By Richard Eckersley, published by Australia21

The health and wellbeing of young people, an important indicator of Australia’s future population health, is declining. This development is of immense social significance. It has implications not only for how we deal with specific current concerns such as child abuse and neglect, obesity, media sexualisation of children, and binge drinking, but for national priorities and public policy more broadly.

With the possible exception of increasing wealth, improving health is the most widely used measure of human progress. Wealth has only ever been a means to the end of a better life; health is a core component of that end. If health is not improving, it is hard to sustain the belief that, as a society we are making progress.

Closing the gap between the scale of policy responses and the magnitude of the challenge to optimise young people’s wellbeing will require more fundamental actions. These actions need to go well beyond specific health interventions. Examples include:

• Conceptualising health as more than a matter of healthcare services, including shifting emphasis from the dominant, disease-focused, biomedical model of health to a preventative, social model. This should include increasing the proportion of the health budget allocated to prevention and public health from less than 2% in 2005 to, say, 5% by 2020. The tradition bias in medicine (including public health) against mental health also needs to be addressed.
• Reorienting education to give it a clearer focus on increasing young people’s understanding of themselves and the world to promote human growth, development and wellbeing in the broadest sense. This should include making more use of innovative approaches like role-based inquiry, narrative, and experience- and issue-based learning.
• Setting stricter standards for the corporate sector, especially the media and consumer industries, to uphold the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which include the right ‘to protection from harmful influences, abuse and exploitation’. Concerns here go beyond junk food ads, ‘alcopops’ and the media sexualisation of children, to include the wholesale ‘commodification’ of childhood: the commercial manipulation and indoctrination of young people into an unhealthy, unsustainable, hyper-consumer lifestyle.
• At the most fundamental, cultural level, changing the stories or narratives by which Australians define themselves, their lives and their goals. These changes should include making better health (in the broadest sense), not greater wealth the nation’s defining goal. This, in turn, would shift the emphasis of economic activity away from private consumption for short-term, personal gratification towards social investment in building a more equitable, healthy and sustainable way of life.

Download the full report (PDF) from http://www.australia21.org.au/pdf/Youth%20Health%20Text%2008.pdf.