Episode 50 We Need to Discuss the Unique Challenges Faced by Today's Youth

Are we fully grasping the cultural currents shaping our youth's physical and mental health? 

Young people have never been so anxious and depressed, in this episode I begin to delve into the many factors that I believe are contributing to these issues. I don't know it all and I don't have all the answers, however I believe it is important we start talking about these issues; even if that means discussing hot topics. I believe we learn from talking things out; not shutting down speech which is popular today.

Embark on an important journey with me, as I begin a deep dive into the societal forces impacting the well-being of gen Z.  The digital realm our children inhabit is a far cry from the playgrounds of past generations. I discuss various social media  platforms including TikTok and Tumblr, you will be surprised about the differences between TikTok in China and the Western world. 

I discuss how smart phones and social media really work against your children; and touch on some of what they are really doing and seeing online. I also venture into the influence activists are having on our youth and the how compassion can be toxic.

Many don't want to get involved in the culture wars however, they are coming for you and particularly your children whether you like it or not.

The books I refer to in this episode are:

• We've Got Issues: How You Can Stand Strong for America's Soul and Sanity by Dr Phillip C. McGraw
• Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up by Abigail Shrier

Learn more about Fiona's speaking, radio and consultation services at Informed Health: https://informedhealth.com.au/

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Credit for the music used in this podcast:

The Beat of Nature

Music by Olexy from Pixabay

Transcript

Fiona Kane: 0:31

Hello and welcome to the Wellness Connection podcast with Fiona Kane. I'm your host, Fiona Kane. Today I'm going to be talking to you a little bit more about culture and about how it's affecting the young people today, children and probably generation Z and I don't know, maybe anyone under 30. Really, I'm going to be talking a little bit about that. What has that got to do with health? Well, I feel like culture has a lot to do with health, because our culture contributes to our health, I believe, and I am also interested in culture and politics and all sorts of things. So I'm not going to keep this podcast just being purely health. However, if I decide to start talking politics, I'll create another channel if it's purely about politics, of course, but I know that culture really does affect health and you'll understand why when I talk to you about this in this episode.

Fiona Kane: 1:30

The things I want to discuss today I've been thinking on for a really, really long time, and I want to be clear that I'm not a parent. I think being a parent is the hardest job and most important job in the world, and I am not recording this to have a go at parents. I will be having a go at a lot of things like social media and activists and people who I believe are contributing to this poor issues that we're having, the poor mental health issues we're having in our society. However, this is not an attack on parents. What I would like it to be, though, is the beginning of a discussion about these issues, because I'm really going to be talking a lot about physical and mental health of young people and what I think is contributing to the poor physical and mental health for young people, and what I would like this to be is, like I said, part of a beginning of a conversation around this. I don't have all the answers. I will say some of the things that I believe can be useful. I think this will end up being a series, because there's a lot in this, so I don't want to do too much all in one episode. Also, I have invited some parenting experts to come on with me, and, at this stage, they're really busy. I've also got a psychologist in my sphere who I might invite to talk about this, so I am open to having people experts on this.

Fiona Kane: 3:13

I'm not an expert on this. I am a nutritionist and a counsellor. I also a woman in her 50s who's just absorbed a lot of culture, seen a lot in my life and observed a lot of parenting and the good, bad and the ugly, and I think that every generation of parents tries to do better than the last generation, and my generation did try and do better. However, I think some of the things that my generation has done to do better didn't work, and every generation stuff doesn't work. So there's no perfect parenting.

