Episode 51 Shaping Independent Youths in an Overprotected Society

Are we coddling our youth into a state of emotional fragility?

This is my question in today's episode; I explore the effects of 'safetyism' and the well intentioned but potentially harmful trend of creating 'safe spaces' and focusing too heavily on feelings.  I scrutinise the rise of unearned praise and its link to narcissism, and explain how competition is an essential ingredient for instilling resilience and the capacity to deal with failure.

This episode isn't just a critique; it's the beginnings of a road map for those determined to equip the younger generation with the tools they need to navigate an imperfect world with confidence and independence.

The age old question "where is the balance between keeping children safe but also fostering strength and resilience"? Most parents are absolutely doing the best they can with what they know, it's really tough being a parent and parents are judged all the time.  I believe my generation, like all generations have got some stuff right and some stuff very wrong. This  has been an extremely challenging time with the world changing so fast in the last 10 years that parents and children have been confronted with things that we have never had to deal with before. 

Join me in beginning this important discussion, not to lay blame on each other but to have healthy open dialogue and come up with solutions. The youth of today and their parents really need help.

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

Sign up to receive our newsletter by clicking here.

Instagram

Facebook

LinkedIn

Credit for the music used in this podcast:

The Beat of Nature

Music by Olexy from Pixabay

Transcript

Fiona Kane: 0:32

Hello, welcome to the Wellness Connection podcast with Fiona Kane. I'm your host, Fiona Kane. I'm talking today a bit of an extension on my last episode, so you can refer back to that as well, although you don't need to have heard that episode to know where I'm going. Today I'm going to be talking just extending a little bit of discussion I had last time in regards to self-esteem and things like anxiety, social anxiety and some of the things that I think are making that worse and the things that could make that better. So I'm also referencing an episode of a podcast I listened to with Jordan Peterson where he talked to Abigail Shrier. She's got a new book that talks about some of these things. I have not read that yet, however, I'm just to let you know I'm referencing some of the things from there, and some of this is just my own thoughts as well. So, essentially, what I'm noticing is in our world today is we are becoming, or we have become, extremely risk averse. A lot of things that happen in the world, a lot of things that we bring in, there's a good like, there's a good intention behind it. Well, there's a good reason for it. When I was a kid, we used to be able to ride in the back of a ute, which is a pickup truck in the US I don't know where what they call it in other places, but kids could pretty much get in, pile in the back of the ute and travel that way. Or you could travel without things like seatbelts and you could drink and drive drink alcohol, drink and drive and all of those kinds of things. Today in Australia, a lot of that you can't drink and drive or not. It's very, very limited. You must have seatbelts. You certainly can't ride in the back of a ute or something like that, which is a good thing. So there's a lot of things that come in that are good and that are well intentioned.

Fiona Kane: 2:33

The problem is that we sometimes bring so many things in. It's always balancing the risk versus reward, because the truth is that being alive on planet Earth is a risk and we all die in the end. Sorry, I've ruined the story. I've ruined the ending for you, but we do. Life is challenging and life is risky and sometimes bad things happen Absolutely. However, we can't avoid all risk in life, because life itself is a risk. So what we need to do all the time is kind of, I suppose, weigh up risk versus reward. So keeping drunk drivers off the road good idea. I think the reward ratio versus the risk the reward's very high and things like seatbelts and things like that.

Fiona Kane: 3:23

I'm not an expert in that stuff, someone will probably argue with me on that but essentially, there are things that we've brought in that are probably very helpful and useful and there are things that we bring in that are less so, and so we need to look at the evidence of these things and decide for ourselves and decide really as a society which things are useful and which things are overdoing it. Because what happens is when we are extremely risk averse, in particular with young people and with our children, is they don't get to develop in the way that, the emotional and physical way that they may have done if they're being kept in cotton wool. They need to actually go out and experience the world, and I totally get wanting to protect children, absolutely understand it, and there's a lot of reasons to do that, and so I'm not arguing with any of that, just talking about doing that assessment, and I think parents, carers, whoever need to do that, those assessments individually and make those decisions for their own family of what you think the risk versus reward is in different situations. However, I just think that this new kind of is it called safetyism I think it might be called safetyism where we have to make everything safe, is not helpful. It's even got to the stage now where at university campuses they actually have some schools, I think too they have safe rooms, safe spaces, and so you can go in there and color in because you feel unsafe. And I mean, I know there's children in parts of the world and back in England in the day in different places who had to go to bomb shelters and things like that. And there are real risks and real reasons that people need to go to those things and the US issues around safety and school shootings and things like that. So there is real reason for safe spaces, as in places to protect you from being bombed or something. But this is being safe from having an emotional feeling challenged or that kind of thing, and I think that that is not helpful at all.

