It's Time to Face the Truth....Our Children Deserve Better.

Can I be honest with you for a moment? Because I think we have stopped being honest with each other and it is making us all deeply unhappy.

I spent time in a world that was not mine. A world of fanfare and stages and people talking endlessly about change while creating very little of it. And I will be straight with you, I did not enjoy it. I have an incredibly receptive mind and I can recognise within moments when someone is performing rather than being real, when the conversation is about the speaker rather than the work. We do not have time for that anymore. The world is too urgent and too important for fakery. If you want to feel good you have to do the inner work no amount of validation is going to fulfil this desire long-term, you have to know and like who you are and that is what our children need to learn how to reconnect with themselves.

I pivoted back to what brings me joy. Back to what I believe in....Back to the children, the communities, the real conversations that actually move things forward.

And I think that is the question all of us need to sit with right now. Where are you going? Because so many of us are running around like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, breathless and busy and late for something we cannot even name, and it is a wonder any of us have landed at all.

The masking is what is making us miserable....The pretending and the performing along with the relentless pressure to appear fine when the world around us is asking something much more honest of us.

So let's start there. With the truth.

Let's start with something that should stop us all in our tracks. The UK is the second most miserable country in the world, and I am not talking about a tabloid headline. This is a finding from the Global Mind Project by Sapien Labs, a neuroscience research body that surveyed 71 countries. We scored 49 out of 100 for mental wellbeing while the global average sits at 65.

And when we look specifically at our children it gets worse. The UK ranks bottom in Europe for child wellbeing, sitting below Romania and Hungary, with teenage life satisfaction falling and youth suicide rates continuing to rise. More than a quarter of 15-year-olds experience regular bullying.

These are not comfortable statistics, and I know this isn't easy to read, it is why I don't or steer away from socials now because of the rage and click bait.

We Have a Truth Problem in Britain

We have become brilliant at performing wellness while quietly falling apart, talking about resilience while burning out, setting net zero targets while the people trying to deliver them are running on empty.

I was recently in a room with some of the country's leading economic minds and the honest message was this. It is going to take a long time to get out of this deficit and there are no shortcuts.

And yet the green economy tells a completely different story. While the UK economy grew just 1.3% in 2025, the net zero economy grew 10.1% in the same period. It now generates over £100 billion annually, supports nearly a million jobs and pays its workers 11% above the national average, with every £1 generating an additional £1.89 in the wider economy.

The facts are on the table. We just have to be brave enough to act on them.

What the Happiest Countries Already Understand

Finland has topped the World Happiness Report for years alongside Denmark, Iceland and the Netherlands, and these are not simply richer countries in the traditional sense. What they share is a genuine investment in people, in nature, in honest education and in trusting communities to look after each other.

They do not shield children from the reality of the world they are growing up in because they understand that preparing children for reality is far more valuable than protecting them from it.

Rousseau understood something important about all of this long before any of us were born. He believed that people are naturally good but gradually worn down by the society built around them, by competition, by comparison, by the relentless pressure to perform rather than simply to be. He would recognise modern Britain without blinking.

Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics offers us a practical way forward, arguing that the economy should meet human needs without exceeding the boundaries of the planet. Not endless growth for growth's sake but genuine change within real limits. Amsterdam has already adopted her model and other cities are beginning to follow, and we could too if we were honest enough about what is actually working.

The Conversation We Keep Avoiding

Britain has a habit of protecting the status quo at the expense of real progress, undervaluing the people doing the most important work and resisting collaboration in favour of competition. We ask those working in education, in community and in sustainability to keep giving while simultaneously questioning their worth.

I have worked alongside some brilliant community interest companies this year, people doing extraordinary things with very little resource, and what strikes me every time is their willingness to build together rather than protect what they already have. That openness is what actually changes things.

I pitched recently in extreme circumstances, in the heat alongside influential leaders, dropping my notes and never quite reaching the end. And the truth is I already felt like I had won before I stood up. Because it is never the pitch where change happens, could I have been better? Yes absolutely but this challenge wasn't about the win it was about being heard. The ironic remark was I was told you're clearly confident and if truth be told in that moment in the climate emergency, I felt anything but yet I knew I had to stand my ground through the interrogation and I handled it. It is the honest conversations, the ones where people stop performing and just tell the truth, and that is where everything worth building always begins.

Why Education Is the Only Real Answer

I did not build a regenerative education programme because it sounded like a good idea. I built it because you cannot create a sustainable future without genuinely investing in the people who will live in it.

ESG funding has a real role to play here, not as a tick box exercise or a tree planting photo opportunity but as a genuine investment in the emotional and environmental literacy of the next generation. Self-regulation and empathy are the foundation that everything else is built on. Harvard research backs this up for skilling up the leaders for sustainable change.

Children are disconnected from nature, from their own feelings and from any real sense that they have agency in what comes next. And we cannot keep asking them to fix problems we have refused to face honestly ourselves.

We cannot knock on France or Spain's door and ask to borrow the sugar anymore. That ship has sailed along with some of our closest allies and the trade relationships we took for granted, which means we have to grow our own, in every sense of the word.

Where We Go From Here

The starting point is simpler than most people think and it does not require a policy change or a significant budget. It starts with honesty, with real conversation and with choosing to show up differently for the children and the people around us.

I work with families, schools and organisations who are ready to have that conversation and if you are one of them I would love to hear from you. The work is practical, grounded and already creating real change in Hertfordshire and beyond.

Because when we consistently communicate we will always be connected, and right now connection is the most radical and necessary thing we can offer each other. 💚

The Takeaway

So many of us stick our heads in the sand. Pure ostrich syndrome. And I understand it because the scale of what we are facing can feel paralysing. But asking what can I do is not helplessness, it is the most important question you can ask, because every single seed we plant creates more growth and more change than we can see from where we are standing right now.

Invest in what is important. Not because it sits neatly in your ESG or CSR report. Because it is right and common sense. Upskilling our children and equipping them for the world they are actually living in is the most essential thing any of us can do with our time and our resource.

This is what keeps me up at night. Knowing that we have the ability to create real change but keep refusing to listen to new and innovative ways of doing it. Just because something is different does not mean it is wrong. And let's be honest with ourselves here, if everything was working the way it should be we would not be where we are right now.

We cannot change the path we have been led down. But we can provide the changemakers, the educators, the community builders and the next generation with the tools they need to invest in our sustainable future. 💚

Kerry Trevett is the founder of Green Solutions Group based in Hertfordshire. She works at the intersection of wellness, sustainability and green business, translating climate reality into human capacity.