No team has consciously wanted this change is to happen, which causes a lot of stress. So when we start to recognize this is an emerging at all. But there are some things that they're going to learn from the other bit is we've got to work out how am I going to have the conversation because I actually don't know an awful lot about babing.
Hello, and welcome to separate bathrooms. We would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional custodians of this land, and pay our respects to the elders, both past and present.
I'm Cam Dado, I'm Ali Dado.
Okay, quick thought, quick thought for you, honey. Interesting that we are recording today, that this is the day our youngest is experiencing her final, her last dat of school. Tomorrow, we will no longer be parents of children in high school or school. She might go on, well, she'll might go on to tertiary education. So how do you feel about that?
Yeah? But UNI parents are not involved in the slightest either there's no different there's no book weekday, or there's no festivals that you go and volunteer at.
And I will miss it terribly.
I will miss it terribly, the amount of joy that I had working at the kids' schools and being part of the parent community and organizing some of the fairs. And I loved every second of it. Loved our kids in our school years. I thought it was so much fun.
Yeah, and we made some great friends, yes too along the way. Yes, I remember that the school they went to in the States, just being around some of those dads and doing the working bees, building the play structures, painting the flaws in that hall and doing all those and you know, you're in the brick at that school.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a community.
It's a community that you know, it's hard to find that again in those school years. You can make you make friends for lifetimes, you know, in those school communities.
So yeah, I'm I'm glad that.
She's so delighted and happy, and I'm super proud of her, and yeah, but I'm sad.
Yeah, it's kind of It does remind me of that doctor Zeus quote, don't be sad that it's over, be glad that it happened.
Yeah, you know, totally totally.
Our guest today is has been of huge assistance to parents and children for a long long time many well. She's often referred to as the Queen of common Sense. Maggie Dent has become one of Australia's favorite parenting authors, educators and podcasters.
Yeah, we've been wanting to have Maggie on for a while and she's got a particular interest in the early years, adolescents and resilience which I love that word, and is just such a boy champion, which is just delightful. She's the mother of four sons, of course, and a very grateful grandmother. And Maggie hosts the good Enough Dad podcast and has hosted six seasons of the award winning ABC podcast Parental as Anything Classic and in twenty twenty one she also released a book of the same.
Name, and this year she has released her What We've Discovered is her final parenting book, Help Me Help My Teen, Supporting our teens through tough times. Let's welcome into the bathroom, the legend Maggie Dent. Maggie, welcome to separate bathrooms. We've been fans of you for a long time.
Indeed, that's pretty nice.
Yeah, yeah, I know they call you. What do they call you?
There's a luck queen of common sense. A common sense is that just a really nice type.
Is there pressure? Is there pressure? Being the queen of common sense, if you do something a little, you know, you get the brain just goes. You know, you have tond no.
Pressure because I see everything from both angles, do you know what I mean? I can see it's this beautiful logical reasoning that I got from my dad. Plus I'm a country girl who's raised in the bush, and we just look at stuff and go, well, that's a dumb ass idea.
Yeah.
Yeah, sometimes like sometimes it's better to plow around the stump.
That's sort of that's stuff.
God, you've got it right, Like just leave it right there or else. As I often say, everyone's doing the best they can, right, we really are. No one gets up and says, how can I be a lousy parent today? We really have the best intentions. Yeah, And I'm totally passionate about the fact that there's no perfect in parenting. If you've listened to me or know that without it,
it's just good enough. And then you know, when they get older and they've got their own family, say look back at you and go, God, how did you do it?
That's good enough?
Yeah, you make mistakes, you learn from them. Sometimes you don't learn from them, but.
And you do them again.
I've made it to.
Adult, hold in the hood and they still like you.
I think that is that's the best thing. It's like, there's my trophy. They still want to hang out with me.
We talk about in acting, you get a you know, each each shot is a take, and then you get you have missed takes, you know, so they're like, get another shot at can we just do that again?
One more shot?
Yeah?
Yeah, yeah, You've got us on a good day or on an interesting day. Our youngest daughter it's her last day of school. So now we've got three kids who are out of school. School, So we were just chatting about that before and any advice for us.
