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Hi, Matilda, thank you so much for joining us on teenagers untangled. One of the things I love about your book is the personal reflections based on your own life. What led you to think that this was the right book to write right now?
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So it was originally sparked during the pandemic, and I was at home with my daughters, working from home.
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My partner got COVID pretty early. I was struggling with what I needed to do, how I could look after these two girls, make sure that their well being was protected during a very, very difficult time. And I was looking out for a book that would give me advice based on what the research actually says, rather than taking any kind of ideological or philosophical approach to what what should be done. And I couldn't find anything. So I thought, okay, maybe there is a gap here. And that is what took me to my first book, which is evidence based parenting. And then as my girls continued to grow and develop and encountered new challenges.
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Then that brought me into the teenage years, and led me to researching and then writing teenagers the evidence base. And
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I love that you use weather metaphors through the book, because it does feel like that, English weather, not English weather, not special weather,
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right? Yeah, it's not Caribbean weather.
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And that you can have four seasons in one day. We often think, Oh, we're stuck here. But actually, yeah, I think to change. I
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think what originally led me to that was the idea of this storm and stress model, which is quite an old idea, that the teenage years are marked by kind of the these really dark stormy weather patterns. And actually, research, more recently has pointed towards this not necessarily being the right way to see teenagers, that actually things are a lot more complicated than that, that there's huge amounts of kind of positive weather patterns, and I don't know, creativity and development and ideas and brilliance all built into it, which you miss if you just see the storm and stress model, and if you are expecting to see it, that's what will generally turn up as well. So your kind of expectations really shape your reality when it comes to teenagers. So I think it was important for me to bring in slightly more nuance to this idea of kind of storms and stress that actually the weather patterns are complex. And as you say, the four seasons in one day probably describes it slightly better than just constant storms. And
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I love that you're saying that, because I think there is a negative bias.
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I think that with the narrative is that teenagers are a nightmare. I have lots of parents who write to me and say, I was dreading the teenagers. I thought it was going to be awful. And now I'm starting to understand via your podcast that actually, you know, there's some wonderful things about it. And one of the wonderful tips that you put in your book is that you know when your teenager doesn't give you information, if they're not sharing things with you, because this is their natural developmental cycle. Like they're starting to look at their peers and talk, confide in their peers. There are things we can do, like understanding if we feel a shift on our like look to our own feelings as guide to how our our teenager might be feeling. So can you talk more about that? Yes,
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so that is when you're really not sure what's going on with your teenagers.
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Sometimes the feelings end up getting projected onto you. So how you end up feeling in a conversation may be actually where your teenager is, if they're not able to kind of communicate with that with you, or they don't want to communicate that with you, necessarily, because they're trying to separate and create their own individual identities that aren't necessarily reliant on you. So that might be if you're having a conversation with your teenager that leads you feeling incredibly frustrated. Then maybe your teenager is feeling frustration, and if you end up feeling really sad after a conversation, perhaps that's what's going on underneath. So looking to your own feelings about a matter, in some cases, obviously not always, can give you signals and clues as to how your teenager might be feeling. And
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throughout your book, there's a whole sort of self care side to it. Yeah. I mean,
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I'm slightly cautious about the idea of self care, because I think that can imply some of the kind of going inwards rather than looking outwards. And perhaps kind of it taps into the self help thing, which I it's not quite what I'm trying to communicate, I think more what I'm trying to say with that is that one of the best potential predictors of teenage well being and positive outcomes is how their parents are feeling. So actually, if you are making sure that your own needs are being met, so you are you have time for social connection.
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You have time to do exercise.
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You have time to read books or.
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Paint pictures or go to the pub or whatever it is that makes you feel as though you are getting what you need out of life, then that will help you to look after and meet the needs of your teenager to a better extent. So I think my my point is really that it's not a selfish act to do what you want to do, but actually it's quite important, and making sure that parental basic needs are met makes it easier then to make sure that teenagers basic needs are met.
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So this kind of idea, that it might be selfish to take time out, I think, has been probably mis presented, and actually is almost an act of selflessness to make sure that you're taking that time.
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I can buy into that. I love that, and we have talked about that as well. I love that attitude. I think I'd love to talk about identity, because you said, you know, we should encourage our children to explore different identities.
