Stephen Cenatiempo:
It’s 23 minutes to 9:00. This is not going to come as a surprise to anybody with any common sense, but it’s still worth talking about. Recent research has confirmed that COVID-19 lockdowns in Australia caused substantial prolonged disruption to mental health education and physical well-being of children and teenagers.
This is data from the Australian Institute of Family Studies, the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and the Australian Human Rights Commission. And it pointed out a whole bunch of issues. To talk to us about this, we’re joined by a psychologist and adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, Claire Rowe. Claire, good morning.
Claire Rowe:
Good morning.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
You were talking about this at the time. We were talking about it at the time. This just confirms what most experts said was going to happen.
Claire Rowe:
Well, it does and we are still seeing the effects. I know people question that, but when you significantly interrupt a child’s development at five years old, you will see the effects at 10, 11, 12 years old. That’s how child development works. And yeah, a lot of us were talking about that at the time of saying keeping these kids inside for months and months and months at a time, interrupting their social development and their learning at school, would have trickle on effects and that’s what’s come to show.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
And the quantum of this is absolutely staggering, because a national survey of 20,000 young people, so that’s a fairly substantial sample. It shows that these lockdowns attribute psychological distress in 70% of them.
Claire Rowe:
Yeah, that’s right.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
I just can’t get my head around that number.
Claire Rowe:
Yeah, absolutely. And we’re seeing the effects now where reportedly, we have one in four students now classified as requiring disability adjustments at school. I mean, that is an extraordinary number for a First World country like Australia. So look, either our children have suddenly become dramatically more disabled in the space of a few years and what proportion we put down to COVID, there is a proportion there, but there are other things going on as well. Or we have to look at the threshold for defining disability, which I think is fundamentally changed.
And it’s not just COVID, it’s a perfect storm of things. And I think we do need to confront the possibility that modern childhood itself has become far more dysregulating for them. They’re growing up in very different environments now.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Because it’s also the compound impacts here, because I’m looking at just some of the things here. We’re talking about over 71% of children in strict lockdown zones experience massive strikes in recreational screen time, and we know how bad screen time is. So it’s almost like we’ve forced our kids into something dangerous. They’re not sleeping properly, and some of the studies say that it’s caused permanent shifts in their youth routines.
Now, I mean, I think of my niece and nephew, I mean, my brother gets them out playing soccer and they’re outside in the yard jumping on trampolines and stuff, which is a good thing. But if you put a screen in front of them, they’ll stay in front of it. And that’s the problem we’ve got at the moment.
Claire Rowe:
That is the problem. And we’re seeing this with children who didn’t necessarily go through COVID. So I actually don’t think we can blame all of this on COVID. Children today, their environment is full of screen exposure. I think parents have completely lost sight of what good sleep is and how much sleep kids actually need.
As you said, we’ve got reduced independent play. We’ve got heightened parental anxiety. Parents are very anxious these days. And just this increasing emotional, I think, surveillance of normal childhood behaviour. So we have radically changed the conditions under which children are growing up I think in one to two generations. And you cannot expect to do that and not have an effect of it.
And, yes, the pandemic undoubtedly intensified many of these problems, but there are many problems today that still exist. Many children didn’t go back to school after the lockdowns. They dropped out in year 10, year 11. They are having trickle on effects into adulthood. But I think one of my bugbears, I suppose, in my own profession is the tendency to reduce this to kind of a simple argument, because multiple things can be true at once. We can acknowledge there is a greater awareness of mental health and disorders, but we can also acknowledge that some children who were previously missed and now being identified, but we can also say, and I get shot down for this, that ordinary developmental struggles are being increasingly pathologized.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Yeah. Okay. Which kind of leads to the next thing I wanted to talk to you about. It’s a paper you’ve written for the Institute of Public Affairs on climate change anxiety. Now, normally when we talk climate change on this programme, we’re talking about the economic cost of rolling out renewables only programmes that aren’t generating electricity or whatever. But we’ve also created this environment where we’ve led kids to believe that the world’s going to end tomorrow almost.
Claire Rowe:
Yeah. This is actually my second paper on this topic. It’s something I have been increasingly concerned about over the last 5 to 10 years, and that’s because as a psychologist working in a clinic, my colleagues and I have seen increasing number of children coming through absolutely beside themselves and terrified that they won’t grow up to adulthood. And I’ve kind of had a look at this and tried to work out, “Where is this coming from?” Parents bringing them in saying, “We’re not talking about this to them.”