Yeah, I just got to drop a bit of a clanger here for you, because we often feel you know that, you know, we just got to focus until o're eighteen and then they're magically an adult and it's just not bloody true.
No, it's not.
So what you've got now is one of the riskiest windows is eighteen to twenty four.
Leaving home, they actually.
Feel more adult like, but we've still got a capacity for being led astray or doing what their friends want them to do, or you know, not step up and be brave when they need to be.
And we've got a generation of around.
This age of a heightened level of social anxiety, partly COVID, partly too much time online, and some of them are too scared to actually go out into the wide world.
And there is I mean, this is how weird the world's become.
Apparently there is you know, they actually feel safer in their bedroom, in their social you know, connections and friendships than the real world. So there's a we used to have fomo what do I miss out on when out in the real world?
Now it's fomo.
Online and it's joemo in the real world, which is the joy of missing out up because I'd actually prefer to stay home anyway.
And how weird is this?
There are actually apps that help your teen make excuses for not turning up that doesn't offend them. What I know, right, see how different the world is from where you were sixteen, seventeen and eighteen, and God knows me, heavens that's the Dark ages. But you can see how it has changed so much and why parents can find it's so damn confusing because in just that sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, twenty year difference.
Wow, what did the world do? Yes?
Why that blows me away that we actually have an app to give you excuses. It's like you can't even think of your own excuse anymore. There was that article you probably saw this years ago. It was on the cover of Time magazine. It was called, is Google making a stupid Yes? You know that we're having to Google everything. I mean people on phones like, oh, I know, yeah, some and so wrote that song, or you know, it's like we go to Google straight away for all our intel.
I know, because sometimes I want people to just give me a minute and see if I can remember the actor's name. I'm like, hang on a minute, hang on, let's see if I can get it. But people are already going, yeah, yeah it was Tom Jones. I was like, ah, damn it, it was right, No, yeah, absolutely right, absolutely right.
And then of course AI pops in and if Google was making is dumber, what the heck's that doing? Like seriously, I mean, you can actually.
Ask it to write a piece about all.
My philosophies around parenting and they'd cover every one of my ten books in exactly the number of words you give it. And I think, what are we doing with upper school education? Like why the hell do we have to remember, you know, facts from ancient Egypt and how it applied.
AI.
Yeah, Maggie, this is what so body, our youngest say. This is what she's exactly what she said to me, like two weeks ago, she was she had her trials for HSC, and she's doing her HSC. She doesn't really need to do it because she's going to go into hairdressing, so she's going to get into doing an apprenticeship. And then she said to me, I go, well, how are you doing with your exam study for modern history? And
she said, Dad, I don't think. I don't think it's going to matter whether the Mesopotamian army and the takeover and what they did through Persia is going to really matter when I'm putting foils in missiles mcguila Cuddy's hair.
And I said, you're absolutely right.
Have you ever thought about stand up?
But also one other thing in that cam is there way wiser than we often give them for an even even pre digital I think we often you know, they get you know, they get presented as really, you know, they don't know what they're doing, and they make a lis misakes and they're grooty and grumpy. I could always find a pathway into a deeper conversation with a team.
That's really was one of the big motivations with the book is if you can set it up in a way honest to goodness, they they're actually incredibly reflective because they've learned stuff way earlier than many of us did. But also, yeah, there's a different awareness of the whole world. You know, our global community really impacts them because they well they're part of a global one.
Gollye.
I grew up on a farm and didn't even have a TV, so I didn't even know what was going on in the world at alone, you know, in Perth, which was only two hours away. So their awareness and understanding of stuff, and I think they do talk about it among their friends. Yes, you know, it's not all this. You know what we see they're all they're worried about is how they look or you know, they're watching porn.
There is a depth to them, yes, and even the you know, the tricky kids that I worked with, the ones who were really struggling in school, environments, you peel under that layer you know they're so judged, they think they're all useless, and dive under that and you can still have a deep conversation, but how the world could be better or who do you think is really important at changing things for young people in your school environment? They will go with you and that's you know, that's
just one of those beautiful things. And so for us as you as parents every now and then, you know, if you create the environment and the situation in a respectful way, you can ask some really big questions and they will give you really honest feedback, also respectfully.
I was asked to speak on.
A panel about one of the sort of not necessarily social media, but an app, you know what the kids, A lot of the kids use for interaction with each other. And so I went straight to body to say, you know, ask her questions about it because I don't have the app, and she's like, I don't stand where they don't have teens on the panel. Yes, right, She's like it affects us, like it's and all of her everything I asked her was so well thought out. She knew the dangers of it,
she knew the plus sides of it. She knew what it was, what was occurring with it. It was just I'm like, you've got this completely covered, Like.
I don't have to every about you at all.
That was what was beautiful when I did, because I always do a survey, you know. I did it from boys to men. I asked the guys and the boys, and a beautiful one and early part of the book where the teen sort of said, look, thanks just for asking us. Most people write about us but never ask us, you know, And I mean, how can we possibly without their feedback?
Yeah?
You know, when I.
Was teaching all those years ago, god, it was a long time ago, getting feedback off my students was not something we were taught at university, right. You know, I would have given them an opportunity of the end of a topic that i'd done, particularly in the upper school classrooms, I'd sit them all to circle on the floor with the lights out, and so let's get real here, I want to get some feedback on how you felt I covered that part of the course in this part here?
How could I have done it better? And that just wasn't heard of, right, Yeah, But how did I improve.
As a teacher?
Yeah?
The feedback from the students.
Yeah, I mean that shows great humility on your part as well. Hey, look, we spent a quarter of a century living away from Australia, so there's a lot of cultural things that we missed out on and Maggie Dent is part of that and so, you know, but we've caught up. We've caught up, but there are other people that that are not haven't boarded the Maggie Dent train.
So all on board.
Can you just give us a little little bit about your journey and how did you come to be this this person who's one of Australia's favorites.
I feel like Thomas. Yeah, well.
Yeah, so obviously you've talked about being a teacher and that was so long ago.
But I'm of four boys. That's a big learning.
Yeah, of course you have life experience, but how did it all sort of get to this point in a n.
I guess I was raised to be quite curious.
My dad was an agricultural scientist, So even though we were on the farm, which doesn't look like you're going to learn a lot, he was always kind of posturing questions and encouraging the curiosity in my mind.
And I was an avid.
Reader, so I was always you know, but I also recognized I was born that the kid that's the observer, right, even from a little age, watching growing up and thinking wow, on Earth would you do that anyway for teaching? And then I realized, okay, I'll go back to the intensive breeding program. So I taught for five years and then
I had an intensive breeding program. And while I was doing that, I also, you know, I thought I needed to do something around the ages, not full time work, so I volunteered it the Albany Hospice, and I was particularly good at supporting people who are facing death, and I ended up being a death dueler, which was not on my list of things in year ten. But that journey of understanding what is you know, one of the toughest things that we experienced as a human.
You know.
Then I ended up in funerals, and then I ended up becoming an authorized marriage celebrant. So I've done over a thousand weddings and two hundred and fifty funerals.
It's about humans and.
Listening to humans and their stories and their pain and their suffering, and then when you apply the science over the top of it, you often see there's a layer that matches. And then when I stepped out of the classroom, I just realized, I think it's more important that I helped the troubled kids then teach kids how to write a paragraph which somebody else could do.
Right.
So I did a postgrade diploma in cancing and therapy, and then kind of a year or two into that, I realized I needed to work with a bunch of parents who had very similar issues with their teenagers at the time. So we had a little mini seminar and the feedback from them was cheers, you make so much sense.
That just makes sense.
So then I burnt out, as you do when you work too hard and you want to save every teenager that you can. So I transferred some of my notes for my professional learning for teachers into a book, and that was my first book, which go on laugh about this. This is the title of my first book in two thousand and two, Ready Saving our Children from our chaotic world, teaching children the magic of silence and stillness, Like what.
The want chaotic? I want to buy that chaotic.
So then years later, let's something else. And then the other thing, which is interesting is one of my adult sons, because I was going to schools and running seminars for parents, and one of my boys just said one day, look.
Mum, he's the lawyer. One pretty smart.
I said, Mum, do you know I pay fifty bucks to go and listen to Kevin Bloody Wilson at the pub. Why don't you charge people to come and listen to your seminos? So they don't just they can come if they don't belong to a school, right and yeah, and that also has evolved into and then you know that whole space only women to start with. Yep, but I have got apparently a bit of a knack of you know, making people laugh what they learn, and I take the piss out of men and women, so good way to learn.
Often we can have up to forty percent of dads. But it also was at the time when dads were starting to turn up with their big, beautiful hearts, wanting to be team parents, wanting to know how they could do stuff differently to their own dads. And that's it's been a very special part of my work, you know, working with dads.
It's probably going to be a probably be too hard a question to answer, but I'll ask it anyway. Do you remember any one defining family or child or parent that has stuck with you all these years.
Oh yeah, that's easy. So it's the.
It's a beautiful boy called Matthew who I taught in one of my English classes, who was in year nine, and he was a literate and I wasn't prepared at university for a literate kids who couldn't read or write my English class. But he wasn't the one that wanted to mess around and misbehavior.
It was just really quiet and he was just the sweetest boy.
And you know, to shorten the story, one day I dropped him home and I had a conversation with him away from school to find out he had a solo mum and an older brother, and he was just this incredibly It was like talking to somebody really smart and wise. Anyway, back in class the next week, showed a video about dots. I was trying to introduce you prejudice and stuff, and I asked THI everyone what it was about, and even my brightest girls had no idea just about dots and that.
Matthew leant back and just said, oh, miss, I know what that's about. It it's about color prejudice where people think they're better than others because of the color of their skin. But we're not all. We're all really just one fourteen years of age, completely literate, and we just gathered around that lad that year. We helped him put his voice onto even those days we had to record it on a tape machine what and then onto paper.
But unfortunately, moving on, he left school obviously early and really struggled, ended up with some mental health issues, drug addiction, got into marijuana, and when I ran into his mum many years later, I learned that he had died by suicide at twenty three, and it was I realized that was a moment that I felt, we've just lost the
world lost someone special. Yeah, and partly it was because of what happened in the school system, but the rest of the world also, And that was where I thought, nai every single you know, kid matters, whether they're clever or they're not. And that's kind of you know, we know that the you know, the the number of our kids who are choosing to leave our world is way too high. The number one killer of fourteen to twenty
five year olds is suicide. We can change that by simply being better humans around them and we have to stop punishing and shaming mainly boys before they're six or seven.
Yeah, absolutely, in distilling your sort of parenting philosophy, is that sort of it? Is it about being able to raise?
I mean?
Is it just about raising children in kindness and respect?
I mean?
But I guess that's that hard thing, isn't it. If you weren't raised that way? You've got to like strip it, strip yourself back to be able to raise your child in a different way and even understand that you were raised without respect and kindness because it's your norm. So you're just teaching what you know. So where do we get stuck in and change the direction for these kids?
How do we do it?
Well, it's really interesting, isn't that what children need has never changed?
Yes, that's right, it's just the world around our kids.
Yeah.
And so there's a couple of factors that play into that, because today's parents are really aware that you know, hitting, hurting your kids actually doesn't necessarily improve the behavior.
But what it does do is it damages the relationship.
And we now know how important having a safe base to land, which of course is a big theme in my book of It's Not Your Parents where's a safe lighthouse.
Figure who you can go to.
So the big thing I think it's we just can't blame you know that all these social changes where you know, parents have to work much harder and longer hours. Kids spend many more hours in childcare than they ever did.
And while early childhood education can be fantastic for kids, it's only high quality, right, And so for high quality, they need to be paid better, and they need to we need to support them better because staff changeovers with children under three can cause all sorts of issues around anxiety, which of course we struggle with later. But the big one, one of the biggest ones, is that in actual fact, out of love, we almost do too much for today's
kids than we did for previous generations. And my challenge is we need to return authentic autonomy to our kids, at least some of the time, which is not orchestrating and over scheduling their childhood and filling it full of stuff, but also allowing them to create opportunities to play with
other children. My challenge is neighborhood play needs to kind of be a thing or children playing outside of you know, venues like tennis clubs and sporting events like they used to do without much supervision, because older children and younger children is exactly how mother nature intended us to pick up our social and emotional skills. You didn't need your parents to read you those books every night to get it.