Fiona Kane: 3:44

So, again, not having a go, but I think we need to discuss this because we can't fix a problem unless we identify it. So what I'm trying to do today is identify some of the issues I see and maybe delve into a little bit of some of the solutions and really just begin a conversation. So I hope that you receive this with that understanding, understand what I'm trying to achieve here and anyway, with that I will launch right in and sort of say that really I've written some notes here too. So for those watching, sorry for kind of reading my notes, but I just want to make sure that I stay on track. So what I find today with young people is that we do have a generation that has more mental health issues, I think, than any before. I don't have all those stats in front of me, but you can easily find those. There seems to be a lot of mental health issues and a lot of health issues with young people of today, and I want to talk about some of the things that I think are contributing to that. Like all things, health and wellness and mental health related things are multifaceted. There's always more than one thing, so I'm not blaming one particular thing, just having a discussion about what some of those things might be. For those of you who aren't aware, dr Phil has actually just released a new book that covers some of these things and I really highly recommend that you read it. Even though the book is aimed at Americans in Australia and certainly a lot of other places in the Western world, I think we copy what they do there and we're doing what they're doing there, so a lot we often have the same issues or we're starting to have the same issues. So, even though it seems like an American centric book, I feel like it's got a lot to offer, particularly parents in Australia and in the UK and anyone else who's got this kind of Western, western things that are going on that I will be discussing.

Fiona Kane: 5:44

I feel like children and young people are being exposed to lots of lies and lots of mistruths and half-truths. They're really being told a lot that's not true and told a lot that's not helpful. Whether it's true or not, they look at the world through devices and the invention of the smartphone. I think Dr Phil actually says in his book that essentially what's happened is now that now kids are, actually, rather than going out and living their lives, they're actually watching other people live their lives through their smartphones. Not only are they watching other people live their lives, but they're watching other people live fake lives, because a lot of these just aren't real. However, your kids, these young people, do think that they are real, and so that's what they're being exposed to is that they don't live their own life. They watch other people live fake lives, and their fake lives are so fabulous that your kids have left feeling really like they're lucked out and that their life is terrible. And this is very different from you. Know, I'm a Gen Xer.

Fiona Kane: 6:56

When we were kids, we didn't have. We didn't have mobile phones, we didn't have computers. Well, we barely did. We kind of had a computer lab at school with four or five computers that for a thousand students, that only the nerdy kids used, because they're the only ones that even knew what they were. But in general we didn't have those things right. So what we did is we went outside and we played outside and we learned how to talk to each other and we made friends and lost friends and all the different things. But we actually just re-socialized a lot and we read books and all of that sort of thing. But what we didn't do is we didn't. The only insights and other people's lives we had was on the regular TV shows we watched and was on, you know, was at neighbors or home and away or those kinds of TV shows that are still around today, and otherwise it was through magazines or books that we read. But a lot of what we learned about other people's lives was just through interesting books. It was not through watching someone's filtered life on Instagram. So we just didn't see. We didn't have that level of. We just weren't constantly consuming all of this information from all of these different places. It just wasn't there.

Fiona Kane: 8:10

So the kids today are being absolutely overwhelmed with information and notifications and ads and don't forget all of these platforms. They rely on advertising and what they do is they need to hold your children's eyes there for as long as possible and they need to, or ours as well, adults as well, anyone you know this would relate to and they need you to click on the things they want you to click on or watch the things they want you to watch, and essentially, the more time you spend watching things, the more it feeds to you for those things. They actually did a study recently where they were looking at TikTok. And for parents who don't realize this because I have friends who say, oh, my daughter's on TikTok, it's fine, she's just friends with you know a group of you, know her girlfriends from school. They just do cute dances, that's all they do and that is fine.

Fiona Kane: 9:04

But what you don't realize is there's a few things that you don't realize. The first thing is that your child is being exposed to everything. So other people may or may not be seeing them. I don't quite know exactly how it works, but what I do know is they can see everything, and when I say everything, I mean everything. They are being exposed to every type of sexual and I'm not talking even just about kind of normal every day, what you'd call vanilla I everything you could imagine on there. They are being exposed to people who are, to groomers who are targeting them. They are being exposed to really, really disgusting ideas in regards to politics and the world, and they are being exposed to things like stuff in regards to I'm just trying to think of the right language because I'm on YouTube but stuff that relates to eating disorders.

