Diolch, Ddirprwy Lywydd. Well, Members, you can tell from the tone of the motion that we are looking today for an open and discursive debate, which will help inform three things, I think: firstly, how to improve the well-being of individual children, which is obviously the most important, but also how to help them grow up with a sense of resilience and confidence to be good citizens, and then, of course, how to help our Governments, regardless of their politics, to agree that without an effective long-term vision for child health, other aspirations for our young people are going to be a bit of a stretch.

Raising our children, regardless of their circumstances, their start in life, their challenges, which of course may be lifelong in some cases, to be able to cope and to really believe that tomorrow is another day is the most valuable of gifts, not just for an individual child, but for a strong social fabric. And yes, of course, as part of healthy maturing, young people in Wales, as anywhere else, need to come to terms with the usual youthful crises of confidence: things not going their way and a range of petty injustices. But something seems to be happening that is making this healthy maturing more difficult.

We heard earlier from Angela Burns about the growth in unhappiness for girls and their sense of being stranded with their anxieties. It’s younger boys who admit to being unhappy, often associated with schoolwork, conduct and inattention. Left alone, these unhappinesses that children experience can grow into something far more serious than youthful unhappiness. These findings, while they might be exacerbated by what we recognise as the effects of poverty, are found across the socioeconomic board, and we miss them if we rely too heavily on indicators, as Angela said, such as family income and structure. You can find the happiest, most resilient, most emotionally supported children in the poorest communities in Wales and the loneliest, most directionless, most emotionally abandoned children living in mansions. Who is the more deprived on those indicators?

Of course, I’m not gainsaying any of the evidence about the connection between poor child and maternal health and deprivation. Everything I’m sure we will hear today about overcoming social inequalities and building the data to approach it in a more granular way is something I’m sure that the Cabinet Secretary will see the sense in. It’s the kind of data we collect that will inform change. My point is that every child’s mental health is important and if one in four of us is likely to experience poor mental health, then it’s pretty clearly no respecter of objective socioeconomic boundaries. Building up this different granular data is essential not just to judge the scale and depth of poor mental health, but for designing effective mental health support for all children. We know that the child and adolescent mental health service is struggling. I’m sure poor old Lynne Neagle is fed up of saying it. And, yes, young people may be being wrongly directed towards CAMHS and, yes, in all fairness, Welsh Government is investing more in talking therapies, which is good news, but we are in difficulties in meeting the specific mental health needs of individuals before adulthood, and we are in difficulties preventing poor mental health in the first place.

So, in looking at a long-term vision for child health, let’s not ignore preventable poor mental health. Compulsory teaching about healthy relationships, different sexualities and gender equality is part of that, I would say— so I hope that your colleagues, Cabinet Secretary, will have their working party report on that sooner rather than later—but so is understanding that you are part of something bigger than yourself or even bigger than your own family. It’s easy enough to blame social media for this, so I will, but when you’re getting 500 likes for a picture of your new eyebrows well beyond your teens, and when that becomes more important than saying hello to your next-door neighbour, standing up for someone else on a bus, or carrying someone else’s bag for them when they’re trying to control a buggy and three kids, do you have to ask, ‘Why are people more unhappy?’

Of course, we can’t go back. I see tremendous examples of individuals coming together via social media to stand up as a community and fight for something or, even better, take responsibility for it themselves. Individuals who, in the analogue age, would never have gone to a public meeting or got involved in working as a group to solve a problem in their area, because they were too shy, had no self-belief or, worst of all, thought it was somebody else’s problem, someone else’s responsibility. If you just take the example of social care in years to come, we are not going to be able to deal with that if we are a disconnected society. We need our children to grow up healthy in body and mind, strong and confident enough to contribute to healthy communities. Thank you.