Kids these days: Rethinking the youth mental health crisis with Dr Nevin Harper

074 Since the time of Socrates people have been opining and pearl clutching about the wayward state of the youth. For better or worse, Millennials and Gen Z have received a tremendous amount of attention and public scrutiny from professionals and social media influencers. With labels like ‘the anxious generation'  more young people find themselves defined through a mental health lens and aggressively treated for conditions that previously may have been considered adaptive challenges of adolescence.

Rather than focusing on a perceived fragility of young people or finger pointing at over protective parenting, the origins of the youth mental health crisis might be sourced in common issues we all struggle with in the digital age and the anxieties of professionals and policy makers.

In this episode of Awake In Relationship I speak with Dr Nevin Harper, nature based clinical therapist and coauthor of Kids These Days: Understanding and supporting youth mental health. In this conversation we talk about the societal and cultural origins of our current thinking around the youth mental health and 3 common disruptors in modern life that negatively effect the developmental process. We also discuss how to shift focus from an interventionist approach to returning to the basics of mental health, including healthy attachments, connection to the natural world and encouraging risk tolerance to create the conditions for young people to thrive.

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Transcript

Framing The Youth Mental Health Crisis

Dr Nevin Harper 0:00

What are the adults doing? Every child grows up in an environment and experiences life in environments that were created by adults. And yet adults are saying there's something wrong within the child.

Intro music 0:19

Greetings this is Silas and you are tuned into another episode of Awake in Relationship, the first 20 26. In the past ten years, it really feels like there's been this explosion of kids being diagnosed with various psychoemotional disorders, like depression, anxiety, autism, and ADHD. According to the National Institute of Health data, about one in five teens in America have some sort of mental health disorder. That's kind of a shocking number. But adults are not far behind. There's something in our culture and society that's driving this mental health crisis forward. And our kids really are the canaries in the coal mine. Much like with the opioid crisis, a whole industry of experts and professionals have lined up behind this problem. Yet somehow, things seem to be getting worse, not better. It's a complex and sometimes controversial topic, which really needs fresh thinking. Which is why I invite back to the show, returning

Why Write “Kids These Days”

Intro music 2:19

guest, Dr. Nevin Harper, to talk about his new book, which he co-authored with Will Dobud, called Kids These Days: Understanding and Supporting Youth Mental Health. Nevin brings to this conversation decades of experience as an outdoor nature-based therapist and clinical counselor working with at-risk youth. He pushes back on the professional pearl-clutching and pathologizing of young people, often encoded in labels like the 'anxious generation'. In this conversation, we discuss three common disruptors of normal adolescent development that incidentally also affects us adults, and how to move from an interventionist approach to mental health towards focusing on the foundations of healthy attachment, connection to the natural world, encouraging healthy risk tolerance as ways for proactively supporting young people in flourishing. Nevin, welcome back to Awake in Relationship.

Dr Nevin Harper 3:37

Thanks, Silas. Thanks for having me back.

Silas Rose 3:40

Yeah. We first connected, I believe it was in 2021. Uh one of my earlier interviews, I believe episode 25. At that time we were we were talking about uh I believe risky play risk tolererance for parents and obviously your work around nature-based therapy. This current work, you know, your new book, Kids These Days, really seems quite expansive in comparison. And I'm just wondering about the motivation for this new book, and really who is the audience?

Dr Nevin Harper 4:25

If I start with motivation, motivation comes from the line of work that you mentioned. So nature-based therapy, or more broadly, outdoor therapies, is sort of the area that I work in. So my research, my practice as both a clinical counselor and as a researcher and author and trainer, and almost everything that I do comes back to that. And so this the new book, Kids These Days, has elements of that in it. It has some storylines in it. My co-author, Will Dobud, is also an outdoor therapies practitioner. He's also the co-editor of the book Outdoor Therapies, which we co-edited together. We tried really hard to not have this end up looking like a book about youth mental health couched in outdoor therapies.

