2023-06-12 14:15:20
Alone, with elderly parents and increasingly evident signs of discomfort: one in three young people asks for psychological support. This is the photograph taken by the survey promoted by the Fondazione Foresta Onlus of Padua in high schools on over four thousand students. The project is called “Permanent andrological prevention in schools” and the results are alarming: “The use of anxiolytics is increasing, those with separated parents tend towards sexual promiscuity”.
The research was conducted through a questionnaire distributed to 4,383 students between the ages of 18 and 20 (1,781 males and 2,592 females, average age 18.4 years) attending high school institutes in the Padua area, within the project “Permanent andrological prevention in Schools”. The data collected – reads a note – showed an increase in unease among young people which manifests itself with a greater sense of loneliness, with an increase in risky behaviors such as smoking and drugs and little in-depth information on sexuality.
“For fifteen years we have been carrying out a project that is developed in schools, speaking to thousands of students – says Carlo Foresta, former professor of Endocrinology at the University of Padua and president of the Foresta Onlus Foundation – and we have collected a lot of material to compare the changes in behavior and lifestyle of children. Already in 2018 we had grasped a very important moment of youth discomfort, which emerges from certain behaviors such as school dropout, social isolation, addiction to cyber sex, eating disorders. And since then we had moved to try to understand and above all find out how to help”.
The key element that emerged from the questionnaires – the note details – is that over time the family constitution has changed. Compared to 2005, when the project started, the parents are four years older: the average age of the mother when the boy is 18 is 50.7 and that of the father is 54. In practice, the young man lives in a family where there has been a generational leap. “This is an important fact – underlines Foresta – because it is one thing to have a 40-year-old parent and another to have one 50 or even more. How fundamental it is that 18% of these children are an only child given the importance of socialization within a family nucleus”.
The parents of these 18-year-old boys today – continues the note – lived in a completely different social and family context from the one in which their children grow up: one in five boys is the son of separated or divorced people, this means that from the first stage of adolescence these young people find themselves experiencing an anxiety-inducing situation, which leads to the use of anxiolytics and antidepressants, but above all in the request for psychological support which, already high in the global sample (31%), rises to 40% in the children of separated or divorced parents. In this single-parent context, a significant increase in manifestations of youth discomfort is observed: more dissatisfaction with life (27%) and more self-harm (23%). Even sexual habits seem to be affected by the diversity of the family context, the research highlights: unprotected relationships and multiple partners are more frequent in children of separated or divorced parents (19% and 14% respectively), sexually transmitted diseases (2.2% ) and the use of the morning-after pill in girls (39%), but also an earlier age of first sexual intercourse (16.1 for males with married families and 14.8 for divorced ones).
“The photograph that emerges from the analysis of the questionnaires that describe the sensations, fears and habits of young people must make us reflect on the realities that underlie these reactions – concludes Foresta – Better still: it is the adults who have to reflect on the consequences that can develop in young people from the life choices that our generation has imposed on their children in recent years.The research results show, once again, how important it is to open a dialogue with young people on issues that the world of adults continues to treat as taboo”.
#elderly #parents #young #people #psychological