We're having a confidence epidemic in our teens.

Its happening, an epidemic of low self-esteem.

As someone who is just healing with this issue, trying to work it out and overcoming lack of self-esteem more and more each day, I can see it happening all around. The reason why we have so many 'drop-outs' maybe is not because they are lazy, they may just not believe in themselves enough (some are lazy but not all!).

We are seeing a confidence crisis in girls and boys who really believe at their core they are not pretty, ugly, unintelligent, unworthy and unwanted. Its all around us. I'm sick of it. I can't cope seeing these young people with so much potential feel like RUBBISH. Not on my watch. I've being there, I know what lack of self-belief does to you, it destroys you. You feel isolated, lonely - then the self-pity kicks in- and in turn then start speaking that over yourself and it becomes a self-prophecy leading to you actually leaving yourself out for fear of rejection. This is academically, socially and aesthetically. I see young girls, obsessed with twitter and facebook, having to know the latest trend and feeling genuine anxiety if they don't have the latest phone and outfit. For a while, I believed that maybe they were a bit superficial but there is something deeper that in my ignorance I almost missed; a need to belong, a need to feel loved and accepted and to feel they have a worth. A future. A destiny. The latest phone for a moment brings all of these things but then its over, the latest relationship brings this is the hype of love feelings and hormones, and the highs and lows of emotions but the reality of love kicks in and it hurts. The sacrifice it takes can't always be handled by every young person because some are just wanting to fit in. This is all natural of course, every single person who has being an adult wanted to fit in. Its inbuilt in our DNA but the extent that young teenagers, who are so precious are going to is astonishing. What have we fed them? We blame society but WE ARE SOCIETY. We've sat back and watched our young ones become so obsessed with their looks, not encouraged healthy self-esteem as a general rule and created this place that says "If you're not a size 6, have a hollister jumper and have an Iphone" you can't fit in. Now we have a pandemic of young people who are so blinded by what they should be they can't see who they are. I was like this but with my personality, so blinded by the fact I didn't feel I had lots of friends and was Miss.Popular I didn't see what I was, who I was or what the truth about me was. I now am uprooting lies that are so deep within me, its taking a while to cut them off and build new highways; well how about building it properly from the beginning. I had close friends and family speak the truth over me, but I got so lost in what I was told my own age group, how rejected I felt that I just believed a lie over the truth. This is happening to young people, on a even greater scale because now in a society with statistically more broken families than ever before we are left with broken people. Parents who by circumstance are not co-parenting, single parents struggling to make ends meet. In no way am I crisiting singleness or divorce, sometimes its just a circumstance and not really anyones fault just a situation but its left us with broken parents and therefore broken children who need affection and need love but its hard to give (in no way have parents failed their children) when you have to work to live.

I'm recommending we start speaking positively and engaging our young people in positive conversations. Instead of hearing them affirm over themselves that they are not a model figure (however, it must be noted there is a difference between someone believing a lie and someone who is heavy and needs to go on a diet for health reasons) we have to re-lay the foundations of our young peoples' thinking. By making then say good things over themselves, engaging in positive conversation, helping them believe the truth and educating them into what LOVE says about them not what LIES say about them. We have to open our eyes as a society and start to deal with issues because if we don't history will repeat itself in their children.