Fiona Kane: 10:15

So what will happen is if your daughter is on TikTok and she's looking at something, and she's looking at something in regards to weight loss, if she's interested in weight loss, within so many minutes it's like within minutes she will start seeing six times more weight loss stuff. But it's not just weight loss stuff. She won't be seeing healthy eating. Weight loss stuff She'll be seeing. This is how to do 400 calories a day. This is how to do anorexia. This is how to do. It's a how to guide and a glorification guide for all of these things.

Fiona Kane: 10:52

They did it, like I said before. They did a study recently where they went on and I think they created several accounts and they all said that they were, I think, 13 year old girls and they all just were interested in different things and they saw the different ads and the different videos that got pushed to those different people, and within minutes like I don't mean hours of minutes, I mean like two or three minutes. They were being exposed to just horrific stuff and, like I said, it feeds your biggest anxiety or your biggest issues, because if you're looking for weight loss, it's going to start showing you that. So, whatever it is, so within minutes they're being showing this stuff. So you think that your child's just making cute videos with their friends, but you don't know what they are seeing on these platforms, and they are seeing stuff that you would never, ever want your child to see or be exposed to. So you must know this. And the other thing, too, in regards to TikTok, is that you have to know that the Chinese TikTok is very different to the TikTok that we have in the Western world, and in China they're only allowed to see educational things, and so in China they're using TikTok to help build up their children. In the Western world, they're using TikTok to destroy them. It's important to understand this, and that is what they're using it for, because that is what it's doing.

Fiona Kane: 12:16

There are other. I'm just checking here with my notes just to make sure that I'm covering this. I'm also there's another app called Tumblr that they use, and apparently they write these joint stories on there and they will do their theme to like they might be themed to something like Harry Potter, and that sounds very innocent. You think, oh, my child's writing a Harry Potter story on Tumblr Isn't that lovely, but they are actually gay porn stories. That are very, very, very detailed stories, and I was when I heard the mothers talking about what was in these stories and what they were about. That's again it's. You know, maybe you do want your children to be doing that and that is fine, but you just at least need to know that this is and it depends on their age, depends on lots of things. So there's all these apps where you think they're doing, oh, they're doing the writing Harry Potter stories. That's great. They've been creative with all their girlfriends. Or you know, they're doing funny dance videos on TikTok. That's not what it appears to be, and so it's really, really important, and a lot of parents just don't know how to use these apps.

Fiona Kane: 13:31

If you don't know how to use the app, your children shouldn't be on them. You should be on the app and you should have absolute, 100% access to their phones and what they're doing. And in fact, in my opinion, one of the solutions to this is children. Just, I don't think children should have smartphones. They are not built for it. We were not built for it. I'm glad that we didn't have it when we were children, and I think it's destroying their lives really. So there are kinds of phones you can get that are smartphones that kind of just allow you to message and ring your children. That's the only kind of phone that I think that children should have these days, even if all their friends have got the latest and greatest. It's your job to keep them safe, not be liked by them. If they hate you, that's fine. You're keeping them safe. And if your children are really acting out a lot in regards to not having their mobile phone which they will it gives you a clue about how much a hold it has on them and how much they need to not have it if they really really can't cope with not having it.

Fiona Kane: 14:36

The other thing that's happening is with boys. They're playing all of these games. I'm not saying girls aren't doing it as well, I'm generalising, but there's a lot of games. I know World of Warcraft. I don't know, I'm not an expert on the games that they're playing, but in these games they get to really quite high levels and become quite significant, and my understanding is they get a lot of status from that and they feel really good about themselves within the game. The problem is that they cannot do that in real life and often they're the sort of person that in real life is not seen and not heard and not popular, and so they're getting really, really addicted to staying on the game because, of course, if that's the place where you feel good about yourself, that's the problem. So, again, children need to be young, people need to be socialising. They need to be out in the world and socialising Absolutely need that.