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And I remember, I think it's Sarah, Jane Blakemore, who said that identity is the job finding out their identity is the job of a teenager. But it's, it's very unstable as a teenager, isn't it? They're, they're constantly one. One of the things they're trying to do is sort of try on different identities. And given the evidence that you've been reading, how can we best approach dealing with their their experiment, experimentation with different identities,
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I think to some extent, let them do it. And actually is one of parents jobs is actually kind of facilitating that process. So perhaps not commenting when your teenager comes down with a different hair color or a new style of dressing, yeah, not making too much of a big deal out of it, because that's then going to make them self conscious and perhaps more wary about trying on different things in future. I think it is understanding as well that when different identities are tried on, that there can obviously it's really important, but there can be negative knock on effects. So for example, if they're moving between friendship groups as part of this, then they may be losing long standing social support networks that have kind of seen them through. And I think one of the things that we can do as parents is just be be aware of that. And if their friendship groups are changing, they'll probably be slightly more unmoored than they would have been previously, and so they might need a little bit more in the way of kind of social connection at home whilst that process is taking place.
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And I think also there is some aspects where of identity, where you can start that those those areas can start to be built slightly earlier, where it's things like, I don't know if they're really into sports or music or drama or some kind of extracurricular activity, then having a strong identity as an actor or a footballer or A I don't know, violinist or whatever it might be, then provide some fairly good building blocks for other aspects of well being. So it can be worth supporting that aspect of identity creation, where it comes up, I think where we need to be a little bit more cautious is about affirming aspects of identity that might otherwise shift and change, so leaving them room to explore further and make shifts, so not kind of labeling them in a negative way, or if they come up with something that's kind of very fixed that you think actually with your own background and experience, or knowing other people that is likely to change again towards adulthood, than just treating it quite lightly, so not undermining it or saying it's not part of their identity, but then just kind of, perhaps not using labels yourselves and then supporting them to be able to make further changes as they go without losing face, cos don't want to
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lose face. No What. Great, great advice. I think the whole labeling is something that's come up many times in our episodes that that can cause problems, whether it's you're the smart one, or you're the inside the family, or generally getting them stuck.
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You know, my friend's daughter dated a girl for quite a while, and she's now at university dating a boy. And you know, if you then label them as something in particular, then they have to sort of wrestle with that, whereas you could just go, Well, I guess that's what you're doing right now,
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yeah, yes, saying that you've changed your mind is quite a hard thing to do at that age. Oh, at any age, I find it very hard to say that.
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Now,
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yes, yes, well, and that's a healthy thing too, isn't it, you get new information, which is what your book's about is that you get new data, and you could go, oh, well, actually, I thought this.
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But the truth is now, given the data, isn't it's not, it's not true. I love your points about friendship, because you've got some scientific facts about friendships and how protective they can be, and they're kind of more protective, in a way, than than, you know, having that relationship with your family.
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You, but your family is very important. So how can we support our child's friendships and and not worry that they're going to sort of be led in the wrong direction? Yeah,
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that's that's a really interesting question, because as well as friendships being very supportive and good, then having having friends who, for example, take drugs or drink a lot of alcohol or take risks in those areas, is also more predictive of your teenager doing the same if they have those friendships. But cutting them off no matter what their friends are doing, is likely to lead to the opposite kind of behavior. So I would say that probably in most situations, it's worth facilitating friendships, even if you believe that they may not necessarily be the ones that you would have chosen for your teenager. So just kind of making it easy where you can whether that's about kind of saying yes, if they want to go around to a friend's house to study after school or kind of meet up in town at the weekends, helping them to work out if they're going, I don't know, off to a party or something when they're a little bit older, helping them to work out safe modes of traveling home rather than necessarily going, actually, no, I don't want you go into that party. So making them know that you will support them, to keep those relationships, strengthen them and have those bonds, will help them to know that you are on their side, and it will also the evidence suggests, make it easier when you do need to put a boundary in place that's on the basis of something like safety, that they will take it more seriously. If you're trying to kind of control aspects of relationships that aren't really directly relevant to you and that are probably quite important to your teenager, then they're going to take other boundaries that you put in place less seriously, whereas, if you actually work out what's really important when it comes to safety and well being then, and you're kind of quite relaxed and flexible around the edges of everything else, then it makes it easier for teenagers to go, Okay, I will take you seriously on these points, because I know that you've got
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my back. Yeah, I found that with my, you know, one of my daughters, when she started being friends with kids who were vaping and drinking that rather than saying you can't be friends with them, I stepped up my discussions with her, asking her opinion and inserting in those discussions my own values, so that she was very clear where I sat. And I felt that was very protective.
