TRIGGERnometry - Our Kids Are NOT Alright - Psychologist, Stella O’Malley

Episode Date: January 14, 2024

Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist, author, public speaker, and parent. She works in private practice, with a primary focus on adolescents, young adults and parents. Stella is the founder and Executive Director of Genspect, an international organisation that advocates for a healthy approach to sex and gender. She has written several bestselling books such as Cotton Wool Kids (2015), Bully-Proof Kids (2017), Fragile (2019), What Your Teen Is Trying To Tell You (2023), and When Kids Say They're Trans (2023) - find her books here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Stella-OMalley/author/B017TK8WZS/ We are proud partners with GiveSendGo - a world-leading crowdfunding platform that believes in free speech. Go to givesendgo.com and raise money for anything important to you. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry premium membership https://triggernometry.supercast.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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They've been made this way. They have. They get chuttled off to a therapist and it all gets professional. rationalized and pathologized and weirded out, Who Am I will lead to? Well, you might be trans. I know that sounds a leap, but if people Google it as if you're a teenager,

you'll see the jumps go quite fast. Estella O'Malley, welcome to Trigonometry. Thanks for having me. It's a real pleasure having you on the show. We're going to talk all about teens and mental health and all of that interesting stuff, and of course the trans issue, which you can never get away from these days.

Before we do, tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us? Well, as you said, I'm a psychotherapist and I'm based in Ireland and up until, I came late to psychotherapy, I didn't kind of qualify until it was about 30. And then up until about the last five years, I was very general and I wrote books and articles in the national media in Ireland about mental health. So mental health is my thing. And I've, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, particularly interested in teenagers and young people because when I had my kids, which was 2007 and 2009, I kind of realised with a shock that it was incredibly unhealthy, their lifestyles as such.

That was being shown, just, you know, the general presuming of how we should raise our kids was very intensive and almost like battery chickens, if you follow me. And that's when I got really, really into the kind of mental health of children and then, you know, when you're good at something, more of it comes to you. I started seeing way more teenagers and then I became inundated with teenagers. So more and more of kind of, I had a hard life as teenager. So that's where my sympathy. That's where my heart lies, really. And during the calculations, you've got two teenagers now as well. I do. They're having an easy time so far. They'll tell me they're having a hard time, but they're all right. Yeah. And obviously there's a lot going on with teenagers nowadays.

Yeah. It seems to be that they have challenges that we didn't have when we were kids. They do. They do. In lots of ways, you know, when I was a teenager and when you were teenagers, in a way, we kind of, we had just about left repression. We were just starting to kind of find our way. I know some people say, oh, no, we were repressed and stuff. We were kind of pulling out of it. It might have been quite difficult to be gay. It might have been certainly difficult as a girl to find your, you know, sexual place.

You know what I mean? It wasn't particularly easy. But where they are now is just horrendously difficult. It's no comparison. There's no doubt it's a lot worse. And I thought like up until really up until the end of the 20th century, arguably, you know, life was getting better and better and better. But mentally it's like we've regressed in quite a significant way in that. last 20 years or so. And that is absolutely borne out by all the evidence. I mean, the research

shows that very clearly people's, I mean, it's subjective, so we don't know whether it's genuinely happening, I suppose, or whether it's people feeling worse. You know, they think they're feeling worse, but we can't, you know, we can't compare. But the studies do show that, right? Why do you think that is? It's very subjective, because if a kid thinks they're really depressed and I meet them and they tell me how anxious they are and how depressed they are. And you look at them and you think, I know you think you are,

but actually, if we look at the actual facts of your life, they're not that bad, certainly compared to your own mother who might have had, you know what I mean, quite difficulty. So then you think is pain worse just because I know. Right?

Because I think of like my grandparents, like my grandmother lived through Stalinism, Goulags, German Nazi occupation. I don't remember ever talking about depression. Do you know what I mean? Of being an adolescent. Yeah. Yeah, it's a real, we can't compare any of the previous studies

because there's such a heightened emphasis on mental health these days. And there's so much kind of, are you okay? Are you depressed? You know, like kids coming in and they kind of say, I think I'm depressed and I think it's clinical. And they have all this language. And I'm like going, I think you are very distressed. And I think you are very distressed.

And I think you are very depressed. very plugged into the mental health industry, which has sold you, frankly, a line that it could be serious and you might need serious attention. As if there's a man behind the green curtain who'll come out with some sort of magic elixir that will kind of make them better, rather than actually the human condition is quite difficult. Being a human, once you get into adolescence and you can flexify your brain, you realise actually life is really difficult. And they haven't often figure that bit out. They think I'm finding life

really difficult. So actually, to go back to your question, I do think they're lost and being lost is a particularly horrible place to be and they're incredibly uncertain of everything. They can't even depend on the news. Remember, the news was the news, or maybe not for yourself and Russia,

but used to be, the news you knew where you stood. Like, yeah, there was the odd scandal, but really you knew what was what was solid. There isn't a solidity. Everything is fake news. I don't know.

I don't believe that. I reject those facts. So they have this uncertain, really, really, really kind of clay that they're standing on and it's making them feel incredibly uncertain. And all the markets, the economic markets will say,

bad news is fine, good news is great. Uncertainty is what really wallops the mind. That's what we can't actually cope with. And that's what the adolescents are. living in, a very uncertain world, but they can't trust anything. Isn't part of the problem as well is that adolescence is crap? It's always been crap. It's always been terrible. It's always been really, really unpleasant.