Fiona Kane: 15:31

And the other part of what is happening is there's a lot of kids these days who a lot of kids, diagnosed with a lot of things and I'm not saying that none of it's true and none of it's real and it doesn't have its place. Diagnoses have their place and of course, in Australia with our NDIS system unfortunately or fortunately, whichever way you look at it but a diagnosis is important for being part of that system and getting support. It also means that a lot of people are seeking diagnosis and diagnosis. It can be a good thing and I think it can be a bad thing as well, especially a lot of the self-diagnosis stuff right. So they look online and they find out that they have social anxiety or disorder and social anxiety has become a thing. A diagnosis of social anxiety Well, yeah, everyone has a certain amount of social anxiety.

Fiona Kane: 16:24

You know how you get out of over it you socialize. Simple as that. The only way to get over it and get around it is to do it right. You have to actually go out and socialize. And what's happened is we've had a couple of years of COVID. That was really devastating for a lot of these kids. They missed out on so many milestones and so many rites of passage and so much socializing and with kids that are home on their devices instead of out socializing with other people, the amount of times they've been to someone's house and they've got kids and the kids don't greet you or they can't even look up from their device for long enough to greet you. All the kids sit at the kitchen table on their device just looking down the whole time on their device, and they just don't know how to socialize. And I think if your kid can't put that stuff down for five minutes and learn how to have eye contact with another person and say hello, that's really problematic for that child. It really really is. Excuse me, I'll just have a drink of tea and I'm not meaning to have a go at anyone, just like. We've got to identify the issue and understand how big a problem this is.

Fiona Kane: 17:40

The other issue is that children are being told things like they're being told that the world is in climate catastrophe, they're all going to die, they don't have a future and regardless of where you fall in the climate change thing I'm not a denier, but I'm also not a catastrophist I think there's probably a middle road there somewhere. But regardless of where you fall with that, what is the point in telling your children? If you really believe that, what's the point in telling that to your children? Wouldn't you just not tell them that and help them just live a good life for as long as possible, because it's not their job to fix it? So why, even you know, tell them things that they can't do anything about?

Fiona Kane: 18:26

We used to actually not tell children things that they couldn't do anything about, that when their responsibility. But now we put that responsibility onto the kids, and not only that. We actually some of us are creating. You know, we're really proud of our Of activists that we're creating. We're creating the social justice warrior, children. So it's being allowed to just be kids and not have to think about the world, not have to worry about all that stuff We've actually got.

Fiona Kane: 18:50

Them should ring the world's problems and thinking that it's their job to fix it. Not only that, but they're told that adults don't care about the climate, adults don't care about the planet rule, trying to destroy it and you know, and they've got to fix it. And no wonder they're doing stupid things like throwing paint on paint and on Beautiful paintings and trying to destroy them or super whatever they throw on them, or hanging them, dangling themselves off bridges and stuff like that. I mean it's absolutely ridiculous. How, and it's not helping anyone. However, if you thought that you had no future and that nobody cared about it, you'd be doing something stupid like that too. They could be doing something useful, because what in in our world, the way we've resolved any of those kinds of problems in the past and stop the first time this world had problems Is it's people who go and learn and universities, and that in their, in workplaces and things are smart.

Fiona Kane: 19:42

People who are engineers and all sorts of other jobs, scientists, and they learn, they discuss things, they figure things out, they learn together and they create solutions. So kids could be getting involved in Solutions and some of them, of course, are, but many of them are just think that the world's gonna end and they're just working out. And why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you just, why wouldn't you rebel if you thought that that was the truth about the world? The other thing that's happening as well is we've got this, some of this, two different kind of political things that are coming through. So one of them is critical theories, and I won't go into a lot of detail about that right now, but essentially, critical theories are just critical of everything that ever happened in, especially in western worlds, and not helpful at all. Not useful. Just want to tear it all down. And there's a lot of things about the west western culture in the western world. There's a lot of things about history that you know we're really terrible and that you know we've learned so much and we've come so far and we can you know we can learn from and move forward.