You learned it from experience, and so it is, you know, it's one of those things that society has just moved away from that and then we made everyone terrified that there will be a you know, a pedophile on every corner. So you can't let your kids run around outside or they're all going to die because someone's going to run over them. So we've made everyone.
Frightened yes of life, and.
That's really something it's difficult to peel back, but peeling it back even a few degrees can make a huge lot of difference in the way that our kids step into their own you know, adolescence particularly is about taking risks. Well, if you've never taken any, guess what, you're not going to want to do it now because I want mum or dad to step in and help me. And as you know can understand, a big message in the book is stop rushing in and fixing things for them. They're
emerging towards being adults. They've got to work out how to get through stuff. We're right beside them, yep, but we're not picking them up, we're not carrying in them, we're not rescuing them. We're fixing stuff. And you know, and you know that comes from love. I know it comes from love to do it because we love them. And it goes right back to not wanting to be
uncomfortable before five. And of course you know, if you haven't heard me, I'm the one who growls about the changing of the rules of past the parcel.
Well, I couldn't agree with you more.
And I've worked as a teacher for twelve years. Maybe something like that started in early childhood, and it's just been so interesting to watch the changes in the education as well, and how much we're so And I understand that like logistically, okay, if there's an incident on the play yeah, then you have to look at the equipment and da da da da da. But it's like we have one incident on a playground equipment and that equipment goes.
And it starts.
That's it's just so wrong. We don't learn to sort of yes, okay, she broke her arm but she's fine. What and all the other kids don't get to use it now, like we're not letting the children get dirty.
Luckily, our kids grew up.
Going to the Steiner Education and when it rained, those kids put it on a raincoat and they went outside and they played in the rain. If they came home muddy, it had been a good day. Like they still did outdoor play consistently. And it was all about do not overschedule your child. It's exhausting for them. It's meant to be playtime. It's not meant to be How can I train my child to be, you know, an Olympic athlete at the age of five, and a lot of where
sort of programs sort of think that way. It's such an early age and even in the edge, I'm just going on a ranch.
Go go, go out.
I'm right with you.
And then we look at the statistics of like the kids aren't doing well in math and science, let's teach them to it earlier. No, don't teach it to them earlier. That doesn't work, like if you're overloading them, like stop.
We had a teacher, Maggie that was great. She was she was the kids were coming to I'm bored. I'm bored, and she said good, yeah, goody, good, do something, you know. So it was always really great when uh, when when she was would talk, when that would come up, and then.
We would say to our kids, I'm bored, and we were like great and they go, oh.
No, you know what I used to do when they did that those I've got this list of chores, which one do you want to do?
They suddenly not bored anymore.
So Ali I did take a submission to the federal government in Australia in twenty thirteen called stop Stealing childhood in the name of Education, and I don't even think the minister even looked at it.
So it's one of been one of my battles.
Yeah, about returning play to its authentic place, absolutely, and allowing our parents' time to just chill inside for a bit while they run feral.
Yeah, but there is a really.
Interesting shift besides you know this massive you know, I'm a nature play advocate and have been for a very long time, and begging back the long monkey bars and bringing back logs of wood and all those things is happening. But there's been a bit of a shift culturally that I heard. It was through an interview in Brizzy where a house designer, architectic kind of person who helps do those new you know, opening up a new whole suburb.
Apparently parents are now going for smaller houses because I want their kids to share wonderful without their on sweet in their own bathroom and a smaller house and a bigger block. So they're actually realizing, of course they're not going to go outside if you've got one square meteorite of grass, right, And I think the common sense part of me, of course they're not going to want to go outside if that's all they've got to go out. Yeah, But also I feel we're settling back into a space
that we were dictated to. What you know, so we wanted to get the entertainment room and everyone has their own bedroom, and you know, at the end of the day, we have some children who have spent so much time safely on a couch, either watching TV or a device that when they see rain, they're frightened of it because they haven't seen it, or they don't know what a white thing in the sky is, which is a cloud.
Yeah, I'm glad, I'm glad you clarified that. Thank you. Yeah, but my man flying saucer, I feel blessed.
