Trent Nikolic:
That’s right. It’s time now for The Sunday Sweep where we unpack the issues of the week. And a friend of the show, Clare Rowe, is on the line, leading child psychologist and adjunct fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. Hello, Clare.
Clare Rowe:
Good morning. Good to be with you.
Trent Nikolic:
Yeah, it’s great to have you with us again. I always love your feedback on other people’s issues, but let’s have your feedback first on your own opinion piece that you wrote, that I read, that I really liked, which was stop telling your children effectively that they’re amazing when they haven’t earned it. It’ll hold them back later in life. I really, really loved your take on this.
Clare Rowe:
Yeah. Well, look, I wrote about this week and I’ve essentially said that I think we’ve confused two completely different things when raising kids, and that is confidence. And we all want kids to feel confident, but also competence.
And look, I want to be clear. I’m not advocating we start walking around and telling our children they’re hopeless, but believing in your child does not mean pretending. They are brilliant at everything. And I’ve just watched parents over the last 10 years try to protect kids’ self-esteem, but by telling them that they are an amazing artist, an amazing footballer, an amazing singer, but irrespective of whether they’ve actually developed those skills or not.
Yeah. The problem is that the real confidence doesn’t come from being told you’re amazing. It comes from being really competent at something. And I just think that we are sometimes creating children with very high opinions of themselves, but incredibly fragile self-esteem underneath. Because eventually, what’s going to happen is the outside world arrives, right? So someone else gets picked for the team or the teacher gives you a bad mark or your boss tells you that your work’s not good enough. But if you’ve spent your entire childhood being told you’re exceptional at everything, you’re not going to interpret that feedback as, “Right, okay, I’ve got some work to do here.” You’re going to interpret it as, and this is what we’re seeing, “That’s unfair. The teacher doesn’t like me. The coach is wrong.” And that’s what we’re seeing with young people.
Trent Nikolic:
Clare, it’s fascinating. I talk about this a lot with my friends because we’re all turned or about to turn 50. Our parents broadly were born in the late ’40s. So our parents grew up in a pretty tough time, I guess, especially out of World War II. They had to be tough people to succeed and get ahead.
Pretty much all of my friends agree that we grew up with parents who said, “Mate, you’re not very good at tennis. I’d stop wasting your time doing that and stick to cricket because you’re good at that. Or probably forget about the singing and maybe continue with the piano lessons because you’re good at that.” Or your parents would say, “Don’t be an idiot. Don’t be stupid. That’s a dumb idea. This is a better idea. Get back to your studying.” Whatever. They were pretty matter of fact, that generation of parents.
And as a consequence, I remember both my parents growing up saying things like, “You’re going to have to do plenty of things in life that you don’t like, son, but that’s all part of the process.” So then to the point that you made, you start off in the working environment and your boss says to you, “Guess what? This is what you’re doing.” And you kind of accept that you have to do it, the one thing that you don’t like mixed in with the knowing that you do because that’s just the way that it works and you’re equipped to deal with that.
Clare Rowe:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I’m just smiling thinking my own father. He was born right at the end of the war, ’45, so same generation. And yeah, look, I think parents need to get much more comfortable with allowing children to discover that, one, they’re not good at everything, but also that’s okay. That’s all right.
Trent Nikolic:
Nothing wrong with that.
Clare Rowe:
Because you might be brilliant at math, but hopeless at sport or an incredible footballer, but struggle with spelling. I mean, that’s just called natural human variation. And I think there’s something incredibly liberating for a child discovering. I don’t have to be brilliant at something also in order to become good at it. Kids have always had these aspirations to become whatever, celebrities or astronauts. But following that up with, well, that takes thousands and thousands of hours made at dedicated training in order to perfect that. And I think that’s the lesson we’re at risk of losing as well.
Because if you’re told you’re already amazing in the first place, why would you practise further? If I’m already gifted, why do I need to listen to feedback? And if everyone gets the same ribbon anyway, what have I learned about effort? So, yeah, I mean, I just think it’s okay for parents to tell kids, you’re not great at that, but that’s all right. And further to your point, that comes back to that whole kind of philosophy of if your kid is great at tennis and not so good at maths, get them the tennis coach actually. Put them into what they’re really good at.