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Yeah, definitely. And I think sometimes friendships can be used as well to have conversations that might be difficult to have in a more direct way. So for example, when you're talking about risk, if you're saying to your teenager, you're going to a festival, there are going to be drugs around. Then, in a way, having that conversation directly sets up the expectation that you think your teenager might experiment and that might make it more likely to take place, whereas if you can use kind of friendships to have a slightly less direct conversation, that will still set them up and give them the knowledge that they need to have to stay safe, as in, if one of your friends does something that is risky or they get in trouble, then this is what you need to know, and this is what you need to do, so that you're not creating the expectation that the teenager then ends up fulfilling, but at the same time still kind of setting in place, as you say, your values, but also what to do when something goes wrong.
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I love that. I love that's a really good tip, so sort of setting it as a sort of slightly more distance. But you know, yes, what about dating? I know that this is, again, it's to do with that there are functions to dating.
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And I remember reading one passage a while back which said the job of a teenager is to go from an unsexual person to sexual and I just thought that's
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something about, no, I don't want to think about that, but
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it's true. It's true, and it's very and it's a really difficult this is what I think one of the most dramatic, difficult shifts for parents.
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And so can you talk to us about, you know, the research and how, how, what you know, the function of dating and why it matters.
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It allows teenagers, obviously, to practice what they're going to need to know when they reach adulthood, and to understand what's healthy and what's not healthy in a relationship. And I think that's one thing where parents can play a real role, because teenagers won't necessarily know. They don't have the experience to know what constitutes a healthy relationship. So they don't know what coercive control looks like. They don't know where jealousy and possessiveness oversteps the line. So I think parents can be there in the background, and again, it's.
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Probably worth having these conversations at a slight distance, unless you're at a point where stepping in is absolutely critical, as in seeing relationships on TV and where they're not healthy, kind of having a discussion about why they're not healthy, so that that idea is then kind of integrated in a way where you're not directly criticizing relationships that might be kind of very new and fresh, and they might feel very protective over at the beginning. There's also something around so in terms of the really uncomfortable stuff around sex, I think it's worth where it comes up naturally in conversation, reiterating or trying to make the point that actually it's it's quite unusual which it is for teenagers to be having sex, because the more that they believe that other teenagers are having sex, then the more likely they are to want to do it for themselves, perhaps at a time where they might not be ready for it. So what's the data? So the data is, if you look at the I think the the average age of first sex for kind of retrospective questions for young adults in the UK, is 17, but that there are a whole load of, I think it's a quarter of adults who are a bit older than that have never had sex, so the data obviously obscures huge variation in those patterns. But generally, teenagers and parents believe that they're having more sex than they actually are, and for parents that there's not a massive risk in that. But for teenagers, there is because the moment it's normalized, this idea that everybody else is having sex, then they think, right, okay, well, everyone else is doing it, so I probably should too. And if you look at the data on first sex, it generally tends not to be what they hope and expect from the experience. So generally, it seems to be done very often through obligation, not through necessarily desire. So creating that idea that sex is about desire, it's about kind of intimacy, it's about pleasure, it's about connection, and it's not just about something that you kind of tick a box and then move on, may help to teenagers to kind of wait until they're in a place where they feel secure and they're slightly more ready, which will allow them to have a kind of first sexual experience that is more beneficial than one where they're just thinking, actually, I need to get this over and done with, because everybody else
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is doing and I did read recently that teens feel that their parents don't talk to them enough about any of these things. Yeah, handing it to schools, and we should be doing this ourselves,
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definitely. And with porn, handing it to the porn industry, because we're not talking to teenagers enough about porn and that it's kind of giving a really, really unhealthy model of sex and relationships and what's normal.
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And there's also, there are studies suggesting that we're not talking to teenagers enough about the positive aspects of relationships as well. So we're not talking to them enough about love and about respect and about the kind of the pleasure of being in a partnership, and what you can get from that. And if you look at retrospective studies, then there are young adults saying that actually, I wish my parents have been able to talk to me more about this, although you might end up with challenges in the moment, because I'm not sure that any teenager wants to talk about their current relationship in too much detail with their parents, but at the same time, later on, they may appreciate it.
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Yeah, I think, I think, you know, as they say, just take the moment you see something on TV ask. I always find that asking my kids a question about what they think, and then saying, Oh, I think this. And then having a discussion, rather than going right today, we're going to talk about, www, it can be much less confrontational, and particularly if you're both looking at something away from each other, can make it a little bit easier. I love, I love the point that you made that it's actually really important that we ensure that we're not silently communicating that it's acceptable to be treated badly.