In my childhood.
We grew up with a couple of acre is either side of us, so we had We made the golf course, we made the BMX track. We used dad's gasoline for the petrol for the for the to kill with potholes and ride our bikes through.
It, photographs starts and.
Took the risks and we got brave. And if you weren't brave, you got got a bit of curry from the other brothers from it, or the boys down the other end of the road, you know. So it was there was a lot of that.
I think I had some boys that built a bear pit and I didn't want to tell them we didn't have any bears, but man, it took weeks.
That's the best thing.
Drop bes.
You got the drop bears carry some rod, Yeah, the drop bears.
Can I can just talk about You've mentioned fear before with kids and parents, and to me, a lot of it rests on the six o'clock news, and I know that you know it's like well, I mean it was like that in America.
Will show you how to survive the storm that's.
Coming in five minutes, you know, as a little sprinkle of rain, and it was all about this the news watch. Yeah, the news setting up how they're going to be the savior of been. In order to do that, to be the savior, they had to set up the fear first, and it's like turn the freaking news off. I hate to say that networks are going on get rid of Cameron Datto because that's how big money spinner is the six o'clock news. They put news earlier and earlier and earlier.
Yeah, it is.
One of my recommendations for families is to keep the news off for as long as possible for kids because you're exactly right.
But even the way they.
Deliver the news, if you're if they're reporting on, say a fire that's happened, you know, in it wherever in Sydney or anywhere, what they do is they don't just show you one clip of the fire behind the news reader. They repeat it. So it's a car accident, they'll repeat it and repeat it. So for children, particularly up to five or six, they think that happens over and over and over again, which means the world becomes irrationally even
more unsafe. And also the TV's screens are so much bigger now than they used to be, So that's scaring the Bejesus out about hips and making it like it's
almost in their in their lounge room. And you know, great for adults, but if you're raising children, you know that's something you can just not put into that little developing mad because they will take those memories and it doesn't take a lot for one of them to stick and then become a worry cycle that a child will And a quick story when a Victorian bushfires happening, you probably were still illustrated.
So long ago.
I was still counseling and I had a number of little boys being brought to me because they were crawling into bed to sleep next to their daddies and they weren't getting out no matter what they tried to do. And when I explored it with a couple of the little boys, they had seen a four wheel drive just like daddy's burnt out. So these boys were now getting into bed to keep daddy safe at night so he
didn't get burnt up like they saw on TV. That is how easy we can catastrophize what's happening out there. It's always been happening, but it shouldn't be, you know, mainstream into our children's lives because real and imagined, and then the brain and the way it stores memories. Yeah, children are very different to growing up. Even I can't watch it sometimes I'm really feeling a bit overloaded. I can't watch the news now.
No, I've got to say, yeah, my mental health starts and I'll start to wonder why I'm feeling so low and like sad, and I go, I've been watching the news for four days straight.
That's what it is. Yeah, that'll get honey.
Do you remember when nine to eleven happened and how the school responded, Yes, so the Stein of school that where our kids were at the way they responded when nine to eleven happened. They were like, Okay, turn all the media off. We don't want the kids seeing the buildings falling down. And it was such a structured response to keeping them safe and just say, look, there was an event or whatever. The dialogue around.
Even talked about it. It was just the same day, keep.
Them from it was.
It was terrific.
We were running around going, oh my god, it's armageddon. What's going to happen? You know?
But the kids were in Australia.
I was having to counsel a lot of children who had watched it and was sure the baddies just kept on bombing.
Building right, right.
So even in Australia that they were seeing it, and every day it was the same footage, which was disturbing for adults, but for children, again, it just looked like there were more and more of those bombs coming that were in big buildings going down. So I was having to unwind some of that. So you're right, like huge impact, well done that you were in that school at the time.
Yeah, yeah, it saved It saved a lot.
So it saved us as well.
I think because we were I know I would have I would have perpetuated the conversation because I was talking with our parents about it in Australia and it was all you know, it was like something to talk about, and it was because it was terrifying, it was and it was crazy.
Moving on, moving on to teens, maybe because I know that you are you're well versed in this age range as well. Look, teens, as you said earlier, they are they do like to take their risks.