Fiona Kane: 5:47

And Dr Phil's latest book here she talks about how even just things like trigger warnings how trigger warnings we actually think that they're a good thing, but they're actually not. They don't help. If anything, the trigger warning triggers someone more, and so a trigger warning is when you sort of say that, oh, in this book or in this episode of this TV show a dog dies or something, in case someone wants to get is going to get upset about the trigger. And I get, there might be really specific circumstances where that might be important very few and far between, but there might be very specific circumstances but triggering for everything. You just can't do that because the truth is that we all of us have had life happen to us and all of us have had our challenges and so for all of us there's things that might trigger us.

Fiona Kane: 6:40

So you know, and I think I've talked about this before but my mother passed away. It's two and a half years ago now and I just had a lot of intense experiences with her in the hospital and different things and I found so I just found lots of things around hospitals, whatever were quite triggering for me. I look honestly, going to a cafe and seeing like I went to a cafe once and there was a mother and a grandmother and a child there and my grandmother's passed, or my grandmother's of all past, and my mother had passed, and I just got triggered straight away and started crying because I just I was grieving, right, but should those people not go to a cafe? Because I get triggered? Another time it was someone in a waiting room with her mom. She brought her sick mom into the waiting room and she helped her mom sit down and again I felt triggered by that. But unfortunately that's my problem, right, and I wasn't able to have children as well.

Fiona Kane: 7:37

So do I say that no one can talk about children in front of me or show me children or show me babies? No, because that's too bad. So I understand being careful to a certain extent and supporting people and that kind of thing and being kind, but at the same time, life is triggering. Life is triggering. We go through awful stuff in life, but we have our own challenges or our own problems, and so putting a trigger warning in front of everything is not helpful, and actually the data now is showing that, as Dr Phil, as I think he's referenced it in his book, so you could go to him for the reference but trigger warnings are not helpful in most cases.

Fiona Kane: 8:16

So just things like that, where we actually pretty much what you're saying, especially when you do this with children in a school environment or a university environment you're saying I don't think that you are strong enough to cope with seeing, hearing or reading this thing. And so it's constantly saying over and over and over to that person that child, you can't do this, you're not up for this, you're not strong enough for this. That does not create resilience, and actually you may say, oh yeah, maybe. Oh, lucky, I gave you a trigger warning I might have heard something bad, and if I heard something bad, I might have felt sad oh gee. Well, oh gee, lucky you protected me from that. Can you see the madness in this? It doesn't actually create resilience. It doesn't teach someone to be resilient and cope with life. It actually teaches the opposite. Go on hide, because life's scary yeah, it is. Don't go on hide, though, because you need to actually learn how to live in the world, not escape from the world, so it is really important that we understand this.

Fiona Kane: 9:19

He, in this podcast I was referring to and I'm going to read this again. I actually read it last time when I read it again because I'm going to delve into it a little bit more and he was actually talking about self-consciousness and how being self-conscious is a big part of neuroticism, and he was actually also talking just a step back. He was talking here in Abigail Shire. We're talking about how mental health is one of those things because we used to see it as a physical thing and there's to be like sticking things up people's noses to cut out bits of their brain, awful things like that, right. And then we went completely the opposite now, where we see it as completely well, we do see it as a physical thing, but we see it as a physical thing as in. We see it just as being about serotonin and dopamine and they are part of it. But that's not totally that.

Fiona Kane: 10:13

Or correcting those with medication isn't necessarily the way to go. It is in some cases, but in many it's not. We need to sort of look at what affects those neurotransmitters rather than the oh, it's just like there's something wrong with you need to take a tablet to fix those neurotransmitters. Like I said, some cases it is absolutely you do, but in many cases we don't. But we are anyway. We're not correcting the thing that is leading to that imbalance. The imbalance is caused by other outside factors. So we kind of got caught up. Or the other thing we do is we say it's all in your head as in, you have an anxiety problem or whatever and it's totally in your head and it's not sort of fixable on the outside. So again, you need the medication or whatever. And the truth is that a lot of these things again are not all. I feel like I spend all of my time clarifying things not all. Of course I understand there are mental health conditions that need all sorts of treatments. This isn't that I'm just talking about. In general we overdo it with all of these mental health diagnoses and treatments and a lot of people are being treated in with medication or those kinds of things, when I could be get treated by being given strategies for how to deal with life.

Fiona Kane: 11:32

So when Dr Peterson was talking about neuroticism, he said that essentially being self-conscious. He said there's no difference between self-conscious and being depressed and anxious. Being self-conscious and being depressed and anxious they're not linked, they're the same thing. So being self-conscious isn't one of the things that sort of relates to being depressed and anxious. What he's saying is it's the same. So you've got all of those three things. They tend to go together and a lot of what we do as far as how to fix being self-conscious or how to fix being depressed and anxious makes people more self-conscious because it's about you, you, you, you, you. That's all your feelings.

Fiona Kane: 12:18

And again I talked about last time and again now, nothing wrong with identifying feelings, learning how to identify feelings, learning what to do with them. So I actually think understanding and recognizing your feelings is important. So I'm not saying that we shouldn't be aware of our feelings. However, what's happening is it's all about those child's feelings and everything is about not hurting their feelings. Like you know. Go back to the safe spaces thing I was talking about before. We don't want them to hear anything that they disagree with or that could be upsetting for them, and so and it's all about how do you feel, and they're having this check-ins at school about your feelings, your feelings, your feelings, your feelings, and it's fine to an extent, but we've probably pushed it a little bit too far. The other way and therein lies the problem I was talking about last time We've got these issues around compassion, and it's something that they said we're referring to now as toxic compassion, as in compassion can go too far, and when it's well, I'll just put some cotton wool around you when I don't want you to get offended and I don't want you to hear anything that you don't like, and I don't want you to get upset.

Fiona Kane: 13:25

We'll just make sure that you never go get upset. I'm just going to go ahead on the road and fix everything for you. That's toxic compassion, right? Because nobody gets better from being protected to that level. They get better by being empowered to actually go out and do life right. So it is. And again I just want to say again I said it last time I'm not having a girl parents.

Fiona Kane: 13:49

It is the hardest thing in the world, and there's so much mixed information and every generation of parents gets given a different idea of what this is, what parenting should be, and this is how you should do it, and you know you're bad and wrong if you do it this way, if you do it that way. There's so much judgment, so I'm not judging and I think that a lot of people who do these things are doing them very well, intentionally, and it's a real sort of that's our current societal thing, and I think with every generation you can pick on their parenting, because every generation did something that the next generation thinks oh geez, I'm not going to do that. That was terrible. They do something different, but there's something different isn't always better, or there might be bits of it that are better, bits of it that aren't. So.

Fiona Kane: 14:30

This is like a general discussion about society and parenting and our attitudes towards mental health. It's not an attack on any particular group of people, so please don't take it that way. It's so, not, anyway. So when we talk about that self-conscious thing, when all we do is we make people self-conscious, we also do it when we're kind of building people up with the. He's a trophy, he's a participation trophy, he's you know, you're so special, you're so wonderful. I think telling children they're wonderful and special all the time isn't necessarily helpful. Putting them down isn't helpful either. I'm not saying that. The thing is, you say you're special, you're wonderful, you're brilliant, but I don't know that they believe it anyway. Or if they do, what we're doing is we're now creating this narcissist, so we're creating this narcissistic children and narcissistic children. It's not helpful.

Fiona Kane: 15:23

Dr Peterson says, in the absence of all of the things that which I'll talk about before, all the social things we can do, that we can do, that can help us, what we're doing is we're just teaching them to concentrate on themselves, he said. Well, not only are they miserable, depressed, anxious, they're also isolated and lonely and pretty much this leads to this sort of them coming almost insane. And he said that you know, if you're wanting to create a group of children who have all those issues, then a lot of the things we're doing at the moment is pretty much the exact way to do that. So if all we do, you know he talks about the self esteem movement and and you know he said, you can't make the kids feel but feel good about themselves by celebrating non achievements, and that's what we've tried to do. And so he said it's instructing children on how to be narcissistic.

Fiona Kane: 16:22

And narcissism was a confused for self esteem. It's not the same thing. Narcissism is not self esteem. It's not the same thing. So he said, if you look at so, when we look at self esteem, and If we've got poor self-esteem, that is the same as depression and anxiety. So he said, you don't lift people out of anxiety by making them narcissistic and what happens is they foster this dependency, with the children dependent on their parents, so they're dependent on their therapist and they can't make any decisions without them. Again, that doesn't help them. They actually need to become independent.