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Yes, yes, which means maybe looking in some slightly uncomfortable mirrors in some circumstances, and just making sure that you're and that's not it's not just about relate relationships with partners. It's also about relationships with friends as well, so ensuring that you're kind of modeling healthy friendships, and that you're able, if you've got friends who are kind of overstepping boundaries, for example, you're able to demonstrate how to put a kind of healthy boundary in place that then allows teenagers to feel that they can do that as well for themselves, and also to understand what that looks like.
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Yeah,
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and they'll feel, we feel like they're not listening. But if we. Start talking about someone when they're not with us in a negative way, or any that you know, they pick up on that they're like, oh, that's how it works. Massively.
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I mean, they're so good at calling out what you get wrong and what you miss,
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they're instantly on it. One of the big issues at the moment, I mean, in terms of my my episode downloads, one of the ones that's racing up the charts is the online screen time. And we've been having so many discussions about what's good, what isn't does Jonathan hate book? Anxious generation has made a big impact in a good way.
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It's opening up the discussions.
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And I've also had Natasha Devon on the program talking about how to be your best self online. And I think parents feel very confused and conflicted about online, and they know that they've got to do something, but they're not sure. So where do you sit? So
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I think it's slightly more nuanced than the public debate on this has implied. So if you look at the data in terms of impact on mental health, there is seemingly an impact, a negative impact, on mental health, linked to screen time and social media in particular, but actually it's pretty small. When you drill down, when you pull together data across lots and lots of different studies, it's not a big impact. And there are a few different kind of things that might explain that. So one is that it might not be a kind of direct impact on mental health, but there may be an indirect impact of growing up in a society where lots of people are online, you're sitting in a room trying to have real world social connections, and other people are on their phones communicating, or you end up With this kind of very appearance based comparison focus culture that sits around the online world. So even though it's not contributing to mental health declines directly, that there may be this in indirect link, I think there's also, there's another possibility that I think is quite interesting, that the relationship isn't a direct one, which is why it hasn't been picked up in the data. So actually, you might end up with teenagers who spend very little time online and those that spend a lot of time online having negative effects on their mental health. So if you look at the average it doesn't look like it's a kind of strong link, but it may be that the relationship is just a slightly different shape. So for example, teenagers who grow up in very controlling families might spend less time online. They might have parents who say, actually, your grades aren't good enough, so therefore you don't get your phone for the next month, for example. And obviously that's not going to be a brilliant family environment in which to grow up. Or it might be that you get teenagers in very resource poor households who don't have access to that kind of technology, and then those that spend a lot of time online could be seeing kind of very negative impacts as well, and those that are somewhere in the middle, it may be fine. And actually, if you look at some of the studies on positive effects.
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It can help Tina's amplify real world relationships by through, through kind of sharing intimacies, hopefully not in a way that can be screenshotted and shared, but you know, just kind of supporting each other, arranging real world meetups, helping to find kind of tribes on the internet if you've got a niche interest helping to you to learn new skills like videography or whatever it might be. So there, there are kind of positive aspects to it as well that I think often get missed.
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And I think one of the other things may be that it it depends on the individual. So for some, for teenagers who can kind of use it lightly, it's fine, and for those that kind of get lost and can't put it down, or that get caught up in negative algorithms, or kind of end up in involved in some kind of online contagions, which is another issue that actually it's really bad. So I don't think it's bad for everybody, and I think if you can use it lightly, it's probably fine. And I think some of that detail perhaps gets lost in the conversations that we're having about it at the moment. I think the the idea of social media, bands and before the age of 16, which I know is going to be rolled out in Australia. I think it's really interesting, but I'm not sure that we have completely thought through all of the potential consequences of that, given that we've got a whole load of teenagers who are already online, so if we then pull them off social media, are they going to go somewhere else, where we don't have control over the platforms, we don't know where they are, and is there a potential kind of cliff edge at age 16? So if suddenly teenagers can use social media at age 16 and they've had no kind of gradual entry to it, is it then going to be harder for them to manage than if they'd had a slightly gentler introduction?
