Dr. Harry Barry:

I could not agree more. We need to teach our children how to problem-solve from the very earliest age and not just in late primary school. They should be starting much earlier. When a child has a problem, the parent should be taught, "What do you think we should do?" It is not a question of what I should tell them. A few years ago I was asked to speak to 150 leaving certificate students. As I was leaving - I do not normally do this - the last thing I said to the girls "There are two big messages I want you to learn about life. First, life is not fair. Second, life will be full of discomfort. If you can absorb those two messages into your life, you are going to find life a lot easier to cope with." That message should be all the way right back into primary school.

We need to teach children that human beings cannot be rated and teach children that anxiety is physical. We should be teaching all those very simple ideas in a graded way the whole way along so that when it comes to adolescence these are nearly absorbed as part of their training so that they will be much less likely to get into difficulty.

If we are to allow smartphones to rule the roost, which they are going to do, we need to have real conversations with children. I know I keep coming back to smartphones, but I think they are very important. We need to sit down with young people in groups to enable them to express their feelings. Young people have sometimes said to me that they were not allowed to use their smartphones for a while and, if they are being really honest, they felt much better during that period of time. They were pleased to be relieved of the hassle of everything that was going on. We never ask young people whether they really want to play certain games, for example. They say they have to play those games because if they do not, they will no longer be part of friendship groups. They feel alienated. We have to get young people and parents involved in this conversation. If a parent hands a child a smartphone at 9 p.m. and allows him or her to look at the most vile stuff on it when he or she is going to bed, he or she will be up all night and will not get enough sleep. We know that adolescents need nine and a half hours of sleep. Even though we understand that those who do not get sufficient sleep are far more likely to be anxious, to get bouts of depression or to self-harm, we hand our children devices that keep them awake half the night. All of these things are parenting issues. One of my favourite statements when I am asked about parenting is that the job of a parent is not to be liked - the job of a parent is to parent. I know it is not an easy job because I have been there. It is not easy.