The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned of a childhood crisis in Britain as he expressed concern over increasing mental illness among children.

|PIC1|In an interview with the BBC, Dr Rowan Williams said that the increasing mental illness was because children today are starved of love and affection by their parents and are growing up in a climate of fear.

The crisis in modern childhood is breeding a new generation of "infant adults" who will be incapable of caring for their own children properly, the archbishop further warned.

"There is a widespread unease about what is happening," Dr Williams told BBC radio. "We have to go to the roots of the difficulty, and that ... has to do with a shared unwillingness in our culture to let children be children for long enough."

The archbishop's fears come just one week after The Children's Society launched a national inquiry into the state of childhood in Britain - the first independent inquiry of its kind.

The Children's Society will gather evidence from children, parents and experts and will publish its recommendations at the end of 2008.

The launch last week of the inquiry was a prompt response to the joint letter published in The Telegraph in which leading professionals and academics in child-related fields, including director of Kidscape, Michele Elliot, and popular children's author Anne Fine, warned that modern life is leading to more depression among children.

Dr Williams echoed the concerns of The Telegraph statement which said that children were "over-burdened" by school tests. He said that the drive to improve standards in schools and the testing of pupils from an early age had produced an "anxiety-driven" education system.

"The fear of failure is there," he said.

Last week's statement added that children "are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past".

Bob Reitemeier, Chief Executive for The Children's Society, said, "Despite our wealth as a nation, the well-being of children in the UK is amongst the lowest in Europe. Too many children in the UK are still experiencing poor childhoods."