And it comes back to what they’re learning at school, but particularly the way they’re learning about it. So the really strong emotive language, and I’m talking six, seven year olds. So not a debate on whether climate change exists, but whether we tell a very young child that language like there is no planet B, that species are dying out. And also, that the burden rests on them to go and do something and pushing them into kind of going home and telling mom we can’t drive a family car, and we can’t use electricity, and we’ve got to eat less meat. I mean, this is clinically what I’m seeing in my office.
And so I would argue that you’re not actually teaching or equipping children to go and solve these problems when they grow up. They’re actually paralysed with anxiety, but they don’t think they have a future.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
So how do you as a psychologist deal with that? Because you can’t withdraw them from the, I guess, the stimulus, can you?
Claire Rowe:
Well, no, you can’t. Though we are encouraging parents to try and to look into the curriculum to talk to their school. Now, on one hand, I would argue that it’s not parents, not just their responsibility, but they don’t have time to do that. I’m a parent myself. This is the first time I’ve really looked in depth at the curriculum and been horrified that this idea of sustainability, which is often climate change, is what they call a cross curriculum priority.
It’s in everything. It’s in music, it’s in sport, it’s in every subject has to have it. So first of all, I want parents to start being aware of this and engaging with their school and what lessons are being taught if possible. But the second thing is we need to get back to somewhat say a traditional kind of perspective of shielding kids from adult concerns.
I argue in this paper, we do that with other topics. We don’t teach really little kids that world wars and geopolitical concerns and a lot of the other horrors of the world. In this topic, we expose them to everything. And so we really need to stand up, I think, as a parental group and say, “We don’t want this for our children.”
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Claire, I often think about, and you and I are both Gen Xers and we sort of lived a very, very different lifestyle to the generations that came after us. There was almost a forced resilience built into us. Are we taking that away from modern kids? Are we almost setting them up for failure that whilst all of these influences and stimuli are still a problem, but they’re less equipped to deal with them than we might have been?
Claire Rowe:
Yeah. Look, that’s certainly a lot of people would think kids are, that word less resilient these days, the word is used a lot. I do think that the pendulum has swung too far. That we’ve lost that sense of protection of childhood, that they don’t need to know everything, that there is a child world or an adult world for very good reasons.
A lot of parents come to me these days and kind of have this notion they need to be very honest with their children. I get children in our clinic who are kind of these anti-Trump eco warriors and they’re eight years old, and I think you should know about anything like that. You should be learning to kind of make friends, tie your shoelaces, read and write. So they are overexposed information, I think.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Yeah. It is an extraordinary situation we find ourselves in. I mean, I guess in an ideal world, people like you wouldn’t exist, but it’s getting to the point now where I imagine yours is it’s a lucrative business because of these things that are forcing people into, or forcing kids into needing psychology, for lack of a better way of putting it.
Claire Rowe:
Well, yeah. And this paper that was released this week through the IPA, I’ve actually had a little bit of a criticism, if you like, at my own profession, because I actually do think that sometimes psychologists are leaving their evidence-based ways of treating things like climate anxiety. They’re kind of validating, and feeding, and leaning in a lot of the time rather than kind of helping children develop some coping skills and challenge some of their catastrophic thinking about this.
There’s a lot of psychologists out there that are encouraging children to go into kind of activist activities as a way of coping. I think that that’s ludicrous. And so, one of the key arguments in this paper is that psychologists should be very cautious about abandoning our principles of evidence-based practise, and we need to stay neutral. And our job is to reduce distress in children. And if that means shielding them from the information, that’s what we need to do and help parents do that. We shouldn’t be sort of saying to them that their feelings are valid and what they can do to contribute to the climate change cause per se.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
It reminds me of the old George Smilovici joke, how many psychologists would take to change a light bulb. Only one, but the light bulb has got to want to change.
Claire Rowe:
Exactly right.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Claire, where can we find this paper if we want to have a look at it more broadly?
Claire Rowe:
Yeah, you can head to the website of the Institute of Public Affairs. And on the homepage, they should be able to easily find the link to download it.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Fantastic. Claire, good to talk to you. We’ll catch up again soon.
Claire Rowe:
Thanks, Stephen.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
All the best. That’s Claire Rowe, psychologist and adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. It is 11 and a-
This transcript of Clare Rowe speaking on The Breakfast Show with Stephen Cenatiempo – 2CC from 22 May 2026 has been edited for clarity.