The “Kids These Days” Effect

Dr Nevin Harper 5:14

Um the sort of genesis of it was the fact that the two of us were sitting at a conference a few years ago, probably three years ago now, in Norway, actually, surrounded by outdoor therapists, surrounded by social workers, counselors, psychologists, and hearing people talking about their own nation's struggles with youth in terms of mental health, the mental health crisis and the rising rates of anxiety and depression and loneliness. And we were just having one of those evening fireside chats, and the question came up: how is it that there can be so many therapists, so many practitioners, so much awareness of mental health issues, so many interventions, the wellness industry, the common, you know, understanding that teachers and educators and parents, they have all this information and yet things are getting worse. Why is that? And I went, I came away from that conference, and I know that Will and I had already been talking about doing something together, another writing project possibly. While Will was busy teaching social work group, you know, therapy intensives in Australia, I just started calling people that I knew I could get access to and interviewing them on Zoom, because I finally learned that you could get the transcript off of that. And it's a great way to do qualitative research. And in talking to these more veteran-seasoned experts in their different areas of expertise, so child development, therapy, resilience, education, social work, they were pretty clear about what they believe works and what doesn't. And a lot of it didn't align with what the common or mainstream narratives were. And so there was this interest in digging a little bit deeper. And so that was sort of where once we sat and started watching and listening to these interviews closely, we realized like there is a book here, and this is going to be really interesting. And so that expanded into a deep dive on each of the topics in terms of the research literature, what's the common understanding, what is the evidence pointing towards, and then weaving that together with stories from our own practice, stories from our own communities in terms of therapeutic work and educational work, getting permission from some of our own personal clients from counseling to sort of bring some of the narratives to life and then structure it in a way that we're not writing another therapy book, we're not writing an outdoors therapy book, and we're not even just writing a book that's going to kind of get lost in the weeds. We tried to follow the patterns of, you know, best-selling pop psychology type books and um took a crack at it and found ourselves a publisher and got it up and running. I think that was probably the genesis of it. The second part of your question was who is the audience? We didn't want to write a parenting book because we were actually critiquing the amount of parenting books that are written. So we had a simple rule that comes from education and therapy training is that you have to try to do everything you can to not shoot on people. Right? You should do this, you should do that. The best-selling parent books often have, you know, a sensationalist, hyperbolic title and a subtitle with 10 important steps parents have to take to save their kids from mental health issues. And so we tried hard to not write a parenting book, but at the same time we wrote a book for parents, but also for adults. And we would say any adult that works with, has, or knows kids and actually cares about the health and well-being of kids should read this book. So maybe too broad of a target target audience for a publisher to be happy with, but that's kind of where we uh we landed.

Silas Rose 9:18

Yeah, that's helpful actually, because uh it really seems like it has kind of a societal cultural kind of focus. So again, it's such a a great title and really kind of is a nod to an old trope. It seems like every generation does its pearl clutching or finger wagging at young people. Is is there anything really kind of different about our generation?

Dr Nevin Harper 9:48

Yeah, it's interesting, hey, that it's a it's at least a 2400-year-old trope. Ah, kids these days. And and you get access to the club as soon as you turn 18. And we've seen young people, you know, our our students in university at you know, 20 years of age, they're like, ah, these kids, I can't believe it. You know, so there's it's perpetual, and we continue to say it about the generation that follows. We continue to say they are not fill in the blank, they are not, you know, gritty enough, they're not determined enough, they're not, they don't have the same capacity, they don't read enough, they don't respect their elders enough. Like this has been going on generation after generation, and then that group grows up to be the leaders of society and experience more success than the previous generation. Like there's always this, you know, student becomes mentor, mentor, or mentor passes

Pathologizing A Generation

Dr Nevin Harper 10:52

um leader. You know, the the the notion that this is just the part of life that they're in right now where the older generation is saying something about them. You're not living up to our expectations. And generally that's through the eyes of the adults when they are adults. So, yes, it's a 2,400-year-old trope. It probably goes far back beyond that. Um, the question is how much of it is actually true? Yeah, is there hyperbole there? There's hyperbole, and there is in every generation, and we're at risk. So what Will and I called this in the book is the kids these days effect. Will tag the effect on there, and he's like, Yeah, this is the kids these days effect. So you turn 18, you start bitching about the 16-year-olds, right? We're at risk in writing this book of doing the exact same thing. So when we start saying there appears to be, and again, we use this language fairly cautiously, there appears to be a mental health crisis in adolescents and young adults. We start looking at the research and we're saying, what is it that's actually going on? So someone recently wrote a book called The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, sold millions of copies, has led to social change. It has led to governments adopting policies like in Australia, uh, bell-to-bell cell phone ban in schools. Massive universal intervention, very short-term discussion, but really big impact. And it's based on, at least in his book, research that was correlational, but he leans into cause, right? There's a there's a question there, and there's strong arguments against it. Lots of other people that know stats better than I do are calling him out on that. So you've got this idea that um this generation is experiencing more mental health issues. Well, what is that? That's about one in five. It's about 20% of youth are experiencing a mental health crisis that would be diagnosed. What are the rates actually for adults? It's about one in five. It's about 20%. So this actually isn't even a youth issue. If you want to tie it together with social media and smartphones and app use and doom scrolling, it's just a human issue. But to take, you know, and point to the youth and say this is causing an epidemic of anxiety, we'll call them the anxious generation. So we've just labeled and pathologized an entire generation. Not really a good relationship-building tactic, nor is it one that instills hope in those young people's future if they've been, you know, now tagged as having a diagnosis. But again, it was one in five. So if you're talking about 20% of the population, but you're labeling 100% of the population, you're talking about 20% of the population, but you're banning smartphones and social media from 100% of that population, it's a misfit in terms of intervention. And so we're questioning what are the adults doing? Every child grows up in an environment and experiences life in environments that were created by adults. And yet adults are saying there's something wrong within the child. So how much of it is environmental and how much is it could potentially be an organic issue within? So those questions were asked in the book. So we started talking to people about the educational environment, and we find there's strong critiques, not public critiques, not mainstream narrative, but there are critiques against things like social emotional learning and teaching mindfulness