Fiona Kane: 20:50

However, these people just want to tear it all down rather than say, okay, this is this right, this isn't so good, let's fix this, whatever. I just want to tear everything down, this people who have no interest in in nurturing or growing anything. They just want to tear it down. And that's what, unfortunately, what children are being taught as well, and as part of all of these theories, this is thing called post modernism. That's essentially telling your kids that this note nothing is real. Everything is a construct, everything is a social construct. So what your kids are being taught is that literally everything is invented, and not only is everything invented, but it's invented by Horrible white people that want to destroy the world and who have only ever done bad things, never done anything good.

Fiona Kane: 21:38

Again, there's a balance with everything. White people have done really good things and we're done really horrible things, and so has every other race. It's just the truth of the world. The history of the world is complicated and lots of violence and lots of nasty stuff and slavery within every different color and and nation, and they're still slavery happening in the world today. There's terrible things happening in the world today and people are less concerned about some of those things and a whole lot more concerned about things that happened 200 years ago, 300 years ago. Then what's actually happening now?

Fiona Kane: 22:10

So, anyway, because they're being told that there's no such thing as truth. Everything's being constructed, and they're also being told that there's no such thing as boys and girls. All there is, but there isn't so because there's no such thing as boys and girls, but there is because you can become one of the other. So it's very confusing what they're being taught, but essentially they're being taught that a boy can become a girl or a girl can become a boy and people can live whatever way they choose. That's absolutely fine. I've got no issue with that.

Fiona Kane: 22:43

However, you literally cannot become the opposite sex. Even if you have surgery, even if you have hormones, you cannot be the other. You just can't right. Unfortunately, it's a thing called biology. You can't, and it doesn't mean that people don't deserve respect and don't deserve kindness and that people don't need to be supported in the challenges that they're having and all of that stuff. This is not having a go at any individuals or any people who are struggling with any of those things. However, you can't lie to people.

Fiona Kane: 23:14

Lying to people doesn't make it better. Telling them that they can be something they're not is not helpful, and, in actual fact, what we're doing now is the one in the hundred people that had these issues that you could help them when they had the problem. Or now we're telling all the children that they can be something different. There's one family that was on line recently a woman who's got four children, who all happen to be trans. They've all been born in the wrong body. What's the chance that they've all been born in the wrong body? All that, that woman is just. Yeah. I won't say what I think about that woman, but that's just.

Fiona Kane: 23:55

Unfortunately, all of these medical and this is a whole topic for another day but WPATH, who are the body behind pushing all of this into medical practice and that sort of thing in the United States there's a lot of evidence that's just come up in the last week or so that showing that they know the harms of doing this to children and they're not. They don't care. So anyway, I think that is something a topic for a whole big topic for another day. But, yeah, changing a whole bunch of children with hormones and surgeries and living with the terrible consequences of that. There's so many detransitioners now Europe have, like in Finland and Sweden and places like that. They did all this stuff first with kids and then they realized it wasn't working and they said look wrong way, go back, please don't do this. It's not working. These children are not benefiting from this at all. It's actually having the opposite effect. But we're still going straight ahead in the US and Australia, unfortunately. Hopefully things will change soon, but my theory is first in a harm. It's always first in a harm.

Fiona Kane: 25:10

So, anyway, whole other topic, and I know a lot of people get angry about me saying that, but that is just the truth as I see it. I think that we have been frightened into not saying the truth and we have been told that it's more compassionate to just accept things and not say the truth. But it is not compassionate. To not tell the truth does not help people. To not tell the truth and letting people, letting children's bodies, people should, in the name of compassion, that's not compassion. So I just can't abide by that me personally. And the other thing that we're being told is if we talk about any of these issues where some sort of ist or some sort of phobe no, we're just having a discussion, that's all. I don't hate anybody, I don't want anything bad for anybody, I just want a healthy society and to have that we need to learn how to have these conversations, and I could be wrong about some things or write about some things, and I'll learn more as I go along. That's fine. However, we need to have these discussions. We can't help our children or help our society if we can't have the discussions. So it's really, really important that we have these discussions.

