No wonder our kids are messed up

VARIOUS prominent intellectual celebrities - typically they describe themselves as "academics and professionals"

- have begun a campaign to change the way we bring up children. They have noticed that kids these days are "finding it difficult to cope with the increased pace of technological change"

The kids are eating junk food instead of real food. And they are not running about, but instead sitting in front of the television, the computer or the electronic game. And if they talk to one another, they do it by text and mobile phone. So our children's lives have become artificial. They are deprived of reality

In short, say these academics and professionals, "children are depressed"

I was astonished there was no suggestion that children be brought up to have healthy minds in healthy bodies. These experts thus reveal by their own words they are as dislocated from reality as the children they are trying to help

The leading ones turn out to be the usual suspects anyhow: Susan Greenfield, behaviourist neurologist; Philip Pullman, children's writer and militant atheist; Penelope Leach, academic expert on children and families at Birkbeck; Jonathan Porritt, Prince Charles' favourite tree-hugger; and various other commissioners for bureaucratic dogooding, mental health experts, psychologists and secretaries of social policy quangos

Why can't these brain-boxes see that our problem is we don't dare encourage personal pride and self-respect these days? We cultivate self-esteem instead - which is the one thing we shouldn't do, esteem ourselves

But we all think so well of ourselves. Our obsession is with the "self" which must be perpetually pampered and indulged. And our new fundamental beliefs are in "progress"

and "change". All the parties in the General Election are talking of nothing else - so everywhere there is a lack of reality and an obsession with image

Progress is the new religion and it is the phoney religion of gadgets. Everybody has to have the latest. But this religion of gadgets and progress is a false religion because progress is not happening. It is the myth the modern world lives by - a delusion measured only by all those shiny new gadgets

Modernity is worshipped for its own sake

And when anyone in the media wants to refer to something truly awful, they describe it as "medieval". But the Middle Ages were heaven on earth compared to the 20th Century

Progress? There were more people killed in the wars of the last century than in the wars of all the previous centuries added together

I wonder we don't put up plinths in town centres in honour of our modern idols: mobile phones; PlayStations; expensive trainers; designer clobber with fashionable logos; junk food; trashy books; and all the other accoutrements of clubbing and drugging, the mindless pop culture and shopping 24/7

The modern world persists in its denial of reality. We won't acknowledge our true human nature. We pretend. We lull ourselves into a world of phoney progress, insane ambition and sickening self-esteem. Is it any wonder children are perplexed and depressed?

These self-appointed secular professionals and academics are powerless to help - precisely because they are secularists, materialists and technocrats. Kids need lives more rooted, more rough and tumble. Need to know more about children's healthy eating ?

? Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange