just for a moment what I'd like you to do is I want you to imagine that you're four years old and you're on the ground and you're building a tower and you're really proud of this tower that you're building and then the next minute he comes running along kicks over your tower and you are outraged and you feel these feelings bubble inside you have hurt and panic and frustration and helplessness and just in that moment an adult comes in close gets down low and says honey what happened it and you see in their eyes there's
compassion you feel that their bodies calm and regulated and then all those feelings come bobbling out frustration the anger the helplessness and this adult goes ah yeah tell me all about it I don't try and fix it they don't say to you don't worry you can build another one they just let you feel all that you're feeling and then they open their arms and you snuggle in take another deep breath and then you feel better and then you get back to building your Tower now I'd like to see if you can remember what it was
like when you were four years old and perhaps at a time when you felt angry or sad or scared or you didn't understand what was going on and how did the adults in your life respond to you now if you were lucky the adults in your life would have given you lots of space to express how you feel to listen to those worries and hurt it's not trying to fix what was going on but for the majority of people we had the opposite which is that we would have been told stopping so stupid you don't
need to cry you might have been sent to your room to the corner you might have even been hit for making a mistake now why am I talking about children and feelings it's because I want to talk about mental health because our current mental health landscape sees a steady increase in psychological distress we see that one in eight Australians suffer from some form of anxiety disorder and one in Tennesseans with depression and even though we are doing better at understanding things like mindfulness empathy compassion resilience and vulnerability I see that the increasing rates of distress
in adults is deeply rooted in the imprints we received as children around how to express feelings and emotions now it would be very easy to blame our parents for what they did or didn't do but our parents were doing the best job they knew how they were either doing what was done to them or perhaps they swing so far in the other direction so I'm going to do it the exact opposite I see that the issue lies really in the lack of emotional literacy that we have in our culture we don't teach parents how to
respond to children's feelings and emotions with empathy and compassion we don't teach it in our kindergartens we don't teach it in our schools somehow we still value IQ far more than we value EQ I wonder if from the beginning we were told that childhood defines ment adult mental health whether we would take greater care to nurture a child's soul now my work over the last 16 years with families around attachment and trauma and connection has shown me that there's usually three ways that we learn as kids to deal with feelings and emotions the first one
is repression which means that as a child if you learnt that it wasn't safe to express your feelings perhaps you got shut down you were told to stop crying perhaps you were given a look that made you draw everything inside then you were going to have to find a way to cope with all those feelings and emotions and for most people they learned to repress them they push them down deep most of the times they disassociated now the impact of that on a child is that those feelings stay there and then as adults those feelings
can turn up again when life throws us a curveball that's got similar themes to stuff that happened when we were a kid those same feelings come up but this time our repression mechanisms look like this they look like another glass of wine that we drink they look like ours mindlessly scrolling through Facebook or they look like making yourself so so busy at work that you don't actually have time to the other thing that we might learn to do is move into aggression which means that as a child if we felt really powerless if we felt
scared if we grew up in an authoritarian environment where we didn't have a voice where we couldn't say how we felt then those feelings again would bubble inside us and at the point where they would tip over when we often felt frightened or threatened they would come out in aggression in rage in loud words and sometimes you might have been labeled as naughty too much or trouble when really all you were doing was responding to your environment and then as adults those aggression tendencies turn up in bullying behavior they turn up in harsh critical thoughts
about ourself and others they turn up as violence then the third thing that we learn to do is expression which means that if we grow up with an imprint that said feelings are welcome it's okay for you to express how you are I will accept all of you for happy bits the sad bits the joyous bits the bits that are angry all of you is welcome I'm not going to try and fix I'm just going to hold well then what happens is adults when things feel hard we reach for our journal write down our thoughts
we call the friend and say hey can you listen to me we go for a run we do some yoga we speak to our therapist and we find a way to lean into the feelings we feel them and then we let them go now I am a mum to three big beautiful teenagers and when I first became a parent like I'm sure many of you here as a first-time parent you have absolutely no clue what you're doing and when it came to understanding feelings and emotions my game plan was going to be I'll just keep
