The Kids Are Not Alright

Something has gone seriously wrong with our children.

Things are not ok and we need to fix it, fast. From babies to toddlers, to those in their mid-teens, school leavers and those on verge of adulthood. Young people's mental health and wellbeing in this country is amongst the lowest in Europe and deteriorating year on year. Our children are not happy.

From social anxiety to depression, the explosion of special needs, ADHD and autism, those unable to make eye contact or communicate verbally, from toddlers hooked on screens to teens addicted to smartphones, children with selective mutism, gender dysphoria or eating disorders, those who are self-harming, lonely, obsessed with Roblox or wracked with climate anxiety, things are not alright with kids in the UK.

From the bestselling author Emma Woolf comes this blistering and painful exploration of what's happening for young people in the UK right now. With personal insight, warmth and wit, she compares our childhoods of the past (full of falls and fun and danger) with the over-anxious, over-protected experiences of kids today. Are they really safer indoors, isolated, glued to the internet, or running wild and free?

The Kids Are Not Alright is a call to arms, a battle for young minds. This is a manifesto for real childhood.

Emma Woolf is a writer, journalist, TV and radio presenter, political commentator, broadcaster, campaigner and wild swimmer.

Born in London, she attended St Paul's Girls' School and went on to study English at Oxford University. She worked first in advertising and then in publishing, commissioning and editing many bestselling psychology and sociology titles over a ten-year period at some of London's leading publishing houses. Following a series of high-profile media appearances and articles she went freelance and began to write a weekly column for The Times which ran for three years, and a weekly column for The Daily Beast US, on The View from the UK. She also writes for The Telegraph, The Sun, Guardian and Daily Mail, Cosmopolitan, Red, Grazia, Closer, Bella and Good Housekeeping, among others. Internationally, she has written for Vanity Fair in Italy, Harper's Bazaar and The New Daily in Australia, Newsweek, Vice, Vogue Korea, and Newsweek Europe.

Early media appearances included Newsnight, Woman's Hour, The World at One, the PM Programme and Sky News. Emma's career developed as an arts critic and presenter on Radio 4's flagship Saturday Review, newspaper reviewer on Radio 5 Live and presenter on Channel 4's Supersize vs Superskinny. 

She speaks internationally at Literary Festivals from Cheltenham to Mumbai, and at mental health, medical and wellbeing conferences.

Emma's non-fiction books have been published in the UK and US and translated around the world in countries as diverse as Hungary, South Korea and Italy. Her award-winning titles include:

• An Apple a Day: A Memoir of Love & Recovery from Anorexia (2012) 
• The Ministry of Thin: How the Pursuit of Perfection Got Out Of Control (2013)
• Letting Go: How to Heal Your Hurt, Love Your Body & Transform Your Life (2015)
• Positively Primal: Finding Health & Happiness in a Hectic World (2016) 
• The A-Z of Eating Disorders (2017)
• Wellbeing: Body Confidence, Health & Happiness (2019). 

Her first novel, Ways of Escape was followed by a second bestselling novel, England's Lane (published in the US as The Years After You). Both novels have been widely praised as heartbreaking tales of love, loss and redemption.

Emma is the great-niece of Virginia Woolf and independent publishing is in her DNA - hence her joy at joining the Free Speech Press as a founding author. She grew up in her father's own independent publishing company, Cecil Woolf Publishers, and they lived with books and cardboard boxes and page proofs all over their house in Camden Town. Emma learned to edit and proofread at the kitchen table from an early age, and clamber over piles of books in the living room, and help out with packing parcels with her father.

Emma's literary heritage goes further back, of course, with the founding of the Hogarth Press by her great-uncle and aunt Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917. This was the pioneering independent publishing company they ran from their Richmond home, with a small hand press in the dining room on which they manually typeset every single letter of every single book. Notable Hogarth Press authors included Sigmund Freud, Katherine Mansfield and T.S.Eliot. 

Virginia and Leonard famously rejected James Joyce's Ulysses, feeling that the hand-written pages were too legally risky and "reeked with indecency". More than a century on, the Hogarth Press is still in existence as one of the imprints at Penguin Random House. 

Away from writing, Emma spends her life as a political commentator, analysing and debating current affairs, news and politics on TV and radio. She's a regular on GB News, Sky News, BBC, LBC, Times Radio, TalkTV, The Mike Graham Show and many other channels in the UK and around the world. 

She's also a single mother to a brilliant little boy who (like his mother) is being brought up without TV, smartphones or the internet. Emma's own experience of growing up without television has led her to campaign passionately for tech-free, phone-free childhoods, and a return to values of play, fun, risk, adventures outdoors, books, conversation and argument, walking barefoot in the grass, wild swimming... less YouTube and more real human childhood... hence her first book for Free Speech Press.