The Secure Start® Podcast
In the same way that a secure base is the springboard for the growth of the child, knowledge of past endeavours and lessons learnt are the springboard for growth in current and future endeavours.
If we do not revisit the lessons of the past we are doomed to relearning them over and over again, with the result that we may never really achieve a greater potential.
In keeping with the idea we are encouraged to be the person we wished we knew when we were starting out, it is my vision for the podcast that it is a place where those who work in child protection and out-of-home care can access what is/was already known, spring-boarding them to even greater insights.
The Secure Start® Podcast
#4 Parental Navigation of the Digital Frontier, with Catherine Knibbs
Join me for a highly engaging and thought provoking conversation with Catherine (Cath) Knibbs, as we discuss the scope of harms children and young people may experience when online, Cath's reaction to the Netflix series, Adolescence, and Cath's question to me without notice about how we are failing boys in contemporary western society and discourse. I hope you like it!
About Cath:
Cath is a Researcher, Psychotherapist, Author, Speaker, and Doctoral candidate looking at the real harm children suffer in a world of technology, which is advancing quicker than many adults can keep up with.
Cath has a background in Engineering in the Army, IT, and Computer Tech of over 25 years, and over a decade of working with children and adults directly around issues relating to the internet, from Bullying to Porn viewing, from cybercrime to cybersecurity and more.
Cath writes about issues such as the impact of tech on the developing child, the impact of cyber trauma and the issues of immersive technology on eyes, brains, and bodies.
Cath runs a company educating professionals about child safeguarding around tech and digital spaces, and she teaches therapists how to be 'safe AND secure' when using tech to ensure they protect their clients.
For more information about Cath visit her website.
Disclaimer
Information reported by guests of this podcast is assumed to be accurate as stated. Podcast owner Colby Pearce is not responsible for any error of facts presented by podcast guests. In addition, unless otherwise specified, opinions expressed by guests of this podcast may not reflect those of the podcast owner, Colby Pearce.
Welcome to the Secure Start podcast.
Cath:And the thing that I would certainly say is the vulnerabilities offline result in far more vulnerabilities online. What we tend to do at the moment is talk about the use of technology as though it is a tool, and we forget so often it is the medium.
Colby:Welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I'm Colby Pearce, and joining me for this episode is a global expert in children's online behaviour and associated online harms. Before I introduce my guest, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we're meeting on, the Kaurna people, and the continuing connection the Kaurna people and other Aboriginal people feel to land, waters, culture and community. I'd also like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. My guest this episode is Catherine Nibbs.
Colby:Catherine is a researcher, psychotherapist, author, speaker and doctoral candidate, looking at the real harm children suffer in a world of technology which is advancing quicker than many adults can keep up with. Kath has a background in engineering, in the army, in IT and in computer tech of over 25 years and over a decade of working with children and adults directly around issues relating to the internet, from bullying and porn viewing to cybercrime and cybersecurity and more. Kath writes about issues such as the impact of tech on the developing child, the impact of cyber trauma and the issues of immersive technology on eyes, brains and bodies. Kath runs a company educating professionals about child safeguarding around tech and digital spaces, and she teaches therapists how to be safe and secure when using tech to ensure they protect their clients. Welcome, kath.
Cath:You're welcome, colby, for inviting me on, because I'm very excited to talk about this, and thank you to that beautiful rendition and nod to the land you're on.
Colby:We do that as a sign of respect for the traditional custodians of this land that we refer to, australia, and their continuous connection and habitation of this land that spans at least the past 40,000 years. So, kath, I've given a little bit of a bio or summary of your work, but I'm just wondering how you would describe the work that you do.
Cath:Ah, in a nutshell, well, some of that description makes me sound younger than I actually am, because it's over 30 years. I've been working in and around technology, so we'll just skip that bit quickly, but I would say what I'm doing in my role is I work from the micro to the macro in terms of trauma. One of the things that isn't on that description is my background in functional health since 2018, and using functional testing, such as checking for gut microbiome DNA what we call single nucleotide polymorphisms I can actually see on a cellular level what trauma does and how it impacts a body. And when I'm looking at technology, I'm looking at what we do individual, all the way through to the macro, in terms of society and how we're changing, if you like, as a species, uh, so I would certainly say what I do is working individually, collectively and metaphysically. If that's not too deep for uh, what? What time are we on tuesday morning?
Cath:you know it's the afternoon for me uh, here in Australia, but yeah yeah, wow, that is fascinating, and I wonder is that um associated with the PhD that you're completing, which I referred to, or um, no, the PhD is in um, how young children so I've worked with seven to ten year olds how they perceive the impact of viewing, distressing, inappropriate graphing imagery and this is a piece of research that really hasn't provided any new findings really in terms of children are affected by this stuff on a, let's say, a nervous system level, on a psychological level, on an emotional level, and it's almost like I've had to do the research to prove to people what I've been saying for the past 15, 20 years.
