Young lives lost

It's been a bad week.

It started off with news that Cory Monteith, a 31-year-old actor who is best known as Finn Hudson on Glee had passed away alone in a Vancouver hotel room. The British Columbia coroner issued a report indicating that the actor had died of an overdose of heroin and alcohol.

The man that many came to think of as a lovable quarterback with a great voice and excellent chemistry with the star of the show, Rachel (actress Lea Michele, who is also his girlfriend in real life), had struggled with drug addiction from his early teens. According to one article, he started experimenting with drugs and alcohol at 13 and by 16, he was so addicted that he dropped out of school.

Asked why he had turned to drugs when he was still, for all intents and purposes, a child, Monteith said, "Finding a place. For me it wasn't so much the substances per se, it was more about not fitting in. I hadn't found myself at all. I had no idea who I was."

I felt immeasurably sad when I read that quote. To think of immature 13-year-olds making such life and death decisions when they clearly do not have the mental capacity and insight to understand the implications of their actions is horrifying: would the 13-year-old Cory Monteith have chosen to "find himself" that way, had he realised that it would lead to him dying alone in a hotel room 18 years later, at the peak of his fame and success? Would he have made the same choice given the slightest idea how drugs take over your life and take you on a downwards spiral that can, and in fact did, destroy his life?

Most parents I know and particularly those parents who, like me, had their children on the cusp of their teens, will shiver to hear stories like these. We might be tempted to tell ourselves that no, our kids are not exposed to these dangers and that our kids live a much more sheltered life than those in Canada or the UK.

However the biggest danger to our children comes from within. I am now fast approaching middle age, but I still remember those hard teenage years. The self-doubt, the conflict of emotions between wanting to grow up and fearing it... So my heart goes out to all youngsters who find themselves facing life and death decisions without any of the perception that experience brings, and it also goes out to their parents, who are sometimes powerless spectators.

I look around and I see here in Malta teenagers struggling with exams and despairing when they fail. At this age they still cannot understand that sometimes one door may close but that invariably another door will open - that failing today does not mean that they will fail tomorrow.

I think about my 10-year-old daughter and her floods of tears when she came home and told me that she feared she had not done well in maths because she had not answered all the questions. So I can imagine the angst of teenagers sitting for O and A levels, thinking that their lives depend on their results. The teenage years are years filled with big emotions - everything is magnified a hundredfold.

How can we protect our young people from the harsh realities of life when they are still not ready to face them? This is something that keeps me awake at night and that I know worries other mothers too. In fact only last week I was chatting to a friend and she said to me, "Is it too early to tell my daughter about sex and sexually transmitted diseases? Is it too early to tell her about drugs?" We discussed the subject for hours and in the end we agreed that no, it was not too early, because life does not wait for our kids to be "ready" before it hits them with obstacles they are not prepared to face.

When it comes to exams, there is no doubt that this country is obsessed with success. Social media has to a certain extent magnified the problem, with proud parents doing the equivalent of standing on the church parvis with a megaphone, to announce to the whole world that their kids did well - that little Mike or little Ally had got a 100 in maths.

The pressure on our kids is enormous and it is our responsibility to act together as parents to let up a little. Exams are important, but they are not the be all and end all of life. It is true that we need to pass on to them a good work ethic and a determination to succeed, but we should also pass on to them the tools to help them cope when they do not succeed.

We all experience failure in life. It could be the failure of a marriage, or the failure of a business, or any of the hundreds of let-downs that each and every human being faces during a lifetime.

Tonight, when you tuck your kids into bed, tell them that you love them no matter what. That you love them because of who they are and what they mean to you and not because of what they have achieved, and most definitely not because of their exam results.

We all need to hear that sometimes.