School, SEL, And Co‑Regulation

Dr Nevin Harper 14:40

to children. That sounds great, doesn't it? I mean, on the surface, it sounds ideal. The problem might be when those tactics and tools and curriculum are being used to say get kids to be able to self-regulate in a classroom. Now, if a child doesn't have the autonomic nervous system to be able to self-regulate when they're having big feelings, a teacher with 20, 25, 30 students in a classroom does not have the time, energy, or capacity probably to sit with that child as the adult in the room, help them co-regulate, get them back on track, move on with the class, and have 29 other students go, oh, so we're allowed to have those big feelings. That's normal, that's okay. And that person, that adult in the room will sit with us and be our safety to allow us to co-regulate and learn the skills to regulate. That is growth and development. Sending a kid to the corner, sending a kid out of the room, or teaching them to meditate and deal with their own big emotions is actually a misguided intervention as well. There's nothing wrong with those skills. Teach them to the teens. But you don't, otherwise one of our chapters, you don't teach a five, you know, you don't teach Zen meditation to a five-year-old. So the critiques are all over the place, the issues are all over the place. We blame primarily adults, us, for creating those environments, for putting toxins into the environment that are creating things that look like behavioral problems and neurological problems and learning difficulties. And yet we've created systems that would say, oh, this young person is not succeeding in the classroom. Send them to the counselor. Counselor says, go on for further testing. You go to a doctor. You end up with some type of medical pharmaceutical intervention that may or may not be useful. We're not anti-meds, we're not anti-diagnosis, but we're asking some serious questions about what's being measured, by whom, and how. Like the bar of entry for anxiety and depression has been lowered in the last 20 years. There's two simple measures that doctors use, one for anxiety, one for depression. They both have fairly high false positive rates. Um, and they have a direct scoring system that equates to a dose of medication. And if you happen to be a child that grew up in a school, a progressive school, like they all are now, where they're talking about mental health, we're trying to destigmatize mental health so kids know the language, they know the symptoms. If they start experiencing those symptoms, they can confirm them by simply looking on WebMD, and then they end up with the physician, it's quite likely they're gonna get this one or two um screening tools given to them, and it's quite possible that they're gonna leave with medication. So again, adults, adults, adults, adults, adults, adults, teaching kids, feeding them the language. I mean, just imagine if instead of teaching kids about mental health, and we did find Salah's one book called um Psychiatry for Kids, it was a picture book teaching children about psychological disorders. Why on earth would you have a book like that? What would be the point of it? Some young medical doctors were funded by grants from the Gates Foundation and other groups to put these books together. Why? Why do we need to teach children about the difference between obsessive-compulsive disorder and, you know, ADHD? It just seems

Lowered Diagnostic Bars And Meds

Dr Nevin Harper 18:20

unrealistic and unnecessary. But if we spent that time talking about resilience and grit and gratitude and belonging, and had those as our central focuses for education, curriculum, parenting, therapy, we could be in a completely different space. We might not actually have a mental health crisis in teens.

Silas Rose 18:46

Somethings you described is obviously quite complex. Some what you mean by a quote-unquote wicked problem?

Dr Nevin Harper 18:52

A wicked problem. Absolutely. I can't remember the names of the original authors of it, but I believe they were in architecture or design work, and they were talking about you're faced with a presenting issue you can't quite understand or put your finger on what caused the problem. Now, if we have a youth mental health crisis, there are probably so many variables, so many contributing factors that we might never know which ones are causing more or less harm, or maybe it's combinations of these factors. Um, but we do have a fairly sensationalist media and social media, and even the sale of these books that came before us. There was a book on bad parenting, there was a book on you know, bad therapy, there was a there's the books on social media, you know, the anxious generation is pointing at the cell phones and and um social media. Yes, and yes, and yes, and we went to 40,000. feet and said, there's at least eight or ten variables that we can see. We're going to try to squeeze them into the same book so that an adult reading this book can go, oh, there's so many things that I can do. There's so many, there's so many small interventions. There's so many small changes that I can make. We even used a tagline from the Canadian Men's Health Foundation out of Vancouver. Don't change much. That's their message to men that are dealing with with health and mental health issues. Just start with small changes that have knock-on effects. So don't change much. The problem with most attempts to resolve these issues is that people focus in on one topic. And those books that I mentioned, we agree with most of what's written in those books. However, you can't just say it's say permissive parenting or you can't just say it's because the language of therapy is used too much. You can't just say it's the smartphone. It's just too simplistic. And here's one of our issues those are the books that will sell on scale because there's less nuance. Instead it leaves you with four simple rules ban the cell phones.