Colby:Yes, yeah, yeah. Well, I guess that in some ways is the role of research, isn't it? Yeah, is that research is? I often describe research as being scientific inquiry into the things that we already believe to be true.
Cath:Yeah, and I guess what we do as clinicians is considered anecdotal until we have a piece of research that backs it up.
Colby:That's right. That's right which can be reassuring but also frustrating, I guess.
Cath:Yes, yeah.
Colby:You know certainly you would be aware perhaps that I sometimes write about things like practice expertise and titled expertise, and a lot of titled expertise emanates from universities and probably has more standing than practice expertise. So it's good to hear from someone who is a both a practitioner and a formal researcher, who is conducting research, just bearing out, I guess, what what you have known from significant practice in this field. Significant practice in this field, yeah, so that's fantastic. Yeah, and how did you get, like, how did you get into this area of work?
Cath:oh, in a nutshell, um my, if I go all the way back to my childhood, because that's where we always go when we're clinicians in this space my father was a radiographer in the prison service after leaving the army and he worked in and around what's called category A prisons. So these are prisons where people are serving lifelong sentences for really macabre and abhorrent crimes. And when I was younger he would talk about the crimes that some of these criminals have had engaged in. And I must have been nine, ten. Obviously there's reasons why my dad talked to me in that way and we'll not talk about his dysfunction for doing that, but I got really fascinated in. Well, why would somebody do that? And because of the, if you like, the dysfunction in the family.
Cath:I went down the route of physics, not people. But I actually came back to people after the career in engineering and going into computing because I was raising my own children, I was working in the computing industry and what I was dealing with. So this is when the Internet really started to take a really prominent part in people's life, particularly in business. So this was like 1996, 1998, 2000. And I had young children who were beginning to get used to computers. I introduced them to technology very early on and what I noticed is the way in which the adults use the Internet and the way in which children use the Internet. And that was really my foot in both camps. And then I decided to train as a therapist because I jokingly say computers suck my soul. Train as a therapist because I jokingly say computers sap my soul.
Cath:It's a very quiet industry to work in in most cases, and I'm a chatty person. So I went and trained as a psychotherapist and, whilst doing so, did a little bit of work in some of the secondary schools.
Colby:Yes.
Cath:And I was finding what children were doing online was kind of in between, let's say, the teenagers. Really, what the teens were doing differed to the primary school age children versus what the adults were doing, and we were not talking about this in 2010. If we go back, that's really when I started, it was being missed and I continuously say and that's the generation of children that we let down.
Cath:Now, in 2025, 15 years later, we are now talking about the harms that children face, and this is thanks to uh online safety, trust and safety and, of course, a recent tv program which we'll probably get into. But also it's the space in which now we're looking backwards saying we should have put um guardrails in place, we should have taken care of the children and, because of the ubiquitousness of this space, now we are now recognizing that children can be harmed.
Cath:But I would certainly say the phrase I tend to use is we look at the ACEs study for trauma but, what we didn't look at were cyber ACEs, and these are the ones that you can be harmed by on the internet, and that goes all the way back to early 2000s for the last 25 years, really.
Colby:So you're really talking about cumulative harms when you're talking about the aces um, yeah, study, which is for those who who are not familiar with it, that's the adverse childhood experiences um study. That um, that really contributed to our idea, contributed to our knowledge about um the impact of cumulative harms during childhood on health and well-being in adulthood. And yeah, it's very interesting what you're the parallel that you draw in terms of um, I guess children's exposure and and and uh, in the same way that the ACEs study referred to complex trauma experiences, because there were multiple trauma experiences, probably experienced multiple times you're clearly drawing a line of association between that concept and what happens in the online world for children and young people yeah, yeah, and the reason for that, uh, colby, is because everything we do online is attachment based.
Cath:When you actually get to the crux of the, the modus operandi and the why we do what we do, there is so much neurobiology involved in using technology, being on technology, doing what we're doing, and unfortunately, that's the bit that has been missed, because what we tend to do at the moment is talk about the use of technology as though it is a tool and we forget so often it is the medium, and that's that's one of the phrases that I've used for a long time is it's a tool and a medium.
Cath:And when we're talking about screen time and the metrics that that are being discussed in ways that reference addiction and things like that, that's not taking into account the why we do what we do and when, when you actually get down to the crux of it, it's about socializing, it's about connection, it's about engaging with your, your peers, and each and every part of uh, the developmental, uh trajectory of children is about that technology and how they interact with it or how others interact with it in front of them so everything has an impact on uh attachment and the thing that I would certainly say is the vulnerabilities offline result in far more vulnerabilities online.
Cath:but when we're talking about children who are um in environments where uh technology is um present uh and and it's overly used at the detriment of the real-world connection, we are seeing a different kind of process emerging, and I call that e-tachment.