And you hear kids talk about all of these things, and there's a part of me that goes, yeah, that's just being a teenager. Yeah, I don't know. Because sometimes I go, yeah, yeah, right, okay, I'm certain, my adolescence is crap. part of me thinks we you know we arrived on the teenager in the 1950s and when we did we sexualized girls at a very high speed and like the songs from the 50s and 60s they're saying some really crazy things about little girl

oh yeah there's a very famous song by Gary Puckett and the something union called Young Girl Get Out of My Mind Oh no that's so yeah and it's I mean it's a brilliant song that you listen to the lyrics a BBC classic yeah exactly and it's but you know And you go, well, this is, you know, this is disgusting Sweet Little 16 by Chuck Berry. Yeah. Yeah, there's so many of them like, Rolling Stones and stuff.

There's some really, really extraordinary. And this happens in the 50s. Well, yeah, if you think about it, James Dean, the teenager arrived. And it was very cool. It was very Americanized. It was very consumer culture. But it was still very attractive. But arguably the sexualization of the teenage girl has happened since then.

And arguably since then, maybe since then. I don't have data to back it up. We weren't checking out the mental health of teenagers in the 30s or the 20s. But there's a, there's a, there's a question to be asked about the sexualization of girls. Because anorexia arrived in the 70s and then bulimia in the 80s. Then we've got self-harm. We've got gender. Do you know what I mean?

You can see, these are girls who hate their bodies and you can't help but think, well, teenage girl as a thing hasn't gone very well, has it? And the concept of Teenagehood is what you're actually talking about. More and more I'm thinking because everybody says adolescence is awful and I'm like, yeah, we don't actually know what was it like to be, I don't know,

a 15 year old in any other era because there was no such thing as a teenager so they kind of, they grew up and then they worked. Do you know what I mean? There wasn't that period. The actual concept of the teenager was created in about 1911 by Stan Hall, a psychologist, like that this is a thing. This is the time of storms and stresses.

And then it built on and then, you know, the pop culture created it in a big way with the 50s. It's just not gone well, is all I can think. And then you factor in social media on top of that, and that has just made it infinitely worse. It's so sophisticated and it's happened and so young. And it's so horrible to see this kind of hypersexualization of kids. I have so many kids. And this is preteen. This is they're 10 and 11 and it's happening all the time. It's extraordinary how often that one kid in the class gets a phone. One kid in the class is hypersexualized, maybe by their older brother or their older. There always was one or two kids, but they come in with their phones and they take photos

and some kid is taking their top off or their bottoms off and there's photos taken. They are so out of their depth. They're so not able to. They're so, they're babies still. They're usually prepubescent. Do you know what I mean? And they've got this kind of device that's just way beyond them that we've allowed to happen. It'll be like smoking. Do you remember when, you know, in the 1950s

and when I was a kid, like you could buy single cigarettes around the corner because they knew all the children were smoking so you didn't have to buy 10. Do you follow me? That's how common it was to smoke. It'll be the same, I think, with the phones that will go, wow, look at the way they had those phones for the kids. And why is it not more of a scandal?

Because we're seeing, you know, the effects that Instagram in particular is having on young girls. Let's say, can we talk about that a little bit? Because to me, that is horrendous. It's horrible. And they become really vain because society has taught them to be. Do you know what I mean? It's not that they grew, they kind of woke up as vain. They were created vain.

And they become incredibly judgmental of everybody else's looks and their own looks. And they're obsessive. with their look, whether it's not only just vanity of, of, but like they know about whether their lips are nice or their nose is nicer, their eyes are nice, when they're 10, like, you know what I mean, their self-consciousness arrives much earlier now because of all the photos, but people, you know, in fairness, parents are taking photos of their kids at a very young age. So this photo, photo, photo, photo, photo, photo, and then they had this pose. By the time they're five, the kids have this pose. They know how to pose. And then by the time they're, you

know, in their preteens, they're on Instagram and it's just vanity writ large. And what effect does that have on things like eating disorders, self-perception, body dysmorphia, etc? It's a direct line. It's a direct line between if you're constantly looking at yourself and, you know, putting filters in of yourself and then kind of trying to improve your pose at all times, and then you're comparing yourselves with others. I remember, type of. magazine did a study of the different platforms and they were kind of astonished to find out that Instagram was the one that made people feel worse. The one that's supposed to be, which is classic of this world, what you think is never what you think. You know what I mean? The one that's

supposed to make you feel good is the one that actually wrecks your head. But with girls, what it moves very quickly from vanity to kind of a very critical analysis of what's wrong with them. and they generally hate various aspects of them. I remember one girl who came into me and we had a lovely relationship and it took a while, you know what I mean? And I'll change the details of this. But effectively then after a while she said,

well, you know, my eye. And I says, what about your eye? And she's like my eye as if there was this massive thing. I couldn't even tell which eye she meant. Do you know what I mean? And basically from looking at it, if you look at the mirror for hours upon hours, I figured it out during Zoom.

I'd never looked at my face so much during the COVID era. You know what I mean? All those zooms. I suddenly thought, oh my God, all those things wrong with my face. But this girl had decided that there was something wrong with her eye. It was so minor. You couldn't see it visibly. From just looking at herself all that time.

I'm looking at herself critically. But it turns, it sounds silly and it is in a way. But it ends up not silly when you got gripped into either anorexia or a body dysmorphia, which is an obsession about one part of your face, maybe your, or your body, your nose or your breasts or your eye or whatever. And the grip of mental illness, then it's not funny. Then it's a hell, it's a prison, it's really awful. So when you tip in, just because you've tipped in because of a vacuous culture

that was all around vanity, doesn't mean that when you've gone in, it isn't extraordinarily powerful. It's devastating. Oh, absolutely. And it feeds it a narcissism as well. I remember my wife and I were on holiday in Spain and we went to a castle. And there was a girl there taking a selfie of herself. And I just caught out the corner of my eye.

