It’s a constant challenge as a parent to stay positive rather than paranoid.’ So says one mother quoted in the Independent’s response last week to a report from Cambridge University that declared that Britain is failing its children.

It’s no wonder that parents are prone to neurosis. Over the past year, several major surveys have reached the same conclusion. Last November, the Institute for Public Policy Research found that British teenagers drink, fight and have casual sex more than any of their Continental counterparts. More recently, Unicef published a report that said that British children were the unhappiest in Europe.

Moreover, last year the education consultant Sue Palmer put out a book titled Toxic Childhood: How the modern world is damaging our children and what we can do about it. Fortunately, she followed it this year with Detoxing Childhood.

Is it cynical to think that making parents miserable is now big business? Or is the frequency of these reports prompted by a genuine concern over our children’s welfare rather than a hunger for headlines and research funds?

The Cambridge report does have substantial grounds for its findings. The information was collated from over 750 interviews conducted last year with parents, teachers, heads and pupils – and its compilers were quick to point out that contributors across nine very different regions of the country ‘often referred to specific local issues by way of illustration’.

Some of the most frequent views expressed were that ‘family life and community are breaking down; that respect and empathy both within and between generations are in decline; and that the task facing teachers and other professionals who work with children is much more difficult than it was a generation ago.’

Familiar strains, but what we need is not more analysis of just how poisonous our society is for the young but the will to transform the environment that shapes them. What comes across time and again is the sense of a lack of social cohesion, common stories, a unifying ethos that can provide the momentum to effect change for the better.

This is surely a rallying call for Christians. Not for holier-than-thou pronouncements that Britain is learning that it can’t live without us, but for an offer of the cure for this prevalent pessimism – to fulfil (as someone once said) Christ’s vision for his Church to be a vital, unstoppable, life-embracing, viral conspiracy of hope.