Colby:Very good. Yes, it's fascinating listening to you talk about it, and particularly the link that you draw to attachment. My mind was going to thinking about children's online behaviour, as you were describing it as being a place where connection is achieved, a significant place where connection is achieved, and it's through those those, each of those connections, plays a role in what our children, young people's, attachment style is. So I you you may well be familiar with my work I draw a distinction between attachment, relationship and attachment style. Children, young people, can have multiple attachment relationships and they all differ based on their experiences of those relationships. Their attachment style is something of an amalgamation of all of those experiences and and it's very interesting and the penny's dropping for me, even as we speak as that you have included real world and online relationships as contributing to a child's attachment style, which is very important in the way in which children and young people, and eventually adults, approach life and relationships and is like the rudder the rudder that steers them and their ship through life.
Cath:Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's why I went off to do my TEDx, because I found myself in that position with my own children. So one of the things I've looked at is early developmental, because I found myself in that position with my own children. So one of the things I've looked at is early developmental needs. When there's a three-parent family the mum, the dad, the device and I was really interested when I was doing my baby ops about what sense do babies make of their world when perhaps the parent is only interested when the flashlight is on and the camera's on and they're paying attention to this thing and this thing gets pointed at them, and then their cadence and tone changes and, of course, the prosody around connection is around. Hi, let's take a picture Da, da, da, da, da, da. And then the parent goes back to looking in the phone. What do, what do babies make of this new way of um being in the world? And what happens when that distracted parenting becomes about what I call other children inside the device, because babies can't recognize themselves. And when, when mum, dad or other relatives are like oh my goodness, look at your picture here, swipe, swipe, swipe. Is that another infant in the room? Is that a sibling? Is it a baby that could be a threat. You know what is really going on in those first 1001 days and the?
Cath:The reason I went off to do the TEDx is because I was sitting in, uh, my living room this is going back quite a few years, because my children are adults now, but nearly 30 in terms of their age and I was sitting there with one of the first, first ever iPads and I'm tapping away thinking, look at me doing my extra hours and I'm being a very busy mom. And here I am tip-tapping away and my children were playing on their consoles and devices and I realized nobody had spoken for an hour and I had this realization. I went okay, everybody, stop, we need to not do this, or we need to not do this as often as we currently are. And it was about, you know, really having a conversation Fast forward to I don't know, probably about five, six years ago.
Cath:I was on the telephone the good old fashioned, and I'm doing it here like the good old fashioned finger and thumb telephone, doing it here like the good old fashioned finger and thumb telephone and my eldest son sent me a piece of research. I opened my phone and started to read it, because we were having a conversation and he went deadly silent and he said you're not paying attention to me, are you, whoa? And that was a moment where I thought, oh my goodness, even in a telephone conversation I'm not present because I'm reading the piece of research, which means I can't do, you know, multitasking, and as a result, I kind of dropped that into the middle of the talk about this real world connection. What I'm beginning to see well, not beginning this has been happening for 15 years. Children who do not get their needs met and I call it out here go looking for their needs in there, and in there is whatever kind of technology they can find, or whatever app, device, game, etc. Etc.
Colby:Wow, I'm yeah. I think we all have a certain level of understanding that these devices intrude into our real life and real-time interactions. I got goosebumps when you talked about what what do babies make of this? Uh, three-way interaction. Yeah, that that is fascinating and probably probably the um, the topic of, of of a of a much longer, I think, podcast interview. But I'm really, yeah, now that you've brought it up, I'm fascinated to hear more about what you've said and what you believe to be the case about that.
Cath:Can I just put my caveat in there? Actually, it's not to blame parents. I understand, um, and I think I've written this in my first parenting is the hardest job in the world, and if you've got a brand new baby and you've got I don't know 300 people on your facebook page because that's where us old fogies are, apparently- yeah if you've got 300 people telling you how you need to be as a parent, that can be so overwhelming for these, uh, new parents.
Cath:Maybe there's a reason why they're online so long. Maybe it's because they're like well, should I be doing this or should I be doing that? Should I be doing sleep training? Oh, my goodness, I gave them food too early. Uh, I'm feeding them too often. Contradiction, contradiction, contradiction. Plus the health visitor who comes round. Maybe they've got 300 friends that have been telling them what they need to do.
Cath:As a professional, we are overwhelmed with not doing things in air quotes the right way anymore. No real way of sitting with our instincts anymore, when this device can be telling you continuously comparison, comparison, comparison. You're not good enough, um, you haven't done enough of this. Your baby's not doing that. They're not standing, they're not sitting, they're not walking, and I I totally understand that must be overwhelming for brand new parents. But also, parenting is so difficult that in the early days when babies are sleeping, it used to be you would stick the television on. Well, you can now sit and play a game, you can talk to your friends, and for new mums, I guess that's a way that they can still have some form of connection, whereas the isolation of the parents before the phone connection, whereas the isolation of the parents before the phone.