Trent Nikolic:
Yeah. Absolutely. Now, in a move that will surprise nobody, I wanted to talk about a multimillion dollar government grant that may not actually have the effect that it’s supposed to have. There’s a charity that’s warned that a $10 million LGBTIQA+, I want to make sure I get that right, health grant, announced by the Albanese government will channel young people questioning their gender toward unproven medical interventions with irreversible effects. Now, you and I have spoken about this before. This is a concern that we need to really pay attention to rather than just swatting it away and saying, “Ah, it’s nothing to worry about,” is it?
Clare Rowe:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Look, I want to be clear about what this grant is. $10 million going to establishing national training for healthcare providers like GPs, right? So importantly, the government has made it very clear, this $10 million is not directly paying for things like puberty blockers, hormones, medical interventions. But my concern is we have bundled basic dignity and the terms inclusion with this other term of affirming care. And that has a very particular clinical meaning in this debate.
And the context is we have seen a significant shift in countries like England and Sweden and Finland towards a far more cautious approach when we’re dealing with these interventions for children experiencing what we call gender dysphoria. England has subsequently now banned the routine use of puberty blockers.
Now, the thing I’ve got concerns about here is the timing of this $10 million announcement. I think it’s very strange because the Commonwealth already has underway a major evidence review in order to develop national clinical guidelines for treating kids with gender issues. So we are awaiting the results of this huge review. It’s happening right now. Interim advice is expected this year. And I think the complete national guidelines aren’t expected till 2028. Anyway, my question is, why are we spending $10 million on this training and accreditation framework before we have finished determining what is actually the evidence base? What should the framework be? I mean, surely you do these things in the opposite order. You establish the evidence and then we establish the clinical guidelines.
Trent Nikolic:
Not when you’re the federal government, Clare. You don’t.
Clare Rowe:
No.
Trent Nikolic:
You just say whatever you feel like and then when the data doesn’t back that up, you just change your position.
Clare Rowe:
Well, that’s it. Exactly. We should be developing the national training around the guidelines that haven’t come out yet, so I’m very worried about that. And this should not be an ideological argument about whether you are for or against transgender people. This is a very straightforward question of evidence-based healthcare. And when you are dealing with vulnerable children, and particularly when treatments can have irreversible consequences, which these can, this is not about being nice or inclusive. The evidence has to come first.
Trent Nikolic:
Absolutely. And just before we take a break, Clare, we’ll be back with you in a minute. A funny message here from Shane that’ll resonate with all of my mates. We joke about this a lot. Any of us who’ve got an ethnic father, we joke about this.
“Hi, Trent. You’re so right. My dad was born in ’42 and during school and my first 12 months after school, I worked alongside him.” Yes, Shane, guilty as charged. It’s made every job I’ve had since then seemed like a holiday, but he built in me the resilience. Shane, I can very much relate to that, mate. Very much relate to that. I used to joke that I was my father’s slave younger in life, but I tell you what, it made the real workforce seem like a holiday. It is about 23 to 10. We’ll take a break and we’ll be back with Clare Rowe.
Trent Nikolic with you for Luke Grant on 2GB, 4BC and wherever you might be listening around the country on the app. My guest is Clare Rowe, child psychologist. Clare, we were talking before about school kids. And the other one on school kids that I really wanted your input on, I spoke about this yesterday, is this planned protest around Australia against One Nation. It’s happening on August 13. These are kids. These are high school kids and they’re skipping class to do it. My position’s pretty clear. You’re at school to learn, not to worry about protesting. It just seems counterproductive to what we’re trying to do in school and just a complete waste of time.
Clare Rowe:
Yeah. Look, I’m in two minds a little. I think we need to separate two questions here. And the first is, what do you think of Pauline Hanson and One Nation? But the other is, should school students be supported by parents and schools to leave school, as you said, during school hours, to participate in political protests? And they’re not the same question. And I can appreciate there may be 16, 17-year-olds who are genuinely engaged and read widely and developed their own views they feel strongly about.
