Stop Experimenting on Our Kids

We have got to stop using children as guinea pigs.

The Guardian ran a piece this week about a 1960s education experiment where researchers decided it was a good idea to invent an entirely new alphabet to help kids read. The results were disastrous. Thousands of children were left unable to spell, their basic education scrambled.

What’s maddening is that we haven’t learned a thing. We’re still experimenting on children – only now the buzzword is mental health.

Schools across the UK are flooded with mental health interventions. Mindfulness sessions. Wellbeing apps. Assemblies on anxiety and trauma. External organisations like YouHQ parachute in with glossy tools and dashboards – and parents are rarely informed, let alone asked for consent.

And yet, the outcomes are getting worse, not better.

The Children’s Society reports that 1 in 5 children aged 8 to 16 now have a probable mental disorder. That figure has been climbing steadily. So here’s the awkward question no one seems willing to ask: what if more mental health support is actually making things worse?

It’s not just correlation. It’s a trend. The more we pump resources into school-based mental health schemes, the more we see anxiety, depression, and self-harm going up. We’ve created a culture where kids are taught to monitor themselves constantly for signs of distress. They’re given a language of diagnosis before they’ve developed emotional resilience.

Abigail Shrier’s book Bad Therapy lays this out clearly. Well-meaning adults, often untrained, are pathologising normal childhood experience. Feeling nervous before an exam? That’s now “test anxiety.” Upset about a friend? Let’s talk about your “attachment wounds.” The result isn’t wellbeing – it’s fragility. It’s dependency. It’s a whole generation learning to self-identify as mentally unwell before they’ve even left school.

And it’s not surprising that the organisations offering this kind of help – no matter how well-intentioned – keep calling for more funding, more access, and more expansion. There’s an entire industry now that benefits from keeping children in perpetual need of help.

We saw this with the self-esteem movement too. “Tell every child they’re brilliant and they’ll thrive.” Spoiler: they didn’t. We ended up with young adults who can’t cope with criticism, who expect applause just for showing up. Now we’re doing it all over again – only this time, with therapists instead of gold stars.

Let’s be clear: children do need support. But support that works. Support grounded in data. Support that doesn’t ignore parents or bypass evidence. We need to step back, look honestly at what’s happening, and ask whether the endless wave of “interventions” is helping or hurting.

Let’s stop the untested schemes. Let’s stop treating childhood like a medical condition. Let’s stop experimenting on kids.

And let’s go back to education.

Teach them to read. To write. To think. To wrestle with hard things. Let them grow up with real challenges and real victories, not bubble-wrapped in therapeutic jargon.

It’s time we remembered what schools are for.