Colby:So it's pros and cons. It's interesting because, while you were speaking about that, when we think about tech and of course our first concern is always our children and whether we have, and whether we have, by embracing online tech with the alacrity that we have as a society, whether we have created a I guess the grossest generalisation is that we've created a generation of anxious children and young people, people, more to the point, we've created a generation of anxious young adults, but what I'm hearing you say also is that it's more generalised ubiquitous, I think, is the word than that, in that we've also created a generation of anxious adults who have a medium by which to constantly compare and contrast their performance in various roles, as well as the general stuff you know how they look, how they, you know what their interests are and all of that sort of thing, what Alain de Botton, my favourite modern-day philosopher, refers to as status anxiety.
Cath:Yeah.
Colby:Wrote a fantastic book about it.
Cath:Yeah, his most recent one is absolutely gorgeous.
Colby:Is it? Yeah, well, I haven't read the most recent one, but, wow, I could sit and talk to you about tech, I think, for much longer than we've both got. But if you could, I'm actually really interested to hear a summary of where you land with tech and in terms of what you would say to professional people like me and yourself, and what you would say to parents about tech, and what you might even say to governments about tech.
Cath:Well, do you know what that segues really nicely into? I have just written a book, right, which will be out in July with Penguin, and it's called Tech Smart Parenting, because I am pro-tech, I am pro-parenting and I am pro-education and those three need to go together. In terms of the world we now live in is technological. So I will just go back to your reflection on the anxious generation being a particularly provocative piece of literature. Um, that has not summed up the world of technology very well. Uh, mainly given the. The author is not steeped in. Technology has arrived and done a recent uh, it's kind of like an overview, without understanding all of the different domains and spaces and ways in which technology is used. Um hasn't included games. Hasn't included. Uh, immersive environments hasn't included. The internet wants to just talk about social media without actually defining what social media is. So that's just my little rhetoric reflection on that particular book.
Colby:Absolutely Sorry. I was just going to jump in and say yeah, I think my understanding is that there is a distinction to be made, or at least, if we're going to talk about the impact of tech and the online world on children and young people, we need to look more broadly than social media. Yes, if we're going to talk about what we're noticing, about the changes in the emotional health and wellbeing of our young people, we need to not just look at tech and the online world. We we need to look at everything that is happening in society yeah, there is um, I'll actually send you a link to it.
Cath:There's a very good uh podcast that I've not long watched, which is an attachment specialist talking about actually the mental health crisis started before technology which I'm sure uh yourself being in this domain, this is not a new um arrival and because of tech it's much more complicated and nuanced um I didn't suddenly get busier.
Cath:I didn't suddenly get busier in 2010 um, there is yeah, there is something to be said about. I get it clickbait. Books and book titles sell and unfortunately I'm watching this particular professional at the moment distance diagnosing people on the internet when he knows nothing about the family situation. Actually, they've just appeared on a big US platform. A very well-known um tv presenter has just hosted them and one of the lines was so no tech, you know, no social media, but if they want to take a laptop into their bedroom then and I I just kind of rolled my eyes and went. Then you really do not understand what the dangers are and where they come from. And the reason I say that, colby, is because the reason I'm in the world of cyber trauma is because of something that happened to my children when they were about 10 or 11, on these flip phones which are allegedly safe.
Cath:I can tell you they are not, because all of the spaces that children can interact and engage with all have the same kind of harms and they can be accessed in many different ways. They can be accessed a library. They can be accessed um. I actually know recently of a child managing to do something on a mcdonald's uh device. Mcdonald's device in the restaurant.
Cath:So children are savvy enough to know how to get around if they're not allowed on social media, because there's no way to regulate this vast internet. So, going back to my position on this, I would say we need education for parents that A does not shame and blame, because that's what I'm seeing at the moment. There is a huge drive to say, well, you gave them the damn devices, you should know better. You must, you can. And what I've seen as a fallout is scared and angry parents. And when we're scared and angry and we go into fight, flight, freeze, we want the thing to go away, which is why the campaigns at the moment for no phones, no social media, no whatever.
Cath:It is smart tech, this, that and the other. They're coming from a place of fear of the unknown and it's being driven by lots and lots of narratives in the mainstream media and certainly by TV shows, saying, oh, my goodness, this particular outlier case could be your child, and that isn't helping anybody. And the children that are growing up now are going to be prime ministers, they're going to be the technicians, they're going to be the surgeons, they're going to be the librarians. They're going to be the surgeons, they're going to be the librarians they're going to be, tradespeople.
Cath:And they are going to do that with technology, which also includes AI.
Cath:And if we're going to make this approach get rid of smartphones, get rid of social media what is it that we're going to miss out on by teaching children how to survive in the real world?
Cath:And it harks off going back to hunter-gatherer tribes and saying we're not going to have fire in the camp because it could actually burn our village down, so we're not going to learn to live with fire because it could potentially be dangerous, whereas another, another hunter-gatherer tribe might say well, we're going to contain ours with stones and we're going to use it, and we're always going to have somebody taking care of the fire to make sure it doesn't go beyond the bricks, so to speak. And what we're doing at the moment is we're saying we're going to be a village that has no fire. There we are. We've progressed far more than the tribe next to us, who have learned to harness and contain it and to educate people about the dangers. But also, fire can cook food, fire can keep us warm, and this goes to that metaphysical approach. So heidegger talked about this, actually and called this techne.