Fiona Kane: 17:04

So he said that to make people less anxious, you have to expose them to graduated doses of a thing they're anxious about, like if they're anxious about going out and being social, they have to be exposed to that little by little by little until they get better at it. But you don't say, well, you're a victim, so I'll protect you from that, which is a lot of what we're doing now, and I think we are doing it in the name of compassion and caring. But it's not compassionate and it's not caring, unfortunately, even though it might feel like that's what it is. Challenging people is actually compassionate and caring. Challenging them to be the best they can be, the best they can be, is something that they'll become by going out and being involved in the world. He just sort of said and the other thing that Dr Pedersen was talking about is eliminating competition.

Fiona Kane: 17:53

He said let's do more competition, inappropriate and there's a thrilling victory, but dealing with the negative emotion of failure, of not winning, is catastrophe. So we can't have that, and we also. What we're saying now is when people have victory, it's morally untenable because it comes at somebody else's expense. So it's sort of the whole victim story. So we often don't do winners and so we don't teach kids to actually play in a way that where there's winners and losers and actually that's really important Competitive games besides the fact that they're fun, they get skills, they learn how to win, but the most important thing they learn is they learn how to lose gracefully, without it being a catastrophe, and they learn how to just get back up and continue playing.

Fiona Kane: 18:47

So what happens is when we don't allow them to lose, when we don't give them enough experience of losing they need experience of losing they become risk averse because they've had no experience in losing and you might not think this matters, but when it comes time for them to go out and get a job or go out and find a partner or just do life right, they're so risk averse that they can't do it. So it's actually really, really important we set them up to lose a lot. They have to have lots of experience of losing so they can learn about winning as well, and so they can learn how to play the game and they can learn how to be a gracious loser and they can learn how to get up again. So all of these things are important. So he says that there's no difference between words, fiona, words that slow down. There's no difference between being a gracious loser and resilient. They're the same thing, right? So what we want to do is we want to teach our kids resilience. Where you do it? By teaching them how to become a gracious loser, right? So they need to learn how to lose.

Fiona Kane: 19:47

So this whole, nobody wins, nobody loses. We all get participation, participation trophies it's a hard word to say. It's not helpful, it's really really not helpful. And so, and the other thing we do is we call everything trauma and everything damage, and there is such thing as trauma, but we call everything trauma. Now we overdo all of our words and everything is traumatic, and so we're so terrified of traumatizing our kids, because we're told that everything we do traumatizes them, that we stopped trusting our instincts and Russian therapy and not saying that therapy isn't useful. Sometimes it absolutely is. However, what we've done is we've taken away a lot of our natural instincts and we're doing all this performative compassion that we've been taught that we have to do, and and it's not healthy for anyone. And so you know, you can see why this is a problem, and when you go to, I was at Sydney University last week for a talk and and I saw the behavior of some of the kids and look, there was some great ones that I have a lot of.

Fiona Kane: 20:52

I'm inspired by our next generation too. I think some of our next generation are brilliant and they're really, really exciting to meet and see some of the young people who are coming up who are doing well. And so I'm not having a go at that generation, I just think that generation has been shortchanged a lot and we need to do something about it, and but some are doing really well and some are not doing so well at all, but anyway, I saw they adopt. Peterson describes the university. He said now it's it's a place for infants. So it's basic infants and caregivers at universities and schools now, and middle schools. Yeah, that's fine, but universities know, university is not a place to be an infant. University is a place to be, to learn how to be an adult, and they need to be exposed to lots of different ideas and free speech and all of that.

Fiona Kane: 21:41

And instead what they're doing is shutting down any speech that they think is threatening and pretty much anything that they have. You know, they've been given all of their, all of their tropes about what's true in the world and everything else is threatening and bad and that's really, really dangerous and even if your belief is correct and even if you are right, learning what the other person on the other side thinks is really really useful for several reasons. One, if you learn what your enemy or opponent believes, that will help you to with your own argument. But second, if you learn what they believe, you may actually learn something. You may find that your argument is wrong or that you just need some adjusting. So either way, it's a learning experience. Even if a learning experience is about how right you are, you will still learn that.

Fiona Kane: 22:28

But but yeah, unfortunately they just can't and won't hear it, because it's all bad, and hearing anything that I might disagree with is bad, and it's and that's not only that, it's a hate speech. And hate speech essentially now has become anything I hate. Hearing is hate speech, which is really really sad. So, anyway, what we're going to do is what we're not going to do is help kids. If we treat them in this way and if we protect them and protect is that you know we say we're protecting them, but that's not protective. We're not going to be here forever to look after them. So it's really, really important that we teach them how to function in the world and I know I was having this conversation.

