"Stress" and its slightly more clinical-sounding cousin, "anxiety", are the curses of our age. Our latest worry, we discover today, is that, according to a survey by researchers at Cambridge University, our primary-school age children are telling us they suffer from the mental and emotional torture of too much testing and examination, against a background of generalised fear of climate change and terrorism.

But what does it mean that our 7- to 11-year-olds are stressed? Isn't stress, after all, simply part of the human condition, and even a positive stimulus to response and action? There is a healthy level of stress that makes us work and thrive; arguably, there is even a type of synthetic worry we enjoy in a mildly masochistic way (much marketing and advertising depends on it, and without it, the very substantial circulation of the Daily Mail, for instance, would probably collapse).

Of course, people can experience a level of anxiety as a symptom of depression, which paralyses them and makes their lives miserable. But that is a medical condition, almost always psychogenic (rather than social or world-historical) in origin, and we have Prozac and therapy to treat it. The way this report recruits, in a headline-grabbing way, the language of psychiatric disorder should not stampede us into thinking that our children are on the edge of a nervous breakdown because they have a lot of homework or because they've witnessed the wicked "propaganda" of An Inconvenient Truth.

Primary-school children are more tested than they used to be, but most of the tests are for the purpose of assessing the performance of their school, not the child. Sure, if teachers are transferring their anxiety about getting good-enough results to their pupils, that's a potential problem. But this report does not prove that this is happening. Parents, teachers and government all want and expect standards to rise, and this is part of the price. The reward is more young people in higher education than at any time in the country's history - an achievement and aspiration worth a bit of mild stress, no?

So, what about what the survey calls the more "pervasive anxiety" about the state of the world? Climate change and terrorism are extremely serious global concerns; there's no underestimating them. But every generation finds its overwhelming worries, rooted in real events: for me, in the 1970s and 80s, it was the threat of nuclear war internationally, and a resurgent neo-Nazi movement, the National Front, locally, that provided the stuff of nightmares. (What did I do to deal with those "anxieties"? I joined CND and went on anti-fascist marches - the stress-as-stimulus-to-action thing at work.) For my parents' generation, it was Hitler, the cold war and Cuban missile crisis that threatened annihilation. For their parents, perhaps, the first world war and the depression.

I could go on, but the point is that there is no period in history that has not been subject to what appeared to be vast existential threats. To worry about them is rational, but to wallow in millenarian visions and phantasmagorias of destruction is not. Wailing and gnashing of teeth is for after bad things happen, not before. The truth is that, for our children, the drumming hooves of the four horsemen of the apocalypse have probably never been further away; we should be wary of too much navel-gazing concern about our small problems, when in other parts of the world there are still millions who actually face war, pestilence, famine and death.

Every epoch has its moral panics, and every era imagines that what went just before was a lost, Edenic golden age. This is not even my argument; it is made for me by the lead author of the report, Robin Alexander:

"Although there is a strong vein of concern that childhood used to be better; it's important not to indulge in nostalgia for childhood, it has always been under stress in one way or the other and poverty was much more prevalent in the 1950s. Every generation has its nightmares and problems to contend with."

But NOSTALGIA FOR CHILDHOOD 'NOT TO BE INDULGED' doesn't exactly set the world alight as a headline, does it? The story itself illustrates that we like to be scared - in a controlled, modulated way. And if the stress isn't there already, then we invent and manufacture it. Without it, we'd never get anything done.