Cath:This is the use of uh, if you like to improve the environment and society and progress.
Colby:Thank you. So I'm pro-progress, yeah, yeah, and powerfully so, if I might say. And of course, I'm coming to you from a country that is seeking to ban young people access to social media until they're 15. And, in fact, legislation has been passed bringing that into effect, and the mind goes to you know, whether we've learnt anything from prohibitional approaches.
Cath:Not so far.
Colby:No, no, but at least the government is on the side. The government can say they're on the side of concerned parents and that's a good thing.
Cath:Yeah, it is in how parents feel supported.
Colby:Yeah.
Cath:However, the gripe across the world from the academics is this is not research based, and I will give you a good example in terms of Pete Etchells has written a book called Unlocked. So, professor Pete Etchells, and he talks about the way in which sometimes we implement good ideas with the vested interest, only to find out later it wasn't the best approach and that has happened repeatedly in medical settings where we've considered, for example, where somebody has a head injury and we do the little hole known as trepanning, where you actually do that, and we do the little hole known as trepanning where you actually do that. That has not been for the best interest of the patients, as it turns out, but it sounds like a good idea and if we think about what we're doing at the moment, this is that it's really an anecdotal. I don't know how to, in air quotes, control my child. I don't understand the technology, so I'm going to shout from the rooftops. It is damaging my child, because that's the only thing I can say as a parent, because I don't understand what's happening and because there is, um, a movement of parents saying I, I've heard it and I'm going to go into the the things that really gripe me in terms of I've heard it gives them a dopamine fix or a dopamine hit? Um, when people don't even understand what dopamine is or how it actually works within the body, um, I, I believe they're addicted because they won't get off it, whereas the understanding about what children are doing and why they can't come off the game or why they can't come off the platform at this point in time is about relational processes.
Cath:But what we do is we get scared and we get angry and then we shout at the government and the government says well, best we keep our voters on side, we will support this movement and, sadly, bit around uh, we're going to ban social media, hasn't even defined it, and what I have seen is certain platforms are still available, but the internet isn't banned and neither is gaming and neither is uh, vr, ar, xr, you know all of the different new immersive technologies, and the government is is pretty much saying there we are, we we've put a gate around the pond, but we haven't done it for the skate park and we haven't done it for the swings and the rides and we haven't done it for the? Um, the, the graveled area, and we haven't done it where the dangerous dogs run, and we have. It's almost like we've done our part, because we've done the health and safety over this particular aspect in the city park and parents feel relieved, but it hasn't really sorted the issue out yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Colby:Yeah, yeah, wow, yeah, there's a lot in there. I think you mentioned the word segue earlier and I wonder if this is a good place to segue into the topic of the Netflix show Adolescence, which I guess very much from my observation, taps into some of these issues that you're talking about, not least of which the concern that exists around the impact of social media on children and young people's behaviour. On children and young people's behaviour, I just want to ask you firstly well, I'm probably going to ask you a double-barrel question, the first part being just your general impression of the show and, in particular, how it portrayed social media use amongst young people and the contribution it made to the plot, I guess, of the show.
Cath:So I think I used the word earlier, but I will make sure that I do use it here again. It is a fictional outlier story, okay, and certainly in terms of the actors in it, I enjoyed the programme it was. If it was a book, it might be what's called a page turner. For certain, the story was fast paced, which I'm going to do the idiosyncratic. If we're going to talk about what social media does in terms of how they influence us and how they hook us in in air quotes, that's the same as the cinematic way in which this story was told.
Cath:We went from, uh, an opening scene that was, uh, very energetic. It had lots of unknown uh questions and answers as to what was happening. Why was this child being arrested? Is this really how the police arrest children, etc. Etc. So it absolutely captured our attention and gave us that dopamine spike and I'm being slightly ironic, sarcastic here, okay, so what the program did was really good in terms of creating that attention economy in the same way that social media does, and, given that it was a screenplay, the way in which the story started to pan out on the first and second episode were kind of indicative of if we didn't know anything about the policing service, we would expect that's how they arrest children, and that is not necessarily the case. That is a very, very rare case that somebody would be arrested in that way, particularly if they were known to be 13. So for me there was quite a lot of eye rolling. Well, that's not how it happens. That's not how it happens, but in terms of entertainment, I enjoyed watching it yeah in terms of the actualities in practice.