Silas Rose 21:27

Yeah everyone's looking for a a magic pill. A quick fix, yeah. Well one of the things I appreciate about your book is that you parse out the the complexity but you also really kind of identify uh not causes but disruptors of normal adolescent. The first of the trifecta really is technology. And you mentioned Johnathan Haidt, I just so appreciate his work because he is having a massive impact.

Dr Nevin Harper 22:10

Well to start with there's there's no doubt that social media, smartphones, the ad you know the invention of like the front facing camera, um touch screens, like buttons, the algorithms, the infinite scrolls there's

Wicked Problems Require Nuance

Dr Nevin Harper 22:48

very few people that would argue that these things have become problematic. They're developed by people that understand gaming they understand addiction they understand the psychology of nudging the dopamine effect like there's no doubt and we're there's a significant amount of court battles going on at least in the US right now where these technology companies are going to be held to account for some of their intentional addictive programming and and and also not being transparent about it. So we know that that's that's the case. Jonathan Haidt in his book chose a particular narrative and a particular path and it had a significant effect. Again, there's no question about that. Good luck trying to question that on social media you know because the number of parents and adults that agree with that tactic, it's just so strong it's really hard to curb and even have a, to be honest, to even have an academic conversation about the positives and the negatives. Some of the early research coming out of places like Florida is starting to suggest that there's actually been a slow decline in academic achievement and that behavioral problems are actually on the rise since the banning of cell phones, which is the reverse but again in the world of research you're going to see positive results, you're going to see negative results there's always going to be this back and forth and there's always going to be personal opinion and public opinion. One of the things that I I question and Will and I write about in the book is that that book stayed in its lane in terms of this is our position and didn't fully give credence to the fact that there is a difference between digital interference and digital integration. And we live in a world with technology we live in a world with a rise of the digital influence. And one of the examples I wrote in the book was a game developer who's maybe a programmer who's 20 years of age can be playing a highly addictive, highly interactive I'd like a let's just say a shooting game like where it's some combat related shooting game and be looking for glitches and looking for ways to improve that technology and be in a very objective place in their brain and taking notes at the same time. And then you have a 13 year old playing the exact same game at the exact same level and intensity and they're completely dysregulated and losing it and their parents are trying to get them to come for dinner. And they end up unplugging the game and the kid has a complete meltdown and there's a fight in the family and you know it just gets really ugly and something gets broken. Was it the game? Or was it the developmental stage of the individual and the the intention in engagement is different. So I'm not a I'm not a gaming fan. I'm not a proponent of letting kids play video games. That's not that's not my position but the point is is that if 20% of the kids have some relationship to a mental health issue and it's being tied together or shown correlating with social media what's going on there? I'm more interested in what that relationship is because some people in that realm like Candace Auders, Canadian researcher at University of California Irvine, this is her domain. This is the area that she researches in. So she's got a few comments for for uh Jonathan Haidt and the anxious generation they've debated live on TV I think Candace kind of deconstructed everything that Jonathan's putting forward around the anxious generation and saying that social media and cell phones cause youth mental health issues. And she's saying youth with social with um mental health issues more often use more social media and smartphone use. Like that that is a relationship that is potentially in the other direction not one causing the other. So we interviewed um Dr. Mary Swingle from Vancouver runs the Swingle Clinic. She's a neurotherapist she's written a book called I Minds. I would say that she's probably the expert and she was not referenced or you know her work wasn't referenced or recognized in the anxious generation and I really think it should have been because she also knows that with the right types of family involvement and parents making choices and you know behavioral changes within the home that the majority of the issue can be resolved quite quickly. And she does it through EEG and brain mapping and she can actually see the changes like when frontal lobes are being hijacked by video games or types of different types of screen addictions. So her her language is digital interference, digital integration was it not just three, four years ago we told every kid to go online to do their schoolwork online, to see your friends online, to get your entertainment online you're good at this. You're a digital native this is your language you've got this and then three or four years later you can't be online

