Childline’s tips on tackling loneliness are helpful. But Christians should go further.

This month Childline revealed that that they ran nearly 5,000 online or telephone counselling sessions with youth and children in 2023-24. There are lots of issues that worry youth and children but, in those sessions, the main concern was loneliness.  This isn’t an outlying report. The Office for National Statistics said something similar about the same time period. Loneliness, it seems, is a big problem. 

The reasons the youth and children counselled by Childline felt lonely ranged from the problem of moving house and having to make new friends and modern-day parents working long hours, through to damaging experiences of bullying, onto the contemporary issue of Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) when seeing others having fun on social media.

One 11-year-old told Childline:

“I feel so lonely at school, I only really have one friend. What’s harder though is I feel I can’t talk about how much it upsets me. My parents seem annoyed or judgmental when I try to talk about my feelings.” 

The statistics are bad, and the comments are heartbreaking, so what can be done?