She was staring into her phone ready to take the selfie. And it looked like she looked like she was in love. Do you know what I mean? I do. She had this like being in love face. And I remember just thinking, whoa, that is quite a weird emotion to be experiencing when you're taking a photo of yourself. You're shivering that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think the one thing that doesn't get said enough that I'm so glad you said is these young people didn't get born this way. They've been made this way. They have. Yeah. You know what I mean?

And when you chat with them on a deep level, which I would be doing, you wouldn't, you would think at core, you know, they know it's all crap. They know it's all vain and vacuous. They have deeper impulses, but nothing about social media, Instagram, nothing about society has lifted the better part of themselves. And everything about society is feeding into the base, more basic parts.

But just to say about the beaming in, when I went to see the Eiffel Tower with my kids last year, it was unbelievable all around the Eiffel Tower. Everybody was taking selfies with this Eiffel Tower in the back. No, everybody had their back to the Eiffel Tower taking photos. It was like, oh my God, what is happening? Nobody's looking at the Eiffel Tower and everybody was looking at it with their back. And it was horrible to watch. It was like, we've really lost it.

We've really lost it. Because it's also encouraging people, especially women, to focus on their looks. But what happens as you get older and your looks start to fade as will happen with all of us? Yeah, I know. And it has been researched that the better looking women find it harder to get older. And I can see why, you know what I mean? But you're losing more. Yeah.

And it's not only that so many doors opened for you, so many, I remember I was in a, I was with somebody and she had been gorgeous and she asked the waiter to do something for her. And he said, sorry, like, no. And she's like, oh, and she's like, I used to be gorgeous. She said to me, like, she used to be able to get anything like that. Like an awful lot of doors slamming your face when you're not as pretty anymore.

But I think I have to say one thing I've noticed, like when, let's say I was growing up in the 80s and 90s and the boys were joyfully unselfconscious in many ways. There was the odd. There's always going to be extremes. There was the odd. But mostly they weren't that bothered about their looks. And the girls were very preoccupied. But rather than the girls following the boys, the boys have followed the girls. The boys have become much more vain.

They're much more into bulken up. and bulking is a huge part of eating disorders. You know, the girls are getting skinnier and the boys are bulking up and it's an issue. It shouldn't be underestimated because they're really becoming very bothered about their looks, the boys. And why is that social media as well?

Or are there other factors involved? Yeah, that's massively to do with social media and the looks and frankly, there's been a huge amount of targeted consumerism. You know what I mean? there's an awful lot of sales going to the boys to up their game and it's working. I think it's it's it's just we've become such a brand oriented society that we all look much better. If any of us were from 40 years ago, none of us would look as good as we do now. Yeah.

We all look better. But we've been in a lot more effort. We do. Yeah. I don't know. I don't. I really don't bother too much. But you know, it's interesting. I've noticed this. trend as well. I actually wrote a piece about, on my substack about Jordan Pete, why they hate Jordan Peterson. And one of the observations I made in it, I think as we've got to a society where we've tried to suppress healthy masculinity, or perhaps in the desire to deal with unhealthy masculinity, we've also suppressed healthy masculinity because we've tared everybody with

the same brush, looking bulky is one of the few socially acceptable ways of like being a man now. Do you know what I mean? I do. I agree with you. No, I agree with you. I think there isn't much of a place for, there isn't many decent role models for men, for young boys, for boys to, you know, to aspire to. And I think they're kind of, they're veering wildly from Andrew Tate to kind of Jordan Peterson and, you know, various other people. And some of these people are great and I'm well aware of it, but I think the boys don't have a firm idea of where they're going. and I think it's difficult to contend with and I know the girls have their own challenges

and I'm not underestimating it at all but I do think there's something about being a boy that they don't quite know what... For example, this is a big one for boys these days and I've really noticed it. So when testosterone comes in, you know, they have very strong sexual urges, right? And it doesn't come in like the way it seems to come in for boys.

It comes in much more, well, for me anyway and for most girls, it seems to come much more gradually, but it seems to hit boys over the head and they suddenly kind of go sex mad quite quickly. So they're quite sweet boys and then they turn into them. Yeah. Yeah, they do.

And they're kind of ashamed of it now. You know what I mean? And I remember my, for example, my daughter was talking about her friend and her friend's best boyfriend is a boy, so it's a girl and a boy and their best friends.

And the boy is staying over in her house in the same bed and they're 15. And I said, well, that's insane. And everybody, all the teams that were around me were like, he's not a creep. He's not going to just suddenly lunge at her. And I was like, well, no, I wasn't saying he's a creep. But I was thinking of this poor guy feeling like he's a creep if he wants to lunge at her, but he's a 15-year-old boy in bed with another 15-year-old girl. It's mad.

But it felt to me like the kind of weird double-taxie. speak that happens these days. That's it. Yeah. He's a creep. If he kind of has his very normal natural impulse in the middle of the night with a 15 year old girl, a very pretty 15 year old girl beside him, I just thought everything

about that was wrong and it says a lot that story. It's so much of this going on society where we want to pretend reality isn't what it is and then all of the shit cascades down from that. Yeah. Which is what you're talking about there, which is if you pretend boys don't have the

sexual urge at 15 and if they do their creeps, then everything else follows. You're supposed to be able to sleep in a bed with a girl that you're not. Yeah, at 15. Regularly. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You know what I mean? Now, we know this because we're old world almost. Do you know what I mean?

Because they were, there was a group of them, they were stunned. And their big emphasis was, he's not a creep. Why would you think that? And I'm like, but he's a 15-year-old boy. I'd never met the boy. It's just that's not a healthy. scenario that you would regularly expose a 15 year old boy too. And I'm not, you know, we can all see what you, it could be implied by what I'm saying. I'm not saying any of that.

I'm just saying you've got to respect the fact that there's an influx of hormones that is very intense for boys and they don't quite know what to do with it now. And honestly, they're shaming themselves like bold. Don't think that. And they, I've no doubt because I meet these boys. It goes weird. If you keep on telling all your sexual impulses are kind of toxic and creepy, do you follow me? It's not going to end very well. It's basically shaming boys for their sexual impulses. And then you factor in hardcore pornography, which they all have access to. Yeah. And I was just imagined this poor boy, and God knows him. I don't know them. Okay. But I was just imagining being shamed in the bed and lashing out to the toilet for some hardcore porn

coming back. And I was just thinking, this is an act. He's not a creep though, so it's all right. Yeah. And then you factor in the Catholic church on top. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. So I suppose the question, first of all, is, you know, there will be a lot of parents who have teenagers as you do. Yeah.

What can parents do? Before we get to the advice for kids and stuff like that, what can parents do about this? Yeah, well, the reason I wrote my book, I'm a therapist, I'm a psychotherapist. I can't believe in psychotherapy less and less every year. but I still do believe in it. And thankfully, I seem to be good at my work and I've seen huge kind of differences

from working with teenagers. So that's been lovely. However, my reason for writing the book was to kind of encourage parents to take control of their own families and not to immediately triangulate by bringing in the experts, by bringing in a psychotherapist,

by bringing in a CBT, because actually, in my experience, it hasn't gone very well. that we've kind of got this lightweight pseudo mental health industry that is making everybody kind of think that they need therapy and it's not going well for these teenagers. So the teenager might be, as you said, all adolescents, it's quite a hard place to be.

They're a bit distressed, distressed in the middle of depressed. And they get chuttled off to a therapist and it all gets professionalised and pathologized and weirded out. and the kids think they're especially upset and it's suddenly turned into this crown kind of major event as opposed to you're just suffering from the human condition. You've complexified your brain and you've realized life is deeply unfair and incredibly unsatisfactory in many ways

and that's something you're going to have to get your head around maybe with art or literature or music or film. There's lots of ways to get around. Charging off to the therapist is sending a very, wrong message to young people that they can be fixed and that there's this kind of golden world out there where there's golden people and golden friendships and you know you get out of bed and you feel good and you feel good all the way through the day and you never have moments of despair and anxiety that's what we're selling them by by sending them to the therapist too early to think you know

what I mean it's their first juncture of oh my God life is hard and they say oh oh, you think life is hard. Okay, well, you know, let's get you to the therapist. It's a real huge issue. So it's kind of a book to say, don't send them to the therapist. Read the book. Equip yourself.

Just if they've got a little bit of anxiety, you know, learn a bit of anxiety. If they're starting to kind of towards disordered eating, learn a bit about it, read up a bit about it, and handle your own child. You know, to equip yourself so you can handle your own child because it's very disempowering for a parent to bring. And it's a triangulates the situation.

And a triangulation in any situation would make, let's say, for example, the child would be the victim, the parent would be the persecutor, and the therapist is the savior. And triangulation happens all the time and different, like it happens with divorces. You know, the father is the persecutor, the mother is the savior,

the child is the victim. It's always bad. So bringing in this savior person to fix the child is such a danger. thing. I'm not saying never. Sometimes there's real deep trauma and distress and we need professional help. A lot of the time, I think, the person can handle it. They can handle it in lots of different ways. One thing I've really noticed, which I think is kind of important to note, is that an awful lot of childhood these days is gorgeous, actually. It's kind of like

they, you know, the fabulous activities, amazing birthday parties. They've got Christmas, which is just magical. They've even got all sorts of new kind of type Christmases like tooth fairies and Easter bunnies and Halloween. It's unbelievably magical and it's we as parents because we're grim and jaded we kind of get into it in an extremity that's never happened before. So you have a lot of people for example live believing in Santa until really quite in the old age. I remember I say it in my book there was my beauty therapist. She was doing my nails or something I don't usually get things like that done what she did. And the first time she got drunk was when she learned about Santa.

She didn't, do you follow me? So she was 13 and she still believed in Santa. And she was with our mates and they were all getting drunk. And she said, what are you getting for Santa? And they said, no, there's no Santa and everybody laughed at her. And she was drunk and she cried all the way home drunk and crying and went into her mommy's arm. At 13. You, you, wait, you say your candle will go open.

you'll think, when is he going to stop? Remember, I'm Russian. He's getting a hard dose of reality at about three. You say that, wait, you see, because the whole school will say, why have you wrecked it? Why have you wrecked it on everyone? So it's a massive conspiracy.

She was 13, yeah? That's so many few years ago. The great Santa conspiracy. I taught an 11-year-old who believed in Santa, and I told him at the age of 11, Santa doesn't exist. Well done, son. Yeah, and then his mom had to go at me.

And I went, your kid is about to go. to comprehensive school in East London. It's better that he hears it from me than he goes to a comprehensive in East London and announces to demand him that he believes in Santa. It gets his head kicked in. You would be surprised.

How many of them now believe in Santa 11, 12, 13. You would be surprised. Loads of kids are believing in Santa until an old age. Like I say, she was getting drunk and it was just such a crazy combination of and it's what I think is,

really important, which is this kind of magical childhood where all, everything is just gorgeous. It's all kind of, you know, sparkles and Easter bunnies and stuff and fairies. And then they hit adolescents and very quickly it becomes grim and hard and life is difficult. And actually, your friends don't really like what you like you. They're quite competitive. They're slagging you off. And, you know, homelessness, we have no solution for that. And racism, we have no. a solution with that. And, you know, it's just, it's so grim, so fast that they fall from a cliff from disappointment. So I see a lot of kids in and around 12 or so. They've just gone to their first year of secondary and they come in like they walked into a wall. And generally, after a little