Tech As Disruptor Or Integrator

Dr Nevin Harper 28:07

you can't have social media you can't handle this. There's a bit of discord there. There's a bit of a a 180 degree flip in the narrative around what kids are or are not possible about so if we're in relationship with our parents as kids we can have conversations about how we are in relationship with technology and we can make those decisions in a very different way and we can decide what works, what isn't working, when to turn it on, when to turn it off the sensationalism and fear mongering of even the cover of the anxious generation with that one sad looking, unhealthy looking girl lost in all those emojis, staring at the light of her screen and labeling it you know, anxious generation brains being rewired. It's like yeah and we can talk about disconnect and the hijacking of frontal lobes and that but that's happening to adults just the same. So we all need to be doing the work again back to the adults we all need to be doing this work. We need to have parents role modeling how many parents are coming home from work and getting just one more email in or they kick it on the couch and start scrolling when their kids are trying to talk about how school was that day. I mean far more powerful than banning the device the technology is asking the adults in the room to role model appropriate behavior with technology and to set and enforce some healthy boundaries until the demonstrated skills are there that the young person can use the technology in a way that's functional. I mean it's not either or it's both and I guess it also implies some sort of healthy attachment attachment and belonging I mean these are the the quote unquote loneliness epidemic is about kids that are starving. They're starving for emotional attachment they're starving for this sense of belonging we can talk about that more if that uh please the interview that we did or I conducted with Dr. Martin Brokenleg who's um he actually lives in Victoria. He's uh worked out of the States and out of um Canada for quite some time. In the 1990s he and his colleagues developed well they wrote a book called Reclaiming Children and Youth. It was a little little green paperback book that many of us in youth work and counseling and and outdoor education picked up because they had a really really brilliant model for um for childcare, for raising kids and it became a model that could be used for intervention programs, the development of after school programs, community-based and it was based on the uh medicine wheel of the the Plains First Nations, you know, with the four colors and the quadrants and but the conceptual quadrants were belonging, mastery, independence, and generosity. And in having that conversation with Martin I was reminded how powerful that model actually was and how simple it is and how it actually translates quite well across time across culture. And when we look at what's going on today the first one has been compromised belonging and when belonging is compromised good luck moving on to mastery and independence, let alone generosity so Martin used the language of kids are starving. They're starving spiritually they're starving emotionally and when we started using that language with other people that we had interviewed at least from our previous conversation when I was talking about Dr. Swingle and her work with you know digital addictions she had said oh and what I'm seeing is gorging so starving spiritually starving emotionally but gorging on technology to fill the gap. And that's where that circle of courage model is something that we put into the book and refer to it occasionally because if you don't have a belonging good luck developing the skills to get towards mastery which every kid needs to feel like they're capable of doing something well. That's the sense of mastery which leads towards that launching or independence. And then eventually with independence if it's been developed well in a healthy way then generosity back to the family generosity back to the community generosity back to society in general. So there's a there's these these strong connections that we found between the people we were I conducted 12 interviews with experts in what you would say are probably you know seven or eight distinct fields of study and yet the themes that came out of all of these individuals, again later in career quite well renowned in terms of where they're at in their careers, lives and and and recognition, the themes started weaving themselves together that what we've got to do is stop looking for the new intervention, stop looking for this new unique pill that's going to solve all our problems and maybe stop, take our bearings and maybe even look back and see what worked and what should we hang on to. Well Will and I play with the word conservative in the book, you know, this idea you know left, right, liberal conservative conservative the idea is to conserve, to protect that which works. And so we play a little bit on tradition and culture and ritual and practices that actually work. That's that's if there's a shoulding on people we're just basically loosely suggesting that people maybe look at their cultural orientation look at your community see what is working find the people that are doing something that's maybe completely against the grain but they're being successful.

Silas Rose 34:31

You know as our conversation progresses again it just sort of comes back to this idea that all the anxieties and projections we put on young people really are about ourselves or the adult world, we suffer from the same sickness.

Dr Nevin Harper 34:50

Yeah absolutely and what and what is that in today's world we move to pathologize really quickly and and almost too quickly and and speaking with a resiliency expert probably one of the foremost resiliency researchers in the world Dr. Michael Unger's at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia we were talking about the the number of young students now that we have that are asking for accommodations in the classroom at university you backtrack 15 20 years ago 90% of those were the need for a scribe the need for assistive technology for reading maybe a wheelchair ramp. You know those were the those were the assistive technologies necessary for students to be successful in the classroom. Now that's probably closer to 10% and the other 90 80 90% is um I cannot be called upon in the class I need twice the the time to write tests because I have a test anxiety um I shall not make public presentations. You know and Michael Unger was saying I want my students to be a bit anxious in the classroom. I want them to be I hope he doesn't call on me today because that means they had to do the work and they had to actually struggle through learning the material and then prepare themselves to speak up.

Silas Rose 36:17

Yeah well this this actually relates to the second disruptor of development you identify in the book which is medical intervention and and psychological intervention it really seems like there's been this particular in the last 10 years a kind of explosion explosion of various diagnoses like ADHD

Role Modelling Digital Boundaries

Silas Rose 36:40

and depression anxiety among young people and and as you mentioned you know adults , how much of that is based in in reality and how much of it is maybe social contagion or just our own anxieties.