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So you don't. End up with this kind of all or nothing scenario, and I don't know what the answer is to those questions, but I think we probably need to talk about it a little bit more before we make too many kind of heavy, irreversible legislative changes. Yeah,
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and I think regular conversations with our kids are absolutely critical so that they have a real awareness and even asking them what they think, because actually, when I've asked a whole bunch of teenage girls, they've said, Absolutely not. I don't want to be off social media. But then when I say, What if everybody was off it? They go, Oh, that would be lovely. And and so you can see that there's a they feel quite scared about not being on social media because of the social relationships. And I think educating them, you know, having that time when we're building up to them, having a phone of their own, or a life of their own when we're not there, and being able to talk to them regularly. But we do have to be doing that, don't we? Yes,
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yeah, absolutely. And it's quite hard sometimes, I think, to bring up those conversations or to find a natural way of chatting about them that doesn't sound as we were talking about slightly earlier. It's It's not that you're kind of trying to bring up a lecture in the middle of the dinner table, but actually just trying to find kind of natural ways of bringing these discussions into kind of, I don't know if you're in the the car or another place where you can talk about it without there being too much pressure on the conversation. And I think it is quite a hard job for teen for parents, to work out how to draw in those ideas naturally. But as you say, is so important to do so, and that element of critical thinking as well, so understanding that what you see on social media doesn't reflect real life very often. So to understand that the kind of images that you see online are not reality, that you don't have everybody else off living these kind of picture perfect lives with everything in kind of beautiful Technicolor, that there's kind of real world differences and photos that didn't make the cut, and unhappiness and heartbreak and all of the other things that all of us go through in any human life, that everybody experiences, that no matter what you see online,
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and that's never a one and done conversation. Whenever we go to the supermarket, I say, Look around you. How many people look like the people you see on Instagram. You know, it kind of grounds them properly. Yeah, let's talk about secrets.
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Because, you know, secrets are lying, or what are the things that really bother parents? And you know, we have an entire episode on lying, but what I thought was really interesting was you said parents believe their children share more information with them than they do, and one of the one of the reasons can be to try and equalize their relationship with us. So how, how should we be dealing with this? Because there's an element of parents, parents thinking, well, I should be monitoring them. I need to know where they are. I need, you know, I need to protect them.
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But at the same time, it's really for their separation and for their ability to gain some some power for themselves so they can grow. They need to have their own world. You know? How do we navigate things like this?
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I
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think part of it is understanding that it's normal and natural to withhold aspects of life from parents, increasingly, as they get older, and it's not anything to worry about, and it doesn't mean that our relationships are falling apart, but actually it's kind of part of this normal process of separation. It's a little bit clear, as unclear from the evidence, whether the issue so you get more negative outcomes with teenagers that withhold more secrets, and it's a little bit unclear from the research whether it's the kind of active, active withholding that is the issue, or whether it's parents absence of being able to kind of hold those conversations and get teenagers to open up. So we're not quite sure about that, but parental monitoring, as in knowing kind of where your teenager is loosely, what they're doing, who they're who they're hanging out with, that can be very predictive of good outcomes. Being intrusive is predictive of bad outcomes. So it's about a balance. It's about right, not not trying to kind of Weedle out information. That teenagers are unwilling to share, but at the same time creating norms and expectations that you kind of vaguely know where they're going to be and what they're going to be doing, apart from anything else, just for kind of safety. So if my teenager has gone down to the beach, I would like to know who she is, in case I can't get hold of her and something's gone wrong or for that reason. So I think creating creating norms can be quite helpful. And obviously, the earlier that those can be put in place, the easier is to do. If you've got a 17 year old and you haven't created that expectation, it's going to be quite. Hard to put it in place retrospectively, and perhaps you're going to create more issues than you might solve. It reminds
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me of my bonus daughter when we she was on social media. This was early days, and we were I'd friended her, and then one day she blocked me, and I went, Yeah. I mean, I didn't say anything. I just when I saw her, I said, Oh, I noticed you blocked me. And she went, Oh, whoa, I said, and I learned from that. So don't, don't. It's because I'd made a comment or two and she'd remembered that I was watching her, but not, not not monitoring her, but just every now and then I'd check in. And I said, so why did you why? Just out of interest? Why did you block me?
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She went, Oh, just, there are things I don't want you to see.
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And I said, that's absolutely fine. I don't mind. I just but just so you just have to think that if you don't want me to see those things, and I'm actually quite liberal and generous with my opinions about you, you might not want to be putting them on social media. You might not want to be doing them. And it's that kind of tuning and froing, isn't it? That sort of Yeah,
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and the kind of general rule of thumb, and I think I say in the book that I need to take better account of this for myself, that you don't put anything on a screen, that if somebody were to screenshot it and then share it, that you would feel uncomfortable about it, because that record is there going to be there for probably slightly longer than you would like.
