The Archbishop of Canterbury today warned of a crisis in modern childhood forcing youngsters to grow up too quickly.

The Very Rev Dr Rowan Williams said that a generation of young parents is failing to offer the right level of love and support to their children who, in turn, are becoming "infant adults".

In comments to the BBC Radio 4's Today programme, the Archbishop said that a wide range of different influences, including family separations, the barrage of testing in schools and commercial pressures, were causing children to grow up before their time.

"It is not just Kevin the teenager, there are measurable problems," said the Archbishop.

"We are talking about one in ten young people with measurable mental health problems, including depression and self harm. That is a very worrying statistic."

The Archbishop's remarks come on the same day that the Children’s Society launches an inquiry into the state of childhood, concerned at reports of rising levels of child depression in the UK.

The independent inquiry by the charity is looking at all aspects of childhood amid growing concern over the health and quality of children’s lives. The Children’s Society is concerned about a climate of "fear and confusion" among young people. It points to higher levels of depression and mental illness in the country than elsewhere in the European Union.

The Archbishop said that he supported the inquiry and hinted at some of the influences that could be damaging young people.

In schools, he said that the new emphasis on school performance had created a climate of anxiety among teachers and administrators to achieve good results, which communicated itself to the pupils.

"It's a very difficult balance to get right because accountability in education is what everybody wants, but at the same time I think the level of testing, the age [seven] at which it begins and the relentlessness of it - the fact that teenagers don't now have even a single year without some major public testing - that makes for high levels of anxiety in the whole education system, not just the children," he said.

"It's fear... fear of failure. We have surrounded education institutions with criteria, hoops to jump through, there going to be some level of fear."

The Archbishop said that he was not advocating quick fixes, but he thought that it was important to acknowledge that there was a cluster of real problems affecting children.

He referred to the open letter last week signed by 110 academics, teachers, psychologists and authors, including Baroness Greenfield, a scientist, Penelope Leach, a childcare expert, Jacqueline Wilson, Children’s Laureate, and Philip Pullman, children's writer, which said that modern life was compromising the mental health of unacceptably large numbers of children.

They too highlighted "the escalating incidence of childhood depression" and warned that poor diet, the rise of video games at the expense of outdoor play and modern education was stifling the natural creativity of many youngsters.

The Archbishop said that computer culture did occasionally worry him, and that it was "certainly worth" having a look at the exploitation of children by advertising designed to make them pester their parents for expensive clothes and toys.

But he said that the roots of the problem lay in the over-restrictive regime in which children grew up, what he termed an "unwillingness to let children be children for long enough".

He suggested that mothers and fathers were so worried about the now highly publicised threat of paedophiles that some were over-protecting their youngsters.

"The consequence has been to discourage and undermine the volunteering culture, to instil in children themselves a sense of suspicion and unease, and to deprive them of the great outdoors," he said.

He suggested some possible ways ahead. "The whole thing about pester power for children which advertising inculcates so often, I think that needs challenging," said Dr WIlliams.

"And we can begin to ask questions about the testing culture, and we can begin to ask questions about how we encourage rather than discourage volunteering."

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