Stephen Cenatiempo:
My next guest, of course, is psychologist and adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, Clare Rowe. Clare, you’re lucky you came a couple of weeks ago.
Clare Rowe:
Good morning, Stephen. Did you say it feels like five degrees?
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Yeah.
Clare Rowe:
No, thank you. No, no.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
But it’s actually only three, right?
Clare Rowe:
Oh, dear.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Now, you often write thought-provoking columns in the Australian Financial Review, and you’ve written about the recent incident in, well, one of our most expensive schools, Timbertop, Geelong Grammar’s country estate, let’s call it, where Prince Charles once, or now King Charles, once attended.
A group of 11 Year 9 girls snuck out of this school, walked seven and a half kilometres to a country pub in the middle of the night, apparently smoked cigarettes and vaped before being driven back to campus in a bunch of trips by a P-plater. And the school had a fairly unique way of punishing these girls.
Clare Rowe:
Well, they did. I mean, it wasn’t just a minor rule breach, as you said. It was a serious safety issue. You’ve got kids sneaking out in the middle of the night and up to the pub and sneaking back into school again.
So as a punishment, they were made to sleep in their tents by themselves for a couple of nights and were isolated from their friends and peers, I think, during meal times and so forth for a couple of days. But the story quickly turned from not what these children did and their behaviour or the consequence really, but the reaction, I thought, from the parents. And the parents’ reaction was to accuse the school of breaching their children’s human rights and causing psychological harm.
So that was really kind of what I was writing about in the AFR there, and probably goes in hand with a change I’ve seen in parenting and school relationship for several years now. I hear this from schools all the time. The teachers tell me, “We’re really hesitant to put in place negative consequences.” And let’s remember, every consequence is unpleasant by definition, right? If the consequence isn’t uncomfortable, it’s unlikely to change behaviour. We’re really uncomfortable in putting in place punishment because parents will be on the phone, parents will be knocking on the door defending their child.
Now, I don’t know about you, Stephen, but I tell you what, if I ditched school, got away up to the pub, smoked and vaped, I don’t think my parents would be defending me.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
No, the punishment would’ve been double when you got home, and my experience was the same. But I think the interesting thing here is is that you’ve talked about whether or not we’re building a less resilient or less accepting of consequences generation.
But there was an interesting comment on LinkedIn from somebody who pointed out that, “Well, the people who send their kids to this school is a high-net-worth individual who are generally people that lead their communities, and they’re just pushing back like they normally would.”
But I don’t know that 30 years ago… I often think about Kerry Packer being sent back on the train to pick up his cricket bat by Sir Frank because he’d left it at, I think, the same school.
Clare Rowe:
Yes, exactly. And that is, I think, a generational change. This isn’t just about high-net-worth individuals. There is a change, and parents don’t send their children to a school like Timbertop because it is easy. I mean, certainly I would’ve thought that they choose it precisely because it is challenging and it’s built on developing independence and resilience. Those values just don’t work without meaningful accountability.
But now you’ve got this situation where children are learning from their parents that, “Consequences can be negotiated, and Mom or Dad can be in my corner and defend me on that.”
So yeah, look, I think reasonable people can debate whether this consequence, sleeping in a tent by yourself, was the best one, but that’s different from suggesting that every single consequence constitutes psychological harm or a human rights issue. And that’s the blurring for me as a psychologist. We need to make a distinction between discomfort and these, I hate to say it, catch words like “emotional safety,” “psychological safety,” which are just now in the vernacular now of the public.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Which I think leads me to the next point in your professional career is that a lot of these kids who would be subjected to any kind of punishment now, and as you say, there’s psychological ramifications or human rights issues, they’re going to be sent to people like you. How do you deal with that?
Clare Rowe:
That’s a very good question. You deal with the parents.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Right.
Clare Rowe:
A lot of my work is working with parents as opposed to directly all the time with young people. But yeah, I mean, you need to be able to give the message to young people these days, I say ad nauseum every day that you can do hard things, which I think is actually, ironically, related to the motto of this school. It’s Latin, translates something along the lines of, “We can do hard things.”
And young people need the opportunities to experience manageable adversity. It might not be pleasant, it might be uncomfortable, but they can cope and they get through it. And day after day, I’m telling young people in my office, “You know what’ll happen at the end of this? You’ll have two arms, two legs, and a head, and life will go on.”
So as long as I can say, “This is manageable,” then this might actually be good for you because we can’t hand kids resilience, which is what everyone wants kids to have. They need to build it.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Clare, I went to a suburban Catholic school, so I never paid $90,000 a year for school fees, but I reckon in my day, if we had have been made to sleep in a tent for a couple of nights, we would’ve thought, “How good’s this?”
Clare Rowe:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, that’s the thing and a similar story recently at my office, a child came along because Mum was worried they had trauma from a normal arm break and the arm was in a cast. I said, “This is this story in my days where everyone was proud to get everyone to sign the cast and it was great fun.”
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Yeah, it was certainly a different time. Clare, always good to talk to you. I appreciate your time.
Clare Rowe:
Thanks, Stephen.
Stephen Cenatiempo:
Clare Rowe, psychologist and adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.
This transcript of Clare Rowe speaking on the Breakfast Show with Stephen Cenatiempo 2CC Sydney from 30 June 2026 has been edited for clarity.
