Bringing up daughters: The new battlefield for parents

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advertising, alcohol, anorexia, anxiety, bulimia, daughters, Depression, Eating Disorders, family, media, mental health issues, parents, pressure, self-harm, social media, Teens

Bringing up daughters: The new battlefield for parents

It’s a freezing night in Bristol, and snow is forecast – but every seat at Colston Hall in the city centre was sold out weeks ago, and not only for Ronan Keating who’s playing in the main auditorium. Also packing them in is a 59-year-old, softly spoken Australian psychotherapist, who will take to the stage for 90 minutes with just a whiteboard and some ideas that will keep his audience on the edge of their seats.

The psychotherapist is Steve Biddulph, and most of the people queuing up to hear him are the mothers of teenage girls. A few years ago Biddulph toured Britain warning of a crisis facing boyhood: now he is back with a similar message about girlhood. And if the audience here is anything to go by, he’s definitely touched a nerve. “Parents of girls are seriously worried about their daughters,” says Saffia Farr, editor of Juno magazine and the organiser of the Bristol part of Biddulph’s country-wide tour. “They feel there’s this overwhelming tide of advertising that’s targeting their daughters, of inappropriate clothing being sold in the shops, of media messages that encourage their girls to grow up way, way before their time. And they want to know what they can do about it.”

Telling them what they can do about it is Biddulph’s mission. “A few years ago, boys were a disaster area – there was an epidemic of ADHD, they were underperforming in exams, they were drinking too much and getting involved in wild behaviour,” he says. “Back then, girls seemed to be doing just fine. But, about five years ago, that all changed – suddenly, girls’ mental health started to plummet. Everyone knew a girl, or had a girl themselves, who had an eating disorder or who was depressed or was self-harming. It was a huge change in a very short period; I started to investigate why this was happening.”

Biddulph lives and works in Australia, but the crisis he sees brewing for young girls seems to be echoed across the Western world – and, in Britain, the figures suggest it’s worse than in other countries. A few weeks ago, the charity Childline announced a 68 per cent increase in youngsters contacting them about self-harming, and said most of the increase was among girls. The problem also seemed to be affecting teenagers at a younger age, with 14-year-olds now likely to be among callers.

Anxiety and depression in teenage girls is also on the rise: research from the Nuffield Foundation last year found that the proportion of 15- and 16-year-olds reporting feeling frequently anxious or depressed has doubled in the last 30 years, and is more common in girls: it has jumped from one in 30 to two in 30 for boys, and from one in 10 to two in 10 for girls. Meanwhile, a report from the Department of Health found teenage girls in Britain are more likely to binge drink than teenage girls anywhere else in Europe; more than half of 15- and 16-year-olds admit they drink to excess at least once a month. A separate report in 2011 found that one in five girls in this age bracket who drink at least once a week have drunken sex and later regret it.

Anorexia and bulimia are also dramatically on the increase: official figures for hospital admissions released last October pinpointed a 16 per cent rise in hospital admissions for eating disorders, and showed that one in every 10 of these admissions was a 15-year-old girl.

“There’s plenty to be concerned about,” Biddulph says. “Everyone who has a teenage daughter right now sees this, in their child and among their child’s friends.” The people they blame, he says, are the advertising industry and the media. “They are driving girls’ sensibilities and making them miserable. The corporate world has identified them as a new market for products, and is preying on them.” During his talk, Biddulph describes teenage girls as being out in the wilderness, surrounded by hyenas: it’s starting to get dark, he tells his audience, but they are all alone out there.

His message, though, is one of empowerment: he encourages parents to get together, to challenge the advertising industry and to lobby the Government to impose more restrictions on advertisers.

“Take the drinks industry – about 30 per cent of the market is sales to underage drinkers,” he says. “Alcohol companies are extremely powerful – but parents are powerful, too, and they have to stand against this and stop the marketing of alcopops and push for a higher drinking age.”

But the battle needs to be fought on a domestic as well as a policy front. “What we need to do is re-evaluate how we think of teenage girls: the current philosophy is that they’re growing older, so they need us less. But I believe that teenage girls go through a kind of second babyhood, and they in fact need their parents more than ever. We have to spend time with our daughters at this age: talk to them, listen to them, keep in touch with them. Staying connected to their parents makes all the difference to how they cope with the pressures they’re up against.”

Case study

Lindsay Julian, 51, lives in Salisbury. She has three daughters: Emily is 24, Olivia is 14, and Amelia is 11. She also has a son, Alexander, 28

“Emily got into drinking when she was about 15, and she started taking drugs fairly soon after that. It was a real roller-coaster time for all of us: sometimes she’d drink a lot and run off, and we’d have no idea where she was. One time, she didn’t come back all night, and we ended up calling the police. They were difficult times.

“There are so many pressures on young girls today – you’re very aware of that as a mother of daughters. So when my younger girls got close to the age where things got difficult with Emily, I thought: we’re going to do things differently this time round. I sent them to a Steiner school, where I think the pressures are lessened: the philosophy is holistic, it’s not all about exam results, which I think can be very stressful for young girls.