Cath:Is this? No, it did not. It did not go, uh, in line with what I know as a child therapist, certainly what I know in the criminal justice system, certainly in terms of, um, being around children who are within this system in this way and and that's because I work with children in the criminal justice system and in this particular way, um, what was interesting was the tiny little nugget, and this is the bit that seems to have captured everybody's attention was the, the police, uh, the police's son, who said dad, it's all about the manosphere, and began to talk about an environment that isn't usually talked about in that way by 13 and 14 and 15 year olds. And I have had so much fun since the program talking to my 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 year old clients, because many of them have watched it, including the ones that are underage, and their response has been we don't even talk like that and we don't use the emoticons and the emojis like that, and that's not how, that's not how we behave, that's the adults not getting us. Uh, again, and and one, one client reflected and do you not think this was my favorite, you know, and do you not think that now you adults are talking about the emojis, that we're not going to change what we're doing. And I laughed and said but that's, that's what all children do. Yeah, so what it did do was it named, or it kind of gave a nod to the environments in which, um, in which misogyny and um and I particularly despise this term toxic masculinity is being discussed.
Cath:Um, there's no such thing as toxic masculinity. It's masculinity and toxic behavior, and toxic behavior always has a root cause, which comes from and I'm sure I do not need to say this to you at all, colby that children do not rock up as toxic adults. You know, there is a trajectory, there is a story, and the way in which the the story has been told is, it's, an absolutely outlier case. This does not happen in general day-to-day practice, however, we're back to that blame, shame, scare, shock and all in which parents are now frightened uh, maybe my child is a potential killer. Maybe my child well, that is true of everybody who lives on the planet.
Cath:We are all one. I think the way to to phrase this is probably we're all one fight away from being um a dangerous person, and that for anybody who's interested. Actually, there is a book called ordinary men. It is not a very nice, uh gentle, read. It's about, um, how, how behaviors happen in nazi germany, how ordinary men became these killers, and that's the thing about the human psyche. We are all one error away from a lifetime sentence in prison, for example, and what it has done, certainly, is bring to the surface conversations that we need to have about children, about boys, but the social media influence wasn't discussed enough.
Cath:For it to make sense in the program. I can say with absolute certainty not all boys who watch pornography turn out to be killers. Not all boys who watch pornography turn out to be sex addicts. Not all boys, not all boys, not all occasions, not all situations and the reason I say that is because I've worked with a number of them for 15 years. This is not a I'm not throwing this out to defend the program. This is based in a long time of being a clinical practitioner.
Cath:What the program has effectively said is porn, social media gaming and being out of the sight of parents is the thing that caused the problem, and what I'm not seeing being discussed is really what it was like for a young boy to not get on with his father in that way. There was no discussion about how he got on with his mother. There was certainly a lot of shame, a lot of parental conflict, a lot of um, uh like parental uh modeling in terms of the way the father behaved. That that was completely missed and that's the bit that we haven't focused on. And yet again, I don't need to say this to you when you go back and look at attachment processes of children who end up in criminal justice systems. There is always that child to parent neglectful or abusive attachment process underneath it all. What we have done is we found the common enemy to point towards. It's social media, it's pornography, it's gaming are job done. Wash our hands of it, make it go away.
Colby:And certain speakers in the so-called manosphere. So yeah, very interesting points that you make passionately, kath. I think it's just yet another example of an inherent need is not the right word for it but an inherent focus on the behaviour of concern and a lack of consideration of the reasons those behaviours exist.
Cath:And Daniel Kahneman would be, or is probably rolling in his grave, as the phrase goes. Because if ever there was a situation that absolutely played out type one and type two errors, as he called them, uh in in terms of the errors of misjudgment, the errors of speedily uh making a decision based on intuition, that is not true. This is it.
Colby:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep, it's been my own reflections that we're missing the point really in our society, or community's concern about young boys, or community's concern about young boys. We're missing the point by creating labels, by concern about the online presence of certain people. The point that we're missing is consideration of the experience of our boys growing up.
Cath:Absolutely absolutely.
Colby:And, for example, why they're turning to connections, connection on the internet, to help them to understand who they are as a male person. And you said something earlier which I think will resonate, which is that young people seek in the online world that which they're missing in the real world, so to speak. I mean, the online world is the real world, but you know what I mean? Yeah, so if our boys are attracted to or consuming a certain type of content, then we really need to be looking at well what's actually going on with our boys in terms of their connections in the real world, in the non-online world.
Cath:Yeah. So there's two little points that I want to dip into here. One is early childhood experiences of everybody's equal, and I'll come to that one in a second. But if you look at the internet writ large and how these podcasts occur and take place, what I would say is we are getting a cocktail phenomena, and the screenwriter and the conversation about Andrew Tate is quite minimal. So what I'll say is you get what I have colloquially called the bro science podcasts.
Cath:Ok, it's a number of podcasts of adults talking to adults, and some of those podcasts are Jordan Peterson, they are Joe Rogan you know some of the biggest podcasts in the world and it's adults talking to adults about adult sexual behavior. And in that space is where Andrew Tate lives. I've mentioned him, and Andrew Tate's audience is not 13 and 14 year old boys, because he can't sell to them. Because he can't sell to them and whilst he operates in what I call the porn industry approach, which is customer of tomorrow, his audience are people who are putting money into his wallet, and that audience are young males, usually around 18 plus the males that are consuming the Jordan Peterson and Joe and joe rogan uh, content tend to be a little bit older, and what happens is then there is a conversation that takes place between the adults who are on the podcast and the adults consuming the content, and then we have the slightly younger adults who are regurgitating and having the conversations, without necessarily having that level of understanding that maybe Jordan well, jordan Peterson is his own uh, his, his own uh monarchy in his own right anyway, but there is something about an 18 year old young male who might be saying the same things using the same language that's picked up by a younger sibling, by younger boys who hear it being talked about, I don't know, when they're on the football or rugby field, and what I find is the 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13-year-olds are using phrases that they don't even understand.