bit of time, I say something along the lines, are you a bit disappointed in life? And they're like, yeah, it's awful. It's nothing like what I thought it was going to be. Like childhood was lovely. And then it's just bang, really hard very quickly. And I think the massive change has never happened before because when we were kids, there was a dawning at a much earlier age that all of this, that life was actually harder. It was much slower dawning and it crept up on you

while the kind of the fairy tale childhood is lasting too long and then they're falling from a cliff with disappointment. It's a big issue. That's a really interesting point. We had a guy called Mark Walshaw, who's a trauma expert. He worked with trauma. And one of the things he was talking about

is the lack of initiation rituals that we would have had in the past. I mean, we say primitive and technologically they're more primitive, whether they're culturally more primitive is another conversation. But they would have, for boys, for example. You're a boy and you know,

you stay with the women for a while and you're not really part of the male society. And then when you hit puberty, it's like you go out and you kill a whatever and then you wear its horns on your neck or whatever it might be. And from this point on, you get treated like a man. And that means different things are expected of you. And this like, you know, comfortable world that you live in,

you are now rewarded by being initiated into the male world, to which actually all boys aspire, actually, right? But we don't have that anymore. No. What happens when you're 13 or 12 or whatever it is? Nobody initiates you into a different world. And I imagine there would have been a similar thing for women, where there is obviously a natural transition from girlhood to adolescence to sexual maturity.

Again, there's a transition. I don't know how many, as many girls immediately aspire to that right at the beginning. But my point is, we don't have a way of, you know, a path for people to follow. Yeah, I couldn't agree more and we need to bring them back. Those ceremonial rites of passage, they were with us for millions of years. And suddenly we've done away with them. and I do think it makes people, again, that uneasiness, the uncertainty of young people, they don't have anything to kind of grab onto as in I have done this, write of passage,

and I am now in the next stage. They don't have any of that and they feel it like little boys look at men and they can't imagine being a man. It's just so hard for a little boy to imagine being a man. You need these stages and don't worry, you're part of a process, your daddy did it before you and your granddad did it before you. That's been taken away. Nothing's been replaced. And as a result, you've got people who are just very anxious. It's no wonder that's what they are. Because there's nothing that can rely on. There's no certainty. There's no solidity.

And as a man, what can, I'm something I'm thinking about. What can you do with your son to offset that as much as you can? I think if at all possible, I think it's important. And that's where I'm really into like parents kind of going for it and saying, well, what can I do? Well, can bring in a kind of a very definitive knowledge of your ancestors, easily done, you know what mean, you look it up, but so that they know where they came from and they know that there was different walks of life in their families. And secondly, you can bring in rites of passage. I don't know what it would be, but you look through your culture and you figure out what you should bring back. Just because society has got rid of it doesn't mean that you should allow

it to be got rid of for your kids, because I think it would make a huge difference. So that they realize they're part of the circle as opposed to they're just cast into this 21st century digital age. And this is why religion actually is so valuable in many ways because I was raised Catholic. You had your first communion. You were baptized. Then you had your first communion. Then you were confirmed and so on and so forth. So forth with Judaism bar mitzvahs.

That's really important to have these rituals so that people understand where they are. when it comes to the circle of life. It's really interesting. Like this, now we're, I think we're in the post-religious age. I know other people would say we're not, and there's all sorts of kind of upsurgeon religion. But the kids I see, the normal Western kids I see, just God and religion is nothing to do with them.

And I'm a Catholic as well, so went through all those ceremonies. And my kids aren't, my kids are Protestant. And I thought my husband was going to give them all these ceremonies. He was useless at it. Yeah, you can't trust the Protestants. we've known that for a while. Right, let's not start the troubles right here on the show. Thank you very much.

I should have known. Yeah, but we did bring in some kind of ceremonial events. Do you follow me? And I remember thinking, this is going to make weirdos of us if we don't watch ourselves in the town. You know what I mean? Because it's so unusual if you follow me to do stuff like that. So that was a bit of a shock.

But when you look at some of the anxiety that's manifesting, you really start thinking about the post-religious age. Because OCD is a very good example. OCD is often very much about repetitive gestures. And there's a lot of kind of, what would you call them, symmetrical gestures with OCD. And when you look at a lot of religious ceremonies like blessing yourself and the rosary beads and all those kind of, they were for the anxious people who were inclined towards, looking for a framework. The feeling that God's in his heaven and if I do, you know, seven decades

of the rosary, I'll be okay. It was so calming for anybody that there was somebody looking after them and they didn't need to think all that much because there was actually something going on that they didn't understand. And all of those people have been plugged out of that framework. We took it away from them and they have nothing and where are they going? They're going into anxiety and OCD. I remember reading and this extraordinary kind of account of this boy who just kept on blessing himself, even though he'd never had anything religious. And I thought, yeah, that makes sense to me

now that we've left religion, that it feels it's not accidental for thousands of years. They had all these symmetrical gestures that calmed people. And then we took them away, and they're coming in in different ways. And you no longer worship God, but that doesn't mean you're going to stop worshipping something or someone, which again is when the social media thing comes back into it, when you worship celebrity, you worship follow accounts,

you worship all of these things. Yeah, the social media aspect. I think we're still in the baby pool. We don't know. I don't think anybody's in any doubt. It's been devastating. It's been fabulous for people who are older, but I think it's been devastating for young people.