“Some of my daughters’ friends spend a lot of time on social media, texting and on Facebook – but I’m careful to limit those things for my girls, and it does make a difference. They watch TV but I monitor it – in some homes, TV seems like a third parent, and I don’t want it to be like that in our house. A lot of teenage girls never switch off, they’re constantly connected, and that puts them under pressure from one another as well as from advertisers.

“We’ve got friends where you can see that their 14-year-olds are more like adults; the wanting to drink, to go to parties all the time.

“Emily is fine now: things turned around for her eventually, and she now works as a researcher and has written a book. She’s a rock for her younger sisters and I’m very proud of her. I know you could say that she was OK in the end, but I don’t think it’s an experience I’d want to go through with my younger daughters. I think their adolescence could be happier, and less fraught, than Emily’s was.”

If you judged the world on advertising, you wouldn’t know disabled people exist

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advertising, disability, Downs Syndrome

If you judged the world on advertising, you wouldn’t know disabled people exist

A Spanish designer, Dolores Cortes, has chosen a baby girl with Downs Syndrome, Valentina Guerrero, to appear on the cover of her US catalogue.  It’s a bold move guaranteed to generate a little extra publicity and I welcome her decision; personally I find the image refreshing, it makes me smile to see a cute, happy young child regardless of her disability and it’s constructive to stir up the conversation about disability in advertising again.

I began modelling back in 1994 after winning the UK’s first competition to find a disabled model; this was four years after breaking my neck and acquiring my disability, paraplegia. Though I’ve had countless jobs for dozens of large international organisations and hundreds of press interviews it wasn’t until 2010 that I was finally booked for a mainstream advertising campaign for a high street fashion store, Debenhams, and only then with the backing of Gok Wan and the How to Look Good Naked team.

Advertising and marketing is about generating publicity for a product, encouraging consumers to purchase said product generating income for their client; the industry is about making money, not charity and social change unless there is a possibility to make a profit. Advertisers are generally reluctant to use a disabled model unless the product is targeting disabled customers, disability isn’t deemed suitable or aspirational for mass appeal.

However, they’re happy to take our money; high street stores and supermarkets know they have customers with disabilities, accessible changing rooms and specially adapted trolleys are provided to make our lives a little easier. There aren’t statistics for the number of disabled shoppers online, there isn’t a box to tick upon payment yet a vast number of disabled people shop online for ease; to avoid transport and access issues, to avoid changing rooms being used as hanger storage and to avoid negative attitudes.

Designers and advertisers aren’t naïve, they realise how much free publicity this drums up for their product, let’s be honest how many of us had heard of Dolores Cortes until she used Valentina in her catalogue? Now her brand is being discussed on websites throughout Europe and the US. I don’t know her motivation, extensive publicity, financial gain or promoting social inclusion but I support the decision in the same way that I support most brands that choose to promote equality and inclusivity by using models with disabilities. This week I noticed a wheelchair user in an advert for Barclay’s Bank and a blind woman is currently featuring in a Dove advert; again both positive moves that I welcome, but I ask that it’s consistent, not sporadic, as only then can it bring us closer to inclusion as the norm, not something deserving of press fanfare.

The Paralympics games have made disability very visible throughout 2012, but it’s a particular image of disability, the healthy, athletic hero or heroine; what about those who don’t fit that mould? Where’s the dad with a disability driving his kids to school? The wife with a disability shopping supermarket aisles for dinner? The son or daughter with a disability playing with their computer console?

I accept that people may find it hard to believe that simply including disabled actors and models in advertising could change attitudes, but if it couldn’t then why is it such a lucrative industry which spends millions researching exactly how to change consumers preferences from one brand to another? We are frequently subject to subtle messages from advertisers, everyone can remember an advert that struck a chord, that made them laugh or cry; there are even television programmes dedicated to ‘The 100 Greatest TV Adverts’. We are inundated with advertising all day, on websites, in magazines, on radio, in television commercials, on public transport; yet to see them you would hardly know disabled people existed. Cadbury’s, Sainsbury’s, Kellogg’s, Cow & Gate, Proctor & Gamble, M&S, Johnson & Johnson, Heinz and Ikea; well known brands you’ll find in most homes, but will you find disability in their advertising? No. Yet disabled people and their families are consumers too, we pay to purchase these brands, we eat, bathe and wear clothes just like the rest of the population.

Representation in media is a form of acknowledgement by society; consider Cherylee Houston’s character, Izzy, in Coronation Street or Cerrie Burnell presenting on CBBC, both received press attention because of their difference, but now that is barely mentioned, they are simply accepted by viewers as performers on television like their able bodied colleagues. I welcome the day when we might have a kick ass Disney heroine who just happens to have a disability so disabled children can see representation from a young age.

I hope other brands eventually choose to acknowledge their disabled customers and use disabled models; I had a great time, worked with some amazing people and hopefully changed a few attitudes along the way. Did I ever harbour ambitions to roll down the catwalk in couture week in Paris? No, I’m disabled, not deluded.