Cath:And if I was to ask them do you understand the 80-20 rule which was cited in the programme? They don't know what it means. The 80-20 rule, which was cited in the program, they don't know what it means and they certainly do not have an understanding about this uh incel movement, which I find kind of interesting because all 13 year olds, in most cases, are not having sex.
Cath:They're not in those kind of relationships, so by default, they are not involuntary celibate. They are celibate by the very fact that they haven't developmentally progressed to where they are having sexual contact at 16, 17, 18, 19. And it's this I would certainly say go and have a look at William Costello's reflection on the incel movement, because the way in which this was portrayed in the program is, as I keep saying, an outlier. This is really really unusual and not the norm. And then, of course, I think to answer the question about why do boys do this and I'm actually going to throw it back as a question to you in a second is when my, when my children so that I've raised boys okay, when they were in primary school in the early 2000s, going into the 2010 and onwards, there was a whole approach of everybody's a winner. There wasn't on sports days, we all do it together and we all get a certificate. And I I challenged this at the school and I said where is the element of competition which exists naturally in evolution, where? Where is the competition between children racing each other in the egg and spoon race? Because you have to handle disappointment. So I took my children into martial arts. That was the first thing I did, because you learn by losing in martial arts and that is how you develop an ability to understand where you sit in terms of society, in terms of where you sit with your skill set, but also how you can handle disappointment and how you can handle victory and what.
Cath:What I, what I have seen is this certainly the 20 plus the 20 to 30 year age group are that cohort of children who did not get the competition during school. I certainly remember my schooling days where your grades were read out in front of every other child. Oh, my goodness, it was heartbreaking If you didn't you know, if you didn't get your high score or if you were a low score. Actually, what we tend to do is we grade the children into classes and the top set, as they're called certainly here is the way they say well, we're top set, so we know by default we're much cleverer than the lower set or the common denominator, and that is a normative part of adolescence, that is a normative part of growing up, and that's actually what happened in the adolescence movie is there was a child who was given a statement. He was called an incel by the emoji. He was called it as an insult and my question would be about that TV program is where did it address who helped that young person manage that approach of being bullied, of being called names, of having disappointment around his father, of the non-victory status?
Cath:So my question to you then, colby, would be so what? How do I phrase this? So what is it that we're we're not doing? And the reason I'm asking you is because you are a man and I am not. I have lived, uh, in environments, certainly within the army, where there's a lot of male uh or masculinity and a lot of male attitudes, and I've raised two boys, but I, I am not a male, so I cannot talk from that perspective. What do you think we're not doing? We're not getting right.
Colby:So usually this is the last part of the podcast, Kath, and where I acknowledge that I've asked a number of questions and it's your turn to ask me a question and I actually do that routinely in my practice when I've asked people a lot of questions.
Colby:And, as I've said on a previous podcast, all the kids ask me how old I am. That's their question, which I give them a somewhat vague answer to. Now, what are we not doing for our boys? I think to answer your question would probably take the time of another of our podcasts, but where does one start? Look, I think we're failing our boys in so many ways.
Colby:As a general opening statement, I think that in our society my wife and I often talk about having three boys of our own we're worried about the way society is going to be for them. For them, I think society has moved to one, to a place of accountability. So men need to be accountable for some of the problematic behaviours that do exist in our society. Men need to understand, for example, the dynamics of intimate partner violence, of intimate partner violence and consent in sexual matters. Our young men need to know all that, but our young men need. We're not proud. I don't think we're proud of our young men as a society.
Colby:I think where we're failing them is that the messages are too much focused, a bit like what you've been talking about, not so much outliers, because the rates of domestic or intimate partner violence in our communities, for example, are not insignificant, so I wouldn't necessarily call it an outlier. It is a significant problem in our community. However, not all men you know the vast majority of men are not perpetrators of intimate partner violence, are not perpetrators of problematic sexual behaviour towards their partners, and I don't think our boys get that message that we, that they, they get the message that we're worried about them, we're worried about their capacity to do harm. Um, they don't get us get the message so much that we're, we're, we're proud of their achievements, that we're even proud of differences between what a person, what a male gendered person, can contribute in all aspects of society, and celebrating the distinctions between masculinity and femininity. Sorry, kath, you did ask a question. It could be a very long answer.
Cath:It's a complicated question. It is. I guess it's like everything else, nuanced. It is very nuanced, multi-faceted.