Fiona Kane: 26:36

The other thing that I just wanted to mention as well look at, this episode is already getting a bit long, so I don't want to keep it going for too much longer. But the other thing here I just had some notes here, so I was telling you about Dr Phil's book. Sorry, I'm arming so much in this one. It's just a difficult topic and I know I'm going to get a lot of pushback on this, so it's just a bit harder to talk about this stuff because I'm used to being told I can't talk about it. So, sorry, I'm struggling a bit with just how to word this.

Fiona Kane: 27:11

Anyway, the other thing in regards to what young people are being taught is they're being taught that their feelings matter more than anything, and so it's all about their feelings. It's only about their feelings. Now, my generation was quite the opposite, which maybe was or wasn't good or bad, I don't know. Like I said every generation they get things wrong, they get things right. So we had a time where people couldn't talk about feelings and where we weren't having that, and that wasn't necessarily healthy, and I do think it is important that we learn how to identify our feelings and understand them. And if we can identify our feelings, we can verbalize things better and we can resolve things better or we can understand ourselves better. So I do not have any problem with identifying and understanding our feelings. I think that is important.

Fiona Kane: 28:03

However, young people are being taught that their feelings are the most important thing and they are the only thing and your feelings are. Often they're just short term things that relate to some event that's happened and they are not the most important thing. The world doesn't care about your feelings. Unfortunately, if you teach your child that the world cares about their feelings totally and it's most important thing, they're going to struggle in life because out in the world nobody cares about it. It's just. The truth is that we all have our feelings right and our feelings are very subjective and while it is, like I said, good to learn to own them and to have them and to identify them and do something useful about it, the world doesn't necessarily have to know or care about every feeling that you have. And the problem is that what we're doing now is, in the name of being, of building up children and self-confidence, which you can't build up somebody's self-confidence they must do it themselves.

Fiona Kane: 29:02

I talked in a previous episode about forging our identity, because there's always kids online creating their identities out of thin air by watching TikTok videos. It's the same thing with self-esteem you can't build it for someone else. So self-esteem is developed and it's developed by going out there and having a go right. It is developed by going out and being part of the world and you fall over and you get up again, you fall over again and you make a mistake and you have a faux pas here and you do something wrong there, and it's basically just going out and living right. You go out and live and you go to and you study and you get a job and all the different things and you learn and you get confident in yourself because you're able to do the thing. So, essentially, our self-esteem is built up bit by bit, for everything that we're able to do for ourselves Doesn't build up because you're told that here's your participation trophy and you're the best and you're wonderful and you can do everything. No, you can't do everything. Not everyone can do everything. Right, I'm five foot tall. I'm never going to be a pro basketballer, right? The truth is not everyone can do everything. We can do a lot and it is good to aim for a lot, but you know, telling children that they can be anything, they can do anything and they're wonderful and here's your participation trophy I don't think is helpful and we're actually seeing that that this over psychology thing and again, psychology has a really useful place, not having a go at it per se, but what we're doing is we're just having kids just talk about their feelings constantly, all the time.

Fiona Kane: 30:32

And I was listening to Jordan Peterson recently. He was talking to Abigail Shrier. She's got a new book about this as well. I haven't read it yet. I'll get back to you when I do. It's about this stuff, this sort of over-therapizing with children where it's not needed. Sometimes it very much is needed. Different therapist do different approaches, so it depends on the approach. But Jordan was saying that self-consciousness is a part, like a subset, of neuroticism and he said that being self-conscious and being depressed and anxious they're not linked. He said they're the same thing. So I'm going to read that again being self-conscious and being depressed and anxious they're not linked, they are the same.

