Abigail Fawcett, 15, writes play scripts in between studying for GCSEs. Photograph: Don McPhee/Guardian
It's tough being a teenager, as Laura Barton reports in today's Guardian after talking to 15-year-olds around Britain. They're 70% more likely to be depressed than their peers were in 1974, and twice as likely to display behavioural problems. They are disenchanted with education a year ahead of the GCSEs in which 54% of them will achieve five or more passes. They fret about socialising, status, shopping, sex and spots. They drink alcohol, have sex and take drugs, and 3% of the girls are clinically obese. Some are scared of gangs, violence and gun crime.
According to Chantelle Horton of Bliss magazine, interviewed for the piece, they are concerned about "being cool, and about cash and material goods. They're very concerned about crime; three-quarters of them didn't want to go to war; they're worried about tuition fees. I think they feel a bit lost, and worried, particularly about the future."
All in all, it's a far cry from the life of your average teenager during wartime Britain, for whom obesity probably wasn't much of a problem. To mark the opening of an exhibition
at the Imperial War Museum, veterans - now in their 60s and 70s - are gathering today to recall their wartime experiences of evacuation, working in coalmines, escaping torpedoed ships and seeing their parents killed in the Blitz.
But you try and tell the young people today that ... and they won't believe you.
