The head of a charity which supports Jewish teenagers with their mental health is calling on parents to establish firmer boundaries with their children when it comes to mobile phone use.

JTeen CEO and psychotherapist Yaakov Barr said that parents should be “creating an expectation that phones get handed in before they go to bed”.

He said Jewish teenagers were experiencing a “chronic lack of sleep” because they were staying up late on their devices.

He also said that excessive social media use was contributing to issues around body image and social pressure, and that Jewish teenagers were less likely to reach out for help out of “fear that people will find out and talk about it in a community where everyone knows each other”.

Yaakov Barr, founder and CEO of JTeen (Photo: JTeen)

JTeen, which is based in Hendon, north-west London, goes into schools to educate students on well-being and resilience and how to apply balance to their lives. This includes teaching young people how to engage with social media “in a healthy way” rather than not at all. “We can’t dial back. This is the world we live in,” Barr told the JC.

But one of the ways that children develop healthy phone habits is by observing their parents or carers. “You only have to go into a restaurant and see adults and children hunched over a screen. Because of the developments in technology, we are all trapped into it. But we can teach them to have healthy boundaries around use and time spent on them.”

Teenagers need to learn healthy ways to engage with social media, says CEO of JTeen Yaakov Barr

JTeen was set up by Barr in 2021, with the aim of providing non-judgemental support to anyone aged 11 to 20 going through a challenging time.

The charity runs a helpline, where teenagers can reach out with a phone-call, text or WhatsApp to get help with “anything from a mental health crisis to struggling with friendships” Barr explained.

The helpline is completely anonymous and doesn’t reveal the number of the person contacting them.

Barr said that they had seen an “alarming” increase in calls to its helpline during exam season.

In response, the charity is launching 10 Life Hacks – a schools programme – in September, where students will learn how to overcome stress using easy-to-implement wellbeing techniques.

"Exam stress is a critical issue that demands immediate attention,” said Barr, who is the author of Mastering Your Mind, a self-help book for teens on adolescent mental health.

“Schools, parents, and policymakers need to prioritise mental health education. If we can equip students with practical strategies to manage stress effectively, then we are preparing them for life and its inevitable challenges and stresses.”

JTeen CEO Yaakov Barr says that the charity has seen an increase in the number of teenagers contacting them due to exam stress (Photo: Getty Images)

JTeen currently has 70 volunteer counsellors and trained therapists on call to answer messages from 6pm to midnight from Sunday to Thursday and after Shabbat in the winter. They can also direct teenagers to out-of-hours support.

Barr, who is a father of four, said: “We have engaged with thousands of kids since we started and sometimes it might be a conversation back and forth with a child. For others, it might be that they need more ongoing support.”

He said there were not many services that offered support to teenagers in crisis. “Parents often don’t know where to turn, and they don’t have that many options when it comes to getting help.”

“There are huge waiting lists nationally because of the explosion of teenagers struggling, and we have seen more children coming forward [to J-Teen] saying they need help.”

Barr said the Jewish community was probably providing more support to teenagers than what was available on a national level, but “even then, the tide is so vast. The number of people that need help is too big.”

He said that he hoped the charity could nevertheless help young people before they reached crisis point. “We want to catch these things before they develop. We often see that there is a burgeoning problem, and if you can deal with it early on, you can save lives, and that is not an exaggeration.”

For information on JTeen and its helpline, click here