calls from kids and teenagers about bullying and relationships are increasing.
Youthline handles about 60,000 calls a year, and its free texting service shot to 5500 texts in August.
Without these charities, and hundreds of others, our horribly grim child and youth statistics would be even grimmer.
You've heard them: second in the developed world for male youth suicide, third for female youth suicide. Second for teenage pregnancy. Up with the world-beaters for beating our children - third highest in child death-rates from maltreatment (although the rate has fallen by a quarter since 2000).
Children are more likely to die from injury or accidents here than in any other rich nation.
Experts report rising depression in young people. Adolescent health expert and GP Sue Bagshaw estimates 80 per cent of the under-25-year-olds she sees have anxiety problems.
What's going on? And why are charities having to pick up the slack?
The answers from the frontlines and research are as confronting as a switch-blade-bearing 13-year-old.
Says Whatsup director Grant Taylor: "We get a tragedy, something that's appalling, there's a whole lot of tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth, and we set up another task force, commission more research. And the findings are what we already knew. We don't need more research. What we need is the whole of the community to do something about what we know, and that's tough."
What we know is that one in five New Zealand children (230,000) lives below the poverty line (60 per cent of the median income), and that poor children are likely to be at the sharp end of social indicators.
Taylor expresses the predominant view, supported by research, that seriously curbing child poverty would vastly improve the lot of many children. But that would ultimately mean diverting public spending from other areas or increasing taxes.
More broadly, he says, child-centred policy must sometimes place children's interests above parents' objections, as with the so-called "anti-smacking" debate (really the dilution of the reasonable
force defence to assault of children). He argues that as a society we undervalue children and as a result children from all backgrounds are hurt by that attitude.
BAGSHAW IS even more damning of today's parents, branding them the "me" generation. "Parents aren't considering their children's needs; they're considering their own needs. That's across every section of society: for rich people it's all about me and having my needs fulfilled; for poor people it's all about 'I'm a victim and I want my needs fulfilled'. But no one's saying what about the needs of the kids?"
Protests that the anti-smacking law interferes with parents' rights upsets her. "I just want to cry when I hear that because of the whole 'these are my possessions' attitude. It's an incredible responsibility, an incredible gift to be a parent."
Bagshaw argues we need to make authoritarian parenting - warm relationships based on mutual respect and clear, consistently enforced boundaries - the norm; and do what it takes to ensure children are wanted.
"If the child is wanted then you are much more likely to put energy into looking after it, whereas if a child is a possession or a status symbol or something that loves you or it's a nuisance, it's hardly likely you'll put the energy in to it. It's hard work."
The conservative child advocacy movement also sees an erosion of responsibility and exhorts us to better value children, but with a very different view of what that means.
John Sax from For the Sake of the Children curses the death of right and wrong. "It's all 'everything is right if it feels good to you', forget about the damage from the consequences, the state will patch it up... We've got so preoccupied with the rights movement, we've forgotten about the responsibility movement."
Pro-marriage campaigners, such as Sax and Family First, argue the breakdown of the "traditional" married-mum-and-dad family, and associated moral decline, fester at the root of children's social ills.
They say Government should be propping up marriage with financial incentives, relationship and parenting support, and public health campaigns.
They point to international research that appears to show marriage is better for all involved than modern twists such as single-parent or de facto-parent families.
But other experts argue the research says more about the kind of people who marry (who tend to be wealthier, religious, hold conservative values, and will therefore stick out an unhappy or abusive marriage because of its perceived sanctity and peer pressure) than it does about the institution itself.
And, says Bagshaw, "the research shows exposure to family violence is much worse than parents breaking up". A strong line of evidence shows it's the quality of relationships children have with a parent or caregiver, not the family form, that counts.
Says Youthline director Stephen Bell, a trained psychologist, "I worked with young people from traditional families who were so traumatised and abused they hardly functioned.
"I worked with young people from solo families who are outstanding."
The reality is only eight per cent of working adults now live in a traditional family with a full-time working dad and a stay-at-home mum. One in five households with dependent children are now single-parent households, up from eight per cent in 1983.
Aucklander Shona Paul, 48, married for keeps, but no amount of counselling or resolve could save her marriage in the end.