What do we do?
How do we treat a teen when they've been busted doing something that's pretty naughty, Like I mean, I don't know if we can say naughty for teens, but let's say it's a pretty poor choice. We found them with some marijuana in their pocket. We've found like the hidden bottle of vodka, maybe the underage drinking or whatever it is.
Or the vaping, the vapor that's huge.
How do we deal with that as parents?
Well, the very first thing that we are biologically wired to do elie is to get angry. It's the same as if we lost our toddler in the supermarket. Instead it just whooping them up with love, we go ad them angry. Apparently it's a dry I don't know what it is, but there's some pretty good science around it.
So I'm going to say the very first thing you do is to go and calm your own what I call the glividge art, because when we turn up angry, we shut down all capacity to be able to manage what's going on because we haven't got the full information. How often do we rip into a team where you've found something in their bag that an actual fact they're looking after for a friend, and we've just shattered the plane are.
That they made me look after their rat bag.
Yeah, that is true. I had my boyfriend's pop plants growing at my apartment and my father let himself in one day when I was away and thought I was a drug dealer, and I was like, I swear to god, it was even spoke.
Yeah.
See okay, and then I think the next thing.
The next thing is recognizing that this is not a sign that you've failed as a parent or your kids. You know there's something wrong with them because they are biologically wired to take risks. They've also got an impaired brain which for making good decisions, and if you've got boys, oh my god, it's even further. We know that the gabba gets turned off, which is an impulse inhibiting neurochemical in the brain, so they're more likely to make really impulsive,
poor choices. And also we know that you know, they don't always learn the first time they make these things.
You know when you get it.
That's why the first half of the book is could you please understand what's happening? Because no team has consciously wanted this change is to happen, which causes.
A lot of stress. So when we.
Start to recognize this is an emerging adult, but there are some things that you know they're going to learn from. I think the other bit is we've got to work out how am I going to have the conversation because I actually don't know an awful lot about vapor or I don't know a lot about those funny colored tablets.
And it's a really big part of the book that I spent hours searching the best places for parents to go and get good information or their teens that you don't go on a Google search and end up down rabbit holes which are absolutely not helpful. And it's beautiful because we can keep updating that, which is great on our website. That means that when you're going to have the conversation, when you've calmed down, and there are ways to open the conversation, and sometimes you might need to.
Drop a queue day before you have it.
Now that takes enormous emotional maturity for yourself not to rip their head off, is you're just going to drop it. You know what.
I can't believe.
How big vafings become, even outside offices.
You've already so in the seed.
You get in there, and it's how do I have that conversation, because as soon as I sit down with a power over my team instead of a curious approach, they're not going to come on board and give you the rest of it. And then we're going to go okay. So this is a challenge. I made poor choice, which I can understand because I know all about the brain. So what's your plan going forward?
You know?
Is this is this something you know you're planning to do or are you already is it struggle? Are you struggling with that? Always go through the friends first, any of your friends struggling with this, because they're more likely to give your feedback.
They're more worried.
About their friends than themselves. And you've got to remember that for a lot of them, particularly boys that absolutely think they're bulletproof.
Yes, god, I had four of them.
There's never going to happen to me, don't be ridiculous. Only happens everyone else, not me. So once we get that sort of a conversation, then we're going to go what's your plan A, what's your plan B? You know, but I want you to you know the other bit. And it's a big part that we don't realize. Everyone's got a higher self or an inner compass. We all have it. It's a part of the way our mind
has worked. And I challenge parents to say, Okay, let's have each conversation and then let's have another one in a couple of days, and you tell tell me how you're going to move forward. Because what I've found, even if they want to go to a crazy party with two hundred teenagers somewhere that you don't want them to go, if you say, look, let's have a couple of days and we'll revisit this idea, so often they change their mind after a couple of days without any input from you.
As a growing up yep, because.
We want them to hear that voice. Yeah, but it's a lot quieter than the one upstairs, it says, but.
Everyone's going to be there.
It's going to be great, it's going to be everything I love you know.
All Right, We're going to have to leave you there for the moment. But hang tight, because there is a part two to this conversation with Maggie Dent.
Catch up with you next week.