And yeah, you're right. The human disposition is towards idolizing people. people, idolizing gods, looking towards other people who have it sussed. Just give me anybody. And if it's, if the culture is teaching you, it's that person on TikTok who does funny dances, it's teaching. It's like we've taught the entire generation of kids coming up to be quite vacuous because that's what we've given them. We've given them quite a, quite a, uh, an empty culture, which is funny and, you know, great for passing attention in every 10 seconds. But It's like we're like, if we're not careful, we'll create a generation of epsolons where they're just

never thinking a long thought, never thinking a deep thought. It's just go, go, go, next thought. You know, nothing wrong with their brains. And when I find, and that's one thing if a parent was saying, well, what do I do? And the one thing I said, well, maybe if not, don't go to a therapist, maybe figure out yourself what's going down and get in there. But another thing I would argue that parents should do is go in with depth. This idea of keeping things light because it'll be heavy, that's not what teenagers want. Teenagers want depth. They want kind of, why, why haven't we figured out homelessness? Why is there starving people in different countries? Do you follow me? So going in with depth is much more nourishing than maintaining this silly, vacuous thing that society is teaching us to kind of

maintain. And it's also as well that I feel that more and more, and I saw it when I was a drama teacher, actually, it seems that every year the kids got a little bit worse at relating to one another, because a lot of drama is, you know, you create long form improvisations and devised improvisation and devised improvisation is where people create a play and it doesn't have a script, but they create it and then they perform it. And it just seemed more and more that. the kids were losing the capacity to listen and share ideas. And not only that, they've lost the capacity because they've measured this. To kind of rough play has really gone to pieces because they're hitting each other too hard

because they've no ability to hit each other lightly because do you follow me? Their actual physical interaction skills haven't been nurtured in the way they would have been in other generations because they had screens instead. So you know the way you have to practice a lot of times. before you get it right. So when you're two and three and stuff, you're practicing. Well, they didn't get to practice. And so, yeah, their ability to interact has been walloped by social media.

And it's happening all over the place where you can see it. And I, you know, it's amazing because it was happening and everybody was talking about it. And I was writing about it. You were talking about it. No, everybody was. And then COVID happened. And it just, you know, multiplied by a magnitude during COVID. And so those kids are literally coming out.

Every teacher, because I often talk to, you know, teachers because of working a lot with teenagers. And they're all saying, these COVID kids, like, there's a significant issue because they've been on screen so much. Their ability to handle social life is really reduced. So a lot of the teenagers I'd be working with, so they were very lonely during COVID. And loneliness is awful. And then they were very reluctant to become back friends after COVID. They were anxious because, you know, the world had made them frightened of... That's a disease that doesn't affect them.

Yeah, I thought that we're never going to die. It sparked that. They were anxious for that reason. And so they'd be very, very, very often telling me how their message in their mates. And I'm like, isn't your mate like, doesn't she live 200 yards from you? And they're like, ah, yeah, but we prefer messaging. Or like another kid. And every time we called over to his friend, his friend was.

send them back home saying, let's just talk on Xbox. Like, you go home. And I, yeah, I'm going on Xbox, you're going on Xx, and we can talk or whatever it was, PS4 or whatever. Because not massively comfortable being in each other's company, much happier, still wanted to hang out with them, but you go back to your house and I'll talk to you on on Xbox. This is really common. And this kind of late night texting. So they're, they're kind of very vacuous, very vain, very vain, very funny and silly, arguably in school, then real life comes in because you're on your own and bedroom and stuff like that

and they're sending really quite dark messages to each other late at night which would be filled with real kind of revelations about their self-harming or their eating disorder or some really quite awful distressing things and it'll be done by text

which is not the same as if I spoke to you or if I spoke to you and we had a real heart heart there's a feeling of nourishment or something Now, if it goes bad, it's awful and it's very vulnerable making and you feel very alienated. If it goes well, you feel really like we've deepened our relationship and it's actually very hard to describe how much of an impact that makes. These kids aren't doing any of that. There's none of that.

Obviously, I'm generalising wildly, but just to make the point because it's notable among the different age groups is their message in each other, so I'm hurting myself and all that. The kid might write back, oh, that's awful. that sort of thing is happening. And then the next day and it's going, hi, and it's back to bakery. And then that nice, dark messaging again,

that's not, that's, that wouldn't have happened in any other generation. So in terms of social media and all the rest of it, then is, I mean, do your kids have smartphones? They do. They do. Go on. Well, I mean.

Yeah, I'm all over them. If that's what you're asking. Well, I guess the question really is, should kids have smartphone? I don't, yeah, I think, you know, I think they shouldn't have them as long as possible. I think as we get older, I imagine by the time your kid has grown up,

it won't be so ubiquitous by the time they're 13. I was very resistant to them getting them, and when they got them, they got crappy ones that didn't quite work and were old phones of ours. They just depressed lots of times and kept them going out of battery. So they kind of got a very stilted introduction to it, and I'm all over them,

like get them out of the bed, and you know what I mean, have them plugged in outside my room at night and stuff like that. But yeah, I think trying to raise a kid without a smartphone, a teenager without a smartphone, it's such a Herculean task that I wish you well if you do it, but I think it's really hard these days. I think you'd be better off just like learning everything difficult in life. You'd be better off learning, teaching them how to handle themselves, how to put it away. it's like junk food and it's like alcohol when you're older.

Do you know what I mean? You've got to learn how to deal with this. Do you know what I mean? Yes, but we know with both of those things there are some people who are not capable of dealing with it properly without really like, you know. Totally. And I think there's the same with smartphones.

Well, no doubt. There will be people whose brains are literally broken by the thing for sure. And by the way, I say people, there are times. Yeah. I found when I had COVID, I had it three times. it made me incredibly angry. I was constantly very angry all the time, which is the natural go-to place for me

when things aren't the way that I want. It's my natural response, which I generally keep really under control most of the time. But when I had COVID, I was really angry, and I was a prick to everyone on social media, right? So I'm thinking, what if I was 13? My brain's completely unregulated. I haven't had 40 years of trying to work out

who I am what I'm supposed to do with myself, etc. So I just, that I think is the real, and you say we may not be as ubiquitous. I wonder what the future of that is because I don't think parents giving the children unfettered access to the internet is working out. No. I don't think it's working out. I think even 10 years from now, I think there'll be more knowledge not to have controls. For example, when I was first start talking, so my first book came out in 2015 and I was all

over social media saying parental controls and all this, a massive resistance from parents. Now they're like, it's accepted that there should be parental control. So I've seen that happen in eight years. Just a kind of acceptance that either you should be controlling it or you're guiltily not controlling it. Which brings us in terms of people's opinions of something changing over time very nicely

onto the biggest issue that anybody ever talks about on the internet nowadays, which is of course trans. How does trans play into all of this? Massively. Massively. Tell us more. You know, like, it's amazing. Like, that first book I wrote was Cottonwell Kids.