them happy all the time right because it's really easy to keep your turfy all the time and have any of you know who have kids that's a ridiculous thing to do it is impossible it's it's ridiculous and it's incredibly exhausting trying to keep people happy all the time so I learnt pretty soon that that wasn't actually going to work and I needed to find a way to help my children thrive emotionally and also create home in our homes so I was lucky enough to understand and study trauma and I began to see that what we
need as humans is a safe place to unpack all of who we are we need boundaries and holding but we also need empathy and compassion for all those big feelings that rise within so instead of trying to fix my kids problems instead of trying to make them happy all the time I just got down low and I said tell me all about it and I just listened sometimes it was tears sometimes it was rage there's a lot of complaining that happened but every time my only job was to sit there and just hold for them
and what I began to see was this incredible emotional intelligence developing in my children now I think the time where I realized that this was incredibly powerful was one evening when I was making dinner I had to go and teach in a class so I'm doing the hustle that most parents do where you're trying to make dinner quickly some about to get out the door and my youngest daughter who was five at the time comes into the kitchen and she's looking not happy and I could see that she's got some feelings on board and I'm
like ah door and I actually turned to her and said honey do you think you could hold onto your feelings for a few hours which of course is you can imagine she looked at me like are you kidding and then at that moment my middle daughter who is 10 walked into the room and she said I'll listen to our feelings and I'm like okay so my ten-year-old takes the five year old into the bedroom and I'm thinking I'm gonna be late for work I need to see what happens here and I'm standing outside the door
and this is what I'm hearing I'm hearing my ten-year-old say tell me all about it and then the five-year-old starts crying and she starts complaining about all the things that had happened at kinder and the 10 year olds going oh that's hard what else and then there's more complaining and then there's more tears and then there's giggles and then there's laughter and then they come out of the room and I see my ten year old and I say to her honey how was that for you and she looked at me and she said well mama
I just did to her what you do for me and in that moment I realize children could not be what they can't see how do we expect children to have empathy and compassion for other people if we don't show them how how do we expect them to treat others with kindness and respect if they don't know what that feels like in their own bodies see I wonder what it would be like if we actually supported parents with tools and understanding to listen compassionately to their children I wonder what it would be like if we actually
helped parents unpack their own childhood so that they don't have to carry that baggage and put it on their children's shoulders I wonder what it'd be like if we supported and encouraged boys to cry and be vulnerable and we encourage girls to rage and find their voice and speak up for what they need and I wonder if instead of harsh disciplines and punishments we replaced it with compassionate listening loving limits boundaries and we learn to look behind the behavior there is always a reason behind the behavior and I wonder what it would look like if
we took all of that and we placed it in our education system so it's because of those ideas that around about 18 months ago a colleague and I set out to create woodline primary school a primary school set in the Geelong hinterland on a beautiful farm with abundant nature we have horses and trucks and veggie patches and the philosophy of our school is around fostering emotional well-being in a safe learning environment so research actually shows that when children feel safe to learn which means they feel free of judgment and criticism when they're treated with kindness
and respect where they have autonomy over their bodies and their learning and they are given much love and celebration about the unique differences in who they are then what happens is their neurological systems become fully operational and their capacity for growth and learning increases so our aim at woodline is when children spend time with us at our school not only do they learn about the world but they develop critical life skills such as emotional intelligence growth mindset critical thinking a love of failure because every time you fail you just realize ah this is so many
more options I haven't yet explored and more than anything they learn to become compassionate citizens of the earth we believe that if we support children's emotional well-being then learning becomes effortless and infinite the great Sir Ken Robinson said that the aims of Education is to understand the world around us and understand the world within us but what if we prioritize the world within then surely the world around us would make so much more sense how well how different could the world be if we place connection heart and compassionate listening at the center of every relationship
[Applause]
