When Lorrie Peniston brought her baby son home from the hospital 17 years ago, her first thought was, “I’ve no clue what I’m doing”. She has since discovered she was not alone.

The psychotherapist regularly meets people struggling to meet the pressures and demands of parenting.

They love their children and want to do the best by them, but there is very little information out there to help.

“There’s no guide book, so most of us do by trial and error,” Mrs Peniston explained.

“One thing that’s common for people to talk about is the pressure they have as parents, which in turn can create a lot of anxiety.

“Anxious parents can raise anxious children, so we have to be able to find a way to accept our imperfections so that we aren’t giving children the message they need to be perfect, because that’s certainly not possible.”

Mrs Peniston, 50, believes one of the most useful things you can teach your children is how to be resilient.

She will be sharing her findings on this next week at Paradox of Privilege, a seminar she is hosting at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute.

“There’s an assumption the more resources and privilege a family has that’s going to increase the child’s wellbeing, but the science shows the opposite,” she said.

“The science shows that parental involvement can do a lot to either contribute to the happiness or unhappiness of today’s youth. Sometimes parents feel very guilty because we can’t give our children the time and attention they need and, as a result, we sometimes fill that with materialistic things.

“We substitute these things for our time and attention — and children know.”

Research shows that young adults are now less able to deal with the common stresses and strains of everyday life.

Counselling needs for college and university campuses have doubled over the past five years as more young people have emotional crises over “seemingly insignificant events”.

“Young people today are quite emotionally fragile and universities are finding that they aren’t able to manage the everyday bumps in life,” Mrs Peniston said.

“Students are afraid to fall and afraid to take risks and their grades and external measures of success tend to be more important than actual learning. These students are used to being taken care of. Whereas in the past being in university meant you had autonomy and the ability to be independent and manage your freedom, what we’re finding is that’s not happening as much anymore.”

Mrs Peniston has found some of the statistics around this phenomena startling.

While the average age for the onset of depression used to be 30 years old, it is now 14.

In addition to that, 20 per cent of high school graduates have experienced depression and adolescent suicide rates have quadrupled since the 1950s.

“Part of what I’m going to talk about at the seminar are some of the various factors that contribute to the erosion of resilience,” she said.

“Resilience is an individual’s capacity to leverage growth from change, challenges and adversity — their ability to bounce back.

“I’m going to be talking specifically about strategies and simple things that parents can do to check on this.”

Mrs Peniston is the first to admit she is not a “perfect parent”. But even in those moments when life got busy, spending active time with her son was always a priority.

“It’s not necessarily the quantity of time, but the quality,” she said. “While my son, Liam, was younger I went and got my master’s degree and that required me to travel.

“I’ve also done some extensive work with the US Army and it did take me away from home, but my husband and I worked as a team.

“It meant I needed to capitalise on my time with Liam and make sure those moments counted and that I was getting the best bang for my buck with my connections. I wasn’t distracted by the phone or e-mail or anything else that was going on.”

Today her son is deputy head boy at Saltus and has completed his application for medical school in Britain. Mrs Peniston, who was born in the US and has been married to her Bermudian husband, Bill, for 21 years, said they were thrilled for him.

“We’re very proud of him and what we’re most proud of isn’t everything he’s achieved, but rather how hard he worked for those things,” she said.

“This summer he took part in a medical programme overseas and he applied for the visas and everything himself.”

Parents have a tendency to want to do everything for their children — from homework to filling out job applications, but that creates a sense of dependency, she said.

“We often think involvement is good, so we think over-involvement is better, but that’s not the case. When we intervene too quickly with our children we’re giving them the message they can’t handle it and they stop trusting themselves and never develop an important thing called self-efficacy. That’s knowing what you can do and what you can do well.

“It’s important that they develop a level of competence where they can figure things out for themselves and what they’re capable of.

“It allows them to take calculated and appropriate risks and that’s how they grow.”

• Paradox of Privilege will take place next Thursday from 7pm until 8pm. Tickets cost $37.50 and are available at Pulp & Circumstance and online at www.bdatix.bm. Visit www.lorriepeniston.com