And it was about how these kind of over-parented kids weren't turning out very well. They were becoming very anxious. They were on the internet too much. They were online too much. And then I never knew, obviously, this is 2015. I had no idea that this bomb was going to explode in my life a few years later. later. And when it did, I thought, they're the kids I've always been talking about. They're the same kids. Clever, cerebral, over-parented kids who aren't out enough, who aren't outside playing,

who are kind of inside and very, very impressive with their extracurricular activities, their music and their, you know, whatever, their dance or whatever, and also their academics. And it's on paper, they're very impressive. And then they go online. line too much and they get sucked into something because they're looking for depth and meaning because that's the noble and natural aspiration for any teenager. And when you're looking for depth and meaning and you're 14 today and you're kind of thinking the very, very normal question healthily appropriate, which is who am I? What am I for? Who am I? I don't fit in. That's what you should be thinking when you're that age. They will find very quickly who am I will lead to. Well,

you might be trans. I know that sounds a leap, but if people Google it as if you're a teenager, you'll see the jumps go quite fast. Queer theory and that entire kind of movement is offering teenagers

what every era of teenagers have sought, which is a kind of sticking it to the man. It's, you know, turning it up side down. It's rejecting your parents' values. Do you follow me? It's doing all the things that teenage,

culture has been doing since arguably the 50s. Do you know what I mean? And it is got an added specter of medicalization. That, you know, other generations, you know, the 60s, they had loads of drugs and that didn't go so well, you know what I mean? Punk, whatever. But this one, the medicalization of children just feels really grim. And I had my own experience as a kid.

I had when I was about three, like as far back as I go when I was a kid. I was, I was, I wanted to be a boy and it lasted many years. And it was horrible feeling. It wasn't nice and it was very deep and it was very ingrained. And I was a strange kid. I was an unhappy kid, but it was a strange kid. And I wanted to be a boy and I was very good at being a boy. I could beat up all the boys and played.

And I still see that boyishness in me. You know what I mean? It doesn't stun me. I think I would have been a great boy. I could have been great. But yeah, I obviously, wasn't a boy and puberty. So many years later, puberty was very grim for me. It was awful. It was like, oh my God. Like, just to go to the toilet and think, what's going to happen next?

Like, it was awful. It was awful. It was a very good way of describing it. It was a terrible, terrible time. I was lonely and devastated and all over the place. But ultimately, long story short, I pulled out of it and I'm glad I'm a woman. And actually the most important thing to me is the fact I became a mother. I love being a mother. Badassish as I am. But no, I love being a mother and it's so much, such a part of me. And I kind of in the midst of all my mental health world, I realize, what are they doing with kids? Kids like me? Kids who had the experience that I had and they're medicalizing them so that they'll be one day infertile and a different sex and have impaired sexual functioning. I was horrified when I realised kids like me were being medicalised. Of course,

obviously it's completely imposing my own experience on these kids. And yet there's validity with it. I did have that experience. I had it for years. And arguably sometimes experience does count for something. And as well as that is obviously I have expertise in mental health. To put the two together, I started talking about it and it's been insane ever since. The thing that always gets me is that they talk about this as if it's one particular issue and you go, this is several issues that we're talking about here. The fact that, you know, it just seems that more and more and more girls are transitioning. 42% of them was a statistic that I saw recently were autistic.

That's very different to the boys. That's very different to men transitioning when they're older. why can we not have a conversation where we look at all of these things individually as opposed to lumping them all together under the umbrella of trans. Stop being transphobic, mate. Yeah, yeah. What's this? I suppose we're living in a sound bike culture that wants the quick solution very, you know,

what's the headline on that, Francis, is what they're saying, do you know what I mean? Give it to me in four words. Well, I just did. Stop being transphobic. Well done. Yeah, exactly. So I suppose because people aren't seeking the long-winded explanation, people aren't interested. But you're right. Like, you know, never before. There was always a cohort of very young children. I'm actually classic. My experience is very typical. There was a small number of very young children who were extremely strange. And generally, about 70% of those kids ended up being gay, lesbian or bisexual. And some of them like myself weren't. But it, That's kind of irrelevant as in they were always there. And then there was always a group of middle-aged men who sought medical transition,

certainly in the last 100 years, again a very small number. And then suddenly out of nowhere, the teenagers who had never before been seen in the literature, vanishingly rare, no kind of, no studies on them because nobody ever saw teenagers seeking medical transition. And they arrived. And when you look at the graphs of social media, And when you look at the graphs of smartphone use from around 2012, it shoots up. Social media shoots up. And gender issues shoot up.

And if you do a graph on it, you think it's incredibly similar as arcs. And yeah, it does seem to be very much supported online and it's a certain type of kid. And that kid is very often, like you say, neurodiverse, very often autistic, ADHD, a little bit isolated, a little bit lonely, often after a traumatic incident. And what did they do? Do you remember back in the day

if you were lonely and you were, you know, you'd had some trauma as you often do in adolescence. You went into your bedroom and in my area you listened to music and it changed my life

to be honest as a teenager. Where they go is the internet social media. That's where they go and that's where they find it. And there's a perfect storm which is extraordinary to study of everything that's going on

that lands them into queer theory and they might be trans. It's weird when you see it because you're like, how's this happened? When you actually unpick it, you can see exactly what's happened. It's such a profound point

because I remember when I was growing up, you know, you talk about a kid who was neurodiverse and a little bit, you know, I had a lot of friends, but very sensitive, blah, blah, but I mean, you got into music. I listened to, you know, the bands of my generation,

like Nirvana, talking about, you know, teenage angst, not fitting in, not being part of the world wanting to withdraw. You know, there's also the element of putting two fingers up to the world. I don't see that in kids now. Those kind of pop culture bands, which had in garnered huge followings, they don't really seem to exist anymore.

