Bullying, peer pressure, bed wetting, school work. The stresses and strains of a child’s life may be different to the stress we experience as adults, but nevertheless it all matters. Young people express their stress and anxiety in different ways. Perhaps through a tantrum, hair pulling, obsessive behaviour or excessive eating.

However they express themselves a child needs to have a system to be able to cope with this.

They need to understand the difference between feeling ”normal” and feeling ”stressed”. A good exercise for children is to trace around the child on a large piece of paper, or draw a smaller version and then ask them to draw on the body where they feel stress. Ask them why they feel like this and use your experiences to help them learn skills to mange their stress.

Other good tips include encouraging children to tell people how they feel. Teach them deep breathing techniques for when they feel overwhelmed or buy them a diary where they can write their thoughts.

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She believes that limiting exams and reducing the homework load would enable children to have a little more ‘down time’.

Atikinson, who was formally the director of children’s services at Gateshead council believes that more creative experiences are the way forward. She has championed foreign exchanges, overseas visits and outings to theaters and art galleries and says that scrapping Sats tests for 11-year-olds should be considered.

In her first interview in her new post, Atkinson warned that many children were under so much pressure to achieve high results in exams that they lacked a healthy balance between work and normal life and were at risk of becoming ill from stress.

One in 10 young people had “anxieties or diagnosable mental health problems”, and worries about achieving at school could translate into eating disorders and self-harming.