'My mum showed me how to connect with kids'

When Saskia Joss was seven, she told her mother, television presenter and broadcaster Vanessa Feltz, that she wanted to be a psychotherapist.

- Saskia Joss changes children and teen's lives as a therapist, but she couldn't have done it without her mother Vanessa Feltz

More than 20 years later, she fulfilled that ambition and has now written a book, the title of which came from her mum, a woman never short of an insightful phrase or pithy response.

The result is Help! My Child's Anxiety Is Giving Me Anxiety, a hugely practical and comprehensive guide for parents navigating issues faced by young people today, from gender questioning to bullying, eating disorders to self-harm.

"I was talking through the book with Mum and she said 'Isn't the whole thing that anxiety makes parents anxious?', says Saskia, 36. "I thought 'She has hit the nail on the head'. It was exactly what all my friends were feeling."

Saskia says when she made that declaration at seven, she probably did not even know what a psychotherapist was, and she tried other careers before becoming a child therapist specialising in anxiety and trauma.

"It took a longer time to come true because I decided to be a primary school teacher first," says Saskia. "Being a teacher was great, but being a therapist made me much happier and the work I could do was more impactful in the amount of children I could help. I can go to the source of the problem and sort it out much more quickly."

PANDEMIC

She's now been a therapist for more than six years. She initially started training as an adult therapist before swapping to children.

"I realised there were children who, even with the best teachers, even with an incredible school, would never be OK if they didn't have some additional kind of intervention."

The need for Saskia's services has never been greater. Since the pandemic she has noticed a huge change in anxiety in children. "It was less obvious and less common before. Parents would see it as children going through a phase. Whereas now it feels like it sticks around for much longer. Once you've got anxiety, it's very hard to shake it for some people," she says.