Colby:I think so. If I really would sum it up, it was a question without notice, but that's okay. Because I love questions, I always promise I'm being able to answer any question put to me. I would put it like this Our boys are exposed from a relatively young age to a lot of concern about masculinity. As such, perhaps yeah.
Colby:I think masculinity has become conflated with issues like intimate partner violence and sexual violence, and so the message that they have been given is that to be a man is to be a problem. To be masculine is a problem.
Cath:Yeah, absolutely yeah.
Colby:The problem with that is that is what we know from attachment, which is if you marginalise people, if you make people feel marginalised in society, in community, then normal social rules and mores the expectations of others have less influence over how they go about approaching life and relationships.
Colby:Yeah, yeah yeah, they withdraw psychologically as a defence against being shamed. So I think, to sum up my broader views about this topic, I would say, to the extent that we have marginalized males or made them feel bad and inadequate, or the behavior of a proportion of males, we have in fact contributed to an outcome where we will continue to see problematic behaviours amongst males in our community and we may even see growth in those behaviours of concern in circumstances where the people who are calling out the behaviour would say, well, no, that's not our intent. Our intent is actually to promote accountability and informed reflection by men about the harms they could potentially commit, so that they can approach life in a much more self-aware way and not commit problematic behaviours. And my concern would be that you'll never get to that point if you start from a place of it's a problem being male.
Cath:You start from a place of it's a problem being male. I might change one word in that, because the thing that I found, colby, is it's you're the problem. So it's not being a male is a problem, it's you are the problem. And for me, that's to reflect something that a child said in my office and I've said this out on social media a number of times I, I don't want to uh. He was asking a question actually about uh approaching a woman and said I'm not going to bother because I don't want to be called a rapist.
Cath:And I went wow, if that's the attitude and that's the fear that young males are holding and and some of it will be conscious and some of it will be unconscious if that's what we have done as a society is create this feeling that you are the problem, it is no wonder that there is a retaliatory uh um response at the moment, because I think and I'm going to quote my friend here, actually, who I'm going to suggest you talk to at some point as well Lisa Edison, who's created shame containment theory and she talks about shame. Containment is all about you contain your shame. Shame seeps out and it comes out as rage and it comes out as aggression and it comes out. And if we are continually pointing the finger that you, being male, are the problem, then this contained shame is going to be uncontained and uncontained shame. Is that really primal aggression that comes from a place of well I might as well, anyway, if that's your and it's kind of people's opinions, isn't it, I guess?
Colby:And it's the well, it's like, almost like the dogs in Seligman's helplessness experiments.
Colby:Yeah, if I'm damned if I do, and I'm damned if I don't, then I might as well just do what I want to do, rather than um do what I want to do, in consideration of how society um thinks about what you want to do, and so I think so that yeah again, not to not to be meaning to be repetitive um and, by the way, I'm always interested in suggestions for interesting people to speak to address here are um are likely to be maintained or even worsened in in circumstances where it is a shame to be male I I'm I'm feeling incredibly sad deep down at the moment as we're talking about this.
Cath:I really really feel incredibly sad for the men who are emerging and the males yet to be men. I really worry in terms of, absolutely, we need to address violent behaviour, but also we need to understand where violent behaviour comes from, and I think what we have done is what I call the finger-pointing exercise, and it has never worked in society, and I just wanted to acknowledge, on behalf of those men, I feel incredibly sad that we have done this, yeah, and we society.
Colby:So I think, if we just bring together a number of threads of our conversation, it is the case that when a problem arises, our society tends to focus too much on the behaviour of concern and too little on the reasons why those behaviours exist, yeah, yeah.
Colby:And that inordinate focus on the behaviour of concern would, in my view, maintain and perhaps exacerbate the behaviour or increase the Now I'm starting to lose my words, Kath Increase the prevalence of the behaviour? Mm-hmm. Yeah, so the very response is a significant part of the problem. Kath, it's been awesome to speak to you. There's been so many things that have come out of this conversation that I hope are thought-provoking for people. People can contact you, I guess, via your website.
Cath:Yeah, probably the easiest way to find out where I am is on TikTok, Instagram.
Cath:I am on Facebook, but I would certainly say that it's it's more of the social media channels and it isn't always me who's on the social media channels, because we we put out, because I'm now doing um, I think it's called micro influencer, because I'm putting out helpful videos for parents um, a lot of it is pre-record, then it gets shared on particular days and times and at the moment I'm doing another blog around, really around this pornography conversation, because I think we also get that one completely wrong. So I once heard a professional say why is porn so horrid? And I thought when did research become values-based Rather than looking at yeah, so people can find you on those mediums that you've mentioned.
Colby:I know that you also have a website, because I was on it earlier, yep, and you've got a book coming out which sounds fascinating and I can't wait to read it myself. So thank you very much for agreeing to be on this fledgling podcast. Thank, you.
Cath:It was a good conversation. There are things where I was like I don't think I've covered that. I don't think I've covered that I need to do something separate there. But that always happens. So thank you very much, colby.
Colby:No worries.