Dr Nevin Harper 36:57

I'll play on other people's work to start before I put my opinion out there. Mid-1960s Thomas Saz, who's a psychiatrist, wrote a book called The Myth of Mental Illness. And this is closer to the beginning of his career as a psychiatrist he had said when he started medical school there was only a handful of psychological diagnoses by the time he finished mid school there was quite a few more at the time when he wrote I think the myth of mental uh the myth of mental illness there was probably hundreds. Now we're probably looking at 500 plus diagnoses. Each of those probably have some medication associated with them. So there's this corporate angle to this whole thing wherever there's a profit margin or profit um motivation it's often the case that it's been identified as um often a repurposed pharmaceutical product that could be tied to with uh a diagnosis. So we've got this language we've got the DSM for the the statistics manual, the diagnostic statistics manual that has its own problems in terms of the committees that put it together and the number of conflicts of financial interest ties that those individuals have with the pharmaceuticals auto. So we did a little bit of that we shone the light in a few of those deep dark corners and made sure people understood that this isn't just a criticism of the DSM four. This is a criticism of what could be the mental health industrial complex because it's a really uncooperative system that as it's grown and become stronger, it's harder to chip away at and understand. You've got these I've mentioned before these two sort of devices the PHQ nine and the the GAD7 a depression and an anxiety scale if our young people are growing up already with the language of diagnosis already with the names of the diagnosis in their minding what the symptoms are, already self-identifying as I'm so OCD, I'm ADHD, I'm depressed, I'm so anxious. Again, the likelihood when they end up in the doctor's office of getting a medication and a diagnosis is pretty high. You know, and I think the context this is where my sort of interpretation and in my career at least the context is more important than even what might be going on inside because that's your adaptive response to something. So if what you're responding to is a toxic environment, if what you're responding to is an unhealthy or dangerous environment, then what you're experiencing inside is probably the appropriate response. It's probably the adaptive measure that's protecting you. And if you take the example of I'm just going to stick with a child, a child growing up in a really unhealthy environment maybe there's substance abuse, maybe there's violence in the home, but there's Uncle Silas Down in Fairfield, you know, I could go live with Uncle Silas and you get put down there. Well, you'd left a home where you were diagnosed with anxiety

Belonging, Mastery, Independence, Generosity

Dr Nevin Harper 40:10

and taking medication, and maybe you already had an ADHD diagnosis as well. So you're on two medications with two diagnoses. Six weeks after hanging with Uncle Silas, chilling in Cook Street, still going to school, but not living in that harmful, dangerous, toxic environment that has such significant influence, you're feeling better. You're doing better in school. Life's still a little dodgy with the parents and the siblings that are still in that environment, but you're doing okay with no meds, and suddenly no diagnoses. That's an extreme, that's a perfect world example. But it is an example of the fact that it was an environmental influence with a natural response within the individual. And that's unfortunately the systems that we work in, the medical model, it's you know, its dominance in society, um, and our response as a society that likes to have things fixed quickly. I'm overweight. Give me some Ozempic

Silas Rose 41:23

I think some people might might consider that a bit of a controversial view, and I kind of want to address that. Because I think uh teens, particularly, you know, are going through massive changes in their biology and their psychology and it's probably really difficult for any parent to know what what is within the range of normal. When would you actually refer someone to more kind of aggressive medical or psychological intervention?

Dr Nevin Harper 42:03

That's you know, that's that is a difficult question, and those are murky waters because it's always going to be contextual. I think our approach in the book, and maybe this isn't to avoid the question, but our response in the book was maybe a little more philosophical, right? If we start getting back to what was my experience like as a teen. So for the parents or the adults to think about all those hormonal changes, all the growth that happens, all the lessons of relationship and intimacy and identity, it's supposed to be a struggle. Adolescence is a challenging adventure, and it is supposed to be uncomfortable at times. This is where the learning occurs. I think we've tried to keep our kids so safe that we're not allowing them to be uncomfortable. Like there's this overreach of safety and protection, and we see it in the explanation of um all those requests for accommodations in the schools through our teaching and learning centers. Those are to prevent our young people from feeling uncomfortable in the classroom. The reduce um or the reduction in the amount that we're allowed to have challenging debates in the classroom around contentious issues, that other people have different opinions, and that's okay. That has been drastically reduced. I mean, I know, at least in the universities, that there's probably a tendency to avoid difficult conversations. Right? So if we're protecting, protecting, protecting, um, we're not accepting that some of adolescence is supposed to be difficult. It is supposed to be uncomfortable. And the growth and learning and the identities that come out of that shouldn't be overly influenced by adults. So if we're saying you're feeling anxious about X, you'd have to step back and say, how's our relationship? Are they being fully honest with me? Do they have a sense of belonging? How are they doing in school? What is their connection? And is it with teachers? Is it with their peers? Is it with the curriculum? Like some kids love school because of the content, you know. What I would want to know is more about the individual, who they are and who they want to be in this world, and you know, what makes them tick and what sparks interest and what causes stress and and you know puts them in that position where they feel scared or or feel the need for something like that. There's there's likely a place for someone who is more apt to defer to professionals for them to say, you should probably go talk to the counselor, you should probably just go talk to the psychologist, you should talk to the doctor. The doctors, the psychologists, the counselors, we're all trained in systems. Some of those systems become uncooperative because they're driven by other interests. And medication is a very, very large industry, the pharmaceutical industry. It's a very big, powerful machine. It's not necessarily looking out for the interests of the individuals on the front line. And that's where we're trying to ask parents and adults to do everything they can to try to be the front line for their kids, to be the front line for their students or their clients, to help them make decisions that are the best decisions for them in the moment and to remain in that position and not wait for governments, not wait for the regulatory agencies to make decisions to protect our kids. You know, when we hear, we hear arguments about, you know, the removal of food dyes, you know, in the US from ultra-processed foods. It's like some of those things were never allowed to be put into foods in most countries of the world, anyways. Right? But we're waiting for governments to make the decisions. And I think that's where um, again, philosophically, we're not we're not stepping in and saying that parents should do this or should do that.