For the past 12 years, she has raised her two daughters, now aged 19 and 15, alone. Her 19-year-old, who was a good student, has two babies, the youngest of whom has congenital heart disease.
"I don't know what's in the future for her," she says of the young mother. "It just gets harder and harder. You want a better life than yours for your kids."
Yes, single parenthood is tough on families, she says. She couldn't keep as close tabs on her daughters as she'd have liked. Initially Paul worked part-time and received the DPB so she could be home more, although Work and Income pressured her to work full time.
"I had a friend who was thinking of separating. I said to her if there's a glimmer of hope, stay together."
Looking back though, Paul thinks she made the right call.
"We could have tried to stay together, but then we all would have been miserable. My biggest responsibility was to my children."
ONE THING everyone agrees on: parents need more financial and practical support. Bagshaw: "It's a total fantasy that parenting comes naturally."
Naturally, everyone wants more from Government.
Lesley Max is co-founder of Great Potentials, a charity that runs six Government-funded one-stop-shop family centres nationally. The centres offer the internationally successful Hippy programme, which teaches parents how to foster learning in their toddler. Max is exasperated that Government won't extend funding for more centres to meet demand from parents for Hippy and other courses.
She's also lobbied hard for a national database recording every baby born in or immigrated to New Zealand to ensure every child gets basic Well Child checks (currently voluntary on the part of parents but Government agencies do share information about families where abuse is suspected).
Lucas wants detox centres for under-18s (there are none in New Zealand) and more rehab centres. Everyone working in the area wants the drinking age raised.
And she wants the Ministry of Education to provide courses for students expelled from school.
"I get so angry about picking up the pieces."
EXPERTS ARGUE information overload from a wired lifestyle and intensive youth marketing, coupled with the fluidity of modern lifestyles, may be fuelling a rise in anxiety and depression in children.
Stress is a known trigger in many genetically based mental disorders.
Pharmac figures show 4305 antidepressant prescriptions for the 2006-2007 year were for children under 15.
Adolescent psychiatrist Craig Immelman believes there has been a real growth in childhood depression in developed countries, not simply improved detection.
He stresses the drugs don't work on their own, but need to be part of a package including talk therapy and practical measures that involve all aspects of the child's life.
Bagshaw says parents and teachers can help children filter the information snowstorm by teaching critical skills, communication and limiting their time in front of a screen.
Judi Clements of the Mental Health Foundation says many mental disorders first emerge in adolescence, and we need to improve detection and get mental disorders out of the closet.
Immelman's feeling is that society is in transition the new ones yet to bed down.
"And as in growing up, a transition is a time of anxiety."
Bagshaw is unphased by the numbers calling helplines. "In a way it's great. I love this generation because they're asking for help. Their parents didn't ask for help, they just soldiered on and were too proud or whakaama (shamed) to put their hand up. It's a real step forward."
ABOUT TURN
For a while, things were looking precarious for Beatrice (not her real name). In the past year, the 16-year-old has been kicked out of home and school and been in trouble with the police for theft.
The last straw for her school was when she stole a school uniform from lost property and sold it.
"I was generally naughty in class and they were just looking for a way to get rid of me," she says. "Classes were boring and being naughty was fun. I couldn't be bothered going to school, the teachers are just annoying. You get sent out for talking and that's just stupid; if you keep being sent out you're not going to learn anything."
Then she helped a friend steal a laptop. "Kids steal because they want money and parents don't really give you money. In my group a lot of kids smoke weed so they steal to pay for that, and for alcohol."
Her mother, a nurse, and father, a drainlayer, were at their wits' end. Beatrice was bored, angry, at sea.
"My mother seemed to have this idea in her head that I was this real naughty person. There are people my age who've done way worse things. I'd just stolen a couple of things, but it didn't make me the devil's spawn."
Then she was referred to the Hibiscus Coast Youth Centre. She received career guidance and went on a series of boot camps run at the Navy base.
Now her goal is to become a flight instructor. She's living with a relative and commuting an hour every day to get to a pre-military course.
"I suppose it's just good to have people that are on your side and want to help you... I didn't listen at school, but I listen at my course. I'm more independent now, I don't feel as trapped."