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Yes, and I think, I think that's a really, really important point. And one of the things about social media that came out of, I think, Abigail Shri book, where she was saying that she'd seen entire banks of screenshots that had been taken by kids encouraged by their parents, so that they had evidence, so that if their child did something wrong, then they could then use the screenshots against the you know, it's like, oh, this is horrible. This is horrible material, and it's a negative spiral. It's much better to just not put it stuff up that you that you don't want people to see and to save. Yeah,
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definitely. And then just going back to what you were saying about kind of the secrets and information and and that kind of thing, I remember reading a piece of advice in a book, and I can't remember which one it was, but it was saying, I think it might have been Lisa D'Amore actually, that if you are giving lifts to your teenagers, if you're if you've got a car and your teenagers need to go somewhere where you can facilitate that, that if you've got a group of teenagers in the car, they tend to forget you're there and work out what's going on in their lives. Just don't join in with the conversation. They'll forget,
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yes, just pretend to put a bit of music on at the front, or even just be driving, and they just simply, I love it. It's the best thing ever. And the gossip, the gossip, yeah, it's amazing. Now, what about mental health? And because this is something that gets taught, there's a lot of hashtags for mental health.
00:32:39.500 --> 00:32:49.900
There's a lot of talk online about mental health, a lot of sense in the newspapers that it's really dramatically plummeting. Yes, what's the data? So
00:32:50.079 --> 00:35:22.400
Jonathan height, who you mentioned earlier, has put this down to directly and almost exclusively to smartphones. And as I kind of suggested, I'm not sure that's quite right, and there does appear to be at least an element of something around awareness of mental health and talking about it a lot can make some kids focus on it to a much greater extent than is healthy, and that can lead them to ruminate. That can and that can then lead to inflation of mental health symptoms. And there are a couple of academics, Lucy Fox and Jack Andrews, at the University of Oxford, who've developed a kind of theory around this, and we're quite early in terms of being able to look at and see data, but there's a lot of kind of very new studies that are pointing towards them. There could be something quite significant in this, as in so, for example, that there are a few studies with school based mental health interventions, where you get an intervention arm, where they'll get, I don't know, taught about cognitive behavioral therapy or mindfulness or something of that nature, and then you'll get a kind of control arm where they don't get anything, or they get some fairly neutral piece of paper, or a kind of blank lesson that doesn't really teach them anything. And you track them and see how outcomes change. And this isn't the case across all interventions, but in some they have found worse mental health at the end of the study in the treatment group than they have in the ones that didn't get any mental health awareness training or support. And so focusing on mental health, I think, particularly when you get those generic symptom lists, and those are a big thing online. So you get or do you? Do you sometimes feel sad? Do you sometimes feel worried? And obviously everybody sometimes feels sad and sometimes feels worried. So you start to see yourself and recognize yourself in the symptom list. Then you start to check yourself for the other symptoms. And sometimes you can start to find it. And. And that can actually create more problems. So I think part of it is we've got this kind of very well intentioned thing where we're trying to talk more about mental health and reduce stigma, and I think there are perhaps some unintended consequences of that, and we might need to treat that a little bit more carefully than we have yes done so far.
00:35:22.820 --> 00:35:43.300
Yes, Renee mill talked about that in my anxiety episode very well, where she just talked about how, you know, you can talk about, I'm feeling anxious, and that's a healthy thing because, and the reason you're feeling anxious is because you've got something you really care about coming up, and we can have discussions about that and how you manage the feeling anxious. But having anxiety is a very different thing, and it can get people stuck in an identity, which isn't helpful,
00:35:43.300 --> 00:36:26.300
yes, and it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, about labels. So the moment you take on a label to say, I have anxiety or something of that nature, it can be quite hard to kind of shed it off change. You get massively stuck in it, and particularly during that kind of developmental phase where you're seeking desperately for for an identity, and having anxiety can get you it can be a kind of self reinforcing thing, because it can get you support, and it can get you empathy, and it can, it can create some incentives to get stuck within the identity, and I think kind of linked into that point is, is something around pathologizing normal feelings as well, and that we need to be quite careful about.
00:36:26.300 --> 00:36:45.579
Just saying, everybody has difficult experiences, and it makes them feel anxious or sad or whatever as they go through them. But generally, the feelings pass and we move through them, and how I feel right now. You've got, you've got exams coming up, is totally normal. You're feeling stressed.
00:36:46.239 --> 00:36:55.599
They'll be over in six weeks, and then things, there'll be a very, very different cast on matters. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a kind of mental illness.
00:36:55.840 --> 00:37:09.360
And this is the first time they've gone through this, and it's the first time we've been parents as well. But when you, when you look at them, it's, they're looking to us for guidance, because they very frequently, are coming back going, is this normal? I mean, am I like I've experienced it?