Silas Rose 46:14

Then the thrd disruptor you talk about in the book sounds quite diabolical, the extinction of experience. Which I think we touched on already, in the sense of disconnection from the natural world. And I think particularly from our own sense of basic humanity.

Dr Nevin Harper 46:40

Well, definitely what we've already talked about reflects that that that third um disruptor. My area, like we talked about at the beginning, my area of work is nature-based. It's outdoors, it's connecting with nature, it's some of the adventures and activities you can get up to in nature that that assist people in growing and developing, and it's ties to therapeutic work as well

From Quick Fixes To Foundations

Dr Nevin Harper 47:06

as to educational work or just human development in general. Just the amount of time we spend in nature has been reduced drastically. I mean, that's as obvious as saying my father's generation when he was young grew up in a farmhouse on the prairies, you know, wood-heated, uh night jar, outhouse. Um, they did have some running water into the kitchen, but it wasn't the house wasn't plumbed. Right. So we're talking about a life that was very engaged, very tied to what was going on just outside of the walls of the house. They learned about a radio coming into the house. They experienced a TV coming into the house. You know, each of these had a moral panic around them because it was gonna wreck the minds of our kids. Right. So whether the radio, I mean, people were talking about having voices coming into your home as something that was gonna disrupt the world and disrupt society. We grew through it. Same thing with television, same thing with the internet. So here we are with technology. The people that invented the like button and the infinite scroll, we document this in the book. We use their names. I'm sorry, I can't remember them again. But both of those now, as parents, regret developing those two technologies. They're both designed through like gaming and interactive addictive technologies. Like the infinite scroll, it isn't about what you find on the next page when you scroll. It's the anticipation of what you're about to see. It's that hunt. That's the dopamine bleeder that just keeps going and going and going until suddenly you feel crappy because you're exhausted and you're, you know, you're tapped out hormonally. The inventors are regretful for those things. Right. So we know that this technological advance is a bad one. It's one that we're going to live through, and we have to remember integration, digital integration, because those same devices are allowing young people around the world, and not just young people, but people around the world to run successful businesses off an iPhone. You know, like this is this is the reality of it. This is a this is a device, it's causing problems, and disconnect is one of the biggest outcomes because of it. And again, parents are doing it just as well. So they need to put down their phones to role model the behavior, to get their kids outside, to get playing outdoors again, to stop overprotecting, to get back to more simplistic schedules with less programming, more time playing. We do a piece on outdoor play. We interviewed um Ellen Sandseeder from Norway, who's like the world's foremost outdoor risky play researcher. Her and I actually had a conversation recently, uh, a recorded conversation on outdoor risky play, which is the first conversation I had with you a number of years ago. And she's even going so far as to critiquing, you know, the I'll use this term lightly, but but it is accurately describing like the feminization of the early years in school. Because a feminine perspective versus a masculine perspective on, say, two kids playing in the schoolyard in a rough fashion, rough and tumble play is what we were talking about. There's developmental assets to fundamental skill development, mobility, strength. Um how do you protect relationship while you know having a wrestle? The adult version of this is jujitsu, right? I'm choking you out. I'm about to put your lights out, and you just go tap, tap, tap

Overprotection And Needed Discomfort

Dr Nevin Harper 51:10

on my arm, and I let you go. So there's safety in relationship, but there's also the allowance for a testing of your ultimate capacity. Can I put this person to sleep? Oh, I got them, and they're tapping, but I don't actually put them to sleep. So there's this that that is what we were talking about. Children are actually trying to figure out how do I maintain my friendship here because this is my best friend, but I still want to slam them down on the ground. And she's trying to slam me down on the ground, right? So we're having this tussle, and we should be the best at determining whether or not that is aggression, violence, fighting, or play. And it's the type of play that has been massively removed from child development. Whether it's wrestling, whether it's sword play, whether it's king of the hill, uh, pushing contests. And how do we get adults, in this case, probably teachers and daycare center, you know, facilitators, early childhood educators, how do we get them to a place where they're okay allowing kids to determine the rules of engagement, engage, and learn from it? Right? Over protection. I think that's maybe one of the better examples that people can get their heads around in terms of the extinction of experience, because kids don't play unsupervised anymore. They don't range far away from home anymore. They're not out until dark, and then parents just yelling out like our parents were in the streets, like, you know, silence. And then you hear a neighbor down the road going, I think they're in the forest. I'll yell from here, and they're like, you know, and eventually it gets the message gets to you that you need to come home for dinner, and you do, and it's dark out. That is an extinction experience. I I don't know too many kids growing up in those under those circumstances today.

