Friendship matters most to youngsters

Making and breaking friendships has again dominated calls to the children's telephone helpline What's Up.

The Auckland-based service says calls about peer relationships increased from 21.3 per cent of its calls in 2003 to 25.5 per cent last year - well ahead of the next biggest issue, bullying.

The service is aimed at children aged 5 to 18, with most callers aged between 7 and 12. Two-thirds of callers are girls.

The director of the Kids Help Foundation which runs the helpline, Grant Taylor, said the figures showed that parents often had the wrong ideas about what their children worried about.

"The adult perception is that drugs and alcohol and suicide are important, but really, fortunately, those affect only a small proportion of children and young people.

"We know from longitudinal research that peer relationships and associated aspects of social skills and bullying have enormous impact on emotional health from mid-adolescence onwards, so our aim is to engage those pre-teenagers having difficulty and teach them how to cope with those sorts of challenges."

The service started in 2001 with four sponsors - NZ Dairy Foods, Woolworths, Kelloggs, and Griffins.

However, the first three of those have quit over the past four years - NZ Dairy Foods when it was sold to Graeme Hart, Woolworths when it was sold to Progressive Enterprises, and Kelloggs due to a change of corporate policy late last year.

The service picked up one new sponsor last year - Telecom's White Pages, which is holding a fund-raising auction at Ellerslie Racecourse on Thursday night, of the 100 best artworks submitted for the covers of this year's phone directories.

Mr Taylor said the service had a budget of just over $800,000, but would need $1.2 million a year to answer all the calls it receives.

* 0800 WHATS UP (0800 942 8787)