Fiona Kane: 31:21

And what's happening? I believe this self-conscious thing is coming about because we're encouraging that the children are looking at themselves online all day. You see your reflection of yourself and they're doing all these videos where they're videoing themselves with filters, so they're seeing themselves all day. We used to see it like in the morning you put your makeup on maybe, if you do even do that and then you go out into the day and you might catch up, look in the mirror when you go to the bathroom and just fix up your makeup or something right, so we would see ourselves a couple of times a day. Maybe these kids are seeing themselves reflected in their screens all day, and often through all these sorts of weird and wonderful filters. Actually, when they go for when people go for surgery now they have to get like facelifts or not facelifts, but you know plastic surgery what they're doing is they're taking these AI images of themselves because they see themselves through AI generated pictures. So they're not taking a picture of a movie star or something. They're taking the AI image of themselves and wanting to be turned into this AI thing. So, anyway, these kids are looking at themselves all of the time and through all sorts of weird and wonderful filters, and they're being told all of the time to think about their feelings and how do they feel and what do they feel like they are today, and they're having emotional checks in the schools about how are you feeling. And the problem is that we are making them miserable because we're making them self-conscious. In actual fact, you know, human this is.

Fiona Kane: 32:53

I'm just going to read this quote from Jordan Peterson because I think it's very good and I might leave it there. Human wellbeing is a proper situation in a hierarchy that includes the social environment. So what that implies is the more you think about yourself, the less you are focusing on how to establish solid, reliable and reciprocal relations, intimate relationships, friendships, bonds of a family and less tightly wound binding that you would have with a broad community. And I don't think I read that very well, but essentially what it's saying is, if you just focus on yourself, that just leads to depression, anxiety and miserableness, whereas if you go out and you just get involved in your society and you connect it to your family and you connect it to your environment, your society, your workplaces, your friendship groups, your schools, wherever it is. When you go out and create relationships in all of those places and spend time doing that, that creates wellbeing, that creates good physical and mental health. When you spend all your time looking at your image on your phone and trying to decide how you relate or who you think you are, that actually just makes you really, really depressed and anxious.

Fiona Kane: 34:06

So I've gone over way over than I want to. I think this is a series really, but I just would encourage you to rethink your child's access to smartphones and rethink their access to very definitely to social media platforms. I didn't even get into some of the some of the stuff. Anyway, I'd love to be future episodes because I've gone way over time. I would love to hear your feedback and if you're an expert on any of these kinds of issues and you would like to come onto the podcast, please contact me. Fiona at informedhealthcomau, I do really want to have further discussions about this. I don't pretend to be the world expert on it. I'm just observing things. I'm seeing that I feel quite concerning and I feel that a lot of parents are just so busy that they just don't, they're not fully aware of all of this, so I think it's important to bring it to their attention. I hope this was helpful to you and and please understand this it was intentioned from the best of places.

Fiona Kane: 35:08

I know that some people will still get offended and insulted by it. I know the world's that's the world, isn't it that we don't always like things, but sometimes we have to hear things that we don't like, and that's just how it is, and actually that's some that's. The other thing, too, is that with free speech, free speech is really, really important and free speech allows us to think. So when we have conversations, we can think through things and we can navigate through things and we can work with them together. So, right or wrong, having the discussion is really really important and it's how we get to better answers.

Fiona Kane: 35:44

But shutting down speech, not listening to things we don't want to hear, doesn't help with that. So, right or wrong, I do believe that we do need to have these discussions, the challenging discussions, but they need to be had and through these discussions we will come up with solutions. That's not through shutting each other down. So I, so I invite you to keep that in mind and I'm happy to hear your feedback. If you just want to troll me, go away, but if you actually have genuine feedback, I would love to hear that and I will be doing more on these kinds of topics, because they are affecting the health of the mental health particularly, but also the physical health of young people today, and I think that someone needs to stand up for them, even if they are going to get hate for it. Anyway, I hope you have a great week. Please like, subscribe, share all of the usual things and I'll see you next week. Thank you, bye.