AS a former mainstream secondary school teacher and mother of two girls, I am following your debate about the teenage pregnancy strategy with keen interest.

Even before the morning after pill was made accessible to children without parental knowledge, girls were often under extreme peer pressure to behave in risky ways. I note that these kinds of behaviour impacted very negatively both on the physical health of girls and on their emotional and psychological well-being, an aspect of this debate which is often completely overlooked.

Until recently, children who wanted to abstain from the prevalent sexualised banter and horse-play could at least assume that adults were theoretically on their side, even if rarely around to protect them.

Now, it seems, the general culture is to wonder if they are not joining in, why not and how can we facilitate them in ‘behaving normally’ without immediate physical and obvious repercussions (and let the long-term psychological consequences go hang).

A report into brain development in teenagers in this week’s New Scientist (April 4) notes: “the lack of impulse control, poor judgement and a woeful underappreciation of long-term consequences” which, due to developmental and structural reasons, are features of teenage brains, and observes that if teenagers are left to their own devices (and at the mercy of an increasingly dictatorial peer group) they are vulnerable and likely to engage in risky behaviour.

It continues: “since... a broken heart... (has) been linked to mood disorders later in life, this is the time when (it is) best avoided”.

Young people need parents. In mainstream schools they need teachers and other adults such as nurses who are in loco parentis to take moral responsiblilty for children, to be accountable to parents and to place the long term interests of the child before them above expediency and a quiet life.

They do not need to be told ‘at your age, sexual activity is normal; now take a pill, get on with it and then get over it’.

This is the current message being given to young people, and those who subscribe to it are failing them.

Let us hope a glance at the soaring rates of STDs and depression among children will be a wake-up call to all adults and will galvanise policy-makers into reinstituting such traditional protection for young people, as time to spend with their families, prescribing policies which consider long-term health implications, and respect for parental authority.

Karen Rodgers Brimley Road Cambridge