Where the mental health crisis may begin
This BBC story stopped me.
A city is now sending toilet-training guidance out with primary school offer letters.
On one level, this is about school readiness.
But on another, it points to something deeper:
for many children, the foundations of emotional health are not being built early enough.
Teachers are reporting that more children are arriving at school not yet toilet-trained, with weaker speech and language, and more difficulty regulating feelings.
I do not read this as a reason to blame parents.
Many parents are exhausted, under-supported, and trying to manage children’s distress with the tools they themselves were given.
And often those tools are limited.
So an upset child gets distracted rather than helped to notice what is happening in their body.
A device is used to settle distress rather than support a child to stay with and process a feeling.
And distress starts to feel like something shameful rather than something that can be safely contained, understood, and worked through.
That matters.
Because long before we talk about adolescent anxiety, adult burnout, compulsive coping, or disconnection from self, there are earlier developmental tasks:
Can I notice what my body is telling me?
What I call somatic attunement: the skill of tuning into my body and making sense of what is happening inside me.
Can I stay with a feeling long enough to process it?
What I call adaptive emotional processing: learning to recognise my inner experience, name it, and move through it rather than immediately shutting it down.
Can I have a moment of struggle without feeling that something is wrong with me?
This is healthy self-worth: the skill of retaining dignity, worth, and lovability even when I am distressed, and becoming more resilient to shame.
Those are not small things.
They are foundational skills for lifelong emotional and psychological vitality.
And when these foundations are weak, the same patterns can later show up in very different forms:
anxiety, compulsive coping, burnout, depression, relational instability, avoidance, over-control, shame, and disconnection from self.
If we want to take the mental health crisis seriously, we need to look much earlier.
Not only at services and diagnoses later on,
but at the emotional, relational, and bodily capacities children are, or are not, being helped to build from the beginning.
Support for parents matters.
Non-judgemental guidance matters.
And helping children become ready for school is about far more than getting them through the classroom door.
It is about helping them arrive with not only classroom readiness, but the beginnings of inner stability.