I remember the first teenager I had working with counseling. She wasn't the first one that I ever had, but the first one who said, no, I don't like music. I was like, you don't like music? You don't like music? It's just like, I just doesn't. doesn't do it for me. The vast majority of the music is just something in the background.

It's just not that big. Now, there will be, of course, there'll be exceptions and people will ride in and say, my kid is mad into music. But mostly, no, music is not that heartbeat of teenagehood that it was for us. Wow. I know.

They're missing a lot. Because it's kind of transcendental. It lifts you into a kind of universality. When I realized, when I listen to the lyrics and it was so professional. for me and for so many others. They don't have it. You know, it's interesting. I actually am not that into music now, but now that you were talking about it, I remember, as you were talking about it, when I was a teenager, I used to listen to music all the time. Yeah. And it did help me dealing with all sorts of, you know, emotions and whatever. So we're running out

of time. We're going to go to locals in a second where our audience are going to ask you their questions and we'll continue the conversation with some of our own. But before we go to our last question, just very quickly, give us a kind of like toolkit or some kind of practical ideas for parents and if there are teenagers listening. How do you deal with some of the stuff? All of the stuff that we've talked about. What are some of the things to just to focus on, to think about, to maybe do when you are in a difficult place, just a little two minutes on what people can and should do. If you're worried about your kid. Yeah. If you're worried about your kid, there is a, there is a way you can go at it. Okay. And, you know, first of all, in a way you have to kind of think,

going in and there's a kind of a level of confidence needed because you know you ask the kid what's going on and you very much zip it yourself you don't give Hollywood coach kind of with a towel around your neck kind of inspiring speeches instead you ask them to clarify what's going on because often you'll think it's A and it'll actually be B so it might look like it's their friends but it's something else that's going on so you ask over a period of time you don't jump in like you're grueling them but you ask them questions to clarify. And when you've clarified, and any good therapists would know this, when you've clarified, you check that you've got to write. And you say, am I right in thinking, say, I'm trying

to help you and I mightn't have it right. But I'm right in thinking that what's really upsetting you is the fact that you're not doing as well as your other friends in school. And it's making you feel stupid. Is that what it is? And be very open to rolled eyes and no, that's not it. And it's cool, it's fine. Because when somebody doesn't understand you and you're upset, it's very upset. You can be very, the kid can be very harsh about that. Let it go, just keep plowing on because you've committed to the fact that you want to help them. When you've actually, when they actually say, yeah, that's what it is, you'll usually see a physical kind of a sigh, a shoulders, a kind of, yeah, you know what I mean? And that's a real crucial point because so many of us as parents, we're terrified of our, of our kids' pain.

We're terrified of their distress. We want to think it's just little kids, little problems. And so we think, oh, you'll be all right or oh, just it'll be better. And instead have the courage to have the empathy to kind of get into the trenches with and say, oh, now I get it. Now I get it. That takes a kind of emotional bravery. And then when you've gone in there, I get it.

Then try not to jump in with massive solution very quickly because that diminishes it. And it's more along communicating solidarity of, okay, I can see this is a big problem. I get it. and we're not going to fix this today or tomorrow. Like I will look up things and I'll look for solution, but you're kind of shown a seriousness to it. So let me help you work with, work with you on this. And it could take his ages and we could take loads of wrong turns.

But just know, I've got your back. I'm on your team. Shoulder to shoulder. Just let's give some time to this. So if you can just do that, if you can kind of clarify what it is, have some empathy and then kind of say, we'll give it some time.

Let's try lots of things. That's an amazing feeling. It's an amazing feeling for anybody to think they get it and they know it's not easily fixed and they're willing to try it in the long term. I've said that very fast, but honestly, if you took your time at that and that could take a couple of months to do,

it would be worth its weight in gold for any kid. That's really good advice because I think we do live in a kind of quick fix Hollywood speech kind of environment. They don't work. It doesn't work. Unfortunately, sorry Sylvester's the last. So before we go to locals, our last question in this part of the interview is always the same,

which is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that you think we really should be? I think what we're not talking about is that there is a kind of a really thick online culture of Reddit and different social media where they're all affirming each other in a very female empathetic way. and it's making people feel worse and worse and worse. So it's kind of toxic empathy where everybody's, oh, it's really hard for you. Oh, it's really hard for you. And nobody is willing to do the hard, kind of,

the hard, challenging conversation with people. You should see my Twitter feed. Yeah. Yeah, Twitter is its own crazy world, which I enjoy. I'm kidding. Yeah, but I'm talking about the teenage world where everybody is so empathetic and kind to each other and it's all, oh, don't worry, don't worry.

And it's very unnourishing because nobody will give it to you straight. Truth has a value. Yeah, and depth has a value. And it's vacuous. And I think it's, I think there's a real genuine toxic culture. I know everybody says it,

but I think we're not talking with just how toxic it is to be a teenager these days. I think it's really hard. And I think they're suffering on a deep level. And I think it's, it's, really unfortunate because we've never had it so good. Stella, Amali, thank you so much.

Head on over to locals where we continue the conversation. My daughter is currently six years old. How will I keep her respect and trust if, stroke when, her or her friend's views and desires conflict with mine?