Silas Rose 53:08

When I think about the extinction of experience, I actually think about AI. And maybe that's kind of I don't want to end on a dark note, but I don't think humanity's ever confronted uh such a I would call it a threat to our basic sense of self. And uh I know you don't want to be prescriptive. You you kind of actually offered or touched on some kind of broad solutions around reconnecting in the world, reconnecting with nature, risky play, allowing kids to play and figure out conflict. Is there anything else you feel parents in the audience might want to know uh about how to insulate their kids from this kind of brave new world that we are moving into?

Dr Nevin Harper 54:06

Yeah, and I really I feel the same way. Like I I see AI as as a threat, and I know that that may be looked back upon 10, 15 years from now as an unnecessary sensation, but it it may come to pass that it is a very, very big threat. I think my work in the university is redundant. I honestly think that's one area where AI is going to disrupt in a significant way. That's the entire educational system. I think for parents having the recognition or the for parents to recognize that they do have control over small things that that they can make changes in. Um they can build networks with groups of adults to tackle some of the bigger problems, they can speak out. Um I always encourage parents to look around your community and find, as we call them, the positive deviance, who's getting stuff done or who's being successful doing stuff with their kids that's counter to what you would expect, counter to the mainstream narrative. Um, that's always a good way to do it. On the advice front, I think one of the areas that we do slide a bit of parenting advice into the book is after I talked to Dr. Gordon Neufeld, who is a pretty well-known parenting guru, um, the Neufeld Institute, his work is really about attachment parenting. And his book, he wrote a book in 2004 with Gabor Mate called Hold On to Your Kids. And, you know, they just they just passed their whatever 20th anniversary of that book and they put out a new edition of it. They talked a little bit about technology in there. His thesis is exactly the same. Your kids' teen years have to have an adult orientation as opposed to a peer orientation. Those are the years when our kids learn values, they set the tone for their behavior for the rest of their lives. You know, that those key learnings around morality and and what's important, values and goal setting. If it can't be you as the parent, then make sure that you're surrounding yourself with really good adult role models because your kids might not listen to you. They're paying attention, even if they act like they're not. But if they see that your friends are role modeling the same behavior, have similar values, that's going to be so much better for them in terms of setting them on a life path versus getting their values and beliefs, you know, cemented in place by the algorithm that they happen to be locked into at that time through social media and or their peers. Because those peers are still trying to develop their the rest of their nervous system and frontal lobes. They're still trying to figure stuff out for themselves. That's the last group that you want your teens taking, you know, advice on life from. And so it doesn't mean you don't have friends as a teen. It just means that your parents actually have to have more influence, influence during those teen years and maintain relationship, which means you can't come across as just telling them how it is. You can't shoot on your kids. But if you can build the community, again, environmental, if you can build the community and the relationships around them that carry that same positive message of healthy living, um, solid values and belief systems, it's better for that to get set in place with a group of healthy adults rather than the internet or or AI or whatever it is to come down the road. But I'm telling my colleagues at the university, I think we've got five years.

Silas Rose 58:04

Yeah. It's all about relationships.

Dr Nevin Harper 58:07

It's all about relationships, 100%.

Silas Rose 58:10

Nevin, thank you so much for this conversation. If people want to get the book or maybe find your Substack or on the ways to connect with you, what

Environment Versus Diagnosis

Silas Rose 58:20

do you suggest?

Dr Nevin Harper 58:22

Well, you can get the book hopefully from anywhere you get books. I've seen it in both independent bookstores as well as the big ones. Um we're told in terms of sales that Amazon is the king. Um, unfortunately, that is a reality. Um, that's the easiest, quickest way to get it. But um I have seen it in both local bookstores and have uh reports from others across the world that it's in their bookstores too. Um in terms of my work, uh, I can be followed on LinkedIn at Nevin Harper. I can be followed. I do do some writing on a substack called Adults in the Room. And that should be fairly easy to find as well. Um Yeah. And if people if people have interest in that and or nature-based therapy, then uh have a look.

Silas Rose 59:14

If you want to connect more with Nebin's work, check out nebunhar.com or his new substack. Adults in the room. He can also be found on LinkedIn. And I'll be sure to put some links in the show notes at awakenrelationship.com if you found this episode meaningful or even perhaps challenging, and you appreciate the conversations a host here at Awaken Relationship, there's a couple ways you can support the show. Please consider sharing this episode with a friend or on social media. Or maybe you have a colleague that's deep in the trenches of the youth mental health crisis. Also, I'm told That the algorithms really love reviews. So if you can send me some stars, I'd really appreciate it. I'm always open to feedback. You can connect with me on LinkedIn and sometimes Instagram. Or send me a message and awakenrelationship podcast at gmail.com. I'm always up for fresh ideas and topics for the show. If you made it this far, dear listener, I'm wishing you a happy 2026. Till next time, stay connected.

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