Youth: Wussification, Resilience and Alarming Trends

TONIGHT Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, an expert in child and teenage mental health will help local parents navigate the increasingly stormy waters of raising a young adult.

“First I will tell them the bad news and then tell them what they can do about it,” said Dr Carr-Gregg.

“The bad news is that the youth suicide rate in young women has doubled in ten years and in boys and girls presentations to psychologists and psychiatrists has tripled over the last ten years with young people with mental health problems, so it’s a pretty gloomy picture and we have to stop thinking about the really expensive ambulance at the bottom of the cliff and I’m interested in how we can build robust fences at the top,” he said.

 

Read the full interview with Dr Carr-Gregg:

Why is there such high rates of suicide amoung young women and is the increase in the number of people going to see psychologists necessarily a bad sign, could that be because the community is becoming more aware of mental health and are accessing services?

Yes it is a good thing, it is a terrific thing, early identification and prompt treatment is associated with a much better outcome so that’s great, as to why we are seeing these rates, nobody is sure if we are more aware or if the prevalence is going up.

What we can say is the journey into young adulthood probably has more risk factors now than ever before things like social media, online porn and the incredible pressure we put kids under at school and the fact that to be honest with you we’re actually not very resilient.

I was talking to a grade three teacher and she said the big change for her over the last ten years is that when a kid today gets a maths problem wrong they can breakdown into tears and be inconsolable, now that is not good news, because the kid is going to have a lot more on their plate than a maths problem later on in life.

So I think building resilience is very important and I’ll make a point of going through the five key factors which build resilience in kids.

Is humour one of those key factors?

Yes, it is one of the social and emotional competencies you’ve got to have a sense of humour.

The kids who survived the concentration camps in Nazi Germany all had dark humour and there was seriously nothing to laugh about but they managed to find something and I think it greatly contributed to their survival.

 

Are parents too concerned about their children’s academic performance now?

Many parents believe that they are defined by weather or not their kids get a good ATAR (Australian Territory Admission Rank for University admission) and the kids can be a source of narcissistic supply which I thing is unhelpful when the pressure around the ATAR is just crazy and often the reality is you can be much better off getting a trade and make much more money, most University graduates can’t get jobs.

We need to educate parents better.

 

There seem to be many adults in what is considered successful well paid positions who are unhappy, so are we leading our children down the wrong path?

One quarter of all Australians are manifestly unhappy so we need reorganise our priorities somewhat and I’ll certainly be talking a little bit about that as well.

 

Do you think we should be so focused on ‘happiness’ and perhaps be looking more at contentment and the range of emotions?

I think we should talk about well-being, not happiness and part of well-being is riding the ups and the downs, I’m a bit sick of happiness to be honest.

 

Does social media affect children differently to adults, what is the impact it is having on young people?

The main impact of social media is it makes kids really lack confidence because they see what everybody else has and they think it came easily.

I’m the agony Aunt for Girlfriend magazine and many girls say they want to be Nicole Kidman or Kim Kardashian and especially Nicole she worked really hard to get what she got and it doesn’t come easily; but this is a generation that thinks success is fame and money.

I think that is a shame, we don’t have very many good role models anymore who aren’t about fame and money and I think that is sad.

I grew up with Fred Hollows as a hero, the most selfless man you could wish to meet, I think we need more of those types of people now.

Do you think a lot of those values are coming from parents placing too much value on people who are financially successful or well known, not just social media?

That’s where they get their cues from, no question, none at all.

I think parents have to take a step back and think what’s possible, many of these kids are never going to own their own houses many of these kids will have multiple jobs over a lifetime and they’ll change and life has changed so I don’t think we are preparing kids for the future in the way that we should.

The whole social media thing with all of the bullying, harassing and trolling is really difficult to deal with when you are young, so you have to prepare kids for that.

 

Why do you think we are seeing more youth suicide?

I think that is due to the predominance of risk factors in their life and the lack of protective factors they don’t think they have the capacity to cope in the way that other generations did and that’s very much born out in a study released in 2017 done by Mission Australia where 25,000 kids were asked what is your biggest problem and it was coping with stress.

When I was growing up stress was an architectural phenomena, bridges got stressed, arches got stressed, I didn’t know anyone who was stressed I didn’t know what it meant.

 

Do you think parents contribute to that since so many people wear stress and being time poor as a badge?

There’s a bit of that, yes and I also think they don’t know the difference between sadness and depression, which is sad too.

Not everyone who is sad is depressed, if your grandmother has just died you are sad and you should be sad, so there is a lot of work we have to do on emotional literacy.

 

Do you think people misuse the term ‘bullying’ and it’s diminishing the seriousness of it when it is used to describe someone who has been rude or has upset them in someway?

Yeah, I sit on the National Centre for Bullying and what we are really clear about is that many parents don’t get the distinction at all.

So if you and I disagree with each other that’s not bullying and that’s fine, if you decide after the conversation you don’t like me very much that’s also not bullying you’re more than entitled not to like people.

So I feel really strongly that one of the things we do at the National Centre is we make schools put on their website what bullying isn’t because I think a lot of parents wouldn’t have a clue.

 

Do you think parents are over parenting now and worried about breaking our children?

They’re much more resilient than we think.

I had a woman ring me up when her eight year old son’s fish died and it was floating on top of the tank and she wanted to know if it was ok for her to rush down to the fish shop and get a replacement fish before the kid came home and I said to her ‘one day you’re going to be that fish’ which is very important because it was a teachable moment.

I call it the wussification of a generation, I think that is what we are seeing at the moment.

 

In an age where there are gyms for children and devices gauging their personal best, should they be climbing trees instead?

Or have fun! I think we over parent at the moment and we have a spectrum from really over parenting to completely negligent and that’s not good either, so we run the gauntlet in Australia.

 

You touched on the impact of porn and the sexualisation of children earlier, can you explain that further?

One of the problems is kids hit puberty earlier now and there is this thing called developmental compression, where their physical development shoots ahead of their psychological and our ten years of age which was a time of great innocence is now about six for this generation which is terrifying.

By the age of ten a lot of these kids boys and girls know an awful lot of stuff that I’d rather they don’t know.

And the clothing stuff really irritates me, in 2010 I had a go at Best and Less because they had in their stores a push up bra labelled for eight year olds and I went on Sunrise and I talked about it the community was rightly outraged and they lied and said it was a labeling error, but in fact that’s the worst example of that early sexualisation that I’ve seen.

 

Do you think parents need to chill out a bit and trust they are more resilient than we may think?

It would be great if they could it would be really good for the kids.

I think kids growing up in the country are massively advantaged and to the benefit of the community, but the downside is you don’t have the services for when help is needed and the undeniable fact is the suicide rate for young people in rural and remote Australia is three times higher.

I also worry about the isolation of some of those kids and I worry about the fact that because communities are little they feel more reticent to disclose if they are unhappy.

 

Learn more from Dr Michael Carr-Gregg tonight in Muswellbrook:

• WHEN: 7pm, Tuesday, May 22, 2018.
• WHERE: Muswelbrook High School.
• COST: Free
• TRANSPORT: Buses from Merriwa, Denman and Murrurundi will be available, with details to be published on the Where There’s A Will website and Facebook page.

Related story:

• Expert Answers Parents Questions – April 27, 2018.