But look, I have a few questions. The first one’s probably a bit cheeky and that is, how many of these students will turn up if the protest was 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning rather than during maths class?
Trent Nikolic:
Yeah.
Clare Rowe:
Because if we’re going to describe this as evidence of some extraordinary political engagement amongst teenagers, yeah, I’d be interested to see whether that engagement survives outside of school hours. And I was very interested by the response of the South Australian Education Minister who essentially said that whether students attend is a matter for parents.
Now, of course, yes, parents ultimately make decisions about their children, but surely as the education minister, they should unequivocally say, “On a school day, children should be in the classroom.” That’s not taking a position on Pauline Hanson. That’s just the education minister stating a fairly basic expectation that children attend school during school hours. And, yeah, I mean, I’d genuinely love to know how many of these students attending could sit down and explain to me the One Nation policies they’re protesting against.
Trent Nikolic:
That’s the point Clare.
Clare Rowe:
Not what they see on TikTok.
Trent Nikolic:
Yeah, that’s the point.
Clare Rowe:
Not Pauline Hanson is bad.
Trent Nikolic:
Sorry to cut you off. That was the point. I know that Tom Elliott, my colleague on 3AW, spoke to one of the girls who was planning on protesting, and she mentioned fascism. And then she mentioned that “hundreds” of her classmates would be deported under Pauline Hanson. And to your point, I would have said to her, “Well, what’s fascism? Define that.” Because I don’t think she’d have a clear indication of that.
And then first of all, if hundreds of your schoolmates are going to be deported judging by what Pauline Hanson said, they would have been people who’ve overstayed their visa and they were here illegally, which is a concern. But to your point, what do they actually know about One Nation’s policies?
Clare Rowe:
Absolutely. And look, we know peer acceptance is enormously important during adolescence. Young people are particularly sensitive to what their friendship group thinks. And so when we see, if she said hundreds of teenagers enthusiastically supporting a political cause, I think we should be at least willing to ask how much of this is considered political conviction and how much is just social conformity.
And the other thing is, I commented on social media about this during the week and I got a lot of adults defending children’s right to go and protest. Now, that’s fine, but we can’t defend their right only when they arrive at the political conclusions that we approve of.
Trent Nikolic:
It’s a fair point too.
Clare Rowe:
So to back at those people, yeah, if we genuinely believe people should be politically engaged, that’s fine, but then we have to defend their rights to explore views across the political spectrum. And I don’t know how many of those adults that contacted me during the week would agree with young people protesting against labour, or an anti-abortion protest, or supporting Israel march. So you can’t have it both ways.
Trent Nikolic:
One I want to get your opinion on quickly before we go to another break, Clare, is young people saying that the social media ban’s not working. We’ve heard and read this a lot. You and I spoke about this last time you’re on the show. I don’t think it is working, is it?
Clare Rowe:
Well, no. I mean, I think it’s about 70% of parents now say their children still have active social media accounts. And kids are basically telling us, “I wasn’t asked to verify my age.” Or, “I just made another account.” Yeah. And Australia is being watched around the world about this. And if we can demonstrate that you can actually keep young children off social media, other countries will follow. But let’s just remember that children are extraordinarily valuable customers to these companies.
Trent Nikolic:
Aren’t they?
Clare Rowe:
They don’t want to lose them. They don’t want to lose them. So I’m not particularly sympathetic to big tech saying, “Oh, it’s too complicated.” I don’t think they want to make this work. And no age verification system will be perfect. Teenagers will find loopholes. It all comes back to what I’ve said the whole time, which is this is still a parenting problem. And if parents want their kids off social media, it comes down to how you manage that in the home.
Trent Nikolic:
Clare, thank you so much for your time this Sunday morning. We’ll be reading you through the week and you’ll speak to Luke again soon, I’m sure.
Clare Rowe:
Will do. Thanks, Trent.
Trent Nikolic:
Thank you so much. That’s Clare Rowe, child psychologist, with a lot of opinion there. Some of you agree, some of you disagree. I think Clare and I are coming at the same argument from a slightly different angle, if that’s fair to say.