00:37:09.360 --> 00:37:24.679
Is this right? And, and, and this is why it's so important to be kind of, kind of quite circumspect and balanced. And I remember Abigail talked about that in bad therapy, and it's called the iatrogenic effect of, yes, you know where you actually create the problem? Because you're talking about the problem, yeah.
00:37:24.679 --> 00:37:49.360
And she talks a little bit as well about all of the Mental Health screeners that you start to get in in kind of GP surgeries or healthcare clinics, and you kind of go in for a normal, I don't know appointment about a I don't know, broken finger, and then get a survey about how's your mental health? And are you feeling anxious right now, to which the answer for some people then becomes Yes, somebody's asking about it. So maybe I've got a problem.
00:37:50.199 --> 00:38:11.099
Exactly No. I love that we've been talking about identity, and the fact that it's very malleable at this age, talking about your gender as an identity is quite an a new way of working. Can you give us any more detail about, you know, gender identity, what the data is on it, and you know, how we can help our teenagers?
00:38:13.320 --> 00:40:18.360
Yeah, so, so there has been a real kind of explosion in kids identifying out of kind of SO, SO out out of their sex, so boys identifying as girls or as non binary, girls identifying as boys or or something different. And that's really been increasing since about 2010 and prior to that, you tended to get cases of gender distress in younger children, and they mostly resolved by the time they reached adulthood. And this phenomenon of teenagers identifying out of their sex is quite recent, and it has I think we're looking at the data, we probably kind of at, or maybe slightly over the peak, but there's definitely, I think there is a significant social element of this. And I think as adults, we need to be quite careful going back to what we were saying earlier about trying to help children that do feel that level of distress not hook on to an identity that then becomes quite hard to shake off later. So if you look at data on outcomes children, and we've had a review called the cast review in here, which I think will it means that fewer children or fewer teenagers are going to be transitioning medically. But up until this point, a lot of teenagers who identify. As the opposite sex being put on puberty blockers, which kind of presented as being a pause button, so it gives them time to decide if they actually then want to move on to cross sex hormones and then eventually surgery when they become adults.
00:40:18.659 --> 00:40:36.079
But the problem is that it seems to make concrete this sense that something is wrong with their bodies. And nine there have been a couple of different studies that show that 98% of kids that go on to puberty blockers end up going on to cross sex hormones.
00:40:36.320 --> 00:42:13.679
And if you have puberty blockers followed by cross sex hormones, then there are huge lifelong medical implications. It means that you will probably be infertile. It means that you may never experience orgasm. It means that you'll probably have poorer bone density, heart health implications. So it's a really big thing, and I think, as I said, the kind of medical transition that there is a pause on that at the moment, but with social transition, and that is calling a girl by a kind of boy's name and using he, him pronouns, I think some of that has a similar risk of making an identity concrete. So I think with children, whether they are teenagers or younger children, who have that element of gender distress, I think it's probably worth just kind of helping them feel comfortable and confident in their bodies as they are, and help with and kind of taking them out of their heads slightly as well. So sport fresh air drama, things that just help them feel connected and grounded and that there isn't anything wrong with them, because this sense that you have an inner gender identity that conflicts with your body, I think, can really mess with your mind and make you feel as though you are wrong. That's so distressing.
00:42:13.739 --> 00:42:18.179
Yeah, that becomes very hard to remove. Yeah, yeah. I
00:42:18.179 --> 00:42:45.039
think there is there is there. You know, I think it's very hard for parents and teenagers to navigate something like this. That's, that's, you know, good advice, I guess. How do we build if you've got a child that not, not even someone who's gender distress, just kids who are growing up as teenagers, how can we build their self esteem? How can we be positive about growing what data have we got to show that that what works, what's positive?
00:42:46.599 --> 00:45:10.380
I think, as I said, like helping them feel comfortable and confident in their bodies is really important. So if you're thinking about what bodies can do, then it kind of helps get over that mind body disconnect. So if you know that you can run and you can hit a ball and you can dance to music, then it helps with that kind of sense of integration. I think part of it as well, is is creating, is trying to help teenagers move away from a narrative that may have been developed through their time at nursery school, followed by primary school, followed by secondary school, that has really normalized the idea that people have an inherent gender identity that may not be the same as their physical bodies, and that there might be a mismatch. And because that idea has been normalized, it's very easy to kind of catch on to it. And if we can help teenagers realize that the world is complex, that there are many different ways of seeing things, help them with their critical thinking skills, and help them understand that kind of that there is such a thing as material reality and that they are fine, and that we love them as they are, and that there are lots and lots of different ways to present. So talking about kind of gender non conforming role models, there isn't one. I think part of the issue as well is is it becomes quite a regressive idea about stereotypes that if you if you're a boy and you like sparkles and fairies that actually they are girl things to like. So therefore you must be a girl, and actually moving kids away from these ideas about stereotypes that actually there are infinite ways of being a boy or a young man, and there are infinite ways of being a girl or a young women and actually kind of however they are, is the right way of being that for them, that the only thing that kind of girls and boys have in common with each other is a kind of biological reality of the gametes that they will eventually end up producing, and that actually. In terms of how they want to to live and express themselves. The world is their oyster. They can do it in in whatever way they choose, but it doesn't actually change reality.