Fiona Kane: 23:12

I was having one of those. I usually don't try and do it, but I was having a social media argument with someone once and talking about the world and how challenging the world is for people. In this person pretty much said well, I know, I don't want my children to grow up in a world like that. I want to change it, and essentially, you can't change it. You can change bits and pieces, yeah, sure, and we can change a lot of. You know, in the Western world we have, there's a lot of things that we do better now. But even then, if you might change it in the US or in Australia, but you can't make them change what you know. Have the attitudes that you have in Iran or in Egypt or in, you know, afghanistan or wherever, right? Okay, we're not going to change the whole world. You might, so you can change your little bits of it, fine, but your child has to survive in the world, and so they and the world's not always kind, it's not always nice, you hear things that you don't want to hear, and and it is what it is right. So we need to teach our children to deal with the world, that is, and not with a not with a fictional fantasy world that we wish that they were in and and teach them how to be resilient, or they become resilient by learning how to be, by learning how to be gracious losers, don't they? So it's really really important that you know.

Fiona Kane: 24:35

In closing on, just say give children a chance to fall and fall again and fail and play and socialize, socialize, socialize, socialize. Get them off the screens and get them socializing with other people in, and not not the socializing on screens, socializing in person. Get them doing things together in person. Not all the kids sit around with them, my God finds ignoring each other. I mean socializing, doing things. Get them exercising regularly, whatever that looks like, because that's really really good for your mental health and when you're strong physically, often it helps to make you stronger emotionally as well. Right, so that's really really important. Have the meeting good, healthy food, generally speaking, you know, protein at every meal, plenty of veggies, you know nuts, seeds, eggs, those sorts of things. Just get them eating well, eating sort of solid meals and yeah, a bit of junk food's fine, but just not overdoing that. But also get them, you know, involved in the world. So this is.

Fiona Kane: 25:32

This is what Jordan Peterson was talking about in regards to human well-being. He's human. We sort of see it as like we need this SSRI medication or we need this different thing, and what we need largely not in every situation. Well, in every situation, everyone needs this, but they might also need other things. But what we need is he explains that human well-being is about your situation in the world. So it's about that hierarchy that includes your social environment.

Fiona Kane: 26:02

So essentially, it's like if you're involved with your family, if you're involved with community work, school, whatever it is, and different friendship groups and different social groups, if you're involved in all of those things, first of all, you have to negotiate. You have to negotiate your identity in there too. I've talked about creating our, creating our identity before, and our kids just make it up online by looking at TikTok videos. No, you create, you forge your identity. You forge your identity by being out in the world and being part of the world and you actually negotiate your identity. You don't negotiate it with yourself and some imaginary TikTok video. You negotiate it by in your friendship groups. You negotiate your identity out in the world. That's how you create that identity.

Fiona Kane: 26:45

So you get it from being out there and being part of things, and what happens, though, is the more that we are connected to all of these other people, the less we are naval gazing and thinking about ourselves, so we're going to have that less of that fear and neuroticism and depression and anxiety, because we're going to be thinking of other people and other things, and we're just going to be doing stuff. If you're out doing something and you're thinking about other people and you're involved somewhere, you're part of a community, you're important cog in a wheel in different places, and people look forward to seeing you and look forward to having you as part of their life and you're involved, right, you matter somewhere. All of that is what, largely for most people, will really really go a long way to helping with things like anxiety and depression and those issues, so we need to understand it's a whole society issue, as about how we go out and get engaged in society, and if someone's got problems with that, it's just like a little bit, little bit, little bit getting them more and more into it, but we don't fix it by just putting people on medications, putting them in front of screens and just hiding and saving them from the world. They need to learn how to be in the world. So I hope you found some of that useful and, again, no judgment on anyone.

Fiona Kane: 28:06

We're all just trying to figure this stuff out and a lot of this stuff is, if I had had children, a lot of this stuff for things that I think I would have done because I believe that they were the right thing. But we now know that some of these things that we thought would be great are not great. They're not working. So, again, it's like I've always said in my podcast this is about having important discussions. We need to have important discussions and we're not always right all the time about things, but we need to have the discussions. And having discussions is how we think and how we learn, and so we need to have the discussions. Whether we're right or wrong, we need to have the discussions and figure things out. So, anyway, I'd love to hear your feedback and hope that was useful and hope you have a great week and I'll see you next time. Thanks, bye.