00:45:10.980 --> 00:45:11.219
So
00:45:11.219 --> 00:45:33.800
I guess, you know, overall, it's, it's just helping our kids start to think in a more nuanced way, asking them questions that make them think about, you know, that there aren't just black and white solutions. Because I think I remember being a teenager and just wanting the answer. I just wanted it over and done with. I wanted someone to tell me how I could how, how things would be great. And I think that's very it's very alluring for a teenager,
00:45:33.800 --> 00:46:03.300
yeah, I think I still want that. I think there are lots of adults that want somebody to tell them how everything is going to be great as well. Yes, yeah. Yeah. And I think with the with the ideas about kind of gender identity versus sex as well, it's worth not setting it up as a point of conflict if your teenager thinks differently from you. So just treating it quite lightly, as in, you believe this. I believe that it's fine. We have different ideas. It doesn't matter. It's not the end of the world.
00:46:03.300 --> 00:46:28.219
Yes, yes. And I have actually got an episode on conflict resolution, so that if you do get into a situation where you think we are thinking in a fundamentally different way here, and I can't really grasp what it is that's causing us and how we can get manage our way through it, that could be really helpful just to just so that you can actually find ground where you can accept each other, discuss things, and it doesn't become a big point of contention. Yeah, and
00:46:28.219 --> 00:48:15.360
I think just one more point on the data actually, because I think it's worth saying that there's quite for teenagers who are distressed about their gender. There are quite a lot of underlying vulnerabilities if you look at the data. So if you have if you've been diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental condition, for example, you are several times more likely to end up having some level of gender distress. Similarly, if you've grown up in care, I think it's by a factor of eight. You're eight times more likely to end up wanting to identify out of your sex. Those with underlying mental health difficulties are much more likely to have gender distress. So there are all sorts of kind of anti sexuality. Is that? Yeah, yeah, yes. And if you look at data from jids, which is now closed down the former Gender Identity Development Service, their data shows that the vast majority, I think it's something like 80% of kids that ended up seeing them either were exclusively same sex attracted or they were bisexual, so they had some element of same sex attraction. And there is a link between kind of gender non conformity and same sex attraction. So I think those two concepts have ended up getting quite muddied, and you end up with a situation where a teenager who is same sex attracted ends up thinking that they have to kind of identify out of their sex to become heterosexual, or supposedly heterosexual, because if they are if they then identify as the opposite sex, they perceive themselves as being straight as opposed to being supported to feel comfortable in their same sex orientation, sexual orientation. Yeah, that's
00:48:15.360 --> 00:48:31.699
great. Matilda, thank you so much. What an interesting discussion. It's always good to go back to the data, because at least that gives us, but I think, I think essentially what you're actually saying is that we do, we do know how to parent. We just need, we need some guidance, don't we? I
00:48:31.699 --> 00:48:51.880
think what I would say is that there are, there is no one right way to do it, and that it can be really helpful to look at the datas to get different ideas about other ways of approaching it. What you're trying isn't right, but having kind of confidence that you know the right thing for your family and your teenager is probably the most important point.
00:48:52.480 --> 00:48:58.840
I love that point. Great point. Matilda, you've got the book coming out.
00:48:55.239 --> 00:49:01.860
I'll have the link in the Episode Notes. Where can people find you?
00:49:02.880 --> 00:49:13.679
So they can find me, on my website, which is Matilda gosling.com, on sub stack with the same link and on x at Matilda Gosling. And I just
00:49:13.679 --> 00:49:31.340
want to say one of the things I absolutely love about your book is how you know, when you read a book and you're thinking, Oh, this is so, so good, and then you think, Oh, what have I just weird. I can't remember. You've got really helpful summaries with here's what we parents can do at the end of the chapters, which I can't tell you, that's just so great to have. Well done.
00:49:28.639 --> 00:49:31.880
Matilda, thank you so much for joining us.
00:49:32.119 --> 00:49:33.500
Thank you very much for having me.
